{"id":459,"date":"2018-01-07T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-07T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pagan-gerbil.net\/?p=459"},"modified":"2018-01-07T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-07T07:00:00","slug":"books-ive-read-in-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/?p=459","title":{"rendered":"Books I&rsquo;ve Read in 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This year, I\u2019ve made it a personal goal to read only new (to me) books. I haven\u2019t been good at finding new things to read and I\u2019ve spent a lot of time (possibly a whole year) re-reading Discworld books, with occasional dips into my comic shelf.<\/p>\n<p>So that was a simple challenge \u2013 only read books I\u2019ve never read before. Not even a long time ago.<\/p>\n<h2>Successes<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>David Copperfield<br \/>I read Nicholas Nickelby last year and enjoyed it, this was a little bleaker but still very interesting. You learn a lot about everyday Victorian life from Dickens.\n<li>The View From the Cheap Seats<br \/>A little disappointing, it feels a lot like a reminder to read things and listen to people I wanted to anyway. The other things in there would probably be more interesting to me if I had already read them, kind of like a covers album is better if you already know and love the originals.\n<li>Singing From the Well<br \/>Trippy as hell. Reminds me of the film Cat Soup, and to a lesser extent My Neighbour Totoro. An easy read, I got through it in a couple of weeks.\n<li>The Un-discovered Islands<br \/>An interesting book about places that we thought exist, but don\u2019t. I think I might look for the Phantom Atlas for more, it\u2019s an interesting alternative to real history\/geography.\n<li>Star Trek: Destiny<br \/>Recommended to me as the best continuation of Star Trek after Voyager, after I looked out on my own and found The Lives of Dax. I would have preferred a less epic, more DS9 focussed story but this was still good.<\/li>\n<li>The Prince<br \/>Very difficult to read, as it contained so many run-on sentences and I like to read just before sleeping. Not my most alert. Slightly interesting, but not nearly as diabolical as Macchiavelli\u2019s reputation has come to be.<\/li>\n<li>The Better Angels of our Nature<br \/>Since I heard Penn Jillette talk about this book <em>all the time<\/em> on his podcast (<a href=\"http:\/\/pennsundayschool.com\/\">Penn\u2019s Sunday School<\/a>), I picked it up. I even got it signed by Penn and Teller when we went to their London show! They said it was a great book, and it\u2019ll change my life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Failures<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>World\u2019s End<br \/>I was having a slow, tired week and wanted to read something but wanted something easy. I love World\u2019s End as a story about stories (and one of those stories is about stories\u2026) in a strange place \u2013 like a lot of good sci-fi, it\u2019s not about what\u2019s going on, it\u2019s about the stories that happen before and after the episode. It fires the imagination.\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/pagan-gerbil.net\/2017\/05\/06\/drive-comic-act-one-book-review\/\">Drive, Act One<\/a><br \/>I think this counts mostly as a failure, because I\u2019ve already read the story as a webcomic.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year, I\u2019ve made it a personal goal to read only new (to me) books. I haven\u2019t been good at finding new things to read and I\u2019ve spent a lot of time (possibly a whole year) re-reading Discworld books, with occasional dips into my comic shelf. So that was a simple challenge \u2013 only read &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/?p=459\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Books I&rsquo;ve Read in 2017&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,9],"tags":[208,58,209,210,211,132,212],"series":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}