>>7406


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxxhAS16vB0

Either of you two read any of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series? I'm thinking of starting it but reviews remain sharply divided between it either being poorly written rubbish or a work of genius. By all accounts it's not something fit for audiobook given you need to pay attention and infer events.

It feels like a massive commitment and I like to a finish series once I start you see.

I'm not really sure what I made of this, but I didn't entirely know what to expect going into it. I felt quite detached reading it.

I really liked this.

Americans unleash a bioweapon in Afghanistan. The bioweapon spreads and within four years it has killed almost all of the world although it doesn't matter until it reaches American soil, fuck everyone else.

The first half of the book jumps in time between scientists a) frantically trying to halt the spread of the virus, developing an antidote and creating robotic 'mothers' to care for genetically modified children who aren't affected by the bioweapon in case humanity is wiped out and b) the future where the mothers are raising their children in the desert in Arizona. The latter is interesting but the former is rather dull, particularly as there's a very American and very ham-fisted obsession with the ethnicities of the characters and also because there's a fair bit of jargon as the author seems more interested in showing off her technical knowledge (she's a biochemist) rather than telling a good story. The children are also quite poorly written.

The second half is concerned with the mothers taking their children to a compound in California for safety while the surviving scientists try to make contact and ultimately release them to a tribe of Hopi who've been unaffected by the bioweapon which is still in the air. The mothers who were good and were thought to have turned bad turn out to be good all along. You soon realise in this half you've been railroaded from a story which could have gone anywhere into a rather unimaginative rescue mission where everything turns out just fine and dandy in the end.

>>7371
Interesting. I may well visit one of these "Rye Men's" of which you speak.

>>7372
Come again?

>>7372
I was watching TOTP2 the other week and it was noticeable how most of the acts from the 60s, 70s and 80s looked like ordinary people rather than actual pop stars, like Alan from down the road could just write a banging tune and then amble on stage one day.

>>7370
>I think I've been lulled into only being able to read single paragraphs
Isn't this the whole book?
https://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/
Or this?
http://www.lee-web.net/pdfs/the_manual_full.pdf

But you might not have been serious about that, given that you can't get the whole thing printed if you don't have the whole thing to begin with.

>>7373

Rymans will give you a 10% discount if you sign up for a business account too, far as I can tell the staff entirely do not care if it's not a real business.

>>7374
Mullets looked so cool back then.

>>7320
Septics?

>>7322
Not unless they're using proxies.

>>7319

Visit your local library and talk to the librarians - people often have the idea that they're just glorified shelf-stackers, but they're skilled professionals. Through the inter-library loan system, they can search for and request books from any library in the country, including the British Library. Bear in mind that most library services will offer you membership even if you don't live in the borough and university libraries are usually open to the public.

Google the words "libgen" and "scihub", because they're the greatest academic resources in the history of humanity.

Choose a reference management application and learn how to use it properly. I prefer JabRef, but the most popular options are Mendeley and Zotero.

Learn the basics of statistics. Even if you're not particularly mathematical, it'll hugely improve your ability to spot dodgy data and see through weak arguments. How to Read Numbers by Tom and David Chivers and How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford are gentle, intuitive and very readable introductions to statistical thinking.

If you're thinking about going on a shotgun rampage in Plymouth, seek psychiatric help.

I don't have any knowledge of the writer, but in the interest of encouraging freedom of research, the following website can be very useful for finding rare books:

https://www.addall.com/

I've read 5 chapters so far and the book does seem fairly bias. I'm not really educated enough to point out examples, but it's there to be felt.
Parts of the writing seem reasonable; it has atleast offered in interesting explaination of the french revolutions, which if i ever get around to learning history might serve well compared against other accounts.

(A good day to you Sir!)

How modern are we talking?

This is one of my favourites. Not quite 'true' exploring but a good insight into isolated communities.
'Cold' by Ranulph Fines is great too, if you like polar exploration.

Brian Clough's autobiography is pretty contentious. Does he count? There's an extended bit about Justin Fashanu which explains a lot about Justin Fashanu's death.

>>7293

If he has the relevant expertise and can put some nice sample chapters together he may very well get a book deal. Non-fiction at least has the advantage that you don't have to complete the whole thing in advance to sell it.

>>7294

The average advance for a new author is around £6,000. The majority of books don't sell enough copies to recoup that advance. I don't know how long it takes to write a book, but £6,000 undoubtedly works out to a piss-poor hourly rate.

If you want to earn a living from writing, learn to write commercial copy. There's still (just about) some money in advertising.

>>7295

I hope you're not a proof reader.

Just to point out that nowhere in the OP's post did they mention they're trying to pursue a career in writing.

>>7297

OP here. Thanks, yes. In fact I was trying to draw attention to a problem that's sort of the inverse: how do you fit in writing around a normal life? I'm not aiming for writing to be my main career, so I'm thinking about how I can best make the time for writing something publishable as a passion project. I suppose I may well find out through trial and error if I can put together some sample chapters (or adapt previous writing).

The points about the practicalities of getting a book deal are appreciated, though. I welcome any views you all have.

He's a good storyteller in the oral tradition, one of the very few good enough at it to make a living from it. It's not something you see a lot of these days.

Is your girlfriend extremely posh? This strikes me as something you only do if you have a family library to store it in.

>>7282
The thought of a family library is very appealing, though i wouldn't want to have to move it. Books are heavy, yo.

>>7283

You don't need to move your library when it's in the country pile that's been in your family for eighteen generations.

Books are fucking heavy, though. The only ones of mine I've kept are all big cooking hardbacks and my notebooks from my previous life as a cheflad. That's just one medium sized box and it weighs about as much as I do. I just think it's simply impossible to have a substantial book collection if you ever plan to move.

>>7282
I think her grandad was loaded but he remarried when her grandma died and all of the money went to his second wife's kids. I believe his memoir is the only one she has a physical copy of, which is largely about how he was stationed in India during the Second World War and spent most of it having a lovely time mountaineering. She recently got in contact with her second cousin once removed, or whatever the fuck it is, whose family have been in Canada for several generations and they sent over a digital copy of their father's memoirs.

>>7284
You could always write a memoir and cookery book at the same time.

I downloaded the Borrowbox app and signed up to my local library services that use it. Have ebooks and audiobooks

Tried audiobookbay?

>>7185
Buy stolen credit card info from the dark web and use it to pay for Audible. It's as good as free.

>>7199
You can get a Quickbooks accounts for free if you enter 0's in the direct debit information area, at least you could when I worked there a year back. Or you can just say you're an accountant and get the full package free.

I wonder how often these cracks are available, but simply just not attempted because of how stupid it would be for it to work.

>>7233

Not particularly atmospheric, but you may enjoy the 'nursery crime' books by Jasper Fforde (>>7169).

>>7189
John P. Marquand has a fair few books that I'd say fit that bill.

Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep is a classic.

I'll take a wild guess at L.A. Confidential, although I've not read it, but the film is excellent.

Schliemann's book about Troy.


Kurt Mendelssohn book about the Pyramids

Kuntmann's book about Fartz

Get on telly for a bit, get someone to ghost write any old shite for you, have a teary on This Morning. Bestselling status in no time.

>>7153
So I'm assuming these book charts are daily/hourly say, not an assessment of total volume for a particular year.

So something like you're using the fibonacci sequence to weight books based on how long they've been out.

I'd have to think about it some more. Say new releases get a 21x multiplier, releases from last week 13, and so on down to 1.

Brent Underwood made a picture of his foot a bestseller.

https://observer.com/2016/02/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes-to-be-a-bestselling-author-3-and-5-minutes/

>>7157
Or more precisely by not using just the discrete whole-number values, but actually mapping time-since-release on to the continuous interpolated Fibonacci plot.

>>7159
I sold those two over the course of three years so I reckon that's my chances fucked.

>>7147
I'm still punishing myself by trying to finish the Keys to the Kingdom series. Currently in the middle of having stopped reading Sir Thursday about six months ago.

>>7148
He's read the first four Old Kingdom books this week so far, plus a fair chunk of the Nome trilogy. I picked up Mister Monday in a second-hand bookshop a few years back and now he's suddenly into Garth Nix again he's asking for all of the Keys to the Kingdom books.

He's not reading as much as he used to but he's just finished the Mistborn trilogy, which he's rated 7/10.

>>7349
It's a good intro to Mr Sanderson's writing style and 7/10 hits the nail on its head. Mr Sanderson is consistent and prolific if nothing else and has written other books in the same style or even the same universe. Maybe stay clear of the Wax & Wayne books, they depart from fantasy and instead move into something between noir and slapstick in a Mistborn Spaghetti Western trope style.

May I recommend Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy? I enjoyed both author's work immensly, yet Robin Hobb's style is more focussed on how characters interact, while Sanderson is more about how the world works. Maybe supply Assassins Apprentice and see.

Either way, good job on you and your lad, good stories deserve to be told.

Quick festive laddo update.

>>7147
>Laddo didn't wake up until about 3:15 this afternoon. Bought him a few Garth Nix books to keep him going and evidently he decided to read a couple of them last night/into the early hours of the morning.

He got Terciel and Elinor by Nix for Christmas. He didn't wake up until early afternoon today because he was up until the small hours reading the entire thing.