starexplorer wrote:

Felicitous Sk8er wrote:

We're departing for the UK in 2.5 weeks.  Thus, the only reading I've done recently has centered around travel guidebooks and Beatles-centered biographies. 

I loved Maximum Volume: the life of the life of Beatles producer George Martin, the early years 1926-2016.

I've almost finished the sequel: 
Sound Pictures: the life of Beatles producer George Martin, the later years 1966-2016
both by Kenneth Womack.

Excellent books if you are interested in learning how the music we're still talking about and playing 60+ years later was produced.  Both books drive home how creative and groundbreaking the Beatles -- and George Martin -- were.  I've always loved the Beatles -- but now truly appreciate them.    

On a related but slightly different note, I can recommend the podcast “A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs” with Andrew Hickey. Very good and extensive historical presentation starting in the 1930s.

The older I get, the more I appreciate The Beach Boys! And the Beatles, of course.

That sounds intriguing, Star.  I will definitely check it out - it's already hooked into my podcast platform of choice.  If I were to recommend another such podcast in return it would be The Album Years by Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness.  They pick a calendar year and discuss the more significant album releases of that year.  It's always entertaining and informative but can be a pain in the hip pocket - for example, how did I not know that Massive Attack's second album, from 1994,featured the vocals of Tracey Thorn from Everything But The Girl?  Now I have to find a copy, so off to the online record store I go. Sigh.

My own musical listening as I too get older also goes back to what I was listening to in my student days.  In my case it was not so much contemporary top 40 or whatever, but a lot further afield and fringe by Hobart standards in those days.  Lots of European artists: Hawkwind,Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, Tasavalen Presidentti, Klaus Schulze and so on were in that mix.
 

I finished No Man's Land by Richard Morgan. I thought it was very good - probably the best thing I've read so far this year if I'm honest.

It's a different direction for Morgan.  It's not the noir dystopian SF future of the Takeshi Kovacs books or Black Man and Thin Air.  Nor is it the grimdark epic fantasy stylings of The Steel Remains trilogy.  It's a mix of alternative history and folk horror.  The setting is Britain post the Great War.  The German Kaiser has been defeated but the Britons face a new enemy on home soil. The ancient Forests and all their Fae inhabitants of the old legends have reappeared almost overnight and are slowly pushing back 'civilisation' towards the seas.  Our protagonist is a survivor of the trench war horrors of Flanders and the Somme who now survives as a woodsman, venturing into the Forests to retrieve children stolen by the Fae and replaced by changelings left in their place.  Of course, things are not that simple.

It's as bleak and dark and unflinching a read as anything else by Morgan, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to those who like his earlier work.
 

Here's hoping you enjoy it, Star.

I've decided to take a short break from SF/F before tackling Tchaikovsky's Children of Strife, so it's time for some mad Mancunian poetry and a memoir from Dr John Cooper Clarke.

 

In the final throes of The Last Dive: a father and son's fatal descent into the ocean's depths - a gripping true account of high-risk ambition, a mysterious German u-boat, and tragic death
by Bernie Chowdury.

This account of a well-known 1992 diving accident* has been in my to-read stack for months.  The book covers a lot more than I anticipated -- decompression illness, diving history, cave & extreme deep water water diving conditions & techniques, and more.  Excellent book -- the wait was worth it.. 

*This was no "accident" -- given the personalities and interpersonal dynamics of the protagonists, it was inevitable.   

Felicitous Sk8er wrote:

In the final throes of The Last Dive: a father and son's fatal descent into the ocean's depths - a gripping true account of high-risk ambition, a mysterious German u-boat, and tragic death
by Bernie Chowdury.

This account of a well-known 1992 diving accident* has been in my to-read stack for months.  The book covers a lot more than I anticipated -- decompression illness, diving history, cave & extreme deep water water diving conditions & techniques, and more.  Excellent book -- the wait was worth it.. 

*This was no "accident" -- given the personalities and interpersonal dynamics of the protagonists, it was inevitable.   

Thanks Sk8er,  I'll check that out.  I've always been a sucker for a good submarine story.

Star, I'm curious as to your reaction to the Tchaikovsky book.