What are you currently reading?

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Well, it doesn't happen very often, but The Odyssey beat me, just cannot get into it, so have put it back on the shelf for the time being and moved onto;

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Now THAT’S fun.

Don’t blame you at all. The Odyssey is Greek to me too. Far too much florid description before you get to the point.
There are some good modern synopses if you just want the story.
 
The Mapmaker's Eye - David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau (by Jack Nisbet)

An account of David Thompson's explorations of western North America in the late 1700s / early 1800s under the umbrella of the Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company. He was mapping the Columbia Plateau and the Rockies, trying to find an East - West passage to expand the trading empires of the companies, and was also fur trading with the indigenous peoples (First Nations), many peoples of which had not met Europeans before. Members of the First Nations were often taken on as guides or employees on the various exploration trips.

Quite fascinating.
 
The Mapmaker's Eye - David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau (by Jack Nisbet)

An account of David Thompson's explorations of western North America in the late 1700s / early 1800s under the umbrella of the Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company. He was mapping the Columbia Plateau and the Rockies, trying to find an East - West passage to expand the trading empires of the companies, and was also fur trading with the indigenous peoples (First Nations), many peoples of which had not met Europeans before. Members of the First Nations were often taken on as guides or employees on the various exploration trips.

Quite fascinating.
I'll have a look at this one, sounds interesting.

Fatal Passage is a good book covering the exploits of John Rae, perhaps in a similar vein to this one.
 
Tracks by Robyn Davidson. True story about a woman’s journey across the Australian desert with four camels and a dog. Fed up with all the rain so this isn’t a bad escape from reality.
 
Odette: World War Two's Darling Spy by Penny Starns.

True inspiring story about a French lady, Odette Brailly, who joined SOE and worked undercover in France with the Resistance during WW2. Amazing woman: captured, tortured, Concentration Camp; never gave anything away. Survived to testify at the War Crimes Tribunals.
 
The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, by Bernard Wasserstein.

If it was a novel one would not believe it!

The true story of an adventurer, thief, fraudster, MP, con-man, etc., etc. from his birth in the late 19th to his death in the mid-20th century. What a dude!
 
Tracks by Robyn Davidson. True story about a woman’s journey across the Australian desert with four camels and a dog. Fed up with all the rain so this isn’t a bad escape from reality.
The film of this is on netflix, very good but I haven't read the book so don't know bastardised it became.
 
I have two books on the go the first is about the Brompton Folding Bike by David Henshaw and the second is called Whores, Wars, and Waste: Antics of the Modern British Army by Richard T. Sharpe.
 
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Just finished Metro 2033 which deserves all the recognition it has received. There's great world building and a genuine sense of unknown terror while being poignant and philosophical many times too.

At the other end of the scale I've finished Garth Merenghi's Terror Tome which continues very much in the vein of Dark Place as an absurdist parody of 1980s pulp horror. It is gruesome, trashy, bonkers and I laughed a lot.
 
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