h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

CD I loved Shakespeare on Toast and recommend it as much as possible. I've tried the iambic pentameter and keeping the pauses to the rhythms thing, and it generally works, although I do tend to count in my head which isn't helpful.

Thanks, Mol, I'll try those.

And ahhhhh Flambards. We watched the TV series at school and swooned a lot

I have about 20 books that were bought as sets. I hadn't catalogued them because I wanted to get my 'Not Read' list below 100 first. I recently achieved that, so I added these books. One of the books I'm reading at the moment is Does Anything Eat Wasps, edited by Mick O'Hare. It's a selection of questions from the Last Word section of the New Scientist magazine. It's a book I can dip into, so it will probably end up as my bathroom book.

I was going to dip in and out of that and ended up reading it in one go, fascinating information.

Now reading Philosophy for Dummies. Too much brainwork for me early in the morning

Some of the questions so far have been quite reasonable - questions about bruises and eyebrows, for example. Others have been a bit strange - how fat do you have to get to be bulletproof? is one that springs to mind.

I also have Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? and Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? from the same series. I'm looking forward to those.

My willpower wasn't strong enough. I've bought The Light Fantastic, book 2 of the Discworld series. Well, we are going away for a week and I wanted something light to read.

Enigma by Robert Harris. It's Bletchly Park in 1943 and the naval Enigma code has been rendered indecypherable when the Germans changed their weather codebook (long story). Meanwhile, surely the glamorous Claire can't really be a spy: she comes from such a *terribly* good family.

Apparently this was made into a film a few years back, which explains Kate Winslet's presence on the book cover.

I remember quite wanting to see that film, but DH wasn't keen.

My most recent Goodreads review was for Codes and Secret Writing by Herbert S Zim. Which sort of reminded me of the book I read a couple of years ago about the Enigma machines (not Robert Harris's book). But Herbert S Zim's book is much easier to understand.

Mol

Finished the Bill Bryson book about Shakespeare, which was entertaining and am about to start Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist and More from Martha by Jill Tweedie. A while ago I read Soldier's Song: True Stories from the Falklands by Ken Lukowiak. He was a young soldier who fought in the Falklands and suffered from, I think, undiagnosed PTSD afterwards.

Somehow he was sort of befriended and mentored by Tweedie and her husband and was thus diverted from a life of being a scallywag into that of a writer. I'd read a bit of Jill Tweedie's work before and this book made her sound really very interesting. So I thought I'd give this one a try.

Well, I'm back. I enjoyed The Light Fantastic. It got a bit serious towards the end, but it was fun most of the time.

Currently reading The Life and Death of St. Kilda by Tom Steel. It amazes me that a community could exist for so long (centuries, not decades) in such a remote and inaccessible place.

Currently trying to get my head round the new library lending service I use (digital talking/audio book one) and as I was trying to figure it out, just wanted to click 'download' on 'any' book, so I could test out some options for moving the 'media' about...

Random book turned out to be one I read, not all that long ago, and now I seem to be re-reading it, after picking up something differnt I'd not on the first read, within the first few pages Storey of O, by Pauline Reage 
I must find a 'proper' book to read next though

I started reading Rubinrot by Kerstin Gier which is a YA book about a time travelling teenage girl. Sounds a bit Time Traveller's Wife actually, but so far so good (and I'm not sure what it is in English)

I just read 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett and it has catapulted itself into my top ten all-time favourites (welllll ... really it's more of a top 100 than a top ten, I can never pin myself down to ten. But if I say it's catapulted itself into my top 100 this doesn't really convey just how much I liked it).

It's a delightful book, excellent if you need something to give you a bit of a lift, and a really satisfying read.

Mol

They Came And Ate Us: Armageddon II, The B Movie.

The second in the Armageddon The Music trilogy, and if the first one was weird, this one is weirder still. Gets a bit tricky to keep going in the middle, but is worth it.

Regarding the Discworld novels, does it matter what order you read them in? Having read the first two, I appreciate that they had to be read in that order. Otherwise I'd have been puzzled over who Twoflower was and why Rincewind was following him around. But does it matter with any of the other stories?

some of them build on what's gone before - I've been reading them all in publication order and I think it helps

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. I actually got a bit put off by the number of things that seemed to be nerdy in-jokes rather than bits of a properly thought out world. Still, with references to hyperspace bypasses and Vogon poetry it won me over.

Thanks for that, Sho. have major expenditure coming up on my car, so I guess I'll have to put off buying the next Discworld novel for a while.

I read all the Discworld books in a completely random order, dependent entirely on what was available in the library, and I still enjoyed them and they still made sense.

But I did then go back and read all the 'Watch' books in the right order, just to follow the characters' development properly. I also think you do need to read the Tiffany Aching books in the right order. And I'm looking forward to the day I start my complete series re-read

Mol

There was a conversation recently regarding the order to read the Discworld books in, and, on trying to google for it, I found this: http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A292790/conversation/view/F36687/T77148 which is much older. A292790 A153668 .. are also out there, but as the latest update is in 2006, they're a bit behind, too! The recent thread is proving far more difficult to find, though. Can anyone help? I read all the Discworld books as they came out, because my sister always gave them to my son for Christmas. Even when he moved away from home, I still borrowed them and read them as he got them.

It looks like I may have got myself into another series of books. Amazon UK are offering the first two Flashman novels for 99p each on Kindle as part of their Monthly Deals. I read the sample of the first one and decided to buy it. At least there are only 12 books in this series.