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

It's probably no secret to any of you lot that I've got a bit of a book-buying...well, "habit" is probably the word. In the Lou Reed sense.

But if anything, my newspaper/magazine/periodical habit is even more severe, particularly if it's something uncommon - from another time or place, for example. So I was delighted to end up with a few issues of "Sputnik" today.

Sputnik is a true Cold War product. It's essentially USSR propaganda for the outside world. It's largely about Russian history and culture. Very little of it is about the USSR or the October Revolution, Lenin, etc, but it's about winning friendship abroad.

In Ireland at the time, we fell within the American sphere of influence rather than the Russian, and a lot of what was really Cold War propaganda was part of the mainstream discourse and seemed like obvious common sense. So it's interesting to see the Russian mirror image of the Reader's Digest.

Apart from the end of the Cold War, there's another way this periodical shows its age: the letters pages. It's all "Dear Sir, I would like a pen-pal in Leningrad." No Facebook back then...

I wonder how many of the letters were really "Dear sir, I would like a pen-pal, to tell him about what's going on at the RAF base..."

(I did also notice that the letter writer from, er, the city on the River Foyle gave his address as Londonderry. I would have thought the pro-Moscow camp in that city in 1970 would have been in the 'Derry' camp! )

I love old periodicals.

Are you buying more books, or more periodicals, or perhaps both?

I rarely buy books. When I do buy them, they tend to be insanely long books like "War and peace" or "The Goldfinch," books that I would need to renew ten or twenty times if I tried to read library copies. So I buy them in the interest of having the leisure in which to properly enjoy them.

Sputnik seems like a dream or an alternative-universe story that I can't really be sure happened. I was a little boy at the time, and the Buck Rogers comic strip in my local newspaper had a story related to Sputnik. Another comic strip was a graphic version of Ian Fleming's "Doctor No." How can a young person sort out what's real and what's fantasy?

The Goldfinch didn't take that long to read, did it?? But still, it certainly deserves plenty of attentive contemplation, considering it took wassername 10 years to write it.

Talking of seeing things from the other side, I am reading a book about a fascinating and very rich period in history the turn of the 14th/15th centuries in France. To actually read about the Battle of Agincourt from the French side and the mind-boggling situation in France at the time, having done Henry V for O-level when at school, was definitely an eye-opener.

Hang on - I'll just look up what the book is called. I've been referring to Wikipedia a lot whilst reading it because the history and the families and the French Civil war are very confusing, especially as people have lots of different names (Count of this, Earl of that and King of the other, plus their own Christian and surnames) and are always given different names, often in the same paragraph.

The book is called "The King's Women" by Deryn Lake. She obviously used much more than just Wikipedia for her research - the details are marvellous.

I read parts of eight books a day. Strangely enough, I remember as much of the details as I would if I read each book straight through. I borrow almost all of them from libraries, so after renewing each book once I have to return it.

Of course,. there are some old books that I am unable to part with: a 1940 full translation of Collodi's "Pinocchio," at least a dozen reprint softcover collections of Walt Kelly's "Pogo" comic strips, numerous cookbooks, a collection of four Douglas Adams books, and a beautiful atlas.