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

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.

It's absolutely dreadful. The dedication ends with "...and to you, if you have stuck with Harry right to the very end." That sets the tone for the rest of the book, it seems.

There's so much "Harry thought back to all those years ago when he started at Hogwarts..." in it that it makes me want to throw the thing in the bin.

I'm studying with the OU for a BA in Literature. One course that I'm thinking of doing gives students a choice of Northern Lights or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as one of the set books. I've already decided to go for Northern Lights if I do that course. I have no desire to be sucked into the world of Harry Potter. I've enjoyed the films and that's good enough for me.

I´ve just discovered a writer, Mercé Rododera. She wrote most of her works in exile. The novel is El Espejo Roto, The Broken Mirror. Most of her novels are translated into several languages. She wrote in Catalonian and I´ve read a superb translation into Spanish by a catalonian poet, Pere Gimferrer.

A great novel. Her style is quite original, although I´ve thought of Jane Austen and Faulker while I was reading it.
She tells the story of a Catalonian upper-class family years before the break of the Spanish Civil war. It´s mainly about people falling in love with the "wrong" person.

She gives details of the landscape, the house, the furniture, jewels... and also subtle details of the personalities of the characters.
I finished reading it yesterday, and I´ve got now my mind full of images of that house, that garden, those people...

Not many times a novel leaves such a "print" in my mind.

I'm currently reading Jules Verne's Propeller Island, kindly lent to my by KB.

But the introduction essentially says "we left out any bits we found too difficult to translate", and the translation is awkward at best anyway - so it might be time to brush up on my French

That bad, is it? I hadn't got around to starting it myself yet.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim N. Taleb. I started it yesterday evening and so far it's very interesting.

Unseen academicals - very appropriate for the World Cup I thought

Stopped into the library yesterday & after posting this will be sitting down to read more of The Chalk Circle Man, by Fred Vargas. Part of a(jacket)quote from Scotland on Sunday -"Commissaire Adamsberg...must be the most engaging French detective since Maigret."

Spider World, Shadowland by Colin Wilson. Waited years for this book.

The Gospel of Judas, by simon Mawer. Thriller-type about a priest who translates the definitely genuine gospel of Judas Iscariot. The literariness interrrupts the thrills. Not bad, not great.

The Sunshine Limited by Cormac McCarthy. It's the first book of his I've read, and it's quite impressive. It's more or less a play, with a black guy talking to a white guy in a room. His use of language is pretty good, enough to make me read more of him anyway.

Since last I've posted, I've read the humorous The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde and a pre-release copy of Major Petigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson, which I enjoyed very much.

Right now I'm reading Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould, a collection of essays on Natural History, quite compelling.

Just finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and about to start Jane Eyre - they're in a Bronte Sisters omnibus. (I read Wuthering Heights a while ago, not in any hurry to repeat the experience.)

As usual I have a couple of non-fiction books on the go at the same time - Earth Story (the book of the BBC TV series) and The Nineteenth Century (a collection of essays on that era).

And on the subject of 'classics', I've started reading Pride and Prejudice and zombies. It kind of demonstrates why I avoid 'classics'.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim N. Taleb. So far it's a bit of a "how brilliant am I?" and "rah rah America" but I'll push on, it had good reviews.

In the meantime still hugely enjoying The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.

P&P&Z was the first time I've found Austen even remotely readable.

And now there's this:

http://pages.simonandschuster.com/janeslayre

Which might do the same for Brontes.

The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell.

Or this, which could possibly make the most tedius, turgid piece of chick lit I've ever had the misfortune to attempt, readable:

http://www.quirkclassics.com/index.php?q=androidkarenina

Currently, I'm reading "Johannes Cabal the Necromancer" by Jonathan L Howard. It's off to a promising start.

Excession by Ian M. Banks.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. Very enjoyable if not quite his best I think.

The Complaints by Ian Rankin. This is also a post-Rebus thriller set in Edinburgh, but really excellent, much better than the last one I read.

Galatea 2.2 by richard Powers: meh! Got to around page 12, which says it all really..

the next of the Percy Jackson series: The Titan's Curse.