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

Just finished Pratchett's "Dodger" and really
enjoyed its amorphous-confessional tone in which
he shows us how Discworld and Ankh Morpork evolved
from Dickens and Mayhew into the post Dickensian
virtual reality we all know and love. Through the
muck of the ancient Roman drains to the halls of
Victoria's palace.
God bless 'im.

Just started "Mr Penundra's 24 Hour Bookstore"
one of the more trendy new books in America.
It's about this 'bookstore' see...
Lots of strange characters with wizardly overtones...
And very contemporary innerwebby stuff... even Twittering.
All my egghead academic type friends say they love it,
especially those who seldom read fiction, which almost
put me off, but now I'm enjoying it for the clever writing
even if the plot is developing slower than global warming.
Apparently there's some great 'secret' yet to be revealed.
I'll update on that later.

~jwf~

Currently re-reading John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" (copyright, 1972).

As prophetic science fiction goes, exceptionally good prophecy, if somewhat exaggerated.

Pratchett - Thud
Tolkien - The Return of the King

and a book about Teenagers which is depressing, frankly, but explains a lot.

I'm slowly making my way through Tad William's 'The Ditry Streets of Heaven'. I just have no time for reading at the moment.

Read The Hunger Games on Monday evening. Didn't intend to but it was lying around the house, and even though I don't really like books written in the present tense (no, I've no idea why) I got sucked in very quickly. It's excellent.

to the film thread ... because guess what I did next?

Mol

I was thinking this morning I might give 'Paradise Lost' by Milton a crack next. I'm feeling on a 'classics' kick again....

Finished the Hunger Games trilogy yesterday. One that stays, I think.

Mol

Yesterday I felt like reading something lighter than the other books I have on the go. So I started, and finished, The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia were a Daily Deal on Kindle a while ago, so I bought the complete set for 99p each. I'm pleased to say that they've kept the illustrations by Pauline Baynes, but not so pleased that they felt the need to colour them. (Obviously you don't see the colours on a Kindle, but you do if you have a Kindle app on anything with a colour screen.)

didn't they colour them for the 50th anniversary editions?

Possibly, but I still don't see the need. The colours don't look very good on my tablet - the skin colour is too dark and orangey, for example - but that may be down to the tablet's graphics.

Och. All part of modern life. You can't so much as fart without someone bringing you the same fart back next day, digitally remastered.

I had a look at the illustrations via the Kindle app on my laptop and the duff skintones *are* down to the graphics capabilities (or lack thereof) on my tablet.

Finished 1000 Years of Annoying the French. It's quite good, but Clarke falls into the trap of going with the stereotypes of Catherine de Medici, and believing that the only people who died during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre were Huguenots. When the killing started a lot of people saw it as a way of settling scores or killing creditors. Catholics died that day, as well as Protestants.

My bathroom book/book at bedtime is now Honour This Day by Alexander Kent (another Bolitho book).

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Very different from Farenheit 451, this is definitely in the realm of fantasy, with a creepy carnival and a strange man who sells lightning rods emblazoned with signs to ward off evil.

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon...in the time it took to have a bath and in a bid to find my creative mojo again.

"things to do now that you are 50"

Something Wicked is superb! I do love Bradury's work

Big (in the sense of popularity and trendy reads) new book
called 'Mr Penumbra's 23-Hour Bookstore' ((Available @ Amazon).

Pretty damn good for a first novel. Starts off slow and ends
up sorta silly but the middle bits - oh the middle bits - where
he creates a transcendental realm of cyberspatial visualisation
amid the overload of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the mythos of text.

A loving imagining of the crossroads between the printed page
and the computer screen.

Anyone who loves books and/or has visions of new-tech potential
(ie: anyone at h2g2) will like (if not love) this book. Imagine
for a moment the idea of re-creating a giant gallery of printed
matter in a virtual reality. (Some uncredited echoes of Pratchett's
L-space and several reverent acknowledgments to Douglas Adams
and his 'Guides' with a few shots across Google's bows.)


~jwf~

Yikes. Typo Alert.
Do not be misled.
It is of course a 24 hour bookstore.
23 is not enough hours in a day.

~jwf~

stalled on Teenagers because, frankly I'm living that dream

Picked up Nurse! Nurse! which is a kind of "one pair of hands" for the modern era - 30 something bloke retrains as a mental health nurse. Very interesting and well written

also reading A Hatfull of Sky which is lovely.

I've just realised how little of Bradbury's works I've read over the years. I read The Illustrated Man in my late teens, and I still have a copy of Fahrenheit 451 (a horror story to a bibliophile like me). That's about it. Now that his works are available as ebooks, I may check them out - when I've finished the 80+ books I have on my Kindle right now.

Not reading as much as I'd like because of OU course work, but I recently read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.