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

The immunology and getetics textbooks are all mainly in the boxs in the loft, I was a student a few years back actually, and now I think of it very pretentiously ; I actually have a hard bound copy of my masters dissertation on the shelf unit with CDs on, sitting under the three unopened copies of the phone book/yellow pages I must store it away with my BSc dissertation : finished rereading the tom sharp, or is that sharpe? Last night so returned back to Tomas Hardy to read I can't see that there is a huge difference between the two authors in many ways; Hardy has a b very bleek some would say pesamistic take on things (I'd say realistic), and tom sharp does too, albeit in a more satirical way and with a differnt emphesis Just remembered a few other books I've got kickeing round, I've c Marx's communist party maanfesto and des capital (I can't spel) sitting in the spare room (where I am now) in the top of the wardrobe, along I think with where the as yet not got round to reading copy of salmon of doubt is Oh, and anohter book type thing I just remembered is lurking actually out on the shelves for some reason downstairs is a chemistry book which is mainly just about/listing the periodic table No idea when or where I even got that from actually tempted to go back and read a bit more now rahter than spending all day on the PC again

DONT read the salmon of doubt. It's awful. I mean, it just stops in middle of nowhere and leaves you hanging and you wander around fuzzily wondering what was going to happen next for days and your friends get all concerned but it only takes around a week to wear off.

I confess, I've never read any Thomas Hardy... I see it really IS time to visit the library...

They're not really hard going to read or anything, I like them, as they've got relaly long detailed descriptions of the environments and peoples action in them.... very 'wordy' in that way but pretty easy reading language wise if you know what I mean... I relaly enjoyed Thomas Hardy from the first book I read... Woodlanders I think (but then again I'm origionally from a countryside-ish background, so maybe that helped me enjoy that one....)

books written in the 19th century tend to be really descriptive. it was a quality that was admired and it was usually used to "pad the novel out" a bit.

We-ell, depends, there. Dickens was descriptive, but Twain wasn't. Conan Doyle wasn't. Poe kept things short. James was wordy, but still brief. Um, was James 19th century, come to think of it?

um, later 19th century. james was around the time of oscar wilde i was thinking more along the lines of earlier 19th century, stuff like radcliffe, austin etc. of course some authors employed description later as a narrative device. conrad used it in heart of darkness and woolf used it in to the lighthouse.