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

The Lord of the Rings Random Mood

me too - it's my "lunchtimes at work" book this time
I've just left Isengard...

I'm reading a battered old copy that was going to be thrown out of a charity shop!
It's held together with brown paper, sellotape and a rubber band!
My bookmark is in 'The Mirror of Galadriel'.

Random Mood

Of Mice and Men/Cannery Row- John Steinbeck

(Hovered over Stella Gibbons' 'Nightingale Wood' but couldn't resist Mr Steinbeck.)

We talked earlier about 'The Grapes of Wrath', superb as it is, but I'd say that 'Tortilla Flat' is better and my absolute favourite JS is 'The Winter of Our Discontent'

How to write an Iain Banks novel:

Take some characterisation and plot ideas from previous Iain Banks novels;
Add a Scottish country house;
Mix in some adolescent sex, big family secret, and impending doom;
Include a leftist monologue using one of the characters as a mouthpiece;
Season with a smattering of an Iain M. Banks novel. (A social unit held together by a game? Puh-leeeze!)

Et voilá! You have “The Steep Approach To Garbadale”.

RF

So he's re-written 'Crow Road', basically? Again. Good to know I won't need to bother thinking about reading this one, then.

I'm presently reading 'The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril' by Paul Malmont, a very well researched novel dealing with the adventures of pulp writers Walter Gibson (creator of The Shadow), Lester Dent (creator of Doc savage) and a young L. Ron Hubbard, with a nice cameo by H. P. Lovecraft whose death acts as the McGuffin for the whole thing.

Reading:- The forgotten man of English, err, Irish SF, umm, oh' well, I'm reading Bob Shaw and he leaves most of the current crop of scribblers for dead in that odd titled area.

Most of Shaw's novels are serious, but he was known in the fan community for his wit. Every year at the British science fiction convention Eastercon, he would deliver a humorous speech. These were eventually collected in A Load of Old Bosh (1995).

This is lifted from a Wiki site.
If you have not read Bob...
Well try and do so now, forget about the pretenders strutting about the place, like...(Ha, I'm silly but not that silly)

I think he'd probably sue if you said he was English, mind. The difficulty with Shaw is that I don't think any of his work is presently in print in the UK or North America.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

He's 66 today don't ya' know!

Who? God?

Iain Banks....nnnyeeeesss...I don't feel the urge to read his latest these days.

Steinbeck: Good to see someone else has read Tortilla Flat. Kind of a grittier Cannery Row, no? My own favourite is In Dubious Battle.

Lord of the Rings - I'll pass over that one. Life's too short

Bought in London last week:
'A Very Short Introduction to Juergen Habermas'
'Look We Have Coming To Dover!' - Daljit Nagra (poetry)

Bought in Oxfam at the weekend:
Graham Greene - 'The Tenth Man' and 'A Sense of Reality'
Penguin Modern Poets: Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. (Ferlinghetti is often amusing - but I'm not convinced it's poetry)

10 pages off finishing:
'Red Mars' - Kim Stanley Robinson. I'd not read any SF for years. Very good...I'll have to stop myself launching straight into Blue Mars...but not 'Litratcha', I'm afraid.

See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F19585?thread=4005961&post=47005906#p47005906 Random Mood

REcently finished 'African Exodus' by Chris Stringer, and 'The Fossil Trail' by Ian Tattersall. The former was pretty good, but the latter was much better, in part because it had a broader look ( both at human evolution). My favourite subject in non-fiction, I think.

Strange Highways- A collection of short storires and novelettes by Dean Koontz

Recently finished the latest Marian Keyes - Anybody Out There.
Loved it - her books are one of my guilty pleasures, great, but probably for girls only.

Wonderful to hear others rating Tortilla Flat - that was my introduction to Steinbeck, loved him ever since.

Recently finished the first in Conn Iggulden's Genghis Khan series - can't wait for the next one.

Next on the bookshelf is Richard Harris Imperium - any comments?

oops - I mean Robert Harris!!
(although I did meet Richard Harris in a bar once ...)

We need to talk about kevin

James Ellroy -The Cold Six Thousand
Douglas Adams - Mostly Harmless
Roald Dahl - Matilda (though granted I'm reading it to my grandson)

I'm *still* reading the same book (Conquest of the Middle-East R.Fisk) as when I was back in #4075. In my defence: it's a big book.

I'm lining up to read next Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War by Michael Maclear - which Dad assures me is much in the same vein.

The Lords of the North, by Bernard Cornwell.