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

I saw a great stage production (Tramway, Glasgow) which majored on the scenes where the Chief descended into the bowels of the hospital at night. It was a useful corrective to the film, which slightly gives the impression that the patients aren't actually ill.

"Juicy Fruit"

Currently re-reading Cannery Row as a warm up for tackling Grapes of Wrath for the first time.

Still have Imperium on the bookshelf, but got sidetracked into rediscovering Steinbeck after reading this thread!

Would be interested to hear how Black Swan Green goes. I enjoyed Cloud Atlas, Number Nine Dream and Ghostwritten, but haven't got around to that one yet.

One flew east, one flew west, ... 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' just finished! Good luck up there on your river Chief!

Starting tomorrow on 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison as my thick book.
About quarter of the way through Coetzee's 'Youth' which is my thin book. It's building up nicely in a stylish and tense Coetzeean kind of way.

Hmm. But Chief *does* seem to have schizophrenia, or some form of psychotic illness. Yes, Kesey was making some very valid points about the treatment of psychiatric illness, the disproportionate hospitalisation of ethnic minorities, etc. etc. - but I do feel that some of the 60s anti-psychiatrists threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Black Swan Green - very different to Cloud Atlas and No 9 Dream (I'm told - not got around to them yet). He does a very good portrayal of a teenager with a crippling stammer. I was that teenage - as was Mitchell. Things like always thinking two sentences ahead...the impending doom of having to read aloud in school...the stupidity of adults...

Ah! Invisble Man is wonderful. If an author is only going to have one novel in him, better make it something like that.

I finally finished We Need To Talk About Kevin. This isn't because it's a bad book, but more due to lack of reading time. It really is quite good. I'd recommend it to anyone who listens to my recommendations

next up...Think I'll try John harvey's Darkness & Light. A recommendation from HI...

RF

Phantoms in The Brain. by V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., & Sandra Blakeslee

"Talking to denial patients can be an uncanny experience. They bring us face to face with some of the most fundamental questions one can ask as a conccious human being: What is the self? What brings about the unity of my conscious experience? What does it mean to will an action? Neuroscientists tend to shy away from such questions, but anosognosia patients afford a unique opportunity for experimentally approaching these seemingly intractable philosophical riddles."

Fascinating

Ooh! Ooh! That sound like one for me! Plus it gives me yet another chance to plug his excellent 2003 Reith lectures (google 'em). Worth listening to as well as reading - he has the most gorgeous voice known to humankind.

And it's also worth plugging my recently re-read 'Consciousness Explained' by Daniel Dennett. A seminal book. He doesn't believe in qualia, unlike Ramachandran (who says they are the basic unit of processing), but it seems to me that they're each using the word to mean different things.

Actually...Dennett doesn't even believe there's such a thing as consciousness, come to think of it.

And almost anything by Oliver Sachs is worth a read - eg 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat'.

Yeah, 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat' is very good

Coincidentally, Oliver Sachs wrote the foreword to 'Phantoms in The Brain'

I'm not sure that quite counts as a coincidence.

I recently finished 'Absolution Gap', a sci-fi novel by Alistair Reynolds. It's pretty good, excellent plot, very ambitious and the aliens are weird enough to be believable. The humanoid characters are pretty well drawn too. A nice, easy on the brain change from studying.

I've now just started 'A Life In Our Times', the memoirs of JK Galbraith, a famous, recently-dead economist. He's very erudite, and writes extremely well, and seemed to know every famous person in the world between the 40s and 60s. Very promising.

Or rather...

40s and 60s. Very promising.

got a delivery today from "south america"

so I'm now also reading the latest version of the Diary of Anne Frank

What is it about economists? JM Keynes knew everyone, too. (And, seemingly, shagged half of them.)

Wellll, they teach at top universities, where they teach the families of the rich and famous, then they go and tell governments how to spend their money. Those long uni holidays are also quite handy for contract work, so they can meet the top business folk as well.

The name-dropping would shame Stephen Fry

Plus, in JMK's case, he was at Cambridge with half the Bloomsbury set must've helped...

The bit I'm at, JKG has just arrived at Cambridge, waiting to meet JMK.

Galbraith's 'The Great Cra$h 1929' is a fascinating account of the Wall Street Crash (and it's very well written.)

'The Winter of Our Discontent' is my favourite Steinbeck