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

Do persevere with O'Brian, Sho. Once you get in the groove, there's a lot in them.

to PC. I liked the incongruous modernism of the airplanes. And if you liked that, you'll love 'I Capture The Castle' by Dodie Smith. Opening line:
'I am writing this sitting in the kitchen sink'.
I've had a 100% success rate with recommending it so far.

Duly noted- I'll check it out!

Of course, now that someone's loaned me a book I'd like to return promptly, my copy of "Parzival" has arrived. I'm anxious to read it, too.

Currently immersed in The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen Donaldson

Novo

Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett, just finished Angels and demons by Dan Brown.

"Music and the Mind" by Anthony Storr

with Brasyl by Ian McDonald on the side.

Chicken - was it you who also read the latest Oliver Sachs re music and neurology?

Not me, it's on the wanted list but still in hardback so I'll wait a while. Might have been Clive or Bagpuss reading the Oliver Sachs?

Wasn't me.

I did buy a replacement copy of Sach's: 'man who mistook his wife for a hat' recently though and have 'into the silent land: travels in neuropsychology' by Paul Broks on my Amazon wish list.

I finished E=MC2: a biography of the world's most famous equation, yesterday. Following on from atom it was just a mite repetitious, but I suspect had I read them in the reverse order that wouldn't have been the case, Atom goes over some of the broader history, EMC2 goes over some of the same history but in a little greater detail.

One of the really interesting and sadly under - explored features of the book is to treat each of the component parts of E, =, M, C & ^2 separately. Each symbol is given a chapter and the history of each is given a resume. This was an innovative way of exploring what e=mc2 actually means and builds later into the concept of the = being a bridge over which matter and energy can cross. Really my only complaint was that I wish there'd been more of it, since the book is comprised of about equal thirds - the history of the equation, consequences bomb and atomic theory and a substantial postscript of detailed footnotes and lives and careers of the significant players.

Am enjoying this revival of my Physics reading - and am thinking I might buy Richard Feynman's book on QED (Quantum Electro Dynamics) because I want to try to understand electromagnetism better - but scanning around I see Amazon have copies of his lectures on physics available which is a temptation...

was about to start book on of Tolkien's unfinished tales, only to see that it appears to be a previous version of the Silmarillion (with part 2)

can any of you Tolkien experts confirm that? Because I've read the Silmarillion and wanted to read it later this year, but I'm not going to read both.

Instead I got down my rather battered and about to die copy of The Fellowship of the Ring instead

I've read both, Sho. With the Silmarillion, the unfinished tales were revised and compiled in an attempt to form a single, cohesive "historical" work about Middle-Earth. When the Unfinished Tales volume was published, the tales were left as they were. So while the stories themselves are incomplete, ending at whatever point Tolkien stopped writing them, they're a bit more detailed.

I own both copies, and enjoyed reading both. They really are "different" enough. Maybe if you read one and then waited a while to read the other, instead of reading in sequence, you would, too?

oh I might give them a go then - instead of reading the Silmarillion (I read that last year anyway).

thanks

"A Tale of a Tub", Jonathan Swift, about 1700. From Wikipedia:

QUOTE

A Tale of a Tub is divided between various forms of digression and sections of a "tale." The "tale," or narrative, is an allegory ... the book is constructed like a layer cake, with Digression and Tale alternating. However, the digressions overwhelm the narrative ... [it] is an enormous parody with a number of smaller parodies within it ... The digressions individually frustrate readers who expect a clear purpose. Each digression has its own topic ... the digressions are each readerly tests; each tests whether or not the reader is intelligent and skeptical enough to detect nonsense ..."

END QUOTE

So basically like a Conversation here on H2G2 ...

Finished Jasper Fforde's 'First Amongst Sequels'. There are some great literary jokes which would take far too long to explain, unless you know the basic premise of his Thursday Next series. And it would be quicker for me to recommend that you read them than it would be to explain. (http://www.thursdaynext.com).

Some neat time travel paradoxes - like a fossilised VW Beetle with the next day's newspaper in its glovebox reporting its discovery.

Spurious parenthisis:
http://www.thursdaynext.com

I deny ever reading any Oliver Sachs. Still working my way through Ben-Hur at the moment.

The Perfect Spy, John Le Carre. Rated as one of his best, but I've only had the chance to read in fits and starts lately, and since a lot of it's written as memoir and hopping back and forth in time, I haven't had a chance to get into it properly.

Marx for Beginners by Ruis.

I'm not quite a beginner in Marxism - but it does a pretty damned good job at putting Dialectic Materialism in the context of Western Philosophy. It's slightly less good at relating The Theory of Capital to Marx's economic predecessors.

I read Dr Sacks' book last month and have just finished 'This is your Brain on Music' by Daniel Levitin. They cover the same stuff. Levitin's take is in some ways even more interesting. Dr Sacks tells his from an anecdotal perspective. Levitin is a rock an roll musician turned neurological researcher. It's also much more detailed. He disputes Steven Pinker's belief that music is non adaptive, that it is pendentive of our linguistic powers. He points out that it's not accidental that rock stars get way more than we fools who didn't learn the three chords. He even points out why the three chords work so well.

Sacks' book is more poetic but Levitin's is more informative.

'There Are Two Errors In The The Title Of This Book' (sic) - Robert M Martin.

I bought it at random and only picked it off my stack when I couldn't find 'Atonement'. Turns out it's rather good! It uses philosophical puzzles to introduce various themes in logic and philosophy.

Read the sequel to Master & Commander (Post Captain), and went so far as to buy the next two in the series.

Back to uni stuff in the meantime, one book (written for a general audience) worthy of note is 'Globalisation and its Discontents', by Nobel Laureate economist, former World Bank bigwig, and general good guy Joseph Stiglitz. Just started it, but it's promising so far and gives a good overview about why some economists are full of shite, and a danger to about 2/3 of the world's population.