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

'Dreams From My Father' by you-know-who.

It's been said many times - but it is *sparklingly* well-written.

The Three Musketeers - finally thought that Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds should not provide my knowledge of this classic tale. Turns out D'Artanian is a bit of git really.....
BCNU - Crescent

Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You by Marcus Chown. Very readable, but he simplifies some stuff a bit too much for me.

reading Liz Smith's biography

Despite being very busy entertaining my foreign guest I managed to finish Spin by Robert Wilson over the holidays. Some very cool ideas and rather nice story-telling. I should find some more about his other book - Axis I think it's called...

Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton. It's the conclusion to the stoy started in Pandora's Star, which I really enjoyed.

An Island Parish by Nigel Farrell. A bit of travel writing about going to the Scillies. I think he was on telly a while back.

Actually alternating between...

The Winds Of Change by Eugene Linden (historic instances of climate change - excellent!)

At Risk by Stella Rimington (thriller, need I say more?)

The Janisary Tree by Jason Goodwin (historical fiction set in 19th century Istanbul

and-nearing the end of-

Last Chance To Eat by Gina Mallet( (subtitled 'The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World', engagingly written and informative.)

On the Wealth of Nations - P J O'Rourke
(anything by Peej is well worth the effort)

I've never found him much of an effort, mind. He's delightfully annoying.

At Bertram's Hotel- Agatha Christie

It's one of the later Miss Marple stories. I remember seeing the Joan Hickson version on television when I was young and finding it very boring but the book's been good so far.

I've recently finished 'The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English' by Henry Hitchings. Very interesting. It does what it says on the tin basically. There are a plethora of interesting nuggets, but it does start to pall slightly by the end. Still worth a read though for all linguaphiles.

And I'm now onto 'The Inverted Pyramid', a history of football tactics. It's way more than that though, as it traces how football tactics evolve it's also a social history of the world through the 20th century. This one definitely scores.*







*sorry.

The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

A history of how money is essential to trade. Unfortunately, the best and brightest among us tend to lose sight of the trade and instead start to think of the money itself as what's important. The manipulation of the money itself becomes the dominant industry and the ordinary mundane things in Adam Smith's sense suffers.Then everything crashes and the cycle has to start again.

I finished Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton. Not as good as the first part, Pandora's Star, I thought. Partly there's one bit of the plot that doesn't seem to make sense.

I'm now on Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs. More Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist. Good as usual, and what seems like authentic science to me (it should be given that author and character share the same occupation), but she still irritates me with her cliffhanger chapter endings - things like "I was shocked at what I saw," and you have to read on to the next chapter to find what Tempe saw.

I smiled at Tempe reading a Jasper Fforde novel. Hopefully not First Among Sequels in which she makes a guest appearance, because that would be too confusing.

Just finished Salam Pax's 'The Baghdad Blog'.

I used to be an avid reader, before 'The Unpleasantness'. One thing that it's refreshed my memory of is that, contrary to people now seem to believe, the US *did* have a post-invasion plan. His entries for the months before cover debates within the news sources on such things as arrangements for the US govenorate. The problem was that it was a piss poor plan.

Just finished First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde. It was the first book of his I've read and I found it original and inventive.

Started On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Never read it before but I went to see the exhibition about it (including the original scroll manuscript at the Barber Institute at Birmingham University recently).

Random, I somehow missed Bagpuss' post about First Among Sequels.

What's it like starting on the fourth Next book? There's rather a lot of stuff to take in in the first three that mightbe useful to understanding First Among Sequels.

I found it rather odd that a lot of the time the author is essentially running down his previous books. Given that I haven't read them, I don't know how much of that is real and how much is a joke. I found it fairly simple to get to grips with the book world and so on. It would definitely have been useful to have read the others first, though.

I guess you're referring two fictional Thursdays, neither of which is much like Thursday in the previous books - it's all basically a joke, or a self-referential version of what he previously did with Jane Eyre in The Eyre Affair.

Yes, I thought it would be something like that. Thanks, Bagpuss.