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

A work mate loaned me a lovely old style hardback version of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsdawn. I have read it before but the re-read is still fantastic.

"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?"

Okay, I think that's all the Marlowe I know.

The edition of Doctor Faustus I was told to get as my set book is aimed at AS/A level students. (I'm doing an OU Arts foundation course.) It's good because it goes into Marlowe's use of language, blank verse, why he has the characters say certain things, etc. I'm actualy enjoying it, although it's not an easy read.

Well, I have just finished Raw Spirit, non-fiction by Iain Banks. Someone apparently gave him a load of dosh to go round Scotland tasting all the Malt Whiskies. A tough task to take on. But he did. Enthusiastically. It's very chatty and readable, made me want to drive around the Highlands in a fast car one day, has some rather naive and abusive rants about the Iraq war (But it was written about that time, and anger was still raw (like the spirit)), and I agree with three of his top five, never having tasted the other two. But I find the effusive descriptions of the whiskies a little OTT, Malt is, after all, a quiet solitary drink surely. Paragraphs of adjectives - tasting notes - it doesn't need. Very oddly, also, the book (My paperback version anyway) has many (I mean dozens) of spelling mistakes.

The Story of Mathematics by Anne Rooney. I suspect there are better books on the subject. It's a bit too shallow and I'm not sure about its accuracy. For example, it refers to Pythagoras banning the use of irrational numbers, which I think is a misrepresentation of events, especially as it's apparently arguable whether Pythagoras really existed.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. It's a bit strange but it's fab. I wish I knew more Spanish though, but I'm very happy for the few words I picked up from Dora the Explorer.

Finished Dragonsdawn, now reading Powers That Be, a collaboration between Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. So far so good, but I'm still not sure...

Just finished We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (I'm a bit behind the times, I know).

Really enjoyed it. Fascinating insight and a good twist at the end - though I had an inclining that might happen.

On to The God Delusion now. I really am behind the times, aren't I?

Nah, not really. I'm just entering the post-war world with Sartre's "The Age of Reason"!

On Tuesday I was reading a bit of "The Hounds of the Morrigan" by Pat O'Shea, but I've set it aside now. It seems better to read it with rain pelting against the window.

I'm reading "Sharpe's Havoc", to figure out why he makes Sho swoon.

Watching the series might be better for that.

I'm on an Ursula Le Guin binge at the moment. Having just finished off a 3-books-in-one of Rocannon's World, Planet Of Exile and City Of Illusions, I'm now reading The Wind's Twelve Quarters. When I'm done with that, I have The Dispossessed to look forward to.

I think I read (nearly) all of these in my twenties...but it's good to come back to them after all this time.

RF

Good thinking. I might dig some of hers out too.

That reminds me, I lent my copy of "Very Far Away From Anywhere Else" to a colleague and never got it back...

It's a little known fact, but in the manufacturing process in sawmills they take all the returnability of books and transfer it into boomerangs. This is why books never return, while boomerangs return more than they ought to.

That the manufacture of the two is linked can be shown by the growth of the publishing industry in Europe roughly around the time after Europeans reached the Antipodes.

actually Sho swoons after both versions of Sharpe - the one in the novels started out with dark hair and a scar on his cheek. What's not to like about that (sounds a bit like my old Action Man)

In the meantime Sean Bean does look rather fine in a frogged jacket, tight trousers and boots

That would explain why I found my missing book down under the sofa.

Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams which is something I like much much better than the hitchhiker books.

I Shall Wear Midnight, the Fourth (and final) chapter in Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series.

I shall write a proper book review of this at some point, but in brief loved it, a fitting end to a good little seriers and I am sorry I shall not be spending any new time in the company of these characters.

I do hope that Terry has not finished with Granny Weatherwax mind you and I wonder if she will be back somewhere.

FB

The Complete Richard Hannay stories, by John Buchan - purely because I found it on the train.

It's making me think I had the wrong kind of upbringing. No friends listed in the Peerage, no valet, no pathological fear of Arabs, Germans and Jews...well, maybe not!