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

How many times do I have to explain this one? It is not theft. It is a matter of civil contract between me and the publisher.

I're read books fairly constantly since I was seven and have got through quite a few over the last mumblemumble years. I can articulate quite clearly *why* I think 'World War Z' is a literary lowlight - but it maybe warrants a separate thread.

I can see why you didn't like it, but as a fan of trashy horror books, I enjoyed it for what it was.

It wasn't because it was trashy horror. It was the incompetent writing. And the blatant misuse of Wikipedia. And the gratuitous politics.

I can see how that'd distract you from the trashy horror aspect of it. I just focused on the zombies.

To put my judgement in Context, Mr 6, I've read a Jack Reacher novel...

haha - one of the Jack Reacher novels was ok as a bit of brain candy (the one with the forged money) but after that they got very very samey. I can't talk, however, given my addiction to the Stephanie Plum novels...

Crikey. You must really have disliked it...

And I've not even finished it yet!

I've just finished Mockingjay - the third Hunger Games book. And I must say, I was enjoying it right until the tacked-on epilogue, which just didn't ring true at all...

Exactly. Huge huge huge disappointment to me too.

If anyone has read the first Trudi Canavan magician series, it has a similarly disappointing tacked on ending.

I'm currently reading 'The Story of a Doctor's Telephone' (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38752/38752-h/38752-h.htm) and listening alternately to 'Three Men on the Bummel' (Jerome K Jerome) and 'Schattenreiter' by Wolfgang Hohlbein.

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Tell me about it. You get three books of "look, violence is bloody terrible. Even when it's justified, it IS going to mess you up. You're going to be hurt. Battered, bruised, cut, burned.

"But that's just the outside. It's going to make you hate yourself. It's going to make other people hate you, and you'll justify it in your own head. The people you hurt will haunt you.

"And the people you love won't be safe. And it might even be that the people your violence is supposed to save end up dead....

"Ooh! Babies!"








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I just finished my first Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility. I can see why someone added zombies.
'He was the nearly perfect beau. There was, at first, some difficulty deriving from the odour of rotting flesh and that his singing was somewhat less than angelic, yet, inarguably there was the virtue of the two thousand per that won my soul to his virtue. That and that he, so perfectly like my perfect self, was completely incapable of referring to an implement for the manipulation of soil as an implement for the manipulation of soil.'

But isn't the circumlocution the point? It's satire.

I'm reading 'Die Stadt der träumenden Bücher' (the city of dreaming books) again. It's really a nice book.

I must read that again; got the second part for Christmas and forgot too much of the first!

I'm now on Pavane by Keith Roberts - a science fantasy classic

Yes, I also just read the 2nd part and now as I read the first again (and in fact all other Zamonia books) it makes a lot more sense.

Just read 'The Death of Grass' by John Christopher. Interesting enough, in a rather earnest 'Play For Today' way.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Grass-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141190175/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330946364&sr=1-1


Someone else mentioned 'Just My Type' by Simon Garfield. nnnn...I *should* have liked this. I'm interested in the subject matter. But I just found it too bitty and disorganised. Lots and lots of facts without actually telling you anything..OK - so what actually *are* punches and matrices? Why did making them require different skillsets? And if someone says that a typeface is 'Assertive yet warm'...what the feck does it mean? And what characteristics make it that way?


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-My-Type-About-Fonts/dp/1846683017


Also 'If You Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask For One.'

Took it down on impulse. A transcription of a stage show. Lots and lots of footnotes (more than the actual transcription!) analysing it to the nth degree - which may or may not be funny, but I think that's meant to be the point.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stewart-Prefer-Milder-Comedian-Please/dp/0571279848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330946778&sr=1-1


I really need to get into a meaty hunk of litratcha.

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke. Unsurprisingly superb, a crime thriller (and so much more) set in rural Texas. It had the same kind of tone as No Country For Old Men, but was more human somehow.