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

....I Capture The Castle is an EXCELLENT book. I keep lending it to people and have had a 100% hit rate. I always say that if they like the first sentence, they will enjoy the rest.

And I've just bought my 2nd Patrick O'Brian. I forget its name. It's the one after 'Desolation Island'. I found DO hard going at times, but got entranced by realising how hard life was for seafarers - eg the whalers who had to plant cabbages so they wouldn't catch scurvy on the way home.

have you read the one where maturin has to drink seabird crap soup on an island?
no one has ever heard of ICTC...we should form a fanclub

No..as I say, I've only read one so far, and just bought the next one. I doubt I'll get around to the whole series (although I understand one gets addicted). So many books but such a short life!

ICTC - Armistead Maupin (of 'Tales From The City' fame) is a big fan. His novel, 'Maybe The Moon' - based around a friend of his who played E.T. - deliberately followed the way it is structured into notebooks.

That was a clever bit that I loved - the way that at the end she's running out of paper and starts writing 'I love you' in the margins. It also reflects back to the experimental style of Mortmain's novel - the start of which, incidentally, owes much to the first chapter of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Favourite lines:

The opening line: 'I am writing this sitting in the kitchen sink'

'Fortunately there's no cheaper form of bread than bread'

'Topaz says that she was born with the name, but I still think it's ridiculous, for who is to say that one cannot change one's name.'

'I find that listening to Bach is rather like being hit repeatedly on the forehead with a teaspoon'.

Anyway...we MUST talk some more about books. Read any Kurt Vonnegut? Or Steinbeck? Or Greene?

i've read a short story by vonnigut.... can't quite remember what it was except that the people in it weren't allowed to think so noises kept on playing to distract them... anyway, it was really good. What other stuff has he written? g2g now but i expect i can post back later.

That would have been 'Harrison Bergeron' in the collection 'Welcome To The Monkey House'.

I've always been puzzled by that story. It's about a socialist dystopia in which everyone is levelled out: clever people are stopped from thinking; strong people are given heavy weights. Yet Vonnegut has always been an avowed socialist. Possibly it was written because his short stories were written for the then thriving magazine market, purely to feed his large family (his own children, plus those of his sister who died of cancer just before her husband was killed in a car accident), and that was the sort of idea that would go down well in a late 50s US market.

Where to start:

Slaughterhouse 5. Based on Vonnegut's wartime experiences as a PoW during the fire bombing of Dresden....but also featuring time travel and alien abduction.

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. About an eccentric millionaire philanthropist and featuring (like many Vonnegut books) a pulp SF writer named Kilgore Trout

Mother Night. About a man who aided the Nazis, but secretly worked for the US...or was it the other way around?

Breakfast of Champions. Trout is a leading character here. At the start of the book there are some 'amusing' doodles of girls' underpants, an a**hole and a (ahem) 'wide open beaver'. When I first bought it, for ages I kept it hidden from my parents. Acknowledged as innovative by many writers (Martin Amis, Alisdair Grey) for the device of making the author a character in his own book.

The Sirens of Titan: Time slips through the Chronosynclastic Infidibula, a soujourn on Mercury and the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

Cat's Cradle: The end of the world and the calypso religion of Bokononism. 'See the pretty cat in the pretty cradle? There is no cat! There is no cradle!'

Phew!
I'd say start with Slaughterhouse 5, then try Breakfast of Champions.

I've just finished Patrick O'Brian's 'The Fortunes of War'. I'm hooked now and want to find out what happens next.

Currently reading Anthony Burgess' autobiography, 'Little Wilson and Big God'.

I'm so sorry I haven't replied to you for ages....
I don't have internet at boarding school, and then I got completely side-tracked (or straight-tracked, depending) by my Cambridge interview.
Good to hear that you're into Po'B - I haven't read any for a while, due to aforementioned pressures. I'm currently reading Catch 22, which is great - very circular.
Did you see the film of ICTC on bbc 2 the other night? What did you think?

I didn't like the film of ICTC at all. As I feared, they went for the "terribly terribly English" angle - which I think missed the whole point.

If you like Catch 22 you'll love Slaughterhouse 5. Heller and Vonnegut were close friends.