Archive for the ‘52/6 (2007)’ Category
Extracted by my paper diary.
# 9 15 / 8 / 07 - East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I curse the name of the teachers who felt ‘Of Mice and Men’ was below me at school. I condemn those who fed me the agony of Atwood, Golding and Shakespere whilst all the time, the dyslexics and the lumpenproletariat luruxiated in the work of this great man. Today I have read a truly great novel and I am humbled by it.
# 10 18 / 8 / 07 - Animal Farm by George Orwell
For my birthday I asked for the Complete works of Orwell, I’d left it on my shelf until now, Lord can that man write. On a tangental note - has anyone noticed that people describe Facist states as ‘Orwellian’, despite Orwell’s strict stance as a Democratic socialist. It’s somewhat of a cruel irony that his name in death has come to mean what he stood against in life.
# 11 19 / 8 / 07 - Burmese Days by George Orwell
Christ, what a miserable book.
# 12 21 / 8 / 07 - The Brentford Triangle by Robert Rankin
I’d promised myself a light read after crawling through two and a half Orwell novels. It was like a cool breeze during a heatwave. If I’m not very well behaved, I might take a sojurn through all of Rankin’s work. I had promised myself that whilst I wouldn’t discount re-reads from the challenge, I’d be a lazy person if I delved into safe territory.
10/08/07 - My Tank is Fight by Zack Parsons
Twenty brilliant deranged yet entertained inventions from WW2, some of the also-rans in Hitler’s quest for the Allies-beating superweapon, discussed with a frankness, delicacy and humour that makes a book like this entertaining enough to wish you could make it required reading for history classes.
The Norwich Odeon (Formerly the UCI) now has a digital projector in screen 8, which is where Rachel & I watched Transformers for our 5th anniversary. Aside from my usual quibble of being tired of watching enormous blurs because they can’t be bothered to render in the detail and slow the footage down, the film’s awesome. A true spectacle.
5/8/07 Box 132 by Alex Shearer
It’s odd reading a novel about attempted adultery recommended to you by Cheryl ‘Dalek Box Set’ Bardell* in her second or third letter, written to me in year 9 (We would pass them between classes and sit reading and writing responses in the afternoon’s classes. Except I’d usually avoid her until the next day so I could type mine. Think my handwriting’s bad now? You should have seen it then). I can’t fathom why I remembered the title of the book, so many years later when I found it for £1 in Bookthrift, 9 (Fuck, I’m old) years later.
Sadly the context is more interesting than the novel, which has ‘Really low-budget British Feelgood romantic comedy’ (Which will bomb at the box office) written in it’s DNA like a stick of rock.
* My one reader will at least remember her by that moniker.
29/7/07 - Picking Up the Pieces by Paul Britton
The sequel to ‘The Jigsaw Man’ follows Britton as he tries to balance his criminal work with his job as a NHS psychologist and the cases here are far more personal. No longer do we deal with famous killers like Fred and Rose West or the Bulger killers, now we’re onto smaller stories about a man who killed rabbits because he couldn’t kill his abusive father, a woman who was ‘posessed’ with a repressed personality and a man who thought he was a werewolf. Read both back-to-back, and marvel at how Britton manages to solve a case using only a photo of the dead body - the rest of the information is missing.
28/7/07 - The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton
Paul Britton was a forensic psychologist before the term was invented. A police officer asked him once how he would go about creating a ‘profile’ to catch a killer, and in a flash this oop-north NHS doctor became single-handedly responsible for solving and catching some of Britain’s most lethal killers. Not only is this an amazing account of his work, it’s a brilliant insight into how psychological profiling works - not to mention all the way through, you’ll be thinking ‘Why hasn’t someone made *this* into a TV show yet?’. I might phone his agent and find out how much the rights are myself…
Either way, the scariest thing about this book is that it’s all true.
24/7/07 - Tunnel Visions by Christopher Ross
This book is either
a) A self-effacing witty discourse as to the mundanities of working on the London underground through the eyes of the world’s smartest man - a philosopher who has travelled the world, being blown up, taught kung-fu in the far east, smuggled things in the middle east and wound up a tubie for the intellectual pleasure of it all…
b) A self aggrandising hagiography (Like there’s any other kind) with embellishments of a wannabe Indiana Jones figure who presents himself as a ‘philosopher’ as he travels the world seeking enlightenment…
c) A thready narrative from a writer who has grasped hooking his audience but confuses his conclusion by having an entire section of the book as snatches of philosophical musing without conclusion.
Either way, I enjoyed it. Tomorrow’s book’s a little heavier though.
22/7/07 : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
I’m a grown man and as such refuse to suggest that I even contemplated weeping at the conclusion of the book. Now I can sit with that hollow feeling that I’ve lost an old friend, never to excite me again, smugly smiling to myself that at least some of my guesses were right.
[Edit]
Hang on a mo, I’ve spotted a massive error here chaps!
How could [x] remove [x] from [x] when placed on his [x] when the [x] had been given to [x] after [x] had broken into [x]? When you’ve finished the book, tell me, because I’m scratching my head here.
20/7/07: The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken
Written in my diary at work
Al Franken’s books are a slog. Not because he has a poor prose style but because it’s hard not to be driven to a psychotic rage when you read the litany of crimes the current U.S. administration will avoid punishment for. I tried to reccomend the book to a friend who in typical fashion defended the (alleged) child prostition and enforced abortions of the slaves of Saipan as beneficial to capitalism. It made me wonder if he was serious, I wasn’t in the mood for such irony when all I wanted to do was react violently.
Having finished the book at 3:00am and expected the shift to end early, I shall have to sit my remaining hours seething in jealousy at those who are already well into the final Harry Potter.
17/6/07 Freakonomics by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Despite its relative brevity, Freakonomics presents a wide series of alternative explanations for commonly understood social trends. Minor sections are spent talking about the work of Stetson Kennedy (Who used a Superman radio show to destroy the KKK*) and why Crack dealers operate the same business model as McDonalds, but the main thrust of their book deals with how abortion laws and crime statistics are tied together and how a child’s development is correlated to how many books they have in the house, but not the marital status of the parents. It’s fascinating reading, light and accessible, presenting it’s left-field suggestions with sufficient certainty to make you pay attention. Why not check out their blog at Freakonomics.com and see for yourselves?
*Wikipedia however, suggests differently.
Every year my girlfriend makes the resolution to read 52 books in a year. I just resolve to read more. In the last 6 months, I’ve read 6 books; I rarely feel like reading after pouring at a textbook for days on end, but this is an appalling state of affairs. So I’m doubling up my stakes. Starting now, on the 17th July, I’m going to try to read 52 books before January 1st 2008.
I’m going to cheat a little by counting the books I’ve already started, and the books I’ve read over the past few weeks on slow nights at work, but the hope is to see how close I can get to 52 in the next six months.
