From the Orient

“Mags”:http://moosiferjonesreading.blogspot.com/2005/09/book-meme.html (from such books as History 101 and Warring States) has infected me with the book virus. I’ve fought off a similar infection in the past but have succumbed to this one

1. Number of books I own
Many. About 300 on bookshelves around the house (this is not counting the 100 or so books my children own) + about 10 boxes of books in the shed waiting either to be sold or a bookcase to be built for them. Plus, there are an unknown number of boxes in the loft full of books (these include a nearly full set of Virgin NAs and a full set of BBC EDA’s). I think I’m going to need an extension on the house for all these books.

2. Last book I bought
Oddly enough, Warring States by Mags L Halliday, but before that The Mechanical Turk by Tom Standage which I saw in a shop and it reminded me of an old Paul McGann EDA, The Burning, so I had to buy it. UPDATE: Today, I ordered Aq’s HTML for Dummies book, but I suppose work bought that, not me.

3. Last book I completed
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. That was two weeks ago, and since that time, I only managed another 100 pages or Lawrence Miles’s Faction Paradox book. This annoys me because I really want to get to the next book in the series.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me
This is the one I have a problem with. To me, books have an everchanging flow of meaning. What meant something to me 5 years ago means nothing to me now. Also, a list such as this is skewed in favour of recent books. Therefore, I’ve deliberately ignored recent books.

* Strange England, by Simon Messingham
The first Virgin NA I read, and whilst it wasn’t the best book by a long shot, it was astonishing as I didn’t even know there was a range of Doctor Who books before seeing this. It introduced me back into the world of Doctor Who and for this it means a lot to me.
* Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
Read when I was 11, and took ages. It was my mothers copy, and introduced me to fantasy novels which were my reading diet for quite a few years to come. I’ve only read it twice and it is pretty much unreadable now, but again it defined my reading for the next 5 years.
* Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings
Pretty much like admitting to like Def Leppard to a serious Anthrax fan, but in my childhood this was unputdownable. My favourite for a long time. Farmboy turns into hero, the template for many a fantasy novel (and Star Wars). Can’t read any Eddings now. Turgid nonsense.
* Fermat’s Last theorem, by Simon Singh
Combines two of my favourite non-fiction subjects, history and science. The story of a mathematical equation. What could be more boring? (except Dave Becks autobiog?) Far from boring, it gives the history of the people behind the science (I recommend Bill Byson’s “Short History of Nearly Everything” for the same reason). And who thinks writing in the margins of books is a bad idea?
* if on a winter’s night a traveller, by Italo Calvino
When I was at university, a friend I lived with lent me this book and recommended it. We were in our finals and I couldn’t get past chapter six or seven before we all went our separate ways. My friend took the book back. For years the book nagged at my memory, but I couldn’t remember the title or the author (finals had a very bad effect on my memory which is why I got a third) but I thought that one day I would find and finish the book. Over time I even forgot what the book was about. One day I was in a bookshop and saw “if on a winter’s night”. Was this the book my friend lent me? Even after reading it I wasn’t sure. Weirdly marvellous.

5. Who shall I tag next?
No one, I don’t like doing that. If anyone wants to do the book meme after reading this, they can. Although I’m probably the last one to do it.

I’ve started a new weblog to manage and maintain my Reading Pile (more unread pile actually). Inspired by Mags, it is also powered in the same way (del.icio.us tags for currently reading, having been read, and to be read using the del.icio.us js blogroll thingy for added easy of creation).

With my new Tungsten C (a review coming soon, honest) I’ve been getting back into ebooks (I know the Zaurus did this too but I never used the Z every day and lost impetus with it).

Most of the time, I have to stand up on the bus, and find reading a book too difficult. One handed reading of the T|C is very easy. “Plucker”:http://www.plkr.org/ is a great tool and I use it to read downloaded websites and feeds (using “J-Pluck”:http://jpluck.sourceforge.net/) for reading on the bus.

One of the current favourites is Doctor Who Ebooks. There are some real classics here, I’ve already “mentioned Dying Days”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/05/30/pyramids_of_mars but since then they have published a few more including Lungbarrow (I paid £18 for a copy of this) and Human Nature (£1.50 but I got lucky). Human Nature is written by Paul Cornell who is going to be a writer for the new TV series being made this year, and I think represents his finest work.

My favourite detective[1] author is getting a TV series spin-off series based on his first main character, Jack Parlabane. According to his forum’s, James Nesbit is booked for the role of Parlabane, which I think fits in well.

Meanwhile, there could be a film of “Tony Hawks”:http://www.tony-hawks.com/ skateboarding, erm, I mean fridge hiking exploits which would be excellent indeed.

[1] I say detective, but you can’t classify it as simply as that. Political, scottish, violent, terrorist, gun-weilding and damn funny detective stories would be closer.

Tim Bray has been slowly reading through QuickSilver. He’s not the only one. I’m on page 264 and I’ve been reading for nearly two weeks now. By my standard this is incredibly slow. I usually cruise through 200 pages a day, and read Cryptonomicon in about a week.

However, I am loving Quicksilver and it ties into a lot of things I am interested in; early scientific advances, Newton, Hooke, Pepys, the Plague. It was funny watching Steve Coogan (not often I say that these days; the last series of Alan Partridge was whipping the rotting carcus once too often) as Samual Pepys the other night on BBC2 after reading Neal Stephenson’s version of him.

I may be in the minority of most of Stephenson’s previous readers (sci-fi/cyber/neo-victorian or whatever) for liking a good historical story.

That is why I loved “The Years of Rice and Salt”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006511481/qid=1071742683/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-2331353-6811602 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which also touches on many of these areas in an alternate universe way. The plague wipes out western Europe and the scientific advances made by Newton and others are made by the Chinese and Muslins.

In a move that is going to make “Karen”:http://www.uborka.nu/ so very happy Joyce’s Ulysses is going to be an unabridged audio book on 23 CD’s no less. Imagine that.

bq. “Whenever I mentioned doing this people would guiltily admit the book had been sitting on their shelves for years unread,” said Professor Marsh.

So now we can also have 23 unread CD’s sitting on our shelves for years and years too.