I'm a great fan of the works of H. Rider Haggard and some year ago I picked up at a con a very battered edition of Moon of Israel, not one of his better know books. It turns out to be a retelling of the story of Exodus from an Egyptian viewpoint ( Read more... )

About this time of year I take down from my bookshelves a book I read a long time ago and re-read it, a different book each year.  This year I have decided upon Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.  It is the centenary of his birth in February ( Read more... )

I went to see Dave Gorman at the G Live in Guildford last night.  (I'm not sure, but I think this is the first time I've ever gone to a comedy gig ( Read more... )

I'm reading at the moment Peter Heather's history The Fall of the Roman Empire.  The second chapter, Barbarians, discusses the borders of the Empire and the threats to it in the fourth century.  Just got to a sub-chapter called "Thrace: The final frontier".

I finished re-reading a book yesterday that I had been reading for the last five weeks, the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos.  It was more or less the only book I was reading during that time.  (It was too big to go in my jacket pocket so I read other stuff whenever I travelled into London for a concert.)  Those of you who know about my massive ( Read more... )

So I'm entering newly acquired books into my database, and I discover I now have two copies of To Outer Space by Captain W.E. Johns.

I'm currently reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos, a book about translation and its problems.  By a curious coincidence I was reading a section on the constraints of subtitling and then saw an amusing instance of it ( Read more... )

Arsene Wenger: A biography.

In the Science Fiction Section

Although some of my earliest memories are of being scared by space travel, after seeing an early US attempt to launch a sattelite blowing up on the pad on TV in late 1957, some time in the next couple of years I got interested in the subject, and I remember reading a book at school called The Tiger Who Went to the Moon by Nancy Spain.  I think this ( Read more... )

Saw a headline on the BBC News digitext just now: "Oliver tops Christmas books list ( Read more... )