I don't appear to have read much in 2006. I think a lot of that is down to months wrestling with Penrose.

( Anyhow, the list )

The utterly fabulous frankie_ecap sent me Simon Raven's The Rich Pay Late. I'm loving it. It seems to cry out for one of those 11+/MENSA type questions; Arms for Oblivion is to A Dance to the Music of Time as The Thick of It is to Yes, Minister. It has the wit, the close social observation of Dance but it's really nasty and squalid. I can see me enjoying ( Read more... )

angharad was chuffed to have a picture of one of the tabbies with a copy of The Secrets of Jin Shei though it was entirely accidental. Anyhow I wondered about other LJ authors and so I bring you ( kittens with dragons and talking lobsters. )

I reread David Lodge's Changing Places yesterday. I suspect the last time I read it was at least twenty years ago, long before I'd visited Plotinus, stayed with friends in Ashland, met a Morris Zapp protegée and shacked up with a girl from Miranda County. Mercifully, even another twenty years hasn't resulted in any greater acquaintance with ( Read more... )

Do other people get as annoyed about factual goofs in historical novels as I do? Frankly, they drive me nuts. Recently I've been listening to some of the Alexander Kent Bolitho books while running. They are not bad as adventure yarns but the man has done no research at all. It would be tedious to list all the errors but they include huge ones ( Read more... )

I finally made myself read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It was OK but only OK and it certainly didn't make me want to rush out and grab the rest of his works. It has a couple of interesting ideas (though one is singularly unoriginal) and two or three plot twists but not enough to sustain 600 pages of narrative and narrative is pretty much all we ( Read more... )

via a_d_medievalist

One book that changed your life?

There are many candidates. The shortlist might be Sartre's The Roads to Freedom, Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Abbott's Flatland.

One book you have read more than once?

One! There are some books I've read five or more times. Let's go with Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time.

( Read more... )

I'm feeling a bit low today as my whole left side (diodes and all) is FUBAR'd by a pinched nerve and copious quantities of codeine have brought but slight relief. So, I'm nicking an idea from misschili. I'm looking for book recommendations. I usually read mostly non-fiction, particularly history, but I'm open to other areas too. My fiction reading tends ( Read more... )

I've read a lot of books on WW2 but Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard is far and away the best general history. I've just finished reading it for the third time and I have once again gleaned any number of previously overlooked insights ( Read more... )

From abebooks.com, The Ten Most Expensive Books Sold on ABE.

I can't help noticing that a first of the first Harry Potter sold for more than a signed first of 1984. All well out of my league though. The most I've ever paid for a book is 565 Euros.