Here's the email I wanted to send last night:From: pozorvlak
To: Dan Bailey
Subject: Coire Gaothach circuit

Dear Mr Bailey,

First off, thanks for writing Scotland's Mountain Ridges. It's been a great source of beta, and has taken me to some beautiful parts of the country and up some great routes which I otherwise wouldn't have thought to visit.

( However. )

I just finished reading a great book: It's All About the Bike by Rob Penn ( Read more... )

I was chatting to steerpikelet the other day, trying to come up with puns based on family saga novel-series and great feminist works (long story). Seeking inspiration, I looked up The F-Word's list of recommended reading, and was astonished to find Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones series there ( Read more... )

Eliezer Yudkowsky just kicked it up a notch: "Blood for the blood god!" screamed Neville. "Skulls for the skull throne! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The enemy's gate is sideways!"

...

"I am Neville, the last scion of Longbottom!" screamed Neville to the sky above, holding his wand pointed straight up as though to challenge the blazing blue heaven itself, ( Read more... )

I keep starting to write book reviews, then running out of steam and abandoning them half-way through. I don't know why I find book reviews so hard to write. Anyway, apologies if this one sucks: I'm deliberately lowering my prose standards so I can finish the damn thing.

I recently read a book called "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin ( Read more... )

A while back I read a book called Gin: the Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, from which I learned all kinds of interesting things about the Gin Craze (and parallel Gin Panic) in eighteenth-century London. I can't whole-heartedly recommend the book - it would have been better with fewer rhetorical flourishes and more serious analysis - but it ( Read more... )

Got home late and drunk on Friday night from the West Port book festival's Literary Twestival, where we'd been presenting the best of Project Twutenberg. Sat down rather heavily on the bed, only to hear an ominous cracking noise and find myself about six inches lower than anticipated. On closer inspection, it turned out that a large section of the ( Read more... )

Should you be bored and have a Twitter account to play with, can I suggest Project Twutenberg*? To quote their page: Project Twutenberg aims to make literature accessible. We take classics of world literature and translate them to "twiterature" - from stodgy, unappetising tomes into easily digested tweets ( Read more... )

A while back, I promised mrkgnao and necaris that I'd contribute something to the cultural/gaming webzine FerretBrain. I've been reading a lot of books about climbing and mountaineering recently, and I thought it might be interesting to do a sort of comparative review, interspersed with my observations on the general conventions of the genre (provided I can ( Read more... )