This started off as a collection of links to go into a comment on
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I meant to post these as the year went along, and completely failed to. Also, it seems I never posted the last two months for 2009 either. Whoops ( Read more... )

I've now read the first four volumes of Charlie's "Merchant Princes" series - which is to say that, in his original plan, I'm halfway through book 2. Unfortunately, I don't have copies of volumes five and six, and the Oxfordshire libraries website informs me that the only copies available on-shelf are in Witney, Henley, and Banbury, all of which ( Read more... )

Thus beating my initial target in ten months instead of twelve. (And I'm only a fortnight behind on the write-ups, too ( Read more... )

September contained a lot of re-reading, hence only four new books ( Read more... )

Still catching up; some of these were written up at the time (or not long after), while others have just had notes made based on what I remember two to three months later. This may or may not show ( Read more... )

Still catching up on my backlog. I'm cheating a little bit here by not putting individual comments for each volume of the series, but there is some overall commentary in the notes on the first book in each case ( Read more... )

I seem to have got a bit behind, somehow, and a four month backlog is a bit embarrassing, so I've finally got round to making notes on the missing one of these ((46), for what it's worth) and put them up. June's batch to hopefully follow fairly soon, followed by July and August ( Read more... )

Today, I bought a second-hand (mass-market fiction) book with the explicit intention of defacing it by writing in it. This feels terribly wrong; it actually feels even more wrong than the time I bought a brand new book with the explicit intention of taking it home and gutting it with a Stanley knife. (Possibly because that was in a good cause(tm ( Read more... )

34) Arguments for Socialism (Tony Benn, ed Chris Mullin). An interesting discussion of the challenges faced by Britain-as-an-industrial-country in the 1970s and 80s, based on speeches made by the then-minister (for industry) and edited together shortly after Labour left power in 1979. It's depressing to see how much of his proposed plan of action ( Read more... )