Blue Anorak » Books

The other Douglas

admin — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:10:19 +0000

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

As someone who has expressed interest in books by Douglas Adams, you might like to know that Health Monitoring of Structural Materials and Components: Methods with Applications is now available. You can order your copy for just £66.50 by following the link below.

Sometimes, Amazon’s recommendations don’t really work.

Simon Jenkins: Facts should be taskmasters, and there is no exemption for fiction

admin — Fri, 26 May 2006 18:58:28 +0000

Simon Jenkins of the Guardian writes about “The Da Vinci Code”: “Journalism already has a tough time guarding Fortress Fact from marauders (including its own) until the historians can arrive. To find novelists and film-makers getting in round the back and stealing the treasure is galling. Despite Humpty Dumpty, words do not mean anything we choose. Facts are still facts wherever they are used, and should be honoured in fiction as in history. The dictionary offers no exemption to novelists. They have the entire range of the human imagination at their disposal. They can play with light and shade, fantasy and magic, dancing free of reality to conjure their tales from the air. But facts are sacred. If writers use them to disguise their fabrications, I call them liars.”

Bookcrossing

admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 17:03:09 +0000

One of the finest innovations this year has been, to my mind, bookcrossing, the idea of which is to share books.

By abandoning them.

And then letting people know, on the Bookcrossing site, that you’ve done this.

So far I’ve obtained a couple or three books from the Brew Coffee Shop on Lune Street but have not released any books in to the wild myself. This makes me feel, as you may understand, a mite guilty. However, my problem is that I rather like to keep those books which I have enjoyed as I will probably want to read them again. I could release a large number of mediocre books in to the wild, but that wouldn’t really encourage the take-up of this activity.

Is this man Britain’s finest author?

admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:19:12 +0000

I shall not name the pompous fool of an English teacher at Westcliff High School for Boys who worked so hard to persuade me that reading really was a terribly dull pastime by extolling the wonders of the Julie Christie / Terence Stamp version of Far from the Madding Crowd and 1970s BBC Shakespeare over, for example, John Wyndham, Sue Townsend and Alan Paton.

However, one of the authors who turned me back on to reading is Julian Barnes. He is an intelligent writer of witty, original novels, short stories and letters. I’ve just bought (for one whole penny on Amazon) his Letters from London which he wrote for the New Yorker magazine between 1989 and 1994. I have been astonished to learn that Michael Heseltine was, in 1990, worth £65 million.