I got the bus to work and read some. Then read some more on the way home on the bus. And still wasn’t in to it.

The writing so far has been truly awful. I read something mildly interesting and looked at the bottom of the page to see it was the land mark century – page 100 before something amusing happened.

About 10 pages in I seriously considered writing to Ben Elton and asking for my 20p back.

Anyway, why am I writing a mini ramble so early into a book? I had a quick glance at Amazon and noticed it was averaging 4 out of 5. What the hell? I then looked at Wikipedia which notes it was commercially and critically successful in the United Kingdom and Australia. and sold over a million copies.

Really?

Really??

The characters so far have been woeful. Page upon describing them from an authors perspective, it reads like a first years essay at school:

Jim was wearing his flares. Flares were out. He figured that they would come back round again and so he was ahead of fashion. He thought he was cool – but he wasn’t. He remembered meeting the woman and how it had went. Now he was going to see her again and wanted to impress. So To that they could have SEX. He liked SEX and thought about it a lot. But he was pretending to be who he was to get some SEX. The last time they met there was a discussion about some boring fucking subject which the reader is not interested in. He had briefly considered taking position A. He then thought about position B. But because the character was a fucking moron he couldn’t answer before the woman (with boobs) said something that meant she blatantly supported position B. I like position B he had then said. Wow he was in there! Except they didn’t have SEX at all. In fact she went away in a taxi later. But that was ok. Tonight was date 2 and he was sure to have SEX after that. Oh here are two random characters who are also annoying. They will discuss SEX and drugs and some random tangent to the plot which is a mystery and will probably make the book even more boring on a second read.

This is not a quote, just me paraphrasing the style. It goes on and fucking on. I was going to drop it but am curious as to whether he learns to write by the end of it hence earning the 4 stars of praise.

Once more into the breach.

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I mucked around with the samples throughout the book and think that Gennas Jewellery site is probably ok for layout and style. I will probably tweak it a bit – definitely try to do something with the logo section to be laid out a bit better.

I have the idea in my head of what to do with the amount of content – move from 11 top level pages down to 6 and re-write most of the content there. The catalogue I am still not 100% on.

Just started reading Building Findable Websites so that I have a better idea of what to do with the content I write for it.

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It was quite fun, the weather was pretty poor at times (which you pay attention to when working outside!) but at its worst was not as bad as last years torrential downpours.

One of the reasons I like the fairs is that I enjoy blethering with people. To quote Kaylee from Firefly They’ve all got stories. Not just the public but the other exhibitors too. Every year there are new people and you are next to a different set of people so you get to know a bit about everyone. This year we also bought/swapped a bunch of stuff.

Gillian Kyle was opposite us and has pretty cool printed t-shirts etc with Scottish cultural logos.

Next to us was Will with his hand made Journals. These were really cool, Genna bought me a Serenity one. I will be contacting him at some point in the future to make another one too.

Gayle Robinson was just to the left. Her collagraphs were amazing. We got one and I was drooling over another really nice abtract landscape one in various shades of blue.

Sue from Look out scout! has totally awesome kiddies t-shirts with fun animal facts. Her website is really cool with lots of activities for kids. She had hers with her some days and they amused themselves giving everyone a quiz. My 5 out of 10 was not enough to win the packet of Oreos though . Her stand was really nice too with fake grass and animals etc all over the place. Sometimes you get a bit bored seeing a row of stands all day every day with the only variation being the colour of tablecloth and whether necklaces are on the right or left of the display. Really brightened up your day noticing new stuff all over.

Frans McAnaraks stall was even cooler this year. Steve from Highland Games made her buttons for clothing and they had so many requests from people they eventually caved in and started selling them too. Last year was a trial run with a small selection, this year there was a massive amount on day 1 and not so many on day 9 when we left. Her site has her selection of buttons on it but not her really funky one off coats etc. Genna now has 4 of her clothing items.

Stephen O’Neill had some really nice prints and we ended up getting 4. With the Rikki O’Neill print we got last month we can now make a wall of images of Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Genna did really well too. I’ll dig out the spreadsheets etc later (we forgot to take the details of last year) but it was definitely worth going .

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My RSS reader now has 64 unread posts in it down from a constant of around 800 a month ago. Basically I had been stuttering through every blog trying to catch up and failing. I decided to work my way down, getting one to zero then trying to keep it there, rinse and repeat.

I managed this on all but one blogs, which has around 40 left and another with 8. These are all pretty heavy reading articles so I am moving through these less slowly.

After that I will attempt to tackle the yahoo account inbox (currently 6000+ items, 200+ unread). To be fair I have had the account for over 10 years. Hopefully when I get it to zero I can consolidate the mail I have and what I get to decide if I keep it or move to a better mail system. Given the time it will take I might migrate to Google Wave, which looks fantastic

Anyhoo, this was a long diversion to post praising one of the blogs I keep an eye on. Max Dunbar regularly posts on a wide range of topics including book reviews. His review of Terry Pratchetts Small Gods is absolutely superb and bang on the money. First review in ages to remind me why I love a book, film etc.

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First up was Mark Thomas with As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela: Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade. This was really interesting, funny and horrifying in equal doses. Some brilliant anecdotes of groups set up to take on arms dealers.

Next was Mark Steel with What’s Going On?: The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion. I had been looking forward to this as it covers the last ten years or so. Each chapter has a mixture of the disintegration of his private life, the disintegration of any lonely last principles in the Labour Party and the disintegration of his relationship with the SWP.

Each of these is quite depressing and bitter to read and the contrast of the three leads to a real understanding if what he has been going through.

Recently I also read Jack Jones Union Man: Autobiography and have just started on IOU: The Story of the Debt a book I got in Poundland and has a first chapter praising Bono so looks to be pretty shit.

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The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known is his autobiography from 1998 to 2002. It is also available to buy online through links on his site.

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I also managed to read through a short Buffy novel Doomsday Deck. I picked it up for about a quid and it was quite enjoyable. I am always a bit weary of TV tie-in books but they are easy to pick up and carry on from, so perfect for reading on the bus early in the morning. Unlike the TV show though you already know that character A is not going to die and character B manages to escape without injury, especially ones set before the current time line in the universe. Ho-hum, it wasted some time and was a change.

I don’t know what my reading list is next year but Tayside Recyclers 10p specials have yielded me quite a varied bunch, I think for comedy’s sake I have to start the new year with Kilroy Silks autobiography from the 80s. It’s going to be baaaaaad.

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Shortly before it closed there was a worrying trend of book prices rocketing. It became common to see hardbacks for more than the cost of a new paperback edition. Having the dedicated bookshop meant that all the other charity shops had lower quality books in and also started creeping their prices up.

There are a couple of charity shops on the Perth Road who regularly have decent stock in, but the ones in the town can be pretty dire. One Perth Road shop used to have a decent selection of political/academic books and is also where I got the amazing Michael Scott Rohan novels for 50p each. The last time I went in I was excited to see some newish Computing textbooks in, but they were £10-£15 each. Maybe they were bargaining on the rarity factor of having computer books that don’t boast “Office 97″ on the cover and were making the most of them, but it was certainly more than I was going to pay for some second hand books they got for free.

The Wee Red Bookshop in Glasgow and Word Power in Edinburgh have me sorted for political stuff but I wish there was somewhere locally I could get both political/academic books and novels regularly and at decent prices. Can anyone recommend anywhere or do I have to resort to eBay (10p plus £80 postage) or amazon (10p, £0 postage and your soul)?

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I hadn’t been reading books for a while so to get back into it started taking them for the bus journey to work and back. Unfortunately this was probably a poor choice for reading early on the day.

It’s a book analysing late 18th century political theory and is written in a style to match. Really dense, black hole academic dense. I quite enjoy books with loads of endnotes and footnotes.

The bibliography is almost 30 pages.

30.

pages.

That tells you how many endnotes etc. there were.

The book was enjoyable, interesting and informative. It just achieved these attributes in spite of its style. And it was a bargain too, normally £20+ I got it for £3 from the SSP‘s Wee Red Bookshop.

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It was a really interesting and engrossing read.

The book is split into a number of chapters, each dealing with a type of logical fallacies. These include “The right to my opinion” and “morality fever”. It is well written and funny, dissecting statements from the great and the good, showing their flawed reasoning. As well as contrasting hypothetical positions of liberals, socialists, conservatives and libertarians.

One timely chapters deals with stock brokers. After discussing whether their high salaries are rewarded for luck or for skill, and discussing statistics of results and how some of the traders will have good runs he concludes:

Investment banks should employ former winners of Lotto tickets for them. No salary could be too high for these wizards of ticket selection.

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To start that off I nicked this meme from someones blog

• 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
• 2) Italicize those you intend to read.
• 3) Underline the books you love.
• 4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
• 5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them

Here is the list. With no underlines as it doesn’s seem to be

• 1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
• 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
• 4 The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
• 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• 6 The Bible
• 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
• 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
• 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
• 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
• 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
• 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
• 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
• 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
• 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
• 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
• 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
• 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
• 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
• 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
• 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
• 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
• 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
• 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
• 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
• 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
• 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
• 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
• 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
• 34 Emma – Jane Austen
• 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
• 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
• 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
• 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
• 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
• 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
• 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
• 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
• 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
• 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
• 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
• 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
• 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
• 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• 52 Dune – Frank Herbert
• 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
• 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
• 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
• 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
• 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
• 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
• 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
• 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
• 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
• 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
• 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
• 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
• 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
• 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
• 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
• 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
• 75 Ulysses – James Joyce
• 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
• 78 Germinal – Emile Zola
• 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
• 80 Possession – AS Byatt
• 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
• 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
• 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
• 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
• 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
• 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
• 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
• 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
• 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
• 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
• 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
• 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
• 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
• 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
• 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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