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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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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