mssv

  • Remembrance of Books Past

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Remembrance of Books Past

    Remembrance of Books Past – an article by Ray Bradbury in which he talks about the idea of rewriting books from memory; a never-realised sequel to Fahrenheit 451. “Why not a sequel to ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in which all the great books are remembered by the Wilderness People and are finally reprinted from memory. What then?…

  • The Pile of Doom

    ·

    2–3 minutes

    ·

    No comments on The Pile of Doom

    If you wander into the home of a book-lover, you will find books everywhere, arranged neatly on shelves, lying on tables, sitting behind the toilet and stacked beside the bed. These are the books that have been read, and they enjoy a happy and fulfilled existence. There is a darker side to life in this…

  • Confound you and your punctuation book!

    ·

    3–4 minutes

    ·

    2 comments on Confound you and your punctuation book!

    There’s been a lot of press about Lynne Truss’ bestselling book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s a very quick and light read, but the book certainly deserves all the attention it’s been getting. Lynne Truss has written what is essentially a very long essay on the history and contemporary uses of punctuation, amply…

  • Ecclesiastes

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Ecclesiastes

    I’ve seen this hauntingly beautiful phrase from Ecclesiastes twice in the past week, in the context of Orwell’s essay on the English language: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men…

  • Lyra’s Oxford

    ·

    8–12 minutes

    ·

    2 comments on Lyra’s Oxford

    Lyra’s Oxford is more than just a short story and a collection of colourful extras. Pullman has set us a mystery, and judging by his past works, it’s going to be interesting.

  • Killer Chairs

    ·

    2–3 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Killer Chairs

    My karma was restored to its correct level this evening when I went to a signing by Neil Gaiman at Borders. I turned up half an hour early, just in time to bag one of the last chairs available (handily situated near some Philip Pullman novels); by the time Neil came out to talk there…

  • The Rules of the Game

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on The Rules of the Game

    I’ve just finished reading John Gribbin’s Science: A History, which is by all accounts a very well-written and interesting book. Gribbin could have probably done with making some of his sentences a little shorter and more readable, but other than that it’s an excellent review of science and the people who discovered it, starting from…

  • Cursed by Dust

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Cursed by Dust

    So Philip Pullman will be at two events in Oxford in the next few days to promote Lyra’s Oxford. The first one is a signing at Waterstones on Saturday, conveniently at the same time I’m going to be in Cambridge. But no fear – the second one will be a presentation organised by Borders at…

  • Books

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    4 comments on Books

    In what must be a record for me, I finished Robert Sawyer’s Hominids in around three hours this weekend; that’s about 30 seconds per page. I don’t normally read that quickly, but Hominids was a particularly easy read and had several sections on the science of DNA and quantum physics, both of which I am…

  • Middle England SF

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Middle England SF

    Radio 4 on SF – the Open Book series on BBC Radio 4 recently aired (12th October) a very good programme introducing people to science fiction. You can listen to the programme at the link above, which features authors such as Pat Cadigan, Stephen Baxter and Iain Banks. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a…