Reading etc.

To read the pile of books beside my bed:

Almost all of the tomes are improving. There are many worthy presents (I did not buy “Great Irish Lives” myself), a few bookclub books I still haven’t finished (“33 Moments of Happiness”, I have been looking at you since 1998) and things I found in the bargain basement in Hodges Figgis that I knew, even at the time of purchase, were going to prove challenging (“Ladysmith”, really, why?).

I aim to polish them all off. Except for “Map of the Nation” which is Mr. Waffle’s and I am not going to read it, I know my limitations. And Saki, Father Brown and Myles are what I read at night when I have nothing else on and they are going to stay there forever but everything else is fair game.

“One Day” by David Nicholls

Not as good as “Starter for Ten”.

“A Hatful of Sky” by Terry Pratchett

Unchallenging. Readable children’s fiction by the man who brought you Discworld.

“Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen

I did not like “The Corrections” very much but I was surprised to find myself really liking this. And there’s nothing like really enjoying a book about middle class middle aged angst and realising that it runs to over 500 pages. Do they not have editors in North America?

1970s – That tennis game where you moved a cursor up and down to bounce a tennis ball to your opponent at very low speeds. Also, my cousins’ very exciting video recorder. You could make people go backwards. At speed.
1980s – A pointless course on COBAL in school. My sister’s acquisition of an Apple MAC.
1990 – My first job. The partner with a computer the size of a house on his desk who the other partners all laughed at. The phone that needed its own suitcase when you lugged it on business trips.
1993 – Traineeship in a large organisation. We had some kind of convoluted internal email. All of our usernames consisted of first four letters of surname followed by first two letters of first name. This led to some amusing nicknames. Look, we were trainees.
1995 – Real email in a real job. Windows 95 – Where do you want to go today?
1997 – The boyfriend who said that his Finnish ex-girlfriend said that everyone in Finland has a mobile phone. Complete refusal to believe this was so.
1998 – Become aware of internet shopping and the intranet is hot.
2000 – Marvellous new search engine called hotbot.
2001 – Online travel booking. Put directions to my wedding and other stuff on a website (arranged by technically gifted brother-in-law). Feel like the bees knees.
2002 – First googled, I think. Apparently, Arthur C. Clarke said that trying to get information from the internet was like trying to get a cup of water from a waterfall. He meant before Google.
2003 – Buy a computer for home use. Set up blog. Buy a digital camera.
2004 – Discovered the joys of RSS, I think.
2005 – Joined Flickr.
2006 – Joined Youtube.
2006 – Got my own domain name as my blogging host sinks beneath the waves.
2007 – Joined Facebook.
2007 – Joined Twitter. Gmail, maybe.
2008, 2009, 2010 – Nothing that I can think of. I may be getting old or else I don’t notice the new things any more.

Do you remember when you first googled?

“Started Early, Took my Dog” by Kate Atkinson

Another Jackson Brodie adventure. I love Kate Atkinson. I think that she is one of the best living authors. Great plots, beautifully written – a rare and wonderful combination.

“Yeah, Right Get a Life” by Helen Simpson

A series of short stories that, in some cases, capture more accurately than anything else I have ever read, the relentlessness of caring for small children. Very good.

“Ship of Fools” by Fintan O’Toole

This is a very depressing read. It’s by an Irish Times journalist who is pretty annoyed about the particular way Ireland chose to blow the boom. It reminds readers of old scandals and weaves a pretty convincing thesis that these are linked to the Irish psyche and the kind of mess we got ourselves into. On the minus side, the book doesn’t have any kind of bibliography or sources which is, I think, pretty poor for this kind of book. He excuses this at the beginning by saying: “Since this book is intended as a polemical, rather than a historical or academic work, it does not have an apparatus of references and footnotes. All of the facts and statistics used here, are, however, easily available online…” Frankly, this is a bit of a cop out, isn’t it? Nevertheless, it’s very readable. It’s main conclusion is that Ireland’s jump from pre-industrial to post-modern which we all thought was terrific was actually a big part of the problem. He argues that we fitted globalisation on 19th century structures and ideas and they just couldn’t bear the weight of the 21st century world. There are certainly plenty of holes to pick but he maks a good argument which, is, I suppose, the point of a polemic.