vodkafan

NOooooooo

Nah, the difference is that you actually use and expand your brain by reading. A more apt equivalent is endless watching of TV. It is Soma for the masses, as Aldous Huxley puts forward in Brave New World. He saw the dangers all those years ago. Being a wirehead is the next logical step up from TV.

Yes, I know I am two years late watching this series but you know I don't have a TV.....I got to watch the first 3 episodes last night all at once. My 15 year old daughter is hooked on it. I gather there has been a second series made since then. The Cumberbatch bloke was OK I guess but Martin Freeman as Watson really irritated me.

Hi Bianca welcome. I have fond memories of Bournemouth, I stayed there once at a place called Alum Chine. I was quite young and I had never seen anything like the Chines before- just like big natural gashes in the cliffs, covered in greenery and leading right down to the beach. I was fascinated. I am guessing from your author list you like a good murder mystery.

Struggling a bit with The Weaker Vessel (part one) by Antonia Fraser. Not because it is boring (it's not) but because I am having a busy time right now and never seem in the right mood to read this kind of history and digest it. I picked up and started a book of horror short stories called The Nightmare Chronicles by somebody I can't remember which is a light read. But dammit that book was not on my TBR pile I will never beat Chesil at this rate if I keep adding books. Hope to get the Antonia Fraser book finished by tomorrow.

Woa! Frankie has read a sciFi !! Nice review Frankie. What you mentioned about being lost a bit half way through is not unusual in fact. But you figured it out for yourself. All these SciFi worlds are created in the authors heads , so like College courses they have to contain everything you need to know to pass the exam at the end. Well done I am proud of you ! That technology in the film Strange Days (worth watching just to see Angela Bassett ) is an old stock-in trade of many scifi stories, and has been given many different names by different authors, none of them I can remember except "wirehead" to describe somebody who is a junkie addicted to other people's life experiences but who never gets off his own bed.

The Blue World!

I guess a lot depends on how far back in history the period is that you are writing of. If it is so far back that the English would be unrecognisable only an academic or historian could read it then that is a problem. I guess the biggest problem is accidentally placing a "twonky" (paraphrasing John Varley, from his time travel story Millenium) which is an anachronism, something out of it's time.

Hello Megan, welcome. I love rabbits. Howl's Moving Castle is a book? I have seen the film twice with the kids. I never knew, I will have to read this now. If you like Sci Fi and fantasy how about Jack Vance?

Good charity shops you have round your way Brian !

I like the speech to be identical. It also shows that the author has done his/her research and really cares enough about their own work to get it right.

Good gives me a chance to catch up after my slip on holiday !

We seem to be diametrically opposed. However after reading my first Michael Moorcock I have hopes that we can find some common ground in the middle ! Jewel In The Skull was brilliant!

Ok gonna grab them too.

My best books, out of the 43 read so far (16/6): Coraline Pied Piper Before I Die Jane Eyre I Capture The Castle The First Person and Other Stories The Penal Colony Autobiography Of Malcom X The Shadow Of The Wind The Princess Bride Hmm, 10 out of 43 not too good. Another 4 or 5 were OK reads, the rest were forgettable . Going to change my reading pattern next year.

Good review Poppy, sounds great

The Thief sounds OK. Of course he went straight to the police to explain the ghastly mistake, right?

s'funny how people seem to pick up Emphryrio - this is one of Vance's weakest books IMO

Dancing In a Distance Place sounds quite good Diane

King Arthur - Man Or Myth by Paul White This is a slim volume I got in Devon. It just discusses the origins of the Arthur myth and examines the evidence for him being a real person. It was interesting. He was most likely a warlord or general who fought a couple of big battles to hold back the Saxons with some success and then disappears back into history (probably killed). The legend maybe a composite of at least two different people who lived half a century apart . There is no evidence of him ever being a proper king at all. I like reading about both the true evidence and the myth. If I had read this first I would have enjoyed Patrick Cornwell's book more.

The Accidental by Ali Smith Ali Smith is a new writer to me. I really, really enjoyed the book of her short stories I read before this. This novel left me a bit unsatisfied although I can't put my finger on why. Maybe because the elements that I liked in the short stories- the quirkiness and the great descriptions of feelings and relationships- seemed to be missing in this story. It starts off quite quirky enough with an unnamed woman seducing a boy in the milk bar of a cinema and conceiving a girlchild who is named after the cinema. We never find out the mother's motivation for this act. It is not giving anything away to say that this girl, grown up is the main, somewhat amoral character who descends on a disfunctional family renting a house in Norfolk. At first she seems to give every member of the family something they need. That is all I am going to say about the plot. The annoying thing about this story for me is that it stretches credulity too far that a woman they don't know would just be allowed to walk in off the street and become part of the family without the mother, at least, questioning it. I can appreciate a certain level of abstraction and "what if" in a novel but it just didn't add up to a great deal in the end. Smith goes off in places and sems to be trying to draw parallels with life, and cinema, morality and stuff going on in Iraq and what have you. It has not put me off the writer but I know this cannot be her best.

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About Mil Millington Most Lad Lit books leave me a bit cold, I "get" them but they just don't do it for me, seeming a bit formulaic . This one was genuinely funny though, I could equally have put this under the genre of comedy. Against the background of his demanding German girlfriend wanting to buy another house (he only likes the one they are living in now because it is cheap)The hero Pel gets unexpected promotion when his manager disappears in mysterious circumstances and Pel starts to get phone calls from sinister Chinese gentlemen . Can Pel keep his relationship together , move house and hold his job down and avoid being chopped up with meat cleavers? The key to this book scoring for me where others did not is that he starts off with situations that are quite reasonably possible in reality and in true male fashion tries to bluff and blag his way out rather than admit to anybody he is out of his depth. Even after the situations start spiralling madly into surreal territory.

The Jewel In The Skull Michael Moorcock This was a rollicking fantasy read. It could equally be termed scifi though, as the events happen in this world in the far-flung future. Europe has descended into a new Dark Age with a basically medieval level of technology, despite some bits of dark science here and there. Britain- now Granbreton- is a dark twisted, possibly insane society which has dedicated itself to conquering all of Europe and then the whole world. It's methods, aided by its strange sorcery-like science, are both insidious and brutal. The old war hero Count Brass wants nothing more than to live out his old age in peace in his province in what used to be the South of France. But Granbreton will allow no one to remain neutral and trouble comes to his castle in the form of the evil Baron Meliadus of Kroydon. This was a quick read and great fun, I think this is just how fantasy should be, and was before authors in this genre started to take themselves way too seriously. I will certainly read the rest of this series, of which this is the first.

Nearest I have ever come to this is books about body language ...think they stopped writing books about social skills pre-WWII....could be wrong though