In this cold weather I read.
What are you reading?
Is it any good?
Would you recommend it to others?
Is it any good?
Would you recommend it to others?
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ArishMell · 70-79, M
I don't read very much - I ought read more! Most of my books are factual in various ways
Of fiction, I enjoyed Robert Harris' [i]The Second Sleep[/i].
This is a dystopia eight hundred years beyond our own time, but a very unusual form. Most futurist tales use ever more advanced science and engineering, but this follows long after an apparently world-wide, total collapse of [i]our[/i] civilisations in [i]our[/i] close (21C) future.
The main location is a fictional village in the real SW English county of Devon, with part of the action in the city of Exeter. England has recovered from the collapse (the first "Sleep") but only to an approximation to the late-17 / early-18C. The nation has become an autocratic Christian theocracy that bans any attempt to learn anything about the past; and the story is of the investigation into the disappearance of a priest
Another unusual point is that the writing gives us its characters' "eyes", as in seeing puzzling relics from our time - an era they little or nothing about.
....
Of very different style, one of my Christmas presents was the first of a trilogy I had long promised myself after hearing it dramatised on the radio some years ago.
This is Philip Pullman's [i]His Dark Materials[/i]. I will have to read it [i]and[/i] the other two books!
Another fantasy I have long thought to read is Mervyn Peake's [i]Gormenghast,[/i] of dark doings within the labrynthine court of something like a Mediaeval / Renaissance European kingdom. BBC TV once made a very enjoyable and rather tongue-in-cheek screen version, with some wonderful, deliberate anachronisms.
.....
Of [u]factual[/ul books, I heard parts of [i]How To Argue With A Racist - and win[/i] - sorry I forget the author - serialised on BBC Radio Four's, weekday morning book-serial slot, and bought it. (I was introduced to [i]The Second Sleep [/i]in the same way.)
I read part of it then mislaid it and have not yet found it!
I did learn from it about those commercial DNA tests claiming to reveal your ethnicity. For most people these extremely inaccurate so rather meaningless tests are merely fun (do the arithmetic!), but sadly, they are exploited by racists trying to "prove" imagined "pedigree". Usually unsuccessfully - but then of course, it's the test that's wrong, not their own ancestors' breeding!
.
Have also finished reading Bill Gates' [i]How To Avoid A Climate Disaster[/i]. Subtitled "The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need", I respect his research, which is fully and properly cited; and I admire his optimism.
Plenty of statistics, explanations and suggested policies [i]not[/i] needing us all leading hair-shirt lives, but helping raise the living standards of all those presently in deep poverty around the world. First-rate thinking, and I agree with many of his ideas, but they call for world-wide technical, political and social co-operation I fear becoming less and less likely.
I ignore the anti-Gates campaigners, seemingly mainly based around US party-politics. Indeed, I bought the book partly to learn what Mr. Gates [i]himself[/] says, not what someone on some social[?]-medium tells me what to think what he says.
Among the many papers and books Gates cites, I have but am yet to read:
Professor Emeritus (Uni. of Manitoba), Vaclav Smil's [i]How The World Really Works[/i] - "A Scientist's Guide To Our Past, Present and Future".
This is a much more sober, scientific assessment of mankind's condition, and I bought his and Gates' books more or less as companion volumes. They were even on the same book-shop shelf!
....
Whilst I must catch up on the various narratives of explorations and expeditions I have:
I am partway through Jill Heinerth's [i]Into The Planet[/i] - "My Life As A Cave Diver".
Hailing from Canada, the author narrates her path to being a leading, professional diving and cave-diving instructor, photographer and writer. The stage I have just reached illustrates her struggle to be accepted in a somewhat macho activity, as a caver and diver who happens to be female, rather than a female caver and diver.
......
So plenty of good reading, whatever the weather!
Of fiction, I enjoyed Robert Harris' [i]The Second Sleep[/i].
This is a dystopia eight hundred years beyond our own time, but a very unusual form. Most futurist tales use ever more advanced science and engineering, but this follows long after an apparently world-wide, total collapse of [i]our[/i] civilisations in [i]our[/i] close (21C) future.
The main location is a fictional village in the real SW English county of Devon, with part of the action in the city of Exeter. England has recovered from the collapse (the first "Sleep") but only to an approximation to the late-17 / early-18C. The nation has become an autocratic Christian theocracy that bans any attempt to learn anything about the past; and the story is of the investigation into the disappearance of a priest
Another unusual point is that the writing gives us its characters' "eyes", as in seeing puzzling relics from our time - an era they little or nothing about.
....
Of very different style, one of my Christmas presents was the first of a trilogy I had long promised myself after hearing it dramatised on the radio some years ago.
This is Philip Pullman's [i]His Dark Materials[/i]. I will have to read it [i]and[/i] the other two books!
Another fantasy I have long thought to read is Mervyn Peake's [i]Gormenghast,[/i] of dark doings within the labrynthine court of something like a Mediaeval / Renaissance European kingdom. BBC TV once made a very enjoyable and rather tongue-in-cheek screen version, with some wonderful, deliberate anachronisms.
.....
Of [u]factual[/ul books, I heard parts of [i]How To Argue With A Racist - and win[/i] - sorry I forget the author - serialised on BBC Radio Four's, weekday morning book-serial slot, and bought it. (I was introduced to [i]The Second Sleep [/i]in the same way.)
I read part of it then mislaid it and have not yet found it!
I did learn from it about those commercial DNA tests claiming to reveal your ethnicity. For most people these extremely inaccurate so rather meaningless tests are merely fun (do the arithmetic!), but sadly, they are exploited by racists trying to "prove" imagined "pedigree". Usually unsuccessfully - but then of course, it's the test that's wrong, not their own ancestors' breeding!
.
Have also finished reading Bill Gates' [i]How To Avoid A Climate Disaster[/i]. Subtitled "The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need", I respect his research, which is fully and properly cited; and I admire his optimism.
Plenty of statistics, explanations and suggested policies [i]not[/i] needing us all leading hair-shirt lives, but helping raise the living standards of all those presently in deep poverty around the world. First-rate thinking, and I agree with many of his ideas, but they call for world-wide technical, political and social co-operation I fear becoming less and less likely.
I ignore the anti-Gates campaigners, seemingly mainly based around US party-politics. Indeed, I bought the book partly to learn what Mr. Gates [i]himself[/] says, not what someone on some social[?]-medium tells me what to think what he says.
Among the many papers and books Gates cites, I have but am yet to read:
Professor Emeritus (Uni. of Manitoba), Vaclav Smil's [i]How The World Really Works[/i] - "A Scientist's Guide To Our Past, Present and Future".
This is a much more sober, scientific assessment of mankind's condition, and I bought his and Gates' books more or less as companion volumes. They were even on the same book-shop shelf!
....
Whilst I must catch up on the various narratives of explorations and expeditions I have:
I am partway through Jill Heinerth's [i]Into The Planet[/i] - "My Life As A Cave Diver".
Hailing from Canada, the author narrates her path to being a leading, professional diving and cave-diving instructor, photographer and writer. The stage I have just reached illustrates her struggle to be accepted in a somewhat macho activity, as a caver and diver who happens to be female, rather than a female caver and diver.
......
So plenty of good reading, whatever the weather!