annafdd

Yeah, yeah, some people read 20 books this month. I read the equivalent of several novels in internet flaming, does that count? Thought not. And there are, of course, the many, many "currently reading" tomes.

1. Flat Earth News, Nick Davis
This has moments of absolute, absorbing brilliance, and a lot of stuff that, frankly, is a lot more interesting for a professional journalist than a reader. The whole chapter on how lack of resources has forced journalism into recycling pre-prepared press releases, for example, is vitally important but I got the point after a few pages and moved on. The chapters on the "black arts" are also far less relevant than the ones about pre-cooked news fed by intelligence agencies, and takes forever to tell.

All the same, it is a book I won't forget in a hurry. The chapter on the Daily Mail alone is worth the price of admission, and the first few chapters outline in devastating, depressing detail what's wrong with journalism today, and how much of an impact it has on the concept of democracy itself.

Not something we didn't know, obviously, but rather more in depth that I had ever read.

Definitely recommended.

2. The Character of Cats, Stepehn Budiansky

Slim volume I found while clearing up cables behind the TV and read in a few hours. I think I had already read it at one point, but it still taught me a couple of new things about cats, for example the fact that they do, experimentally, show vastly different personalities. Most of the other things it says I knew already (hey, I've had cats and read about cats all my life) but a refresher course never hurts. It drums the evolutionary rationale of every single bit of information into you at length, band it gets tiring after a while, but still a fun read all the same.

I have more or less given up on reading fiction, and I am fairly sad about it. I remember when it was the main pleasure of my life. What can I say? My attention span is what it is.

1. Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell
A bit of a cheat this, since I read it over the Christmas holidays.

A buttonholing book, that is one of the books that I keep telling people about. Its underlying message is that success is not about being awesomely talented and gifted with willpower. It's about talent, yes, but mostly working hard, being lucky, and coming from a background that allows you to seize the opportunity. There are fascinating pages about the difference between a wheat and a rice economy, the garment district in Manhattan (a place and time I have already been struck in love about since I visited the tenement museum in the Lower East Side), and the author's own family history. There is quite a lot about the 10,000 hours rule.

But mostly it's about the waste of human potential that comes from cultivating the idea that talent and personal qualities are everything. Gladwell talks elegantly about the reason most great Canadian hockey players are born between January and March, and make a case that just as great potential hockey players are lost just because the cutoff date for enrolment in the junior advanced league is January the first. And by extension, how much talent and human potential is lost because people aren't given the opportunity and nurturing to realize it.

Gladwell has said that this is his angry anti-Bush book. It is true in a very deep and intelligent way - a book about how wrong and toxic the myth of the worthy floating naturally to the top of society by divine will and natural talent is.

It's also a gripping book, a totally painless read as pnh (happy birthday!) would put it.

Highly, highly recommended.

2. The Hungry Ocean, by Linda Greenlaw

A bit of a disappointment. I really really wanted to like this book, but it is exactly what it says: a moment-by-moment chronicle of a commercial fishing try. Not devoid of charm, but when it comes down to it, alas, boring. The writing is graceful and there are glimmerings of humor here and there, but what the backcover says about it being gripping consuming and non-stop excitement? Not true.
Left unfinished.

ETA (thanks Jhetley for reminding me): Linda Greenlaw started writing because she became famous through Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm", now THAT a totally gripping and absorbing book, and one of my perennial favourites, who indeed I recommend heartily.

I have been carrying around a mean, nasty, ill-natured headache for the whole day. I kept telling myself that's it, I finish this job and go home, but still managed to stay until they kicked me out at 5.

I still have a headache. I have successfully resisted the lure of some jeans that would actually fit me (note for future reference, Gap boot cut 32-30) but failed to resist a lipstick.

I am reading The Ghost Map, a book I had read about on Making Light and that is so engrossing that I was actually tempted to read it while walking home.

I didn't know that Marx lived in Dean St, and Blake had set up shop in Broad Street!

I posted my tax returns without the capital gains addendum because I realized two things:

a) I can amend my declaration, and I have 12 months to do it.
b) the disposal of your main or only residence is exempt from capital gains tax.

B) is probably true (and indeed, makes sense) but I need to check with a tax inspector. However, I can do it in a little while. Honest to God I will procastinate until it's too late. Really.

What I also hadn't realized until I read what is written on the front of the form, was that in Italy, where the mail is notoriously chancy, cutoff dates are counted according to when you mail the thing. In the UK, where the mail actually delivers stuff (with notable exceptions, but that was TNT anyway), you have to actually get the stuff to the relevant office by the cutoff date.

Which means I will probably have to pay those £100 anyway. But, well, too late to do anything about that, is it?

On the other hand, I decided yesterday to investigate why Matter wasn't yet with me, unchecked the "deliver all my stuff in one go" option on Amazon, and opened the floodgates - Matter, Ha'penny and Malignant Sadness arrived in quick succession in my mailbox. Joy.

The Plan:

get to the Gower Street Waterstones and acquire a) One Stop Short of Barking, a silly book in the Underground that I keep wanting to buy and then think, oh come on, it's too silly, and b) Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffmann, an autobiographical book about the author's migration from Europe to England, reccomended in my counselling course.

The Process:

Got me to Gower Street. Seen the Travel, London shelf in front of me. Looked for Barking. No joy. Asked very young person at Enquires desk if they had it. Young person laboriously peers at terminal and pronounces that there is a copy, in the Travel Guide section. We trudge to the Travel Guide section, just opposite, but can't find the book.

"Wierd," she says.

I then ask about the Hoffmann. Yes, there are five copies in stock, and they are across the floor in Biographies.

Observing the young Waterstone person flip through a ring binder to dechypher the meaning of the codes from the terminal, I muse sadly on the disappearence of the terminals that used to be there on the floors, where the public could look up availability and location of books.

"Oh yes, I remember them," she says. "I think they took them out because they were giving out wrong information."

I swallow a quip about Microsoft Word and trudge over to Biography.

Biography is helpfully shelved in alphabetical order, by SUBJECT. I am looking for a book by Eva Hoffmann, called Lost in Translation... what IS the subject?

I work out that were there isn't a clear subject (for example, a book on the life of Kafka, called "Kafka"), the books are shelved in alphabetical order by author. But not one copy, let alone five, of Eva Hoffmann are under H.

I ask the guy sitting in the other Enquiry desk about the book.

"Oh yes Eva Hoffmann," he says when I tell him the title. He obviously knows the book. "That'll be up on the second floor, History."

I ask, "History, which part?" but he assures me that "They will find it for you".

So I go up to History. Before even starting to look for Hoffmann I happen in front of the History of London shelf. I have a look and what is peeking at me from between The Subterranean Railway and London Underground? Yes, it is One Stop Short of Barking: the one copy that was supposed to be downstairs in Travel Guides.

Reassured, I surreptitiously browse the shelves, then give up and ask the desk. The guy confidently strides to the Jewish Studies, locates the H, and announces with a touch of perplexity that no, there is a Eva Hoffman , but it is another book.

I keep looking some more, hoping for misshelving (five copies after all!), then give up, wander around the stacks reading this and that and resisting the siren call of several books, evilly leave Robert Hare's Without a Conscience over the festive stacks of devotional happy-fluffy Christian books, then head down to Popular Science and Costa Coffee.

I cannot help but acquire a book about cats (Fur Babies: why we love cats, proceeds to go for a cat shelter!) and a book about the neurological underpinnings of happiness (research!)

While paying for the books I relate my fruitless search for Eva Hoffmann to the cashier, whose interest is piqued. She checks again, and yes, the terminal assures us that there are indeed copies of the book in the store, and they are most certainly in Biography.

I am left with the certainty that somewhere, in the labyrintine penetralia of the ex-Dillons, there ARE five copies of Lost in Translation, whom nobody can find or buy because God knows where they have been shelved.

I appreciate the delicate logistics of such a gigantic stock of books, but people, really. Amazon manages.

The Results:

a. One Stop Short of Barking (I bought this book mostly because its author has the triumphantly Londonish name of Mecca Ibrahim)
b. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
c. Daniel Nettle, Happiness, the science behind your smile
d. Fur Babies - why we love cats, Liz Jones et al.
e. The Bhagavad Gita, pressed on me by a shivering Hindu missionary at a street corner. Well, I thought, why not have the Bhagavad Gita around?

So, according to delicious library:

Total books, 779 (I am I think a little more than halfway through)
Of which read: 434

I was a bit taken aback at this. Of course, I have read more books than this, because what's missing here are all the books I read from my parent's library and the ones I have left back home in Italy. And the ones still to be catalogued of course. Still, I thought I had read more.

Of which in my to be read Real Soon Now virtual shelf: 60

Sigh. When I was fifteen and I had longing dreams about being back in Forbidden Planet (the old shop in Denmark Street) I would never have thought that I would end up with such margin of Books to Read. My mother, a much avider reader than me, is always begging for books to read, and I am always telling her that if only she read in English I would have SO MUCH to give her. Sometimes the books get translated and she reads them way before I do (that's the case with Life of Pi, for example). But alas, the science fiction ones as well as the non-fiction ones often are not translated. (Would you believe that Listening to Prozac, possibly the best book on depression, is out of stock in Italy and the follow-up Against Depression has never been translated?)

To sell: 46 (actually 45, I should one tonight. Man, are serial killers books an easy sale.)

I was surprised at how easy it is to sell books through Amazon. I have a small but tidy some away already, nothing to write home about but hey, I get paid for regaining space on shelves!

Of the unread books, some are not books you actually read (encyclopedias, atlases, reference books). Some are books that I not sure I will ever get to but I am reluctant to sell (es. The Oxford Companion to Science Fiction - it might well happen that I will go back to it, one of these days, but it's in my To Be Read Pile exactly).

That leaves a lot of books of which I tell myself: be honest with yourself, are you EVER going to read this one? Or: do your really need to hang on to this book once you've read it?

I have solved my problem with Italian books by using another program, BOOKS, which does manage to access an Italian database, which actually works. BOOKS is a better program than Delicious Library in how it organizes and processes the data, but Delicious library is much better in how much data it gathers and because it uploads books automatically to Amazon Marketplace.

So I catalogue my Italian books with Books, export them, import them into delicious library, and ta-da!

I then have fun hunting for the right cover. sciamanna suggested to do a google image search and, lo and behold! it works beautifully.

Unfortunately, what doesn't seem to have access to Italian books is LibraryThing. The have several Italian databases, but none of them seems to work. That's really a pity.

This evening, feeling thoroughly miserable, I tried the Universal Panacea:

CUP OF TEA!

Believe it or not, it worked. Amazing. I felt so much better than I went on with the cataloguing of my books. They are currently stashed on the shelves in no particular order, but at least, gradually, I get to know where they are.

I've done the almost empty cabinet near the bed for Books To Be Read Real Soon Now (ah!), and two out of eight shelves of the niche in the living room, plus almost all the Lecco bookshop next to the window, for a total of 512 books.

The main problem is that I am using Delicious Library and I have found no way to import my Italian books. LibraryThing is not much better - there are several Italian databases but they don't seem to find any of my Italian books. This is very, very vexing.

I am uploading my new books to LibraryThing, just so I can have a backup, but I think I will also look into other cataloguing programs, one never knows.

I am not as thrilled by Chabon as I should be. This is the first book of his that I manage to finish, and despite it being little more than a novella, I struggled. I found it awfully overwritten, slight and unsatisfying. I also did not get the resolution at all.

Yes, yes, description is a fine art, but there is a point when it becomes stifling. Yes, yes, homage to Conan Doyle, but I have to say that Conan Doyle is a lot more entertaining.

I'm still wanting to get around to read Kavalier and Klay one day. When it will come out of its box.

Just finished "Wintersmith". It's got cats in it. And sentient cheeses. And faces that sank a thousand ships.

When can I have the next, please?

I am culling my books (a surprisingly painless task, maybe because I'm not culling them muchly), and was about to pack several kilos of Locus, when I thought: "Hmmm. Do I really need years and years of old Locuses in my new house?"

So the next question is: is anybody out there interested in old locuses? Several years' worth, with gaps. In pretty good conditions. If it's institutions, academics, etc, I'm willing to pay postage. Packrats would have to pay postage for me.

I just finished Jo Walton's Farthing after having spent three days waiting eagerly for the tube commute so that I would get time to read. It's been far too long since I have been so thoroughly sucked into a book, and as I finished it (stealing precious time from my sleep, which I deserve after an 11 hours uninterrupted workday) I was reminded of what intense, satisfying pleasure reading was for me. Why don't I get the same rush from most books? I used to. Maybe my standards are higher now, or maybe something in my mind became more restless, I don't know.

However it goes, it is a wonderful book. I have to be honest now - I never managed to get into The King's Peace. Something about it made me bounce off, maybe the narrator, I don't know. Or maybe Jo just became better and better with time. I can say that I loved both Tooth and Claw and Farthing immensely, and can't wait for the next Jo Walton book to come out (you hear me, Tor?). They now go on the buy-on-publication-in-hardcover-at-whatever-price list, moving there from buy-cos-it's-a-friend list. Well ok, that happened with Tooth and Claw.

When I started Farthing I thought that as much as I liked it, I was just a little disappointed that Jo had written another "book in the voice of". I no longer am. I couldn't tell with TAC, but Farthing is both homage and satire of the the English classical mystery, and it uses its conventions brilliantly, mirroring in its gentle mocking of them the genteel resistance of the characters to the snobbishness and substantial class problems of the society they sprung from.

I stopped reading Agatha Christie when I read the novel where the culprit is the adoptive child, but where it is stated outright that the victim was asking for it, what adopting all those children who are god knows whose sons. This books vindicates me.

The weird combination of first person and close third person, which I found uneasy at first, reflects very cleverly and effectively the different personalities and voices of the narrators, the candid, frank, open voice of an English girl we at first took for a bit of a babe, so bubbly and happy that we don't realize her strength and intelligence for a long while, and the reserved, guarded, detached view of the police inspector, who has his own reasons not to let his guard down.

In a way, it's not an easy book to read, especially in these days. I mean, it's supremely easy, but leaves you with a deep sadness, a sense of impotence and anger.

(Yesterday I had a wonderful brief chat with my landlady, who I liked already but whom I found to be a nice, progressive, resolutely down-to-earth no-nonsense Old Labour lady. I was for some reason immensely glad. Maybe in these days of legalizing torture and privatizing health we need all the fellow feeling we can get).

I managed to maximize the chances of my suitcase causing undue alarm and delay and possibly even inspection by packing cutlery, coat-hangers for skirts, orchid fertilizer, and several suspiciously dense rectangular objects in it.

After it had closed, with a bit of effort, I realized there was another book I need to take with me - Chabon's special number of McSweeney's, the Thrilling Stories one. So I went and picked it up, and looking at it noticed that it had Nick Hornby in it, and realized that I still have to read "How To Be Good".

The Chabon anthology, I realized looking at the sticker on the back, I bought in Seattle when I was at Clarion in, ahem, July 2003. The Hornby I had bought before going to Seattle, taken on the flight in with me, put on the shelves in my first Clarion room, moved to the other side of the house, packed (together with the Chabon) in one of the Five Boxes, mailed back to Italy, got it lost, found it again after six months, unpacked, put on the To Be Read Real Soon Now shelves, and now I'm packing it again to take to London with me.

And still I buy new books.

Sigh.

The books I bought:

- A Flashman book (Flashman's Lady) because everybody tells me they're hilarious
- The Well of Lost Plots by Jeffrey Fforde because I read "The Eyre Affair" and found it hilarious. Alas, they didn't have "Lost in a good book"
- "The Collaborators" an old book by Reginald Hill, because I love Reginald Hill, but I have been disapointed by his latest books. i preferred him when he wasn't so highbrow

After mailing all my books from London to home (51 quid!!!), I walked around a bit, popped off to the Covent Garden, where I found the garnet pendant companion to my garnet earrings, then walked back to Ludgate Circus to have lunch with Paolo.

There was a Books Co. on the way. So I pop in, intending Not To Buy Books, and I walk out with (and this will come as no surprise to people who have seen me walk around the WorldCon with the tote bag for the book I wasn't going to buy) "The Men Who Stare at Goats" by Jon Ronson.

Blurb: "Why are Iraqi prisoners of war forced to listen to Barney the Purple Dinosaur's theme tune repeatedly, at top volume? Why have 100 de-bleated goats been secretely placed inside the Special Forces command centre at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? Has the US Army enlisted the help of Uri Geller?

I couldn't decide if the book was a hoax or not, but boy, is it funny to read. Choice extract:

"He told his commanders this at the officers' club in Fort Knox in the spring of 1979. He had arrived there a few hours earlier and ha dragged in as many pot plants as he could find around the base. He arranged them into a circle, a "pseudo-forest". In the center of the circle he lit a single candle.
When the commanders arrived, he said to them, "To begin the ceremony, gentlemen, we're going to do a mantra. Take a deep breath and as you let it out sound Eeeeeeee."
"At this point", Jim told me, "they laughed. A few of them chuckled, a little bit embarrassed. So I was able to say, 'Excuse me! You've been given a set of instructions and I expect them to be carried out at hight level.' See? Tapping right into the military mindset. Second time we did it, the place became unified."

The book is weird, but if it's true (and it creepingly seems like it is) the reality is far weirder.

I had started the latest Brookmyre before leaving for the US and I stalled on it while I was there. I really got hooked on the way back, and I finished it yesterday at my parents' home.

I thought it was a bit slow to start, but in the end I felt distinctly annoyed at having to do other things (like going to the dentist's, or eating) because I really really wanted to go back to reading it. It's been a long time since I had this feeling. Ok, mostly it's because if I want to go on reading something, now I can do it.

All the same, it's a hugely entertaining and sweet book, no least because it's about a middle-aged grandmother becoming a fearsome cyber-assassin, saving the day and finding love. When can I have the next Brookmyre, please?

Also - I got the usual newsletter my publisher sends out whenever there's a review of their books, and it seems like the Friday magazine of the major Italian daily not only had a glowing review of the Italian translation of A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away, but it specifically praised my translation, citing my by name!