The 10 Day You Challenge. Day 7: 4 Books

Sorry for the delay in transmission. Been busy and all. But I'm back now, and they seriously expect me to narrow it down to four books? FOUR?! Are you freaking kidding me?

So, here we go:

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In my primary school, we had a library. We were never allowed to go into the library, but it was there, at the end of the corridor, opposite the P7 classroom. It had glass panels in the door, so I could see in and peek at all the goodness I was missing, and I can remember spying the Encyclopaedia Britannica (possibly the children's edition) sitting there on one of the shelves, all in alphabetical order and matching.

I'm not sure why we weren't allowed in the library, incidentally; each classroom had its own little library, so possibly the big library was just where they stored duplicate copies of those books, or maybe they kept different ones in there and then swapped them round to update the class libraries from time to time. I don't know.

But I remember thinking the encyclopaedias looked brilliant, from what I could see of them, and I longed for the day when I would be allowed to spend time in the library, undisturbed, and start reading from A right through to Z. All I needed was one break time when I could go in there and get started, instead of having to go outside and talk to other children, and play their weird games and stuff.

Finally, in P7, I had my chance: the rest of the class went on a school trip for a week without me. Nowadays I'd have been either sent to join P6 for the week, or referred to a child psychiatrist to establish why I had absolute hysterics when they tried to ship me off to an activity centre to have fun with my friends for a week (and in fairness, it mightn't have been a bad idea for someone to have at least made enquiries about that), but in those less enlightened times, I was sent to spend the week on my own in the library, completely unsupervised, to do a project on water.

Utter bliss. I didn't manage to read much of the encyclopaedias, but damn it, I tried, and to this day I cannot look at the Encyclopaedia Britannica without remembering the sheer joy of having the whole primary school library all to myself.

2. From Fear To Freedom, by Rose Marie Millar
A book I was recommended when I was about 22, which changed my entire outlook on life. I finally began to believe that I wasn't just a weird, hopeless failure with no hope of improvement, but that I was a child of God, a sinner saved by grace, and with all the power of Christ available to me to bring restoration and radical change. So that was good.

3. Treasures Of The Snow, by Patricia St John
Another book from childhood, this was probably the first novel I really loved. It's about a little girl (Annette) growing up in the mountains, who swears revenge on a boy who has hurt her little brother. Through a series of events that I don't quite remember, she ends up learning about forgiveness and grace. There's quite a lot of stuff in this, for a children's book, and I loved it.

4. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
I haven't actually read this one in full yet (I'm currently about 20% in), but Mr Smile lent it to me one time before he was even Boyfriend Smile, and I felt all special because he doesn't lend books to many people in case they break them. I never even gave it back to him; I just kept it for, like, 3 years, and then decided it was half mine because we got married.

Next time: 3 films

A Series Of Things

So I've had a lot of thoughts going on in my head this past while, and I haven't quite distilled them to the point where I'm ready to write about them, but I thought I'd list them so that you can all keep asking me for my deep and incisive thoughts on them.  Otherwise, my vast pool of wisdom could end up being lost to the internet for ever, and that would Not Do At All.

Topic 1: Marriage
So remember I said I was reading a book about marriage and it was making me feel a bit sarcastic?  Well, Mr Smile asked me for my reasons, and at the time I'm not sure I had them properly established.  However, since then I've had coffee with my friend Emma, and she recommended a book, and I looked it up on Amazon, and it's subtitle was "What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?" and I was all "YES!!!  THAT'S what I want to read about!".  So I think the problem with the current marriage book is that it's all a bit "making your marriage work" and I don't really want to read about that, not because it's not important, but because it's not very exciting, and I want exciting.

(In case you're wondering why I'm reading all these books about marriage, it's not that I'm having a marriage crisis; it's more that because we got married fairly quickly after getting engaged, we didn't have time to go to any marriage preparation classes, and in any case we probably would have been thrown out because we would only have sniggered at the sex bits, so I'm reading some books in case there's some vast wisdom out there that I've missed out on.  I still snigger at the sex bits, because I am Not Very Mature. It's also because some people bought us books on marriage for engagement/wedding presents, so it would be rude not to read them).

Topic 2: Loving People
I came across an article on 'tinternet the other day, all about how to love people who annoy you, and it was fine as far as it went, but then I got in a discussion on The Facebook, which lead me to think "Really the command is not to get along with people, it's to love them.  And really it's not about people who annoy you, it's about actual enemies and that". So I have some Thoughts On That, which I'm preparing to dispense.

Topic 3: Friendship and being nice
A third ongoing issue is that of how to be a good friend, especially to someone who has let you down or who is doing crazy stuff that hurts you a lot, or, you know, that kind of thing.  And it has seemed to me that it is not important to be nice, but it is important to be all manner of other things which are much more difficult and scary and possibly unpleasant and risky but which are also (as far as you can ascertain) loving and helpful and therefore you have to do them because the person is your friend and you care about them.  But also you don't want to completely just feck the person off by being an utter twat (incidentally, Mr Smile and I are currently involved in an ongoing argument as to whether 'twat' is a really bad swear word, or just a funnier version of 'twit'... please feel free to get involved), plus they're an adult, and frankly, when they want your opinion they can ask for it, and anyway you might not be as Right as you think, and anyway also you should probably sometimes just shut up and listen.

This reminded me of my second form chemistry teacher, who once said during a lesson (I've no idea why, but this may explain why I have only a very basic grasp of chemistry) that he would never want to be described as 'nice', and this shocked me because I was a 12-year-old girl and being thought of as 'nice' was the only ambition I had at that point.  But now I think I agree entirely with him, because, as they say, no one ever changed the world by being nice, and also because we're supposed to be like Jesus, and I don't know that He was really all that nice, when it came to it.

Topic 4: The Inanity Of Following Your Heart
This was prompted entirely by this article, and I like it because I've never been comfortable with following my heart, but people seem to tell me to do it sometimes, and therefore they are Wrong and I am Right, and I like when that happens.

Also, it gave the opportunity for her over at Living Gently to share the following quote on Facebook, and is worth a lot for that reason alone:

 "Should I bolt every time I get that feeling in my gut when I meet someone new? Well, I've been listening to my gut since I was 14 years old, and frankly speaking, I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."

Rob (John Cusack) in High Fidelity

So these are all grand, and I hope to come back to them, but I think we also need some light entertainment, and so I present some of it here:

1. This is the work of a genius.  An evil genius.

2. Daily Odd Compliments are hysterical.

3. Very British Problems will hit home.

4. Pins which amused me this week were this, this and this.

You're Welcome.

What I Have Been Up To

Reader, I married him.

Mr Smile and I got married on 18th May, and I must say, we did quite a good job of it. We looked quite nice, and as far as we could tell, everyone had a rather pleasant time.

It turns out that organising a wedding is quite a lot of work, particularly if you involve your mother, who transforms from someone who is vaguely pleased you're dating someone Not Too Bad, into someone who appears to have spent the days since you were born thinking up ideas for things without which your wedding will not be complete.

Anyway, we're all married now, and so far all is going reasonably well. I say 'reasonably'; there are ongoing discussions about how many teddies are allowed in the bed (I have lived my entire life being unable to have any less than 'all of them', in case the left-out ones get lonely and sad; whereas Mr Smile is happy to let them live lives of quiet despair, apparently), and this may not be resolved for a while.

On the other hand, we made a good job of merging our libraries. Between us, Mr Smile and I own all the books, so what we needed was a System. We devised the following:

We started with 5 bookcases, plus the shelves in the study. The study has traditionally been home to my Enid Blyton collection, all my Christian books, and reference manuals, so it made sense to leave them there. One bookcase was filled with DVDs, Wii games etc, so we left that as it was as well. This left 4 bookcases, which have been designated thus:

1. The one in the hall for books neither of us has read
2. The one that used to be in my bedroom but is now in the living room for books which I have read and Mr Smile has not
3. The one that used to be in Mr Smile's house but is now in the living room for books which Mr Smile has read and I have not
4. The one that was always in the living room for books we have both read

Obviously, within each bookcase, books are arranged according to the standard Dewey Decimal System, in alphabetical order of author. An initial problem has been that Bookshelves 1 & 3 are full to capacity, so Mr Smile is only allowed to read books from Bookshelf 3, and I am reading from Bookshelf 1. Also, books are joining Bookshelf 1 at a rate far beyond that at which they are leaving, and we've already had to build an annex on the top.

In other news, I got sent to Methodist Conference for a week. This is the kind of thing that has potential to be incredibly dull, of course, but in this particular instance was really Rather Good, and I came back all inspired. Then I gave a talk about it in church, which now seems to have gone viral (in Irish Methodist circles, at least). So I may become famous as someone who had a good time at Methodist Conference, which would be Quite Something.

So that's you all up to date, and I'll let you know if anything else happens.

Books For 2013

Right, this isn't THE post for today, but I've set my reading challenge for 2013.

2013 Reading Challenge

Sharon has read 0 books toward her goal of 35 books.

hide

0 of 35 (0%)

view books

I'm not sure whether the widget automagically updates as I read things, but we'll see.  This time I've gone for 35 books, up from last year's target of 30 (I managed 32).  The previous year I only aimed for 15 and managed 17, so you can see I'm upping my game this time round.

I have some books I'd like to read.  They are:

Novels:
Nathan Coulter
Wolf Hall (started)
Great Expectations (started)
The Poisonwood Bible
The White Tiger
Middlesex
A Place on Earth
East of Eden
Housekeeping
Bleak House
Brave New World
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Non-novels:
The Radical Disciple
Prayer (the Philip Yancey one)
Something about discipleship... suggestions are welcome

I may, of course, read entirely different books, depending on what catches my attention.

Further suggestions are welcome.

Edit [2nd Jan, 2.40pm]: Following further suggestions, the following have been addded:
How to Train Your Dragon
The Island
The Cross and the Switchblade

A Poem I Wrote About Not Being Able To Find My Hat

I cannot find my hat -
I do not
Know where my hat is,
But this I know:
My hat is not
Where my hat us'ly is.

The Noughties: A Decade In Books

Over the past 10 years, I have read a number of books. I now present the best and worst of them. Please note that this is not so much a list of books from the Noughties, as a list of books I have read in the Noughties.

The usual caveats apply: lists are not exhaustive, were dreamed up from the top of my head and may not be representative of my actual opionions. Also, they are not in any particular order.

So, here goes:

Books I Read This Decade And Liked A Lot

1. Possession (AS Byatt)
To be honest, I didn't think I'd understand this, because it was all literary and stuff. The kind of book where I would get a couple of hundred pages in and realise I didn't know who the main character was. But it was very good and I liked it and understood it.

2. The Name Of The Rose (Umberto Eco)
Not being a fan of crime, detective and middle-ages books, this did not seem promising either... I do like monks, though, so maybe that helped.

3. The Time-Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
After re-starting three times I finally figured out what was going on and enjoyed it a lot. Once you realise that he is moving about in time and she is not, it makes more sense.

4. Jayber Crow (Wendell Berry)
I bought this entirely because Jaybercrow had named his blog after it, and I figured that if he liked it, it must be quite good, and also it is about a barber, which you don't always get. By the end I had almost forgotten that there was a whole, real world out there.

5. The Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis)
This should not need any explanation; the only question being why I didn't read it until I was in my mid-twenties. I blame my parents.

6. How To Be Good (Nick Hornby)
This is one of those books that wasn't really all that great, but that I liked a lot.

7. The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)
You may be surprised at this entry, but it is in large part that I felt it was owed a place due to the immense contribution it has made to this blog. When I say I liked it a lot, I am not, of course, referring to its contents, which were mainly dull, anti-scientific drivel (oooh, what's that I hear? Oh, that'll be the comments section going nuts), but I liked when we talked about it. And I liked that it is the only book I have ever shredded (that was fun). And that it inspired what may be the most negative book review ever written, and which was almost on the list in itself.

8. Schindler's List (Thomas Keneally)
If you've never read this, you really should. And it's ok, because the book came before the film, so it's actually really good.

9. Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)
Probably the scariest book I have ever managed to read, which is nice.

10. The Remains Of The Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
I like this mainly because not a whole lot happened, but it was still un-put-downable

Almost made-its: Life Of Pi (Yann Martel), Home (Marilynne Robinson), The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time (Mark Haddon), The Secret Scripture (Sebastian Barry), A Prayer For Owen Meany (John Irving).

Books I Read This Decade And Did Not Like

1. True History Of The Kelly Gang (Peter Carey)
By the end, I was willing them all to die. Should probably get bonus points for drawing the characters so well that I hated them, I suppose, but I'm not that nice.

2. Miss Wyoming (Douglas Coupland)
I'd been promised a lot, and this did not deliver.

3. The Purpose-Driven Life (Rick Warren)
See number 2

4. Catch-22 (Joseph Keller)
We've discussed this before. We hated it.

5. To The Lighthouse (Virginia Wolff)
We have also discussed this. We got bored after the first sentence, which did not end till page 5.

6. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
I hated this not for the crappy plot, the over-hyped excitement, the non-existent characters, the symbolism nonsense, or the poor dialogue. I just hated it, just because.

7. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis De Bernieres)
Much like To The Lighthouse, I tried, I really did. But I just couldn't.

and I can't think of any more books that I did not like this decade.

On Orderings Of Books

An awesome thing happened on Thursday evening. I ended up alone in a room with an unordered bookshelf. And 25 minutes to do what I pleased with it. I KNOW! I was like a child in a toy shop, a bull in a china shop and... umm... me in a bookshop? Anyhow, moving on...

I began, of course, by taking all the books off the shelf and putting them on the floor. In such a situation, this is the only proper way to begin. Next, I removed the videos and cassette tapes which had weaseled their way in, and put them on a separate shelf, at the top.

And then, I had to decide on a system. And to be honest, it wasn't easy. I thought of sorting by author, but they weren't really that kind of book (the bookshelf in question was our church 'library', whose stock mostly consists of books people were clearing out - not that this is a bad thing, but it makes the selection a little... random). They're the kind of books you want to browse, and sorting by author doesn't lend itself to browsing.

Next, I considered organising them asthetically - either by colour, height, or a combination of both. This would have worked well in terms of making them look pretty, and with a certain amount of effort, one can get a fairly pleasing arrangement in this manner, but eventually I decided there wasn't enough variation in the colours and sizes of the books for it to be entirely satisfactory.

So, finally, I settled on arranging them by subject - 'prayer', 'Bible study', 'Christian tat' etc. - and within that to go for alphabetical order of either author or title.

This progressed well, and for a time I was even wondering where I could get a hold of a copy of the Dewey Decimal system (as used in public libraries) and make the appropriate modifications to ensure that I had covered all categories correctly, but I was interrupted by everyone else arriving for the meeting for which I had been 25 minutes early, so I didn't get to finish. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

Tagged

At long last I've been tagged on one of those tag things that do the rounds of blogs every now and then. Usually these pass me by, almost like no one cares what I think. But, high-5 to Jools for including me in the list of people of whom he wants lists of five books that have changed how you read Scripture, and how you think theologically.

So. Hmm. Let me think. I assume we're not allowed to say the Bible, like in those nights on a CU weekend where someone says 'What one person, living or dead, would you like to have lunch with?' and everyone says 'Jesus', because it sounds spiritual, even though they're really thinking 'David Beckham' or 'Zippy'.

Anyway. Here goes*:

Five books which have changed how I read Scripture:
1. The Contemporary Christian, by John Stott. Before I read this, I didn't really read the Bible as such, just sort of scanned it for interesting bits.
2. The Teenage Survival Kit by Pete Gilbert. Before I read this, I didn't even scan the Bible for interesting bits.
3. Can We Believe Genesis Today? by Ernest Lucas. OK, so it's only about Genesis. But it made me read Genesis differently, which made me read other bits of the Bible differently as well.
4. Streams Of Living Water by Richard Foster. It has bits about lots of different people and traditions, which gave a different perspective on the Bible and helped me to have a bigger view of it.
5. Excellence In Leadership by John White (I think). Looks at Nehemiah and applies the book to leadership issues today - one of those books that made me see how relevant the Bible still is.

Five books that have changed how I think theologically:
1. The Last Battle by CS Lewis, or really anything by CS Lewis. I like how that Calormene bloke (?) gets let in.
2. From Fear To Freedom by Rose Marie Miller. An excellent book about what it means to be a child of God.
3. Prayer by Philip Yancey (and, as a subcategory, What's So Amazing About Grace, also by Philip Yancey). By the end of page 1, I was excited about praying again.
4. Seasons Of The Heart by Janette Oke. Made me realise that not all Christian literature is good.
5. The Cross Of Christ by John Stott. The first book I read that made theology accessible.

So, now I tag:

• Me In My Small Corner
• And Miles To Go Before I Sleep
• The Soapbox
• Transfarmer
• Dotted White Line

Footnotes:
* The usual caveats apply: these lists are not exhaustive, have not been extensively thought through and opinions expressed by the author of this blog are not necessarily her own.

The Shack

It has been fairly well documented that I will read more or less anything with words on, but even I have my off-limits material, and they fall into 2 categories:

1) The Christian novel. Virtually always twee, simplistic and generally crap, the Christian novel is to literature what fizzy cola bottles are to gourmet cuisine. The storyline is generally as follows:
Family of people who are all good church-goers apart from one wayward son who gets in with a bad crowd and begins to drink and say things like 'damn'. Much hand-wringing ensues. Wayward son goes off to seek fortune and ends up destitute; he comes upon a church, repents and turns nice. Previous friends of wayward son (who abandoned him in his hour of need, thus proving that only Jesus is your true friend) come to a bad end, while wayward son marries impossibly nice local girl who always thought he had a good side. They raise their own cute little family (this allows the same story to be repeated with the new family in the next book in the series, ad infinitum, although at some point Grandpa dies).

2) Everything that other Christians rave about. Examples have included The Purpose-Driven Church, The Da Vinci Code, and anything to do with Nooma (There. I said it. I don't like Nooma).

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I picked up 'The Shack', a recently-published Christian novel that lots of other Christians have raved about. I had been given it by a good friend, but nevertheless spent several minutes thinking up ways in which to pretend I had liked it despite hating it, even before picking it up.

And it is not a well-written book. The dialogue is clunky and the characters are fairly 2D... the plot is bizarre (though necessarily, so that's ok) and the ends are tied up so nicely that you can all but see the literary pink bows.

So really, I should have hated and despised it. But somehow I didn't. The only vaguely rational explanation I can come up with is that it appealed to some sort of inner child who likes her stories simple and unchaotic; perhaps we can blame it on the economic downturn, the local shootings and riots, and my own predisposition to misery, coming together to create a longing for nice. But whatever it was, I quite enjoyed it, and a couple of times it even inspired me to pray (in a good way, not in a 'Oh please, let this book end soon' way), and you can't say much fairer than that.

So maybe I should give Rick Warren another chance...

On Literature

I still can't really type, so I'm going to post things I can just cut and paste from more interesting parts of the internet instead.

I think this might be the best summary of how I feel about books, ever:

... my books are part of me. For the first 19 years of my life, I didn't go out. All my formative experiences are on those shelves. They are me, I am them. They are the reason I have a vocabulary instead of childhood memories. Glasses instead of an adventurous spirit and heavily stamped passport. Incipient scoliosis instead of a varied sexual history. I did not gut them for knowledge and move on. I absorbed them in their entirety and carry them with me still. We are indistinguishable and indivisible. Sometimes, when no one is looking, I take down favourites and hug them.

(Lucy Mangan, The Guardian, 17th Jan 2008)

Initial Reflections On The Institutes Of The Christian Religion

So. John Calvin's 'Insititutes of The Christian Religion' is still being delivered daily to my iPod, and now that we have got beyond the preface, the Calvin and Hobbes version is looking more and more tempting by the day.

I think I should give a bit of background here, since not all my viewers are Northern Irish Presbyterians (more or less the target audience for the above tome), and may not be entirely clear on who we're discussing. John Calvin was a French Theologian during the Protestant Revolution who established the system of Christian theology called Calvinism or Reformed Theology. OK, admittedly I just copied that from Wikipedia, but anyway, the point is that that somehow led to the Presbyterians. And maybe some other denominations (although not Catholic and not Methodist, but beyond that I'm unclear).

Anyway, despite now being (if I must be something) a Methodist, I grew up in a Presbyterian church, so I have the general impression that somewhere along the line I ought to have had some sort of awareness of Calvinism, but I can't think that I ever did. I can think of 2 possible reasons for this.

1. In Sunday School we were tasked every week with learning a verse and a catechism. At this point I should explain that as well as Sunday morning Presbyterianism, I was also sent to the Sunday afternoon Brethren Sunday School where my granny was a teacher; the Brethren version had no catechism, but was both more demanding and more rewarding in terms of verses: you got a stamp on a card for your verse and catechism for the Presbyterians (the stamps, I think, worked a bit like petrol tokens, you could trade them in for prizes once you had enough; I'm not entirely clear since, as we shall soon discover, I never got that far), but you could (and I once did) earn an entire pound for reciting the first chapter of Hebrews for the Brethren.

Anyway, with so many things to learn, and an inclination to do so that hovered around the nonexistent mark, I was usually trying to get my sister (always far too enthusiastic for my tastes) to teach me the verse and catechism on the way in the door, so that I could run up to the teacher, and without pausing for pleasantries, rhyme off the required words (or, in truth, usually some mangled version of them), get my stamp (occasionally) and then promptly forget all about it.

The only catechism I can reliably remember now was the first one, because I remember having such a huge argument with my mother about how dumb it was and how I didn't want to learn dumb stuff that didn't make sense. The catechisms were presented as a series of questions and answers, and, for the record, the first one (from memory) is:
Q. What is man's chief end?
A. Man's chief end is to glorify God
which clearly makes no sense because, while I am not intimately acquainted with the male anatomy, even I know that men have 2 main ends: their head and their feet.

I mention this because I now suspect that the catechism was where the Calvinism came in, and it may be that had I learned it properly, I would now understand The Institutes. It is possible that my sister is listening to the same podcast every day and writing in with suggested improvements.

2. Reason number 2 why I might have escaped Calvinism is to do with the lie of the ecclesiastical land in Ballywalter (where I grew up). Basically, there is a choice of 3 churches (unless you want to go somewhere else (for instance, Millisle) to church, which is considered A Bit Odd and slightly frowned upon):
i. The Brethren hall
ii. The Church of Ireland
iii. The Presbyterian church

The Brethren church has a bit of a 'reputation'; you sort of have to have always gone there in order to go there.

The Church of Ireland is nice enough, but since it's slightly outside the village it's a little bit of an unknown (indeed, I only discovered today, on t'internet, that it has a name - Holy Trinity), it is also a bit cold and has no car park.

For this reason, the default church to go to, unless you have been brought up Brethren or CofI, is the Presbyterian, so the congregation there consists less of committed Calvinist Presbyterians and more of people who like a comfy seat and appreciate the car parking facilities.

Hence, it is not exactly a bastion of Reformed Theology, and this may be why I had never heard of things like the Westminster Confession of Faith (the bedrock of Presbyterianism) until I went to university, where I once encountered it in casual conversation right before deciding I'd got in with the wrong crowd.

Anyhow, as soon as I understand anything Calvin is saying, I shall let you know.

On Another Pet Hate

I was just scanning some newspaper takes on the credit crunch (oh how I have come to hate that phrase), and came across the Daily Mail's

Apocalypse Now?: New world order could have devastating implications for Western nations

and this reminded me of something: I really cannot stand the Daily Mail. I mean, seriously? Apocalypse? I mean... seriously?? Apocalypse? To clarify: it's not the Apocalypse (well, probably) - it's a wet week in October and we've finally figured out that money doesn't buy happiness.

OK, we also have the Four (self-declared) Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Richard Dawkins (a good friend to these pages), Sam 'a little bit creepy' Harris, Christopher Hitchens (the thinking woman's crumpet), and Santa; and perhaps we should be taking them more seriously (rather than just pointing and laughing), but (and I may be wrong here) I don't think we should take this as a sign that we should hold off on the New Year's Eve plans.

But back to the Daily Mail. Every now and then I wonder who actually buys it, and then I go to my parents' house and find it on the sofa. Their reasons for reading it, though, are instructive: the crossword is good and it has Garfield; sound reasons to do anything, you will agree. Furthermore, you don't have to think too hard - the answer, with the Daily Mail, is usually in the headline, viz.:

Headline: Apocalypse Now? (Answer: 'no')
Headline: Are Our Children At Risk From Baby TV Stations? (Answer: 'no')
Headline: Do Asylum-Seekers Cause Cancer? (Answer: 'no') - ok, I made this one up, but it's only a matter of time.

The Daily Mail is not a fan of asylum seekers, anyone on benefits, falling house prices, anyone with AIDS, gays, foreigners in general but especially the French, Guardian readers, CCTV, Health & Safety, the EU, or religions other than white-middle-class-protestant.

They do like health scares, angry letters, headlines in CAPITALS, and pretty young blonde things, especially those who just passed some GCSEs.

I am heartened, naturally, to know that the Daily Mail hates me too: after all, I am unmarried, have no job and recycle a lot.

Books I Disliked

I have finally finished Catch-22, having speed-read the final hundred pages or so, and now I feel like my life can get back on track.

Anyway, I got caught up in a discussion over on ShipOfFools.com about books you never managed to finish. Now, technically, I will never admit to myself that I have given up on a book; I just 'postpone it for later' and hope one of us dies or gets eaten by worms before the charity shops run out of alternative reading material. So this (in no particular order) is the current list of 'postponed' books:

1. 'To The Lighthouse' by Virginia Wolff. After reading 5 pages and realising it was all one sentence, gave up in a huff. Learn to use full stops, woman.

2. 'Captain Correlli's Mandolin' by Louis De Bernieres. 4 chapters, 4 different sets of characters and 4 different plots. Tie it together, captain.

3. 'The Confessions of Saint Augustine'. You may recall me buying this in a frenzy of shopping just over a year ago. Maybe my problem was context: maybe this is not the book for a sunny afternoon in the back garden, sipping cool drinks and eating ice cream.

4. 'Amy Carmichael of Donhaver'. A Sunday School prize when I was about 14. Meant to be an inspiring story about a missionary from Millisle; just couldn't get into how nice she was. Maybe if I read it now I'd be a more appreciative audience. Gave it away to a charity shop though.


And the ones I hated but finished anyway:

1. 'True History of the Kelly Gang' by Peter Carey. Very well-written, but I hated the characters and was glad when they died.

2. 'Catch-22' by Joseph Heller. As previously discussed. Again, not a bad book, just not for me.

3. 'The Purpose-Driven Life' by Rick Warren. Apologies to those who loved it and thought it was better than the Bible.

4. 'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown. Just poor - not even interestingly bad, just dull.

5. Anything by Janette Oke. These would warrant a blog entry of their own. The typical American Mid-west Christian novel, where the bad guys get saved or get their comeuppance, and the good guys get married and have beautiful babies. Bleurgh.

Discuss.

The Catch

We all know by now that when there is a list that could in any way conceivably be construed as a 'Things You Must Do' list, WhyNotSmile is as unable to resist as a QuestionMonkey in a theology debate. It is for this reason that I am currently reading my way through the following:

• The Booker Prize winning books, since the dawn of time (read 15 out of 41)
• The Guardian Top 100 Books of all time (read 53 out of 100)
• The BBC Big Read Top 100 Books of all time (read 49 out of 100)
  

Furthermore, the Costa/Whitbread award winners are being kept in reserve.

The problem is, we've hit a snag: a fairly big, 500+ pages snag, in the form of Catch-22. I just can't get through it. It's not that it's dull exactly - in fact, it's very funny - more that it's a bit wearing after a while. There seems to be nothing much in the way of a storyline; the characters appear to exist simply to convey jokes. Much like WhyNotSmile, you might say.

At the moment I'm about half-way through, and determined not to give up, even though this is the first time in history that I've had to renew a library book because it took me longer than the allotted time to read it.

If anyone has read this book, can you please reassure me that I'll make it to the end? I mean, it's number 11 on the BBC Big Read list, so there must be lots of people out there who've read it and enjoyed it. Please tell me what I'm missing.

On The Morality of Book Buying

I've been having a bit of a moral crisis of late, caused by something I read in the paper. Someone had written in with an ethical dilemma about secondhand books. I forget the exact story, but it was something along these lines: they had tried to sell some books to a secondhand bookshop; the shop had refused to buy them because they didn't reckon they could sell them on, but offered to take them for free to stop them going to the charity shop next door, which they claimed is destroying their trade. So the person had some kind of moral dilemma about what they should do, or something.

Anyway. Various people had responded, and one of the responses was from some outraged person who said that the only morally right thing to do was to recycle the unwanted books, since no one has a right to buy books secondhand as that does not earn the author any money (they excluded out-of-print books from this, obviously).

WhyNotSmile (having too much time on her hands and being quite easily swayed) was promptly thrown into moral crisis, as she buys a lot of secondhand books and was rather distraught at having so unwittingly been party to (albeit unintentional) evil. This was further enhanced when she dug about in her memory and recalled that something similar was said somewhere along the line by some author (Janette Winterson, maybe? - would go online and check, but I'm currently Not Friends with my Vista internet connection).

Their point is this: books are written by authors. Authors have to earn a living. If you buy a new book, the auther gets a cut of what you pay. If you buy a secondhand book, only the shop you bought it from benefits, and the author gets nothing. This is therefore stealing, and you should be Ashamed Of Yourself.

The aforementioned-possibly-Janette-Winterson author compared secondhand book trading to music and film piracy, and suggested that it should be made illegal.

Now, in a sense, they have a point. If authors cannot make money by writing books, then clearly they're going to stop writing books. This is bad for them (as they'll have to go and get a real job), bad for publishing houses (who won't have anything to sell), and bad for literature in general (since Mills and Boon will always be the last to die). Now, I like reading, and I want to continue to be able to go to a bookshop and find books in it: new books, which I have not read before, and which are worth reading. For this reason, I do buy new books some of the time.

However, I do not agree that I am Morally Wrong (as opposed to Simply Unwise In View Of The Effect On The Future of Literature) to buy secondhand books some of the time as well. The only valid reason I can see for it being morally wrong is the one about authors' rights; the other two reasons mentioned above fall under the 'simply unwise' category.

My reasoning is this: just because someone wants to write books, doesn't mean that the rest of us have to make sure it's economically viable. You can't always get what you want; it's what everyone's parents call 'Tough'. I mean, I would like to be a wife and mother, but, since I have so far failed to attract a member of the opposite sex, I have to be a computer programmer instead. And I don't go around haranguing widows who remarry and accusing them of moral bankruptcy for using more than their fair quota of men. I would further argue that if you're a good author, the system will not fail you, but I don't like the implications for the analogy, so I won't.

Additionally, this argument could surely apply to any secondhand stuff you could name; when you buy it, the person who designed and made it in the first place doesn't benefit. But when stuff is made and a price is set, the price has to take into account the lifespan of the stuff, and how likely it is that people will buy the stuff new in the first place, and so on; this is how economics works (actually, I made that last bit up; I've no idea how economics works).

And thirdly, this also assumes that when I buy a book secondhand, the alternative would be to buy it new; in practice I can't afford to do that, so I might just buy one new book rather than 10 secondhand ones. But if I have bought a particular author's book secondhand and enjoyed it, then when I go to buy my one new book, it might just be that I decide to buy one by the author I liked. If I hadn't bought any secondhand books, I wouldn't know which new book to buy, and would simply collapse in a sobbing heap in the book shop, which does nothing much to improve anyone's economic prospects.

And finally, if trading in secondhand books is morally wrong, wouldn't that make libraries absolute dens of iniquity? This cannot possibly be true, so, using Proof by Absurd Converse, my argument stands.

Five Go On A Saga Holiday

First up, I'm sorry if I don't smell quite so pleasant as usual. The spider-horse is still in the bath, and I have been unable to wash. I checked on Google, and it says spiders can live for up to a year. The only hope is that, since presumably they are not born the size of horses, this one must be at least a few months old already. Alternative accommodation may, however, have to be arranged. Fortunately I'm getting a new bathroom soon (from Q&B again - ha! My inane and mindless optimism never ceases to delight me), so it may just be a case of removing the spider-horse with the bath.

Onwards, however, and it seems that the week which saw the promise of the re-launch of the Wispa has another thrill up its sleeve - the re-launch of that ever-jolly quintet, the Famous Five. Not merely a remake of the old stories, ho no. According to today's Guardian (incidentally, on my weeks off I have discovered that newspapers are still available in their old-fashioned ink-on-paper format. How deliciously quaint. But I digress again.), there are plans to make a new TV series in which the Five are reunited in their middle age, to solve a new "complex modern mystery".

As a life-long Enid Blyton fan, I am almost hysterical with excitement. It's almost worth getting a TV for. But the Daily Mail (of which, one can be sure, it will turn out that Julian at least is an avid reader) sounds a note of caution: "There are fears that seeing the carefree crime-fighters saddled down with adult concerns - at least one of the team is likely to be divorced, say insiders - could destroy the youthful innocence of the brand."

Now, Guardian writer Marina Hyde rather callously hopes that it is Julian's marriage "that imploded", but I don't know. In the books, you will recall, it was Dick who always seemed to assert a strange attraction over the wandering gypsy girls - a power which, surely, can only lead to trouble. Julian, I suspect, became chief of police in a pleasant rural setting somewhere, but has now taken early retirement and devotes his time to giving road safety lessons to chavs in the local primary school. I have to agree with Hyde when she says she imagines Julian as being "not desperately keen on reality television, among several thousand other things". As ever, Julian's role in the new series will be to provide the ready cash (although probably for fast cars and international flights rather than ice creams and new torch batteries).

Dick, on the other hand, may well have have become the black sheep of the family for a time... his 'frightful' language, commented on by Anne in one book ("'Darn it!' said Dick. 'Dick!' said Anne, shocked to hear her brother using such a frightful swear word.") may well have taken him into rather less pleasant company. Of course, he'll have turned out all right in the end, after a sharp talking-to from Julian, and much pleading from Anne. Moreover, since at least one of the "new millenium" Five will need to be a forensics expert, my money for that one's on Dick.

Everyone will expect Anne to be the nice little housewife she was shaping up for, but this neglects to take into account the strength of her emotions when stirred. This is the girl who, in "Five on Kirrin Island Again" (book 6, I believe), abandoned a scoundrel at the bottom of a quarry with a broken ankle, shouting back over her shoulder 'you're a wicked, wicked man'. There was a firey heart in Anne, which any prospective husband will do well to have spotted. I'd say it's worth a bet that she at least had a fling with Alf the fisher-boy (you will remember him as the one who used to get George's boat ready each summer; never once was it ready when she wanted it, but always, always the paint had dried in time for them to row off and catch the kidnappers), but I can't imagine Julian allowing that to develop into anything more serious. No, Anne will have become a nurse, married a sensible and slightly older chap from the next village, and be happily settled in Kent. Of course, Anne will have her contacts from the past - and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that an old boyfriend might re-surface.

Incidentally, how any of the above three can be expected to turn out all right is, of course, a mystery - having spent their entire lives either at boarding school or on an island being chased by smugglers, scoundrels and the ubiquitous 'foreigners', with parents who turned up only briefly and infrequently.

And then, of course, there is George. Good grief. First, of course, we must remember that Timmy will no longer be with us. There must, naturally, be a descendant (otherwise it would be the Famous Four), but George will have had to weather the grief of seeing Timmy off to the great kennel in the sky, and can it be hoped that she will have come out the other side as a stronger, more mature person? Apparently a number of commentators have idly surmised that George will turn out to never have married (really, what gives them that idea? Or do I hear a civil partnership in the offing?). Aged 52, George, I suspect, is still a student. She's never quite got around to handing in her thesis (which is something to do with some kind of obscure art that nobody gives a toss about), but has a large house and vegetable garden in which she grows, amongst other less legal things, her own vegetables. As ever, George's role in the plot will be to do a lot of stamping around and throwing tantrums, during which she'll lob a 3-week-old copy of 'The Guardian' at Dick and it'll accidentally disappear down a rabbit hole. Some plot lines just keep re-surfacing.

George's parents will no doubt still be alive - Uncle Quentin simply by forgetting to die, and Aunt Fanny determinedly sticking by him, feeding him soup and tidying his 'important documents'. He will no doubt be aggrieved that his way of producing non-polluting energy from nothing (which, I assure you, was actually completed at the end of the afore-mentioned 'Five Go To Kirrin Island Again') has not been taken up by the world, but he has now settled for a quiet life and is working on 13-dimensional string theory instead.

One wonders, too, what kind of world the modern-day Famous Five will live in. No longer will it be acceptable for someone to be deemed a criminal merely because they are 'foreign' or beacuse they 'belong to a circus'. The local waifs who frequently turned up in rags and without fail found the secret entrance to the castle/high tower/cave/dungeon will now be knife-wielding chavs, more likely to block the Five in a rabbit hole and steal their wallets than to be won over by Dick's charm and turn out to know the local hills like the backs of their dirty hands. In any case, we can be sure that Julian's big car will have sat-nav.

And can you even still buy ginger beer?

Q and B, Part Deux

My, it has been a while. You see, I've been off work, and therefore had things to do other than write my blog. I'm still off work, as it happens, but thought I should write something, in case you're missing me.

So on Friday night I was at the rugby (Ireland vs Italy), and discovered the slightly disappointing fact that the crowd shots at these events are mostly staged. What happens is, the cameraman points a camera at you while you stand in the crowd at a quiet moment (obviously if there's anything remotely interesting happening on the pitch, they'll be filming that, so crowd shots are only used as fillers), and tries to whip you into a frenzy. Obviously one doesn't want to look like a prat live on TV, so one must feign some kind of enthusiasm, but I tell you, that's not so easy after the first 30 seconds.

You'll be pleased to hear we have a further development in the Q&B story (if you're new to the blog, check back around the April/May archives for the first installment of this sorry tale). Needless to say, no one from Q&B ever called me back, so on Thursday there I went to the warehouse to try again. I took my dad too, labouring under the delusion that he might be scarier than me.

So we went to the girl at the kitchen department, and explained the tale, and I said I wanted (a) someone to bring a new cupboard door, (b) someone to fit the new cupboard door and (c) someone to take away the pile of old cupboard doors and the cupboard which, you will recall, was erroneously sent by Steve some months back. She was very sorry about the whole thing and phoned a manager. Then she said I could buy a new cupboard door, and then bring the old one back and get my money back; also, she'd arrange a fitter to come and fit the new door.

Now, I was not so keen to hand over more money (although it was only £4), but my dad seemed temporarily to be possessed by insanity and said 'oh, yes, let's buy a new one, and sure I'll fit it for you. And we can take the old doors to the dump ourselves and you can bring the extra cupboard back'.

Great. So let's let Q&B off the hook and do it all ourselves. Incidentally, how did my dad suddenly become able to fit cupboard doors? Where was that skill when I was handing over thousands of pounds to Q&B to come and mess my house up? As it turned out, of course, my dad couldn't install it, but only because he didn't have a drill with him, so after a brief excursion to my parents' house, the new door is attached, and looking different from all the others, since they appear to have changed how the doors are sealed since I got the last lot. But it's on.

Anyway, I refused to agree to take the doors to the dump myself - they'd never all fit in my car, plus the guys at the local dump get tetchy if you try to dispose of more than a sweet wrapper there. So the lady in Q&B said she'd arrange for someone to come and pick them up. So I'm waiting for them to call back. Ha.

In other news, today saw my annual shopping trip, and I finally managed to get the birthday present from my parents sorted out. I never got round to ordering the jeans in Next, but I got new shoes today instead, so whatever else happens, my feet will not be naked. I also got new sexy underwear and a book called 'The Confessions of St Augustine', which is a sort of 4th Century Christian version of Heat magazine, only it's a book instead of a magazine.

Incidentally, I hear they're bringing Wispas back. Is anyone else finding themselves a little bit too excited about this?

I'm back

I do apologise, it has been far too long. Not that I have much to tell you, even now.

The big event this week is that I am OFF WORK - woo hoo way hey!!!! Score!!!!!!!!! So happy. No need to drag myself out of bed at 7am (who am I kidding?), fight back that sick and tense feeling, crawl to the bathroom, gulp down breakfast, drive through traffic and be at my desk for 8. No phone calls for me to screw up (answering phones is not one of my greater talents), no emails, no chaos, no clock-watching, no stress, no rising sense of panic as the boss approaches....

So I wonder whether I am really in the right job, and to this end, have been updating my CV and reading books entitled things like 'how to get a job that doesn't make you feel sick every time you think about it'. I'm at that stage of life where I wonder where the last 10 years went and what on earth I'm going to do next. You see, I never really had a career plan that went beyond 'get job for several years, get married, have kids, leave work for 20 years, get job for several years, retire'. Now, this is all well and good, and is still Plan A, but since we are missing one vital component, I'm thinking maybe I should try out Plan B for a while.

So I need to make a Plan B, and this is where we're at right now. So I'm trying to find the perfect job for me. It needs to have the following components:

• Be interesting with lots of fun things to do every day. These may include things which are considered to be actual 'work' as well as things which are not.


• Involve nice, sane people. Nice more important than sane.


• Pay enough money for me to have a mortgage. The necessary amount is rapidly increasing, but last time I checked I think I need to earn about £300000 per year.


• Provide opportunities to meet nice guy. One who is single and lovely.


• Be near my house, or within cycling distance. Or even better, not involve me getting out of bed at all (in a 'working from home using my laptop' sense, not in the sense of any other type of job which can earn you money for staying in bed).


• Involve at most 37.5 hours per week, and at least 23 days off per year. Preferably less hours and more days off though.

So if you hear of anything, please let me know.

Onto Facebook. It used to be all Friends Reunited, but not any more. For today's cool kids, it's a well-established battle between Facebook and Bebo. Now, I am on both. Bebo I like, it is simple and you can draw pictures for other people and I like that. And you can see what celebrities you look like. But, you know, it's for kids. So I should really be investing my time with Facebook - the choice of the grown up, sophisticated technophile. But I'm afraid I just don't understand it, and that scares me. People keep sending me pandas and flowers and ice creams and things, and just the other day, I think Voxo threw a sheep at me. I have no idea how they're doing it. Is this a sign that I'm getting old?

One final thing and then I'll go. The final Harry Potter book. I had a marathon Harry Potter session last week, reading the entire series in one week, leading up to the grand finale on Sunday. I loved it. I cried.

My Visual Bookshelf