Minus the scales, plus legs

Lately I've mostly been reading "Goodbye to Berlin" by Christopher Isherwood. In fact, I read the whole thing in 24 hours, which counts as powerful mad for me. Literary friend Jo tells me about how, as a child, she would go to the library and gorge on up to three books in an afternoon in a kind of intellectual feeding frenzy. I think my style when it comes to books could be characterised as a python: For months I live on one little spy thriller, then some terrible internal clock ticks around and I'm driven out of my dank lair to devour some hapless novel the size of my head. Afterwards, I sit unblikingly, a single forlorn flysheet emerging from the corner of my mouth. Well, a bit like a python.

I'm going to give you a lot of useless links, but here's one you should really look at: http://www.bookcrossing.com/, and in paricular My page there. Basically the idea is that it allows people to register books then pass them on: Future owners will be able to go to the website, tap in the code on the label and see who's owned that book before them. If anyone wants me to send them a collection of Issac Asimov stories, email me at nathan.hill@mansfield.oxford.afurthersubdomainthatdoesn'texistbecauseI'mwaryofwritingmyemailadress.ac.uk
(I plan to talk about spam in a future blog. My middle name is Hackney.)
I plan to register some more books in the immediate future, and when I do I'll announce them here. So if I register something you like the look of, just mail me and I'll post you a free book. No strings.

I really like Goodbye to Berlin. I reccomend it to anyone... having said that, those used to Quiller (for whom I have a soft spot) may complain, as poeple are wont to do with The Catcher in the Rye: "Nothing happens". That criticism is, well, somewhat justified. However, like Catcher, the quality of writing lets you slide through despite that. It's not in the least turgid. It's also set in 30s Germany, a setting that has more than enough ironic tension of it's own to give the whole book a particular flavour. I find that period of time really interesting, because it's the facing-off of Enlightenment age values that you and I share, meeting this other worldview... intersting.

I've now started reading "Virtual Histories", which is a colection of essays along the lines of 'What if there hadn't been an English Civil War?" Sadly, the one-and-a-half essays I've read so far have more along the lines of "Is it historically feasible that Charles could have silenced his critics in the Long Parliament of 1638?" They're trying very hard to get across the message that things could have gone differently. I accept that already, I just want speculatiuon as to consequences. In a way, that's vacuous: if you assume that small changes, like a week's delay in negotiantions of the convenantors rebellion, could have caused large changes down the line then that throws doubt on the whole predicting-the-alternative-timeline thing. (My, that was badly expressed)

In other news, I'm looking seriously at the Oxford Times Science Writing Competition. I don't flatter myself that enough people read this, least of all from Oxford, to create any meaningful competition as such.