Back from Manchester today, started reading this on the train
Category Archives: books
Books & flowers
One of those days where you have lots of online meetings, work till 7 and then realise you’ve barely been outside. Here are some flowers and books anyway
Hollywood reporting
I’m reading a lot of film industry books at the moment – this is Julia Phillips account. She was the producer of The Sting and it’s a fun account of the 70s/80s Hollywood era
The book of the film
I’ve bored people before about how much I like the movie Jaws. I hadn’t read the novel and someone got me this for my birthday. It’s definitely a case of the film being better than the book, but it’s interesting to read to discern the decisions they made to transform it into a great movie.
Broooooce
As a teenage boy, I listened to a lot of Springsteen (it was my only nod to non-punk). I sort of stopped around the time of Born in the USA, but Nebraska remains a favourite. I bought his autobiography today which has been getting good reviews.
Digital economy
I’m writing something on digital economy models applied to education so reading a few books on the subject. They’re rarely good.
It’s all in your head
Current reading is this book about psychosomatic illness. It’s very interesting, the manner in which people develop very real, and debilitating symptoms such as paralysis and blindness, from their subconscious. One of the tragedies is that they often resist the diagnosis of psychosomatic as they think it means they’re making it up, and so continue to suffer.
Can you even Amazon?
I ordered a couple of physical books from Amazon the other day, rather than Kindle versions. I mistakenly ordered the LARGE PRINT version of Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. It’s already quite a long book, but especially bulky in large print version.
The Code
This is current bedside reading. It’s about fighting in ice hockey. It’s an odd thing, ice hockey is the only team sport where fighting is allowed, but there is a very strict code about it. The book isn’t really glorifying fighting but exploring the code and how some people view it as a positive (the argument is that knowing if you mess with someone the enforcer will get you, stops dirty play), but also lists the injuries and damage it causes.
There is a Cardiff Devil supporter, [url=http://cardiff.academia.edu/VictoriaSilverwood]Victoria Silverwood[/url] who did a PhD in this concept of legitimised violence. She’s publishing a book on it soon, which will be an interesting accompaniment to this.
One random book
I bought a book from [url=http://onerandombook.co.uk/]one random boo[/url]k. They choose a book for you – you can go general or specific genre. I got this one, which I just finished – it was an enjoyable read, and not something I would’ve come across. So in that sense the experiment was a success.
I notice that yhe website isn’t up at the moment & the book took ages to come so maybe it hasn’t taken off.
