freedom costs money

oh good god.

1x cure for insomnia:

give up caffeine (sorry, there's no easy shortcut)
approach bookshelf (with caution)
Choose biggest, most obscure looking book thereon.
Take it to bed with you.

I acquired today a copy of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design at a second hand book sale and already I've finished it. If you want a quick introduction into (surprisingly enough, given the title) modern design, then you can't do any better than this.

There is a long tradition of those in the know writing spy thrillers, the most obvious being John Le Carre, who had to leave his post with MI6 on account of his spy books becoming too successful. (i wish i had seen that meeting).

This book, is perfect.

The Time Traveller’s wife is simply the most enjoyable, touching, moving, insatiable book I have ever read.

The basic premise is obvious, a man time travels and he gets married. But where as all time travel novels find them self bound by the laws of quantum physics, the risk of paradox and the redundancy of free thought… Audrey Niffenegger bypasses all of this by having Henry flip through time involuntarily, put simply his body clock is all messed up.

This is Gatiss' (Of League of Gentlemen fame) first novel, and it is to be hoped, the first in a series of Lucifer Box books. Box is the edwardian equivelent of James Bond, a spy for His majesties government.

I have now completed my lightening war on the various texts that I must study for my course. Here is a series of bite-sized easily-digestible reviews of the hallowed texts – a sort of literary version of one of those tinfoil hedgehogs you used to get with spines made of cocktail sticks with cubes of cheese and pineapple or very small sausages on:

This is from one of the chaps that wrote Red Dwarf and is about a United States of Europe where incompetence has flourished thanks to a total lack of any discrimination.

This book reminded me of two others: The Salmon of Doubt and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It reminded me of Adams' last work in the style of its humour and of Orwell's masterpiece in the way it makes you, when you finish the last page, say to yourself "that's how the world could end up".

I have recently finished reading a biography of Robert Falcon Scott, of Antarctic fame.

Ranulph Fiennes thought (rightly) that Scott's reputation had been maligned by earlier biographers who thought his story needed to be embellished and wrote his biography of Scott to set the record straight. I, though, hadn't read any of the other biographies and so their malignant speculations had rather passed me by. I wondered whether it was just me that has always thought of Scott as rather a hero, even if he didn't return from his expedition alive. So please let me know what you all thought of Scott, and especially of his expedition to the pole.

How can a book that’s so frightening be so funny? It’s lucky that Michael Moore possesses the ability to make you laugh because without the chuckle factor this book makes for a distressing read. The manner in which the reckless actions of the Bush Administration and their corporate sponsors are chronicled is comprehensive to say the least and could be enough to have some readers heading for the nearest terrorist training camp if not for the fact the book’s central thrust is that their collective anger should be channelled into something positive, namely ousting the Republicans at the next election.