More Books

[muninnhuginn]

What is it with goldfish? In the list of "lifestyle enhancements" in You Are Here, we get "screensavers (especially goldfish)". A bit dated, methinks. Goldfish are so, well, early to mid-nineties: think the Bravo ads especially the Twin Peaks one; think the credit card advertised using Billy Connolly..... That was in the days before everything--or at least Red Bull and female sanitary protection--had wings. The vagaries of advertising icons.

On with the list:

1. Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
2. Ulrich von Liechtenstein, The Service of Ladies
3. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
4. The Lifted Veil, Women's 19th Century Stories (Folio Society)
   Interesting, gothic collection. It rather highlights how the supernatural has been marginalised from mainstream fiction. These are almost without exception tales from household names, both then and now, and yet they use elements of the gothic and the supernatural in a way more likely to be nowadays marginalised to genre fiction.
5. Bremner, Bird, Fortune, You Are Here
   Occasionally amusing, but, much like their TV programmes, mainly just depressingly enlightening. I found one bit of good news: "The WWII Debt [to the US] (totalling $4,336 trillion will finally be paid off on 31 December 2006." Do we need to start a campaign now to have the equivalent of the repayments ring-fenced for something really useful?

Comments

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, I'm looking forward to getting 'The Lifted Veil' as one of my membership books. Mmmmm.

[muninnhuginn]

Lovely pictures. A physically weighty tome, which is one of the reasons I've been reading it intermittently: can't take it out with me. I think the Charlotte Bronte takes some work, but the George Eliot is wonderful, and the one set in Cumberland (I think that's the Elizabeth Gaskell but I could be wrong). It's one of the nicest collections of short stories I've read.

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you for that info! I should hurry up and get my renewal form sent off, then. I don't think I'd realised that it was out quite yet. It's probably my single biggest reason for renewing.

[armb.livejournal.com]

But computing power that allows this (http://www.screengardens.com/gallery.html) sort of modelling of water (and fish), in realtime, on a typical desktop machine, is more recent than the 90's

[muninnhuginn]

It's the image rather than the implementation that seems dated.