My Weekly Book

MWB itself is maintaining a dignified silence on the conclusion of a certain popular seven-volume series for young people as the management is not much of a fan and is not intending to read said conclusive volume.

So it’s a case of move along, nothing to see here. However, if you really insist on having our reaction, you could always follow this link to our sister blog Botheration:

Why I won’t be reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Form an orderly queue, now.

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Much sniggering here at MWB Towers as Lucy Mangan in The Guardian imagines an up-to-date sequel to Pride and Prejudice:

…the only realistic future for Elizabeth Bennet involves her divorcing Darcy for his emotional illiteracy and refusal to make small talk with her mother. Then she’d turn her half of Pemberley into a corporate spa retreat and face ruin when her accountant realises its success is not built on her Meryton Mudwraps or pre-ball pampering packages.

Rather, it owes it all to the fact that Wickham is secretly ensconced in the gate lodge and lowering his britches for every lady in the south Derbs area who is finding that supervising even the most complex loggia at home is leaving her unfulfilled. Read full article here…

We’re always looking for new things to read here at MyWeeklyBook. Which is why I was intrigued by this review on the Freakonomics blog of Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, which often throws up interesting things. I’ve quoted a bit to give you a flavour of the book, and included a link to the original post so you can read the whole thing if it grabs you. Definitely going on the old TBR list, this one – sounds fascinating.

The blog is also planning a Q&A with the author (hence the title of the post) and is inviting readers to submit questions, so get on along.

Your Input Needed: Hunting the Black Swan

“Ferreting out antilogics is an exhilarating activity.”

Do you agree with the above sentence? If so, you will probably enjoy the writing of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a polymathic gentleman whose new book is called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here’s how its dust jacket succinctly describes the thesis: “A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11.”

I am about a third of the way through The Black Swan, and am finding it to be one of the most fun and challenging books I’ve read in a long time. It barrels its way through history, psychology, philosophy, statistics, etc. You find yourself arguing Taleb every third sentence or so — but, to me, that is part of the great fun. Read on here…

Always interested to hear your book recommendations – email them to recommendations SPLAT myweeklybook.net…

Allow me to expand on Mr Random’s definition of cricket, that we referred to a post or two ago:

There are two teams. The Australians win.

So far, so good. But there is actually more to it that we decided not to bore you with at the time:

In the absence of Australians, the team with the most South Africans wins.

Well, on a tally of 11-2, we were never really in with all that much of a chance, were we?

Still, we are enjoying a splendid late stand from that noted batsman Ravi Bopara who, while partnered by those other noted batsmen Monty Panesar and James Anderson, has managed to put down more runs than Bell, Vaughan, Pietersen or Flintoff and get within an ace of Collingwood’s impressive total of 30.

Happy days. I expect he’ll be offered the captaincy shortly.

[Search for cricket-related books on eBay]

Just to prove this blog spares no effort and expense in its bid to bring you the very best of literary tourism. Here, from a recent trip to Edinburgh, are some pictures of Scotland Street – the location of the serial novel being written by Alexander McCall Smith and published in The Scotsman newspaper.

The street itself turns out to be in a residential suburb just north of the city centre and the numbers actually run out, I would estimate, somewhere in the mid-thirties. Still, even knowing this, I was rather disappointed to walk through Drummond Place and not encounter a dog named Cyril with a gold tooth who winked at me…

Looking into Scotland Street from Drummond Place

Road sign at the Drummond Place end

[Search for Edinburgh books on eBay]

(more…)

Thanks to England’s dismal performance in the cricket today, I have learned a new word, always a pleasing activity. Here it is:

nurdle v. To get runs sedately by gently nudging the ball into vacant areas of the field (thanks to Wikipedia, as ever, for the definition).

Cricket, of course, has a whole wonderful terminology of its own. To see a nurdle (and lots of other obscure fauna including an off-drive, a reverse sweep, some back-of-a-length bowling and an easy catch to gully) at large in its native environment, read this BBC match report…

I would also like to refer the reader to the definition of cricket that my good friend Mr Random mentioned to me the other day, which may prove particularly helpful for any members of non-cricketing nations who may be reading. It is this:

“There are two teams. The Australians win.”

Usually I find The Guardian Digested Read annoying – too smug and sarky for my taste. But this one did make me laugh – shades of Life of Brian, I think:

Chapter 1

1. This gospel is written so that all may know the truth about Judas Iscariot and the role he played in the life and tragic death of Jesus of Nazareth.

2. Judas Iscariot was a good man. He was the world’s fastest runner, always told the truth and was the greatest storyteller Jesus had ever met.

3. I know this to be true because biblical scholars can’t actually disprove it.

4. Writing in an even more wooden style than usual is God’s sign of my sincerity. Read on here…

The Guardian Digested Read archive

Here is a book that I have just found out about (via a review on LiveJournal’s 50 Book Challenge community) – a book that I MUST HAVE:

If I Were an Evil Overlord, a short story collection edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis (no, not him, at least I don’t think so.) I don’t expect it to be brilliant, but an entertaining read, oh yes.

[Buy from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

And for your amusement and edification in the meantime:

The Evil Overlord list

Warning: reading this will inevitably mean you can never watch Doctor Who again without asking plaintively: “Well, why don’t they know to just shoot the gobby little bloke before he talks them to death? Haven’t they ever read the Evil Overlord’s Handbook? Don’t they have the Internet at Cyberman HQ?”

An amusing column by Charlie Brooker in Comment is Free from The Guardian today on compulsively reading the work of writers (mainly crap columnists) you don’t like:

Joe Mott’s blog heaves with demented beauty

I actively enjoy reading people I can’t stand. When they write something particularly horrid, a wave of nausea surges through me and my pulse quickens. I am hooked on it, like a base jumper compelled to leap off chimney stacks for the adrenaline rush. Consider it a sickness.

Previous obsessions have included Liz Jones of the London Evening Standard (specialist subjects: new age spa treatments and marital despair), and the Barefoot Doctor, who used to write for the Observer.

The latter took over my life for several months. Everything he said incensed me. He gushed a wild river of bullshit, which I swam through open-mouthed, savouring the taste. I even bought one of his books – a “guide to urban survival”; an incredible how-to manual apparently designed to help shallow, cosseted airheads become even more self-obsessed, justifying their unhinged narcissism as spiritual development.

It outlined concepts such as “people-surfing” – which seemed to involve deliberately developing superficial relationships for personal gain – and “visualisation”. If you wanted a new laptop, he said, you should picture yourself throwing a magic lasso around it, and before long it would be yours in real life (assuming you walked into a shop and bought it at some point).

I read the book from cover to cover, pausing occasionally to hurl it across the room in disgust. Even the typeface annoyed me. It was brilliant. Read on here…

A brilliant and provocative article recently published in The Guardian’s books pages. Julie Bindel examines why it is that, contrary to established belief, women swell the ranks of those reading and writing thrillers and crime:

Given my work as a feminist activist and writer, you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder. I talk regularly to women who have survived sex attacks, and have had to look at crime-scene photographs showing mutilated corpses of women who have been raped, tortured and murdered. It was as a direct result of the hideous brutality of a serial killer – Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper – that I became a feminist in the first place. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial killer genre is my favourite. Read on here…

These are, in my opinion, the five most weird and wonderful search terms used to locate content on this blog during the month of January:

• i already own a book – Congratulations, dear. Unfortunately I can’t save you the trouble of actually reading it…
• chapter summaries on bloodshot by sara paretsky and i don t wanna buy the book – Cheapskate. So much for Amazon affiliate links :- ))
• book recycling bank – I once had a discussion on a LiveJournal forum about the inadvisability of climbing inside one of these…
• my preferences choices lifestyle advice film recommendations – I’m suspicious of this, sounds like referrer spam. I can recommend a good book, but the rest’s a bit outside my scope.
• whipsnade d*gging – not a subject I remember having written about before or intend to ever write about in the future. The asterisk replaces the letter O in the perhaps vain hope that this post won’t now show up in thousands of searches on the same subject. If you haven’t come across the term before, suffice to say it’s absolutely nothing to do with books or reading…

Here’s an article written by Louis Theroux for the BBC News website talking about his series Weird Weekends and trying to define what makes a person odd.

I read the book in which he revisited some of the people he met in the series more or less in a sitting last year. It turned out to certainly be in my list of the top 15 books that I had read. So this was an interesting addition.

[Buy The Call of the Weird from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

Weird, or just wanting?

…The truth is, like beauty, weirdness is in the eye of the beholder. Often, something is weird not for any intrinsic reason but simply because not many people are doing it. A practice that is considered eccentric or taboo in one time and place is quite normal in another.

“Madness is a rare thing in individuals,” wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule.”

And I think this is what he was referring to – we may find, say, ancestor worship quite odd and racism deeply repellent, but in days gone by, these were both part of “normal” belief. Read full article here…

• Weird Weekends (not very informative) website

I’ve stuck my neck out, done something new and unexpected and risky – submitted an article to Wikipedia. I did this radical thing because I wanted one (one in particular, that is) – and it wasn’t there, much to my irritation.

So I went away and wrote it.

It seems fair to mention it here since I wanted to link to it on this blog. My first book of 2007 is a crime novel by the author Frederic Lindsay and I was looking for links. While they do exist, you have to hunt about for them.

I was a bit wary about posting it. Once upon a time I tried to engage with the peer review system on h2g2. While I am prepared to admit that stoically accepting criticism may not be among my biggest virtues, the comments made on the one piece I did try submitting were so stupid that I grabbed my toys and left. Since then I have been a little bit wary. But nothing upsetting has happened so far, such as editing firestorms or having it replaced with porn. Here’s hoping…

Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Lindsay

[Search for Frederic Lindsay's books on eBay]

Came across this the other day – I’ve never been a fan of the free newspaper Metro or any of its imitators so it made me smile. And I love the idea of finding ways of circulating writing that doesn’t depend on traditional publishing methods – I think this may be a big feature of the next few years. And, since you can sign up online and even print out stories to take on a journey with you, it’s not just for Londoners.

LITRO is a free weekly publication, distributed at underground stations (Stockwell and London Bridge at the moment), which each week features one piece of original fiction. I choose stuff that I like (obviously), but which I think will appeal to someone who is on their way to work. That is: not too long or too abstract, not too outwardly horrific or gratuitous, but which at the same time is not just a bland extension of your morning television, and which takes you to places you normally don’t think about visiting when travelling on the Underground. Anyway, that’s the aim. Why? Because there’s more to life than Metro and I’m tired of reading ads. I like to read a book, but sometimes my pockets just aren’t large enough, or my journey long enough. Learn more here…