Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Literature
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Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines how humanity has used technology to augment human memory over the ages, and how we are now entering a period where technology gives us near-perfect memory through digital archives. He argues that this is an abnormal situation for our societies, and that we ought to be finding ways in which we can facilitate forgetting rather than remembering.
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Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson won the 2006 Hugo award and deservedly so, it describes an Earth enveloped in a opaque membrane that blocks starlight and slows down time. Not a challenging read (I blitzed through it in a few hours) but enough great, Clarkian concepts to keep my mind buzzing. Recommended.
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My Book Life, Revisited
Back in July I let you know of my resolution to read, during 2006, an average of one book per week. At the time I was already six books behind schedule but I was confident that I was going to manage it. Now though, with just two weeks of the year to go and my count at 40, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make it, but I’m fairly satisfied nonetheless.
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Riddley Walker
As part of my (actually now-floundering) attempt to read an average of one book per week, I’ve been spreading my reading about, taking in books by authors who I feel I ought to have read but haven’t (Hemmingway, Greene), translated literature by foriegn authors I’ve never heard of (Calvino, Gutiérrez) and current popular fiction (Safran-Foer, Niffenegger). There’s also one, dreaded category that I touch upon only rarely: books that have been on my shelf and remained unread, in some cases for up to fifteen years.
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My Book Life
I’m not usually one for New Year resolutions, but this year I made one that I told nobody about in case I spectactularly failed; my resolution was to have read, by the end of the year, an average of one book per week. So far, 30 weeks into the year, I’ve read 24, so, while I have a little catching up to do, I’m confident now that it’s an achieveable goal.
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Pratchett Plays it Safe
There was a time when I was such a Pratchett fan that I even went to a Discworld Convention; after his last few books, it seems those times are past. The current Discworld novel, Thud!, was the first one I failed to finish, and I actually returned it to the shop to get a refund. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before.
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The Mao of Harry Potter
This weekend was nice in that it didn’t exist. It crept up on me as I suspected that it was the weekend of the 23rd, so I was fairly pleased when I discovered that a weekend of the 16th even existed. It was a free weekend, one that I hadn’t planned or budgeted for.
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Magazines
Prompted by the folding of style magazine The Face, Simon Collison at collylogic.com writes an article entitled “The Monthly Style Magazine – R.I.P”
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The NME
Buy an issue of The NME. It could be the current issue, or a recent issue. Start at page one, and read your way through it.
- If you encouter the word ‘shroomadelica’, take a drink.
- If The NME describes 2004 as being ‘The Third Summer of Love’, take a drink.
- If you see their ‘shroomadelica’ logo and typeface, take a drink.
- If an NME reporter interviews a musician and asks them if they take mushrooms (or ‘shrooms), or there’s an article on The Bees, or The Zutons, or any modern band at all somehow linking them to the ‘shroomadelica’ movement, take two drinks.
- If you start getting the feeling that The NME really is going on about taking mushrooms an awful lot, and the nagging suspicion that this mushroom craze is not actually sweeping the nation, but sweeping the offices of The NME and nowhere else, take a drink.
- If you read something about music, have some coffee, and check that you’re still reading The NME, because chances are, you’re not.
You’ll be pissed by page seven.
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