Category: books

It must be a quiet news day. I really can’t see how the announcement of the publication date of a children’s book can be considered news. I suppose it can be considered advance warning that the news in July will be full of children explaining why it’s vitally important that they queue all night outside… Continue reading Advance Warning

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article about Pride and Prejudice must start with the words “it is a truth universally acknowledged…”. The Guardian likes the joke so much that they used it twice today. In a real news story and also in a feature.

It’s about time I read The Golden Bough, but the problem is deciding which version to read. I’ve got a copy of the Wordsworth Classics version that I picked from from a second hand bookshop a few years ago, but it seems that this is a reprint of the 1922 edition and in that version,… Continue reading The Golden Bough

Occasionally (!) films based on books end up bearing little relation to the original books. A good currenty example is I Robot. I haven’t yet seen the film, but the trailers I’ve seen make it very clear that that it has almost nothing to do with Asimov’s original collection of short stories. However there must… Continue reading Film/Book Tie-Ins

I got a royalty statement from O’Reilly over the weekend. It seems that we still haven’t sold enough copies of the badger book to make back our advance. It makes me wonder if there’s any point in spending such large parts of my life writing obscure technical books that (almost) no-one wants to buy. I… Continue reading Best-Selling Books

There was an interesting article in Saturday’s Guardian about the effect that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has had on tourism at Rosslyn Chapel – the small chapel just outside Edinburgh which has been at the centre of the UK grail-hunting industry for many years. Rosslyn seems to have become another essential stop on… Continue reading Rosslyn Chapel

To celebrate the 100th annivesary of Bloomsday, the BBC publishes an abridged version of Ulysses. I bought all of James Joyce’s books after my first trip to Dublin in 1992. I’ve still only read Dubliners tho’.

I’ve just noticed that tonight Channel 4 are repeating Solid Geometry. If you like Ian McEwan (and doesn’t everyone like Ian McEwan?) then it’s well worth watching. It’s a brief (40 minutes) adaptation of the short story from First Love, Last Rites. It’s not an easy story to film (and if you’ve read it you’ll… Continue reading Solid Geometry

Like many people, I’ll be off to watch Troy when it opens this weekend. For a while I’ve been thinking that it would be a good idea to re-read the Iliad so I’d know what I was talking about when I was comparing the film with the book, but I was surprised to find that… Continue reading Ilium

When I first saw The Da Vinci Code in bookshops I was very interested as I love all that conspiracy theory stuff about the Templars, the Holy Grail and the early christian church. It’s over twenty years since I first read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and I still like to read a… Continue reading The Da Vinci Code