Not Enough Books!
Apr. 21st, 2007 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnAccording to the Daily Mail (OK, not the most accurate source of data) the average British person only reads 566 books in their entire lifetime! (Wish they'd asked me, I'd have pushed the average up a bit. Though having said that, I don't think I could give them accurate figures: it has to be thousands, but I haven't been counting...)
Apparently the average cigarettes per lifetime is over 77000! What are these people doing, wasting all that money on smoke when they could be buying healthy books!
John Fisher: Why Does My Dog?
Some interesting information on the effects of diet on behaviour, but rather outdated (published 1991) views on the relevance of wolf behaviour to dog behaviour. Also some quite mad stuff on dominance theory, and what in my view was a criminally irresponsible anecdote describing his recommendation for use of an electric shock collar on a greyhound. If there is one breed of dog for which the 'invisible fence' approach is even more totally inappropriate than another, it's the greyhound.
George RR Martin: Fevre Dream - Very impressed with this. GRRM does Anne Rice, only better. A vampires in New Orleans/ Mississippi river boat book: I loved it.
Ursula Le Guin: Changing Planes I'd read this before, but it seemed the perfect book to take on a tedious plane journey (and it was very tedious. Boston is FAR too far away to go for a 2-day course). I love the story of the woman who is 4 percent corn, and the Ansarac bird-people who have a developed civilisation yet still perform a seasonal migration are really inspired.
Adrian Woolfson: An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics. Interesting, but at the same time rather an annoying book. The historical anecdotes seemed to be in there just to show what a renaissance man the author was: I don't know if I just didn't get it, but they seemed to tie up very loosely with the science that was the point of the book. And it annoys me when species are described as 'useless weeds' or 'evolutionary dead ends', as if evolution was deliberately planned and structured to produce modern man and his possessions.
George Mackay Brown: Vinland
A story of a man of early Orkney who hitches a lift with Leif Ericsson. I wasn't entirely convinced to start with: the characters were a bit flat, I thought. But it won me over with some gorgeous descriptive writing: I now want to paint at least one of the descriptions (the description of the waxing and waning moon as a girl-woman-crone).
I'm sure I took something else as well, but I can't remember which book it was now, as I foolishly shelved it when I got back, and now it's become one of the Multitude... It may have been Le Guin's The Beginning Place, but I *thought* I read that the week before.
Apparently the average cigarettes per lifetime is over 77000! What are these people doing, wasting all that money on smoke when they could be buying healthy books!
John Fisher: Why Does My Dog?
Some interesting information on the effects of diet on behaviour, but rather outdated (published 1991) views on the relevance of wolf behaviour to dog behaviour. Also some quite mad stuff on dominance theory, and what in my view was a criminally irresponsible anecdote describing his recommendation for use of an electric shock collar on a greyhound. If there is one breed of dog for which the 'invisible fence' approach is even more totally inappropriate than another, it's the greyhound.
George RR Martin: Fevre Dream - Very impressed with this. GRRM does Anne Rice, only better. A vampires in New Orleans/ Mississippi river boat book: I loved it.
Ursula Le Guin: Changing Planes I'd read this before, but it seemed the perfect book to take on a tedious plane journey (and it was very tedious. Boston is FAR too far away to go for a 2-day course). I love the story of the woman who is 4 percent corn, and the Ansarac bird-people who have a developed civilisation yet still perform a seasonal migration are really inspired.
Adrian Woolfson: An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics. Interesting, but at the same time rather an annoying book. The historical anecdotes seemed to be in there just to show what a renaissance man the author was: I don't know if I just didn't get it, but they seemed to tie up very loosely with the science that was the point of the book. And it annoys me when species are described as 'useless weeds' or 'evolutionary dead ends', as if evolution was deliberately planned and structured to produce modern man and his possessions.
George Mackay Brown: Vinland
A story of a man of early Orkney who hitches a lift with Leif Ericsson. I wasn't entirely convinced to start with: the characters were a bit flat, I thought. But it won me over with some gorgeous descriptive writing: I now want to paint at least one of the descriptions (the description of the waxing and waning moon as a girl-woman-crone).
I'm sure I took something else as well, but I can't remember which book it was now, as I foolishly shelved it when I got back, and now it's become one of the Multitude... It may have been Le Guin's The Beginning Place, but I *thought* I read that the week before.
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too many books
Date: 2007-04-27 06:16 am (UTC)