A Book a Night, or the Year of Sleeping Dangerously

I couldn't sleep again last night so I made lots of progress with The Poisonwood Bible and should finish it tonight. It's excellent! The language is poetic yet accessible with some unusual and clever use of words, and it has humour, history, politics, relationships, characters who develop and tragedy too. Thank you to Catriona who lent this book to me. Here is a link to the book on the author's website.

1000 Novels Everyone Must Read

... as chosen by the Guardian. Click here to see their list. I'm going to print it to see how many I can tick off! I was encouraged to see I had read the very first book, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, but sadly there was a very long gap after that. Lists, checking things off, what's not to like for a cataloguer and book fan?

Clowns!

Does ANYONE like them and find them funny? Apart from other clowns?

I've just read in Foyle's Further Philavery that the word coulrophia means a morbid fear of clowns, and Foyle points out that research research shows visits by clowns to children in hospital has a detrimental rather than a cheering effect! Eek!

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

In progress! It's 600-odd pages so as I didn't start it until 9.00 last night I won't be able to report on this for another 2 or 3 days. So far, so good though: it starts in a very dense, lyrical style, but then the style varies depending on which character is speaking. It's set in 1959 and a minister and his wife and 4 daughters have gone to the Belgian Congo for a year ... what will happen and how will they all get on?

How Clever

Look at what someone on Craftster has made. It's a very stylish coffee table created from a very grotty coffee table. Scroll down to see table crime converted to table design. I want one!

Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O, by Christopher Wanjek

This is reminiscent of Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, but written about medicine particularly rather than science in general, and from an American rather than a British perspective. The author is witty as well, but nobody is as funny as Ben. The book was quite long, but as I kept waking up last night, I finished it in installments!

Did you know you could still be killed by the Black Death ... in America? That the organic movement has been so hijacked by big business that you would be better buying local than buying organic? That Rambo would be completely deaf after firing all those guns? For these and miscellaneous other facts about health, then read this book.

Day 133; Book 133

Memorial to Fife Members of the International Brigades

I knew there was a memorial in Kirkcaldy to the Fifers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, so I looked out for it when I was there recently. I wished I could have given it a clean up, but you can still make out names and home towns in the photograph above. Touchingly, flowers had been left at the memorial, even all these years later.