Be Excellent To Each Other

I didn't really like any of the Hitchhiker books.

Awesome.

Get out!

Oh, I suppose you can't really, can you?

Fine. I'm leaving!

Back now.

They were alright. I read the first one, and the one with the restaurant at the end of time.

I fail miserably at things geeks are meant to like: Star Wars, HHTTG and Monty Python don't really interest me much.

I've never really got on with HHGTTG 3 'Life, The Universe And Everything', but the other Adam's penned ones were great. This recent sixth one is really dull though, with Colfer seemingly intent on giving it authenticity by simply throwing in as many references to the previous novels as he can crowbar in. The spin-off 'Starship Titanic' written by Terry Jones was a bit shit also.

... I ... what? WHAT?!

I think it's massively overrated.

Is The Art of War actually readable today? And genuinely worth reading? I've always been put off by how old it is...

The original is a bit crumbly now, get a new paperback version.

It's a good toilet book.

Listening to people repeating favourite lines get tedious pretty quickly, but then we were all young once.

For fiction, I can't recommend Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett, enough. Seems like it's going to be a lovely fluffy thing, turns out to be funny, surprising and just great.

Agreed. But watching the actual show when I was young was mind blowingly chucklesome.

Star Wars was pap.
HGTTG was ok. Some good stuff in there, but hardly wall to wall Awesome.
Monty Python, again, had good stuff, but intermingled with less good stuff, and things that have been repeated so many times they've got much worse than not funny.

May be opening a can of worms here, but Star Wars always was and always will be, a kids film.

Absolutely. Video games are just for kids too.

And sweeties.

And puppies.

And Flat tops.

I'm intrigued to know what exists that you do find wall to wall awesome? It's not that I'm calling you a miserable bastard, I'm just implying that I think you are a miserable bastard.



That said, I've always thought the Indiana Jones films were a much better Lucasfilm creation than the Star Wars movies.

He likes dancing to not music.

I've just started reading this, and it's great so far. I love reading about counter-intuitive psychology, and this is absolutely full of the stuff.

I've also downloaded The Art of War, seeing as it's a free one on Project Gutenberg. I think I'll read that one next.

I'm having trouble finding Mick Foley's Have a Nice Day in eBook format anywhere, so I'll probably end up buying a physical copy of that, unless someone can point me in the right direction. I'm trying to reduce house clutter at the moment, you see.

So I couldn't wipe my arse on it?

For dabbling in new subjects, I quite like the OUP 'Very Short Introduction' series. They're just the right length and level to satisfy my curiosity.

List here: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/aca ... ral/vsi.do

Filim wise? Off the top of my head...

Ghostbusters films, T'original Blues Brothers (Not a musical!), Shawshank, Evil Dead 2, Dude where's my car.

(One of those is a cunningly concealed horrible, horrible lie.)

Yeah, i never really got into Blues Brothers either.

Blues Brothers is definitely my least favourite of that bunch. Dave is such an arsehole.

Anyway, Dude Where's My Car was potentially awesome, but they changed the script to make it child-friendly and completely fucked the film up - I heard. Is this true or did I hear a moronic rumour from a moron?

Monty Python is just as funny now as it was when I first saw it.

Star Wars is still pretty good now despite having seen it at least 100 times (as kids we had a 3 hour VHS set to long play that had superman, star wars and (I think) the goonies on it - taped of the tv, which my brother and I watched practically every other weekend for several years)

HHGTTG I've read twice, I went to read it again recently, and got distracted.

Oh, and Blues Brothers is almost perfect.

Malc

I've just done some research and I may be very wrong. Apparently it is based on the script for the "live action" Beavis and Butthead film that was never made.

Geeky things, or just "things"?

I think I love you again.

Well, far from giving up on The Wasp Factory halfway through chapter 2, I'm now 3/4 of the way through the whole thing a mere 24 hours after starting it. For me, an incredibly slow reader, that's pretty good going. It's horrible though and I swear it's put me in a bit of a stinker of a mood.

If you can wait till next time I visit mummy and daddy you can have my copy.

I didn't mention this before because it is a very baseball-centric book, but "Moneyball" by Michael Beane is an outstanding account of how one of baseball's poorest teams tore up all the accepted baseball wisdom around the turn of the century about what makes a great baseball player and managed to put together a team of cheap nobodies that competed for championships year in year out. I still think it is a good read even if you don't have much idea about baseball, but I could be wrong... but it has elements that will appeal to you I think.

This am good. It am about the history of tea and the British Empire. Very interesting without being too heavy or too fluffy.

Sure, ta. Bring it to the Lakes if you've got it by then.



That sounds really good, too. I'll add it to my list.



Good stuff. List++

Is that tea one available in the UK? Silly yanks!

Just a note to say it is by Michael Lewis, not Michael Beane... I confused the author with the main guy talked about in the book, Billy Beane Alarmingly, it is a mistake many critics of the book have also made, which is bizarre

I read the entirety of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro on the plane to America in one sitting. It's fucking brilliant. Don't read anything at all about it before reading it though.

But I just have!

Ok, don't read anything else! Including this post!

It should be. I read it when I was working in a library here. He (Roy Moxham) also wrote a book about the great hedge of India - something of an almost forgotten mega-project that probably would have disappeared if he hadn't stumbled across an obscure mention of it and followed it up. It was basically an attempt to control smuggling in India, but it's obviously more complicated than that.

The tea one was a bit more my cu... my thing, though.

Non fiction Blood River by a journalist for the Guardian or something. He recreates the trip Stanley made along the Congo at rather a lot of risk to himself. Very interesting.

That sounds good. List me do.

I've finished Freakonomics, which was excellent, particularly all the info about abortions lowering crime rates.

I've just started Moneyball, which is again turning out to be quite excellent. I quite like the guy's writing style, too, so might check out some more of his books when I'm done.

Ah coolio! I'm definitely gonna hunt it down - always been fascinated by India and the Empire. Love me a bit o' Kipling.

Me too... from chocolate slices to cherry bakewells, he is most definitely the man

Country Slices are the best, and don't you dare say any different!

Yep.

Fear not, they are included within the spectrum of tast-o-rama

Good chap!

He probably didn't coin the phrase, but it certainly entered the general consciousness as a result of the book. Much like Douglas Coupland and 'Generation X'.

I agree to an extent about what Gladwell did in his book(s), and found the exact same thing with Freakonomics. I enjoyed both of them, but there was a lot of padding there amongst the interesting things... and what's more, I don't believe half of what either of them say anyway.

I'm currently reading "13 Things That Don't Make Sense" by Michael Brooks. It's a fun scientific book about 13 of the greatest unanswered questions in science.

Such as "Why do we die?", "Why do we reproduce via sexual means when it appears to be evolutionarily backwards?", "Why can't we see most of the Universe (what is dark matter? Does it really exist?)?", stuff about cold fusion, cosmological constants and so on and so forth.