Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Stood next to someone on the tube this morning who was reading a fascinating book, must have been about vermin or something similar, with a chapter on pigeons. The pigeon problem where they become too numerous in cities is caused by human overfeeding, which stimulates them to overbreed. The key to controlling pigeon populations is to stop people feeding them. But this is really difficult because there are a small number of mad feeders – eccentric animal obsessed types who defy any ban or fine to carry on feeding them.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, May 16th, 2008
Neil did a book list and I couldn’t resist!
“Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread†in LibraryThing.
The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list.â€
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Well, I didn’t hate it, I think in some ways it’s quite cool. But I’m certainly never going to enjoy reading it.)
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (One day anyway. Perhaps when I’m old, in a home, hopefully the same home as Charles. And he can explain it as I read it.)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (I’ve read a couple of them anyway – great stuff!)
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (well, bits of it)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray *
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbevilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Dune
The Prince (bits of it!)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces*
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Jon T gave me this in a secret santa at Charles’ house. I knew he gave it to me, because he asked me afterwards if I’d read it or not. I’m looking forwards to reading it at some point.)
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being (Poor old Karenin. I’ve maintained that I didn’t like this for the last eleven years, just to annoy Steve and Charles. Actually, I did like it. I still do.)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road* (inspiring!)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* (still good – even when you read it again!)
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, November 7th, 2004
I recently finished an excellent book called Managing Britannia, by Robert Protherough and John Pick.
It’s about the way that the idea of management has come to take over swathes of British life, bringing its own ethos, rules and vocabulary, imposing them on organisations which worked well beforehand, and wrecking them.
The book is quite polemical, but it mainly deals with areas where the effects of modern
management has been particularly corrosive. The chapters where idiocy is most plain are those on schools and universities, and the NHS. In education, it is plain that the assault on the professional independence of teachers and the proliferation of central targets and tests and reforms has had appalling consequences. The chapters that criticise government attempts to understand the arts as an ‘industry’ are entertaining (particular disdain is piled upon Chris Smith in his time as Culture Secretary) but not always convincing. The authors are inclined to see the creation of DCMS and its forebears as a Stalinist project.
I like the way that they book points out how all this began in earnest under Thatcher in the 1980s. Despite their neoliberal rhetoric about ‘little government’ it was the Tories who oversaw the initial proliferation of central government management over every sphere of
human life and endeavour.
Blair and the control freaks of New Labour emerge as the natural heirs of Thatcherite Conservativism in their relentless multiplication of management bureaucracies and their ambitious attempts to bring all of British life under the tedious reductionism of evidence-based policy.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »