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The Phoenix - the making of modern London by Leo Hollis
The author takes the important period in the history of London and England, the age between the reign of Charles II and Queen Anne. The book starts just before the great fire of London in 1666, talks us through the great thinkers of the day and reveals how much they contributed to the advancement of our country in just half a century. The rebuilding of London after the devastation of the fire is staggering considering what they were up against - the cost and the logistics. The great minds brought to consider many of the periods problems were the likes of Christopher Wren, John Locke, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, and many more.
The achievements during those few decades years were remarkable - the rebuilding of London including the mighty St Pauls Cathedral, the Bill of Rights, the founding of the Royal Society and it's encouragements on the advancements of scientific experiments, the founding of the financial City of London.
Definately made me want to seek out more to read on this very interesting era. One little passage about Christopher Wren was very poignant. He was 37 when he got married for the first time to a lady who'd been a neighbour when they were children. Sadly they were only married for six years before she died and there remains only a scrap of a letter written from him to her on the return of a watch he got repaired for her:

I have sent your Watch at last & envy the felicity of it, that it should be soe near your side & soe often enjoy your Eye......but have a care for it, for I have put such a spell into it; that every Beating of the Balance will tell you 'tis the Pulse of my Heart, which labors as much to serve you and more trewly than the Watch; for the Watch I beleeve will sometimes lie, and sometimes be idle & unwilling...but as for me you may be confident I shall never..

sweet.

Oo, that looks fun. Just caught the first two eps of C4's Genius of Britain series and they focused mainly on the likes of Wren, Hooke etc. Worth a look

You might like Newton & The Counterfeiter, which has some of the science explosion and finance trickery, and general flavour of that time too. Less romance tho - it's about curmudgeonly old Newton after all (altho an infatuation with a male acolyte is hinted at )

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hey Gol that book looks good, I'll def check that out. I'd like to read more about Wren too as the pain he went through to get that cathedral built is awesome. I've gone and missed the first eps of the Genius of Britain too, I'll have to see if I can watch it on the net somewhere. Hooke was an amazing character. I was aware of him before but didn't realise how much surveying work he'd done after the great fire in order to measure out the new streets, tramping around for months with rope and measuring sticks. Hooke had a few ill tempered barneys with Newton too I read!

Finally finished Ann Radcliffe's hoary gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, a book I started three or four months ago in the wake of another pretty bad 18th century tale, the Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

Walpole's is undoubtably the more eccentric book. A young prince is walking to his wedding ceremony when a giant helment falls from the sky crushing him and beginning the fulfillment of a prophesy. In the aftermath of this heavy-handed foreshadowing his dad turns into a big jerk, plots to divorce his wife and marry his son's fiance, accidentally murders his daughter, and finally repents after a surprise browbeating-from-the-heavens. That mere outline makes it sound better than it actually is, but in spite of heavy handed imagery and clunky prose the novella moves along briskly in it's slight 100-pages.

Then a couple decades later Ann Radcliffe decided decided to tell a similarly dark story set in a series of gothic castles, with menacing princes and charlatans plotting bad things for innocent virgins. One problem is that Radcliffe isn't very good at imagining bad things in any specific or lucid detail. Her heroine/pov character suffers no lack of prolixity in composing trite poems whenever she sees an earthy peasant or hears the "murmur" of a babbling brook; throughout 670 pages her sense of propriety and stubborn dignity keep her from ever actually investigating any of the portents of doom that assail her every waking hour. In stead she just becomes a serial fainter. This is pretty emblematic of Radcliffe's prudish writing as well, and couples with a penchant for monotonously chirpy dialog to produce a pretty... well you get the point. At about the half-way point I was starting to get bored, but 350 pages later I was so happy to be almost done with it that I actually enjoyed the last 20 or so pages.

It may be of mild historical interest if you're going to read Northanger Abbey (which is why I read both of these) but that's about it. I can't not recommend this book enough.

It's a little better if you read the book aloud in stereotyped British, French and Italian accents, as appropriate. I became especially fond of doing an Eliza Doolittle impersonation for every tediously pedantic female servant or peasant in dialog.

I also finished a book my Girlfriend lent me, Crackpot: the Obsessions of John Waters

I thought a lot of this was pretty interesting, but I think Waters' self-aware pretention and cleverness was easily overshadowed by another collection of Humor essays that I'm reading right now, The Most of S.J. Perelman. Still, if I were to judge this book by its cover I'd give it an A:



I also just want to repeat how much I loved Anna Karenin, easily the best book I've read so far this year. Tolstoy's eye for detail and descriptive-metaphor, the emotional-physical-temporal texture makes this a pretty singularly heart-breaking novel. Gush.

The 'Genius' series is all up on the 40D site for free . It's very swift, interleaving about five scis per episode, but their modern champions obviously love their subjects and fill out the sections with lesser-known facts and the like. One of the best C4 docs I've seen in a while. Nice to know they remember they have an education remit occasionally

Hooke's section is beutifully realised, really making you feel the wonder the first compound microscopes must have had, especially when made by your own hand, and then revealing the intricate monstrosity of the flea by candlelight.

The Counterfeiter book has some good stuff on Hooke too, from his cantankerousness with Newton to his effect on the Royal Society, getting interested amateurs around the country to record the climate reliably etc.

Good gushing I may have to bulk buy a whole set of Russian classics at the rate they're being recommended on this thread (Hopefully I won't have to put on any accents to keep them interesting tho )

The Silent State by Heather Brooke

A slightly annoying but definitely informative read by the journo who was key to the expenses scandal breaking. In a wide ranging look at how info is withheld from us, from local councils up to the embroidered pomposities of Parliament, via law courts and police stats, she turns over a lot of stones. Her fervour does work against her at times though, leading her to describe a council cutting back on its biased local rag as an 'island of sense', having only pages before quoted stats showing hundreds taking similar actions. That may seem a reasonably small slip, but her descents into hyperbole don't help her hard-won factual assertions (her comparison of bureaucrats to Schindler's List Nazis being the most needless low point).

Whether you agree with her or not that it's always bad for the state to employ PR, her ad hoc estimation that the state has a 12:1 ratio of PR to FOI staff does give you pause for thought. You can disagree with some of her more lurid depictions of UK statism, but there's no doubt she's provided a massive service, along with others, by forcing detailed facts into the light of day (although she does point out that almost all the info has ultimately come via leaks and whistle-blowers, not official channels). She does highlight positive actions by the increasingly-independent statistics bureau etc, but the overall picture of undemocratic law-changing via 'statutory instruments', spun stats, charges for public data, and wilful obfuscation of incompetence or fraud in the name of the 'national interest' is pretty damning.

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The Prince by Machiavelli

As unblinkingly brutal as you'd expect (fortune is your wife, and you must beat her, says our man from the 16th Century), but also awash with scenic hues (fortune will also sweep you away like a river, unless you at least set up dykes for that unfortunate day). Reading his thoughts (or sarcastic retorts for the layman? No-one's quite sure) on how to navigate geopolitical life frequently conjures images of Iraq invasions, countries formed by wars, and many other modern day affairs of the sword. Divide and conquer is scorned, capital punishment is nothing new, killing when you could not is generally the thing to do...

It's an intriguing look at the complications of the times (not least in that M had lost his standing due to losing a war, but waxes lyrical for his imaginary Prince about how to never to lose again). He relates how contemporary factions have been played off against each other, goes allegorical when advising Princes be like both lion and fox (& learn from the half-bull tutors of the ancient ones), and generally paints an easy-read bit of historical scenery, educating us layman separated by the distances of time and temperament (whether he meant to or not).

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Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

This is part parody and part satire both literary (Gothic romance) and social (courtship, class and abusive manipulative friendship). We get a bit rushed to the romantic conclusion but it's a quick and fun book to read, unlike Count Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which is often a lot of fun but nowhere near as quick. Characters telling stories nested in stories nested in stories with as many as 5 or 6 layers of narration in one point. It's pretty clean and easy to tell who's telling each story though, In fact it's so clean that it can almost seem desceptively logical (for example a mathematician character who describes love using a very involved but elegant algebra metaphor) unless you keep in mind the ambiguity of what's ultimately motivating the narrative: desire for sex, wealth, mere caprice and the joy of artifice or some sort of holy conspiracy, and whether "narrative" can even fully encircle experience.

The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson, awesome adventure narrative with one of the coolest and most diabolical villains in literature.

I've just started this;

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"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."

I had a Discworld book for fathers day called Unseen Academicals, so Ive started this and its pretty cool so far.

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~In the event of a Zombie Uprising, remember to sever the head or destroy the brain!~

The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs

A really interesting read for agnostics, and quite possibly for the religiously inclined too. Jacobs throws himself with Gonzo zeal (and no little OCD obsession) into the hair-splitting, reverence-chasing, mountain-moving challenge of living a year strictly by the bible's rules.

He focuses mainly on the old testament, but embraces the practices of many flavours of Jewish and Christian thought. His challenge is naturally impossible (given the disagreement that exists about bible interpretation) but his take is frequently respectful and he earnestly wants to see how adopting religious practices and thoughts might change his life. There are no lists of crazy-seeming rules here (he does tackle many of them, but they're normally embedded in some form of context), and he adorns all his doubts and choices with advice from his theological advisers (who all have something pithy, spiritually challenging, or just downright brain-knotting to say).

He's an intriguing and humourous guy to share time with in his own right (although it does feel a bit like reading his diary entries at times, as he charts his inner turmoils, personal obsessions and the effects of his new lifestyle on his wife and kids). I came away with some envy for the 'reverent agnosticism' he manages to achieve by the end, some more knowledge about the barmy, beautiful and benign aspects twirling at the heart of many religious groups, and the hope that no-one ever breeds the red heifer of the apocalypse

-(-)

A Short History of Renaissance and Reformation Europe: Dances over Fire and Water by Jonathan Zophy. This was the text book from a history class I took about 10 years ago, I went to it for a survey of a long period of European history. Zophy's area of expertise seems to be the reformation of Martin Luther because the two (out of a total of 13) chapters of Luther struck me as by far the most detailed and engaging. The up-to-date bibliography is the other part that's pretty useful.

I've been reading The Prairie Traveler by Randolph B. Marcy. Written in 1859 by an Army captain, it's a precise instruction manual for taking a wagon train across the western United States. It covers in detail the tactical approach to animals, packing, provisions, dress, shelter, medicine, fording rivers, Native American tribes, tracking, repairing wagons, best types of saddles, routes, etc. It's so interesting to read about this, because it was a reality 150 years ago, yet we'll never ever experience this again. I don't think I'll be sleeping with a loaded rifle between my legs using the stock as a pillow, or putting gunpowder on my steak anytime soon, but they sure did. Fascinating book.

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Under-the-radar Movie Awesomeness.
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The last book I finished was November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli, this being the second of his books that my girlfriend has lent me. It's a sleazy and gross murder mystery and a quick, enjoyable read. Not something I'd strongly recommend but I'm still pretty new to horror literature.

Can anyone recommend any books similar to Shutter Island?

Well, the novel was written by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Mystic River, which as you know was also adapted into a pretty decent movie. And Gone Baby Gone, which was made into a significantly better film than either of the other two.

I just got my Kindle delivered late last week, yippee!, and didn't know what i wanted to read so i went to the Mysterys and Thrillers section and chose the first 5 star book there which was..



And i have to say its was very entertaining! It starts out with a group of friends while at a medical conference in Wyoming decide to go for a little adventure before flying out that weekend, but their SUV gets caught in a overwhelming snowstorm, so they take refuge in "Kingdom Come" a very small town of 12 identical houses nestled deep in the woods. Problem is they're are all abandoned or at least they think so.....You can tell the author has lot of knowledge in autopsy and the medical practice in general by the way she describes one certain injury *goosebumps*. It certainly does have you guessing throughout the book.

Agreed.

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You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never. (The Red Shoes, 1948)

Currently reading...

The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph M. Marshall III

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I read another Tess Gerritsen novel called The Surgeon which was better than the last one! Now i decided i wanted to go a bit deeper so i bought Thus Spake Zarathustra on my kindle got through the first 15 pages but i think i need to stop there and go back after a while, meaning i need to ease into it, to really enjoy and understand the philosophy. So for the time being i guess im just gonna have to read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I saw the movie(1945) about 8 years ago and very much wanted to see it again soon, but thought it was best if i read the book first as i have never done so before.

Finished four books while on vacation last week. The highlight for me was The Priest by Thomas M. Disch, which has to be one of the blackest comedies out there. Really nasty.

Also finished a very spotty biography of an obscure Elizabethan polymath, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, which peaks rather early with Hariot's voyage to Cape Hatteras (where I spent what feels like a great deal of my childhood) but has interesting bits spread throughout; John Crowley's very weird imperialist-time travel novella, Great Work of Time; reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.