A while ago I posted about a fairly decent british sci-fi book, The Death of Grass, written by recently re-trendified John Christopher in the 1950's. Obviously things went down hill after that point, as I've just been reading about one of his later works, which must surely have one of the best pieces of cover art ever:


Nazi leprechauns? Could there honestly be a more terrifying premise?

Here's a brief plot synopsis from the website The Groovy Age of Horror:

Bridget Chauncey turns an Irish castle she inherits into a hotel. Her first guests are a bickering American couple with a nymphomaniac daughter; a German couple, he descended from pure Aryan Nazis and she a Jewess who lost her whole family in the Holocaust; the handsome alcoholic Irish soliciter who is not-so-secretly in love with Bridget; and the snooty English soliciter to whom she's engaged.

A few strange happenings quickly have this bunch talking about legends of the "little people" around the dinner table. Amazingly, a half-joking late-night vigil actually results in contact with the green-clad wee-folk. But there are also journals and boxes of files in the cellars--and they're written in German.

These little people, it turns out, aren't the supernatural creatures of Irish lore, but rather Jewish victims of Nazi experiments....

I didn’t have much time or inclination to read on holiday, but I did manage to get through one book in between the periods of unconciousness – and it was truly most apt –

The Dirt, the full throttle autobiography of horrible 80’s hair-metal band, Motley Crue.

I have to say that even without the almost endless stream of hilarious anecdotes involving wheelbarrows full of drugs and gullible groupies, it’s one of the best structured and most honest autobiographies I’ve ever read. The writing style is surprisingly un-american and lacks the self-awareness of most ‘celebrity’ biogs. The candour of the people involved is incredible, they really do lay bare their frailties in the most guileless and charming way, especially the heroin and crack addicted bassist, Nikki Sixx, who comes across as a very damaged little boy.

You don't need to have any interest in the band or their music at all to be totally intrigued by their story - a brilliant study of people who have lived many men’s dreams (the drugs, the mansions, the Pamela Andersons) and come through the other side; this book contains vicarious thrills in every paragraph, loads of lurid hollywood gossip… and is very highly recommended indeed!!

Here's an excerpt from a great book I've just read: How To Be Wild by Simon Barnes (he of purple sporting prose in The Times) - its the kind of book that's almost perfect for me, a collection of heart-jolting pieces of nature writing, exploring the emotions we feel on interacting with the wildness that still lies all around us - it's actually a bit like reading a whole book of Nige

Anyway, on to Barnes:

"The law of conservation of energy is, in effect, a promise of eternal existence. The universe is, practically speaking, a closed system. Its total energy will be conserved. More will not be created, none will be destroyed. Your private sum of E, the energy in your atoms and bonds between them, will not be annihilated, cannot be nulled or voided. The mass and energy of which you’re built will change form and location, but they will be here, in this loop of life and light, the permanent party that began with a Bang."

Natalie Angier The Canon

Last week, I posted about 'trendy' fishing site

'Caught By The River'.

I also mentioned that I had purchased their eponymously titled and newly released book. I was quite excited about reading the book as it had received plenty of good reviews, so I shelled out for the pretty hardback version. I managed to plow through 3/4 of it yesterday evening and I must say it left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

The writers who had contributed were of wildly varying standard, many of the music journalists involved were very poor indeed. The book would have benefitted from being half the length - and it contains plenty of spelling mistakes, and such non-sequiteurs as:

"the silver fish was made of a material far more valuable than gold"

The subject matter was intensely repetitive, and in most cases pretty mundane. The vast majority of the stories had little to do with fishing, and instead tried to evoke childhood memories of playing near water, and how wonderful and warm and protected it feels to be standing next to their big strong daddies. The effect over hundreds of pages of sub-par writing is numbing to say the least, in fact I can't think of another book I've read that could be more easily described as
'literary cotton wool'.

It's the trendy urban 30-something equivalent of 'Heartbeat' on Sunday night TV, replacing the early sixties with the early 80's, with a few right-on Guardianista mentions of Maggie T and the miner's strike thrown in for good measure - (Is there any book in Britain based on the 1980's that doesn't build it's premise around the backdrop of the miner's strike? Its almost as if nothing else happened in the whole decade, and that every single writer in the country grew up in a struggling Northern mining town)

This pretty yet empty tome yet again confirmed to me the infantilization taking place in the western world right now amongst people of my age. The book's aim is to sell you a childlike, warm, unthreatening womb-like existence of sunny days and strong, wise fathers.

They are peddling a myth, a lifestyle that never really existed in the first place. It targets a particular type of urban man in exactly the same way that 'homemaking' magazines target urban women with endless images of happy mothers baking pink sugary cupcakes with their daughters in their perfect country kitchens.

- much like fishing, reading this book is something to be undertaken with one's brain in neutral.

Perhaps I'm not the target market, and I should be thankful that at least some people of my age show an interest in the natural world and in a life that doesn't just revolve around money, iphones or celebrities. But this book still revolves around trends, and I'm not sure I need to be sold this new-fangled trend of 'fishing' - it's like the new chill-out, man.

Picked up this book,'The Road' on the way home last night, read most of it in one sitting - which means that at least the storyline must be quite good...

Since reading 'The Stand' by Steven King as a nipper I've always had a soft spot for bleak apocalyptic dystopian nightmare futures. So far my main gripe is that the author lays it on waaaay too thick with the cold and the wet and the grey and the dark. Literally every single thing in this book is cold, wet, grey or dark. Even the surface of the sun is probably cold, wet, grey and dark.

In terms of overbearing scene setting, the only other book I can think of that I've read with such a similar overwrought sense of melancholia was
'The End of The Affair' by Grahame Greene, which was definately one of the most turgid books I have ever had the misfortune of chancing upon, it inadvertantly perfectly encapsulated the navel-gazing and introspective selfishness of unrequited love that I often felt as a teenager. Unfortunately I hated the book so much I have been scared off Greene ever since, although I feel about ready to give him another chance - not sure which book to begin again with though...?

I read a really lovely piece about a book today at the blog of advertising wunderkind Russell Davies. His review of The Invention of Air really inspired and interested me, so much so that I immediately went and purchased the book on Amazon. I'm looking forward to reading it alot, and shall try to post a review if my critical faculties are up to it...

Found on this great blog by clever man, Russell Davies

"And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences - things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures."

from G.K Chesterton - On Running After One's Hat

There are 2 excellent books around called:
The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World

and its sequel Toujours Tingo

That are definately worth a read - Tingo is a word from Easter Island that means "to borrow objects from a friend's house one by one until there are none left". here are some more wonderfully weird words:

Gwarlingo: Welsh description of the sound of a grandfather clock before it strikes.

Pisan zapra: Malay for the time needed to eat a banana.

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper - literally, "an enraged sheep".

Kati-kehari: Hindi meaning to have the waist of an elegant lion.

Yupienalle: Swedish for a mobile phone - literally, "yuppie teddy" like a security blanket.

Ikibari: Japanese, a "lively needle" and describing a man who is willing but under-endowed.

Tantenverführer: German for a young man with suspiciously good manners.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone's parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door - literally, a "see-you-home wolf"

Trennungsagentur: German for someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped.

Momma ko ene: Cheyenne for having red eyes from crying over your boyfriend marrying someone else.

Kanjus Makkhichus: Hindi description of someone so tight that if a fly falls into their tea they'll fish it out and suck it dry before throwing it away.

Tlazlimquiztli: Aztec for the smell of adulterers.

Nosom Para Oblake: Serbian for "he is ripping clouds with his nose", describing someone conceited.

Traer la lengua de corbata: Latin American Spanish for to be exhausted - literally, to have your tongue hanging out like a man's tie

Sjostygg: Norwegian for someone so ugly the tide refuses to come in if they stand on the shore.

Lolo: Hawaiian for someone who would gladly give you the time if only they could read a clock.

Lalew: Filipino word meaning to grieve so much you can't eat.

Nito-onna: Japanese for a woman so dedicated to her career that she has no time to iron blouses and so resorts to dressing only in knitted tops.

Buaya darat: Indonesian for a man who fools women into thinking he's a very faithful lover when in fact he goes out with many different women at the same time - literally, a land crocodile

Chantepleurer: French for singing at the same time as crying.

Hira hira: Japanese for the fear you get from walking into a decrepit old house in the middle of the night.

Les avoir a zero: French for "to have one's testicles down to zero", or be frightened.

Du kannst mir gern den buckel runterrutschen und mit der zunge bremsen: Austrian for "go to hell" – literally "You can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake".

taken from

Daily Telegraph 11/02/2009