Stuff I've read recently 2

Hello. Well it's been a shamefully long time since my last one of these posts, so long I could barely remember I'd done one of these and I'm struggling to remember which books I've read since the last one, though that's not to say I've read lots, just a few...and very slowly! But anyway, it's still a good practice to remember what I've read, and if you find it interesting then all the better.

I'll start with the Bible, I've got through a fair few books of it while plodding through secular literature. Since there's a few books to get through and my summaries have generally been grossly inadequate I'll just note down the books I've read and maybe link to better written reviews later.

The Bible - God et al.

Since the last post I've read through Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea and Joel. These books, especially the early ones take place during a time when Israel/Judah had been humiliated and defeated by the nations around them, but these books emphasise God's control and authority during this dark period in Israel's history, which was ultimately his judgement on them.

Planet Simpson - Chris Turner

"On Thursday 21st January 1993, around 8.20pm I was standing on the edge of a dance floor at a campus pub called Alfie's with a glass of cheap draught beer in my hand. The dance floor before me was packed with people, all of them waiting - as was I - for the nest mind-blowing riff from the in-house entertainment."

This is one of the first non-fiction books I'd read in ages, or at least the first I'd read purely for entertainment. It tracks how the development of pop-culture has influenced the dysfunctional yellow family and how they have had more than a little impact on it in return. While at times a little overreaching in my opinion the book charts how the show is one of the most vivid and accurate reflections of consumer culture in modern times. Dense, but a very easy read I would recommend it to anyone who wants to think a little more about the impact one TV show has had on our world.

Elephants can remember - Agatha Christie

I've returned this to my Dad so I don't have the opening line, but it was a great read nonetheless. Again Christie shows her great ability to weave unique and thrilling plotlines in many different ways. This story builds on intrigue rather than tension, with the murder being long in the past and no one at real risk of death. The story follows a girl's need to find out whether her parent's death was murder or suicide. No one knows, there is little evidence to prove anything other that that they are dead and most witnesses so old they only have foggy recollections. With this scant evidence Poirot must try to piece together an ancient case, and makes good reading while doing so.

Transformers: Ghosts of Yesterday - Alan Dean Foster

"Standing taller than a thirty-six-story building and weighing six million, seven hundred thousnd pounds, in the year 1969 the Saturn V moon rocket was the biggest man-made object ever sent to space."

While I wouldn't class this as one of the best books I've read, and tie-in fiction is hardly renowned for it's masterful prose, it was still a pretty decent read. The book is set around the time of the Moon Launch where a secret crew enter space and inadvertantly find their way into the middle of the conflict between the Decepticons and Autobots, not knowing who to trust and struggling to survive, lost in space and outclassed by the far superior Transformer race. Some of the details were a bit unclear and there seem to be a few discrepancies between it and the film it prepares you for, but nonetheless it was a good intro. If you're a fan of the film and want to know more then it's probably worth the flutter, otherwise I wouldn't rush out to get it.

Untold Stories - Alan Bennett

"There is a wood, a canal, the river, and above the river the railway and the road. It's the first proprer country that you get as you come north out of Leeds, and going home on the train I pass the place quite often. Only these days I look. I've been passing the place for years without looking because I didn't know it was a place, that anything had happened there to make it a place."

While prose this was again one of the few non-fiction books that I've read in recent times and though it's taken far too long I'm glad to say that I read it and enjoyed it. The book is comprised of numerous pieces of writing including prose, essays and Alan's diaries. The title piece is an autobiographical account focused on his mother's deppresion, but telling a good chunk of his life's story around it. While non-fiction it certainly has the flow of a prose piece, and it took me a good few pages to realise it was about real life, which to me made it all the more interesting. The man has had an interesting and diverse life yet he tells his story with a good deal of humility or "shyness" as he so often terms it. There is a great variation in types of writing and that keeps it fresh and readable throughout and as a last note the man manages to talk about art and actually make me interested and sympathetic to him as he manages to approach it with both a collector's eye and an appreciation of how it looks to someone who's come into the gallery to keep warm - a rare gift in my book!!

The Forever War - Joe Haldeman

"'Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.' The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me. So if he'd ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he'd done it as an infant."

The Forever War is more my cup of tea, being an epic and unique Science Fiction adventure. The story is told of William Mandella, recruited into a war against an unknown enemy, the Taurans, and finding he spends much longer at war than he could possibly imagine. The method of travelling they use distorts time so when they first attack the Taurans they spend a few days attacking with limmited success, then return only to find decades have past, Earth's economy crumbled and reformed. Unable to cope with such a drastically changed homeworld he returns to the army only to have his so called "veteran" status mean he gets promoted and pushed into command and back into the field. Time and again he fights the unknown, time and again he returns to a drastically changed world, how will a man cope under such circumstances. This book has well deserved the awards placed on it and I reccommend it highly.

Well I've taken up enough space so I'll leave it at that methinks, well apart from word of the post
Word of the post: Apropos - adverb

1.	fitting; at the right time; to the purpose; opportunely.

2.	Obsolete. by the way.