2014 Reading Challenge

Just like in 2013 I challenged myself to read a set number of books in 2014. This time the magic number was 45. And just like in 2013, I hit the target exactly, although it was much less close run than last year (when I frantically raced to finish my last book on New Year’s Eve). This time I actually finished with about a week to spare.

Here’s the list of what I read. Mostly the usual mix of classic sci-fi and fantasy, programming, random non-fiction.

Favourite fiction? To Kill a Mockingbird. Somehow our class managed to not read this in school, so I thought it was time to catch up on a classic that seemingly everyone else had read, and it didn’t disappoint. A real page-turner, but with true heart.

Favourite non-fiction? This was much tougher to choose, but probably Our Pet Queen: A New Perspective on Monarchy. Short, incisive, fascinating and often funny.

The two biggest chunks of reading were A Song of Ice and Fire books 3-5 and Orson Scott Card’s Ender Quartet books 2-4. Both series did start to flag a bit as they went on. Ender more so; it would always have been hard to keep up to the standard of the amazing Speaker for the Dead, but Children of the Mind‘s plot really did descend into the ridiculous. Not sure if I’ll return to Card’s series, I’ve heard the Shadow books are good but after the bad taste Children of the Mind left there’s plenty of other books I want to check out first.

As for ASoIaF, while A Feast for Crows was a bit of a slog, I’ll join the massed ranks of people waiting eagerly for George R R Martin to hurry up and resolve some of these unanswered questions and cliffhangers!

For 2015 I pondered dropping the challenge entirely. It’s been rewarding, but I want to focus a bit less on reading: it’s absolutely still something I want to make time for, but there are plenty of other things I want to do more of as well (writing, coding, photography, maybe picking up guitar again). There’s also some intimidatingly long books on my “to read” list (Pillars of the Earth – I’m looking at you here!) which I found myself putting off at least partially because they would make it harder to hit my target. In the end I’ve decided to scale my goal back to 40 books again this year. Whether I make it is anyone’s guess, but at least it gives me something to blog about same time next year!

My Best of the Internet 2014

2014 seemed to go by in a flash. It was a strange year for me, but one constant remained: I spent a lot of time on the Internet. Here’s some of my favourite discoveries.

Funniest video: “Mr Needlemouse”

5 minutes of comedy sketch perfection. “Fuck limpets!” Up there with the very best, yet criminally underviewed.

Honourable mention: Faramir Can’t Read Maps. Technically it was published at the end of 2013, but it gets a mention here because I crack up every time I’ve watched it and it’s so expertly done. It also means there’s yet another scene in Lord of the Rings that I can no longer take seriously.

Best music video featuring Star Trek TNG and sausages: SAUSAGE SAMBA

not a hotly contested category to be honest

Funniest piece of writing: The Wikipedia Entry for Guam, Retold as a YA Novel

Pushing confusing thoughts of United Airlines’ broad back muscles and status as a subsidiary of Chicago-based Continental Holdings aside, Inarajan looked up and realized they had arrived at their destination: The forbidding edifice that was the Duty Free Shoppers Galleria. She suppressed a shiver. Her very first non-binding Presidential straw poll. Surely she would not survive.

Bizarre and accurate and amazing and hilarious.

Best subreddit: /r/AskHistorians

Still endlessly fascinating, and responsible for reigniting my interest in history. A close contender was /r/DeepIntoYouTube, which is also endlessly fascinating but in entirely different ways.

Best artist: Chris (Simpsons artist)

How could it be anyone else?

Best Twitter bot: how 2 sext

WikiHow’s odd articles have often been a source of amusement. Even more so when how 2 sext tweets random snippets from it formatted as sexts.

Most horrifying Twitter: @BadSonicFanArt

The Internet can be a horrifying place. @BadSonicFanArt is a constant reminder of that. As the name suggests, it just tweets and retweets examples of the worst Sonic fan art. There’s genuine works and parody all mixed up in there, and some sort of fan art Poe’s law makes it difficult to tell which is which.

Best blog: Diamond Geezer

Yes, he writes a few long posts about bus journeys. Sometimes even I skip those for lack of time.

But skipping the occasional post hardly matters since you can be certain there will be another one along like clockwork the next day, and it’s very likely to be informative, amusing, or both. That’s why it’s generally the first site I check every day. I’m pretty sure the blog has never skipped a day, and he’s been posting for 12 years! A remarkable record.

Since I’ve moved to London, this blog has taught me a huge amount about the city and my local area. And I’m sure it will continue to do so in 2015 and beyond.

My Favourite Game

I love “My Favourite Game” by The Cardigans. Fantastic song, and I remember the video well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsMUQK4jdsQ

Where many music videos went over the top in an effort to stand out (don’t get me wrong; there were of course some cracking ones at the time) this one stood out because of its simplicity. Just Nina Persson, looking smoking hot and cool as anything, doing nothing but singing and driving. And it was bloody brilliant. Almost like Nothing Compares 2 U in its simplicity, but this made you want to party rather than slit your wrists.

So I was very surprised when I went looking for it on YouTube today to find this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq-I4orlEhE

It turns out that the original video was a lavish, car-crash studded epic, which cost £220,000 to make. The one that was played on all the UK music channels, the one that I grew up with, the one that I thought was a masterpiece of minimalism, was actually the result of editing out all the violent and irresponsible bits to please the censors.

And yet having now seen the original, I still much prefer the “censored” version.

For you are life

Thermodynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle…

But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away.

For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

– Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen

The Sound of Stations

One of the best things about working remotely is that I can get work done anywhere there’s a seat and wi-fi. In fact even the latter isn’t vital thanks to mobile tethering. It’s a great excuse to explore London a bit, and usually I’ll find a nice coffee shop, or a library.

Now forgive me for sounding old and grumpy here, but libraries are so often full of children and teenagers making an absolute racket. My local Leyton Library being a particularly bad offender, they seem to have stocked it with noisy children’s toys! It’s not all libraries by any means, but too many of them. At least I’m getting my money’s worth from my recently purchased noise cancelling headphones.

Anyway, the other day I did sit down to do some work in a rather pretty spot at St. Pancras station’s AMT Coffee (a chain that I do still retain a certain affection for):

St Pancras

Not a bad view, huh? The thing is, despite the fact that it’s a major railway station, it was surprisingly quiet. Not in terms of the number of people of course (see my earlier post) but the noise level. The only exception was when a Eurostar arrived, which they seem to have made as noisy and ostentatious as possible as if the train was announcing “HEY I CAME FROM FRANCE ARE YOU IMPRESSED?!”. But the rest of the time, surprisingly quiet.

I wandered into Cannon Street station during rush hour once and it was an almost creepy experience: huge throngs of people were standing around gazing at the screens for their platform, all in complete silence. Yes it’s a well-worn cliché that commuters never talk to each other on the tube, but to a large extent it’s true, and it seems to extend to the stations.

Admittedly the stations with more tourists and leisure travellers, rather than just City commuters, tend to be a bit more lively. Still, I find it interesting that the code of silence seems so much stronger in London’s stations than in its libraries.