Archive for February, 2008

50 Best Crime Novels

Published on 25 February 2008 in reading and books. 1 Comment

Just seen at Bibliobibuli, a long list of reading suggestions for lovers of the crime genre (from the Sunday Telegraph’s list of top fifty crime writers).

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.

GK Chesterton - The Complete Father Brown (1986)
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
Edgar Allan Poe - The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
Ed McBain - King’s Ransom (2003)
Kyril Bonfiglioli - The Mortdecai Trilogy (1991)
James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia (1987)
Janwillem van der Wetering - Outsider in Amsterdam (1975)
Carl Hiaasen - Double Whammy (1987)
Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Dan Kavanagh - The Duffy Omnibus (1991)
Margery Allingham - The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1852-3)
Georges Simenon - The Yellow Dog (1931)
Agatha Christie - Peril at End House (1932)
Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone (1868)
Jonathan Latimer - The Fifth Grave (1941)
Ruth Rendell - The Water’s Lovely (2006) [Don’t agree with this one, found it anti-climactic and plodding.]
Ngaio Marsh - Vintage Murder (1937)
Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville!) - Christine Falls (2006)
John Dickson Carr - The Hollow Man (1935)
Michael Innes - The Weight of the Evidence (1943)
Raymond Chandler - Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt - The Pledge (1958)
Michael Gilbert - Even Murderers Take Holidays and other Mysteries (2007)
Donald Westlake - What’s So Funny? (2007)
Colin Bateman - Wild About Harry (2001)
Frances Fyfield - The Art of Drowning (2006)
Reginald Hill - Good Morning Midnight (2004)
Andrea Camilleri - The Patience of the Spider (2007)
Henning Mankell - Sidetracked (1999)
Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
James Lee Burke - Black Cherry Blues (1989)
Jim Thompson - The Getaway (1959)
Walter Mosley - Devil in a Blue Dress (1991)
Denise Mina - Garnethill (1999)
Steig Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008)
Ronald Knox - The Viaduct Murder (1925)
EC Bentley - Trent’s Last Case (1913)
Lawrence Block - All the Flowers Are Dying (2005)
Edmund Crispin - Holy Disorders (1945)
William McIlvanney - Laidlaw (1977)
George V Higgins - The Rat on Fire (1981)
Dorothy L Sayers - Five Red Herrings (1931)
Anthony Boucher - The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940)
Mickey Spillane - I, the Jury (1947)
James Grady - Six Days of the Condor (1974)
George Pelecanos - The Big Blowdown (1996)
Robert Crais - The Watchman (2007)
John Lawton - Black Out (1995)
Elmore Leonard - Maximum Bob (1991)

Along with science fiction, I think crime is one of my favourite genres, so this eight out of fifty is pretty sad. Although I have read more than eight of these authors, just not the books listed: Ed McBain, Janwillem van de Wetering, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Reginald Hill, Lawrence Block, and a few of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.

Techno(t)

Published on 21 February 2008 in meme and technology. 4 Comments

There’s this meme going round that’s about technology blind spots, I suppose you’d call them - on popular technologies you don’t do or skills you don’t have.

I admit to having occasional attacks of techno lust and have succumbed from time to time (PDA, Tablet, iPod, etc), but such attacks seem to be getting fewer and far between.

My blind spots?

Gaming consoles. I am quite partial to certain types of games (MMORPGs, turn-based strategy a la Civ, puzzles) but have never ever really gotten into consoles. This, despite the fact that we have Gameboys, a Gamecube, Playstation 2, a DS, and a Wii in the house. I don’t know why, particularly. I have enjoyed certain games like Galaga and Tetris on the Gameboy, and bowling on the Wii is fun, but that’s about the end of it. Oh, but recently Whack-a-mole on the DS was amusing. Heh.

Macs. I’ve never really used a Mac and I don’t get the Apple cult at all. (We have a Mac laptop in the house but I’m largely indifferent to it, give me my EeePC any day. Or my Tablet.)

Mobile phone. These days I seem to use my phone for text. In fact I text enough that I’m starting to think I should get a plan for cheaper text messages. But I don’t use my phone for much else, apart from sudoku when I’m forced to stand on the train.

Podcasting. Should I be admitting this, given that I have had a lot to do with podcasting at work? Well it’s not that I don’t like it as a medium, it’s just that I am not particularly interested in creating personal ones. I also don’t seem to listen to many.

Programming skills. I have none, beyond Basic which I learned in high school 6 million years ago. I suppose it would be interesting to be able to write little scripts but I don’t have much motivation to learn, especially when I live with someone who can do this with his eyes closed and it’s much easier to just tell him what I want.

I suppose I could call SecondLife a blind spot. I’ve visited there a few times but always get irritated with the clunkiness and the interface. Chat, changing my appearance and being able to ‘fly’ isn’t interesting enough to get me visiting regularly.

Skype. Never used it.

Video. Blogging or vodcasting or YouTube. I used to think this indifference was just due to a lack of a video camera, but I now have a working camera on the EeePC and I still haven’t bothered to investigate.

What else?

Like Laura I am not a cash register fan. I always break a cash register if I have to handle one. This happens so unfailingly that I am no longer intimidated by the things, I am amused by them and always wonder what bizarre problem I am going to cause next…

Like Fiona I am not afraid to tinker with a pc. All I know about computers is self-taught. I’ve also learned a lot from hanging around with real geeks (e.g. M).

Others: Steve, Dorothea, Rochelle, Jenna.

Yours?

Book meme

Published on 17 February 2008 in meme and books. 1 Comment

From Angel:

Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pgs.)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people

I seem to have a few books on my desk at the moment, but the only one that fits the bill is The way of the white clouds: A Buddhist in Tibet by Lama Anagarika Govinda. It fits the bill in that it has sentences; the other books are Teach yourself Dutch, 201 Dutch verbs fully conjugated (rivetting! :) ), Hungry Planet, Seven Hundred Penguins and the Cafe Flora cookbook. 

The sentences:

Indeed, the whole gigantic process of biological development through millions of years seems to have had no other purpose than to create the necessary conditions for the manifestation of higher consciousness.

To the Buddhist consciousness is the central factor, from which all other things proceed and without which we would neither have a notion of our own existence nor of a world around us. Whether the ‘world around us’ is a projection of our consciousness or something that exists in itself, and only appears to us in the form in which we experience it, is of secondary importance.

Wow.

You’re tagged if you feel like it.