books

Dispatches from the War on Clutter

Since we had our loft boarded and smartened up a few years back, we’ve been merrily using it to store away the things that we don’t need from day to day, or which don’t belong in the library. Unfortunately, it’s starting to get a bit full in there (what with ‘s sewing stuff, my tools, Xmas decorations, the ‘s baby clothes, our suitcases, and so on), so we’ve been planning on putting some of Mr Kamprad’s fine modular shelving solutions up there (specifically the GORM range). Now, I could just have gone up there with a tape measure and an… Read More »Dispatches from the War on Clutter

The Big Read Meme

It’s doing the rounds, and I’m a sucker for memes like this: “The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.” Look at the list and bold those you have read. Italicise those you intend to read. Underline the books you LOVE. Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them 😉 Quite a few read – more than I would have thought at first, but some glaring gaps which I’ve been… Read More »The Big Read Meme

Book Quiz Answers

Rather later than hoped (v. busy at work), here are the answers to my book quiz: The Quotes Quote 1 Rambling sentences and sheep? It could only be Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) by Thomas Hardy, specifically the passage in which Gabriel Oak loses his shepherding livelihood thanks to an overenthusiastic sheepdog and a cliff. Quote 2 The alien zoo is on the planet Tralfamadore, which makes this Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes. Quote 3 Now, I am not wishing to be casting aspersions, but there is only one fellow who is writing about gangsters… Read More »Book Quiz Answers

Book Quiz

I may do the film quotes quiz meme that’s doing the rounds, but I was rather taken with the book quote quiz that treated us to yesterday. Given that I won through a mixture of geekery and guesswork, it’s probably beholden on me to post another.

The Rules

(shamelessly cribbed from )

The point isn’t to show off by guessing the titles of ones you’ve read, but by showing powers of reasoning to get setting and time and “interesting thing”. Googling is expressly forbidden, obviously.

All comments are screened and I’ll give out marks on Monday.

Scoring

One point if you can get within twenty five years of when it was written. (Half point for within fifty years).

One point if you can get the genre/setting (so I’m looking for something like “nineteenth century adventure” “near future sci-fi” “contemporary new york” “cod medieval fantasy”).

One point for author and/or title or series of books.

If you don’t know the actual book/author I will give you a completely unfair discretionary point if you can guess something quite interesting about the book or author just from the text provided (not something obvious like “they start sentences with conjunctions” or “they’re inexplicably fond of the Oxford comma”. So you can still get full points if you don’t know any of the actual books.

Really though, what I’m interested in is why you think what you think about the passages and how you tie them to a place and time. I think for some of them at least, the title should be guessable though. Comments are screened.

The Quotes

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We have shelves!

64.25 metres of shelving to be precise. Now all we need to do is move around some of the existing shelves to fit all of our oversized books (mainly ‘s photography books and my gaming stuff) and unpack the remaining boxes. But before that, a poll!