I've started a new site where you can read great books for free in blog format. You can even leave comments and trackbacks on them, or subscribe to their RSS feed. Currently there are seven books 'running', but more will follow soon... The current list is:
Yesterday my wife took me to the public library, where they were having a sale of old books in order to clear some shelf space. Neat: for € 0,5 per book you could have a go at a few tables full of books of various quality, topic and interestingness.
I managed to score some quite nice finds, for that price anyhow. A copy of 'The Name of the Rose' by Umberto Eco, and a nearly-new copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess, to name a few.
But also a tome on the knights templar and the freemasons, a book about the 'Biosphere 2' experiment from a few years back, something by Marlies Philippa about the etymology of Dutch words, a children's book for my daughter and 'The Human Zoo' by anthropologist Desmond Morris.
Oh, and some political works as well: 'On War' by von Clausewitz, 'The Libertine Manifesto' by failed Belgian ex-stockmarket guru Jean-Pierre Van Rossem and 'Without Civil Servants' by the murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn.
Not bad for a total price of € 5,-
I'm currently reading the book by Van Rossem, and I must say it is quite hilarious. He published it in the run-up to the Belgian elections of 1991 in which he participated with his own party. In the first few chapters he looks ahead to the political future of the country.
Some of his predictions have turned out spectacularily wrong: for example, he thought the Greens would become the largest political formation, since they were mostly a-political idealists. And the far-right Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang) which first gained big electoral succes in 1991, was not even mentioned in the book so far.
For all of you Douglas Adams fans out there: check out www.dirk-gently.com. Some guy turned the book into a comic book on the web. Really nifty... The only unfortunate thing about it is that it is not finished yet. Oh well, you can't have everything... And besides, Douglas' last Dirk Gently book never got finished either...
A few weeks ago I finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, but I hadn't gotten around to writing about it yet. I I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it, and read through it in a few days because I just couldn't put it down.
In short, the book is a history of Earth, the Universe and Everything, but told by telling the history of the scientists who figured it all out. Some of them were quite eccentric indeed. I don't remember which one it was, but there was a story about a chemistry researcher in there somewhere who insisted on tasting every substance he did experiments with. He was found dead one day in his lab among a dozen poisonous substances...
Another one had the crazy idea he would eat as many species of animal as possible: eating through the animal kindom, as it were. Yet another story is about the adventures of several teams of scientists traveling all over the world for many long years in order to observe the transit of Venus in front of the Sun from various locations, only to be marred by clouds at the last instant, or to be attacked by angry locals.
But the tales of eccenticity weren't the only thing that made me love this book. After reading it you realise just how lucky we are as human race to have come about at all. Our very existence depends on so many accidents and coincidents that it isn't even funny anymore. If the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had missed, if the moon hadn't been caught in Earth's gravity, if the Ice Ages had lasted a little longer or shorter, if this monkey hadn't made love to that one... no human race.
In fact, if you look at the timeline of Earth's history, we literally arrived at the last instant: hundreds of thousands, if not millions of species have come before us, flourished and gone extinct. Disasters of epic proportions wiped away large parts of the world, only to see them replaced again by strange, new life-forms.
Asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, cosmic radiation, solar fluctuations, shifts in the rotation of the Earth or of the magnetic field... if you look at it, there are many, many ways in which the human race can be wiped out or put back in the stone age, in a much shorter time than it took us to get from there to where we are now. As an example, watch the recent BBC 'fictional documentary' about the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone Park in the U.S. going off...
All of this made me wonder: if there are so many potential disasters we can't do a thing about, why aren't we spending some of that Kyoto money instead on strategies to make sure we survive these things, possibly by getting the hell off this planet?
I just finished reading the Dutch translation of Ben Elton's Dead Famous, which was given to me as a present.
I must say it was quite a good read: I simply couldn't put it down. Even though halfway the book I mostly had guessed who did it, it was still intriguing to find out how it was all done in the end.
The basic premise of the book is that there is a TV show which is basically 'Big Brother' in all but name, with a house in which ten contestants have to spend ten weeks living under the eye of cameras.
But suddenly one of the contestants is murdered! On video even! And nobody recognizes the killer, but it must be somebody from inside the house...
When the police can't immediately arrest a clear suspect, a decision is made: the show must go on! Inspector Coleridge has to solve the murder while millions of TV-viewers are watching with him, speculating about the killer...
While the plot is unfolding, the reader gets a peek behind the scenes of the show: how the contestants are manipulated, how their image is distorted in montage, how cynical it all is. Elton also criticizes the emptyness of the modern, vapid, therapy-and-astrology-using, new-age, wishy-washy culture, mainly through the ruminations of inspector Coleridge, who is a bit of an old fart when it comes to all this.
Having once accidentally attended a VIP party at the end of the Flemish version of Big Brother (what can I say, I had free tickets through my work, and mainly went for the free booze and food... I even needed a friend to point out who the 'celebrities' in the crowd were and who were just other VIPs/shmoes with free tickets/television staff), I can empathize with Elton's feelings. I never saw a greater collection of windbags at one party.
On the other hand, I'm sure there must have been some nice people there too, and that's what bothers me a tiny bit about this book: there are no genuinely 'nice' characters in there: everybody is vapid, vainglorious, idle, greedy or horny, with no firm convictions or beliefs at all. Even Coleridge succumbs in the end.
But hey, great book!
I've just finished reading Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac" and I must say it was pretty neat to be able to read something by him that can easily be held in one hand, as opposed to his Baroque Cycle (1, 2, 3) which I also finished recently.
The story is about an environmental activist who knows quite a bit about chemistry and media handling, and who uses his knowledge in order to track down polluting big companies in order to publicly embarrass them in highly amusing ways, because going through courts and depending on government agencies like the EPA takes too long and is mostly not effective because of the huge lawyer and money advantage these corporations have.
After discovering some lobsters in Boston harbor that have been heavily contaminated by PCB's, an exciting adventure develops, including a group of satanic heavy-metal fans, genetically modified super-bugs, a mythical eco-terrorist, anti-shipping mines and people being shot at with a genuine Indian bow-and-arrow and paintball guns.
In the usual Stephensonian fashion, the story is sprinkled with interesting scientific tidbits and diversions, most of which are actually important to the plot. Don't be scared by this, however, as everything is clearly explained to 'dumber' characters, so non-technical and non-chemical-expert readers can follow.
Stephenson neatly dissects the techniques used by both chemical companies and ecological groups to manipulate the media, analysing the sort of arguments they use in press-releases, handouts and sound-bites, and also takes a swipe at journalism and the way certain myths are created.
All in all, a very enjoyable and fast-paced read!
