RSS feeds

In this busy world were people want everything now RSS feeds sound like a godsend, but you would be wrong.
One of the joys of the web is browsing the blogs, and other sites just smelling the roses. I think we should be slowing our experience of the web down, not trying to speed it up in some attempt to see everything as quickly as possible. It's a big world/web out there and we are never going to see all of it, so instead enjoy the bits you can see, and take your time enjoying them.
Lets take the rush out of life, and stop to smell the roses.

Literary Insults

It's no-holds-barred bare knuckle action in the literary world;

• I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me - Charles Darwin
• Edgar Allan Poe's prose is unreadable - like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane's - Mark Twain
• Ulysses is the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples - Virginia Woolf
• Henry James has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it - T S Elliot
• Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms - G K Chesterton
• It was a bad play saved by a bad performance - George S Kaufman
• Gertrude Stein was a past master in making nothing happen very slowly - Clifton Fadiman
• Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art - Gore Vidal
• J D Salinger is the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school - Norman Mailer
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US - Gore Vidal
• The g is silent - the only thing about her that is - Julia Burchill on Camille Paglia

Go forth

I've decided to start a new segment where I give you my weekly pick of book, graphic novel and CD.
These are all things I think everyone should have either read or listened to.
BOOK:
Frank Herbert - Dune
GRAPHIC NOVEL:
Alan Moore - Watchmen
CD:
Neil Young - Live at Massey Hall 1971

Books, Books and more Books

Books I have enjoyed recently:

• Neal Asher - Hilldiggers
• Mike Davis - Buda's Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb
• Ian C Esslemont - Night of Knives
• Christopher Fowler - The Water Room
• William Langewiesche - The Atomic Bazaar
• Christopher Moore - The Stupidest Angel
• Mark Millar - The Ultimates 2. Grand Theft America
• Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

Books I have not enjoyed at all:

• Mike Carey - Ultimate Fantastic Four vol. 7
• Mark Edmunson - Why Read?
• Michael Grose - XYZ. The New Rules of Generational Warfare
• Myriam Miedzian - Boys Will Be Boys

Any Given Sunday or Saturday or Friday ...

I follow lots of different sports, and at the moment three of my favourite have either begun or are beginning. American Football has begun so I'm following that closely, go the Vikings.

The Ice Hockey season is about to begin so go the Penguins, and the NBA is about to start so go the Suns.

What does this mean for my reading?

Well it means I read a lot of magazines which follow these sports, whether they are reviewing the upcoming season, or following it once it starts.

So lots of stats, player news and rumours of trades.

It makes a pleasant change from my usual reading.