How to get books you really want from the library every time you visit


  1. Get old.
  2. While you're getting old develop a like for a variety of fiction styles: SF, historic detective stories, fiction that wins literary prizes but isn't too wierd, magical realism.
  3. Read about a book a month. Go to the library every three months.
  4. (And this is the important one.) Keep a list on your phone of authors you've liked previously, or that you've heard about on TV, radio, newspapers, book blogs or book podcasts.
  5. Visit the library and work through that list.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cardboard seven inch tablet stand

Image
When I got a Playbook I wanted to use it to listen to BBC iPlayer while doing the washing up. So I made a cardboard tablet stand out of the cardboard you get with new shirts.

Recently I came across a video by Jude Pullen showing how to make a right angle joint with card and it inspired me to share what I'd done, via a PDF rather than a video though.

The PDF below is for a Playbook but I would have thought that any seven inch tablet, like the Kindle Fire or the Google Nexus 7 would fit. If in the unlikely event they are more chunky than the Playbook, you can just cut the slot wider. It's probably more sturdy if you make it out of a corrugated cardboard.
Seven inch tablet stand


Read more

My 2018 awards - light and dark

Image
While 2018 is not quite over, I think we've had enough of the year that I can announce my personal awards. Starting with...
Best TV series based on a number of short SF stories Electric Dreams This was a real treat. A number of Philip K Dick's short stories were turned into hour long TV programmes. This doesn't happen often, maybe because it's expensive to create one-off sets and do casting for anything less than a complete series, but kudos to Sony for doing that with this series. Philip K Dick wrote the stories that the films Minority Report and Total Recall are based on, so you can guess what sort of subjects are covered. Some are set in the future, or on other planets, while others are set around now. Given that they were written decades ago some are very prescient. 
The title sequence for this series also deserves an Honourable Mention for the next award: Best TV title sequence Lucky Man The third series of Lucky Man came out this year on ITV. Although titled Stan…
Read more

In praise of blogrolls

Image
(That’s blogrolls not bogrolls. Stop sniggering at the back there.) Back in the days when only scientists and software engineers knew about algorithms, and the words “filter” and “bubble” were only next to each other on a Scrabble board, we had blogrolls. This would be a selective list of the blogs that you subscribed to placed on your own blog. Selective because only the bravest people put all their feed subscriptions on public show, unless you didn’t mind everyone knowning you had a thing for Selzer drinks or dogs dressed as Star Wars characters.

Today I came across a blogroll, which shows that they aren’t dead. What happened was I followed a link to an article on kottke.org where Jason listed readers' recommendations for new blogs. I had a look at the suggested list and subscribed to a few which looked like they had interesting posts in. One of them was karigee.com. I was looking for contact details so I could comment on an article and I came across this link to her blogroll. I&…
Read more