An Argos Catalogue of Good Intentions

This week, when I haven’t been watching terrible films, I’ve found plenty of other reasons not to write my blog. The foremost distraction on the list is Shelfari.

If you like books and organising things, you’ll love Shelfari. It’s an online bookshelf where you can list the books you’ve read, those you are reading now and those that you plan to read. Granted, you could probably do the same thing on a piece of paper but you wouldn’t get the same satisfaction of seeing all of your favourite books, face-out on a shelf in hyperspace.

It has taken up too much of my time already. The other night, I spent a good hour referring to Random House’s Modern Library top 100 like it was an Argos catalogue of good intentions. No doubt there are some brilliant books in there but for now, I’m not going to read them - I’ll just add them to my ‘plan to read’ list. A picture on a virtual shelf is all I need to feel good about myself.

While we’re on books, I’ve just finished Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer. I decided to give it a spin having grown bored of the TV series and…it was alright. It just showed me how warped the TV adaptation actually was.

The book deals solely with Lloyd Simcoe and the team at CERN (not Mark Benford and the FBI) as they inadvertently knock the whole world out whilst trying to find the Higgs boson. During the two-minute blackout, consciousness is moved forward 21 years (not just a matter of months as in the series) and renders all human endeavour utterly pointless.

For those of you who don’t get Sci-Fi, the tendency is to flash forward to the last chapter just to find out what happens, then throw the book in the bin. I did no such thing. Instead, I nodded with false understanding as I was bombarded with a disproportionate mix of theoretical physics and fuzzy plot.

That’s the problem with most science fiction, in my experience - they never get the balance quite right between science and fiction and you end up with something that’s not quite a novel and not quite a dissertation.

So, in conclusion, I think my time could have been better spent reading something else, something exciting and educational, something like Teach Yourself: The Middle East since 1945.

I’m half-way through it and it’s pretty interesting. With all of the noise on the telly about Gaza and Israel and flotillas, I felt ignorant.

The Middle East is a knot too complicated to approach in any other way than a concise, over-arching summary and in this, the Teach Yourself guides kick everyone else’s ass.

What I’ve gathered so far is that the Middle East is a land populated by people who hate each other and this is due to tribal and religious differences exacerbated by Western involvement. I’m sure you can find a thousand reasons why that statement is technically incorrect but that’s the nature of the Middle East - it doesn’t fit in a nutshell.

I’ve been doing other things this week, like eating and going to work but I do those all of the time so the novelty has well and truly worn off.