find the time, occasionally, to read a book that is not devoted to visual cognition and/or hemispheric interaction

For whom the bell tolls. I have shockingly never read any Hemingway until now. Just brilliant. The dialogue alone is like feeling the sea wash over your toes and the sand drain away again and again.

This morning, I had the pleasure of reading my short story in print! :D I couldn’t attend the launch party as I was up in the tower telling off my stereoscope for not arranging the stimuli correctly, but they sent me a copy in the post anyway, along with some pieces of stiff card with the name and back cover blurb of the anthology printed on _{in case I want to use them as tablemats??}
Unfortunately, some of the other stories in the anthology were not really very good, in my humble opinion, which leads me to believe that perhaps the contest had an unusually low turnout and they just published any entry they got. But anyway, my story in print! Not bad since I wrote it in two hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon, although quite embarrassing to read through it now and think how much better I would have made it had I had time for editing and such..
The anthology is available on amazon (thus confirming that it is a real book) although I don’t think we get any royalites – otherwise I would have filed this under the “sort out my finances” goal.
At any rate it’s made me think about entering more writing competitions. It’s got to be better fun than trawling the internet in the hope of finding something mildly diverting!

A bit disappointed with this, actually. I like the overall message, and there were some interesting factual tidbits, but it seemed to lack a certain punch. I wonder if that’s because everyone has heard of the slow food movement by now? Maybe if I’d read it when it first came out it would have made more of an impact on me.

Borrowed this from my mum when she came up to Edinburgh last week.

An excellent read for Christie nerds, most likely boredom personified for everyone else. There are spoilers aplenty, but since any self-respecting Christie fan already knows the killers and, more importantly, the clues from all the novels, that is hardly likely to be a deterrent.
I enjoyed immensely seeing how she plotted and schemed, how the idea of one novel could evolve in three or more completely different books, the fact that she often didn’t know the killer herself until very late in the plotting process. I especially enjoyed, though in a slightly bittersweet fashion, the fact that one idea for a plot device apparently appeared in so many drafts of different novels, and ultimately was not used in any of them. She simply couldn’t find anywhere for it to fit.
It made me wonder how many other characters and plots and sentences there must be, floating around the tops of trees, so fiercely held by their authors but, ultimately, left out of the worlds they were meant to inhabit.

yes yes, I know it is about neurology, but as there is not one jot of science in the whole bloody thing, I’m fairly sure this counts. It was a refreshing read to begin with, but by halfway through I was almost sobbing in frustration at his whimsical mystical pseudo-philosophical style. Recommended to be read only in very short bursts with long pauses between each outing.

by John Emsley

Matches! Urine! Nerve gas! Spontaneous human combustion! Liver function! Alchemists! Bombs!
Perfect “chapter-per-night” bedtime reading.