reading

Essential Reading

Posted on June 23, 2015

I don’t read enough, apparently.
I don’t do a lot of things enough, according to some people. They like to judge me by their lifestyles and can’t understand why I don’t read enough, watch movies or spend every Saturday morning at a hipster market. I don’t think that I don’t read enough, I just think that I don’t read as much as they read. And that’s an altogether different thing. By the same criteria, they don’t blog enough. I’m just saying.

Anyway, maybe “I don’t read enough” because the stuff that’s out there to read isn’t very good. (I did make it through this abridged version of Grey last night though, so, you know, be proud of me.) But now, I have discovered this:

Redcliffe banged the original version out in 1949, but it was this 1985 revised impression which took the proverbial biscuit, thanks in part to the input from renowned potato scholar and Emeritus Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Birmingham, J.G. Hawkes, and – many believe – the additional chapter on INDUSTRIAL USES by W.G Burton.

This is a book filled with facts and figures:

But being of scientific bent, that’s just fine by me. Facts and figures are my bread and butter. Although, being that this magnificent tome was first published in the 40s, there is a certain dated style of language. I find it intriguing that Salaman borrowed descriptions from other crops though; the extent of cereal crops, for example, was always described as, say, the area “under wheat”. Quite how he got away with “under potatoes”, this being a subterranean crop, is rather beyond me.

It’s these sort of foibles that intrigue me and, despite the somewhat extravagant cost, I’m going to be reading all about spuds and how they’ve affected all of our lives, very shortly.

H2G2

Posted on March 23, 2014March 23, 2014

I’m re-reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It’s unusual for me to read a book and it’s even more unusual for me to enjoy it.
I’ve probably read (and enjoyed) this one about twenty times, but it’s been a long while since I last did, so this weekend seemed as good as any time to start again.
Now you might not agree with my views on reading, but then maybe you just need to look at things from another angle:

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

It’s wonderful stuff, and what’s more, I’m reading the compilation of all four of the books in the trilogy.
And what’s more, I’m reading it in a clumsy, unwieldy book made of paper!

Old Skool Rulez!
#vintage #paper #oldeworlde #hipster

1-year-old thinks a magazine is a broken iPad

Posted on October 14, 2011October 14, 2011

We were ahead of the curve on the Red Hartebees vs Evan van der Spuy video – posting it here when it had just 300 views, way before it had the 74 billion (is this right? – Ed.) it has now.

And I think this one has the potential to go viral too. It’s a one year old girl (the daughter of the CEO of the French Telecoms company Orange-Vallee, as it happens) who can’t understand why she can’t pinch-zoom and scroll on a magazine.

As her Dad says:

Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Things move on, we advance, we progress. Yes, books are great to hold and touch and smell (for weird people), but those are simply emotional responses. And while it’s fine to have emotional responses, we shouldn’t let them hold us back. We have to realise and we have to accept that in the future, books as we know them almost certainly won’t exist. Just as if I handed my kids a cassette tape or a rotary-dial telephone, they wouldn’t know what to do with it, so this one year old doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get any response from the magazines.

One thing it does make me realise is how important introducing as much new technology as possible into my kids’ lives is. Because being able to utilise touchscreens and the internet is every bit as important to them as being able to read a book was to us “back in the old days”.