World Book Day 2015
Tomorrow is World Book Day 2015 and in response to a query as part of the World Book Day campaign, I’ve been asked by MVC to tell my personal story of how literature and books changed my life, and what inspired you to start blogging about literature. Early Reading Like most people I've been reading since I was about four years old. I can't be sure when I fell in love with reading, I was very young. Two books stick out though, because they lived in my primary school bag and were re-read until they literally fell apart. The Facts Factory by Gyles Brandreth was a compilation of esoteric statistics and stuff that appealed to the small boy that was me aged about 8. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier was the other. It told the story of a Polish boy and his…
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Book Review – Scotland’s Stories of Home by Alan Warner
Scotland's Stories of Home by Alan Warner My rating: 4 of 5 stars A good collection of wee stories and poems from the Scottish Book Trust. Most of the content only uses a couple of pages in print, so there is a lot of content crammed in from a variety of sources. Some of it is from established writers but most seems to be from ordinary people sharing their memories of what home means to them, whether now or when they were growing up in Scotland. There's a high level of social history from the mid to late 20th century baked in here. Primary sources rather than analysis bit worth reading nevertheless. It's well put together and an easy read, although there are a few thought provoking bits. For example, how many people really died during the Clydebank Blitz? It's…
Could You Write Five Million Words?
Five million words. That's about a hundred NaNoWriMo winners worth of words. More than most authors will publish in a lifetime. Yet it's not far off what you need to write to become a good writer. Ten Thousand Hours There's a theory, most famously expounded by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, that you need to spend about ten thousand hours practicing a skill before you get to the world class level. He cites The Beatles and Bill Gates amongst others as examples of this. There's more to success than just putting in the hours, but it certainly counts for a big chunk of it. So what counts as practice as a writer? You'd think this was obvious, writing stuff, and maybe a bit of reading. However I'd disagree with that, or rather modify it a bit. What I think makes you increase…
Twenty Years on the Internet
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) It's so long ago that I've forgotten the exact date, but I first used the internet in February 1995 when I was working as a local system administrator for the UK Energy Efficiency Office. I had a second-hand 386 laptop with a 9,600 baud modem in it and I mainly got usenet through a now long defunct CompuServe account (with the snappy and memorable as my email address). My primary use of the internet was for work, I was finding out about Novell NetWare admin and Groupwise as the mail client + server software. However there were no official internet accounts, and no way of getting sign off for one. That said, everything was done in-house, with the odd specialist contractor to add expertise. So I just got on with using one of the free CDs that…
Book Review – Silesian Station by David Downing
Silesian Station by David Downing My rating: 4 of 5 stars Second in the series, and it ends where I expected the first to end. It starts a few weeks on from where the previous book left off. In late July 1939 John Russell is returning to Germany from America by boat with his son. Definitely an interesting read, Downing has clearly done his research well. There is a fantastic period feel to it. Especially the embuggerance around the travelling to and from Poland. The places and the people are very well described, and the latter are well observed and seem real. The danger in the air from unguarded comments is real for these characters, and they are mainly circumspect with strangers. I was also pleased to see how Russell's film star girlfriend develops too. She starts the story with a…