My Favourite Books - Index
My Favourite Books - Index
Posted by almax on May 22nd, 2007
1 Three Men In A Boat - Jerome K Jerome
4 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
5 Collected Essays - George Orwell
6 Poems and Songs - Robert Burns
7 The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle
8 Song and Dance Man III - Michael Gray
9 A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
10 Post Office - Charles Bukowski
11 Selected Writings - Edgar Allan Poe
12 The Neon Rain - James Lee Burke
13 For the Sake of Argument - Christopher Hitchens
14 I, Claudius - Robert Graves
15 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer
16 Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
17 A Man on the Moon - Andrew Chaikin
18 Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
19 The Scottish Enlightenment - Arthur Herman
20 Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
21 The Catcher In The Rye - J. D Salinger
22 Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics - William Donaldson
23 Revolution In The Head - Ian MacDonald
24 Parliament of Whores - P. J O’Rourke
25 My 60 Memorable Games - Bobby Fischer
26 Private Eye’s Bumper Book of Boobs
27 Dylan: Behind Closed Doors - Clinton Heylin
28 The Kinky Friedman Crime Club - Kinky Friedman
30 The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
31 The Long Firm Trilogy - Jake Arnott
34 The Life and Games Of Mikhail Tal - Mikhail Tal
35 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
36 The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
37 Omnibus Volumes 1-3 - H.P. Lovecraft
38 Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies - Francis Wheen
39 Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
40 The Far Side Gallery - Gary Larson
42 Quite Ugly One Morning - Christopher Brookmyre
44 The Very Best of the Daily Telegraph Books of Obituaries - Hugh Massingberd
45 Reliable Essays - Clive James
46 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
47 The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
48 Homage to Qwertyuiop - Anthony Burgess
49 In His Own Write - John Lennon
50 A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
51 To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
53 Famous Trials - John Mortimer
54 The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
55 The Great Shark Hunt - Hunter S. Thompson
57 The Thrid Book of Boobs - Private Eye
59 Adolf Hitler : My Part In His Downfall - Spike Milligan
60 Hitler (1936-1945, Nemesis) - Ian Kershaw
61 Easy Guide To Chess - B.H. Wood
62 The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills - Charles Bukowski
64 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick
65 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
66 The Merry Muses of Caledonia - Robert Burns
67 Factotum - Charles Bukowski
68 Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
69 The Collection Vol 1 - Raymond Chandler
70 Pegasus Descending - James Lee Burke
71 The Suicide Club - Robert Louis Stevenson
72 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
73 Trains and Buttered Toast - John Betjeman
74 The Thirty Nine Steps - John Buchan
76 The Tommyknockers - Stephen King
77 The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius
78 The Penguin Cricketer’s Companion - Alan Ross
79 The Kennedy Conspiracy - Anthony Summers
80 Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess
81 The First Eleven - When Saturday Comes
82 Arlott on Cricket - John Arlott
83 Another Batch of Boobs - Private Eye
84 Corrections & Clarifications - Ian Mayes
August 28, 2007 at 10:24 am
Further to Almax’s comments on the cricket, I was said Gorilla and I was not fighting with the horse, I was dancing with him. The Policeman asked us to move so he could get to the Umpalumpa who had hit someone. I also was not drinking lager.
August 28, 2007 at 10:28 am
Further to the comments about the gorilla and the horse at Fridays ODI, I can confirn that they were not fighting, but were dancing. The Policeman only asked us to move so he could get to the Umpalumpa who had hit someone. I was that gorilla and I was not drinking lager.
August 28, 2007 at 10:57 am
For my response to the above messages, see this link to the original post
http://almax.wordpress.com/2007/08/25/postcard-from-bristol/#comment-29249
September 5, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I got War And Peace as a book prize in the Lower Sixth, which was just over a quarter of a century ago now. As I’ve still not read it, the desire to perversely keep up that record outweighs my desire to avail myself of one of the great works of literature and humanity….
September 23, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Alastair McSporran - it must be you. I am rarely on my pc and am just playing about with it tonight and have spookily come across this page full of information. Is this what they call a Blog? There is only one person in the world that could have put this together. It was the name Alastair’s Heart Monitor that caught my attention. Are you still following the Bairns? How are you keeping? I hope you and Annie are both well.
Best wishes,
A Former Colleague
September 23, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Hello anonymous former colleague,
It’s a bit difficult to respond because of the anonymous bit, but
(a) yes it is me
(b) This is what they call a blog
(c) I am still following the Bairns
(d) I am keeping fine
(e) Annie and I are both well
Let me ask you one question.
Who are you?
Don’t be shy.
October 4, 2007 at 8:05 am
Alastair,
I have a question, bexause I like to plan in advance, if I take Advanced Higher English next year, what books would you recommend for the Personal Study? I think they have to be on the same sort of subject but of a differant genre.
Thanks
October 4, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Wow
Archie, this is a difficult question, because as you know, my own Higher English days are the best part of 40 years ago.
One of the books that was all the rage when I was 16 was George Orwell’s ‘1984′ - the warning of a totalitarian ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ society, is, if anything, even more relevant today. When I read the book we were still watching black and white TV and there was certainly no such thing as telescreens that could watch the citizens. Of course, nowadays wherever you go you are being watched by CCTV cameras.
If you put 1984 in the genre of political satire, then similar subjects in different genres might be -
Philip Dick - The Man in the High Tower - this is science-fiction, but is set in an alternative future where the axis powers of Germany and Japan actually won world war 2 - with the consequent totalitarianism which ensued.
Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave new World’ was another of the ‘in’ books when I was a schoolboy - offering a vision of the future which didn’t have the same intolerably restrictive 1984 government , but instead the citizens were all drugged to keep them happy.
For totalitarianism in actuality rather than fiction, there’s a whole host of histories of Stalin/USSR and Hitler/Germany. These books are all massive history books and you might not want to tackle them, but one I thoroughly enjoyed was Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler (volume 2 probably being of more interest to you, as it covers the war years).
Maybe these suggestions all look a bit gloomy and perhaps you have no interest in this sort of political type subject.
If you wanted to suggest particular subjects you might like to read about then I’ll do my best to make some recommendations
October 4, 2007 at 8:57 pm
PS - I’ve written enough about ‘Towers’ recently - I’ve got it on the brain. Philip Dick’s book is called ‘The Man in the High Castle’
October 5, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Thanks Alastair, I quite like those suggestion as I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Much appreciated
December 17, 2007 at 8:50 pm
listen to Wilco. Jeff Tweedy is an artist. You must be a jedi. Peace
March 31, 2008 at 8:26 pm
SV recommends Paul Curreri and David Heavenor who can both be found at CD Baby.com
March 31, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Stewart
That’s very good of you to pass on this tip. I’ll be checking it out asap