Double bingo!
It might not be a full house but I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed a double bingo in the Books on the Nightstand Summer Book Bingo.
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Category: Blog
Royal Society Winton Prize shortlist announced
Today, the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books shortlist was announced. Congratulations to all the 2015 contenders:
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop by David Adam
Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos
Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment by Jon Butterworth
Life’s Greatest Secret: the Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb
Life on the Edge: the Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe Mcfadden and Professor Jim Al-Khalili
Adventures in the Anthropocene: a Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made by Gaia Vince
After the great success of my 2014 Popular-Science Reading Challenge, I have completely dropped the ball and read zero popular science this year, so I have read none of the above titles. Ellie of Curiosity Killed the Bookworm has read and recommended The Man Who Couldn’t Stop. I don’t think any of the others have been covered by bloggers I follow, but I may be being rubbish at searching so please do leave a link in the comments if I missed your review.
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July reading round-up
Summer has continued to be fruitful for getting through books but less so for finding time to review them. I’ve been distracted by holiday and days out and family. I would normally write a bunch more about my month at this point, but I have a stinking cold and spent eight hours driving today so I’m just going to post a few photos.
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Summer Book Bingo: halfway (ish) point
The Books on the Nightstand Summer Book Bingo lasts from the end of May to the start of September, so we’re just past the halfway point now. Here’s how I’m doing so far with my bingo card:
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Holiday in USA: New York City
Okay, it’s more than a month since we got back from our US holiday and I still haven’t sorted through all the photos (partly because we’ve only had one free weekend, but it’s still remiss of me) so I’m just going to have to try to summarise our week there before I forget it all completely. It was an amazing trip, with far more activities on our to do list than we had time for, inevitably. It’s New York.
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Mid-year reading round-up
I’ve got through a lot of books this year, but I haven’t had time to review them all properly. I may have to start looking at doing something a bit different on that front. Seeing as we’re enjoying a proper actual heatwave (by UK standards) I’m not going to promise to stay home more blogging, I’m going to get out there and enjoy it, but I want to keep the blog alive too. I’ll figure something out. Fellow bloggers: do you find it harder to keep up with it all in the summer months?
As this is the year’s halfway point, it’s a good time to take stock as regards my reading aims and challenges. I’ve read 21 books by men, 17 by women and 1 by both. Not too far off even. I’ve read a reasonable mix of genres and ages of books. However, the actual challenges I took on were the Classics Club – for which I have read four books – and more books in translation. I’ve read five books in translation and one about translation, which is reasonable, I think.
But right now I’m not trying too hard to meet challenges or read the right books. I just want to enjoy reading. Which seems a good summery aim to me.
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Sunday Salon: Narrative computer games
I wouldn’t call myself a gamer by any stretch, but I’ve always played the occasional computer game. I was quite young when we had our first home computer (possibly an Amiga? I don’t really remember) and it was pretty much just for playing games on (a PC followed a few years later with its multifunctionality). I was never an obsessive gamer, tending to give up if I failed a few times.
Computer games have been enough a part of my life that I have never considered them a bad thing or in any way at odds with my love of reading. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve started to interrogate their value as a narrative artform. They certainly are an artform, that’s without question for me, but are they a form of storytelling? And if so, are they a good format for stories?
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Holiday in USA: Books
As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t get through many books on holiday, but I did flex my bookishness in the places we went and the things I bought, because how could I not? I’ve yet to find a good bookshop in Charlotte NC – and I’ll be going back there so any recommendations would be welcome – but New York City of course does not suffer from that problem. However, we did have limited luggage space, so I tried to keep my book purchases as minimal as possible.
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Summer Book Bingo
This is yet another belated post, as I was meant to publish this on Memorial Day weekend (that’s the spring bank holiday for my fellow Brits, the one a couple of weeks ago). Anyway, the fab folks at Books on the Nightstand have for a few years now been setting a Summer Book Bingo challenge. You go to the website, generate your own unique reading bingo card, and set about trying to read books to complete a row or column on the card by Labor Day, which is apparently 7 September. I love this idea and have decided to join in this year, so here is my card:
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Holiday in USA: Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina is not likely to be a place I would go on holiday if I didn’t have family there, but there is something to be said for going somewhere that isn’t a big tourist destination. The city centre is very new, clean and shiny, with public artworks (many related to reading, which obviously I like) and plenty of trees (which again has an obvious appeal to me). There’s also a light rail system that is excellent – as long as you’re trying to go somewhere in that one straight line.
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