Lifted from my Facebook "Visual Bookshelf" application

gaf1983

I mainly read non-ficition or faction/historical fiction, though I do enjoy good fiction when it comes my way I just don't seem to read much of it.

Got five books on the go at the moment. Kind of playing them off one another, making them jealous of each other. Only really reading one properly right now, that would be:

Al-Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel That is Challenging the West by Hugh Miles

Got two long-term ones on the go:

The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football by David Goldblatt

L'encyclopedie Du Savoir Relatif Et Absolu by Bernard Werber

And two that I picked up and read the first chapter of in each so I may as well finish them once I finish the other books:

Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism by Eric Hobsbawm

The Simpsons and Philosophy: The Doh! of Homer (Popular Culture and Philosophy) by a load of American philosophy professors.

I'll throw up reviews once as I finish them.

gaf1983

Just finished Hugh Miles' Al Jazeera book, thanks in many ways to my long journey home from Cardiff ( ) today which involved one bus to Birmingham, one flight to Belfast, one bus to Dublin and one train to Limerick. Here are my few thoughts anyway:

Boring and repetitive at times. Could have done with more editing in my opinion. I might have appreciated the book more had I more background knowledge of the channel before reading it, and so would recognise the people quoted. However, Miles has researched his topic well, and is successful in conveying how Al Jazeera was attacked from all sides (sometimes physically attacked in Iraq and Afghanistan). Some elements of the Western media dubbed it the mouthpiece of Bin Laden, while Arabic conspiracy theorist have dubbed it a Zionist plot. There were some belly laughs too - like the story of how a Jordanian newspaper editor got the sack for publishing cartoons of Emir Al Thani of Qatar superimposed on a belly-dancer's body, or some of the descriptions of the childish bickering between the Gulf regions elites - one conference in Doha was cancelled after delegates began insulting each others' moustaches. Hamid bin Khalifa Al Thani does come out as something of an enlightened figure though, consistently bailing the station out, often with his personal wealth too. There is no doubt that Al Jazeera has had an impact, in terms of providing a forum for debate when previously there wasn't one; in providing Westerners access to Arabic views on current affairs; and in spawning imitations in its own region.

gaf1983

Finished 'Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism' by Eric Hobsbawm. Brilliant. Very fluid writing style, and seems to manage to squeeze an overview of the 20th Century's history and a state of the 21st Century into a mere 160 odd pages. Some nice observations, such as the one on parliamentary democracy these days: elections are just another chance for ministerial hopefuls to commit fiscal perjury. Will definitely be reading more of his stuff, 'Bandits' sounds like a good read.

Reading 'The English' by Jeremy Paxman now - slightly Bill Brysonesque.

gaf1983

Finished 'The English' by Paxman. Going to work on getting through Goldblatt, Werber and the Simpsons book now.

gaf1983

Hoping to finish Mark Leonard's "Why Europe will run the 21st century" before I vote tomorrow...

Still gotta return to the other three books I've been putting on the long finger.

gaf1983

Since I last posted I've finished:

L'encyclopedie Du Savoir Relatif Et Absolu by Bernard Werber

and

The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer, edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conrad, and Aeon Skoble.

Here's what I thought:

L'encyclopedie:

Très agréable. Facile à plonger dans et hors de. Plein de marrant, intéressant curiosités diverses. Certains de mes favoris sont les histoires des Grillons du métro, Shi Huangdi et les expériences de l'empereur Frédéric II.

Simpsons and Philosophy:

Most of the essays were interesting and I learnt many things I didn't know already, such as whether or not Bart could be the representation of Nietzsche's ubermensch. It actually includes some essays which could be considered coming from media analysis or political science perspectives. I hated the last essay: I felt the author didn't meld philosophy with The Simpsons as effectively as had been done in some of the previous essays: I found it to be 10 pages of fairly unreadable, for a layman like myself, treatise on Heidegger and others' views on 'thought', followed by a one page addendum where the essayist attempted to link this with Bart Simpson's own views. I really enjoyed the opening essay, "Homer and Aristotle", in which Raja Halwani depicts Homer's apparently Aristotlean virtues. I also enjoyed the contribution about the presence or otherwise of Marxist values in Springfield.

It was always going to be a tad bit pretentious - I found a small minority of the essays to be so anyway - nonetheless, it was an entertaining and insightful read.


Wanna finally put The Ball is Round to bed now. Only about 300 pages to go - it has finally gotten interesting since I can remember some of the players and events he describes in the latter parts of the book. Found the detail he went into in describing pre-war football (more or less everywhere) to be fairly excruciating.

gaf1983

Finished Ryanland by Philip Nolan this evening.

Short chapters give the book a fast pace, a bit like the rush to the boarding gate or The Da Vinci Code. Unlike the rush to the boarding gate or The Da Vinci Code, it's actually hilariously funny. Ever wanted to turn right into Beauvais instead of continuing on to Paris, or eschew London in favour of Luton? Well Philip Nolan has done so already, so you don't have to. And from his reviews of those two towns, you might not particularly want to. His humour is always caustic, and often as the book-jacket says, "no-holds barred" - the trip to the dogtrack in Cork and his reviews of health spas across Europe are full of examples of the latter. A funny, light read - I got through the first half of it in work last night - a perfect holiday read, appropriately enough.

Gonna try and knock The Ball is Round out of the park over the next two days, heading away on Wednesday and it's way to heavy to be bringing on a Ryanair flight!

gaf1983

The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football by David Goldblatt.
1 minute ago

If you have ever wondered about the finer points of Mauritian league football (in a nutshell: the teams are divided along ethnic lines, attempts to de-ethnicise it in the 1980s have been largely ignored); the uneven division of the spoils of the UEFA Champions League revenue; why football's dominance over other team sports was resisted in the white anglophone reaches of the British Empire; and how come Brazil and Argentina's political elites supported football in the 1970s/80s while the Andean states largely let it flounder: it's all in here.

In a work of this magnitude, it is obvious that the author would have to draw from other secondary sources, so if you have read Tor!, Garrincha or Football Against the Enemy before, chances are you will be covering some old ground. However, if you have enjoyed those books and others like them, chances are you will take to this book like a Yugoslavian coach to a sub-Saharan national team of the seventies or eighties. The Ball is Round is the best blend of a football book with history, economics and other social sciences I have ever read. Even for the non-anorak, I couldn't recommend this book highly enough, even if you only decide to read the chapters dealing with the contemporary game.

I found the chapters that dealt with incidents within living memory the most interesting. Up until the 1960s, I found it hard to visualise the events or feel any attachment to the players and clubs he describes – probably because I had no preconceptions of the players of the pre-TV era.

I wasn't too interested in the pre-1990s Latin American chapters – too many similarly-named personalities to recall. Also, the trajectories of the establishing of football in Peru, Chile and Argentina seemed remarkably similarly: English public school-educated merchants and sailors play the game there; they are observed by locals; locals imitate them. These narratives become very repetitive in the opening chapters.

This is a monumental work. Goldblatt certainly has a nose for some of the more interesting stories – the Madagascar club match that finished 149 nil; how the visit of Mick McCarthy's Irish side sparked off a wider debate about women's role in society on the op-ed pages of Iranian newspapers; and Greek gamblers' obsession with the ups and downs of the Scottish and Norwegian lower divisions are just some examples. At the same time the author is able to give wide-sweeping overviews of football's development in different regions. However, my interest in the development of the game in 1930s Austria or South African soccer in the sixties does have limits, so at times it did feel like a bit of a slog – let's just say I have a fair idea how one particular 1970s squad of Santos felt, who completed one national championship campaign on a Wednesday only to start the next season's Sao Paulo state championship with a game the following Sunday.

gaf1983

gaf1983 is currently reading...
Foul!: The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals by Andrew Jennings

Archangel by Robert Harris

This Is Charlie Bird by Charlie Bird

gaf1983

In the past 24 hours I finished "This is Charlie Bird" by Charlie Bird and "What does China think?" by Mark Leonard.

I had put them on the backburner for a while and read "Archangel" by Robert Harris in the meantime, which I found was a very enjoyable thriller.

What Does China Think?

by Mark Leonard

Feel like I have a better idea about what China thinks now than I did before I read the book. Found some of the ideas outlined in the book, such as the "deliberative dictatorship" model of getting public legitimacy, intriguing. Seemingly Chinese foreign policy is bad news for the emergence of democracies in the developing world, as China is a keen advocate of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states.

Two other ideas that stood out for me were firstly the notion that a country could emerge strong not only economically but politically as well without becoming a liberal democracy. The second is that of the 'Peaceful Rise' - that China may eventually if not quite overtake than become a serious rival to the USA not by confronting it and other nations, but by appearing conciliatory in its dealings on the international relations stage.

I thought that the fact that the book was written by an informed outsider looking in was one of the book's strengths - Leonard does a good job of outlining a wide range of Chinese policy shapers' ideas.

This Is Charlie Bird

by Charlie Bird and Kevin Rafter

An enjoyable read. The structure of the book in many ways resembled a news bulletin, as the chapters moved from one unrelated story to the next. As well as being a memoir, it contained a decent overview of the last quarter century of Irish public affairs. It also contained some lighter moments, including a recounting of going on a session with Dick Spring, getting a present of a dead duck from Charlie Haughey, and funnily enough, I found some of the dealings with IRA contacts quite humorous.

I'm now reading "The Best is Yet to Come" by Marc Coleman, gonna move onto "Foul!" by Andrew Jennings after that.

gaf1983

Finished The Best is Yet to Come by Marc Coleman. My thoughts:

I thought this was a very perceptive analysis of Ireland's economy and demography. However, despite the books hopeful title and front cover, Coleman's outlining of many recent policy initiatives: decentralisation, the national spatial strategy and benchmarking, to name three, left me tearing my hair out in despair.

I liked his ideas on urban planning and local government reform. His analysis of Shannon Airport's routes to Heathrow had me nodding my head in agreement. He also makes a case for more consistent deregulation of the economy - he points out the anomaly of taxis being deregulated and the Groceries Order being abolished while in other sectors, such as pubs, barriers to entry are still in place.

Perhaps it could have done without 5 page appendix detailing 300 years of Scottish economic history. I also thought the sections about the Irish language seemed a bit out of place compared to the rest of the book. Also, the editing was sloppy in places: at one point Dublin footballer Jason Sherlock was of Korean heritage, a couple of pages later he was of Vietnamese extraction. These minor quibbles aside, I would have to agree with Professor Joe Lee, who is quoted on the jacket saying this book is a terrific read.

Three chapters into Andrew Jennings' Foul!, so far so good, however I fear I could get bogged down in the internal politics of FIFA, something I wouldn't have all that much interest in.

gaf1983

Since I last posted here, I have read:

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

Now That's What I Call Jargon by John Murray

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses by Theodore Dalrymple

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor

The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

Foul! the Secret World of Fifa by Andrew Jennings

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

Immigrants: Your Country Needs the Them by Philippe Legrain

The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy

gaf1983

Have also read

War, Geopolitics, and History: Conflict in the Middle East
Robert Fisk

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Barack Obama

A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday

The Other
Ryszard Kapuscinski

Which brings me to 32 books read since I started this log. Which means to read 52 in a year I think I'll have to read 20 in about 2 and a half months.

gaf1983

A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

Blood River
Tim Butcher

Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear
Dan Gardner

Truck Fever
Manchán Magan

Watchmen
Alan Moore and David Gibbons

The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates
Des Ekin


Haven't really read much at all then recently. Six books in five months. Currently reading White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

gaf1983

White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

The Black Swan, Nasim Nicholas Taleb

A Throne in Brussels, Paul Belien

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey

The Eighth Habit, Stephen R. Covey

The Liar, Stephen Fry

The Naked Politician, Katie Hannon

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

King Lear, William Shakespeare (re-read)

The Playboy of the Western World, John Millington Synge

You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay

Ship of Fools, Fintan O'Toole

gaf1983

Just finished The New Pun Book by Thomas A. Brown, Thomas Joseph Carey, published in 1906, some godawful puns contained in it.

gaf1983

So far I'm up to 5 books in the 50 book challenge.

01/01/10 Ship of Fools Fintan O'Toole

07/01/10 The New Pun Book Thomas A. Brown, Thomas Joseph Carey

07/01/10 Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It Allan Pease

17/01/10 Lustrum Robert Harris

21/01/10 The Irish (& Other Foreigners) Shane Hegarty

gaf1983

Have read two more, that's up to 7 in the 50 book challenge.

2/2/2010: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore

11/2/2010: Dubliners, James Joyce