Michael J. Ritchie's Blog, page 45

“Nabokov’s Favourite Word Is Mauve” by Ben Blatt (2017)

[image error] “In literary lore, one of the best stories of all time is a mere six words.”

I am a proper nerd for statistics. I’m not very mathematically minded, but give me a good list, chart or graph and I’m a happy man. The only way I have ever been able to tolerate the Olympics or the World Cup is because of all the statistics that come along with it. Mixing up maths and literature, however, to examine the works of our best-selling authors is almost a dream come true.

Journalist Ben Blatt has allied bi...

“Surfeit Of Lampreys” by Ngaio Marsh (1941)

[image error] “Roberta Grey first met the Lampreys in New Zealand.”

With no Agatha Christie mysteries to fill my brain with, I have turned my attention to others from the Golden Age to find another author I can indulge myself with. My exploration somehow took me to the other side of the world with the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh.

The Lampreys are a large, sprawling family noted for being mildly eccentric but generally harmless. Their ignorance regarding the worth of money, however, comes to be an issue when...

“The Place That Didn’t Exist” by Mark Watson (2016)

[image error] “They had left Heathrow on a morning so gloomy it could have passed for dusk, and now ten hours later it was the opposite: a blue-purple night that felt like day.”

For both the reasons that I don’t care much for travel anyway, and that my Scottish ancestry means my tan is a lovely shade of tomato ketchup, Dubai has never much appealed to me as a destination. Building a city in the desert may have worked for Las Vegas, but the UAE is undoubtedly a more conservative country, and there doesn’t s...

“How We Got To Now” by Steven Johnson (2014)

[image error] “Roughly 26 million years ago, something happened over the sands of the Libyan Desert, the bleak impossibly dry landscape that marks the eastern edge of the Sahara.”

The march of progress rarely proceeds in a straight line. We take the technology of today – smartphones, the Internet, cars, even flushing toilets and electric light – for granted, never much giving any consideration for the things that our ancestors would have found remarkable. Sometimes it takes millennia for ideas to produce t...

“All Our Wrong Todays” by Elan Mastai (2016)

[image error] “So, the thing is, I come from the world we were supposed to have.”

I like the themes of alternate histories. Everything that has happened, had it happened another way, would probably have set the world off along a path unlike the one we currently have. Some of those would turn out better for us, some not. Interestingly though, we focus a lot on the what ifs of the past, not really considering that every single thing we do in the present is changing the future. This is all the past to someone...

“Misery” by Stephen King (1987)

[image error] “umber whunnnn”

While hardly the most uplifting novel on my shelf, I found myself drawn to Stephen King. Maybe the title reflected my mood this last week or so, and it certainly hasn’t helped change that. And yet I’m actually not really complaining, because I think even if I’d been the happiest man on the planet, Misery would’ve brought me down a peg or six. When he’s bad, he’s really bad, but when he’s good, there’s no arguing with the fact that King is one of the planet’s finest writers.

Pa...

Top 10 Books of 2017

So, that was 2017. What a mess, both globally and personally. The world seems to be falling apart at the seams with increasing speed. 2016 had set the bar so low it was impossible to think that things could get any worse, but Christ did 2017 deliver. But I’m not going to focus on the negatives. There were some good things too.

There was an impressive solar eclipse over the USA, the Doctor regenerated into a woman for the first time, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle shone as they announced their...

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” by Douglas Adams (1979)

[image error]

Don’t Panic.

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

I always try to start the year with something I’m going to enjoy, be that something optimistic, magical, or heartwarming. Given the mess that 2017 had left me – and most of us, to be honest – in, I was taking no chances. It was time to dip back into the works of one of the greatest writers ever.

This is the story of Arthur Dent, an Englishman...

“This Is Going To Hurt” by Adam Kay (2017)

[image error]“The decision to work in medicine is basically a version of the email you get in early October asking you to choose your menu options for the work Christmas party.”

Touch wood, I’ve never had much to do with hospitals personally. My family, on the other hand, have all had more than enough experience on my behalf. My dad had two hernias before he was thirty, my mother has apparently had every possible organ removed at this point (sometimes twice), my grandparents are all held together by metal...

“How To Talk To Girls At Parties” by Neil Gaiman (2016)

[image error] “‘Come on,’ said Vic. ‘It’ll be great.'”

This is just a quick one here for a very short book. I’d read the short story of this in Neil Gaiman’s 2006 collection Fragile Things already, but it was oddly memorable and I was intrigued by this visual retelling.

It’s the 1970s, and two teenagers, Enn and Vic, are on their way to a party. Enn doesn’t want to go because he’s crap with girls, and Vic does because he’s a natural when it comes to pulling. When they arrive, Enn is swiftly abandoned becau...