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I have a ridiculously large pile of books waiting to be read. I thought I'd use this wiki to write up the list of shame, to encourage myself to get on with reading them, and to give you, gentle reader, an idea of what I'm into (and what I'm about to get into). I'll use the wiki to monitor progress as we go along!
They're in three categories. Here goes...
Currently Reading (4)
/Tell Me A Story/ Roger Schank
/Great Apes/ Will Self
/Snow Crash/ Neal Stephenson
/Steps to an Ecology of Mind/ Gregory Bateson
Going to Read (13)
/Round Ireland in Low Gear/ Eric Newby
/Hey, Nostradamus!/ Douglas Coupland
/The Blackwater Lightship/ Colm Toibin
/Pensees/ Blaise Pascal
/The Christian Response/ Michel Quoist
/Christ and the Kalashnikov/ Ian Loring
/The Heart of the Matter/ Graham Greene
/A Primate's Memoir/ Robert Sapolsky
/Chronicles I/ Bob Dylan
/Ecclesiogenesis/ Leonardo Boff
/Universality/ Mark Ward
/Raising Sparks/ Michael Symmons Roberts (poetry)
/The Poems of Rowan Williams/ Rowan Williams (poetry)
The Ancestor's Tale Richard Dawkins
Books I started ages ago and then abandoned but intend to go back to (6)
Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins
I think when I started reading this (1999) I had just about had enough of Dawkins, not that I disagreed with him completely, I'd just heard it all before from him via newspaper interviews etc. I completely accept his point about how science can give us a more beautiful view of the wonder and intricacy of nature than antiscience can. Truth is beauty - who said that? I've just looked it up - it was Keats, appropriately enough. But overall the book didn't offer me anything new.
The Extended Phenotype Richard Dawkins
I really should have read this, but I got sidetracked one day and then procrastination sets in
Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker David Gouwens
sort of read this 10 years ago at Uni, must go back to it.
The Island of the Day Before Umberto Eco
Complexity and Postmodernism Paul Cilliers
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond
(Page originally created 14th November 2005; no books have been removed, they have just been moved into different sections. I started with just the first two categories, so you can see that progress has been made! I have added a few books though.)
And here's the ones I've read that now come off the above lists:
Books I have finally finished!
/Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince/ JK Rowling
gripping, how does she do it?
/Freedom Evolves/ DanielDennett??
patchy, full review to come
/The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/ Thomas Kuhn
well I skip-read it anyway
/The Sunday Philosophy Club/ Alexander McCall Smith
absolutely wonderful, what a gift he has.
/ghosts/ Adrian Plass
fantastic, he's always so much better than you think he's going to be, and it left me deeply moved.
/The Devil's Larder/ Jim Crace
interesting, thick like treacle with metaphor and meaty narrative. Story in its pure form, yet sophisticated rather than simple.
/The Five People You Meet in Heaven/ Mitch Albom
OK. Good concept, but a little sugar sweet. The bit about the war (Vietnam?) was pretty good I thought.
/Hell For Leather/ Robert Winder
Brilliant piece of cricket journalism, beautifully written. Reading it ten years on from the 1996 World Cup it is clear that Winder was ahead of his time in his perception of the evolution of the game.
/The Two-Pound Tram/ William Newton
Recommended to me by Mum, so surely I would hate it? But I didn't. It is actually a tremendous story, a charming piece of escapism and fantasy.
Books I have given up on!
