i'm and old folkie me...

...except I'm not.  really not actually.  i try and like it but i fail every time.
it's not all folk music. truly it's just the British varieties.  I'm not biased in this. i dislike all four countries worth equally.  there are.bits and pieces here and there that i don't mind but on the whole it moves me not.
quite why then I'm working my way through the 600 pages of Electric Eden is confusing even to me.  273 pages in and i am enjoying it though.  i was a Wire subscriber for about 11 years and so Rob Young's writing was something i knew well, the subject seemed interesting enough but that subtitle was the clincher.  close enough to sounding like some sort of Coil type musical mysticism reference to haul me in.  that axis of music are certainly going to make an appearance (current 93 mostly i suspect) but i am a long way off them at the moment.
as i said I'm thoroughly enjoying it even though i keep trying out the different artists / songs he references and none have done it for me yet.  also, while it says 'Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music' it does so far seem more like an exploration of English music but i have 300 odd pages to go and this may well change.
so, tonight some more reading and a little bit of reviewing. there's a Dog Hallucination EP playing in the background as i type this, after that it'll be the Sempervirent album on Gruenrekorder.  it's a hard old life i tells ya.

IanH

Reamde

I really like Neil Stephenson's books but i knew i was never going to have the time to actually read his monstrous new one - Reamde - so i grabbed the audiobook. 150 15 minute chunks later it's finally finished. Did I enjoy it? In the end, probably yes. was it worth the time commitment? probably no.
He's gone the john grisham route here with a story based around kidnapping and terrorists. there's a massively unlikely plot twist that you have to negotiate your way around and then a very long slide to the inevitable finale.
it was fundamentally a reasonable story but overly long and a little bit creepy in it's gun fetishism.

Books...

are like heroin for me.

I have an addiction. I am unable to stop buying books. The bookshelves of my study cannot hold anymore yet I still bought another 5 today. There are books piled on the floor, on each other, on the chairs, on the speaker cabinets, everywhere.

i need to fight this addiction but truthhfully I don't really want to. Just being around books brings me pleasure. Reading them even more so.

i do need to clear some room though. i think eBay might be getting well used over the next few weeks.

New items in the Quiet World Shop

I'm having a clearout and as i have a lot of stuff knocking around the house this may take a while.
Most of it will go on ebay (user id elviscoffee) but a lot of it will be added to the shop on the QW site.

I only started doing this earlier today and as I'm otherwise occupied over the coming weekend it's unlikely to be added to in the next few days but over time there'll be a large amount of cds and books appearing on there.

Contact me if you're interested in anything.

reading

i'm knee deep in books at the moment - i usually am but at the moment it's particularly deep as Borders had their closing down sale in the run up to xmas and so i have a lot of stuff to read.

so far i've read Death of Grass by John Christopher (he also wrote The Tripods) which is one i'd been fancying for a while. It was ok, a less cosy Wyndham-esque apocalypse but without Wyndham's charm.
i'm almost through Dan Abnett's Titanicus which is typical Abnett. not his best but eminently readable.
i'm unsure as to what to read next - probably going to be either Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things or Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods.
I also have a load of unread graphic novels that i'll pepper these with including Grandville by Brian Talbot which looks pretty fine.

The latest issue of WWR went online just before new year and included a huge list of other people's choices for the year. It was a great response from those people i asked. some couldn't do it and some wouldn't for whatever reason, the only thing I'm concerned about was no response from Banks, if you're reading this fella get in touch - hope everything's ok. the variety of stuff people picked was really varied, Jean-Herve Peron's list was pretty funny and consisted of 10 albums he'd like to record himself.

xmas was the usual turmoil but was fun to see the family up at the farm.

hope y'all had a good time and have a great 2010.

currently distracted by...

books
Jar of fools by jason lutes. Story about a conjuror on the verge of a breakdown, his senile mentor, estranged girlfriend and the homeless father and daughter con artists they befriend. It's a brave attempt at a Harry Crews style cavalcade of freaks story that almost succeeds. It's let down only by the slightly contrived and rushed feel to the ending. the art is clan, clear and concise. Not my preferred style (i like a more scratchy look to my art (Eddie Campbell is the man as far as I'm concerned)) but it flows nicely and suits the tale very much. A good read and one that I think warrants a re-read but probably not for a while.

The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling - Gosh! So very good. Never read any Sterling before but I'm a long time fan of Gibson. This, their collaborative steampunk novel (probably more correctly described as inter-connected novellas) was an absolute corker from start to almost finish. The picture they paint of a London (indeed a world) changed before it's time by the genius of Charles Babbage is simply awe-inspiring. You can taste the smog and feel the starched collars.
At it's heart there is a relatively straight forward spy vs revolutionary storyline but orbiting this is a bewildering array of subplots and narratives that occasionally impact upon the main in ways that are not always immediately apparent.