Sadly, of late, I've found that video games have less to offer me than ever before (most series that I like have ended or ceased to be in one way or another, and there are only two or three outfits that actually produce games of any interest to me, now), and I've been doing a lot more reading as a result. I usually read on a tablet computer, using the Amazon Kindle app (I previously owned a Kindle device, so I get on very well with this), as I find backlit LCDs to be much kinder on my eyes than paper, for some reason.
I was just wondering if anyone wanted to share book recommendations and the like.
I tend to have a lot of books on the go at once, as I like to dip in and out of various things, and I'm currently working through the following;
Watership Down, by Richard Adams - Said by some to be the genre-defining work of "
xenofiction", Watership Down follows the trials and tribulations of a group of rabbits who flee from their warren after one of their number - a seer by the name of Fiver - foretells of its destruction, and the deaths of all who remain. Richard Adams builds up a brilliant world, fictional language, belief-system, and canon of rabbit folk-tales, for the protagonists, all of which exists right under the noses of humans, in addition to the main story itself, which blends the fictional elements with real-world ones relating to the species on which it's focussed.
It's Your Time You're Wasting: A Teacher's Tales of Classroom Hell, by Frank Chalk - I originally bought the paperback edition of this, and later purchased the revised Kindle edition, which includes some additional content and updated information as of the 2010 UK General Election. It's Your Time You're Wasting is an exploration of the state of British schools, and the attitudes that have made them this way, told by a former teacher. The tales therein will be readily identifiable by both teachers, and those who simply attended schools in the vein of those in the book. It's equal parts hilarious and depressing, and, thankfully, also has a sequel ("Education: My Part in its Downfall"), and
an associated blog, here.
Delete This at Your Peril - The Bob Servant E-mails, by Neil Forsyth - Via transcripts, this book tells of the antics of a man named Bob Servant, who, much in the vein of the scambaiters from
419 Eater, anonymously strings along scammers in order to waste their time and keep them from real victims. The yarns spun by Bob, and especially the responses from the scammers, are oftentimes hilarious. Though it wasn't my own introduction to the genre, I'd have to say that it's a good introduction to reading the amusing results of scambaiters' work, for sure.
In addition to the above, I'm also going through
Grimm's Fairy Stories,
Aesop's Fables, the ten (out of twelve, as two of them aren't available as separate Kindle editions) colour-coded Fairy Books collected by Andrew Lang, and various collections of folk-tales and fairy-stories from around the world (such as two specifically covering stories from Greece and India), as I have quite an interest in these sorts of stories, and find them a lot more fun to read than the bowdlerised, Disney-influenced modern equivalents.
I've also got a small list that I want to pick up when I've next got the spare money, too, but I'll cover that some other time, should this thread go anywhere.
So, what're you all reading at the moment?
