March 08

Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon

Monday 10th March

I had the most normal Sunday that it is possible to have yesterday.

Nobody in the world did anything like what I did yesterday, and for that I decree that you're all just strange.

What did I do yesterday? Well I give you fair warning you'll be jealous of how stunningly normal it was… I spent the morning with The Bible, played golf in the afternoon, had tea afterwards and then went home and started a jigsaw before bedtime. And none of that is euphemism.

Of course, it does have to be said that the bible that I was spending time with was the one I was writing myself. The older one just didn't have any message that spoke to me personally, so I thought I'd write one myself.

There's even the book of Big Bad Jon.

It's amazing what a deadline will do for you though because I managed over six thousand words in three days alone. It'll look right good when it's finished.

Of course, even geniuses, genii, very intelligent people like me have to take a break every now and then for a light amount of sporting activity. So with horrible weather on Saturday and then more today, when the sun broke through the clouds briefly on Sunday I jumped at it and went to play golf.

I wore my most hideous shirt, large voluminous trousers and grabbed my club. Of course I did look a little out of place at the pitch and putt with all the teenage boys knackering their £120 reeboks in the squishy mud.

But admittedly they couldn't play for toffee anyway, so obviously the trousers helped. And they add an extra bit of firmament to the sand trap on hole 14.

The tea was lovely, by the way.

And the jigsaw… well balls to you, I like jigsaws.

And I know there are some people that wouldn't approve of my re-writing of the bible, or of viciously murdering people on a golf course.

But then there are always people that say that introducing a casket of angry bees onto a bus full of nuns as it drives along a mountain pass is wrong.

And I've not done that in ages.

50 books later and still sane

Wednesday 12th March

I read.

I know, it's shocking isn't it?

Actually, I find it shocking that I work with people who have a book they take on holiday year after year and read 2 pages of. And that's all the reading they do for the entire year. Shocking.

So anyway, enough about those I'll educated oiks, back to the important stuff, namely me. 8 months ago, on my birthday (the 10th of July, make a note) I started on another dumb challenge.

To be precise, the 50 book challenge.

The rules were simple, to read 50 books I had never read before inside of a year. No re-reading, no graphic novels, no audio books.

Of course, you know I had to leave myself a loophole just in case it got difficult, and of course someone spotted it in seconds. I never said anything about picture books, so in theory I could have finished it in a day at any bookshop that sold Mr Men books.

But I digress.

Exactly 8 months later on the 10th of March 2008, I finished book 50.

Proud was I, very much so. And slightly relieved.

Do you know how much you want to go back and re-read an old book when you're not allowed to? To be able to snuggle down with an old loved one or just re-live that bit where harry gets punched in the face… ahh, great times.

But you do appreciate a lot when you're forced to bounce from one new book to another. You see, I also restricted myself by not reading any two books by the same author in sequence. I had to switch authors with every book, so although I read six of the Ian Ranking Rebus books, they're spread widely throughout the 50.

I found some wonderful stuff in while doing this, that otherwise I probably wouldn't ever touch. The aforementioned Ian Rankin stuff, "Varjak Paw" is fantastic, as is John O'Farrell's "May Contain Nuts". That one had me literally laughing out loud.

Robert Harris and James Rollins are two authors I'll be looking out for from now on and I've discovered that I love books peeking into real people's secret private lives like "I lick my cheese" and "Found".

Bouncing between these has been great and I've covered a much wider scope than I would ever get around to reading myself in a year, kids books, fact, fantasy, office politics, alternate histories, murders, politics and surrealism.

A lot of the credit has to go to my friends of course, because a fair few were donated, suggested or even given by good friends.

Although I'm still confused as to why you decided that a book called "I lick my cheese" would be a good present for me.

But then again I have trolled my way through monumental amounts of crap before I got to the 50 books that I actually finished.

The lord of the rings trilogy is just as dull and unreadable as the last time I tried to read it. The illuminatus trilogy is so complex that I needed a scorecard before the end of chapter one and Andrew Harman's books are so obsessed with trying to be funny that they forget what an actual joke is.

But the very worst book I attempted to read, I actually finished and is book 13 on my list. "A long trip to tea-time" was written by a vicar in the early 80's about a teenager called Gaz who invents a time machine with his sinclair spectrum and visits periods in time to view Christian persecution. That is, Christians getting persecuted.

I'm now trying to think of one single thing to recommend it and I'm coming up short. It's like the man that wrote it not only had to concept of technology or programming, but also no concept of history, teenagers or even Christianity itself.

The only reason that I finished reading it after finding out how bad it was, was that it was only 117 pages long. Every couple of minutes I adjusted the countdown… only another 60 pages to go, 50 pages to go … and so on.

It really is that god awful.

Anyway, the full list, in the order that I read them…