Wednesday 10 November 2010

Reading

When I got back from Peru in late October last year I started taking a written record of the books I read - a book log. Admittedly I have never been an avid reader although the medium of books has grown on me ever since leaving university.

The list is now just over one year old. Below are only the books I have finished - there are a few entries which have a 'started' date but no 'finished' date which will not be appearing here. This is either because I am currently reading them (and hence have not finished them) or because I started them a while ago but abandoned them after a few pages/chapters. Well, abandoned is perhaps the wrong word - I intend to return to all of them, in time.

The List (in order of start date)

Stanislaw Lem - The Star Diaries (1971)
Morris Kline - Mathematics in Western Culture (1953)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Alistair Cooke - American Journey (1945)
Robin Shelton - Two hundred poems from the Greek Anthology (1971)
Robert Harris - Imperium (2006)
Anthony Seldon - Major: A Political Life (1997)*
Jo Swinnerton - The London Pocket Companion (2008)
Robert Beckman - Crashes (1988)
Alistair Cooke - Letter from America (2004)
Giles MacDonogh - Frederick the Great (1999)
Liz Fisher, John Couruts - The Bluffer's Guide to Accountancy (2006)
Christopher Hibbert - George III (1988)
Robert Eastaway, Jeremy Wyndham - Why do Buses Come in Threes? (1999)
Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1971)
G. Ward Price - I Know These Dictators (1937)
Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler (1890)
Richard Sheridan - The Rivals (1775)
Stanislaw Lem - The Futorological Congress (1974)
Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Sand (1975)

*Did not read in full. 744 pages on one man's career would have been rather a lot - I was primarily interested in the elections (both as a prospective parliamentary candidate and as Prime Minister) rather than the workings of policy units.