The Big Read

Howdy y’all!

I was reading the blog of one of my twitter contacts the other day (his twitter page, his blog). He has a mission to do 40 things before he turns 40.

I loved the idea, and wanted to do something like this myself. I didn’t want to draw up a list of things to do because knowing me and my laziness I’d never do them, so I thought I’d play to my hobbies/strengths. I love reading. But since I started uni I have been reading less and less. The last book I read was 1984 by George Orwell (great book by the way, highly recommend it), and that was almost a month ago. And so, I’m setting myself a reading challenge.

I remembered watching a series of programs a few years ago on the BBC called The Big Read. Basically, it was a competition to find the most popular books in the UK. So, for my challenge I’ve set myself the task of reading these 100 books, that topped the chart in the BBC’s Big Read.

I have no idea how long its going to take me to do this, but I’m determined to do it. Looking down the list I see some titles that send me to sleep just thinking about them, and others that I would never dream of buying (Girls in Love by Jacqueline Wilson for example, number 98. How did that even get into the top 100?!?) 

Counting the novels I’ve already read takes me to 86 books. I don’t think I’m going to read them in order, we’ll see. I’ll post again tomorrow when I decide how long it’s going to take me to read them all and in what order. 

Bye for now,

Andrew.

P.S. Does anyone want to join me? We could have our own little online book club!

Of Kids TV, Chinese Takeaway and that fantastic thing called Twitter

Its Sunday 13th April 2008, about 6 months since my last blog post. 

Dear God, when looking at it like that time seems to have floooooown by. I’ve been meaning to update for quite a few week now but the idea seems to have past as soon as I thought of it.

This week seems to have been quite chaotic for me and for many people I know, don’t know why but people seem to be rushing around, stressed, tense and up to their eyeballs in work. The totally crap weather doesn’t seem to be helping either. Hearing today about the tragic death of Mark Speight got me thinking about the ‘good old days’ of children’s television in the early 90s. I used to watch CBBC every day after school (a choice which seemed odd to many of my friends as the majority of them liked to watch CITV, I thought I was cool because of this :-)) Either way, both channels provided great programs and something which gets me annoyed nowadays, great presenters in between shows. If you switch on CBBC or ITV after school days now, you’ll see that CITV has practically disappeared and CBBC doesn’t use live segway presenters like it used to do. I suppose its all down to the huge number of kids channels on sky etc which we didn’t really have access to when I was younger.

Digressing only slightly, I’ve decided to start following some new TV shows. I’d recorded Chuck (Virgin 1 – Mondays 10pm) earlier this week and with Dr Who, Britain’s Got Talent and Pushing Daisies on TV last night, I was set for the night. I ordered a Chinese (food, not a person of said nationality), and enjoyed the night. It was chicken in chili and black bean sauce with egg fried rice, if anyone is interested.

Twitter. Wow. Social networking is all the rage these days. I’ve dabbled in it and have had a look at what most sites have to offer. The only one I ever settled with was MySpace a few years ago, but I’ve lost interest in that now and don’t use it whatsoever.

Recently I discovered Twitter. I could try and explain it to you but if you don’t know the service already, I’d probably explain it very poorly. So, I’ll let this video do the talking. If you decide you want to sign up, and I ask that you at least try it before dismissing it, you can follow me here.

Bye for now,

Andrew.

Mark Speight, R.I.P