Finally finally finally finished Gravity's Rainbow on the train on Sunday.
Totally and utterly surreal feeling, like the real world had ceased to exist or something.
I wanted to scream right then and there in the train carriage (I suppose the alternative was to behave rather like Roger Mexico in Clive Mossmoon's office...) but I restrained myself.

I want to go back and read it again (and keep a closer grip on who is who) but not straight away!
I'm going to read Iain Banks' The Steep Approach to Garbadale again.
SERIOUSLY?
Did I read a different book to everyone else?

After visiting the building society in Kings Cross, I went into Gay's the Word in Marchmount Street.  It is still pleasant and interesting, but I can remember the days when Proust and Barbara Pym were next to each other of the fiction shelves, and only a bit of, er, visual stimulation in discreet (but not hidden) places.

The days when porn was under the counter and the serious stuff up front are now reversed.  "Do you have Foucault?" I enquired, making sure to give it a sufficiently Gallic accent.  "It's in History" I was told, and we went to the very back of the shop for serious academic books, passing the magazine rack with its copies of Inches, Latin Inches, Black Inches...  (From which I gathered the American gay porn industry has not yet gone metric.)

Then in fiction I noticed a new book by Joe Keenan, My Lucky Star.  Keenan wrote two blissfully funny books in the early nineties, but has been kept busy writing scripts for Frasier and now producing Desperate Housewives, neither of which I know.  He also wrote a very funny introduction to the Penguin edition of The Code of the Woosters.

I got it and began it over my sandwich.  It looks as though it will be wonderful.  Just three pages in I read:

"He had wonderfully broad shoulders, though I couldn't say if this was the result of weight training or if it was workout enough just lifting the massive Rolex and chunky gold cuff links that sparkled on his tanned wrists."

Looking forward to it.  (Foucault could be interesting too.)

That reminds me - I've been reading (the print version of) Geoff Ryman's novel 253 (the online version is here and I suppose is more in keeping with Ryman's idea, but I don't find a computer screen conducive to this kind of reading). Has anyone else read this? It consists of 253 chapters, each describing (in 253 words) one of the 252 passengers and the driver on a Bakerloo Line train over a period of ten minutes on 11 January 1995. There are obvious parallels with novels by Queneau and BS Johnson but it's quite entertaining (and in a way serious) and strangely enough a "page-turner", for me anyway.

I have just finished Joe Keenan My Lucky Star.

I didn't read it too fast, it was so funny, eg

The office had a second door that gave on to a conference room.  This door now opened and Rex entered.  I had never in my twenty-nine years as a gay man seen someone actually sashay.  I did now as Rex paraded in, employing the sort of gait one only excuses in strikingly beautiful women wearing large feather headdresses.

Also finished Foucault (dense but short) and Book VII of Tristram Shandy and Roy Strong A Little History of the English Country Church and finally finished Lord Byron's Don Juan (not a nice man, Lord B,in my opinion - the terms "arrogant public school" come to my mind.)

Edit: I have a bout of 'flu and nothing to do but read.

Good grief, I really should have passed this on to you years ago then, I've known this since it was brand spanking new (thanks to a chance hearing of a radio mention of it). Yes, a definite page-turner in a very non-linear way. And somehow righter in what I think he called the 'print remix' than the original internet version - even though it's obviously more in keeping with Ryman's idea since that's what his idea was, it's more special for me to have that friction between the fact of having the pages arranged in a definite order and the fact that one hops around them. (Of course it's not entirely devoid of linear narrative anyway, as Richard and others probably already know.)

Wow, someone mentioned a book I've read. That never happens. 

Ahh. You must forgive me if I get a little weepy here, for I have today completed the odyssey of reading that is The History of Middle-Earth. It consists of 12 paperback volumes by Christopher Tolkien (the son of JRR), which exhaustively go through the drafts of texts, texts previously unpublished and texts unfinished. They have been a part of my life for over 3 years, occupying many holidays, many hours of Proms queueing, and countless journeys to London and back. The first two volumes were given me on my 18th birthday by a very sweet friend who is no longer on this stage, so they in particular hold sentimental value for me. But now there is not another volume to pick up.

I have posted in a fashion of Byron over the last few weeks, but trust me I have had a less flippant life off boards.

This post of Milly's inspired me somewhat (Thanks Milly!).  John Polkinghorne was my college president for a small while, but I never really spoke to him.  Which is a shame, 'cos like Milly I'm on a ceaseless quest, although I think I am looking for how the physical and spiritual worlds influence each other and a bridge between science and faiths.

I was about to start Dawkins God Delusion when I read Milly's post, and decided not to.  I couldn't find "Quantum Physics and Theology an Unexpected Kinship", and ordered it from the bookshop.  In the meantime, I did find Polkinghorne's "Very Short Introduction to Quantum Physics":



For those of you that saw Jim Al-Khalili's TV series "Atom", Polkinghorne covers much the same stuff - it's a brief and excellent history of the origins of quantum physics onwards.

I also read Polkinghorne's "Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity":



This is probably the 'kinship' book that Milly was expecting.  For the first time I could see that there is space in the uncertainty of Quantum Physics for (a, many) God(s) to exist without treading on the toes of science.  Admittedly, it was an argument that means neither side contradicts the other, but I wouldn't go quite as far as kinship in the sense that they help each other.  I also found it intensely annoying that Polkinghorne is quite logical in his descriptions of how a super-being can exist inside/alongside the known physical world, but that he leapt in at every possibility to then say he believed it was the Christian God / Trinity.  I found his argument for the possibility of Christ's resurrection less than convincing.

Then I read a lot of Dawkins "The Selfish Gene":



Not much I can say about it other than it's good.  Well written, logical, difficult to knock.  The only area I got annoyed was with him falling into the shorthand of saying , for example, an organism decides to develop longer arms, when he actually means the environment will favour organisms with longer arms, and thus increase the chance of their long-arm genes becoming dominant.  He does return to long hand quite often, but not enough for my liking.

Then I read Milly's Polkinghorne book, which had arrived:



I would agree with Milly.  It doesn't show any kinship.  It is more of a compare and contrast exercise.  I didn't get a lot of sense that the two disciplines came from the same root.  Or that they were after the same thing.  There were some interesting things though.  This book explained the Trinity in the clearest way I have read (I believe it's bumkum, but I can at least now begin to see where they might be some possibility to it).  It also made a good distinction between science having repeatable evidence through experiments, and religion having one-off evidence which cannot be repeated and tested.

Then I read 3 more of the very short introduction to... series.  Susan Blackmore's Consciousness:



This was fascinating, mixing philosophy, brain science and medicine.  There were a couple of moments I thought the logic was faulty, but I may not have understood some of the language properly or appreciated all the evidence.  But I hope she is wrong, because she sort of ends with the self being a complete delusion.  I felt quite deflated.

Then, Joseph Dan's Kabalah:



I knew a bit of Kabalah history from an old mentor.  It's fascinating, and uplifting, and whilst it doesn't give you proof/answers about how things are, it helps you look a things in different ways.  This book was more a history of how different aspects of Kabalah came about.  It was also very interesting, but didn't really help me understand links between consciousness, science, self, and the spirit.

Then, Michael O'Shea's The Brain



Very well written, and leaves space for thought about how consciousness could be more than a delusion.  And full of interesting things about how neurons and glions work.  And inspiration, for me at least, about how consciousness appears and how it could be found in other systems outside brains.

Hence, I am going to read Douglas R Hofstadters "I am a Strange Loop"



But first, I'll get on with the Dawkins God Delusion.

Maybe one day I'll get back to fiction too!

Tommo