What better way to start blogging again than with a list? From Hedgehog Librarian, via Jennie Law, a Library Thing books meme. This list shows what a quitter I am when it comes to the really huge classics, and my lack of knowledge of Dickens novels. The annotation is below, from hedgehog Librarian’s original post- one quibble with that is that with lots of the books I didn’t finish it wasn’t so much that I “couldn’t”, more that I could no longer be bothered or just started reading something else. If anyone else fancies doing this, leave a comment below so we can compare notes!

“Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in LibraryThing.

The rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list.”

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One hundred years of solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi: a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius

Atlas shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A portrait of the artist as a young man

Love in the time of cholera

Brave new world

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A clockwork orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbevilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes

The God of Small Things

A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A confederacy of dunces*

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The unbearable lightness of being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye*

On the Road*

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit*

In Cold Blood

White teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

I know, I know, its been far too long. I have a few topics in mind at the moment, so expect something in the not too distant future.

One in a very occasional series, in which I share some thoughts about films I have watched in the not-too-distant past. This time, 2 highly acclaimed films, each with their own very distinctive aesthetic and visual style.

First up is No Country For Old Men. I’m going to nail my colours to the mast, and say that I thought this was the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece, combining all the tension and suspense of their thrillers such as Fargo, with cinematic flair comparable to someone like Terrence Malick, as well as enough jet-black humour to leaven what is a pretty uncompromising plot.

I won’t go into the plot here, which is actually a fairly standard story of a drug bust gone wrong, followed by a pursuit, albeit told in a pretty oblique fashion. What really make it stand out are some astonishing performances from the lead actors. Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones are suitably wry and laconic as (respectively) the protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, basically a decent, resourceful guy in way over his head, and the old-time but astute Sheriff Bell, whose reflections on events provide a suitably terse voice-over narrative.

The real stand-out (and worthy Oscar winner) is Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurrh. Chigurrh is the assassin put on Moss’s tail after the aforementioned drug deal gone bad. To call Chigurrh simply an assassin doesn’t really do him justice, though- he’s more akin to a force of nature or perhaps a personification of evil, being as he is implacable, remorseless and inhuman. Inhuman is perhaps not exactly the right word- he does turn out to have a warped code of honour, although this doesn’t really go any way towards lessening the bloodshed of what is a pretty violent film. There’s a particularly uncomfortable scene during which he torments a gas station attendee for an innocent remark, and all the while you can tell that while Chigurrh might kill the man, doing so would mean as little to him as not bothering.

While the film has a definite ending, it doesn’t really tie up a lot of the loose ends, which I appreciated- so many American films seem to be scared of ambiguity. Also ambiguous was the moral of the story, if any. Sheriff Bell seemingly retires because of the terrible things he has witnessed, although [SPOILER ALERT] I thought it might have been suggested that he had in fact been killed by Chigurrh, and that Bell’s last few scenes were in some kind of afterlife. Chigurrh manages to stagger off at the end, unbowed and no doubt ready to commit more acts of violence, should more contracts come his way. He seemed in some way symbolic of the forces unleashed in the early eighties (the film is set in 1981) by the likes of the proliferating drug trade, the trauma of America’s disastrous war in Vietnam, and the brutalising effects of the move away from the New Deal consensus towards Reaganomics.

Anyway, ill-formed politico-cultural musings aside, the movie is brilliant- it works as a super-tense thriller, a meditation on the old West and the nature of the frontier in the American psyche (oops, there I go again) and as an exemplary exercise in acting from its excellent cast, and film-making from the back on form Coen Brothers.

The other film I’m going to write about is Anton Corbijn’s Control. This is a biopic of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who committed suicide at the age of 23. I’m a big fan of Joy Division, and indeed of all things relating to Factory Records, and Manchester music generally, so I was looking forward to seeing this.

The good stuff first: the cinematography and period detail were both excellent, evoking the grimness of the 70s in Macclesfield and Manchester. The cast’s performances were very good, managing to equal those in the great 24 Hour Party People.  In particular, Sam Riley is uncannily similar to Ian Curtis, and even manages to pull off his slightly upsetting semi-epileptic onstage performances.

What I found lacking, however, was any kind of narrative tension. I guess this is partly because I’m familiar with Curtis’ sad life story, but I don’t think that was entirely it. Anyone watching the film is likely to know that Curtis ends up taking his own life, so the film then has to hold your interest when you already know its ending. Unfortunately, mine waned, and I ended up wanting him to put on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and then do the grim deed just so I could finish watching. Probably worth watching for the cinematography or if you’re interested in post punk, though.

I was also going to blog about There Will Be Blood, but I’ve repeatedly failed to go and see it in the cinema, but hopefully I’ll manage that soon.

A landmark, of sorts- I just posted my thousandth link to del.icio.us, a service that allows you to save URLs and then refer back to them as and when you need to. As well as this, it allows you to tag things you save, thereby building up a folksonomy.

You can view my links here- they are a real mish-mash of stuff, running the gamut from web tools to libraries to politics to film to sport. For the record, my thousandth post was an interview with Carl Wilson at the AV Club, talking about his new book about Celine Dion in the very good 33 1/3 series, and it was tagged with my most popular tag, music.

Yes, yes, I know, I’m about 5 years behind half the people in this country on this, but I finally got an iPod this Christmas, and I thought I would note some of my thoughts on the ways in which it has changed my listening habits.

First of all, it has really made me think about my unwieldy collection of CDs. I must have burnt only a fraction of the total number, and this begs the question: how many of these CDs do I actually really want to keep? I mean, it’s conceivable I might want to listen to a track off that Bentley Rhythm Ace  album I have, for some reason, held on to for the last 10 years, but in all honesty it’s not going to happen. So maybe a CD purge is in order.

On a related note, burning a whole load of CDs has made me realise how weak parts of so many albums (including a lot of albums I like) are. One of my favourite albums of the 90s is Royal Trux’s Accelerator, and I still really like it, but could probably live without hearing half the tracks ever again, which made me think twice about burning the whole album. This is where compilations come into their own, since they provide perfect iPod fodder, and you can easily delete tracks without feeling guilty for dismembering a cherished album (a rockist idea anyway, I know!). Mix CDs are also great in this respect, since if done well they are unique in providing the cohesion of an album with the variety of a good compilation.

And the perfect medium to hear new mixes is in podcast form, which really has opened up a whole new world of (free!) music to me. The two I have subscribed to that particularly stand out are Resident Advisor (check here for a mix by the always excellent Optimo DJs) and the Beats in Space radio show coming out of NYC. As these choices indicate, another side-effect has been that I am listening to lots more dance music than previously, which is perhaps also to do with the fact that dance music tends to work better on headphones from an MP3 than, say, stoner metal.

It has also made me think about my small to medium sized collection of LPs. One the one hand, I kind of wish I had them available in a format that was easily transferrable to computer, since many of my favourite albums are in this format. But then, on the other hand, I picked up a copy of the gatefold edition of Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4, which features  some truly great artwork, making me remember why I enjoyed buying vinyl in the first place.

Finally, owning an iPod has brought home the need to buy myself a decent laptop, over which I have been prevaricating for years. I can’t continue to clog up Jude’s computer with my (to quote her) “funny bleepy music”!

Did anyone find their listening habits changing in the ways I describe when they first got an MP3 player? Or perhaps in other ways? Leave a comment!

If you want to see what law librarians talk about when they get together, have a look here. It’s a new collaborative blog about all things law library!

I know everyone and his uncle has been going on about the greatness of The Wire, and they’d be absolutely correct. I’ve just finished watching season 2, and it just keeps getting better and better- more complex, more nuanced, more emotionally engaging, and more funny (incidentally, the humour is not something many commentators seem to have picked up on). The addition of the docks and union politics to the interplay of cops, drug dealers and city hall has created a whole new series of interconnections and facets that will no doubt be elaborated on in the next season, to which I am greatly looking forward.

Here are some links to interesting Wire things on the internet:

• little things writing about a draft essay comparing The Wire to a video game.
• Lengthy New Yorker profile of writer-in-chief David Simon.
• Even lengthier profile of Simon in the Atlantic Monthly, looking at Simon and The Wire from a specifically Baltimore perspective.
•  New York Times blog on what real thugs think of the Wire.
• Slate on why the Wire is great.
• The always excellent Charlie Brooker interviews cast members, and talks about the show on a Youtube clip from his Screenwipe show.
• All kottke.org’s many entries on The Wire, with much further linkage.

Enjoy- please post further links of interest in the comments below!

First off, apologies for blogging again about Facebook, but the recent Guardian article on the politics of the people behind the site is well worth reading, arguing as it does that there is something of an agenda behind the bland exterior of social networking.

Whether you buy this is, of course, a matter of opinion, and the always-interesting Potlatch has taken the article to task for the sloppy use of the term “neoconservative” as a descriptor for Facebook’s political philosophy. On the other hand, little things discusses Facebook in the light of the likes of John Gray and Aubrey De Grey, and comes to the conclusion that Facebook should probably be steered clear of.

Interesting stuff. I was sounding off in the pub last night, as I do, about wanting to shut down my Facebook account, the only drawback being the lack of online Scrabble, although it looks like that option may soon be gone anyway!

This post brings together a number of themes that I have been thinking about recently. It was prompted by Privacy International’s recent report on Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007. In it, the organisation gave Britain a damning write-up, stating that Britain is an “endemic surveillance society”, on a par with China, Russia, and the USA in its lack respect for individual privacy. This came as something of a surprise to me, even though I keep up with data protection and privacy law to a certain extent, and that it’s fairly well known in these circles that Britain has the most comprehensive CCTV network of any nation on earth. I assumed that the UK’s democratic process was robust enough to cope with these challenges, but apparently this shouldn’t be taken for granted.

So far, so depressing, but what might this have to do with the giddy world of Web 2.0? Well, it occurred to me during one of the sessions during day 3 of Online Information conference (on the future of web 2.0) that web 2.0 actually allows us, and perhaps even forces us, into colluding with this surveillance or even into surveying ourselves. I’m not making any great claims for the originality of this thought (see for example ideas on “digital Maoism”), but there did seem to me to be a useful way of thinking about the effects of certain web 2.0 services, and in particular social networks such as Facebook or Bebo.

This is to consider the way in which Facebook and the like ask us to display a public persona, and the way in which we then regulate this persona. It occurred to me that, in this way, social networks become a Foucauldian Panopticon, in which behaviour is subject to regimes of discipline that determine and condition the ways in which we act. In this way, the personal not only becomes the political, but also the public- everything is “on show”. To put it another way, you had better not let your boss/ teacher/ lecturer/ mum know what you got up to at the weekend via those pictures posted on Facebook, or else.

One of the speakers at the conference above mentioned the interesting idea of “declarative living” as a remedy to this problem, or that apart from very personal matters, you should be willing to put information about yourself online, and then let others use this data as long as this data use is acceptable. This is an interesting idea, but also seems to me to be willing participation in the very surveillance society which we might otherwise object to, for example in the case of Britain’s CCTV network mentioned above.

Does all this actually matter, or am I just going on about some fairly dry theoretical issues with little real-world relevance? I would argue that this stuff does matter, and that these issues are thrown into sharp relief by events such as the recent Facebook Beacon debacle. Essentially, organisations like Facebook and Google make their money out of information about our lives, through advertising, data mining, selling demographic information and the like- should we then be so forthcoming with this information? And if we accept that we can give away our personal information in exchange for the undoubted benefits of social networking, should we be declarative, or should we be differentiating between our web personas and (as it were) real life?

Anyway, enough rambling, I hope this post is at least semi-coherent, and I’d be very interested to hear what people think about all this, I think it’s a very interesting topic.

I think the post title just about covers it! I’ve been off work since Friday now, and won’t be blogging much prior to Christmas, so happy whatever festival it is you celebrate!