I've been thinking about it some more, and it may actually be a new disguised form of cunt-off:

*That's a very interesting post*
> You're a cunt.

*Thanks lad*
> You too.

>>6737
Damning with faint praise, I think it's called.

Fleshmarket Close 2004)
The Naming of the Dead (2006)
Exit Music (2007)
Standing in Another Man's Grave (2012)
Saints of the Shadow Bible (2013)
The Complaints (2009) - Malcolm Fox
The Impossible Dead (2011) - Malcolm Fox
Even Dogs in the Wild (2015)
Rather Be the Devil (2016)

I finished the remaining Rebus novels, as well as the two Fox ones which took place in the chronicity. Malcolm Fox seems like a pointless character, Siobhan is more interesting but rarely develops in any particular fashion. Fox is particularly annoying as he supposedly sticks to the rules and does things by the book as all the other characters are keen to remind him in conversation except he really doesn't, every now and then he'll go against his orders in the most pointless way and achieve nothing at all by it.
The Naming of the Dead stuck out in particular as of all the books it had the most life to it, Rankin seemed energised by the G8 protests and how much he hates Bono. Exit Music and Even Dogs in the Wild had some particularly melancholy moments which I enjoyed.
As the stories progress into the later books (16+) it seems like someone was teaching Rankin about actual organised crime, so they begin to be a bit convoluted in a dull way all to do with buying property and banking investments. Once or twice this is done well but the rest of the time I wasn't terribly impressed. One case in particular was a retrospective thing about how all the gangsters invested in the land around the Scottish Parliament in the pre-2000 referendum and the fallout from that, then later there's a book where they're investing again in the land for the more recent referendum, but when that fails the next book ignores it.
Some odd things in the chronology; Rebus seems to forget his father was dead in one book, and the biography of Big Ger written at the end of one book has been totally forgotten by everyone involved a few books later when someone else proposes writing one.
I'm amused that the early cases sometimes take weeks and months with years in between, then the more recent ones all seem to happen in a matter of days, something that Rankin started doing presumably when he realised Rebus was about to reach the age of retirement and is now getting very old, but wanting to keep writing more books.

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

While I am usually a fan of the memoirs and autobiographies of the users, the junkies, the alcoholics, life's general riff-raff that end up laid up at the lower stratas of society, this one left me not just unfulfilled but also fairly sad that I'd bothered to read it all.

If we can all agree that there is no point in reading (or writing, for that matter) something that you, or at least someone else, can’t learn anything from then we have no choice but to conclude that this is a useless book written by a useless person.

For there is nothing to learn here at all. No musings on the causes, mechanisms, whys, or wherefores of addiction or the visceral drive towards self destruction; about the deepest this book gets (and I paraphrase) is "and then I spent a few years letting gross men I didn't know bundle me into nightclub toilets and give me cocaine before later pulling me onto their laps in taxis while unzipping their fly, but you know how it is, right girls?!?!?".

Even Sarah Hepola's snooze-fest Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget or Burroughs Junior's ungainly, lurching memoir Speed have a comparative ocean of insight and a lot less "My dad was distant and my mother hated me and Kurt Cobain died, and here's a vague description of how I did a lot of dumb shit despite being born with a silver spoon in my mouth without even an attempt at self-contemplation about why I might have done so" when compared to this.

tl;dr - A pointless book by a pointless person, even her beauty columns had more to say about life than this and I'm a heterosexual male whose idea of looking after myself is trying to remember to get my hair cut more than once a year.

I've just killed an hour reading a short story from Frederick Forsyth about some poor sod who got blackmailed by a prozzie. Money with Menaces it's called, I think.

I smelt something was up when the protagonist of the story talked back to his blackmailers, even more so when he mounted a shopping run for some components too ordinary to be left without attention.

The moment with the photo he'd removed from his flat before he got visited by a copper is still kind of brilliant.

>>6788
If you've written a book and want to show it off fine, but he honest about the fact you're advertising it.

>>6790
At least he's not trying to crypto mine us...

>>6791 Not that we can see, anyway...
Just pondering - I can't immediately find anyone who's written a miner in native postscript or pdf, rather than just crashing out of the reader and running it locally. Surely someone's done it, just because?

Also, yes, OP - I downloaded your work. Sorry, but I'm clearly not the target audience. Washed straight over me in a wave of slightly annoyed indifference.

>>6792
People have managed to stick miners in favicons, and some browsers have been dumb enough to execute them.

>>6792

Postscript is definitely possible, PDF less so. That said, Adobe Reader handles embedded Postscript Type 3 fonts just fine meaning that you can happily embed any Postscript program you choose into a single character of your PDF.*

Obviously this is assuming you don't want to just be lazy and run the miner in embedded Javascript.

* I'm sure Arnold Rimmer would be chuffed.

>>6785
EP Thompson's Making of The English Working Class is the place to start. Very good overview, similar to Zinn, and will likely prompt you to research particular figures/groups (in my case it was William Cobbett, Bronterre O'Brien and Owenism).

You'll want to look into the Chartist movement - Dorothy Thompson is highly respected there. Related to that is Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which has been recommended to me several times but I've yet to read.

I don't have a clue re: 20th century really though, sorry.

OP here again. I've slacked a bit on the Pratchett front, he's mainly been reading Horrible Histories and other history books recently, but I picked up The Bromeliad for 50p today so he's having a read of that at the minute.

>>6780
He's a voracious little sod isn't he. Makes me feel ashamed for not reading anything.

>>5761

> Evening, Mumsnet lads.


HAS PURPS DIED WTF

>>6782

Not many people knew, but purps was actually non other than Barry Chuckle.

Truly a sad day for us all.

>>6781
Yeah. It's mainly at night time, so I'll usually have to go up a few times to tell him to stop sneakily reading when he should be asleep. His sister is older now than he was when I started this thread and she's the opposite; she'll read but, other than Roald Dahl, she only wants to read relatively simplistic stuff.

I'm off to my local curryhouse tonight, The Giant Peach. Their speciality is rolled dal.

>>6775
I'm reading a steampunk novel atm called Steal The Sky, if you like Sci-fi? The protag is basically Han Solo and I get a lot of outer rim vibes from it, but it's still good.

>I also seem to recall a book being mentioned on here years ago involving near misses with nukes which sounded interesting.

That might have been Command and Control by Robert Schlosser.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser/dp/0141037911/

>>6776
I read a fair bit of sci-fi, although steampunk has never appealed to me.

>>6777
It wasn't that one. It was something like accounts of several near misses down to sheer human ineptitude.

Thanks, anyway.

>>6777
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/brain-wave-books

A week left on this. One of the books in the 75p tier is 'Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters'.

I am enjoying this very much. Marshall was the US Army's chief
of staff during World War 2 and went on to create the European Recovery Act also known as the Marshall Plan. He is highlighted as one of these very successful people who eschewed promotions and never sought the limelight.

This wasn't bad: "Race to Dakar" by Charley Boorman, the rich, obnoxious twat who accompanied Ewan McGregor on his motorbike trip in "Long Way Round". The book chronicles his attempt to run the Dakar Rally with a small support team and a cameraman, with the idea of making a TV series about it later.

I've always enjoyed watching the Rally, but details about the rules, day-to-day life, etc. are hard to come by. The book gives more of an inside perspective that you don't see on Eurosport or the Youtube channel. I was worried that Boorman's cuntishness would ruin it, but this doesn't really come through in the book.

>>6741

Is Boorman that bad? I enjoyed some of Long Way Round.

>>6742
Mate, he's rich. That means he's practically Satan.

>>6742

The "rich and obnoxious" part is by his own admission. He actually comes across as pretty chill and interesting.

>>6699

> I'm not sure why everyone like to suck Gibson's dick for Neuromancer (1984), considering Blade Runner and Tron (1982).
> Gibson didn't innovate anything in particular, he just got lucky and was made into a symbol.

What Gibson really achieved with the sprawl trilogy, far beyond his unrealistic imaginings of cyberspace or his prediction of the Internet of Things was capturing the hearts and minds of an entire subculture of teenage hackers and phreaks. Gibson was able to capture both the thrill of hacking and drive and desire to hack incredibly well, while also fueling the fires of many a teenage fantasy that they could one day be a "cyberspace cowboy" or a "digital samurai" selling their hacking talents to the highest bidder (which, to be fair, most of us actually are).

Essentially the "cyberpunk dystopia" setting was entirely arbitrary and interchangable; other than the silly bit where the AIs merge and become the matrix, Case and Bobby's stories could have been transplanted into any setting with technology advanced enough for Gibson's mumbo jumbo to pass muster and the trilogy would still have had the same success.

>>6701
> Snowcrash a couple of years ago I thought they were just simply bad. Terrible pacing, trite characterisation... just badly written in general.

Did Stephenson ever really write any sincere cyberpunk fiction? Snowcrash was an on-point lampoon of cyberpunk for the most part, with every character, idea and scenario stereotyped and turned up to 11 for (admittedly negligible) comedic effect (Hiro Protagonist? Come on).

>>6699
I liked those movies, although the Sprawl novels are much longer and have a lot more details. I might check out Judge Dredd again, it was very similar to Gibson's world but didn't take itself as seriously IIRC.

The '60s novels are not bad. One I enjoyed was "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut. He is not as imaginative as William Gibson, but his characters are a lot better, except for the poor people. You can tell that he was a little too bourgeois to let his imagination run wild, or get into the heads of real poor people. I also enjoyed seeing a novel from over 50 years ago deal with the "robots will steal our jobs" nonsense.

>>6701
I enjoyed the first half of Snow Crash. Neuromancer, Altered Carbon, most of the cyberpunk canon just seem a bit gay. I'm interested in Seveneves by Stephenson, if anybody has an opinion to provide.

My favourite sci-fi novel is Ender's Game. I've tried two other Orson Scott Card books from the "Enderverse" and they're utter shite.

>>6723
> I enjoyed the first half of Snow Crash. Neuromancer, Altered Carbon

What stopped you from reading the second halves, or were the second halves magically universally shit?

>>6724

He wouldn't know, would he?

Skim the bits with little useful information, read the useful bits more slowly and take copious, well-organised notes. Learn about concepts like the forgetting curve, spaced repetition and chunking.

1. When I start a book, I read the first chapter, and if I'm not hooked by the end of it I skip the whole book.

2. If I'm still reading after the first chapter and get to a boring patch, I read the first sentence of every page until it gets interesting again.

3. If it's clear that the author is padding out his work, or intentionally obfuscating it to hide its meaning from the plebs (Edward Bernays, Daniel Kahneman, etc.), I read the last paragraph of the whole work.

Every so often, I'll pick up a book I skipped before and try it again. As I have gotten older, some books have started making more sense to me while others have lost their appeal.

>>6683
I FOR ONE DO NOT OWN A TELEVSION

>>6679

TL: DR

>>6695

FUCKING MARXIST BBC SHIT TAX

TV LICENCE = COMMUNIST POLL TAX

TELL THEM TO FUCK OFF STUPID CUNTS

>>6661
Just FYI, all the Anne Fine stuff I could find on undernet and bibliotik is in that mega, except for an audiobook of some sort that I skipped for the sake of my ratio.

>>6662 thanks

Is GURPS really any good though? I played a bit of Discworld GURPS back in the day and it didn't wow me. I feel like it'd be easier to design my own system than bother learning a new one, tbh...

>>6664
Gurps does my nut in for the sheer blandness of it. If you want a system that does nothing to reinforce the individual thematic tone of a setting but gives you a clearly defined set of rules then this is the system for you.

In glorious Soviet regime all other RPG systems are banned as decadent bourgeois opiates of the masses. Praise the Generic Universal Role Playing System of the Soviet People!

>>6664 For what I want I believe so.

>>6665 if you or anyone else can recommend a role playing system then I'm all ears.

I'll tell you lot what it is and then a recommendation?

its a ww2 style game set in the 80's where Hitler won the war by dropping it on Washington first. it starts as a basic rescue mission and will have a bit of lore that I'm writing for padding out. then it turns into Hitler's mission to Mars and the summoning of Cthulhu by Hitler in exchange for a longer life as he's 85 by '84 but Hitler misunderstood the wrath of the elder gods and the heros end up stopping all of this.
That's the wide arc of this and the problem I had was finding something that fitted with "conventional" weapons pistols, rifles and what not, along with some basic DnD stuff like for example; Arcane strike = experimental rifle that's found.
a lot of this would be home brewed but the struggle is with finding something that works. the Grit mechanic in DnD wasn't appealing so I thought something basic would.

>>6094
I'd love to get Dionysian with her.

>>6174
Is this satyre?

>>6094
Phwoar I'd Noam her Chomsky IYKWIM

>>6174
>>6176
I want to fuck her

Here's a fit asian talking about books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kthwIPvepNs

>Aldous Huxley, George Orwell


You'd probably like 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I've never read it but it is very much in that dystopia style, and I've heard good things.

You could try Paolo Bacigalupi, Hannu Rajaniemi or Vurt. Stanislaw Lem?
'We' isn't a terribly exciting book if you've already read 1984 and BNW, it's more of the same (although it was written first).

>>6605

Seconding Vurt.

Other ones from here I can remember going through are the Illuminatus! trilogy and possibly also the Red Mars series.

>>6588

Who do I call if I have Djinn problem? Is there a halal equivalent of Ghostbusters?

Immunology is a complex topic. Unless you took A-levels in chemistry and biology fairly recently, you're unlikely to learn much from a typical undergraduate immunology textbook. An introductory course in biology from Coursera or Khan Academy might be a good start; if you're really keen, you could do A-levels or an Access to HE course at your local FE college.

>>6588

Oh do piss off you idiot.

>>6587
Immunology looks fascinating and incredibly complex. As the previous poster pointed out, if you have no formal training you're probably going to be reading gibberish. Hell, I have a Chemistry A-level and a degree in Physics (he wrote smugly) and I doubt I'd get much of what I was reading, at least at the level where I wasn't just repeating things by rote.

If you really want to study immunology, which is a highly admirable ambition, I'd recommend first studying chemistry at an adult education college then seeing what mature student courses are available. From what I understand mature students are sought after since they're genuinely pursuing a dream as opposed to wandering into x subject since they assume uni is what they should do at that age.

Either way I wish you all the best m7.

>>6587
I'd recommend "Biology: The Science of Life" by Robert A. Wallace, if you can find it. It's just a general biology textbook, but well written and a good introduction.

After that, I have no idea. I used this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Immunology-Fifth-Richard-Goldsby/dp/0716749475/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1492093607&sr=8-3

It will be rough going no matter what. You basically have to memorize an alphabet soup of enzymes and ligands. Worse, everything is unintuitively named because it was discovered by accident or for some reason unrelated to its function. For example, the enzyme "XP" is named after the disease it causes, Xeroderma Pigmentosa, rather than its function (DNA repair).

t. used to work in the immunology department at MIT.

>>6569
Gina? Vaginas did not discover America. I meant to say China, fucking autocorrect.

>>6569

Except it is utter bollocks. But thank you for trying to help, I do appreciate it.

>>6571
Which part of the book did you find to be falsifiable or far fetched?

>>6573

Well, if I am thinking about the same book, the fact that the thing is utter Chinese propaganda bullshit?

>>6570
<Insert obligatory joke about Columbus being a massive fanny here.>

You're an odd woman.

I hope you're well Emily.