Of Books Read,Bought and Kindled

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well another one of those six books I commenced reading a few weeks ago has at last been finished. The Nowhere Men by Michael Calvin.

It's an impressive book about football talent spotters. Explaining to me that it's far more than watching a kid in the local park and saying "He could be the next Ronaldo".

It's explains, with credible readability that it's all computers, analytics, gut instincts and reports. There is a science to this now.

The book is not without it's problems. It hasn't aged well (published in 2013). The Newcastle system, which the author seemed to admire, has been undermined by their relegation from the Premier League. And the portrait of David Moyes as the assured manager of Everton is far from the potentially tragic figure he is now.

It also does seem to lag around the middle. The author going to every nook and cranny to talk about the subject where for a general reader such a thorough clean isn't really needed. Still, the chapter on the talent scout who discovered David Rocastle is worth getting the book for by itself.

I won't be getting a football book to replace this one from the library until I've finished the Sue Townsend I also borrowed there.

A sign of old age is loss of memory. I'd forgotten to mention a book I'd bought for 20p a few weeks back, It was:

Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin

This is apparently a "verse novel". Never read one of these before. Anyway the Penguin Book budget is currently £3.20.

I've decided to start reading now more from the Kindle during the night for the reasons I gave in an earlier post. The first ebook is going to be the complete essays of George Orwell. We'll see how this goes.

Until the next time.

In Which Feeding My Addiction......To Books Continues

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Yesterday (Tuesday)was a day where there were things to do before I went to work on the afternoon/evening shift. First off was the library, not Porthcawl but Pyle where I needed to get a few documents printed and photocopied (our printer having run out of ink and discovering that looking for new cartridges was about as simple as discovering the source of the Nile).

Now I hadn't intended to borrow a book at a different library, honestly. But I was tempted.

Dixe Wills - Tiny Stations

This is about a man who decides to visit every request stop train station in Britain. It's the sort of one person mad challenge story that attracted me. So it was borrowed.

Now we had a viewing on the house at 1pm which meant we needed to get out well before that. The wife suggested that we as a family had lunch together. I said no on the grounds that as I was working I'd be too busy clock watching. So wife/daughter went out by themselves and I would spend the ninety minutes of free time left by having lunch in Porthcawl..and visiting the library.

I'd decided to read all the Sue Townsend books that I hadn't yet read having seen a documentary about her recently. Pyle library didn't have anything but Porthcawl did (aside from the one I'd already written and raved about before). It was this.

Sue Townsend - Queen Camilla

I'd read The Queen and I and loved it so am looking forward to reading this one.

Now being Porthcawl Library this also meant that I needed a football book to replace the disaster that was Sam Allardyce's autobiography. This was the one I picked.

Michael Calvin - The Nowhere Men

This is a book about football talent spotters. It does on the surface link in to the Oliver Kay book on Adrian Doherty I spoke about recently.

After that I even had a bit of time to buy a Penguin paperback from the Porthcawl Animal Welfare Shop.

Penguin Modern Poets 17 - David Gascoyne - W S Graham - Kathleen Raine

It only cost me 20p. Which means I've still got £1.40 in the Penguin book budget.

And amazingly I finished reading a book too. Geology in the Service of Man (1950 edition) by W G Fearnsides and O M B Bulman. Now to be honest I found it to be a literary sleeping pill but it doesn't matter. It's I who am the weird collector of vintage Pelican/Penguin paperbacks. So if these books are on a subject that normally I wouldn't read about then it's hardly the authors' fault. Mind you the description of the book as "Eminently readable" on the cover? Rocky if you ask me.

So that means I need another Pelican/Penguin paperback to fill the void there. From the great unread it turns out to be.

1149 - Ellery Queen -The Roman Hat Mystery

You know off the top of my head G K Chesterton and Ellery Queen were the only "classic" crime writers I've never got round to reading. At least one of those anomalies will be resolved in the future.

What this all means is that if we remember the Michael Palin book I read in the car I have now six books on the go,

Yes I know.

But when you have an addiction to reading it's hard to let it go. Even if  only slightly.

Until the next time.