Botchandango.com

Free Books

I read an interesting article in this mornings Independent about 'Bookcrossing'. The idea behind this is that you read a book, register it on bookcrossing.com, stick a label on it to uniquely identify the book and then release it into the wild by leaving it in a public place, giving it to a friend or donating it to charity.

Someone else can then pick up your book, read it and if they wish register their comments on the webpage giving information such as where they found the book etc. before they themselves re-release the book into the wild. In this way books can travel all over the place. Apparently it is a big thing in America, but although it has been around for a few years in the UK it hasn't really caught on yet. This might change with a new BBC television show called 'Page Turners' which will be broadcast next wednesday. The show will showcase the idea of bookcrossing and attempt to follow 100 copies of 24 different books that will be released in several locations around the country.

I like this idea a lot, especially as books seem to be so expensive these days. I will keep my eye out in future to see if I can find one of these books. Bookcrossing  might also offer a good way to free up some space on my bookshelves, it'd be fun to see where some of those books could end up.

Next week I will be mostly reading...

Kafka on the shore, a 'new' (2005 publication in English of a book first published in 2002 in Japanese) Haruki Murakami novel  that I picked in Ottakars last week. As it is a little while since I had read a new Murakami book I  splashed out on a hardback copy rather than wait months for the release of the paperback. Unfortunately this now means that while my other Murakami books are all similar sized paperbacks that fit nicely on my bookshelf, this latest one stands out like a sore thumb and will have to go on another shelf with my other hardback books thus spoiling my system for arranging my books and generally creating some bad library related Feng Shui. Thinking about those other hardback books now I realise that I actually do this a lot and almost always as the result of a spur of the moment decision to pop into a bookshop that I pass in the street. I should really stay out of bookshops and remain blissfully unaware of new books when they first come out... that way I can pick them up as paperbacks sometime in the future. Either that or just exercise a little more restraint and patience when shopping.

Before starting my most recent purchase, I want to try and finish another book that I started over Christmas but unusually haven't managed to get further than the first few pages of the second chapter. That book is Chasing the cherry blossom by Lowell Sheppard a travelouge detailing his attempt to follow the Sakura Zensen or 'Cherry Blossom Front' from south to north Japan.

In theory it is a book I should (and want) to like as it combines several subjects that I'm keen on travel, Japan and cycling. There are other similar Japan travelogues I've read that have really held my attention. The two earlier and most notable of these being Alan Booth's classic The roads to Sata (Middle-aged gaijin walks the length of Japan north to south) and Will Ferguson's Hokkaido highway blues (Young gaijin hitches the length of Japan south to north, following the Sakura Zensen... sound familiar?). The main problem I seem to have with Chasing the cherry blossom is the authors overt Christianity (happy clappy variety) which is a little annoying especially as it seems to bias some of the historical information given. I'm not a scholar of Japanese history by any stretch of the imagination but this was the first time I had heard of a 16th century character called John Adams who played such a 'sneaky' role in turning the Japanese against Christianity. I wondered if he was talking about William Adams the historical basis for the character John Blackthorne in James Clavell's novel Shogun. Still, I'm going to continue reading and hope that my opinion of the book changes.

Going Up..

Now this sounds like something straight out of a science fiction novel, but there is an American company who are developing (and plan to have operational in 15 years) a Space Elevator. This would be a permanent cable from earth which extends out into space with a mass of some kind at the end in geosynchronus orbit to maintain the tension. Once the cable is in place it is then just a matter of having vehicles that can climb up and down the cable to the release objects into various orbits or, if from the very end of the cable, into space at very high speeds.

I am currently reading the third book in the Nights Dawn science fiction trilogy by Peter Hamilton. In these books, the Earth of the future has several of these elevators in place around the equator to cut down on the amount of polution caused by rocket traffic between the ground and orbit. If Liftport can get one of these space elevators operational, I think that it will mark a significant step forward for space travel and exploration. The relative reductions in cost and energy required to put objects into orbit or further should allow more money and effort to be spent in doing something useful at the destination rather than being used up mainly in the act of getting there.