Wagon tumbling

So, as I mentioned, fell off the wagon a little while ago. I'm a cheap, cheap person and I'm quite resistant to blowing my money on anything, but I have a fucking hard time logging on to Amazon to buy someone else presents without deciding that I deserve a thing or two from my reserve lists, and if I do, well, so does the F-word, because he's such a great boyfriend, and then - well. Here we are.

1. Barcelona, Robert Hughes. I don't think I've ever had the love/hate thing going for any writer I have going for him. His autobiography was so fucking shitty, I mean, just monumentally shit. I may never have been more annoyed by a book than by that. And then, on about equal measure I enjoyed The Shock of the New and Goya. And then The Fatal Shore bored me so bad that I actually gave it up at the 3/4 mark - something I never do.

So I decided to work on the assumption that he's only good when he's writing about things he loves, which doesn't include himself or Australia. And so I plunged for Barcelona, as his shitty, shitty memoirs indicated he loves Barcelona. We're heading there for a week for our vacation this summer, and the F-word really wanted to read it, so it won't be wasted cash in any case. And I don't know a goddamn thing about the place, outside of all that Gaudi and the fact they speak some language that sounds a bit more like Italian than normal Spanish. And the first 20 pages have made me want to keep reading. He has an encyclopaedic sort of brain, or at least a great skill for regurgitating research.

2. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins. I've been explicit in very much disliking The God Delusion, for what I think are terrific reasons. Frankly I'm worried I may have blown £10 on a compilation put together by a man whose writing I've found dishonest and self-serving, in the sense of allowing crap to hide behind controversy. If he's willing to do that with his own writing, who knows what he'll cherry-pick from his colleagues?

But I couldn't resist the table of contents and the introduction it could give me to a wide range of possible new reads. It's like that point in networking where you find yourself being really nice to some guy, even to the point of not mocking him when he has a ten-minute tête-à-têtons with your chest instead of your face, who ordinarily you wouldn't even ask the time of day from, because maybe someday he can help get you a job in a much better country than Belgium.

3. The Great War for Civilization/The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk. This one was very much for the F-word, who enjoys Robert Fisk a lot. Me, sure. He's the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, my favourite British daily outside of its shitty 'science' editor, and writes in a very opinionated, angry, sarcastic way. So now we've got 1300 pages of sarcastic, angry, opinionation about the Middle East on our kitchen table. Slightly intimidated.