• Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?
  - Booking Through Thursday
  

Ah, I have quite a few wordy type books, although nothing to improve my grammar as such. Three or dictionary type one and the fourth is about structure and such in novels. They are...

The Oxford Popular English Dictionary & Thesaurus
(Old dependable, everyone has one of these, right?)

Foyle's Philavery
(This is great, lovely book full of random strange and under-used words)

Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors
(lots of usages and spellings, people and places)

How Novels Work - John Mullan
(Structure, style and devices, mainly.)

Okay, not exactly, but I do remember; when it was red with the punky girl up top, when it was white and grey and powerful, when it was blue with the jumping beach girl (although, let's be honest, that was this morning so it's not a big thing to remember!) and now we have the latest incarnation.

There are lots of good new features which I go into in more depth over at customer support. 

I hope everyone's finding their way around and not having any problems but if you do just give me a shout here or on customer support and I'll try to help. 

Beyond that, have good weekends! 

This entry has nothing to do with Hawaii-5-0. But still, can you remember it? I wonder if it was good, or if I just remember it well because of the funky music and the catch phrase...

Anyway.

• I'm stagnating again on the second book, this time stagnation has hit at 15,000 words. Too many to even consider giving up, but I may well pop it on the back burner for a little while.  Or I may delete the last 3000 words as I'm not really happy with them, I was trying to build up but I think it needs some action there to set the scene.  I'm just worried in case I fall short of the target length.
  
  
• I really like not having the CAPTCHA letters on this site anymore - I think while being one of the subtlest changes in the changeover it will make a big difference, so props to the programmers.
  
  
• In other news I want to know where the sun went! It seems to have disappeared up north and it's not fair!
  

A. Touch. Of. Class.

(Brought to you by the new "Quick Blog - You Tube" button on your overview page :P) 

I was tagged by Suburban Mum 

The rules:-
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

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Hillsong United - You Reign

This one is a real slow builder of a worship track.  I usually like the faster, anthematic tracks the most but this one is all about the lyric.  I like that it tell the Easter story but not from a negative view - often I think writers concentrate on the cross instead of the resurrection, but this ones chorus is all about the now.

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming - Club 8

Summer bottled up and put in a song.  Karolina Komstedt's vocals are brilliant, wistful and light.  It's a beautiful album, it just kind of drifts through but it's all really upbeat.

I feel It All - Feist

The Reminder - being an entirely great album for the second year in a row.  It was difficult to choose which track as they're all pretty good. 


Beautiful Jesus - Kristian Stanfill

The second worship song on the list.  Really well written, Kristian has just surfaced for most people on the last two Passion records but he has a real gift for writing and puts so much enthusiasm into his songs.

Tchaikovsky Romance op 38 #6 - Anna Netrebko

The Florentine Song.  I love it. It's most worrying when you find yourself wandering around the place trying to sing a song in a language where your words are limited to the most basic greetings.  It's got an exceptional melody and feels very bright and summery. 

No One - Alicia Keys

I actually don't have this song yet, but I really love it.  Her best yet, I think.

Braille - Regina Spektor

The lyrics are, expectedly, a little odd and rather sad, but it's beautifully put together, it's quite stripped down mainly just a vocal and piano. Unfortunately I could only find cover versions on youTube.

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It's possibly quite telling that so few of these are new songs but I don't think 2008 has been that much to write home about with regards new songs yet.

Also Tagging... 

I think I'm meant to tag seven people but I'm not sure if I can think of seven off hand so I'll throw it open for everyone who reads...

Times Online | Big Brother Database.

I remember this thing.  Our ancestors died for it in Flanders Fields, they died for it on Normandy Beaches, they died for it in North Africa, they died for it in Crete, they went to the bottom of the Atlantic for it, they fought tooth and nail across Europe for it.

It was called Freedom.

I read The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway last week.  While I have previously written dismissively of modern literature, books like this prove how wrong I was.  The setting is, as the title suggests, Sarajevo during the siege in the nineties.  While Sarajevo may not be the setting you'd first think of for a beautifully written book the events that inspired it are suitably grand.

The book is inspired by a real event that happened in 1992.  When shelling killed 22 people queuing to buy bread outside his apartment a Cellist dusted off his tuxedo, picked up his Cello and a stool and every day for the next 22 days he sat in the shell crater and played Albinoni's Adagio, with no thought for his own life.  The book is fiction, based around the lives of three Sarajevans and how they're effected, directly or indirectly, by the Cellist.

Two of the characters are everyday people trying to live in the city, the third is a sniper assigned to protect the cellist.  The theme of the book for me was the desperate struggle to retain or restore some humanity in an unimaginable situation.  In their own ways each character wants to resurrect something of the city before the siege started, to demonstrate in some way that the spirit of the city as a whole is not breakable.

My favourite of the characters was Arrow, although for reasons of not wishing to spoil the plot for any potential readers I'll not specify why.  I read some criticisms of the characters being clichéd but I don't think this is the case, yes some of the emotions they display are obvious, but then what do the critics expect people under constant sniper fire to be feeling?  

Anyway, I can see this being one of the books from this generation that stands the test of time.  As with any book on this kind of theme there were a couple of rather gross bits, but he didn't dwell on describing them and usually moved on after a sentence or two.