In Liverpool in 1998, I bought a book from a publisher clearance style bookshop called ‘The Breeders Box‘.

It’s set, primarily, in New York, around Greenwich Village - where I have never been - and for the first four, five times I read it, I had to imagine what the area looked like, how the streets fitted together and where things were in relation to each other.

The last time I read it - a couple of years ago - I realised I could look up the area on Google Maps and I could navigate all around, looking at the positions of stuff and blurry satellite photos of the tops of buildings.

This time I read it, I went back onto Google Maps, looked up the area then clicked for the street view - I could see the shapes for all the buildings in the area then plonk my little guy down where, say, the fictional eponymous club was on Spring St and look at the street itself, both sides and moving back and forth along the road.

I wonder how I’ll be able to interact with the real version of the fictional world in another ten years time.

My current employer, Leeds University Library, is running an event called “Leeds Read at the moment, to culminate with World Book Day on Thursday 2nd March 2006.

Around the various buildings, there are displays and opportunities for people to vote for their favourite book, and there are special “meet the author” type events too. The staff room in my library has a bookswap event going on too, in a take-a-book-leave-a-book way.

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By coincidence, I’ve read two books on about British social history since 1945 back to back recently. (Actually, I read the excellent “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold in between but I was ill and got through it in less than a day so it didn’t really feel like a long break between the other two books.)

Anyway, the books I read were “Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-war Britain” edited by Simon Garfield and “Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain” by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.
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For almost a year now, I’ve been playing an online game based on the Foundation series by Issac Asimov. It is, strangely enough, called FoundationGame (or FondationJeu in its original French) and can be found here (and here for the French version).

I started playing because John introduced me to it. He had read the series and was enjoying the game, so got me to sign up too. I was reticent at first: the rules/instructions seemed really vague, with no guidance for newbies. I also felt I would suffer because I hadn’t read the books. But my obsessive gaming streak won through in the end so here I am, a year later, and it’s the first site I visit each time I get on the web. I have a higher threshold for annoying bits of games and bad interfaces than John - he gave it up after a couple of weeks.

This game has become a big part of my online life now so last week I decided to take the plunge and start reading the books. I’ve only read the first one so far - I’m just having a minor Iain Banks break (re-reading Espedair Street and Whit) then will crack on with the others.

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I’ve just finished reading The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer. It was well written and reasonably enjoyable but didn’t really compare to the book that inspired me to buy it, The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Both are essentially about how complicated love can be when one of the people involved has some genetic abnormality and so doesn’t experience time in the same way as the other. They are also much better than that lame summary suggests.
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