Revision Tips

For students, this is the time where we head into exam season and all the stresses and strains that this provides and i am always asked 'What's the best way to revise?'
Horses for courses as we all take in information differently and it is all about committing what you have learnt from the temporary short term memory into long term memory to be recalled.
My tip for doing this is to explain something to someone, the act of speaking it out loud ingrains it where you want it to be for when you are sat in the exam hall with just a pen and a sheet of question paper.
Science says the best time to revise is just before you go to bed as the undisturbed quiet time gives the information in your short term memory chance to permeate into the long term memory.
A study at the University of Edinburgh discovered that this method boosted recall by up to 30% which could make a massive difference to the grade you receive.
Definitely not recommended is doing it at the last moment and attempting to cram a years worth of notes into your brain in those the last few days because that way leads to headaches, far too much coffee than is healthy and trying to find body parts you can write an answer on unnoticed by the invigilator and believe me, THEY NOTICE EVERYTHING!!

The King Is Back

Don't know if it is me getting older or Hollywood is to blame but i seem to be visiting the cinema less and less each year and looking at the list of upcoming films this year the cinema seat will be safe from my backside again this year until at least September when Stephen King's 'IT' arrives.
It would be fair to say that i fell out of love with Stephen King and his novels a few years ago, the decade between the 1998 and the late 2008 was a slog even for a keen King fan like myself but thankfully the King is back and 11/22/63 was a s good a King novel and anything he put out in his heyday.  
Luckily through the lean years we had the King adaptations on our TV screens and films in the cinema and 2017 sees four adaptations to feast upon, the Dark Tower, IT, The Mist and Castle Rock TV Series which is a mash up of Stephen King characters.
Boom times are here for Stephen King then and although there is a fair amount of snobbery about King books from literary types, you don't get to have such a long list of books and TV adaptations without being a great story teller and King, despite his wobble which followed his accident, has been at the top of that list since the mid 70s when he threw his book Carrie at us.
To many King is a Horror writer but those of us who have been what he calls 'constant readers', he is so much more and has an impressive body of work that means generations to come will be able to understand just why he may not be the best writer of our generation but is overwhelmingly the most popular.

I Read It, Honestly

My friend has a weird way of reading books whereas she reads the first chapter, then the last chapter and if it seems exciting, she will go back and read it from the start. If not she puts it down and starts again with the next novel.
In some ways her method makes sense as i have spent far too long plowing through books thinking it must get better soon only to get most of the way through to realise it won't.   
Of course there is no right or wrong way to read a book but some people don't even do that, they watch the film of the book instead and then say they have read it.
Always a dangerous exercise especially as most films stray from the book they are based on but a whopping 64% of us admit to saying we have read the book but really only watched the DVD.
A survey by The Reading Agency found that the top most 'watched' books we lie about are:

James Bond books, Ian Fleming
Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
The Wizard of Oz, L Frank Baum
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

Books To Make You Smarter

Jane Austen said 'The person who has not taken pleasure in a book must be intolerably stupid' and boy are we surrounded by many people who have obviously never taken pleasure in a book apart from ones that comes with crayons but not to despair because neuroscientist Sam Harris has developed a list of 12 books that everyone should read to make them smarter.

1. The history of Western philosophy, Bertrand Russell
2. Reasons and persons, Derek Parfit
3. The Last Word, Thomas Nagal
4. The Holy Koran
5. Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
6. Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honour, Social Discomfort and Violence, William Ian Miller
7. The Flight of the Garuda: The Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Keith Dowman
8. I am that, Nisargadatta Maharaj
9. Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
10. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
11. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom
12. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, Jean Hatzfeld

Quite a heavy, and dare i say boring, looking list there but nobody said being smart was easy but for people who don't find reading books a joy at the best of times they would be quite a slog to work through and i'm not sure how the Holy Koran even got in there.
I think to bring those with an aversion to reading literature into the fold you need to hand them something that would hold their attention and slip things in under the radar so they don't get a chance to say 'hang on, me is learning, what the...' and throw down the book and watch Ice Road Truckers instead.    

My 12, in no particular order would include:

1. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
2. Animal Farm, George Orwell
3. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
5. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
6. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
7. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, Richard Carlson
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
9. Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
10 Hearts in Atlantis Stephen King
11 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick.
12 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Make your way through them and i refuse to believe that you will not put down the 12th book a better, smarter and more rounded person than when you picked up the very first one.

1984 Is Top Novel

I would suggest to anybody that George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, is well worth a read especially to the younger generation if only to see what tv programmes Room 101 and Big Brother are all about but in the current age of Donald Trump and his 'alternative facts', it is even more appealing.
Good news then that sales of 1984 have soared since Donald Trump and his hoard landed in the White House and laughably tried to silence any criticism in the media, especially the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
Orwell's classic novel is a tale of a society where facts are distorted using a fictional language called 'newspeak' for example the much maligned 'alternative facts' which to anyone else means plain not being truthful or lying over the claim that Mr Trump's inauguration drew in record crowds even though photographs showed more people attended Barack Obama's.
The book, first published in 1949, topped Amazon's bestseller list which is a great thing as everyone should read it and not just because it is a cracking good read but for references to an imagined dystopia that chime scarily close to things happening today.

Library Day

Today marks National Libraries Day, one of the most important institutions that we have and according to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) 240 million books were borrowed from the 3,450 libraries left in Britain.
The most borrowed authors of 2014-15 were James Patterson, Juliia Donaldson and Daisy Meadows. Roald Dahl was the most borrowed 'classic author' with Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie making up the top three.
The title that was most checked out by the British public was the 'Personal' by thriller writer Lee Child, 'Never Go Back' also by Lee Child and the crime mystery 'Abattoir Blues' by Peter Robinson.
The most borrowed audio-book was Lesley Pearse's 'Without a Trace' read by Emma Powell.
I seemed to have spent a good portion of last year plowing through the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich, a great accidental discovery about a female bounty hunter who mixes it in a world of supernatural characters and as there are 22 novels, 2015 was certainly a Stephanie Plum year although i also managed to squeeze in a handful of Ben Elton books and re-read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', a book so far removed from the 'Blade Runner' film it spawned that to say the usual 'loosely based on the novel' isn't loose enough.

The Real Scrooge

A Christmas Carol's central character, Scrooge, has to be the most famous fictional characters in history with everyone from the Muppets to Blackadder reworking their own version of Charles Dickens miser whose visits from spirits force him to change his ways.   
Although Dickens was famous for using his own and experiences in his stories, many don't know that when Dickens wrote Scrooge, he based him on a famously miserly politician of his time, John Elwes.
Despite being fabulously wealthy by inheriting a fortune, Elwes hated spending money and would go to bed at sundown to avoid having to pay for candles, he bought no new clothes and was seen so often in filthy rags, would buy cheaper spoiled meat, would walk everywhere rather than hail a cab and would stay in whichever of the properties he rented did not have a tenant at the time.
Elwes lived to the age of 75, but the doctor who attended his deathbed said he would have lived at least another 20 years if he had spent some of his money on taking care of himself.
The name of Scrooge was inspired by an inscription Dickens found on a tombstone of Ebeneezer Scroggie while he was writing the story.

Aug 13 1946 - H. G. Wells Dies

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then on that day ignoring hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

Britain has been blessed with some excellent story tellers down the years and today one of our finest has died with news that HG Wells has died of a heart attack aged 79.
While many will agree 'War of The Worlds' to be his magnum opus, i found 'The Time Machine' to be my favourite story from his pen, the concept of travelling through time an epic piece of science fiction writing.
He may have been a philanderer leaving broken marriage's and fatherless children in his wake but as a writer he must rank as one of this countries finest.
His imaginative and excellently written stories will remain even if he won't and as time passes, historians will settle less on his numerous affairs or what he called 'loving several people very deeply at the same time' and concentrate on his books which deserve to put him alongside the likes of Jules Verne as making an outstanding contribution to literature.

Of Mice & Men Too Good To Lose

Following the government's reshaping of the English literature exam syllabus from 2017, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are being dropped for more modern books written by British authors.
Although i don't necessarily agree with the favouring 'British writers', i do understand the need to refresh the book list every so often so we don't have the same books taught year after year, but it is such a shame that two absolute classics are being heaved aside.
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a bit of a heavier read than Steinbeck's much shorter novella but both books should be first on any list for children to read, if you fail to be inspired by either of these stories then you obviously have not read them.
I first studied Of Mice and Men at school, i have lost count the amount of times i have read it since, a truly special book that weaves in friendship, poverty, responsibility and a last page that is both breathlessly good and shocking as anything anybody has ever written before or since.  
I hope that this will not rob pupils of the discovery of some amazing literature, the kind that will inspire them to read more and i hope that even though these books are not to be covered in full, teachers of English literature will share my thoughts they they are too good to be forgotten and will make a small space for them somewhere in the syllabus.

Men And Books

On the 10th September 2001 the book 'My Pet Goat' was an unknown tale about a goat that eats everything but on 11th September it became one of the most famous books in the World as George W Bush heard about the attacks while having it read to him by a child.
After being told, Bush continued to sit there listening for a further seven minutes before deciding he had better do something, the time between being told and doing something explained by his supporters as 'The President projecting strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening' but we all know he wanted to know how that bad boy ended.
Bush is not alone in not being big on reading books himself, a Reading Agency says that 30% of men have not read a book since school with 'not really wanting to' the main justification.
Now if you are a man, or know one, i'm about to make a list of books that i recommend for them which may suit their more limited abilities.

1. Colouring books. Lots of pictures and you get to play with crayons and no difficult words to read.   
2. Pop up books. As these are aimed at children no tricky words of over two syllables to struggle over.
3. Audio Books. Have an actor read out all those difficult sentences for you.
4. My Pet Goat. Find out what enthralled GWB so much that he couldn't tear himself away. 

If all else fails, follow the George W Bush method and get a child to read a book to you. What i don't recommend is for men to run before they can walk so if you own a pair of testicles and you are tempted to read a book, start off at your intelligence level, approx aged 5, and then slowly build up from the likes of 'The Hungry Caterpillar' to something a bit more complex like 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' before you even consider tackling more grown up literature like Harry Potter.
You never know, one day you may become confident enough to REACH THE BLOODY INSTRUCTIONS ON THINGS!!

Tiny Tim Diagnosis

It just wouldn't be Christmas without Scrooge, Jacob Marley and the assorted Crachit family on the television, especially the crippled Tiny Tim wishing us all a Merry Christmas.
It is the death of Tiny Tim that is a large part of the change in Scrooge, the ghost of Christmas yet to come showing a crutch with no owner leaning against the wall but annoyingly Charles Dickens doesnt explain just why Tim will die if the miserly Scrooge doesn't change his ways.
Now, Russell Chesney, a physician at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital at the University of Tennessee Health Science Centre has worked out that all the clues leads towards Tiny Tim suffering from tuberculosis and rickets.
'In Dickens time, 60% of children of working-class London families had rickets, brought on by poor nutrition and lack of sunlight. At the same time, half of working-class kids had signs of tuberculosis'.
So how could have Scrooge not being such a miser have kept Tiny Tim from dying?
'Tiny Tim's rickets could have been reversed and his tuberculosis improved by sunshine, a better diet and cod liver oil, a supplement rich in vitamin D' Chesney said which ties in with Scrooge giving his hard pressed clerk a raise so he could buy better food to improve his family's diet and keep Tiny Tim alive.
Now all we need is a linguist to tell us what the young boy calls Scrooge when he asks him to go and buy the Goose from the butchers at the end of the film because it sounds like he calls him a w******!

Dr Sleep

As The Stephen King book 'Under The Dome' is presently on Television i don't want to give away the ending to anyone who hasn't read the book but the TV series has deviated so far from the book anyway that i'm not sure that it will end the same way but if it does, i wonder if many people will think WTF as i did when i put read the final page.
My problem with Stephen King is that his books have become so bloated that they can become a slog to get through, it is not often since about 2000 that i haven't finished a King novel and thought that it could have been cut by at least a third.
He does have some great ideas but seems to spin them out to 700 plus pages so my heart lifts when i see a new Stephen King book and sinks when i see the size of it and know that it is going to be 350 great, exciting pages and 350 pages of laboured reading interspersed between the good bits.
King has written 55 novels, and his 56th 'Doctor Sleep', harks back to Danny, the kid in Shining which was one of Kings high spots along with The Stand, Carrie, Needful Things, Cujo, Christine, Dolores Clairborne, Green Mile, Insomnia, IT, Misery, Pet Cemetery and 11/22/63 
I just hope it doesn't come for the same place as 'Dome' and start off great, twirl around in circles not particularly going anywhere in the middle and run out of steam at the end so it seems he was keen to finish it and start on another one which is how it very much came across to me. 
That said there is always just enough in a Stephen King novel to draw me back to the next one so even if Dr Sleep, a book he calls 'a return to balls to the wall, keep the lights on horror', turns out to be a stinker like Dreamcatcher or Bag of Bones, i know i will still be back the next time because when King is good, he is very, very good.

The Great Gatsby

There are some books that are claimed as classics and are well deserved of the title and some that feel as if they have been slapped with a sticker marked classic by literary types but don't really live up to it and that's how i feel about 'The Great Gatsby'.
Now that a film of the book is showing at our cinema's the book is being discussed once again and i'm quite perplexed by the insistence to build the book up to be mentioned in the same breath as 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'Of Mice and Men' which were amazing books.    
The Great Gatsby was a decent enough novella, set in one summer of Roaring Twenties America, the high end of society at the time, it is a slow builder with a brutal ending and the author,  F. Scott Fitzgerald, does a very good job of creating the era in your minds eye.
I do recall a story of how the book was largely ignored at the time it was originally published in 1925 and it wasn't until the book was given away free to US soldiers during the second World War that it became widely read and that is where i believe the term 'classic' comes from.
The book, read by the 150,000+ military, became synonymous with America WW2 in much the same way that whenever i hear certain songs it takes me back to a certain time and place and my good or bad experiences of that time so The Great Gatsby will hold many memories for the soldiers of that time, passed onto the next generation and that was how this 'classic' was born, a great PR move.
I may be wrong but that's how i see a good, if short, book becomes elevated to a status that it doesn't in all honestly deserve.
That said, i would recommend it as a decent read but i do plan to give the film a swerve.

To kill a mockingbird revisited

When i was at school i enjoyed reading but as i entered my teenage years and i discovered girls, music and other more interesting things, the books were left behind. It wasn't until i met my wife and her huge collection of books that my reading flame got rekindled.
Among her collection of classic books was 'To Kill a Mockingbird' which i first read aged around 15 because i had to in order to pass English Literature. It didn't mean much to me at the time, pleasant enough story about a lawyer defending a coloured guy in the Deep South of America, but 10 years later, with more mature eyes, i picked it up and when i finally put it down again i had decided it was one of the greatest books i have ever read.
This month it is fifty years old and it is rightly being flouted as one of the best books of the last century although that is a tough list to be placed head of.
My rejuvenated reading bug has seen me drag out some proper classics from the many book shelves that clog up our home, books that i had read previously but seem to have not really read at all.
1984, Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, Grapes of Wrath and Last of the Mohican's all seem to contain underlying messages and commentary that i just never got first time around.
It is good to read when you are younger but in my case i was just reading them and not actually 'reading' them at all but maybe it's just something that was wasted on a teenager and in my case, To Kill A Mockingbird needed a more mature and life experienced brain to really understand.

Happy Birthday Stephen King

I have a bookcase stood against the wall and a quick glance shows it holds approximately 200 books. Beside it is another bookcase, slightly smaller, which holds approximately 150. Both are chocked full of well thumbed paperbacks and in the case of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, held together by sellotape.
Not driven by any overwhelming desire to alphabetise or order them whatsoever, literary giants such as Dickens and Steinbeck approvingly rub shoulders with Dahl and Orwell until the list of the finest scribes hits King, Stephen and in many peoples minds, the idea of me mixing King with the great and good of the literary world is worthy of my head being removed and placed upon a stake at Traitors Gate as an example to others who keep The Shining beside To Kill A Mockingbird.
I will concede that Mr King's books have become bloated but strip away the fluff that he seems intent on cramming into every book since The Green Mile, and you are generally left with a more than decent story.
More known for his horror stories, King has been responsible for some outstanding works such as Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and the aforementioned Green Mile. He has written some stinkers (Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Dreamcatcher were particularly noteworthy in this regard) but they are few and far between but if a good old fashioned well written story is your want and you are willing to dismiss the sneers of literary snobs, then Stephen King should be on your bookcase.
Throw out the Edgar Allan Poe stuff to make room, he can't hold a candle to King.

Another Book Top 10

The Costa Book Awards have issued a list of the top books that us bookworms like to read again and again. The Harry Potter series tops the list and i can proudly say that i have never read as much as a sentence from any of JK Rowlings seven books. Neither have i ever read the book that came second, Lord of The Rings. No particular reason why i haven't picked up either of these two from a book shop or library, i just never really fancied them. The top ten are:

1. The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
4. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
5. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
6. 1984 - George Orwell
7. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
8. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
9. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
10. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

The only one i have re-read out of that selection is 1984. I do think that there are so many great books that i have to yet to read that i would rather plow through them rather than revisit the classics.
The fact that nothing by Shakespeare puts in an appearance while Eric Blair is sitting proudly at number six only strengthens my belief that rather than teach students outdated Shakey tales, they should be replacing him with the much more relevant to today Orwell.

From Potter To Plato

Coming home tonight i saw a witch sitting on the kerb sipping something out of a flask. A bit further along there was a wizard with a long white beard leaning against a wall chatting to another wizard.
After checking i was still awake it suddenly dawned on me that the reason there was so many strange sights about tonight was the release of the final Harry Potter book.
I have not read any of JK Rowling's books and only saw the first film because we were given free tickets but anything that can inspire children to queue up outside a bookshop of all places has to be good.
In an era of iPods and Playstations, i love the idea that a good old fashioned book can so grasp the imagination of kids and encourage them to get there nose into a book.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh novel in the series, is expected to be the biggest and fastest-selling book ever written. Water stone's predicts that on the first day alone the book will sell more than two million copies in Britain and more than 10 million worldwide. Books have inspired forces for both good and bad and can be powerful instruments, tools, and weapons so if Rowling can get kids engaged in reading again it would of been worth hearing kids shouting 'Wingardium Leviosa' every 30 seconds for the past 10 years.

Hold Your Horses Rushdie

As previously mentioned, I have never read anything Salman Rushdie has ever written and judging by the reactions of those that have, i haven't missed much.
With a knighthood stashed in his back pocket, Salman could arguably think that he is one of the greatest living authors but i say hold your horses mister, there is an author that knocks you into a cocked hat, scarf and gloves.
Those who think themselves of a more intellectual bent when it comes to novels, sneer at the man i think deserves the title of greatest living author, but i guarantee that if you haven't read one of his books, you have seen one of the films made from his books.
He may be gargoyle chewing a bee ugly but Stephen King has been responsible for some of the best books i have ever clapped eyes on.
It is hard to find anyone who hasn't enjoyed The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption or Stand by Me or been heebied jeebied by the likes of The Shining, Carrie or It.
He may be looked down upon by some, but you do not get that popular without having some story writing talent and i would be the first to agree that some of his works have become bloated and would benefit from slashing a few pages.
Not the most articulate writer ever to fire up the typewriter but probably the best storyteller if you like your tales with a bit of a dark edge.
And just think what he could of achieved if he hadn't spent all that time plotting to whack John Lennon.

Midsummer Night's Dreary

The new Secondary School curriculum is being planned and a few subjects have been made 'untouchable', therefore mandatory to be taught. Included are English, Maths and all the usual sensible subjects that we use pretty much everyday of our lives but i can never understand the obsession with Shakespeare.
Why should Shakespeare be made untouchable? I read Shakespeare at School and apart from the hours spent sitting in English Lit, i have never used Shakespeare once since i left school apart from throwing out the occasional quote to sound smart alecky.
There are much better authors with stories more relavant to today but we stick with the same old boring beardy bloke from Stratford Upon Avon.
Forsooth, what through yonder window breaks..ti's my works of Shakespeare book.