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caldron

From Brisbane, Queensland Australia
Age 56
Joined Sunday, August 10, 2003
Recent Book Activity
Statistics
4 weeks all time
books registered 0 189
released in the wild 0 175
controlled releases 0 0
releases caught 0 58
controlled releases caught 0 0
books found 0 25
tell-a-friend referrals 0 27
new member referrals 0 21
forum posts 0 1,494
Extended Profile
I tweet as 'caldron_baidu'

"A society is defined not only by what it creates but also by what it refuses to destroy."
John C. Sawhill


Habent sua fata libelli ~ books have their destinies

"It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness"

Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think . . .


"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwittingly victims of the darkness"
Justice William O. Douglas

"Ageing is a process of exchanging hope for insight"

(from Sheridan Hay's The Secret of Lost Things)

There is no gene for the Human spirit
Gattaca

"sunt lacrimae rērum et mentem mortālia tangunt'"
Virgil: the Aeneid



Read 2010 (29);
January
Slightly Foxed #22 - 'Don't give up the day job' Ed. Pirkis & Wood
The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown
Best American Essays 2007 - Ed. David Foster Wallace
FlashForward - Robert J. Sawyer
Hollywood Ending - Kathy Charles
The Social Entrepreneur - Andrew Mawson
The Blind Side: Evolution of a game - Michael Lewis
Halfhead - Stuart MacBride
February
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower
Standard Operating Procedure - Philip Gourevitch
Matter - Iain M. Banks
Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-88 - Michael Palin
March
The Children - Charlotte Wood
The Husband - Dean Koontz
Traffic - Tom Vanderbilt
Lovesong - Alex Miller
61 Hours - Lee Child
April
The Paris Review Interviews, IV - Vars. Ed. Philip Gourevitch
The Good Soldiers -David Finkel
Griffith Review #24 Participation Society - Various
The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield
May
Generation Kill - Evan Wright
Griffith Review #25 - After the Crisis - Various
Googled: the end of the world as we know it - Ken Auletta
June
Game Change – John Heilemann
Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs – Margaret Simons
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – John Gray
Skinner’s Rules – Quintin Jardine
July
Ten Prime Ministers: Life among the politicians – Wallace Brown


Currently Reading* (& Mt.TBR extract . . . )
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings
Carry Me Down - M.J. Hyland
The March of Patriots - Paul Kelly


My Favourite Reads from 2009
Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas
Here comes everybody: the power of organising without organisations - Clay Shirky
The Red Tent - Anita Daimant
Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
Human Smoke: The beginnings of WWII, the end of civilisation - Nicholson Baker
Me Cheeta: the autobiography - Cheeta
The Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway
Things We Didn't See Coming - Steven Amsterdam
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Other Hand - Chris Cleave
The Last American Man - Elizabeth Gilbert
Still Alice - Lisa Genova
Down & Out in Paris & London - George Orwell
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell
The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life - William Nicholson
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
Under Milk Wood - Dylan Thomas
What they teach you at Harvard Business School - Philip Delves Broughton
This is How - MJ Hyland
On Doubt - Leigh Sales
Little Children - Tom Perrotta
The Spare Room - Helen Garner
Joe Cinque's Consolation - Helen Garner
The Comfort of Figs - Simon Cleary
Ordinary Thunderstorms - William Boyd
Yellow Blue Tibia - Adam Roberts
Strange Days Indeed - Francis Wheen
Zeitoun - Dave Eggers
Without Warning - John Birmingham


My Favourite Reads from 2008
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
Carry On, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett (with thx to jawin)
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S Johnson - Jonathan Coe
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
What a Carve up! - Jonathan Coe
The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lucky - Alice Sebold
Remember Me - Melyvn Bragg
The Abstinence Teacher - Tom Perrotta
The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, power and the seeds of empire - Joe Jackson
The Fermata - Nicholson Baker
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
Barbarians at the gate: the fall of RJR Nabisco - Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
The End of Food - Paul Roberts
The Resurrectionist - James Bradley
Don't tell mum I work on the rigs, she thinks I'm a piano player in a whorehouse - Paul Carter
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch - Anne Enright
Indignation - Philip Roth
Cowboy Angels - Paul McAuley
Table Talk: sweet and sour, salt and bitter - A.A Gill
The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson
Dissection - Jacinta Halloran
The Schumann Frequency - Christopher Ride
The Art of the Engine Driver - Steven Carroll
The Gift of Speed - Steven Carroll
The time we have taken - Steven Carroll
The Rip - Robert Drewe
Vertigo: A Pastoral - Amanda Lohrey
The Beacon - Susan Hill
Someday this pain will be useful to you - Peter Cameron
True Colours: My Life - Adam Gilchrist
The Harp in the South - Ruth Park
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill


My Favourite Reads from 2007
The Memory of Running - Ron McLarty
The Prestige - Christopher Priest
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Two Lives - Vikram Seth (with thx to CoffeeBron)
The Fall & Rise of Reginald Perrin - David Nobbs
The House of Sleep - Jonathan Coe
Christie Malry's own double-entry - B.S Johnson
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Damned Utd - David Peace
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link (with thx to jawin)
I wouldn't start from here: A misguided tour of the early C21st - Andrew Mueller
In My Skin - Kate Holden
A Million Little Pieces - James Frey
Waterlog - Roger Deakin
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture & Assaulting Our Economy - Andrew Keen
Berlin: The Downfall 1945 - Anthony Beevor (with thx to Alex L)
My Friend Leonard - James Frey
The Rain Before it Falls - Jonathan Coe
The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry


Please note that the above lists are given in lieu of a personal commentary, presented only as a guide to my present reading (and therefore current interests).
Some of the books mentioned are in fact on-loan library books.
In addition, those which do belong to me may or may not contribute to my active Bookcrossing adventures, so please check those actually registered.
yours truly, caldron


caldron
C/-
PO Box # 2211
Ascot
QLD 4007
Australia

"Every advance in information technology involves choosing what you want to preserve and what you want to ditch. Scanning rare books on to microfilm is a costly business. The library won't let you do it yourself - they decide first which books should be scanned and which should just rot away in the basement.
Against that eventuality, people should start hoarding the kind of books committees of rational people will decide against scanning into a database"
Robert Twigger - The Extinction Club

"I didn't lose my mind,
it was mine to give away . . ."

Robbie Williams

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