Media science was the last exam, and I find it enormously interesting (I shall not make any prophesies or guesses there, I refuse to think about those frantically scribbled pages during four hours of coffee-and-red-bull-induced hyperactivity). The good thing about media science, is that I can disagree. There are methods, a tad of research, some statistics, a smattering of history, a smidgen of social science, a piece of psychology, a pile of popular culture and a pail of common sense. A delightful breakfast kedgeree, endless discussions and sink-teeth-into material.

In media science, they talk about TV and media as a means of flight.
The theory says that the industrial revolution gave us spare time, mind numbing routines and a fragmented life separated from seasons and rhythm. So a need for diversion. TV as a place to disappear into; another world, to vegetate and receive, with no means or need to respond or act. To either rest the mind from real life, or empty ones head: meditation, in a way, a forgetting of self. A flight into fiction, adventure, the mundane, the fantastic, the trivial: as long as it is not your own life. So here we are, the cream of evolution; with hundred channels and nothing on.
Fair enough.

But here is my thougths: I think the fragmented meaninglessness of the news and media in general (read: gossip) generates this need to “go somewhere else”, somewhere simpler, where rules are followed, good guys good, bad guys detectable. It seems to me to be self-generating. The shorter, more dramatic and contextless the news become, the stronger the need for a simple world somewhere. We cannot truly process the information.

As a virtual friend quoted: Be careful who you listen to, because their voices will influence your own.

I knew people who lived through, spoke like, and was more engaged in Coronation street than what was around them (what was around them was admittedly dismal, but so is Coronation street..). And I know a guy, and he is as smart as they come, who says that he stopped reading books because he’d rather live life than read about it. But his TVconsuption is up there among the best.

We choose the flightpattern. Mine at the moment is going south.

The art of looking sideways
Alan Fletcher
This is how it looks like inside my head. It a fountain of musings, facts, the odd, solid, and whimsical. It is design, doodles, unfinished thoughts, images, drawings. It is colours, shapes and wisdom. It is a delight and frustration at the same time – if I could show what goes on in my head, this is pretty much it.
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I should have stayed home
Roger Rapoport, Marguerita Castanera
Very funny. About all the glorious trips and travels that goes wrong. A collections of discomfort, disaster and disappointments. Timbuktu is not like you’d think. Not a homage to the well-planned, but rather an honest picture of how things can go, regardless of preparations.

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the IRA
Tim Pat Coogan
There’s a lot of junk about the IRA out there; a lot of rubbish. This is not without it’s faults and exhausting going-ons, but it is one of the better ones.
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All the trouble in the world – the lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death
P.J O’Rourke
O’Rourke should not be read in one sitting – he can be exhausting and a little too much. But he IS funny, cynical and sometimes, dead on. All the trouble in the world is not always what it looks like, or what some would like us to believe.
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The great war for civilisation – the conquest of the middle east
Robert Fisk
Depressing, informative, exhausting and impressive. It is very good, and the good Mr. Fisk is a relentless journalist, not letting sleeping dogs lie.
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Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Despite this being part of the curriculum, it is very, very good! Hah! Imagine that – a first class book in an educational institution… what marvels…
It gives a good, sensible introduction to typography, without the annoying, sentimental waffle often found in such books.
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The elements of typographic style
Robert Bringhurst
Clearly for the especially interested – but the book on the subject. In-depth, clear and sharp.
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Neither here nor there
Bill Bryson
Mr. Bryson can be a little too much too, and sometimes rather predictable. But his travels around Europe is very funny, and combining his experiences with the ones he had as a youth doing the same trip, is hilarious. Personally, I am fond of the story about the german restaurant, the incomprehensible menu and the threat of calf brain.
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Three in norway by two of them
anon
Hysterically funny, and should maybe belong under fiction for the many tall tales and absolute nonsense. But the descriptions of norway and inhabitants are spot on..

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Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen /Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke
Never mind the film. The book is beautiful, intelligent. Her view on her time in Africa very interesting, and the stories she tells vivid and touching.
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Hidden agendas
John Pilger
Well. Good old Mr. Pilger seems to repeat himself endlessly, so one book will do. He is relentless in his digging for truth, and like a dog with a bone, will not let go. Bless him.
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Those are real bullets, aren’t they?
Peter Pringle, Phillip Jacobson
There is a large pile of books on Bloody Sunday, but this is the best to my knowledge. There is a limit to how interested I am in reading about bullet entry angles over and over, when we all know what went on. They got the new inquiry, and we are still waiting to hear it.
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We wish to Inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
Philip Gourevitch
The awful story of the genocide in Rwanda.
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Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Brilliant thoughts on time.
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Color – travels through the paintbox
Victoria Finlay
This is the book with the annoying language and irritating fancies and guesswork. But the subject is immensely interesting, and her travels to all sorts of odd places entertaining. The myths and stories well researched; the fascinating conflicts and wars fought over colours fantastic.
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The ice master
Jennifer Niven
The mad story of the polar expedition of the ship Karluk and it’s crew. It is a story of survival, cruelty and a mad scientists’ need for self-promotion, but most of all it is a story of how tragedy can split men and bring out the worst in them. The crew and scientists of the expedition survives or dies along social divides, rather than work together. Revealing and terrifying.
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The politics of nationalism and ethnicity
James G. Kellas
Interesting. Don’t think I need to say more than that.

The poisonwood bible
Barbra Kingsolver
A stunning story about a bible-bashing missionary, his wife and four daughters, in the last days of Belgian Congo. Impressively, the five women have distinct voices and their common story unfolds in different facets through their different viewpoints. The family and the country disintegrates, and the girls all choose different lives based on those two years in Africa.

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To kill a mockingbird
Harper Lee
A classic, I am told. A beautiful story told with subtlety and simplicity. The two children of Atticus Finch, Jem and Scout, discover and learn what is important, and that majority does not mean right or fair. About race, racism, childhood, prejudice and secrets. Secrets kept by families, and by whole communities.

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Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Fairytale, metaphor.
Pi, is a 16 year old indian boy who have been a practicing christian, hindu and a muslim at the same time, to his secular parents’ great dismay. The family is moving to Canada, the freighter sinks, and Pi finds himself stuck in a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, a female orang utan – and a royal Bengal Tiger.
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The last king of Scotland
Giles Foden
A brilliant view on Idi Amin through the eyes of a young scottish doctor. A comment on raving mad, lovable and manipulative dictators everywhere. The balance and the line between funny fruitcake, strong leader and rabid mass murderer is well described, and the rather gullible and naïve doctor realise it all a tad too late.
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Cat’s cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
See the cat? See the cradle?
Wild, funny and desperate social comment from the good Vonnegut. A sharp and glittering view on what motivates people, and what makes the world go ’round.
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Slaughterhouse five
Kurt Vonnegut
Based on Vonneguts own experiences from the bombing of Dresden, it’s wild, mad and utterly believable. Frightening yet funny.
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Out stealing horses – Ut å stjæle hester
Per Petterson
An amazing story that only gets better on second and third reading. Trond, an old man moves to a cabin, and meets a man that brings back memories of the last summer he spent with his dad in a similar place. It seems like a pleasant exercise, but a darkness lies behind everything.
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Midnight’s children
Salman Rushdie
I have read this a few times, and I still think it is Rushdies best. It is fantastic, imaginative; suffused with the weirdness of India, Indias independence and crazy magic, poverty and curry. It is written in a clear language, light-years from Rushdies later see-how-many-complicated-words-I-can-spell tendencies. Quiet, simple.

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Eureka street
Robert McLiam Wilson
“All stories are love stories.”
So begin the story of Jake and his friends, a mixed bunch of people in Belfast. It is wildly funny, shocking, and very very Belfast. Soft and hard, surprising and sweet.
Jakes fat, protestant friend comes up with a scheme to make money, and nothing is ever going to be the same.
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The trial / the process
Franz Kafka
Dark, disturbing and funny. The trial is an excellent story of a man accused without knowing what for, and the senseless labyrinth of mysterious, dark ways to secure support. The desperation of K as he traverses unknown parts of the city to seek knowledge and information, and how his mind changes focus in the process. He stops asking the obvious questions, and accepts.

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One hundred years of solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Tells the story of a family and their fictional town, Macondo, spanning a hundred years. An exercise in history, fiction and a smattering of magic realism, Marquez weaves histories, generations and actions of different times together in an intricate mesh.
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Crime and punishment
Fydor Dostoevsky
The classic story of Raskolnikov, the hatchet and the old lady pawnbroker. Teeming with impossible russian play on words, it is a hard read, but at times hilarious. Raskolnikov justifies his actions and the murder of the old lady, and paranoia takes over his every waking moment. Obsessing with his own justifications, he is also unable to stay clear of the detective Petrovich in charge of the case. Raskolnikovs inhuman philosophy crumbles, and he understand his humanity at last.

War and peace
Leo Tolstoj
Witty and informative, it is not as impossible as some will make you believe. Some rants on history and how and who makes history, but basically entertaining and interesting. And it does indeed describe war. And peace.
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A tale of two cities
Charles Dickens
Dramatic, funny and interesting, it is a story about London and Paris during the french revolution. The plot is tighter than other of his books, and I am thankful that there are less of the hysterical humour too. It is a dramatic story, a traditional storyline, and though it gets soppy in places, I still think it is a great book.
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Foucaults pendulum
Umberto Eco
This is a riot in history, traditions, myths and the ability to see connections everywhere – you see what you want to see. The story is about three friends that works for a small publishing house. After reading too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories, they decide they can do better, and set to invent their own conspiracy for fun. They call this game “The Plan”. It blows out of all proportions, and escalates, as others seems interested in it too…
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The shipping news
Annie Proulx
Brilliant story of a simple guy and his two daughters moving to Newfoundland, where his ancestors are from. Surprisingly much happens in this book, and the language is economical to the roughly hewn, matching the scenery it describes.
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The butcher boy
Patrick McCabe
Mad story of boy growing up in rural Ireland. A mother in the asylum, a classic alcoholic father, Francis talks to the virgin Mary, and murders his best friends’ mother. It is bordering on stream-of-consciousness which I greatly detest, but McCabe pulls it off, and the disturbed mind of Francis comes through.
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Kafka on the shore
Haruki Murakami
My first Murakami book, this is a rollercoaster of whims, talking cats, fish raining from the sky, and some Kafkaesque scenes in dark alleys. Bizarre, brilliant, absurd and funny, the book hardly have head or tail, and is a law unto itself. “Linear” is not a word in Murakamis vocabulary.
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My name is Red
Orhan Pamuk
On the surface a murder mystery set in Istanbul during the Ottoman rule of Sultan Murat III. The story is told by different narrators, including a coin, the corpse and the colour red. Evocative and surprising.
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The island of the day before
Umberto Eco
In 1643, an italian nobleman is shipwrecked, and finds himself washed up to a seemingly abandoned ship at anchor near an island. Not being able to swim, he is trapped. It turns out that the ship is a research vessel, it’s original occupants attempting to solve the problem of longitude, so crucial to mastering the seas. Our man is convinced that the ship is anchored exactly at the date line.
The book is wonderful, covering a lot of interesting stuff, such as the belief that things with relations have “sympathy” with each other, such as a sword and a wound. There are also a memorable logic in the way Father Caspar tries to explain religion with science: there are not enough water on earth or in the heavens for the flood. Where did God get the water from? Simple: our lord used the water from tomorrow.. and therefore, science, religion and power have the same goal: solve the longtitude problem, to be able to rule the sea. And fate.

So- without further ado:

I give you The Alchemist.

Oh god. What sensless babble, what inane nonsense. The story and the point of the whole painful exercise is that there is gold in your back yard, but you would never have seen it without a nonsensical and stupid adventure (alchemy). The language is for children at best, and you can open it at any page and find skin-irritants like «The boy thought. The boy thought about the stars – I wonder what they think.» – or somesuch terror. Godawful stuff – and would not have earned a place on my bookshelf of shame if not for the immense popularity. I am sorry – but when people list this book among favourites, I write them off as idiots. Period (Actually – I’m not sorry about that).
The language is disgusting, the plot childish and daft. A lot of people like it and say it’s inspirational, a word that makes me shudder. Believe me: it is crap. I have read a lot. It’s dumbing down.

Then, to the more laughable and serious

Atlas shrugged.
What self-centered idiocy! What blind narcissism, what racist, stupid, vapid and cloyingly vomity. I read the first hundred pages thinking it was sarcasm, irony, a weird sense of humour – not so.
The woman is dead, that is a comfort, so she cannot spew out more braindead half-baked social commentary and «philosophy». What an affront! She tries to present her «philosophy» through «drama» – it is neither, and both is godawful.
She’s got charming views on social systems, classes and government, but most of all she is basically an «elitist» with facist leanings. Tipping over, rather. So. Poo-poo!

Here’s the brilliant thing: she divides the world into do’ers and wiengers. Do’ers – that’s about one in 10 000 are the only ones worth anything, obviously. Without these do’ers and leaders, the rest falls back to the stone ages and society falls apart into caveman behaviour at record time. See? So every single person reading this book will identify with the leaders and do’ers. The brilliant result is that the woman has a following (!), a cult and a bunch of fans…. now there’s a liiittle contradiction. You see yourself as a leader, and then hang after the author. But her whole «theory» is based on opposite. Result: the loosers hanging after the author and going to «appreciation groups» (how weird is THAT!) proves by going that they belong to the authors cavemen.
Wonderful. The author was an idiot. That doesn’t justify that tail of fools…

The whole book is ..oh.. about 1200 pointless pages of bad, bad drama and exceptionally bad thinking. If you find it in a garage sale, buy it, burn it and make the world a tiny little bit better.

One day I will invite you all to a bookburning, methinks. And we can laugh and read the worst sections of favorite pet-hates before getting hotdogs and hot whiskeys all around. And make the world a little bit better.

..and another day – I might tell you about my loathing for Mr. Hemingway, Anna Karenina and some of the Brönte clan.

Bookshops without books. Somebody should get shot. Somebodies head should roll.

In a corner, behind the massive display of diddle figures, pink pencils, rubber balls, key rings, balloons, wrapping paper, glittering teddy bears, and multi-coloured markers… there’s a small shelf, with a few books. It’s about the size of mine; after I removed 10 boxes and moved here.

They’re seemingly randomly thrown up there, not even alphabetically arranged, and different books and authors stacked in front of others. But they aaaaall have front facing.. the very least, they could have placed them spine out. I stood looking at the shelf for a good seven minutes, trying to wrestle out the system of it. There’s none. Either it was never meant to be a system, or no one is bothered that customers mess around to figure out what is behind.

Or maybe they don’t know the alphabet. Even their limited shelf of audiobooks are not arranged alphabetically.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

And what sort of books is it? I shouldn’t have to say. The DO have a Johan Borgen, the first book of the trilogy (and only that), but that’s just because there’s been an anniversary. And there is a Hamsun there too. Shame I detest him. But you know- standard, awful airport crap, with the embossed names of authors covered in metallic foil. Add a bullethole/slashing knife/bits of skeletal joints… and titles containing words like “final”, “destiny”, “blood(bath)”, “death” and “midnight”. (in fact, all airports I have ever been to, with one exception, had better bookshops than this university college town.).

I asked for five titles, they had none. All of them solid literature, price-winning, booker nominated, current and translated. Oh, I’m lying. They had one of them, as audiobook. It costs a fortune, and it is not the same. It is not a book. The woman behind the counter had obviously never heard of any of them, and I had to repeat author and title several times. Bless her, she’s probably a certified expert on Diddle-pencils and fluffy keyrings.

I’m lying again. They DO have books. Under the title “gift books”. You know, the type full of glossy, gorgeous photos of sunsets, cars, planes, food and as little text as possible. These books often come in folio formats, and take up a good deal of the shelf. So no surprise. They’re beautiful things, usually, but breaks a bookbinders heart more than paperbacks ever could. Don’t say the word “fiber” as you open one of them.
Coffee table books. As if I have a “coffee table”, where I can casually leave out a bunch of exquisite poster-sized books on buddhism, antarctica and cooking with asparagus.

Beauty doesn’t help, if it’s brainfood you want.

And don’t tell me about cost efficiency, the customer-gets-what-the-customer-wants, or any cows dung about majority rules. It’s a f*x%#*! bookshop. It says so on the front.
I’m pissed off and offended. I miss the irish bookshops. The stairs and upstairs in Dublin, Byrnes and Kenny in Galway.

“Stationery’s” is at least a fair name. Or “toys”. Bookshops it ain’t. An offence. A lolly-coloured hell.

Torch them all.

They wouldn’t burn, though. With all that pink fluff, they’ll just melt.