And yes, it’s still the Alan Turing book. Last week I thought I had three weeks more to go, but I’m not sure I want to revise that time frame. I still think it’ll be three weeks, but three weeks from today. I’ve lost track of how many weeks I’ve been reading, but it’s three or four and I’m finally just over halfway. 540 pages and I’m on about page 315. Where I am currently in the book it is post WWII and they’ve been talking about ENIAC. We’re finally starting to get into some things I understand…until I get a little further and I find I’m wrong. I’ll know when there are things I understand because it’ll be easier for me to read. So, until I finish the book and am able to write about it you’ll have to put up with me rambling about things.

I used to write five days a week on this blog. Because I couldn’t read fast enough to write about a book every day, I had various columns I used to write. I’m considering revisiting three of them. They used to give me great pleasure and really stretch my brain. I’ll write a short paragraph about each of them and then ask you a question.

Paratalk or Torque?

This was where I took a paragraph at random, from a random publication. It might have been a magazine, a novel, anything that caught my fancy. It was mostly random. I had to be able to type out the paragraph and then have something to say about it. Sometimes I’d read a paragraph and nothing would come to mind, other times I had so much to say. The column was something I planned while at uni and one of my friends there gave me the name. If, or when, I revive the column I will be using the same name in their honour.

Randomly Shelves or Something

I can’t remember when I started writing this column. It was where I would take two books from my shelves and try to find a link between them. The link had to be fairly real, it couldn’t be that they had the words ‘and’ or ‘the’ in them. Again, this was mostly at random. I would shut my eyes and touch books, when I had a hand on one book each I took them off the shelf and looked at them. I then had to check I hadn’t used these books before, if I had I put them back and started again. I would introduce the books in the first week and then have a week to remember the books so I could find a link. Occasionally I’d have books I hadn’t read so I had to read up on them or skim bits and pieces. I’ve read most of the books on my shelves so I have a lot to choose from.

A-Z of authors

This was great fun, I found some people who have done really interesting stuff. Some of them had written very little and others had written enormous amounts. To make the challenge a little harder I used to make the series about something specific, such as the A-Z of Female Fantasy Authors. Each week I would showcase a different letter in the series. It’s been a while but I think I wrote four different series of these A-Z of Authors. What was exciting when one of these authors found her entry and commented, she gave me a link back to her website, I fangirled the rest of the day. The real challenge is when I’m up to a letter that is not used very often for names such as ‘x’.

And the question

Tell me what you think. Do you have a column you’d like me to revive? I’ll choose the column that gets the most comments. This will take the place of Book Reviews until I’m finally finished the Alan Turing book, at that stage it will move to a different day of the week. If no-one comments I’ll make a choice based on what I want to do next Monday. You have one week, and your time starts…as soon as this is published…and you thought I was going to say ‘now’.

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