I am like reading

I don’t like that. I feel like I’ve lost something – my creative edge – my brains. I feel like I used to be smarter.

I started reading a book called Off the Grid, which I agreed to review for Globalshift.org, so it was more of an obligation read than a fun read. Three pages in and I’m hooked. It’s a fascinating look at what it takes to live outside of a community with water and power and 9-5 jobs. The author references Thoreau’s Walden and I remembered reading that book in college and studying the whole Walden Pond movement, which was somewhat akin to the hippie commune concept of the sixties.

I was born a reader. I read fiction books and biographies, history books and books about movies and how to books, poetry and scripts.

If I collected every word I read in day and put it on a piece of paper, I’d probably find that I read the equivalent of a novel, every day. But they’re scattered words.

It reminded me of Los Alamos phase a few years ago where I read everything written on Oppenheimer and the bomb. I miss being that invested in a subject.

Thoreau said, ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.’

I think this is why I haven’t written any good fiction lately. Because I’ve stopped learning and stopped living. Though I did learn how to move a database, but I don’t know that that really counts.

Slavery By Another Name

."Book is a Pulitzer prize-winning historical account of racial oppression and racial bias in the Southern United States [which] does not advocate violence or a violent ideology, nor does it attempt to incite violence based on race," writes Equal Justice Initiative director and lawyer Bryan Stevenson in the complaint.Stevenson said in a statement that banning an award-winning book about racial history in the South was "not only misguided, but … injurious to anyone who is trying to advance our society on issues of race". The news comes as the US marks Banned Books Week, an annual nationwide celebration of the right to read.

The complaint claims Melvin, serving a life sentence after being charged at 14 with helping his older brother commit two murders, was denied access to the book because of regulations which allow officials to withhold mail if it could be "an attempt to incite violence based on race, religion, sex, creed or nationality". Based on original documents and personal narratives, Slavery By Another Name tells of the tens of thousands of "free" black Americans who were bought and sold as forced labourers decades after the official abolition of slavery.

"The era of racial violence, lynching, and convict leasing in the South following Reconstruction is a deeply disturbing part of our country's racial history that is important and must be understood if we are to make progress overcoming the legacy of slavery and racial subordination. We can't cope with the racial history of this country by banning books or preventing people from reading about it – even incarcerated people, who retain basic rights and protections that were violated in this case," he said. "The need for more informed thinking about race and discrimination is especially critical in prisons, which are disproportionately filled with people of colour."

Julian Assange memoir

It currently sits in 766th place overall on Amazon's bestseller charts, and in 70th position on the internet bookseller's biography list.Whether Assange will be pleased or disappointed by the numbers remains to be seen: although the Wikileaks founder said that Canongate's publication was "about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity — screwing people over to make a buck", the publisher has promised to pay him royalties once it earns back its advance.Created with Assange's cooperation (according to its publisher Canongate the Wikileaks founder spent more than 50 hours being interviewed for it) but published against his wishes, the book went on sale last Thursday amid widespread coverage and serialisation in the Independent."There was no build-up for the trade, the media or with the reading public.

But we're proud of the way we handled what has been a difficult and unusual launch, and we are extremely proud of the book," he said. "Fortunately, the conversation now seems to be moving away from the 'publishing story' and focusing on the quality of the book itself. The early reviews – with the exception of a predictable whitewash in the Guardian – have been very positive, particularly in the Times and Independent with many more lead reviews lined up for this weekend. And the early customer reviews on Amazon are extremely positive too."

And in spite of the controversy surrounding the claims and counterclaims flung by Assange and his publisher, figures from book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan reveal that Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography sold just 644 copies in its first three days in shops."It was only the 50th bestselling hardback non-fiction book of the week, and only the 537th bestselling book overall, sitting directly behind Julia Donaldson's Freddie and the Fairy (Macmillan) and Sharon Kendrick's Satisfaction (Mills & Boon), a £6.99 collection of three short stories featuring 'three of her sexiest, most intense Greek heroes and glamorous heroines'," said Philip Stone, Charts editor at the Bookseller.

Canongate publishing director Nick Davies told the book trade magazine that the autobiography's performance was "a marathon and not a sprint", and that the publisher had "never made any big predictions about the sales of the Assange book – particularly on the first three days of sale"."So far the Assange autobiography has attracted two five-star reviews on Amazon, one saying that the book "was a long long way from the negative view of him presented by a media I now see have an agenda", the other that it painted "a vivid picture of a man on a mission to make the world a better – a more just – place".

Exciting events without the expanding newspaper industry

It was bad for those who joined the very long queues, especially in former mining villages or steel towns, but the majority went about their daily routines, finding themselves better off as the years went by, and would not have known they were living through exciting events without the expanding newspaper industry and increasing number of television channels.

"In the bookshops, you could find some very good books firmly located in the 1980s which dealt with topics like the rise of Thatcher or the causes of the Brixton riots, but equally there was escapist fiction or interesting non-fiction that took out of everyday life. Not a year passed without something new and memorable landing on the shelves."As well as journalistic career that has included spells as chief political correspondent for the Observer and Daily Telegraph and his current role as senior writer for the Independent.

Andy McSmith is the author of five books: biographies of John Smith and Kenneth Clarke, a collection of short biographies called Faces of Labour, and a novel, Innocent in the House. His latest book, just out in paperback from Constable, is No Such Thing as Society – a history of Britain in the 1980s.

"Each decade leaves its imprint on the memory. Images from the 1980s suggest a time of excitement and bustle – Live Aid, Princess Diana, the Falklands War, mass pickets outside Rupert Murdoch's new Wapping plant, testosterone-driven yuppies doing frenetic trade on the floor of a deregulated stock market, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall coming tumbling down, apartheid in its final throes. The western world saw more social change in those 10 years than in any other decade since the war. "But the much used cliché about the curse of interesting times did not apply to the average person.

Robert Harris

Harris was born in 1957 in Nottingham. His father was a printer and while he says "we had very little money, but I had no sense whatsoever of being poor and had an extremely happy and culturally rich childhood. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. The classic family story is us going to a school event when I was about six and all the other children reading out stories about what they did on their holidays, but mine was called 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home'.

There's a lot of moaning today about too many kids going to university, but my parents were bright people and I wish they had had that opportunity." Harris made his name as a novelist with Fatherland, his vaguely Orwellian, 1992 debut that posited a counter-factual history of Europe after Hitler had won the war. He followed it with bestsellers set among the second world war code-breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma) and in the aftermath of Stalin's Russia (Archangel). He has transported contemporary political issues back to ancient Rome and, drawing on his close association with New Labour when a political journalist on the Observer and the Sunday Times, conjured a character very like the post-Iraq Tony Blair in The Ghost (2007).

The books have received warm reviews with a quote from Martha Gellhorn adorning the Fatherland jacket:"Powerful and chilling ... convincing in every detail". They have notched up even more impressive sales. Harris and his wife Gill, sister of Nick Hornby, and their four children live in a large old vicarage in Berkshire that was once visited by Jane Austen. It is usually described as "the house that Hitler built".
　　
In thinking about his latest book Harris's new wealth and his old politics came together. "When Lehman Bros went down people were saying AIG was going to be next. That rang a bell because almost all of my money was in some sort of AIG bond, but like most people I didn't understand the first thing about this world. When I looked into it a bit more it was terrifying and shocking. We're all like mountaineers on some rock face lashed together. We're clinging on for dear life. And at the same time there has been this alarming rise in the super-rich class, which has been somehow facilitated by new technology."
　　
Harris says he had little interest in writing about the new rich. "I have met some of them and they seem to me to be both boring and often themselves bored. But I was intrigued by these enormous amounts of money, all floating free of tax, which is profoundly undemocratic. We've all been like saps buying our pension funds and tracker whatevers, and while we've been left for dead, these people have cleaned up. Anger was not the least of my emotions in writing this book."
　　　　
Harris read English at Cambridge but spent most of his time editing the university newspaper. In 1978 he joined the BBC trainee programme "largely because at that time NUJ rules meant if you went into print journalism you had to start work in the provinces. I'd just come from the provinces and didn't particularly want to go back." While working on Newsnight and Panorama he co-authored a book with his friend Jeremy Paxman about the history of germ and gas warfare; he then wrote books about the media's handling of the Falklands war and an account of the forged Hitler diaries fiasco. By 1987 he was political editor of the Observer.