I'd like to meet:
Hmmm. I'm not exactly a people person.
Music:
Belle and Sebastian, The Delgados, Camera Obscura, R.E.M., The Smiths, Madness, The Who, Isobel Campbell. Apparently these are the things I listen to most often, at any rate. It's forgotten all those musical soundtracks...
Movies:
Musicals, teen comedies, romantic comedies, and things in French where I try to pretend I can still understand it without looking at the subtitles. Not that I can. Apparently I have a girl's taste in films, which I think is rather harsh on the girls. Happy endings are always welcome though, especially when the no-hope socially inept geek gets the girl. Some git always has to point out that this is fiction, unfortunately.
Television:
One word: Emmerdale.
Books:
I'll read anything, just about.
Children's books I like include (and I'm not entering into a debate over whether Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia should feature here!): Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the Harry Potter novels, Garth Nix's The Old Kingdom Series (Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen), and the two aforementioned series. I also used to get through enormous quantities of Enid Blyton and similar things, but not so much of that these days.
I also like... pretty much anything by Wilbur Smith (less sniggering, I know they all share the same basic plot elements but it's fun!), Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children novels, some of William McIlvanney's stuff (the Kilmarnock-based stuff, at any rate; was never too keen on the whole 'whydunnit' conceit), Mayor of Casterbridge and Far From The Madding Crowd (I've never really got into the rest of Hardy), Dickens (kept me going for ages in Belgium!), nineteenth century stuff generally in fact... scanning the bookshelves from the opposite side of the room, I can also see some Thomas Keneally (I tend to find him a bit hit or miss), Henning Mankell (Swedish detective stories; apparently the BBC have bought the rights), Jostein Gaarder (I enjoyed Sophie's World and Through A Glass, Darkly, but I never quite understood all the poseyness involved when I first read them), Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife, L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (good, in a slightly weird upper class way) and sundry novels in French which, quite frankly, are a sheer exercise in pretentiousness as I never had to sit the literature papers!
I've also been reading quite a lot since Christmas (anything to alleviate the Diploma tedium...), so here's some of my post-Christmas list: The Shadow Of The Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon; I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe; The American Boy, by Andrew Taylor; The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory; The Black Cat, by Jenny Maxwell; I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith; and My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult.
Despite the above, I don't have that much fiction in Glasgow... nearly everything else is history. Lots of history books, most of it modern or maybe a bit earlier at best. I'm slowly working my way back! I'm currently reading Martin Meredith's The State of Africa on and off, which is interesting, though I also had a flick back through a book about transportation to Australia following that Mary Bryant thing on TV at Easter. Anyway, this is bound to be getting boring by now...!
