What I'm Listening To
Finished the audiobook of A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s. I went through a big Hemingway phase in my first year at university, but don't remember reading this one and it didn't seem familiar.

His writing style seems a bit disconcerting as an audiobook: it's not quite colloquial and not quite formal so it sounds a bit forced. You get used to it though.

The descriptions are very good, and some of the anecdotes are reluctantly fascinating: F. Scott Fitzgerald's anxiety about his penis size in particular. Glad I didn't read it back then though: away from war, hunting and bullfighting Hemingway comes across as rather snide and petty when discussing other writers personal flaws. While brutally honest at describing other people, he's very cagey on subjects like his own gambling and divorce: giving brief abstract overviews rather than the detailed analysis and reconstructed conversations.

Overall, a bit poor by Hemingway's standards, pretty good by most other standards. Not the best place to start though: if you haven't read him already go for the short stories or "For Whom The Bell Tolls" if you've got to have a novel.

What I Will Be Listening To
Next, it's back to audiolectures for a bit: bought another bunch from the Teaching Company. Have got a few into "Philosophy and Religion in the West" which is pretty interesting so far. Seems to me that the Platonists tend to expand Plato way beyond his original thinking though.

What I'm Reading
Finished The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. Sequel to "The Atrocity Archives": kind of magic/spy/computer nerd crossover books, about a guy who works as for the British government's secret magical spy department.

The first book was quite low-key and gritty, but this one uses a somewhat over-elaborate excuse to go all James Bond. Still quite entertaining, but naff-James-Bond humour is pretty much a worked-out seam, and metafictional plotting has been done pretty heavily as well. Pratchett`s Witches Abroad had much the same gimmick.

Even so, the details are entertaining, the nerdery suitably detailed, and the plot's pretty fast moving if predictable. Also this book feels like more of a novel than the predecessor, which seemed a bit of a fix-up. There is a kind of coda that might be meant to fit in with "Halting State."

Worth a look if you like Charles Stross, but not unmissable.

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Pics. Condom envelopes. Dinosaur bones closeups. Abandoned book depository. Ruined statues of liberty.