Free books for all my (virtual) friends! New co…
Free books for all my (virtual) friends!
New content a-go-go over on the main Spike site, all of which you'll find linked from the main page. There's the corking in-depth interview with Will Self , plus conversations with both porn star Annabel Chong and Pornocopia author Lawrence O'Toole. Plus Steve Mitchelmore's ruminations on Gabriel Josipovici's On Trust.
Meanwhile, 4th Estate and Penguin are the latest lovely publishers to agree to doing book competitions with Spike. Expect a slew of new compos soon...
Good article in today's Torygraph about the code being cracked from Simon Singh's The Code Book. Having written an excellent account of the history of codes and codecracking, from the ancient Egyptians right through to the Enigma machine and beyond, Singh thought it would be a bit of a giggle to include a code to be cracked in his own book. It took a team of Swedes and a stack of computers to break the code and claim the ?10,000 prize.
The Code Book itself is well worth a read - Singh explains how codes work, but it's easy to skip those bits if (like me) you're more interested the uses that codes and ciphers have been put to through the centuries rather than the mechanics. Singh manages to combine both in equally satisfying depth. This type of book, which traces the history of something relatively obscure, is probably my favourite kind of reading, because it usually throw up all sorts of bizarre facts along the way that breaks the sanitised, generalised ideas we have about history.
