Initiation ceremony complete. So who is the winner? amazon wasted a lot of time and money for no sale. I wasted a lot of time for no purchase.......I was thinking about books. And I tried to list my favourite ones. But I have been thinking of another list..and that is books that were influential in my life. Amongst these I would include those by Leslie Charteris that strange half white half Chinese gentleman who created the 1950s Robin Hood.The Saint. In one of his novels he has Simon Templar say words to the effect of.." you cannot compare us with real criminals....we do not aim to compete with Insurance Companies and Banks."
And of course the bank is the winner. $75 goes out at a cost of £49. $75 comes back at £47.-0. Bank in profit to the tune of +$4. And on the cricket score principle...ie everyone makes a few runs and the side turns in a reasonable score....they turn a nice little profit.
While we are on the niceties of scams...The Mall of whom I have spoken before...charges some kind of VAT on purchases. Result I buy an item priced at 100Baht..costs me 100B and 75 satangs..These are nasty little coins like old French centimes used to be....BUT you cannot use them except on buses where the fare is 3Baht 50 satangs (and in The Mall) I have got large jars of these things..probably $100 worth. Went to 7-11 with 100B worth to buy a beer.No thanks. Went to change them in the Bank.No thanks!!

So now the question is do I use PayPal to send money? And opeing that account was another saga, with which I will not bore you! Suffice it to say that PayPal has some nifty little spying device that KNOWS...you are using a Browser in 'HORROR' Thailand not Iowa. Seems to have escaped them that some Americans do go ABROAD....On this subject...you know I would rather not point to mainstrean news sources...because you all read them anyway; but Why we still don't get it, one year on is already a little elusive in the search engines (I wonder why?!)...and The dead and the guilty maybe this one may well be soon!

About these influential books. I am not saying they are 'great or good'.. and certainly not the same as the 'favorite' list....but

Aged 0-10
*Wise Owl's Story..Alison Utley...instructive saga on property ownership
*Adventures of The Little Brown Bears..anarchic animals...'a pound of cotton, a reel of cheese, a pod of bread and a loaf of peas'
*William..Richmal Crompton......DIY guide to insolence and excuses
*The Aeneid....Virgil........tedious under the bedclothes torchlight translations followed by flogging. Strangely the book endured
*The Scarlet Pimpernel.....Baroness Orczy.........DIY Guide to ID concealment
*The Flight of The Heron.....D.K.Broster (who?) Reasonable introduction to Anglophobia
*L'Enfant et La Riviere..Henri Bosco......Provencal escapism (before the rush)
*Down With Skool: A guide to school life for tiny pupils and their parents...Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle...Ethnography of Real Life
*1066 And All That...W.C.Sellar and R.J. Yeatman....We had separate subjects..History and Dates
*Nonsense Songs....Edward Lear
I did not read any of the 'standard classics' RS's taste in or knowledge of Children's Books did not extend much beyond Arthur Mee and The Book of Welsh Fairy Tales and MEE'S not much beyond Little Grey Rabbit. RS gave me Henry Esmond for my 9th Birthday!! And at school I think they thoght Romain Roland was kids stuff. There was Patapouf too-not the Kathryn Jackson thing about elephants...but about a bear or was it a wolf who destroyed pigs houses until they built one out of michelin tyres....maybe it was a promo! See how one remembers good advertising.

10-20
Shadow The Sheepdog...Enid Blyton..Heartrending sentimentality
Angelique...Sergeanne Golon..ie Serge and Anne....Prepubescent Porn with Pirates in The Vendee and The Maghreb
The Saint...Leslie Charteris...On Maidenhead, nice cars and international finance
Poems...W.B.Yeats....Mooning about
Sonnets...W.Shakespeare...More Mooning about
Journey To The End Of The Night...L.F.Celine....Inrush of The Real World
Return Of The Native...Mooning meets the real world
Odes..Horace...more under the bedclothes...but with Radio Luxembourg and no flogging
Homo Ludens..J..M Huizinga...more ethnography and an antidote to Nietzsche
Alexandrian Quartet..Lawrence Durrell....Read in French for some perverse reason..but discovered really did not have to live in England...just took a long while to get therell
Actually I am not sure about 10-20..Will have to give more thought also to this...only a beginning

20-30
L'Etranger...A. Camus......of course....justification for standing outside on the balcony/lawn at parties
The English Anarchists...George Woodcock....excellent introduction to the third way..or no way
The English Utopia...A.L.Morton........why Surrey is still the Land of Cockayne
My life...and lots of it..Alexander Herzen........I used to walk up Westbourne Terrace every day and think of him
Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle ....P-J Proudhon.....More printer's pensees
Elizabeth David..French Country Cooking......Not her best book and none of them as good as Jane Grigson, or as good as many cookery books discovered later..but critical in believing what I had cooked in France could be cooked in Oxfordshire
Russell Lord...The Care Of The Earth.......proto.Green..
babycare calls.............
Paroles......Prevert, Jacques.....seminal Oxford undergraduate affectation
The Raw and The Cooked...Claude Levi Strauss......gateway to ethnography, linguistics....reflective/reflexive everything
Waiting for Godot....Sam Beckett......discovered I could act............
So you see what an effective and stimulating English Literature Degree Course The Dreaming Spires provided.

**No. On thinking about this I would have to knock off A.L.Morton and Proudhon in favor of:
Confucian Analects...Mencius...otherwise my brilliant career as a sinologue would never have begun and therefore not ended so quickly...thank you to those two most uninspiring teachers Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe ,...but I was left with Joseph Needham!
The New Polytechnics,....Eric Robinson....tedious Penguin Special....but...influentially articulated the reasons for not working in Oxbridge, red brick, greenfield or other 'universities'

30-40
This is getting harder......Have to think about this.......HOW ABOUT YOU???
um..never kept a commonplace book..well til now!
The Bookman's London.....Frank Swinnerton.....became an antiquarian bookseller!
Gastronomic Bibliography........Katherine Bitting......wrote a thesis on Cookery Book Illustration!
Ivor The Egine-The Dragon...Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin...Rhodri and I have travelled on Ivor from Porthmadog to see the Dragon...and back
Corsica...Dorothy Carrington....went there...better than one could ever have hoped... like France in 1950...or Laos today
Victorian Publishers Book Bindings....Ruari McLean............eye opener to Book Design, Typography Private Presses and everything
am beginning to think that once we had the book business and Rhodri I did not read anything important except Mother and Child by Penelope Leach and The Clique and The Bookdealer!