feeling listless

Book Currently reading and heartily recommending 'The Victorian Internet' by Tom Standage, which is a history of the telegraph. This isn't as loosely connected as it would first appear. Rather like 'Longitude' this is an important story told with some passion. The first scene of the book is fabulously cinematic -- the moment of the discovery that electricity passes instantaneously from here to there:

"On an April day in 1746 at the grand convent of the Carthusians in Paris, about 200 monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking line. Each monk held one end of a 25-foot iron wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbour on either side. Together, the monks and their connecting wires formed a line over a mile long.
"Once the line was complete, the Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet, a noted French scientist, took a primitve electrical battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of monks -- giving all of them a powerful electric shock."

Bastard. The rest of the book is filled with such annecdotes turning what could have been quite a dry subject into something real and gripping. Believe me, there were hackers even in the early nineteenth century....

Rings Tinkagrrl reports that the first review is up -- it's from 'Newsweek', that august film tome. It's a good review which bodes well for the trilogy's wider appeal from fas of Tolkein and the genre -- more punters, more likely the next two won't go straight to DVD. Looking forward now to Kim Newman and the SFX crowd's reviews....