1788 - Watkin Tench and Tim Flannery

For the first time in my life I am interested in Australia history. The amiable Watkin Tench's account of the first few years of settlement in Australia is absolutely worth reading. It bothers me that every Australian student hasn't read this book (or even knows it exists).

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American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House - Jon Meacham

Fascinating history of a complex, powerful and sometimes malevolent force in the history of the United States.

but Jackson was not a president of consistent principle. He was a politician subject to his own passions and predilections.

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Mapping of The Far Side of the World Complete

My map of the events in The Far Side of the World is complete. Most of the voyage was replete with references to well known rivers, capes, islands and atols making this map easier than most. I am probably least happy with the back and forth around Valparaiso (where I tried to stay true to the references in the book but was left feeling unsatisfied with the results) and the last dogleg around the prodigious storm that hit the Surprise directly after Jack and Stephen's rescue.

It has been six years since I last read The Far Side of the World and I had forgotten much and thus enjoyed mapping this volume all the more. Completing this map in ten months means I am beating my average by a couple of months and am now on track to finish the series in a bit under seven years. Hurrah!

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Life of Pi - Yann Martel

I like the bit with tigers.

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Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

These books were full of so many wonderful things, but the unexpected and quite unassuming insights were often worth writing down. An example:

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now.

The compelling visions of a colonised solar system that were fleshed out in this last book were fascinating, This ridiculously awesome vision of Jupiter:

... and flying gas lanturns had been dropped into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, clusters of them igniting some of the planets helium3 in points of light that were too brilliant to look directly at for more than a second. The fusion burns were suspended before electro magnetic reflecting dishes that put all the light out into the planet's plane of the ecliptic, thus the banded monster ball was now made an even more spectacular sight by the achingly bright diamond dots of some twenty gas lanturns wandering its surface.

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