Waves

The Timewaster Letters
The Return of The Timewaster Letters

By Robin Cooper

I’ll include both of them in the same entry, as concept and content-wise they are exactly the same. I thought these two books were very funny. Basically, the books consist of correspondence between the (clearly mad) Robin Cooper and the various comapnies and hobby groups he sends his insane letters to. Robin Cooper is actually Robert Popper, the guy who co-wrote the genius Look Around You. Ranging from things like asking Debenhams to close for half an hour so he can look for a lost shoe lace to (my personal favourite) Parmaynu (who is a talking Ping Pong bat, and quite clearly an expert). Robin keeps trying to get companies to use him (it?) as their mascot, with very little success – hilarious stuff, it really is.

Check out Robin Cooper’s website for loads of cool stuff including The Timewaster Phonecalls and Ask Parmaynu.

The Video Games Guide

By Matt Fox

Should a guide be impartial? I think the title is a little misleading – this isn’t so much a guide, rather a collection of thoughts on games that this guy played. Surely a guide wouldn’t rate the games, or go into what the person writing the guide thought of them. Anyway, however I define “guide”, it doesn’t make a difference to how this book is presented or written. While some of the entries go into a lot of detail (games he liked), some of them are very sparse and only go so far as to say that the author thought the game was awful.

It’s not really a complete guide either, as he seems to have passed over all hand-held formats, and he also drops a few clangers – my favourite being that Street Fighter is a franchise that has been well and truly wrung dry (the book being written before Street Fighter IV, obviously). And some of the entries are just plain odd, or fail to mention those massive gameplay mechanics that made the game unique (such as the rewind time feature in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time). All in all, it’s an interesting read, but it’s far too biased to be any kind of definitive guide.

Tales from the Thousand And One Nights

Translated by N.J. Dawood

Interesting one, this. I randomly found it in a box of stuff we brought with us in a box from Southampton, and upon picking it up one day and opening the front cover I found that it used to belong to my Dad (it has one of those “This book belongs to” stickers on the reverse of the cover). Apart from my memories, is it the only part of him I have left? It was published in 1973 (hence the original photograph of it, not a stock photo), and it has that smell of old books, it’s delicious. Anyway, the stories themselves are old. Older than anything I’ve ever read, and the nearest thing to a religious scripture I’ve ever absorbed. Every page there’s at least one mention of Allah, not that I’m against religion or anything, I found it quite inspiring that the people inhabiting the Tales found something to believe in and give them comfort.

The interweaving of the stories was nice, I love how one character in a story would tell another story within the current story to illustrate a point or give advice – although it did get confusing at one point when there were three or four meta-stories occurring at once. One thing that did rankle slightly was that none of the stories really had any compelling plot-lines or hidden moral lessons. Aladdin was portrayed as a rude good-for-nothing, but he ended up with riches beyond his imagination, whereas good people are often killed or used as sport by an ill-tempered jinnee. Maybe the lesson was that life isn’t fair. Overall I enjoyed the Tales, and was fascinated how they differed vastly from their romanticised, fairy-tale versions.

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