The Unofficial Doctor Who Limerick Book!

So, the guys at Long Scarf Publishing have produced another fan-led Doctor Who book for charity. This one is called The Unofficial Doctor Who Limerick Book and it's raising money for MIND.

It's available now to pre-order.

Yes, it does feature some limericks from yours truly.
 
And yes, I could have written this blog post in limerick form if I'd really tried!









Details on the book and how to order it direct from the publisher are here:
 
http://drwholimerickbook.strikingly.com/
 
Details on the charity MIND can be found here:
 
http://www.mind.org.uk/
 
Please do purchase a copy if you can.

World Book Day 2017

It's World Book Day - yay! This always provokes a mass of '10 Favourite Books'-type lists on social media. I can't pick ten, or twenty - or possibly even fifty. The best I can do instead is pick a favourite book per decade from the 1680s onwards, when my reading really starts. Yup... So here goes!

1680s Aphra Behn Love Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister

1690s Nothing!

1700s Delarivier Manley New Atalantis

1710s Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe

1720s Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

1730s Eliza Haywood Eovaii

1740s Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews

1750s Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy

1760s Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto

1770s Frances Burney Evelina

1780s William Beckford Vathek

1790s Mary Hays A Victim of Prejudice

1800s Thomas Paine The Age of Reason

1810s Mary Shelley Frankenstein; or A Modern Prometheus

1820s Samuel Pepys’ Diary (the first proper publication of the diaries written in the 1660s)

1830s Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers

1840s Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol

1850s Herman Melville Moby Dick, or The Whale

1860s Wilkie Collins The Woman in White

1870s Lewis Carroll Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

1880s Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll & Mr Hyde

1890s Bram Stoker Dracula

1900s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of The Baskervilles

1910s Ford Maddox Ford The Good Soldier

1920s James Joyce Ulysses

1930s Aldous Huxley Brave New World

1940s Ernest Hemingway For Whom The Bell Tolls

1950s JRR Tolkein The Lord of The Rings

1960s Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange

1970s Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

1980s John Irving A Prayer For Owen Meany

1990s Irvine Welsh Trainspotting

2000s Audrey Niffenegger The Time Traveler’s Wife

Authors I love but couldn’t accommodate: Virginia Woolf, Arthur C Clarke, Tobias Smollett, EM Forster.

 

Hopefully there are some oddities and surprises in the list, along with the predictable crowd-pleasers. 

Also this list ignores all the Doctor Who and associated spin-off novels from the 1960s onwards, as choosing between those is just impossible.