(no subject)

Finally got round to finishing these:
Questions from ladybirdintheuk

4 - What was your favourite book as a child?
Ooh, that's difficult... I was a voracious reader when I was younger (I started reading when I was two) and I think even back then I would have thrown a major tantrum if you tried to make me pick just one book. I think I went through all the usual authors - Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, CS Lewis. I can't remember how old I was when I got into Asimov and Philip K Dick, but it was definitely when I was still supposed to be in the children's library as I used to get the occasional weird look from the librarians.

Genre-wise I definitely had a taste for sci-fi, fantasy and horror when I was younger, and also specifically for hidden-world stories, where there are strange and fantastical things happening just below the surface of the mundane and the everyday - things like the Dark is Rising series, and the Box of Delights, and Elidor. And I always had a soft spot for Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat - he was very Han Solo.

(Of course, the cheating answer would be the Puffin anthology 'I like this story', which contains fragments of many of my favourite stories - think it covered about 100 classic and contemporary children's stories. There was also a companion book 'I like this poem' which again contains many wonderful poems I still love to this day...)

I was also addicted to fairy tales when I was younger - I remember having collections of the original Hans Christian Anderson and Brothers Grimm stories that were delightfully bloody to a child (although not as gory as the ~real~ originals) as well as some intriguing collections of chinese ones. Again, to this day, I am addicted to dark fairy tales.

5 - There is some kind of special learning-things-quick machine like in the matrix. You get to choose 3 things to learn - what do you pick?

1. Neuroscience. I'm fascinated by how human being respond to narrative, written language, visual language and symbology, and if I ever return to further academic study it would be in that kind of area. However I have a feeling that the bits that interest me most are definitely getting into the biological/neurological area, and I'd rather not have to do a whole second degree. So a matrix style brain download would be ideal.

2. Chinese, probably Mandarin. One of the things I always loved about Welsh was that being a celtic language, the basic sentence structures were different to English, so I'd love to learn more non-romance/germanic languages to see how they compare. And Chinese is fascinating because the different spoken dialects all share the same written language, which is intriguing when you're used to the idea of the spoken and written aspects of a language being mutual and exclusive. (Mandarin mainly because my brother's girlfriend studied it at Uni and her parents are native speakers, so I may actually get some chance to practice!)

3. Memory mapping. Whereas when I was younger I had pretty much perfect recall of everything, as I've got older I've found more and more gaps appearing in my memory. Every so often I've flipped through something on memory mapping and how to store things in your brain so they're easily accessible years later, and the techniques do seem to work, but I've never got enough time to properly train myself in them and make them a permanent habit. So dropping the techniques directly into my brain so they're just automatic would be brilliant. Besides, with all this new knowledge I'm getting matrix-zapped in there, I want to be sure I'll still remember it all next week!

(Thanks Alice, and I will think you up some questions tomorrow!)