{"id":1146,"date":"2005-06-14T21:21:49","date_gmt":"2005-06-14T21:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2005\/06\/the_pirates_in\/"},"modified":"2005-06-14T21:21:49","modified_gmt":"2005-06-14T21:21:49","slug":"the_pirates_in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/the_pirates_in\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0753818701&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/001234.html\">The other day<\/a>, I mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/g2\/story\/0,3604,1503203,00.html\">this piece<\/a> about the writing of a book called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/redirect?link_code=ur2&#038;camp=1634&#038;tag=friday05-21&#038;creative=6738&#038;path=ASIN\/0753818701\">The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists<\/a>.<br \/>\nWell, on Monday evening I paid a trip to Waterstones to try to find it. First stop was the large 3 for 2 tables that most people seemingly don&#8217;t get past. No luck. None either in the New Titles section.<br \/>\nWaterstones have recently made their computer terminals user friendly and you&#8217;re encouraged to use them. So, without having the full title of the book, I endeavoured to search. As it turns out, this wasn&#8217;t the easiest thing in the world, and it quickly became apparent that you need to use the &#8220;!&#8221; in the title to find the right book.<br \/>\nBut I was in luck, they had it in both hardback and paperback. Obviously I wanted the cheaper version. (When the author, Gideon Defoe, becomes the next JK Rowling, and first editions of this book trade hands for hundreds of thousands of pounds, I may regret that decision)<br \/>\nBoth were to be found on the first floor of the enormous Piccadilly Waterstones, in the fiction section. But I had no luck there, where I instead found copious volumes of work by the slightly more famous (and possibly related) Daniel.<br \/>\nMuch stalking around Waterstones eventually turned up the book, out of alphabetical order, in humour. And I can see why. For the paperback, the book has been sized down to look like one of those books you see on bookshop sales counters when you invited to think &#8220;Brilliant, &#8216;101 Calming Meditations in Crap Towns&#8217; would make a wonderful present for my nephew!&#8221;<br \/>\nBut enough of a fairly pedestrian story about how I bought the book. What&#8217;s it like?<br \/>\nWell it&#8217;s quite funny really. Not laugh out loud funny. Nobody&#8217;s going to shift nervously in their seats while you chuckle on the tube. Not unless you chuckle on the tube anyway. But it&#8217;s pretty witty. And Defoe has a nice turn of phrase, and makes good use of footnotes.<br \/>\nThis is not a demanding book. Let&#8217;s put that another way, the Guardian Guide on Saturdays is more demanding a read than this. It does however include a &#8220;Comprehension Test&#8221; at the end of the book, and you&#8217;ve got to give it marks for that.<br \/>\nShall I talk about the plot? No &#8211; not really. Mark Gatiss&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/001076.html\">Vesuvius Club<\/a> is the closet thing I&#8217;ve read to it recently, but the plot of that just about held together. I wouldn&#8217;t want to examine plotholes in this too deeply. Still, it let one and half journeys into work and home again pass very pleasantly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day, I mentioned this piece about the writing of a book called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. Well, on Monday evening I paid a trip to Waterstones to try to find it. First stop was the large 3 for 2 tables that most people seemingly don&#8217;t get past. No luck. None [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}