(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 126

The (Sports)Writer's Life

Dolled-up women prefer to have their bottoms pinched by international cricketers and not by those who write about them.

- Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

Books I've actually finished lately: 89a

Facebooks - III

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence / Anglo-English      Attitudes - Geoff Dyer [I don't remember which came first. Most              probably read concurrently]
God Is Not Great: the case against religion - Christopher Hitchens
Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser
Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka [in      manuscript]
Apocalypse Now (Redux) script - John Milius
Histories - Herodotus [partial]
John Clare: A Biography - Jonathan Bate [unfinished]
In Ethiopia with a Mule - Dervla Murphy
Collected Poems - Zbigniew Herbert
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

Keystroke twins - 27 (cricketing edition)

runs
stop

Chinaman UPDATE

It is with no great pleasure that I report that the American edition of Shehan Karunatilaka's multi-award-winning Chinaman: the legend of Pradeep Mathew is to be sold in America under just its subtitle.

Was this, I asked, a weary recognition of the lowlier status of cricket in the States, and/or a late-on realisation that, without very obvious sporting apparatus on the cover, the original title might have side-stepped even quite avid cricket fans?

No, Shehan replies. It's because in America 'the C-word' is deemed 'a racial slur'.

Bowling, Gil-O!

If you are (or were) Kevin Pietersen, then by all means slog-sweep Murali inside out with a left-handed grip for six, and if you're not, then just try to get to the pitch of the ball and drop a straight bat on it like a normal man.

- Giles Coren, The Times

(It's all in the brackets.)

InDefinition - 28

all-for-naught, n. Indian test innings

Mate's gf on Geoff Boycott

Who is this fucking moron Yorkshire twat?!