Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. It doesn’t quite match Bridget Jones Diary but it’s a good read. Notable for adhering to the romantic convention that the heroine should remain chaste throughout the novel even though it’s made clear this was not the case before the action began.

I also went to see Goodbye Lenin which I thoroughly enjoyed. This charming film says more about the social construction of reality than a shelfload of postmodernist tomes. For those who’ve missed it, the hero’s mother, a devout Communist has a stroke/heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes from her coma, her son maintains the pretence that the German Democratic Republic is still in existence, eventually fabricating for it an ending far nobler than the one that actually took place.

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. It doesn’t quite match Bridget Jones Diary but it’s a good read. Notable for adhering to the romantic convention that the heroine should remain chaste throughout the novel even though it’s made clear this was not the case before the action began.

I also went to see Goodbye Lenin which I thoroughly enjoyed. This charming film says more about the social construction of reality than a shelfload of postmodernist tomes. For those who’ve missed it, the hero’s mother, a devout Communist has a stroke/heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes from her coma, her son maintains the pretence that the German Democratic Republic is still in existence, eventually fabricating for it an ending far nobler than the one that actually took place.

I’ve been putting off updating my blogroll, but I’ve finally had a first go at the task. I’ve finally accepted that the “hiatus” of some of my favorite sites is permanent, and removed them. I also deleted a few blogs that I can no longer be bothered with, and updated lots of broken links. I’ve added a number of new ones, but I’ve been fairly lazy about this, so I’m inviting anyone (particularly in Oz/NZ) who thinks a link would make sense to email me. In addition, if anyone reading this still has links to my old blog(s), this is the time to update them.

I had my first blogging brush with fame today. I was presenting some lectures to a very interested/interesting group of students at the Australia-NZ School of Government , held at the College of Art which is part of Griffith Uni’s Southbank campus. Not only had several of the students (senior public sector people) read the blog, but someone came up to me in the cafe, asked “Are you John Quiggin?” and introduced himself as a reader.

It’s puzzling to me that, although the stats say the blog has far fewer readers than the Fin Review (where I’ve been writing for ten years) my daily experience is the opposite. Far more people in my circle of friends and acquaintances seem to be aware of the blog than have read the column.