• Question: What sort of books capture your intrest? Do you think your carrer affects this?

    Asked by fedge to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 13 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Ken Gibbs

      Ken Gibbs answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      I would like to say authors like Dickens, Bronte sisters, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T E Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell and so on but my lifestyle has often been too pressurised (too much work to silly deadlines), so I usually read to relax. So, my career has definitely affected my reading choice. I usually go for novels by best-selling authors (Neville Shute, Tom Clancy, Dick Francis, Stieg Larsson) and lighter writing by Gerald Durrell or Ogden Nash.

    • Photo: Harriet Fletcher

      Harriet Fletcher answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      I like a good story. At the moment I am reading Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography, which is a departure for me but I love her stories. My favorite book is the Life of Pi or Catch 22 but I like all sorts of stories. I loved all the Harry Potter books, Terry Pratchett, Ian Banks (but not his science fiction stuff). The only other autobiographies I have enjoyed are the Maya Angelou series because she’s such a fascinating lady.
      I don’t really think that books have changed my choices about work. If anything quite the opposite, reading is escapism for me so I tend to immerse myself in a book to get away from thinking about things.

    • Photo: Jed Ramsay

      Jed Ramsay answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      I have been known to read books about engineering at home as well as work. This may make me something of a geek I think! Well the ones I read at home tend to be about the history of rivers and how we’ve changed them over the years through engineering.

      I bet if you asked about the river nearest to where you live, you’d find that over the centuries there have been more changes made it to by people than you’d believe! Like building mills, adding new channels, changing it’s route, making it shallower, straighter, deeper and so on. There are less than 10 rivers in the UK that have hardly been changed by engineering and even those 10 have been changed a little bit from their natural state!

    • Photo: Alexander Zacheshigriva

      Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I do sometimes read engineering related books in my spare time, but very rarely, a few examples are The Box by P. L. Bernstein and Pete Culler on Wooden Boats. But most of what I read besides work is 19th and 20th century classics. I almost always read in Russian (as all the reading I do for work in English, it is nice to practice my mother tongue) but a lot of it is translated from English, French, Spanish, German, etc. Currently I am reading “Brideshead Revisited”. My favourite book is probably Master and Margarita.

      Generally in the book themes and in the characters I tend to look for very core human qualities, beyond professions, hence I don’t think my job affects the choice of literature.

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