I suspect that I enjoy creating lists even more than I like reading books, which is a lot. Combining the two activities creates some kind of critical density in my brain so I thought it might be fun to create a super reading list, a large list of all of the worthwhile books that I should try to read over the course of my life.

Now, I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to the meaning of worthwhile. The problem really is knowing where to start. It would need to:

• be large, but manageable – say around 100 books initially, with another couple of hundred added as I went along
• cover the essentials of a wide variety of subjects – art, metaphysics, history, mythology, psychology, architecture, scientific method, biology etc etc

Here’s a start to give some suggestion of what kind of reading list I’d like to create – a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, classic and modern and without getting bogged down in any one area (although I will confess a soft spot for continental intellectualism!).

So help me out – what books can you recommend that are indispensable reading? What should I be reading that will introduce the essentials of a field or change my understanding of a subject I thought I knew?

You know what? Doesn’t matter. It’s still a great, great camera for two reasons:

• apps (eg in-built editing)
• connectivity

Apps

There are loads of really great photo apps now available that make the general crappiness of the inbuilt camera work for you. My current favourites include:

Lo-mob (£1.19)

My newest find, but also my best. The app let you apply a couple of dozen effects like a through the viewfinder look, vintage Polaroid or, as below, 35mm shot in a medium format camera:

ShakeitPhoto (£0.59)

The best fake-Polaroid app out there, for my money. The piece de resistance is that when you shake the iPhone, the picture develops before your eyes, which never gets old.

Best Camera, CameraBag and PerfectPhoto are all worth a look too. They all offer a different look and it’s worth experimenting with them to see which you’d want to use in different situations.

Connectivity

Take the photo, drop it into an app to get the look you want and email it to your friends, or for wider impact, Posterous (which’ll autopost up to Flickr, Twitter, etc.). Perhaps I’m a little simple-minded, but this still seems amazing to me. I know MMS has been around for ages so we’ve been able to send photos to each other over the air for a while, but it wasn’t until devices like the iPhone came about that we reached a tipping point in ease of use.

Now I suppose other smartphones have similar levels of connectivity, but with them you’re stuck with the normal badly exposed, grainy shots you just took. Combine the iPhone’s connectivity with its ability to actually produce worthwhile material and you’re onto a real winner.

Books

• Moon Dust – Andrew Smith
• Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
• Hyperion – Dan Simmons
• The Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons
• Endymion – Dan Simmons
• The Rise of Endymion – Dan Simmons
• Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
• The Black Angel – John Connolly
• Bad Things – Michael Marshall
• Up Till Now – William Shatner
• Live Bait – PJ Traci
• All Politics is Local – Tip O’Neill
• Black River – GM Ford
• Gone – Lisa Gardner
• Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris
• A Blind Eye – GM Ford
• Lucky Man – Michael J Fox
• Into the Woods – Tana French
• Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman
• Generation A – Douglas Coupland
• Everything Bad is Good for You – Steven Johnson
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami
• Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein
• Quicksilver – Neal Stephenson

Still, it’d be good to hit 52 in 2010,which I’m on the way to achieving (three down so far, although it is of course a marathon and not a sprint…).

The missing data here is the amount I’m reading online though. Along with (it seems) everyone else, I’m reading more noit less, despite my ‘traditional’ sources being used less. I can’t think of a good way of tracking my online reading that wouldn’t be monumentally tedious though. And I daren’t keep track of the number of hours I sit in front of a monitor – it’s not the kind of answer anyone wants to hear.

Films

I’ve seen a lot of films this year and most of them I’ve forgotten, but here are the highlights:

• Moon (changed my opinion of Sam Rockwell)
• 2012 (turn your brain off and go with it)
• Wall-E (a masterpiece of sound design with an engaging story and more heart than 99% of the other films I’ve seen this year)
• Star Trek (possible the greatest of all re-imaginings)
• Avatar (visually stunning enough to outweigh the trite story – and it’s the return of Jim Cameron)

And yes, they’re all science fiction. I’m comfortable with it.

I love Joss Whedon’s work. I own complete series of Buffy, Angel and (the all too short) Firefly and I’ve watched them all many times.

But Dollhouse just seems so… pointless. It’s a bit like the second season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles – it doesn’t know where it wants to go, or what it’s trying to say. Being a Whedon fan, I wonder sometimes if he’s taken a back seat on this one as it lacks almost all of his trademarks – clever dialogue, playing with genre, pop culture and self-reference. It feels at times like someone else’s attempt at a Joss Whedon show.

His previous shows have all taken a simple premise and pushed it to its extremes with great results.

• Buffy – a beautiful example of using a fantastic setting to tell stories about the difficulties of growing up.
• Angel – the obvious sequal to Buffy dealing with redemption and the grey line between good and evil.
• Firefly - more redemption and the importance of family and holding on to your convictions and independence whatever the cost.

Dollhouse though – just what the hell is it supposed to be about? Prostitution? Identity? To be honest, the overriding theme seems to be ‘let’s get Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman into skimpy outfits’.

I like ambiguity as much as the next man, but how are we supposed to feel about the characters of Dollhouse, with its catologue of sociopaths, broken people, murderers and willing sex-slaves. Worse still, as it busily spins its wheels with yet another ‘imprint of the week’ episode with a tacked on ‘twist’ ending to show that there really is an arc (really! honestly!!), we all saw the apocalyptic future in the final episode of the previous season. And it looked awesome. So why do I now have to sit through a bunch of doll in peril episodes while they drip feed us plot developments that have already been revealed?

And on top of all that, we are constantly expected to overlook the fact that it’s fundamentally a show about sex-slaves and their pimps. Even if we can overlook the ethical issues (and that’s difficult when the Agent Ballard character (now a ‘reluctant’ pimp) brings it up every week), the premise just doesn’t make sense – if you had the technology to wipe people’s minds and implant new personas, why would you dick around with a worldwide network of brothels? If it’s about co-opting the rich and powerful – as has been hinted – there must be easier ways.

Anyway, I hope they can do something interesting in the final nine episodes to restore some of Whedon’s reputation. He’s promised a proper climax and they have a couple of epsiodes left to film, so we’ll see what happens (and if S2E4 was anything to go by, things are going to get a lot darker). And I’ll watch it because:

• I still have some faith in Whedon’s ability to pull something out of the bag and
• I quite like watching Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman in skimpy outfits.

Thing is – I’m on holiday. I don’t really want to be spending a lot of time each day writing up what I’ve done and the last thing I want to happen is reporting the experience to get in the way of actually having the experience. I’d prefer to put longer posts together after I get back to the UK to give me the time to write something more considered (and fully illustrated), without breaking into my time away.

What I’ll be doing during my (very shortly) impending trip to south west USA is updating my Posterous photoblog from my iPhone. Posterous is brilliant and perfectly suited to this kind of task as (1) updates are made by email and (2) everything happens automatically.

So, for instance – I’m on the road in Arizona and come across the Daily Pie Cafe in Pie Town (seriously, it exists). Perfect photo material so I get out my iPhone, take a photo of whichever pie I’m eating and email it to my Posterous account, along with some content explaining where I am and what is going on. I’ll have turned my data connection off due to stupidly expensive roaming data rates so the email will go into the send queue. As soon as a I get to a wireless access point it sends and a new post is added.

Posterous then autoposts the photo to my Flickr account, Facebook account and onto Twitter with a link back to the blog post, so all my friends and followers can find out what I’m up to.

I’m still very  impressed by this (thanks to Phill Howson for telling me about it). It seems perfectly suited to travel and is both simple and clever. It also lets my friends get in touch with me easily, though loads of channels (either direct on the blog or on Twitter, Facebook, email).  It’s good to be reminded of what an amazingly connected world we now live in, able to share experiences instantaneously from one side of the world to another (and using a device that’s smaller than my wallet and has more computing power than a three year old laptop).  Who needs science fiction?

Admiral Insurance – not a good start. Why are there so many adverts on TV for a product that most people buy only once a year? It’s pretty much guaranteed that 51 weeks out of the year, I won’t give a crap about the insurance on my car. As this was one of those weeks, this was yet another 25 seconds of my life wasted. Better yet, it was for Admiral Multicar, which, seeing as how I have only one, is worthless to me.

John Frieda hair fluffing stuff -  I lost interest after he made it sound like the world may come to end if the model’s hair were to become flat. Oh wait, it was Tresemme, not John Frieda. I quite liked the old adverts with that reality show man/woman, but this one was just dull.

Olay - Fiona Philips (TV Presenter): “these days I’m often asked if cheaper anti-aging products are a smart way to save money’. In what world is this a commonly asked question? I did like the subtle reference to the need to save money in the current economic climate. The message of the advert – why save money when there are penta-peptides to be had?

Flash - actually quite enjoyed this. On the right side of cheesy, suggesting that you’ll need sunglasses indoors because your house will sparkle so much after you’ve used Flash multi-surface cleanser. It even has a nosy neighbour who is quite literally bowled over by the shine. Quality.

Back to school at Tesco – the usual cheap and smug advert from Tesco. Instantly forgettable, which is a good thing.

Wilkinson Sword women’s razor – men’s razors get more blades, women’s get cool gadgets. Well, as long as you want to trim your bikini line. Reasonably clever advert that demonstrated the fancy designs the product can create through the metaphor of topiary magically reshaping itself as some very, very skinny ladies walked by.

So some good news, some bad. The good news – I’m capable of lasting an entire advert break without jumping to my feet and shouting at the TV. The bad news – it’s only a matter of time before I’m overcome by the impulse.

Here are a few that stand out from the crowd.

Evernote

Good note-taking app, let down by being a bit clunky in use and being very slow at times. Still pretty much indispensable though, especially for cross-platform syncing.

Twitterific

I tried Twitterfon and iTwitter (whose push notifications failed to work for me), but settled for Twitterific, mainly because the tweets were easiest to read.

WordPress

Lets me update this blog from my iPhone. Enough said really. Has the important feature of being able to edit the HTML of posts, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Oblique Strategies

Important for those creative impasses.

ToDo

I needed something that would help me get my tasks in order. There are several alternatives, but ToDo seemed to me to have the best integration with online services and the most useable interface. It did however cost £5.99, which is in the big-league for this kind of app and certainly about the most I’d pay.

Remote

Let’s me control iTunes from anywhere in the house. As soon as I figure out how to run iTunes through my main stereo, my life will be complete (and I’ll have almost completely negated any need for CDs).

Flixster

I use it mainly because you can group local cinemas together and get easy access to show times.

Shazam

Free iPhone version of the awesome song-naming text service. Works every time.

Let me test – the too-loud music playing in the cafe at the moment is… Love Scenes by The Jackson 5. I wish people would give the Jackson tributes a rest.

PrezofUSA

I love the Presidents of the USA. Great band, reasonably good app. It allows you to stream most of their back catalogue, including some really rare material. Not bad for £1.79 although you need to buy the songs if you want to listen offline (all available through an iTunes link in the app).

CameraBag

Not-very-customisable but pretty good app for adding effects to your photos. It includes Holga, Lomo, 60s, 70s and Polaroid effects (all named something slightlydifferent – Helga, for example – presumably to get around copyright concerns.

Mobile blogging

For blogging purposes, although the WordPress app is handy, I’ve not used it much as I prefer to write and edit using a larger keyboard and screen.

Far more suited to the iPhone is Posterous, a blogging service designed around email. As so much of the multimedia on the iPhone is shareable by email, this is tremendously handy. Posterous handles all the format conversion you need, even creating galleries from multi-photo emails, and will autopost to almost every service you could want (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook etc etc).

Projects, by postgraduate students from the University’s School of Art and Design, will represent a range of disciplines including fine and decorative arts, fashion design, knitwear and textiles, fashion marketing and communication, photography, graphics, multimedia and product design.

There were less exhibits (is that the right word?) than the undergraduate shows I wrote about previously, but the quality was really high. I think I must have missed some stuff too, because I took home a book that has around 120 graduates in it and I don’t think I saw all of them.

I couldn’t stay too long, but here are a few things that caught my eye.

Chia-Chia Hung

Extremely happy tea.

Isabelle Way

I thought these were great even before I read closely. Which I guess was the intention. They are nicely sly though, which appeals to me… ‘Ooh look! A nice picture of a tractor. Makes you think it’s local free range produce, doesn’t it? IT’S NOT’.

There’s more on Izzy’s website.

There was a paricularly strong showing from the Fashion, Knitwear and Textile Design graduates, as you can see below.

Jia Ye Cai whose designs are influenced by paper folding.

Yang Yang Huang who had probably the prettiest work, embellished with repeating patterns of cut material.

Nina Richardson who created a traditional look that is right at home on the allotment (there were wellies).

Last, but not least was Dimitra Grigoriou’s, well, fake self.

Strategically located next to the doors to the MA office to provide maximum double-take value, the dummy had previously been placed around Nottingham, with a hidden camera filming the reactions of passers-by. I caught a bit of it on my iPhone on the showreel that was hidden downstairs.

While I’m on the subject – what is it with the Bonnington Building? I think the architects may have been thinking too much about Escher when they designed it. I’ve been in it a bunch of times and still have no idea where I am at any given moment.

Anyway, a good show and well worth a visit if you’re able. It’s on until Saturday 18 July. Just leave a trail of crumbs behind you if you ever want to get out of the building again.

Probably my best ever timing, combined with the brilliant choice I made in playing with digital zoom. Yet another reason to like the TZ6 camera.

This is Mascarenhas being bowled out, completely unedited, direct from camera: