For several years I've kept in touch with people who share similar literary interests by means of Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists. Now many ISPs are withdrawing their news service (it does require rather a lot of server space) and so traffic in the newsgroups has dropped off a lot, and I've lost contact with a lot of the people with whom I used to have interesting conversations in the newsgroups.

I've found an alternative way of keeping in contact, through Good Reads, where you can find me at http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw. But more on that later (see below).

For those who have suffered the fate of losing access to newsgroups, there is a free news server at news.eternal-september.org where you can subscribe to the various newsgroups.

My favourite newsgroups for books and reading are:

• alt.books.cs-lewis
• alt.books.inklings
• alt.books.beatgeneration
• rec.arts.books.tolkien

The Tolkien group still thrives, but the others have almost emptied of participants since some of the major ISPs stopped their nntp service.

If you click on those links, your web browser should automatically take you to your default newsreader, but if your ISP is one of those that no longer provides news (I bet they didn't reduce their subs for the reduced service) you will not be able to do much unless you set your news reader up to connect to a server like eternal-september.

There are also other newsgroups that are (or were) useful for those who like books and reading:

• rec.arts.books
• rec.arts.books.childrens
• alt.usage.english

Most of the better-informed participants in rec.arts.books took themselves off to a Facebook group called The Prancing Half-Wits, but the Facebook interface is clunky, and does not lend itself to interactive discussions the way newsgroups do. alt.usage.english continues to thrive, perhaps because many of the participants are a bit more computer-savvy than most, and know how to connect to alternative news sources.

For those interested in the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien & Co) I've started a mailing list called Neo-Inklings, which you can find at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eldil/. To subscribe to it, send e-mail to eldil-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, but it is worth also visiting the web site, as there are facilities for uploading files and photos, creating polls and databases and more. I've invited some of the former members of the alt.books.cs-lewis newsgroup to join us there. For those interested mainly in the works of Charles Williams rather than the other Inklings, there is a Charles Williams list called Coinherence-L.

There are also several web sites for book lovers to keep track of their books and make contact with others with similar interests. Three of the best-known are Bibliophil, LibraryThing and Good Reads. For various reasons I prefer Good Reads.

Good Reads

GoodReads is a combination of a book catalogue and a social networking site for books, and I think it works better than the others.

Like most social networking sites, you can add people as "friends", but in many social networks this is rendered useless by people wanting to add you as a "friend" when they don't know you, don't want to know you, share no common interests with you and you've never heard of them. It's a bit like regarding everyone in the phone book as a "friend" -- if everyone is your friend, then no one is.

But Good Reads provides a good way of seeing whether someone is likely to be your friend.

First you need to join, and enter some of the books that you have in your library or have read, starting with your favourites, but you can also add a few books that you really hate. Like other such sites, you are asked to rate and review them. When you've entered those books and rated them (with 1-5 stars), then you can look for friends. Find someone who owns some of your favourite books, look at their profile and click "compare books".

There you can see if they've read your favourite books, and what they think of them. It's expressed as a percentage. For example, with one of my friends (who sometimes reads my blog), it produced this result:

You and booklady have 21 books (or 7.27% of your library and 2.07% of her library) in common. Your tastes for those 21 ratings are 78% similar.

If it's over 70%, go to the next step, which is the "book compatibility test". This compares your ratings of some popular books in various genres, or if you've even read them. In this case my result was "Your compatibility with booklady is 63%."

If you have read some of those popular books, but haven't entered them and rated them, then do so, because it will make future comparisons easier.

So Good Reads is a good way to find and keep in touch with those with similar literary tastes.

Last week I went to the Amahoro Gathering at Hekpoort, about 40 miles west of Pretoria. About 250 people gathered from various countries in Africa and there were a few from other countries as well.

"Amahoro" is a word in Rwandan languages meaning "peace", and I think it was chosen to represent the rebuilding needed in that country following the horrific genocidal strife that took place there 15 years ago. The gathering was billed as "empowering emerging leaders", so perhaps I shouldn't have been there at all, not really being a leader, and at my age I'm submerging rather than emerging.

Much of it was about what it means to be Christian in a postmodern and postcolonial world. I won't say much about it here -- I've blogged about that in my other blog, where it is also easier to put pictures. But it was useful, because words like "postcolonial" have often been bandied about and I wasn't too sure what they meant, and I think I now have a better idea.

For some of the younger people there it was a lifechanging experience, and if you're interested in reading about it, here are links to some of the blog posts on it, including mine.

• Andries Louw (Christian) of nextchurch on Amahoro Africa Family reunion of change agents
• Andries Louw (Christian) of nextchurch on Amahoro Africa conference The African Reformation
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on cant speak about Amahoro
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on I am an Afrikaner, I owe my being to this continent
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on Adriaan Vlok got his feet washed @ Amahoro
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of Anderkant on ons Afrikaner private godsdiens (aka oom Adriaan part 2)
• Cori (Undefined) of Cori’s Blog on A diverse God
• nic paton (TBD) of soundandsilence on The European Post Colonial
• Roger Saner (Grew up Baptist, went Anglican, now post-church.) of FutureChurch on The drive home from Amahoro
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Amahoro Gathering 8 June 2009
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Truth, reconciliation and smelly feet
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on More on Amahoro
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Amahoro: modernity fights back

If you have posted a blog post about the Amahoro Gathering and would like to add it to this list, please click here to see how to do it. You are welcome to copy this list to the end of your post.

Also, Technorati seems to be working again, so you can find more blog posts on the topic here.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A whodunit set in Stalin's USSR, with echoes of Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at noon and Brink's A dry white season.

Generally well written, with a couple of annoying lapses (the misuse of "substitute" in a couple of places, for example).

Could the hero, Leo Demidov, be entering a career as a new fictional detective to follow? If so, this is where it all began.

View all my reviews.

There were a couple of things i wondered about as i was reading, though. How does the author know all this stuff? How authentic is it?

I don't suppose there are many people still alive with first-hand memories of the Stalin era, though the book is set right at the end of it, in 1953. I was 12 years old then, but don't remember too much of the political currents of the time. But the author is the same age as my sons, who can't remember all that much of the apartheid era, which ended much more recently.

I also wonder if this could be the beginning of the career of a new fictional detective, like Arkady Renko, Kurt Wallander, Vicount Lynley, Adam Dalgleish, Inspector Morse et al.

My first friend on LJ was seraphimsigrist, who was the one who invited me to join LJ over seven years ago, and is still my friend. He writes on an amazing variety of topics, some of which are of of more interest to me than others, but they are always worth reading.

We had met on Coinherence-l, a mailing list for discussion and application of the works and ideas of Charles Williams. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a writer of books, plays, and poetry; he was a Christian, as well as a friend and Oxford collegue of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. His novels and poetry were respected by such diverse people as T.S.Eliot, Lewis, and W.H.Auden. The mailing list continues to flourish, and is moderated by pyegar.

I was away most of last week.

After the Divine Liturgy at St Nicholas of Japan Orthodox Church in Brixton, Johannesburg, I set off for Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, and spent a couple of nights with my cousin and her husband, Jenny and John Aitchison. I hadn't seen Jenny for about 8 years, so it was good to see her again.

John and I compared notes in our police files from the apartheid era -- we are working on an article on the attitudes and roles of the Security Police in a surveillance society, as fevealed in their correspondence with the Department of Justice about the two of us. We hope, eventually, to publish it in a historical journal.

Then I went to a conference at the African Enterprise centre in Pietermaritzburg, which I have described more fully, with pictures, here. There I met several old friends, and made some new ones. The conference was about chapter 17 of St John's Gospel, and a planned book on "The church Jesus prayed for".

On the way home on Friday I met another old friend in Ladysmith, Rod Smith, who had previously been rector of the Anglican parish of Ladysmith, and is now a full-time social worker.

Which worries you more?

Swine flu, or the media hype about it?

Teflon politico Jacob Zuma bounces back from corruption scandals to win election, but which of his wives will be First Lady?

Several people have asked me for my take on it, so anyone interested can find it here: http://methodius.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-ballot-is-over.html

One of my interests is African independent churches -- their history, theology, missiology and mission practice.

There about 10000 of them in South Africa, and about as many again in the rest of the continent. Today I visited a couple of them -- the African Orthodox Church in their church building in Atteridgeville, Pretoria, and another group whose name i did not know, who were baptising people in the Hennops River.

I took some photos of them, but because it's more of a schlep to put them on LiveJournal, I've put them on my Khanya blog, with a narrative about them, for anyone interested in such things.

I've been reading James Joyce's Ulysses.

I've been meaning to read it for ages, and have had my copy for over 35 years without reading it. I'm not even sure when or where I bought it.

I'd read Portrait of the artist as a young man, and had tried reading Finnegan's wake, but had given up.

But Ulysses is on a lot of those lists of "books to read before you die", and since i had a copy, I thought I ought to read it.

I've heard it's supposed to be "modern" or "modernist", and I think I must be very postmodern then, because all the time I'm reading it I'm conscious that all the characters in it are contemporaries of my grandparents. The action in the book takes place a week after my grandparents were married, and I picture them wearing the kind of clothes my grandparents wore back then, and the pubs and newspaper offices as ornate and Edwardian. At one point there are three girls looking after two little boys playing on the beach in sailor suits. My father had a sailor suit, and though he doesn't have one in this picture, that's what contemporary clothes looked like. That's my grandmother Lily Hayes, my father, and his older sister Vera.

Of course Ulysses was set in Ireland, and my grandparents lived in Johannesburg at that time, but the clothes they wore would have been much the same, and so when reading it i get the impression that I'm peeping, like a voyeur, into my grandparents' thoughts. Not modern.

I was introduced to James Joyce by my mentor in most things literary, Brother Roger of the Community of the Resurrection. He it was who had lent me Portrait of the artist as a young man. But then i went to the University of Natal, where the English Department was filled with dedicated Leavisites, and oe of them advised a friend of mine not to read Ulysses as it would impair his critical faculties, and it would be wasting tome that could be better employed reading D.H. Lawrence. The same friend swore he had seen a copy of Ulysses on the professor's desk, and the only explanation we could think of was that he must have confiscated it from a student for his own good, to preserve his critical faculties.

The English department despised most of the things Brother Roger turned me on to -- Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, and the Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes. Anyway, I thought it was high time I read Ulysses but it's taking me a long time. I usually only read a few pages at a time, and though I can appreciate Joyce's bewildering variety of styles, I have little clue about why he is using them. Perhaps that's a sign of my critical faculties being eroded already.