| Smoking when Gambling | If you are smoking when you are playing online poker, then look at alternative ways to relax. By participating in a rakeback scheme for Poker, you can take a share of the house pot and see money returned. |
|
|
| Smoking in cars and vehicles | Stop smoking in your car; smoking in your car can cause problems with selling it later on it's life. Car lease suppliers also have rules on vehicle wear and tear. Smoking in cars is dangerous and can cuase untold damage. Stop smoking in cars with our help. |
|
|
| Smoking Holidays | Forget smoking with an activity holiday at Torquay Hotel TLH. An activity holiday can help take your mind off your smoking habit whilst you are looking to quit. Activies include Ballroom dancing, golf breaks and bowling. |
|
|
| Smoking While Surfing = FAIL | Stopping smoking isn't eady. The hardest part is finding the willpower to MAKE yourself stop smoking, one way to do this is to overcome your habit by replacing it with a new one, a healthy one. My suggestion to you? Surfing, its an amazing sport and by next year you'll be able to do it all year round in massive indoor surfing centres that are opening around the country. Get yourself some surf gear in preparation.
Surf Clothes
Surf Clothing. |
|
|
|
The Smoking Diaries | 
 enlarge | Author: Simon Gray
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy Used: £5.57
You Save: £3.42 (38%)
Used (8) from £5.57
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 1447792
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0786715456
Dewey Decimal Number: 921
EAN: 9780786715459
ASIN: 0786715456
Publication Date: June 28, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Ships from the USA. Delivery in 10-14 business days. Softcover. Some markings on outside page edges. Slight cover and page wear.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
An honest man writing emotional truths - with a few writer's devices December 31, 2008
This book first came to my attention a few years ago when it popped up more than once in a newspaper's `My Books of the Year' feature. I always find myself drawn to the rare volume that is mentioned more than once across these two or three pages in which the literati deliver their annual exhortations. The coincidence of two or three fulsome recommendations led me to make a mental note at the time; a mental note consigned to that vast dark cavern of my life's lost learning. However, a very recent extended essay in the Saturday Guardian by David Lodge, written and published just after Gray's death in 2008 and extolling the merits of his writing, refreshed the memory and stirred me into making the purchase.
As ever, the dust jacket reviews exert too big an influence on me but this time I felt that I had purchased just the book for me. And so it proved - almost.
Gray does beguile with his meandering and confessional style. He describes his yellow writing pad, his pen and the various interruptions that he encounters while telling us readers what he sees before him or what he remembers across the years. A few pages in and I was hooked, proposing to revise my Christmas wish list to include all the companion volumes collected under the generic title of `The Smoking Diaries' as well as the audio versions read by Gray himself.
I didn't laugh out loud, although a number of the reviewers said that they had been unable to contain themselves, except the once when I read to my half-Italian wife Gray's accounts of Italian families on the beach cosseting and fussing over each other while this dour and uptight Englishman jotted down his observations and wished he could loosen his own emotional corset. His darker observations, on mortality, on his past addiction to alcohol, and his unconquerable devotion to cigarettes, all paint a sympathetic character rather than one deserving the chastisement likely to be meted out in this current era of `personal responsibility'. Gray shares his flaws with us, allowing us to acknowledge our own without self reproach, and creating briefly a sense of relaxed and accepting humanitarianism.
In the face of such gifts from an author my one reservation seems somewhat petty and concerns the creation of a sense of intimacy borne of the contemporaneous nature of a diary written in real time. In fact, this must be an author's, or a playwright's, clever device, created more slowly and with more attention to its intended effects. This doesn't diminish greatly the impact of this book for me, it just leaves me a little unsure about the means by which my emotional engagement has been ensured.
At the beginning of the book, Gray's old friend Harold Pinter announces over dinner with their wives, that he has just been diagnosed with cancer, the anecdotes concerning Pinter, I feel, reflecting their genuine friendship rather than something more exploitative. As I put down the book after the last page, still unsure about my overall reaction to it, I heard the news that Pinter had just died the very same day and all those feelings about an honest man writing emotional truths came back.
A slow burner August 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I picked this book up with anticipation, having read an extract of it that I thoroughly enjoyed. I expect more of the same laughs and bitter resentments, but was somewhat confounded by the full diaries. The books is more centred around Gray's plumbing of the depths of his past, heaping mockery upon himself, expressing disgust at the man he has become, and thinking about what his fifteen year-old self would have thought of his sixty five year-old self. The last forty pages are a particularly ponderous and heartfelt affair, and for my money the best part of the book.
Gray's musings on growing old, on the changes he has seen in society and youth during his time on earth, are all written down in thoroughly digestable text, rolling on in a way that is practically unputdownable. His death marks a tragic loss.
 A book that slowly wins you over August 1, 2005
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
The blurb on the cover of this book says something along the lines of "the funniest book I've ever read". I certainly wouldn't go that far, but after a slow start, this book gets the better of you. Dry wit in generous helpings, accompanied with some more personal, intimate truths. By the time you finish it, you'll be surprised to find you were enjoying it it more than you thought you were.
 Gray is still at the top of his form ! March 5, 2005
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
If you have read Simon Gray's other volumes of diaries you will find this is a fitting addition to your collection. Gray's self-lacerating wit is still very much in evidence and despite his documented physical decay he avoids self-pity as he invites the reader into his world of cigarettes, writing and dining.I first read Gray's volume 'An Unatural Pursuit' and was immediately hooked by his penetrating observations of his fading professional fortunes. Whether or not you like the world of theatre is irrelavent for the enjoyment of this volume. The candid observations of this brilliant and witty man in physical and carreer decline are wonmderful.
Hysterically Funny August 10, 2004
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
I found myself laughing out loud on public transport but was oblivious to the stares.The funniest thing I've read in ages - Simon Gray is a comic genius.
|
|
|
Powered by UK Medical Health - The UK's leading health information site | |
