My Favorite Books

Jeffrey Archer, a well-known novelist and playwright in the UK , has spent a very famous and much admired 45-year-long writing career creating bestsellers such as Not A Penny More , Not A Penny Less, Kane and Abel and Paths of Glory. Here he lists his all-time favorite reads.

Sredni Vashtar

BY SAKI （H. H. MUNRO） ,Dover Publications ,150

I put Munro's short stories equal with R. K. Narayan's. They are my favorite short-story writers. Both write beautifully， but they are also pretty good stories. It’s that rare combination of both. This book is a gem（佳作），as is Narayan's Malgudi Days.

The Count of Monte Cristo

BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS, Rupa Publications , ₹ 295

This is a masterpiece. It’s too long by modern standards? of course. If Dumas was around today， he'd write books of 400 pages. With no television, no other distraction, he wrote books of 1，500 pages. And the surprising thing is that he wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in the same year! You couldn't do that today!

Reunion

BY FRED UHLMAN，Farrar ，Strausand Giroux ，₹ 864

A wonderful insight into two young Germans---one Jewish, one aristocratic — in 1939, when they're both at school. This is a very fine book, which would help anyone understand the problems the Jews were facing in the late 1930s.

A Tale of Two Cities

BY CHARLES DICKENS, Penguin Classics , ₹ 250

I think this is probably a book I have reread the most number of times. I love the idea of him (Dr Manette)sacrificing his life for something bigger and more glorious than himself. Quaintly old-fashioned in the modern world—I love it. This was Dickens' most successful book, possibly because it was story, story, story, and impossible to put clown!

A young Mexican-born stood up for her community and fought for a cause that many thought was worthless because of whom she was going up against. Her name is Erica Fernandez.

Erica was born and raised in Michoacán, Mexico until the age of 12. At that time, her family migrated to the United States to the agricultural city of Oxnard, California. After a few years of living there, she developed a strong sense of community through familiar experiences and relationships with the people in Oxnard.

One clay. Erica got word of the proposal of BHP Billiton, the richest mining corporation in the world, to build a natural liquefied gas facility off the Coast of Ventura County. This proposal would have had a 36-inch pipeline routed through low-income neighborhoods in Oxnard. The proposal was first presented to richer communities but was rejected. The company then added 1 0 miles to the project so that it can go around the richer communities and only affect Oxnard. This pipeline, had it gone through, would have caused 280 tons of air pollution each year, not only affecting the health of Oxnard residents, but also causing their crops and farmland to be affected largely.

Seeing that her community was going to be taken advantage of, Erica decided to do something about it. Erica joined forces with local community organizations to stand up to BHP Billiton and stop this proposal from going through, organized protests at the BHP Billiton offices, led marches through the neighborhoods that were going to be affected the most, and reached out to the media to get coverage on this injustice.

All of Erica's efforts became worthwhile after her passionate speech before the California State Lands Commission. The project was asked to be vetoed and the Commission urged the Governor to do the same. It also led to the creation of SB41 2 , a bill introduced in the California Senate that entitles（给 予权利） communities to have a say in coastal construction proposals.

There are those who save every takeaway container. There are others who throw away every takeaway container and later wish they hadn't clone so. Wouldn't it be great if these two people could do each other a favor and just swap （交换）?

Across the world, those with too much "junk”, and those who can't get enough of it, are exchanging and sharing their stuff online on a network called Freecycle. On Freecycle, people can swap with others who live within a few miles of them. All you have to do is list whatever you have to give away or whatever you're looking for. Take a quick visit to the website, and you can get your hands on a baby stroller, a dictionary, or a pair of shoes. Just sign up and make sure you turn up to collect your new-- or , rather , old—item.

“Freecycling" isn't just a trend, though. It's becoming the accepted way of doing things. If your child has grown up, what better way to deal with his or her stroller than to give it to another kid? And if you're moving house, your expensive necessities, even beds and cupboards, can just be freecycled.

Admittedly? a lot of the items carry warnings, such as “TV with remote control missing” or ^saucepan （no lid）”. And some listings are a bit bossy, too, as in “ladies' shoes — must be collected TONIGHT! !

It's also possible to get a bit addicted to Freecycle. A "bamboo cocktail bar"， a   “cupboard with 20 very small drawers”, a huge pile of ^squares of cloth, great for craft projects! It all sounded so good to one of my flatmates that she became an example of a ^Freecycle addict”. But that didn't matter, of course. Everything she got could later be freecycled off again.

An easily biodegradable（可生物降解的）material that could be “part of a global answer” to single-use plastic pollution has won its inventor, British designer Lucy Hughes , the international James Dyson Award.

Hughes' Marina Tex bioplastic is strong and flexible, making it a possible alternative for single-use packaging such as bags and sandwich wrappers. Its key ingredients are fish scales and skin, so it can break down in home food waste or compost bins.

Hughes created Marina Tex for her final-year project in the product design course at the University of Sussex. She had set out to create something using waste rather than unused materials, which led her to the UK's fishing industry. She ran more than 100 experiments to improve the bioplastic mixture, mostly using the kitchen stove in her student accommodation.

The fish scales and skin removed during processing usually encl up burnt or buried in landfill. And with “about 500, 000 tonnes of such waste produced by the country's fisheries annually”, it seems possible that Marina Tex could be used largely in industrial production. The material is low-energy to produce and doesn’t consume the earth's natural resources considering it's based on existing waste. It is also strong, boasting a higher tensile（可拉伸的）strength than the current material most commonly used for plastic bags.

British inventor James Dyson, who every year selects the grand prize winner in the international student design competition that bears his name, said that the material had the potential to replace traditional single-use plastics. “Marina Tex elegantly solves two problems：the ubiquity（无处不在）of single-use plastic and fish waste.” he said. “Further research and development will ensure that Marina Tex evolves further, and I hope it becomes part of a global answer to the abundance of single-use plastic waste.”