To begin, at the beginning...

I shall start with a simple greeting. Hello.

Hello to all you unseeing eyes scouring the web for illicit content. Hello to you search engines, and pop-up blockers, and virus scanners busily processing and storing every word I write more diligently than a human eye ever could. Hello to all the bright LED’s flashing on and off to let us know that the vast servers are still ticking along, alive and healthy. Yes, to all you insomniac machines upon whose shoulders our insubstantial information exchange depends, I offer my most hearty welcome.

I do not humour myself that any actual people will read this blog. That is fine, I just want to write it. But if there are any beautiful eyes - be you brown, hazel, blue, or green, - who happen to flash briefly across this page then I say hello to you too. You are most wonderfully welcome here.

So who am I? Well, I'm Sam Ruddock. I am a Bookseller, currently plying my trade in the midst of the concrete jungle that is the University of East Anglia. I am also happily married to my beautiful wife Megan. We live in Norwich with our two rapscallion cats, and try to be of as little consequence to anyone as possible.

At work, I spend far too long writing reviews for waterstones.com and far too little time indulging my secret passion: building spaceships for bears who want to be astronauts. I spend my evenings reading leisurely in the bath, which I have cunningly renamed ‘the pub’ so as to pretend I have a life. In short, I am a hermit, and proud of it.

Occasionally, I like to pretend I am writing a novel. But who isn’t? Most of the time I prefer to read, and some of my favourite books are (in no order):

• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• The Theory of Clouds, Stephane Audeguy
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
• Underground Man, Mick Jackson
• The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
• Waterland, Graham Swift
• A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Julian Barnes
• The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman
• The Quincunx, Charles Palliser
• The Damned Utd, David Peace
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
• Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
• Music for Torching, A.M. Homes
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

Well, that’s that perfunctory and incredibly self congratulatory section over with. And that is my first post finished. I hope it made some semblance of alpha-numeric sense to your whirring electronic brains. I have found it enthralling to address myself to machines. I feel tiny, and surrounded by some odd sort of beauty.

Goodnight, though you shall not sleep. I am waving at you now, through the information superhighway. And I hope, if you have hands, that you are waving back.