My Weekly Book

I’m posting this here so I’ll be able to find it again… This is a list of the favourite books read by members of the Yahoo group Bookcrossing UK over the last year (2006). I’ve only read (and voted for) one of these - Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon - and there are a couple on there that I know I don’t want to read. But there are others that are definitely on my list, new books I hadn’t thought about - and I live with a big fan of Jasper Fforde.

• The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
• We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
• Q & A - Vikas Swarup
• A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka
• Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
• Emotional Geology - Linda Gillard
• I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb
• Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
• If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
• The Big Over Easy by Japser Fforde
• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hussein
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon
• The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss

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…say it quietly.

Overheard in a bookshop during our recent holiday. Delivered in a loud, knowing tone of voice by someone who is plainly quite sure that their opinion on all subjects is the only one worth listening to:

“Terry Pratchett, well, he’s not what you’d call challenging reading… No, more like fairy tales for adults…”

Mr Random and I look at each other aghast. “Idiot,” we say in unison. “Has she never read Small Gods? Jingo? Monstrous Regiment?”

Honestly. People.

[Search for Terry Pratchett on eBay]

From Bosorne Books at The Cook Book in St Just:

• Smaller Slang Dictionary - Eric Partridge
• The Lorna Doone Trail: tracing the story of Jan Ridd and Lorna Doone in words and pictures - RD Blackmore and SH Burton
• An Autobiography - Anthony Trollope
• Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Classics edition)
• Elizabeth the Great - Elizabeth Jenkins
• I is for Innocent and J is for Judgment - Sue Grafton

From Waterstones in Truro:

• Blacklist - Sara Paretsky
• The Rendezvous and other stories plus Don’t Look Now and other stories - Daphne du Maurier
• Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall - the eponymous author
• Sketches around Fowey - Sue Lewington

I have a confession to make. I hate bookshops at this time of year. All the seasonal promotions take every last ounce of pleasure out of browsing round them, never mind the crowds. Borders today: a hellish mix of pushchair-wielding parents mowing shoppers down left and right with their bawling offspring, teenagers and gormless blokes shouting into mobile phones about present choices and pensioners trying to levitate their way to the front of the queue - “you won’t mind if I ruthlessly barge in front of you, will you, dear? It’s just that I’m old, you see.” And all I was trying to buy was one little graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Dave MacKean. For myself, actually.

It’s not just the invasion of the book-snatchers that bothers me. The proportions of hardback to paperback stock have almost exactly reversed. I’m used to being confronted with nice stacks of paperbacks with enticing special-offer stickers piled high just inside the doors. Economic necessity and room for storage makes the paperback the book format of choice round here. Now you have to walk nearly to the back of the store to find them.

And then there’s the problem with the books themselves. Round about September the crap memoirs of z-list celebrities, washed-up sports start and underemployed television presenters are all served up for the Christmas rush. By December that’s more or less all you can find. Add in the terrible novelty quiz books, volume after volume of lifestyle advice from braying upper-class women with not enough to do and television spin-offs…

See you late in January, Local Borders Emporium. I don’t think I can face coming back before then.

Have read books 53 to 57 (almost). They are, in order: The Call of the Weird - Louis Theroux; Untold Stories – Alan Bennett; Dead Reckoning: the new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach; England’s Lost Eden: adventures in a Victorian utopia – Philip Hoare; and My Roots – Monty Don. Haven’t quite finished that last one actually, I’ve only got as far as May (it’s a year’s worth of gardening columns). But I’m confident of being able to knock it off this weekend.

Now NaNoWriMo is over and I’ve cleared my backlog of library books I can update this blog with reviews of the above and plan what I’ll be reading for the rest of December when I’m hoping to take my reading total for the year over 60. Unusually, I’m having to return a couple of library books unread. They’re both hard-boiled detective fiction and I’m just not in the mood for it.

So, what now? I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy of the first volume in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Preludes and Nocturnes. It’s really difficult. Currently I have it on order from Amazon but it’s one of those four to six week jobs that often end in an email explaining how they can’t sell it to you at all despite the extreme optimism of their earlier communications. If this occurs, it’ll be off to eBay. In the meantime I have managed to get hold of volume two, The Doll’s House, and I have heard that volume one is arguably not the best place to start with this series, so maybe I shall just go ahead and read that.

Possibilities for December/Jan:

• Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll; Tennyson’s Gift - Lynne Truss (both inspired by Philip Hoare’s book on Victorian spiritualism in Hampshire)
• The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman and The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender
• Fire Sale - Sara Paretsky (the last outstanding volume of a recent three for two)
• The Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell
• Writing Home - Alan Bennett (also currently on order)
• American Gods - Neil Gaiman

I found this from English professor Michael Leddy (blogging at Orange Crate Art) via the inimitable BoingBoing. It’s an article on how to get things done, published on Lifehack.

Having just been through NaNoWriMo (where a little planning went a long way towards breaking down a seemingly-impossible project into do-able chunks) and having hit my goal of reading 50 books this year at the end of October, I would say this has a lot of application to the kind of things I’m talking about in this blog. In fact, isn’t it central to the whole idea of ‘a book a week?’

Anyway, here’s a link and an excerpt. And if you’re not reading Lifehack and BoingBoing already, well, you jolly well should be.

Granularity for students

Granularity is also a useful strategy for making even a daunting reading project do-able. If you have eighty pages to read, finish twenty and take a short break; then repeat. If you’re reading James Joyce or Marcel Proust, a handful of pages might be all that you can manage at one sitting, and sometimes you might need to chart your progress by the sentence. But those sentences and pages add up, and I should know. I just finished all seven volumes (3,102 pages) of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), averaging twenty pages a day over five months and two days of reading. Read full article here…

This is a post asking for your help. I’d really like to read some Philip K Dick before the year is up - but it’s not easy knowing where to start, given that he’s such a prolific author and a cult figure too.

His Wikipedia entry highlights the following works: The Man in the High Castle; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ubik; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said; A Scanner Darkly; VALIS; Exegesis.

Anyone got any experiences with these, good or bad, that they’d like to share? Or other recommendations? How about the short stories?

All help (please email me here) is greatly appreciated…

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I am still alive, just desperately trying to keep within hailing distance of my NaNoWriMo writing deadlines, and thus I am prevented from doing much blogging. These deadlines have gone far enough to pot to be really worrying while being close enough to what it says on my ink and highlighter-saturated piece of paper (formerly and laughingly known as a planning sheet) to prevent me sinking to my knees in despair.

The situation is as follows: I am on about 22,000 words and I should be 9,000 in advance of that. The goal is to have written 50,000 words by November 30, midnight. Who knows what will happen…

[Search for NaNoWriMo organiser Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem on eBay]

As to reading, that is going just fine, a better method of procrastination has yet to be invented. I had a little incident in Borders the other day, the kind of incident that comes with free chocolate. They are actually handing out Green and Blacks at the till and who loses here, I ask you? Anyway, it was a classic three-for-two ambush and included a new Louis Theroux (I have phrased that sentence like this deliberately in order to avoid an accident with that x and an apostrophe) entitled The Call of the Weird. Along for the ride were Alan Bennett’s extensive memoir Untold Stories and a new Sara Paretsky paperback Fire Sale. I have already read the Theroux (practically in a sitting) and two-thirds of the Bennett, as delightful as ever.

A trip into the library merely to return books took me past a display that resembled the giant bars of chocolate you see stacked at the end of supermarket aisles from mid-September onwards. The result of that was a book of short stories by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s fame, entitled How We Are Hungry and a detective story by Judith Cutler called The Food Detective. You can see how the library staff were working to a theme in their displays which makes the end-of-aisle analogy even more appropriate. I’ve got Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy, as thick as a brick and a wonderful find, sitting on a table waiting to be started and I dearly hope I will actually enjoy that as much as I expect to. In the graphic novel department, I finally bought a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and am expecting to be reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series in the new year. Oh, and a collection of gardening columns by Monty Don arranged by month and entitled My Roots has been pressed on me by Beloved Other Half who was bowled over by tales of muddy potatoes and hazel hedges. I’ve got as far as March and am enjoying myself.

And now to what I thought was the point of this post; a couple of good things spotted in the Guardian Books pages today (spent writing hard, as you can see). The first is an analysis of the language in DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, a book I once started, did not persevere with and intend to read again. The second is a fascinating interview with Robert Persig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is essential and insightful reading because apparently he allows himself to be interviewed so rarely. Oh, and I was given the most beautiful book as a birthday present, but will post separately about that.

Back to it…

Went away for the weekend - coincidentally this results in some great books bought. Among them were the following:

• The Age of Bede - a Penguin Classics collection of writings about the sixth- and seventh-century Christian church in Britain. Yes, I find these primary sources from the early Middle Ages very appealing, so looking forward to reading this. Yes, really.
• London Peculiars - Peter Ashley. This could, literally, take years of my life. Its subtitle is “curiosities in a capital city” and it contains a long list of visitable oddments - lots of them connected with railways and The Tube. I opened it, saw a picture of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and knew I had to buy…
• Attention All Shipping - Charlie Connelly. A tour round the shipping forecast which has been nearly making me succumb to various three-for-two combinations for months now.
• My Roots - Monty Don. His ollected gardening columns from The Observer - what more needs to be said?
• And finally… two adorable cookbooks from The Covent Garden Soup Company and Green and Blacks. Want to come round to dinner?

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This is horrendous. Because I am coming to the end of the 50 Book Challenge I thought I would make a kind of ‘long-list’ of books lying around the place that I would quite like to read sometime in the next year or so. Below is what I got. This is truly a barely-controlled addiction. This isn’t even exhaustive - it’s kind of the top line. I fear for my sanity if I try this again next year.

Edit: I’ve revisited this list and struck through all books read. I’ll continue to do this through the year…

Books for the rest of the year and beyond (in no particular order):

• No Logo - Naomi Klein
• Total Recall - Sara Paretsky
• The Pelican Brief - John Grisham
• Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett
• The Maul and the Pear Tree - PD James and TA Critchley
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
• The Lucifer Code - Michael Cordy
• The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte - Daphne du Maurier
• Rule Britannia - Daphne du Maurier
• Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
• The Farenheit 9/11 Reader - Michael Moore
• Unfinished Tales- JRR Tolkien
• Dirty Tricks - Michael Dibdin
• The Dying of the Light - Michael Dibdin
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clark
• London Noir: Capital crime fiction - ed Cathi Unsworth
• American Gods - Neil Gaiman
• The Bone Vault - Linda Farstein
• The Secret History - Donna Tartt
• Forensic Casebook of Crime - John Sanders
• Panic - Jeff Abbott
• The Simple Truth - David Baldacci
• Martian Time-Slip - Philip K Dick
• LA Requiem - Robert Crais
• The Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell
• Burning Chrome - William Gibson
• Veil - Bob Woodward
• Angel: Shakedown - Don DeBrandt
• The X-Files: Goblins - Charles Grant
• Secrets of Angels and Demons - Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer
• The Magicians’ Guild - Trudi Canavan
• Pompeii - Robert Harris
• Monkey - Wu Ch’eng-en
• At the Edge of the World - Lord Dunsany
• Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
• Dead Air - Iain M Banks
• Mildred Pierce - James M Cain
• The Runaway Jury - John Grisham
• The Snake Tattoo - Linda Barnes
• Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins
• The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin
• The Birthday of the World - Ursula K Le Guin
• Fludd - Hilary Mantel
• Raw Spirit - Iain M Banks
• Sleeper - Paul Adam
• Women on the Case - ed Sara Paretsky
• Underground - Tobias Hill
• Man of the Hour - Peter Blauner
• The Glass-Blowers - Daphne du Maurier
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
• McLibel: Burger culture on trial - John Vidal
• When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Complete Essays - Montaigne
• The Shorter Pepys - Samuel Pepys
• Supreme Injustice - Alan M Dershowitz
• Eleanor Rigby - Douglas Coupland
• The Power Behind the Prime Minister - Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon
• Vilette - Charlotte Bronte
• Exemplary Stories - Miguel de Cervantes
• Flanagan’s Run - Tom McNab
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - Lawrence Sterne
• Framley Parsonage - Anthony Trollope
• Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin
• The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
• The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents - Terry Pratchett
• Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby
• Jesus and the Adman - Rhidian Brook
• Past Mortem - Ben Elton
• Two Cheers for Democracy - EM Forster

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Whoops - up to my borrowing limit again, even though I had gone to the library on foot and therefore had to walk home with a great armful of books. And I’m not sure that a lot of them are very edifying or improving. Being largely true crime, fictional crime or comics. Ah well. Here they are, in all their awful glory:

• The Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliffe. I should have read this tale of the unlucky Legio IX Hispania years ago - and now I’m making good the deficit. I had this on reservation, this it was a major reason for my visiting the library. Everything else that happens subsequently is therefore the fault of this book.
• Dead Reckoning - the new science of catching killers - Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach. According to the jacket, Baden is a ‘famed pathologist’ and it gets a plug from Patricia Cornwell. Call it novel research. Or blame the fact that I never seem to catch CSI on the telly these days.
• England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia - Philip Hoare. This looks absolutely fascinating - being an account of the Victorians’ fascination with bizarre spirituality in a wide array of incarnations. Challenges history as we expect to hear it - really looking forward to reading this.
• Prescription for Murder: the true story of mass murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman - Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie. Because this can’t be too far removed from the first draft of history and, because I’m still not really sure what happened even after reading all the press coverage - largely because it took a time for us all to come to terms with the enormity of what he’d done.
• The High Window - Raymond Chandler. “There was a stifling scent of summer on the Pasadena morning when he first called on Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdock. Later Marlowe couldn’t work out which was worse: air you couldn’t breathe, or a client who didn’t tell you the story.”
• The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action - ed. Maxim Jakubowski. “Crooked cops, ruthless bigshots, shady operators and molls with a heart of gold from pulp literature’s best writers including Ed McBain, Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, David Gooodis, Joe R Lansdale and many more…” And, by God, it is a mammoth at more than 600 pages. What on earth was I thinking of?
• Batman: Castle of the Bat - Jack C Harris, Bo Hampton et al. Because it looked nicely Gothic, alright? And because it was on the shelf next to something by Neil Gaiman.
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Demon House - Max Allan Collins, Gabriel Rodriguez et al. A Titan Books graphic novel. Moved to read this because my recent Buffy and Angel adventures in graphic novelage went just swell. Obviously I am not catching enough of this series on the telly…

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The next book on my list to read, having now finished the PD James is Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novel Medusa. I had a look at the Guardian review and found this, on the joy of reading thrillers:

“I now begin to understand the attraction. Like a pensioner discovering crack cocaine and liking it, I wonder at the wasted years I have spent not reading thrillers. I could have been having so much more fun. The books I tend to read and approve of do not have quite so many dead bodies, nail-biting chases, sinister conspiracies, or world-weary exposés of the cynical corruption at the heart of the body politic. All these, Dibdin has.”

I feel somehow justified…

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Spotted today - a labour of love which I could never hope to emulate - I’m not recording my reading in this kind of statistical detail, but I do flatter myself that I’ve managed to get in a bit of anecdote and local colour.

But, what an incredible achievement: What I have read since 1974 (found via LinkMachineGo)

Here is a picture showing the extent of the book storage problem referred to below:

I appear to have bought six books in the last two days. This is a bit unfortunate. It’s getting to the point where books are going into crates and being put in storage until we move somewhere bigger. Here I am, trying to read the huge backlog of bought-but-not-read books, and suddenly it’s got worse than ever.

Anyway, this is what I got.

Off a Leather Lane market stall in my lunch hour, taking advantage of a “three thrillers for four quid” special offer:

• LA Requiem - Robert Crais: “Karen Garcia is missing and her father doesn’t trust the cops - he wants someone he knows on the case. His call brings private detectives Elvis Cole and Joe Pike head-to-head with the investigating officers of the Robbery-Homicide division of the LAPD. Karen proves to be the latest victim of a distinctive serial killer…” Hoping the private detectives and the LA connection means a nice little noir tale. Unfortunately I seem to have come in a good way through a series, but I’m trying not to be so uptight about that. Author’s website: http://www.robertcrais.com
• The Simple Truth - David Baldacci: “The heart-stopping story of an evil conspiracy at the heart of the American legal system… As a young conscripted soldier, Rufus Harms was jailed for the brutal killing of a schoolgirl. Yet, after twenty-five hard years of incarceration, a stray letter from the US army reveals new facts about the night of the murder - and the evil secret shared by some of Washington’s most powerful men. Fearful for his life, Harms seizes his one chance to escape. But within hours the people wo knew about the appeal have been hunted down and eliminated…” Irresistible. However, it says “No 1 International Bestseller” on the cover, and I’m hoping I’m not embarking on a journey deep into Tom Clancy land. Still, what’s life without a little risk?
• The Bone Vault - Linda Farstein: “The glitzy reception at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art should have been a welcome evening off for the Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper. But the occasion is overshadowed by a gruesome discovery: in an ancient sarcophagus bound for a show abroad, customs officials have found the body of a young woman…” The author, according to the blurb in the front, is “a former prosecutor and America’s foremost expert on sex crimes.” Hmmm. It’s as much as I can do to watch Law and Order: SVU so that’s not a good sign. Again I’ve come in part of the way through a series but if you worried too much about this stuff you’d never read anything. And I love the premise…

From Borders in the local Big Shopping Metropolis (not a three-for-two for once)

• The Sandman Companion - Hy Bender: I’ve only read one of the collected editions of Neil Gaiman’s masterpiece comic book series The Sandman and I consider this an oversight that needs to be urgently rectified. That was volume three - Dream Country and, while it confirmed my impression that this was something I urgently needed to read, it left me struggling as to what was actually going on (I understand that it is far from typical of the series as a whole). Every time I try to buy volume one, Preludes and Nocturnes, I find it out of stock, to the point where it is starting to feel like a conspiracy. I know that browsing on an actual bookshop shelf is hopelessly old-fashioned these days, but still… So I’m admitting to the fact that I am intimidated and starting with this companion volume instead, which I have been hankering after for a while anyway.
• The Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell: Well, who knew that the wonderful My Family and Other Animals was the first part of a trilogy? I read this book for a first-year English assignment at school and, despite that, have never since fallen out of love with it. I think it is among my favourite books. It is incredibly informative and a tribute to the author’s lifelong obsession with natural history as well as being laugh-out-loud funny and character-driven (the family of the title). Now, it turns out, there are two more volumes and Penguin have just put them all out in a collected edition. This is a miracle (as long as they live up to the promise of the first, otherwise it could prove quite upsetting).
• London Noir: Capital Crime Fiction - ed. Cathi Unsworth: This was another upsetting book. I already own a book by the title of London Noir, also a short story collection, put out by the same publisher (albeit with a different editor, Maxim Jakubowski, of Murder One fame). It was sitting by the Borders check-out, staring me in the eye, so I had to make a quick decision. I leafed through it, saw nothing I recognised, and bought it. Having got it home I discover that it has nothing in common with my pre-existing London Noir and can only assume that there is a series thing going on. The cover blurb says: “This is a London it’s best to read about, rather than experience at first hand.” Excellent. Looking forward to it already.

Oh, and that’s not counting the two Angel comics that came in the post on Thursday (Surrogates and Strange Bedfellows, for the curious.)

And a bunch of reservations turned up at the library. Book two of Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories - I, apparently in the minority, quite enjoyed book one and so did Mr Random. Also I had a hankering to re-read some John Wyndham, which I remember greatly enjoying as a teenager so I’ve got The Chrysalids and Trouble with Lichen on loan. Also outstanding is Robert Rankin’s The Antipope but it’s a bit too soon after The Greatest Show off Earth to attempt that at the moment - anyway, Rankin’s really arrived now; I see his new one’s being advertised on Tube station posters at the moment. Am also most of the way through Not Abba: the real story of the 1970s by Manchester DJ Dave Haslam and have just started on the second part of Don Quixote.

Go on, make sense of that lot, because I’m not sure I can…

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A few days ago, I did something I swore never to do. I bought this book, which was sitting on a stall in the Leather Lane street market in London, shouting out my name every time I walked past:

Er, bears more than a passing resemblance to this book, doesn’t it:

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This kind of cashing-in-on-Dan-Brown stuff usually annoys me intensely. But this is packed full of what looks, in a glance down the contents page, like jolly interesting stuff. There are some articles with a distinctly knocking tone, but not too many I hope, or it may find itself Bookcrossed. I really, really enjoyed the original book, could not put it down while reading it and, like a lot of other people, thought it was actually a better story than its commensurately more famous sibling. I know what I think and I’m not really interested in being told why I shouldn’t have enjoyed it in the first place because it’s all a load of crap in reality.

So, will that happen? I’ll report back when I’ve read some of it on how good or otherwise it actually is.

[More information from Amazon]

Yesterday was just ridiculous.

First of all I went to the library where there was a second-hand booksale. They’d had a clear-out of the horror and sci-fi sections. There were several Buffy novels, a short-story collection by William Gibson, a Philip K Dick novel, a Tomb Raider novelisation, a couple of decent-looking random sci-fi stories and (for some reason) a biography of Michael Schumacher written by ITV pundit James Allen. This just confirms my impression that Schumi is an android, a piece of very advanced engineering created by Ferrari. However they still haven’t managed to install the sporting ethics software correctly… Anyway. The point is that I came home with rather a lot of books.

Then we went to do the recycling and found some more books abandoned there - presumably because the relevant skips were full to overflowing. They hadn’t been wrecked by a rain shower so far… But I will still any murmurings of conscience by donating a tenner to the relevant charity next time I happen to be passing. Here’s a picture of the day’s catch:

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As to the book skip itself, I did find this rather amusing. I am sure there are bibliophiles capable of trying to climb inside but I’m not among them. The chute is currently jammed open in this position because it’s so full:

Here’s a close-up of the sign:

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A list of all the titles:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Gatekeeper Trilogy book one - Out of the Madhouse - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Blooded - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Little Things - Rebecca Moesta
• Unseen: The Burning - Nancy Holder and Jeff Mariotte (Buffy/Angel crossover)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Gatekeeper Trilogy book three - Sons of Entropy - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Faith Trials - James Laurence
• Tomb Raider - a novelisation by Mel Odom based on the film screenplay
• Burning Chrome - William Gibson
• Martian Time-Slip Philip K Dick
• Light - M John Harrison
• Underdogs - Rob Ryan
• Panic - Jeff Abbott
• The Autocourse Annual 1999-2000
• Michael Schumacher: Driven to Extremes - James Allen
• The Double Eagle - James Twining

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Some interesting reviews from The Times books pages:

Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson - reviewed by AC Grayling

Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey - reviewed by Peter Ackroyd

Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control by Dominic Streatfeild.

An Imperial possession: Britain in the Roman Empire by David Mattingley.

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Here, as a reminder to myself, is an author that I keep meaning to get involved with: Robert Rankin. Here’s an excerpt from his h2g2 article:

Rankin’s style is unusual and difficult to classify - his books are not really science fiction, and they’re not really fantasy, they’re certainly not factual, but it’s hard to say what kind of fiction they are. The only thing it’s possible to say with certainty is that they are funny. This uncategorisability is a deliberate policy decision on his part. He claims he wants to create a new literary genre - ‘far-fetched fiction’ - in the hope that by doing so he’ll get a shelf to himself in the bookshop. Sadly, this plan has not worked, and he always ends up stacked in ‘anorak corner’ with the Terry Pratchetts , the Douglas Adamses, and the Tom Holts. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, however, because if you like Adams or Pratchett, odds are you’ll like Robert Rankin.

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Sounds like a winner to me. Also, he offers his readers the bonus of a back-of-my-own-hand familiarity with the London suburb of Brentford. Here’s h2g2 again:

The dedicated Rankin reader will come to know Brentford as though born and raised there. They will know of the Butts Estate, Moby Dick Terrace, The Wife’s Legs Café, the allotments, Star Hill (where all the ley lines4 in England converge), the gasometer (which is apparently not a gasometer at all), and in particular the pub, the Flying Swan, wherein one can buy a pint of Large from Neville, the full-time part-time barman, and where you’re likely to be prevailed upon to buy a round for Brentford’s most famous inhabitants, Jim Pooley and John Arbuthnot Omally (owner of Marchant, the wonder bike). Brentford is described lovingly as a Shangri-la, a Utopia of sunshine and contentment, and a place where extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, many of whom don’t seem in the least surprised.

Fortunately (or otherwise) for me I was very nearly born and brought up there and, as members of my family have frequently stated, am probably related by birth, marriage or mutual commercial interest to three quarters of the people living there. Apparently he’s also big on the End of Days and conspiracy theories. So Rankin it is, then.

Off on holiday, and it’s a backpacking holiday, so every book taken really needs to earn its place. Taking the following books:

1. A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton - half-read already, so not a good use of resources (see brown paper, below) but the trouble is, I can’t put it down and I don’t think I’ll have finished it in time.
2. The Rainmaker by John Grisham - a bit of a doorstop but should, at least, be gripping and escapist. Have been meaning to read this for months.
3. The King of Elfland’s Daughter - by Lord Dunsany. Practical, in that it’s a slim volume, but the content is a risk. Cover blurb says ‘a second Tolkien’. Just hope it lives up to this…

Included in the backpack are a couple of sheets of brown paper, a mini-roll of sticky tape and some stamps. Books read are going to be posted home…

I have also sworn to read Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince this month and have actually started it - but the great diplomat has been knocked to the floor by the lures of Grafton’s California-based PI and a gripping tale of murderous revenge, &c… This probably marks me out as a shocking intellectual lightweight but unfortunately Old Nick (and, according to the introduction to my edition, that really is one of the derivations of the term, so shocking was it on publication) is going to have to cool his heels at home…