Recently in Books Category

It's been too long. Much too long.

Carl Hiaasen has finally published a new novel, four years after his last adult novel (yes, I realise that fans of Donna Tartt or readers awaiting the next in the A Song of Fire and Ice saga have had to wait longer). In the intervening years, Hiaasen has been publishing some non-fiction as well as a series of books for kids. But he's back with something for the rest of us, and it's a return to form.

If you've not read a Carl HIaasen novel before, then stop reading this blog, and run out and buy one. His comic take on the lowlifes and sleazeballs may seem to be far too ridiculous to be true. But readers of his (infuriatingly infrequent) column in the Miami Herald will realise that fiction can barely capture what happens in real life in that part of the world.

Star Island tells the tale of a pop-starlet who most certainly isn't Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera or Miley Cyrus. We know this, because they, and many others who regularly appear in tacky weekly publications, are name-checked. Instead we follow the exploits of "Cherry Pye" a young singer managed by her parents in the period leading up to the release of her new album "Skantily Klad".

Pye's sole talents seem to be her libido and ability to hoover up narcotics in any form that they come. So her management team also hire a lookalike to go to parties and be photographed when their young ward is dealing with one of her regular bouts of "dietary problems."

Meanwhile, "Bang Abbot" is a former Pulitzer Prize winning photographer (the exact details of his prize-winning shot, I shan't spoil) turned paparazzo who is stalking Pye in the belief that he can capture some shots of her last hours before she inevitably pops her clogs.

The action flits around Miami and the Everglades, with some familiar characters making a reappearances amongst the many new grotesques that Hiaasen conjours up here.

Aside from the fact that Hiaasen obviously doesn't know a great deal about DSLR cameras, it's a great romp, and a fun read. It's probably not his best book, but it's plenty good enough. It's just a shame that Hachette/Little Brown/Sphere are making UK readers wait until November for the UK publication. I had to order the US edition from Amazon.com to sate my thirst.

I've read two books by comedians in the last couple of weeks - which is pretty unusual for me. I tend to stray away from anything written by anyone even approaching "celebrity" status. But for various reasons I made an effort to read these books both pretty much on their respective publication dates.

Eleven is the most recent novel from Mark Watson, who's worryingly good at what he does. You might know him from We Need Answers, or just about any programme that takes comedians as pannelists. But he also wrote one of the best, if not the best, programme to air on television over Christmas 2009, A Child's Christmases in Wales.

This book centres around Xavier Ireland, an overnight DJ on a London radio station with an unusual name (there is a reason for this). The number eleven refers to a number of other characters, who are related in various ways to one another, even if they're not aware of it. Although we spend most of our time with Xavier, who continues to battle some demons from a previous life, while not really getting too involved emotionally in his current one, we also take meandering detours into the lives of others.

I always find books set in radio stations interesting, if only because they rarely, if ever, accurately represent the workplace. The station in Watson's book isn't too far from the truth however. And I guess that he either knows people who work on the radio, and has been a guest on enough stations to pick up the general gist of what happens.

I found the book to be a real pager turner with the plot not always following precisely the trajectory that you're expecting.

Good Morning Nantwich, subtitled Adventures on Breakfast Radio, is also a page turner, if not for exactly the same reasons.

It's fair that I should point out that I'm not especially a Phill Jupitus fan. I watch Buzcocks when it happens to be on, rather than seeking it out. And I must admit that I've never actually heard him on-air. I did hear Jupitus read an extract from this book at Latitude recently, and that did make me buy this, if out of interest only.

This is Jupitus' book detailing his time spent on GLR, and mostly BBC 6 Music. Jupitus loves radio, but seems to like little of what actually gets broadcast. He admits to listening to solely listening to Radio 2 and Radio 4 towards the beginning of the book.

But when he gets a job on the BBC's London station, GLR, he first of all enjoys the pleasure that relative freedom offers him, but by the end, he's fallen out of love with the station as a new management broom sweeps through. The same is broadly speaking the case with 6 Music.

In particular he has a loathing of commercial radio. At one point in this book, he spends an entire chapter detailing a nameless four hour commercial radio breakfast show. I completely agree, that this particular breakfast show obviously is inane, with a woeful selection of music and a pair of presenters who sound dreadful. But, as even he understands, lots of people like this kind of radio. It's not demanding, but lots of people - for good or for bad - don't like to be challenged by the radio. It's something that simply helps to get them through the day. He gets upset that Girls Aloud are played twice in the same show. Yet, the reality is that he wouldn't ever choose to listen to a station that plays Girls Aloud out of choice. In the same way that I can get upset about what The Sun or the Daily Mail is printing, I make a choice in not buying those publications. However, personally upsetting I find those media outlets, I understand that they wouldn't exist commercially, were it not for the fact that millions of people do enjoy them.

That of course, does not mean that we should all have to follow a lowest common denominator form of radio. And I believe that as well as 6 Music, there are other stations and programmes that are able avoid that kind of thing. But I also think it's illuminating that Jupitus, by the end of his book, admits that as he began to fall out with his management, despite having more freedom on his show than just about anybody else in radio, commercial or otherwise, he'd been broadcasting a radio station that was directed to his own personal tastes. He also freely admits personally profiting from recording radio adverts for HMV and Duracell.

The recent hullaballoo surrounding the impending closure, and then saving of 6 Music has resulted in many more listeners finding the staiton and enjoying it. Jupitus' work is bookended by concerns about the future of the station, although the vast majority of the book was obviously written before the station was placed on the chopping block. As a result, he doesn't paint a gloriously rosy picture of 6 Music. He's often upset that budgets didn't allow for him to do more things with his show. But budgets are a reality for everyone - commercial and BBC. He gets sent to a bad hotel in Belfast and personally pays to book himself and his team into a much nicer (and more expensive) hotel. His annoyance about 6 Music taking three years to get the ability to receive texts from listeners is a fair complaint though.

The book is also a little "padded" for my taste. As well as spending a long chapter taking apart a commercial breakfast show link by link, we're also treated to a full run-through of Jupitus' final show which comes across as a bit nauseous in print. While I'm sure it was very special for him, his team, and many of his listeners, I think an editor should have cut it down.

Overall, this is a pretty honest book. It doesn't especially make me like Jupitus any more or less than I had previously; indeed I'm not sure I'd want to employ Jupitus on the basis of this book. Everyone working in radio should strive to do the best that they can, be they working for the BBC or commercial radio, remaining mindful of the broad church of likes and tastes. Some parts of commercial radio deserve a good kicking, but I think that Jupitus isn't painting a fair picture. If you were to do something as crass as put my iPod on shuffle, what you'd get is something that I'd love, but almost certainly nobody else. Just because it suits my tastes, I'm not sure it'd make good radio.

Note: Yes - I've been woeful at recording what I'm reading on this blog. Anyone would think that I've actually stopped reading. That's not the case!

Given where I work, there really is no excuse for me not to go to more of the Royal Society's public lectures. So back in January I attended an interesting sounding lecture entitled "The eerie silence: are we alone in the universe?"

The room where they hold the lectures was absolutely packed, and I was glad that I'd turned up in plenty of time. Attendees that I noticed included Jon Ronson (for reasons which will become clear), and Dallas Campbell of the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory. I expect there were a few scientists there.

This year the Royal Society is celebrating its 350th anniversary, and there's a lot going on, so I will try to do more.

But back to the lecture. Professor Paul Davies works at the University of Arizona and is very involved in SETI which of course, is the organisation that searches for extraterrestrial life in the universe.

Is this a mug's game? What's the likelihood that there is someone else out there. Before this lecture, there'd actually been a formal discussion meeting examining what would happen as a consequence of finding extraterrestrial life.

Davies rattled through a lot of the things that we need to consider when searching for life. In some respects, the chances seem very good, but in others, the odds are disappointingly long.

Frank Drake, who founded SETI, came up with the Drake equation designed to determine the number of civilisations in our galaxy. The problem is that to fill it in, there are quite a few unknown variables. And since they represent a probability between 0 and 1, they fundamentally affect N, the number of life sustatining civilisations.

Davies entertainingly quotes Donald Rumsfield in this matter: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know."

The lecture is available to watch onlineat t he foot of this page.

Davies' book itself digs in significantly greater detail into all aspects of possible extraterrestrials, from the sheer likelihood of them existing, to how we might determine their existance, through to what we should be looking for, where we should be looking, what they might be saying and in what medium. The main problem for all of this is that everywhere is so distant, that communication is rendered nigh on impossible.

Davies even gets into how the news might be broken - basically it's not something that governments have thought about - and what the message might be. He even worries about the effect the existance of life might have on the world's major religions. I'm not sure that the effect would quite be the blow he thinks it would be theologically.

He refers a lot to Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which of course was later made into a pretty decent film. Sagan took plenty of liberties of course, but the basics are pretty decent.

I really enjoyed the book. It's not too long, and its pretty encompassing. The one area Davies doesn't spend a great deal of time, is the idea that the aliens are already here. This question came up to an extent at the lecture, and Davies doesn't waste a great deal of time examining it, since the proof just isn't there.

Overall, well worth reading.

The book is getting a lot of coverage all over the place. The Times' relatively new monthly science magazine devoted the better part of a whole issue to Davies, SETI, and alien life in general. In particular, there's a chunky extract online to be read (or at least until the paywall goes up). And Jon Ronson, who was at the lecture above, writes about meeting Davies in the pages of The Guardian's Weekend magazine.

As I mentioned previously, I'm going to try to get around to talking more about what I'm reading here.

I picked up The Chalk Circle Man, because I'd not previously read any Fred Vargas novels, but had heard good things about her, and I found myself in town at the weekend without anything to read (the last thing I really needed was to buy some new books).

It turns out that, typically of the way that any translated fiction reaches the English language, the publishers have been releasing her books out of sequence. So this book introduces the reader to Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, a detective with an especially unusual manner of solving crimes - using divination as much as anything.

The tale is curious, and is told from a few different viewpoints. But I immediately liked the both straightforward and incredibly complex Adamsberg. Someone is leaving curious blue chalk circles surrounding random objects on the pavements of Paris. How long before it becomes something more fiendish? I'll let you decide.

I have the feeling that I'm going to enjoy catching up with the rest of the series. And I'll have the luxuary of reading the books in order. Well - aside from the graphic novel and three novellas, neither of which seems to have been published in English yet.

I've been frankly awful detailing what I've been reading recently. So let's try to right that wrong in 2010.

The book I've most enjoyed recently - if enjoyment is the right word - is Henry Porter's new novel, The Dying Light.

Porter is British editor of Vanity Fair, but more relevant is that he was one of the people behind last year's Covention on Modern Liberty and as well as writing for The Observer, he blogs at The Guardian's Liberty Central Blog.

The Dying Light takes place in a post-2012 Britain in which we've moved on from Blair and Brown to a new Prime Minister, John Temple. The book opens as one of Temple's previous aides, David Eyam is being declared dead - killed in an explosion in Colombia.

We follow Kate Lockhart, an old friend and lover, who's catapulted into a Britain where our liberties have been evaporating in a slow but steady manner. Citizens are tracked and watched in a manner that Ceausescu might only have dreamt of.

What had Eyam uncovered? Who's in on it? How can an overbearing State be defeated.

The themes of Porter's novel are clear, and he paints a vivid picture of a world not far from our own. To that extent, his is the best fictionalisation of that fear that I've come across recently.

There was 2008's BBC1 drama, The Last Enemy, that was ultimately unsuccessful. Given the propensity of Hollywood to take British political thriller TV series and remake then as films, this would be a good candidate for dramatising?

The book did have a stark reminders to me. Some of the action in the novel takes place in Chequers, the Prime Minister's "weekend retreat." The Prime Minister and his press secretary take a walk while they're there to Cymbeline's Castle, an earthwork on Beacon Hill. As it happens, I walked up that very hill last year and took this photo from that very spot.

Clearly, the camera is placed there, because it's on the edge of the Chequers estate, but I think it's somehow indicative of the society we've become, and we're becoming.

The other aside in the novel that resonated was when one character, who studies Middle Eastern history in his spare time, talks about what a Sumerian astronomer was able to record with the help of a planisphere in 3123 BC. An asteroid hit the alps.

A very similar example appears in the current edition of New Scientist, relating to the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa from about 700 BC but recording events from 1000 years earlier.

In both the novel and the New Scientist piece, the gist is that much of our knowledge is stored in an ephemeral manner, and writing it down (or engraving it!) ensures that the knowledge lasts many thousands of years.

In these instances, the language was cuniform, and Radio 4's fabulous new series, A History of the World in 100 Objects examines cuniform this Friday.

Anyway - I'm straying. This book is a real page turner and well worth reading.

A lot has already been said and written about Wired editor, Chris Anderson's new book, Free. In particular Malcolm Gladwell reviewed it for The New Yorker in a not completely complementary fashion. This in turn has been refuted elsewhere.

Books like Free aren't the most demanding of fare. Essentially it's 250 pages devoted to a single idea, illustrated by lots of examples. Sometimes the examples are a little underwhelming. Both Radiohead's In Rainbows and Prince's Planet Earth examples are analysed: Radiohead's pay what you like, and Prince's deal with the Mail on Sunday. But both are major artists who are already famous and popular. Both deals worked for them (although it cost the Mail on Sunday money, and hasn't been fully repeated since), but there's no real proof that they'd work for "average" artists.

But there are still some lessons to be learnt - if not as many as you'd perhaps like.

Sitting behind all this is the newspaper industry - or perhaps that should be "journalism" industry. Rupert Murdoch has recently indicated that he hates the free model, and wants to start putting paywalls up around his journalism (we'll leave to one side, alleged voicemail hacking shall we). So there are rumours that perhaps The Sunday Times might go pay only. And across the pond, The New York Times is said to be having high level discussions about whether or not to put back a paywall. Anderson's book includes a quote from the Times' Andrew Rosenthal about his dislike of giving away journalism free. It has to be paid for.

While Anderson has some great answers for many of the hurdles put in place, it's clear that unless the free model can pay for journalism, then even more newspapers are going to go out of business. Anderson pretty much acknowledges that a full free platform has not been found. Probably because of the sheer number of pages out there, internet revenues are not high - and the lack of scarcity means that costs are driven in one direction. And it's not up.

Newspapers are just one area of this of course. Free does work in many places, and Anderson highlights some excellent ones. Building something on a global scale, and perhaps delivering bits rather than something physical, makes finding that model easier than ever.

But it's disingenuous to think that free works across the board. In a coda to the book, Anderson admits that himself.

So overall, this is a worthwhile read - even if a few too many of the examples are a little well known - but free is only part of the solution. And in some cases, it's hard to see that it's a solution at all.

I'd completely missed the fact that this book existed until I saw a reference to a Daily Mail extract via a friend's blog (obviously I wouldn't ordinarily link to a Daily Mail extract - it's not as though I was surfing the site or something).

Written by John Osborne - no, not our John Osborne - it details one man trying to liven up his dull data-entry job by listening to a different radio station each day.

The radio anorak in me, meant that I had to read this book. I really do love radio. It's why I work where I work - and I'd listen to lots of radio wherever I happened to be.

When the book arrived, the first thing I had to do was see if there was a reference to the station where I work. The list of contents didn't show Absolute Radio, and I was scouring it for Virgin Radio - surely it must be there - when I realised that it formed Osborne's very first chapter.

And so we get a listener's experience of Virgin Radio, as it was about a year or so ago, from Christian O'Connell at Breakfast to Geoff in his then late show. He seemed to quite like the station, but he especially enjoyed a caller to Christian's show who's story transcended the entire show that day - a woman had basically married a complete stranger; and as a man of good taste, he loved The Geoff Show.

We get a canter through plenty of other stations in a fairly breezy way including Asian Network, TalkSport, theJazz (that helps date it a bit), and Resonance.

Osborne has also managed to get interviews with various people to talk about the importance of radio to them. He spends time at the Radio Times, drops into Manchester to see Mark Radcliffe, chats to Tommy Boyd, Nicholas Parsons and Five Live's Arlo White.

Against all this, is the backstory about his dreadful sounding office, where all he has to do is enter data and fantasise about an attractive co-worked. The only place to walk to at lunchtime is an out-of-town branch of Comet. No wonder he started writing this book.

What truly becomes apparant from reading this book is the tremendously dull everyday stuff that some DJs fill their programmes with. Jo Whiley is quoted as having enjoyed watching Lost on DVD, and asking listeners to text in some of their favourite TV shows. That's really not a great radio feature.

Osborne seems to find Radio 4 slightly scary (ironically given it's current serlialisation - see below), and doesn't seem to be able to make it through a full day of Classic FM or Radio 3.

But overall the book's a galloping read and doesn't take that long to read at all.

My only complaint with the book is that there are more than one or two typos throughout it. It really hasn't been properly proofed. Since it's from a mainstream publisher - Simon & Schuster UK - that's really not acceptable in a book with a £9.99 cover price. There are couple of real clangers. At the start of one chapter, the word "I" is replaced by two words from the previous paragraph. And in another place, "presenting" appears as "preventing" which is slightly different.

Oh, and the cover could be better. While they've chosen a perfectly good picture of a radio on the cover in a caravan park, it's got a poorly Photoshopped Union Jack stuck on its antenna. Even worse, the font for the author's name seems to be Comic Sans (and despite what The Guardian wrote recently, that's a crime), while the rest of the title is in seemingly whatever random font they first came up with, with a curious white stroke and a drop shadow. It just makes the book appear to be self-published as opposed to something that's from a major publisher with national newspaper and Radio 4 seralisations.

Don't let those things put you off though!

As I mentioned, the book is currently the Radio 4 Book of the Week. The first episode, aired yesterday, and featured Virgin Radio (although the nice bit about The Geoff Show was cut from Radio 4's adaptation) while today's features Wogan and TalkSport.

Back in 2005 I read a book called The Oxford Murders which was a perfectly enjoyable thriller set in Oxford around mathematics and murders by Argentinian author Guillermo Martinez.

In the meantime, it's been made into a film which I've not seen, and wasn't exactly well reviewed.

Now comes The Book of Murder, which is another tale quickly told. Told from the viewpoint of a unnamed, sometime novelist, and old aquaintance, Luciana, makes contact with him to tell him an unlikely story. Another, very successful novelist, Kloster, is murdering her family. And nobody will believe her.

The set-up is pretty good, but sadly the story doesn't really go anywhere, and as you dash through the 200 or so pages, you begin to realise just that.

Martinez paints a pretty good picture of a bitter Argentianian literary society that you feel he's probably well aware of. Has he experienced some of the success that Kloster has experienced - you don't get all that many Argentinian authors translated into English after all.

He also tries to inject some maths into this, with some discussions on the nature of chance, but it feels a little worked upon.

The Book of Murder is a perfectlty fine tale, but you might find yourself coming away from it a little underwhelmed.

I picked this interesting little title up after reading a review of it in The Guardian a week or so ago.

The story involves an unnamed housekeeper who is assigned by her agency to look after the professor. He had an accident years earlier, and now his memory only lasts 80 minutes. That means he can't remember who his housekeeper is everyday when she arrives. But he does remember all the mathematics that got him to where he is prior to his accident.

So an intriguing plot and a healthy dose of maths - that'll be me hooked then!

The housekeeper's son, known only as "Root" (as in "square root" because of his flat head) also plays an interesting part in the story, which gets into baseball and lots of basic maths.

From primes to perfect numbers, and various points inbetween, all are mentioned, leaving the reader ever amazed by the relationships we have between numbers. It's well worth reading, and I hadn't even mentioned that it's a Japanese translation.

If you just went by this blog, you might think that I've stopped reading books. Well that's not true. I just stopped writing about them here. Quite why, I couldn't really say, but I intend to right that wrong. So let's start with a book I read a few months ago, and its sequel that I just finished today.

Child 44 is the first book in a series by Tom Rob Smith featuring Leo Demidov, an MGB (the precursor to the KGB) agent for the Russian state under Stalin. He does what's required of him, arresting subversives and anyone deemed to have broken the rules, for them to be tortured or sent off to prison or camps.

Against this backdrop, children across a wide part of the country are disappearing. But this is state where murder is unknown. The idea that there might be a serial killer is unconscionable.

How does someone investigate a crime, when that crime does not exist because the state says so. That's the central tenet of Child 44.

The backdrop is fascinating and the book reads like a thriller. Well, it is a thriller. And it's a superbly told thriller, that keeps you turning the pages, as the full horror of events slowly unfolds.

The book's been a best seller in the UK, and according to the author on a recent edition of the Simon Mayo Book programme, has sold over 250,000 copies in Japan. When I was in Prague recently, I saw posters all over the underground advertising the Czech edition. Ridley Scott has the film rights (although he's got such a large slate on his plate just now with Robin Hood, Monopoly, The Forgotten War and this, that goodness knows when he'll get this done).

Anyway, a cracking read, and well worth looking out.

Last month the book's sequel, The Secret Speech came out. And it's more of the same - in the very best way possible.

But first a warning - you might not want to read the following if you've not read Child 44 yet, but I don't give a great deal away.

We find Demidov hoping that he's finally put his old life behind him, and he's heading up the new homicide division of the Moscow police - even though it's not officially recognised. But Stalin has died and Khrushchev is in power. He makes his Secret Speech - something I knew nothing about - and suddenly everything changes. What happens to people who have behaved one way under Stalin, and now must change their ways? What happens when some of those imprisoned are now released?

Demidov gets personally involved and his family is disintegrating. Before we know it, he's going into a Gulag undercover and things are not going well for him.

If anything, the pace is even faster, but as in Child 44, it's a fascinating insight into something I certainly knew very little about. It's a scary world.

I rattled through this book in record time, and now realise that it's going to be at least a year before I can read more of Demidov's exploits. I look forward to them.

I tend to avoid cash-in books to accompany popular TV series; you won't catch me buying the complete Little Britain Scripts or whatever (OK, so Little Britain is well past its sell-by date). But I've always been intrigued by Derren Brown.

It's true that his last special - The System - I found to be a little suspect. In particular, the inclusion of camcorder footage that I don't think could have been supplied precisely as advertised. But overall in his Channel 4 series (with one exception - Trick or Treat) and particularly his specials, I've been very impressed. It's amazing how much publicity he got for his Russian Roulette programme which was evidently a magic trick not dissimilar to a famous Halloween trick that Paul Daniels once 'conjoured' up. But full marks for generating so much PR puffery around it.

Anyway, readers of regular TV tie-in books might be a little disappointed with this as Brown has quite a lot to say. At first, his language is deliberately irritating, and he comes across as not a little cocky. Of course, that's precisely what a magician has to be, and Brown admits this.

This language calms down a little in due course and Brown takes us through some of the areas he's interested in, teaching us a basic coin trick and a card trick, but importantly, explaining some of the other elements beyond the basic techniques which make the tricks work better. Perhaps some illustrations at this point would have been useful.

He also takes us through some memory techniques that can be usefully deployed to remembers tasks, facts and names. And there are also sections that look at some basic statistics (questionning our expectations and understanding of the likelihood of events occurring) and bodylanguage.

Of particular interest to me was a chapter that examined hypnosis and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). These are inter-linked areas that I still have some significant questions over. Brown cleared a few things up - there's not a single thing called "hypnosis" in the same way as something called a "magic trick" might employ any number of different techniques to bring off an illusion. But I was still a little unsure at the end, and questions remain about how real these things truly are.

What is evident is that Brown has clearly been influenced in much of what he practices from his early experiences as a devoted Christian. He's since become an atheist, and now has a much more sceptical attitude than he perhaps once did. I won't get into the rights and wrongs of this - although it seems that he's gone from perhaps one extreme to the other, but it has certainly left him with a questioning mind. And that informs enormously when he tackles such subjects as psychics and beliefs in unproven alternative remedies.

This is not, then, an especially easy read, and although the book has sold well, I'd be surprised if it has been read to such a great extent. It is, however, fascinating and well worth spending some time with. At times you wish that Brown would get into some areas more - I'm fascinated by the art of cold reading for example. But Brown does provide a fulsome list of recommended further reading.

I'm not sure about the value of the emails he includes at the end. In my paperback edition of the book they were all but illegible, and while, as someone in the media, I'm sure he does get perhaps more than his fair share of weirdos writing to him, I'd be inclined to ignore them rather than encourage them in print.

Nick Davies has written a fascinating book that details exactly how we get our news - and he's not a happy man. I like to think that I know a little about what goes on in the media and how truths are distorted and the way that newspapers and news broadcasts are put together.

In a previous life I worked for a local newspaper company, and while I didn't work in the editorial department, I knew a thing or two about how it worked. I've got a reasonable idea about how news is put together for bulletins for my current employer.

But despite regularly reading the media pages of The Guardian and The Independent, listening to media podcasts, and always reading the Street of Shame pages of Private Eye, I still had my eyes opened to a lot of what was, and is, going on.

We all now know about the News of the World reporter who was caught intercepting the voicemail messages of members of the Royal Family amongst others, but I hadn't realised to quite what extent that this kind of activity had been happening further afield, and the extent to which it continues to happen. Davies highlights numerous cases which one way or the other have avoided any kind of prosecution.

His central thesis is that fewer people are now having to produce more and more copy to service additional newspaper sections, 24 hour news channels and websites. There's less time to find things out, and more time is given over to serving an ever-growing multitude of media. So now you have to get a version up on your newspaper's website asap. Then when you're reporting the story, you might need to video or record the story at the same time - perhaps for a vodcast or podcast. All of this is eating up time that you could be using to do more reporting before finally completing the copy in time for the first edition of your newspaper. On top of that, in many cases you're expected to produce more stories per day than previously.

Not that Davies would have you believe that there ever was a "Golden Age" of journalism. Perhaps in the past people were lazy and spent afternoons in the pub instead of using the time properly. The commercial imperatives of today's proprietors such as Rupert Murdoch may be different from some of those in the past - with a "give them what they want" and not a "what's good for them" mentality - but that's not to say that the proprietorial systems that worked in the past were necessarily better. Running a newspaper has always meant being in a position of power.

But what is clear is that there are far fewer sources of news these days. Smaller local news agencies who once provided copy for many papers have closed down, and today we're largely left with the Press Association. That may be fine, but it has its own problems. And it essentially means that most of the news is being supplied by a single agency. The same is true internationally with only Associated Press and Reuters offering full international story supplies (and to a lesser extent AFP). So if you're not picked up by one of those organisations, you're probably not going to be picked up at all - important stories are left largely undocumented.

And it's clear too that there are some massive issues with the over-reliance on PR stories. The growth of the PR industry is phenomenal and with government departments and companies churning out stories left right and centre, as editorial budgets decrease, these stories are swallowed and regurgitated wholesale. Newspapers have pages to fill; websites need 'content' to drive readers to them. Nobody's doing much in the way of checking or fresh reporting. They may seek a quote here or there and that's it.

There are a couple of issues I have with the book. Davies concentrates on the Millennium Bug, and the fact that civilisation did not collapse in the aftermath of the advent of the 21st century. While that is true, and those who created scenarios that would have had us retiring to log cabins in the countryside with copious quantities of bottled water and canned food, were evidently over egging the pudding, I'm not sure that it was quite the non-story that Davies paints it as being.

And at another point, Davies notes a report that mentions fractions of a second differences between stories loading on the BBC News and Sky News websites. Davies seems to think that this is something to do with the undoubted pressures being brought to bear on journalists to get a story onto a newsgathering organisation's website as quickly as possible. In fact, it's patently a report into how quickly a page appears for a user - you are less likely to use a site if the server capacity is poor, and pages load slowly.

I'd love to be able to say that I learnt nothing from this book, and knew the kind of duplicity and immoral/illegal behaviour perpetrated by some of these people (it's important to note that not all journalists and organisations are as venal as some of the stories outlined here), but I was truly amazed by one section. It dealt with the so-called 'Nat West Three.' I remember that latter stages of that story as the bankers involved had been extradited to the US to stand trial for some accusations regarding the Enron collapse. The story I'd certainly been left with was that the UK had inadvertently agreed to a terrible set of laws that let these poor innocent middle class men be extradited to face unfair trial in the US. But this was simply PR spin on a colossal scale. And it worked - on me at least - but I think many others. The evidence, in fact, was vast. And although the new law may be unfair (we can't extradite Americans in the same manner), the fact was that these men would have been extradited anyway. Instead we had marches and a concerted press campaign to support these poor men. It was a fantastically "successful" piece of PR that hooked (or hoodwinked) our press completely - and took me along for the ride.

It's worth noting that Davies doesn't even bother getting into the tabloid press. And frankly, if it's accepted that an intelligent person has a healthy scepticism of the tabloids, it's still enormously worrying to learn what's going on in our quality titles.

But really, this is an essential read for anyone who cares about how our news is put together and delivered to us. Although Davies is a Guardian journalist, he's dished out his distain quite widely, and as well as the venom shown towards targets like Associated Newspapers' Mail titles, there must be some seriously unhappy people at the Sunday Times and his own sister paper The Observer. They really don't come out of the book very well.

So please do pick up a copy of this book and spend some time with it. You really won't regret it.

This is one of two books published towards the end of last year to tie in, unofficially, with Radio 4's 40th anniversary. And Now On Radio 4 takes a fairly brisk look at the history of the channel, with very little background about what radio had been broadcast in the UK prior to the big changes of 1967.

The format of the book means that we go through an average Radio 4 day, starting with Farming Today and ending with the Shipping Forecast. At each time of the day, the network's history is examined, and so we find ourselves jumping forwards and backwards as necessary.

The book has a relative lightness of tone which makes it very engaging, and also easy to dip into and out of. But that does also mean that some parts could easily form whole chapters, instead of the two or three pages they end up being awarded.

And there is an annoying editorial practice of having boxouts of subjects take the top two-thirds of up to four pages at a time, meaning that you have to jump back those pages to where you'd been. The non-linear book experience? Call me old fashioned, but I'd like a straighter read.

But when all is said and done, there are a lot things that I learnt about the channel. It's obvious that a handful of contributors have made up a significant proportion of the book's firsthand tales, but that gives it a very personal touch.

I look forward to comparing it with David Hendy's book.

This slim volume is a well aimed blast at what should be relatively small proportion of our society who believe in some facile and provably untrue beliefs. Yet, as we know, there are all too many people who follow suspect "nutritionists", waste money on homoeopathy, pay too much attention to 9/11 mythologies, and read "history" books that are quite simply works of fiction.

You'll be unsurprised to learn that I am, metaphorically, sitting in the choir stalls as the author, Damian Thompson, preaches to me. In that respect, it's perhaps more important that a wider audience than "un-believers" like me read this book.

The book starts with a well-aimed attack on Creationists. But interestingly, the author, who as well as being a Daily Telegraph leader writer, is also Editor-in-Chief of the Catholic Herald. So while some areas are familiar to Richard Dawkins followers (homeopathy, astrology, etc), this isn't a full scale attack on religious beliefs. Early on in the book, the author makes clear his beliefs and those of many others, that science and religion can live side by side, and evolutionary theory doesn't really affect those beliefs. Indeed he also takes aim at what he sees as worryingly close dabblings with Intelligent Design by those high up in the Vatican.

While I might be well aware of some of the more ludicrous "history" books that litter our bookshops' shelves like the forerunner to The Da Vinci Code, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, I really didn't know the story of 1421: The Year China Discovered The World. This is a title I've seen regularly on the shelves of Waterstones and Borders, and while I'd been a little intrigued by it, I'd never picked it up. I certainly won't now, since I've learnt that it's basically all made up. Indeed, when the thesis of the book is laid out, it's hard not to reject it even then. It's clear that all concerned with the book knew of its shortcomings. But it's sold in its thousands, and the since it paints their society in a great light, the Chinese have adopted it with welcome arms.

I was pleased to see that Bad Science's Ben Goldacre gets plenty of credit in the medical and scientific areas of Counterknowledge. I look forward to Goldacre's own forthcoming title.

And the author isn't shy in attacking the worrying tendency of many Islamist societies to adopt many of the same arguments that Creationists and holocaust-deniers have adopted before. While there might seem to be little in common between them, you only have to look as far as the Iranian president to realise the danger of this if it's left unfettered.

The dangers of misinformation from MMR in the UK to AIDS/HIV in South Africa are clearly explained.

The book is all very readable in tone, and written from a knowledgeable viewpoint. I suppose that I'd have perhaps liked a few more original examples, since all those highlighted have been documented previously (even though I hadn't necessarily been aware of them all). That said, it's the lacking we have in our society - and our willingness to accept untruths, that are our real shortcomings. Why does the NHS support homoeopathy? And why does Boots sell the drugs? Why are proper academic institutions getting into bed with the likes of Patrick Holford? Why are major publishers happy to market and distribute books which they know must be complete fiction?

Cash is the obvious answer. And that's really not good enough.

Open your eyes a little and read this book. It also has a companion website which is pretty substantial and worth adding to your blogroll.

I'd not previously read any James Lee Burke novels, despite him having written over 25 in the past. But I heard him in the book section of the Simon Mayo programme a few weeks ago, and the setting of his most recent novel in and around New Orleans against the backdrop of Katrina was an interesting idea.

Dave Robicheaux is his long standing detective, yet in the early pages of this book, he barely features as we instead concentrate on his best friend, and incidents that are happening in New Orleans. Fairly soon the hurricane hits, but the key incidents which include murder and burglary, don't really occur until afterwards when law and order has just about fallen apart.

While distain for the way in which the authorities dealt with the aftermath is handled well - not overbearing, but fully deserved nonetheless.

I quite liked the flawed nature of some of the characters, and there is one truly nasty individual in here who good give some people nightmares. I may well check out more of his books at some point.

As with my feebleness in reporting back on films I've seen recently, I've also neglected the printed word. That is to say, I've not listed the books I've read recently here.

Now this may have little to do with media, TV, radio, or any of the other random things I tend to talk about here, but it serves me quite usefully.

When On Chesil Beach came out in hardback last year, I was reluctant to buy it - mainly because it was so slight, and also because although I can appreciate McEwan as an author (Atonement was wonderful), he can be miss as well as hit. For example, I wasn't especially enamoured with Saturday, and Amsterdam was very poor. Anyway, I had reasonable hopes for On Chesil Beach which has just reached paperback, but I'm not so sure.

Essentially telling the story of two characters on their wedding night in the mid-sixties, this novella sometimes felt more like a writer's exercise than a novel. I'd have perhaps been happier if it had been a short story in an anthology. I'm glad it didn't win the Booker, as I'd have been upset if I'd been another author on the shortlist.

I could believe the characters, growing up in a sheltered post-war period, not being aware of the ways of the world. And their lives felt real as we jumped from one to the other. Yet the ending felt rushed with a five page summary of the rest of their lives where perhaps there was a more interesting story to tell. Perhaps the book as it stands could have been the opening chapter in a larger tale?

It's a worthwhile book, but it's just not quite good enough for my liking. Perhaps in his novel, McEwan will write about more than a single day's events?

One of my favourite sections in The Guardian is the Review section - largely made up of book reviews. For about 18 months, the section featured a weekly extract in the ongoing story of Tamara Drewe. Initially I didn't read the strip. Then I realised that I needed to catch up, but didn't get around to it. Then I decided to catch up online, but unusually the full story was not now completely available.

So I waited until this book was finally published. Posy Simmonds has polished it up a little for publication, but it's not that you'd notice.

Beth runs a writers' retreat somewhere in the countryside, but she has her own problems with her writer husband who is serially unfaithful to her as she edits his books and looks after him in general. The cast of characters is filled out with a young gardener who no longer lives in his family home, and an American long-staying writer who's trying to get his book off the ground unconvincingly.

Into this midst comes Tamara who's an arrivist young writer from London who once lived in the area but has now reappeared following some rhinoplasty and with her London newspaper column. She's trouble... at least trouble seems to follow her around.

The book is actually a retelling of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. I say "actually" but having never read the Hardy novel, I didn't know this until I'd read it.

But I did really enjoy it, and the book is lavishly printed and published.

Alan Johnston's kidnapping in the Gaza Strip was one of the more shocking moments of last year, and I think most people were relieved when he finally emerged largely unscathed - physically at least.

This is his book, and unusually it's not a full blown affair like those of other hostages. Nor is it an autobiography like Frank Gardner's book from 2006.

Instead we have the fairly rushed publication of what is effectively a series of pieces that Johnston has put together for From Our Own Correspondenet over his time in Gaza, as well as previous spells in Afghanistan and across Central Asia.

The highlight is Kidnapped which is a straight reprinting of his FOOC from last October. It's followed by a question and answer session which elaborates on a few of the areas Johnston didn't cover himself.

It's an interesting little book and highlights how evenly Johnston reported events in Gaza. The group that took him did the plight of the Palestinian people no favours at all, something which the rest of the population in Gaza well understood.

Slide is one of the more recent Hard Case Crime novels - those wonderfully trashy hard-boiled crime novels. In this instance we follow the twin stories of "Slide" and "The M.A.X." as Max Fisher likes to call himself.

The book itself, I discover, is the sequel to Bust which came out last year, also under the Hard Case Crime imprint.

The story in this instance begins in the middle of nowhere (well somewhere forty miles from Mobile, Alabama) as well as in Dublin. The main protagonists are hard men who kill... a lot. Bodies fly left right and centre, but the story moves apace, and you can be sure that in a few minutes someone else is going to get it.

But lest you think that this is just a vicious crime novel, there is a certain element of humour. At least two crime writers are killed along the way, and Hard Case Crime's own "noirish" covers are referenced.

Great fun, and I'll certainly be hunting out Bust from last year.

A bit of searching on Amazon seems to reveal that the two authors of this book are quite prolific. Ken Bruen, an Irish writer publishes one or more crime novels a year, while Jason Starr has also published a number of crime books.

I suspect I'll be reading more of their work.

Jed Mercurio first sprang to attention with the wonderful medical TV series, Cardiac Arrest. At the time he was a practising doctor and wrote under a pseudonym.

He went on to write a novel, Bodies, in a similar vein, and of course this was made into that rarest of things - a decent BBC Three drama series.

Now he's written another novel, and this has absolutely nothing to do with medicine or the NHS. To be fair, he's also previously written TV dramas set well away from medical matters too.

In Ascent, we follow the career of the fictional Yefgenii Yeremin from being a child in the bombed out post-war Stalingrad, and into the Russian air force where he flew during the Korean War under the guise of a North Korean.

But not everything in his career is going perfectly, and the Space Race is taking place, with many top pilots on both sides becoming astronauts and cosmonauts.

I don't want to spoil the story any more by saying how his life develops, but it's evident that Mercurio has done an awful lot of research. The Korean war section of the book is full of dogfights and plenty of technical terms which are just enough to make you feel like you're in the midst of something truly happening, but not so much that you're completely lost with all the terminology.

A pacy book, and if you enjoyed the HBO mini-series of a few years ago, From the Earth to the Moon, you may well enjoy this.

Earlier this year, Michael Dibdin died, aged 60. But he left us a final Aurelio Zen novel. I've been reading the series about the Italian detective for years, and so it was with a slightly heart that I picked up this latest tome, knowing that it was be my last acquaintance with the man.

If you've not read the Zen novels, then you're in for a treat and should probably head right back to the start of the series - Ratking.

As for this final book? Well, Dibdin liked to always take us to new parts of Italy and so this time we find Zen on temporary assignment in the south in Calabria where an American lawyer, who was supposed to be helping out with a forthcoming film about the Apocalypse, has been murdered in a particularly brutal fashion.

But the locals aren't giving the police any information. And it seems that all is not quite as it seems with the search for the impending films location scouting. It needs Zen to take control and crack a few heads.

If I'm being honest, this isn't the greatest Zen novel, but it's not the worst. There are comic characters like Jake, the millionaire dot-com slacker who's funding the whole enterprise. And his right hand man seems to have stepped out a Carl Hiaasen novel to a certain extent. But I enjoyed it enough. It's just a shame that we won't be getting any more.

A couple of years ago, I went along to Borders after work one evening and saw Jon Courtenay Grimwood and a couple of other authors talk about their new SF books. Prior to that, the only Grimwood I'd read were his science fiction book review columns for The Guardian.

This tale is quite intriguing. Bobby Zha is a Chinese American who works for the San Francisco police department. Unfortunately for him, he's murdered. But he comes back, in the body of someone else entirely, returning from a long coma. Fortunately, the person who's body he inhabits is very rich.

Now unlike many a protagonist, Zha is not especially likeable. Despite being a "good cop" (TM), he wasn't averse to taking back handers, in kind, from prostitutes and generally misbehaving behind his wife's back.

But he's keen to find out why exactly he was murdered, and what his partner had to do with it.

We embark on a very noirish story, with plenty of suspicious goings on. And the 9Tail Fox? Well, I'll let you find out yourself.

Another book recommended by Scott Pack via his blog.

Electricity is a novel about Lily who's a teenage epileptic. She lives in a seaside town somewhere in Yorkshire, and the only real family she has is her brother Barry. There was another brother, but he was sent away when she was little, and she's not seen him since.

Lily's mother, who has just died, essentially abused her kids, and her death means that the kids can now sell their mother's house. But what about the missing brother's share.

And so Lily heads to London to look for her missing brother. We see events through her eyes, and sometimes, after the onset of a fit, it can be a disturbing vision. On the other hand, she's never been to a city like London, and the scale of the place is overwhelming for her.

She meets people, and slowly the story unfolds.

I really liked this novel, and fairly well raced through it. And you can't help but love Lily, albeit that her life has not been a good one.

Imperium is the latest Robert Harris novel, and following on from Pompeii, he's again set it in a Roman setting. This time, we effectively have the political life of Cicero - the lawyer and politician. The book is told by Tiro, Cicero's slave and personal secretary, who, we're told, essentially invented shorthand to record conversations accurately and quickly.

The book feels as though it's in two parts, concentrating first of Cicero's prosecution of Verres who ran amok in Sicily until finally stopped in his tracks, and his political ambitions leading to his intervention in the Catiline conspiracy.

Harris can't help but draw a few allusions to modern day politics, first with some comparisons which you can only make with the war in Iraq, and then a general attack on the venality of many politicians.

But I enjoyed these, and the book tells a story I really didn't know. Julius Caesar doesn't come out of it all that well, and other incidental characters are alluded to in a knowing manner.

At the end of the book, is a brief advert for The Ghost, Harris' forthcoming political thriller. We're told that this is a return to political thrillers for him. Yet Imperium is nothing if not a political thriller itself. And a very good one. If I was being snobbish I'd say it makes a great beach read. But I'm not, and in any case, I didn't read it on the beach.

I got hold of Sebastian Beaumont's novel Thirteen on the basis of Scott Pack's recommendation on his very good blog.

The book revolves around the life of a Brighton taxi driver who pulls the night shift, and the strange things he begins to see and experience. What's going on? He picks up passengers from a house numbered 13, but going back later the property is not there.

I suppose I'd describe the book as a cross between a Haruki Murakami novel and Mulholland Drive. You have to puzzle your way through it.

In between, are plenty of incidents that the author assures us did happen to him when he was a taxi driver, and they're totally believable.

The book's an entertaining journey and you get sucked into its strange world very easily.

The Progressive Patriot is one of those books that's going to defy categorisation in bookshops and libraries. It's part autobiography, part history and part social history.

Bragg takes us on something of a personal journey to understand his roots. We travel this journey, partly by way of his East End/Essex born family, but dip in and out of the history of Britain, and England in particular.

We also learn something of Bragg's musical heritage, from his early love of Simon and Garfunkel to his discovering of punk, properly in the guise of The Clash.

It's a good book, and I didn't read it because I'm particularly a fan of Bragg. I guess I admire his work more than love it. But he's an excellent story teller, and I always listen out for radio or television interviews.

I do have some issues with his slightly too accommodating views on ID Cards towards the end - but then you'd be surprised if I didn't. And sometimes, he still has to hammer home his politics a little more than is necessary, especially when it sometimes feels that today's Tories are actually to the left of some Labour policies.

I picked this up in Waterstones the other day, purely because it was the SF novel of the month. But I'm glad I did. John Scalzi has created an interesting world in which 75 year-olds, their bodies decrepit despite organ transplants and cosmetic surgery, sign up to fight for the Colonial Defence Force, millions of light years away from Earth, knowing that they'll never return.

Why OAPs should be fit for this kind of active service is unclear to the pensioners. But they sign anyway, and soon all is revealed...

I won't give the story away, except to say that this is a rollicking space adventure, and it's not Cocoon. There are aliens a plenty and battles all over the place.

It comes as no surprise to realise that there are more stories to be told in this universe. I'll be there.

As an aside, Marc Andreessen, previously of Netscape, has listed Scalzi as one of his favourite SF novelists of the '00s so far.

Nature Girl is the latest Carl Hiaasen novel, and once again we have the usual set of misfits and ne'erdowells. The novel mainly takes place amongst Florida's 10,000 Islands in the Everglades. The story is the usual complex affair of inter-twined happenings that, unlikely though it may be, all manage to be in the same place at the same time.

There's not a great deal else to say really. I'm not going to pretend that this is Hiaasen's best novel of recent years, but then it's not exactly his worst either. It's a little like he's on autopilot, but that's not a terrible thing. There's plenty of enjoyment to be had here.

This is something a bit different from Henning Mankell. I know him mainly... well exclusively really... for his Kurt Wallander novels. Or perhaps those of Wallander's daughter, who's lately become a police officer herself in the series.

But Mankell has spent and still spends a lot of time in Africa. And that's where this novel is set. It's not too clear where precisely we are, but the location is somewhere sub-Saharan and is told in flashback by a small "child". I only use those quotation marks because for a child as young as he is, the language he uses is remarkably mature.

Nelio is the street child who's life we hear about, and it involves slavery, death, hardship, and some episodes which remind me more of something like The Life of Pi or even Arabian Nights.

Nonetheless, it was a good, sad, book. And I daresay that I'm not the only Swedish crime reader who's been sneaked off to Africa as a result.

I'm really not at all sure how I've managed this, but I'd not previously a Neil Gaiman novel. This is a terrible oversight, since I own more than one, and I've been reading Gaiman's blog pretty assiduously for the last two or three years (it's really good). I did see the TV series of Neverwhere a few years ago - and it's finally got a DVD release here recently.

I did start a Gaiman novel some years ago, but for whatever reason, stopped after a couple of pages. As it turns out, it was Starburst. Although it took me a few pages to remember. But this time I carried on and was pleased that I did. This is a story largely set in Faerie just beyond the village of Wall. We follow Tristan as he visits the land and goes on many an adventure.

I won't say much more as it'd spoil it for you, but it's a wonderful short book and I now realise that I've got a wealth of Gaiman novels (and comics) to catch up on.

Of course it wasn't a completely random choice for me to start with Stardust. There's a feature film of it coming soon, and I always like to read the novel before I see the film. The film's trailer makes it look sumptuous by the way, although I suspect that the UK version of the trailer has rather more Ricky Gervais in it than is strictly accurate.

You can't fail to want to read a book called The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril can you? And just look at that cover!

This is pulp book set in a pulp era. I should explain a bit more. The novel has two protagonists, Walter Gibson who used to write The Shadow, and Lester Dent who penned Doc Savage. These were two incredibly popular pulp magazines that were effectively monthly short novels published on cheap paper with fantastical covers. Now I'll be perfectly honest, and will admit that I've not really read any of these pulp titles, but I'm inclined to maybe give one or two a go.

These two rivals don't especially like one another, but in this entertaining novel, they end up getting involved in a complicated real-life case involving strange Chinamen, toxic gas, and strange sects.

There are plenty of other real-life characters who get involved in the case, not least HP Lovecraft and a certain L Ron Hubbard (he hasn't invented a "religion" at this point, and is instead an up and coming pulp author).

I could get into the story a bit more, but it's as rip-roaring and believable as the pulps it's gently mocking. So I'll just say that this is page-turner. It maybe goes on a little long with a couple of false endings, but I liked it nonetheless.

The success of Freakonomics was almost certainly the reason that this book got the green light from the publishers. That's not to say that it's bad, because it's not. Seemingly based on a column from the Financial Times, the author attempts to use economic theory to explain day to day things that we experience.

For example, he looks at the way the takeaway coffee market works, and examines how the pricing of these expensive beverages is determined (basically, it's our own fault that our disposable income means that we can spend two quid on a coffee at a station).

It's all fascinating stuff, and I definitely learnt quite a lot reading this book.

But I don't always agree with the author's views. For example, he's of the opinion that all those people working in Far-Eastern sweatshops were doing so out of choice, as they earn more and therefore have better lives as a result. Except it's not always their choice. Society might dictate that you have to work there - if your family says you do something, you do it. And there are well documented cases of bonded slavery where children are "sold" to factory managers who force the kids to work off the debt in a manner not dissimilar to loan sharks.

One or two differences of opinion aside, this is still a worthwhile book, and the examination of the game theory behind the infamous UK sell-off of 3G licences probably makes the book worth reading on its own.

Ah. The new evil empire. This book probably isn't available for £3.73 in your local branch of Tesco (and what is it about that .73 price point?), but you should seek it out in your local bookshop - assuming you still have one.

We've all heard many of the stories about Tesco, and I'm not shy about talking about them myself in this blog. But it's worth reiterating some of the main points.

Our high streets are dying because you can now buy everything you need from just one shop. And seemingly, consumers are completely happy doing that.

Why exactly are those prices so cheap? Who's having to pay for it? Why does Tesco have a massive land bank that actually stops competitors getting a foothold in the market?

It's not just Tesco, although they're worse than most. If we all want all our high streets to look exactly the same, then we're going the right way.

I noticed the other day that locally, we're getting a new Tesco in what was a car show-room. It's very near a commuter station which won't do it any harm. And it's right across the road from a perfectly good Budgens. It's half a mile from a Tesco superstore, and another mile away from the next one in the same direction. We're slowly but inevitably giving ourselves no choice whatsoever.

This is the book that the British Government really didn't like being published. Indeed I've even heard stories of people being stopped from taking it on the plane with them!

Nobody stopped me at Stansted with it when I went away with it recently.

Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan where he was something of a non-conformist. As well as being somewhat younger than the traditional elder statesmen we imagine our ambassadors to be, he was a lively confrontational way about him. In his time in service he said what he thought to peoples' faces, gaining a great deal of kudos.

He also called it the way he saw it with the UK and US Governments supporting a repressive regime that was hurting its own people, all in the name of supporting the "war on terror."

This gung-ho attitude did not make him the most popular person in civil service, and he was regularly told off and investigated.

Murray doesn't paint himself as perfect, and it's clear that he admires an attractive woman when he sees one (and isn't afraid to share this with his readers). And the break-up of his marriage probably doesn't help his cause.

But whatever his personal failings - and he doesn't hide them - you can do nothing but admire his perseverance and only wish that we had more members of our ambassadorial service like him. The book does Blair and his cronies no favours whatsoever.

I didn't actually know that Z for Zachariah was actually a book. I remember it as a Play For Today back in the eighties (1984 to be precise - ah the power of the internet). I remember it starring Anthony Andrews (late of Brideshead) and not a great deal else.

Anyway, my interest was piqued recently when I saw a copy of it pop up on a certain file-sharing site that'll remain anonymous. Reading a little more, I learnt that it was based on the novel, so I decided to give it a read.

Then I discovered that the book was actually aimed at children.

Oh, and the book has been relocated from North America to Wales. The premise is that there's been a nuclear war, and most of the countryside has been ravaged. Yet there's a valley that's somehow remained unscathed, and in it lives a young girl who's now all alone and is tending for herself, running her farm and generally surviving.

One day a stranger arrives...

And that's all I'll say. In some respects the novel is more of a novella, but if that premise intrigues you then read this book. Now I must go and catch up on the TV version (shhh...).

Nick Griffiths is a writer on the Radio Times amongst other places, and this is a memoir interspersed with Doctor Who. That sounds a bit strange but it all makes sense. Sort of.

He begins with Jon Pertwee and takes us through his early years and Tom Baker. He misses out ther rest, largely, which is a shame because I basically begin with Peter Davison. And yes, I knew him as Tristan from All Creatures Great and Small too.

But as Griffiths is a little bit older than me, his Doctor Who experiences stop as mine begin largely.

He talks about his nice upbringing, every so often leaping forwards or backwards to bring us a bit of his life as a fan of Doctor Who too. Near the start of his book, he explains that he's not some kind of complete obsessive, explaining where he stands on the scale. He puts himself in the mild camp, but we later read about some of the collectibles he's bought, and I rather think he's a little more obsessive than he lets on.

This is a fun read, and if you too were a child of eighties, then you're going to recognise a lot. Griffiths is much more into music than I was, so his life isn't really a parallel to mine, and indeed the book reminds me a great deal of the first volume of Andrew Collins' memoirs. If you liked that, then you'll like this.

Anyone would have thought I'd stopped reading, given that it's ages since I've written up a book review. Rest assured that's not true. I'm just a little behind. Look to a flood of reviews over the next few days.

You've probably seen Mark Thomas on Channel 4. Well not latterly, since his brand of political humour seems to have disappeared. Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins are more likely to be presenting, with perhaps even Russell Brand.

Anyway, he still pops up from time to time. Last year Thomas presented an edition of Dispatches in which he got a couple of sets of school children set-up as arms dealers. Not because it was a good career path for them, but to explain all the various loopholes and legislative failures that let just about anybody sell anything they like to pretty much any country, irrespective of the regime.

I must admit that because I'd seen this film, I wasn't too sure whether it was going to be worthwhile buying this book. It'd just cover the same ground wouldn't it? Well, yes it does. But there's much much more.

Certainly some of the stories related here are from Thomas' various TV shows over the years, but there's a lot more, and this book forms a really good backgrounder into how arms dealing and the arms trade in general works. It's really really scary how easy it all is to do.

In places there are loopholes you could drive a tank through, but you just know that at the end of the day, even if it is illegal of me to directly ship, say, military trucks from India to Sudan while I sit on the end of an email address and mobile phone in the UK, unless someone finds out about it.

The tone of the book is typical Thomas - he is a comedian by trade after all. A good read.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is Iain Bank's first non-SF novel in quite a few years - indeed Dead Air was published back in 2002. I'd say that the novel it's most like is The Crow Road which is probably my favourite Banks novel to date. In place of The Crow Road's Prentice, we have Alban who starts the novel having nothing to do with his extended family who are rich thanks to a board game (and latterly computer game) called Empire! which I'm sure isn't supposed to be remotely similar to Risk.

But there's a family gathering brewing at the eponymous matriarchal home at Garbadale in the Highlands, and Alban becomes enmeshed in the family's affairs with the proposed sale of the family firm to an American giant. Should the sale go ahead? What's the truth behind the suicide of Alban's mother? Is there any future in his abruptly cut-off relationship with Sophie? And what of his new mathematical genius girlfriend VG?

Obviously I'm not going to answer any of these questions here! That'd spoil the story, and very readable it is too. Banks really is on familiar territory with the various aunts, cousins, parents and so-on; almost to the extent that a family tree would have been usefully printed at the front of the book.

The book is very dialogue heavy, and of course you're rooting for Alban who really is much like Prentice before him in that he's about the only rational member of a completely mad family. Highly recommended.

So this weekend it was all things Spartan, and in particular the Battle of Thermopylae. Frank Miller, that doyen of graphic novels, wrote a five-parter called 300 some while back, and this morning, before seeing the newly released film, I read it.

It's a fictionalised telling of King Leonidas leading his 300 Spartan troops into a thankless - hopeless - fight against Xerxes' Persian Army numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The comic version is very gritty and down and dirty. The only real backstory that we get is just enough to put the battle into some kind of historical context. There are only a very limited number of characters, and a certain stylised aspect to them. So the Oracle at Delphi is perched precariously at the top of a rock pillar and is just about impossible to reach. While Ephialtes, the Greek who'd betray that Spartans by telling Xerxes the whereabouts of a hidden goat path through the mountain and round the back, is depicted as some kind of monstrous hunchback.

But it's a thrilling tale that's told well - I wouldn't have wanted to wait a month between installments when it was first published.

This has now been turned into a film, 300, which is nearly a straight retelling of Miller's graphic novel. The sylised feel has obviously followed on directly from the manner in which the same sorts of techniques were used previously for Sin City - another Frank Miller set of graphic novels. Indeed, I did initially think that Robert Rodriguez must have been responsible for the film, so similar is the feel and SFX techniques employed to give an other worldly feel to the film. Indeed, nearly the entire film was shot against either blue or green screen and supplemented by effects.

The film does differ from the book in a few ways - most notably in the addition of a subplot involving Leonidas' wife Gorgo.

And the film features practically no known stars, vastly reducing the production cost, and meaning that it's likely to be enormously profitable given its success in the US to date. What this means is that you should expect to see more films such as these in the near future.

It's a film which is exactly what you expect. Nothing more - nothing less.

Both graphic novel and film are of course inspired by true events, recorded most notably by that original historian Herodotus. These in turn were fictionalised in a 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, which was on BBC2 yesterday. It's not a film I can remember seeing before, and falls squarely into the typical swords and sandals epic feel. It opens with a panoramic view of the Persian army on the march, which was undoubtedly made without special effects and probably employed thousands of members of the Greek army or similar. Unlike 300, The 300 Spartans takes a much more leisurely approach, with plenty of subplots involving wives and others, while the Spartan life seems much more comfortable. There are also far fewer bare-chested six packs on display in this older film.

Xerxes appears as an almost Ming the Merciless style bad guy, and the battle itself is limited to the end of the film rather than taking up most of it. Not the greatest epic of the period to be honest.

Sadly, I missed Discovery Civilisation channel's reshowing of The Spartans, Bettany Hughes' Channel 4 series!

Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link comes highly recommended, and I'd been looking forward to picking up a copy for a while. Happily, it's in a current 3 For 2 at Waterstones, so I've been reading Link's stories over the last few days.

Her tales are very magical realism, and I really enjoyed them - some more than others. The title story is the best with an incredibly detailed view of a TV show featuring some strange characters. You'd just love a show like The Library to exist in reality. The Hortlak, set in a convenience store, was also great, with Zombies living nearby. I think overall, I preferred the longer stories to the shorter ones. But I love the throw away detail that constantly pops up through these tales.

Curiously, the book definitely falls into the SF/Fantasy genre, yet someone at Harper Perennial believes that this is a "breakout" book and consequently you have to search the fiction shelves and tables in Waterstones and Borders to find this title. Indeed it's noticeable that while crime fiction and new fiction are regularly featured in 3 For 2 offers, science fiction isn't, aside from a few breakout Terry Pratchett and Iain M Banks novels. Are SF readers more likely to pay full price?

I read Louise Welsh's first novel, The Cutting Room, and liked it, but the prospect of a new novel with a magician protagonist and set in the seedy part of Berlin amongst other places was irresistible.

The action takes place in three cities, London, Glasgow and Berlin.

As the novel opens, William Wilson is putting on a magic show in a seedy Soho club as the warm-up for some exotic dancers, all in celebration of the retirement of a Met detective. So far, so The Vice. But things take an unexpected turn as Wilson, who's a bit down on his luck to say the least, is persuaded to pick the pocket of the detective to retrieve a mysterious envelope. Things go a little awry and he has to make a sharp exit before gunfire intervenes.

We then jump back and forward in time between Glasgow now, and Berlin some time earlier. As I mentioned in my previous review, I can dislike this device, and early on, Wilson's life in Glasgow is so grim that you really want to jump back to the action in Berlin, where the cast of characters is more interesting.

In Berlin, we enter a dark world of seedy erotic clubs and magic, meeting a cast of decidedly sexy characters along the way, not least of which is Sylvie. And as the story picked up, jumping forward becomes less of a chore, and you find yourself turning the pages ever more quickly. I positively raced towards the end, so much did I enjoy it.

I notice that I've somehow skipped Welsh's second book, Tamburlaine Must Die, but I will return to it. Welsh really loves giving us the seedy side of the world, and it feels very real. I'd be amazed if this book doesn't make either a film of some description. It's crying out for it.

I've never been to Berlin...

William Boyd is always worth reading, and this novel has done especially well. It's probably selling more than all his previous novels combined by virtue of it being on the Richard & Judy list. It was also shortlisted for the Costa Coffee Book Prize.

And you know what? It's really good. It's basically a spy story which flashes back between 1976 Britain as Ruth brings up her son on her own whilst tutoring foreign language students in Oxford. But her mother has revealed herself as not being Sally, as she thought she was, but Eva, an international spy.

The story jumps backwards and forwards as we learn more about the deeds of Eva during the Second World War, first in Europe and then in the USA. She's controlled by a mysterious man called Romer, and it becomes apparent that although events took place many years earlier, there's something that still needs resolving.

The trouble I sometimes have with books that jump back and forth is that you're more interested in one half of the story than the other, but Boyd is a master story teller and he makes sure that each part of the tale is as interesting as the other. You're always left wanting more and the book is a real page-turner.

Catching up with a few recent books still. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was the Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago - you can't miss the sticker on the cover telling you as much. The author, Paul Torday, also popped up on the Simon Mayo book segment a couple of weeks ago to plug this book too.

The plot is simple if mad. The much put-upon Alfred Jones works for a government fisheries department. One day he's asked if it'd be possible to breed Salmon in the Yemen. He laughs it off, but political willpower being what it is - lots of bad news coming from the Middle East - that government mandarins begin to see the "strengths" of the idea, and he's politely asked to get on with it and do the impossible.

The story is told in a series of diary entries, interviews, letters, interviews and even extracts from Hansard. It's silly, it's playful, it's sad and it's happy.

I really enjoyed this story, and you simply don't know quite what's going to happen despite even the least fish-aware person realising that salmon, as a rule, prefer the climes of the North Atlantic as opposed to those of the Middle East.

How could you not like a book called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen?

I read something recently that suggested that Alexander McCall Smith is able to knock out another No.1 Ladies Detective Agency novel in a fortnight or so. That's probably not quite the case, but he certainly is a one-man publishing phenomenon putting the likes of Terry Pratchett (in his prime) in his place. As well as this series he has two other series on the go at the moment, The Sunday Philosophy Club and 44 Scotland Street - neither of which I've read any books from.

But returning to Blue Shoes and Happiness, and Mma Ramotswe is investigating a case of blackmail amongst others. The mystery and crime elements of these books is practically irrelevant - reading these books is the equivalent of following the equivalent of The Archers set in Botswana. You have your regular selection of characters, a few misunderstandings, a few stories developed a little and not a great deal else. It certainly passes the train journey for a day or two.

Well I noted the other day that I hadn't read this book yet. Well now I have... obviously.

I must admit, for a book that's won prizes for comic fiction, I didn't find it terribly funny. It takes a serious-ish subject and handles it with a very light touch. But I'm not sure I'd go the whole hog and call it comedy.

Nadezhda and her sister Vera get upset when their father falls in love with and marries a Ukranian women who's significantly younger than him. She's obviously a gold digger who's just waiting to pop his clogs. But you probably know all this, since the entire world and his mum has read the book already.

It's an easy going read taking no time at all to fly through, and is a very believable portrait of a long settled Eastern European family in Britain. It reminded me of a Polish family I knew a bit at school, with a lot of very broken English spoken at home (you just knew that Polish was the lingua franca when I wasn't around at the house).

It happily saw me to work and back a bit this week.

The Ghost Map is a completely fascinating non-fiction title about two characters, who in 1854, managed to get to the bottom of the cause of one of the scourges of the age - cholera.

If you know where I work, then read the following paragraph, and even though it covers events a couple of hundred years before the bulk of this book, you'll understand why I found it especially interesting:

The fear of death's contamination can sometimes last for centuries. In the middle of the Great Plague of 1665, the Earl of Craven purchased a block of land in a semirural area to the west of central London called Soho Field. He built thirty-six small houses "for the reception of poor and miserable objects" suffering from the plague. The rest of the land was used as a mass grave. Each night, the death carts would empty dozens of corpes into the earth. By some estimates, over four thousand plague-infected bodies were buried there in a matter of months. Nearby residents gave it the appropriately macabre-sounding name of "Earl Craven's pest-field," or "Craven's field" for short. For two generations, no one dared erect a foundation in the land for fear of infection. Eventually, the city's inexorable drive for shelter won out over its fear of disease, and the pesthouse fields became the fashionable district of Golden Square, populated largely by aristocrats and Huguenot immigrants. For another century, the skeletons lay undisturbed beneath the churn of city commerce, until late summer of 1854, when another outbreak came to Golden Square and brought those grims souls back to haunt their final resting grounds once more.

The author, Steven Johnson, is a science author I hadn't previously read. He relates the dual stories of John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead who together, although not for the most part working together, found the cause of cholera. In particular, they identified a specific well in Broad Street, Soho, as being the cause of the outbreak.

This was against all medical understanding at the time, which was inclined to believe that the caused by miasma - or "bad air". This was broadly understandable, since as the picture Johnson so vividly paints early in the book, London was practically an open sewer at the time. A continually growing population was unable to deal with, well, its waste.

The book does a great job of explaining the background to cholera and details the events that led these two men to make one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the age, and directly lead to the cleaning up of London, including the introduction of Sir Joseph Bazalgette's incredible sewars.

The book is accessible and tells the story fairly breathlessly over its 320 pages. Although I must say that it could probably have been edited a little further. Johnson does overwrite in places, and reiterates facts that we've already been told a little too frequently. In one instance he repeats something he's just told us two pages earlier.

But don't let these small points dissuade you from reading this book, particularly if you live or work in Soho where the story is just about completely set. It's a fine piece of local history in that regard too.

John Snow was teetotal, so the fact that on the corner of Broad(wick) Street now stands a pub named after him, is something of an irony. Still, over the road is a resited pump representing the original well that caused the outbreak.

Obviously, I picked up The Prestige following thre recent release of the film version. But I've yet to see that, instead preferring to read the novel before the movie made or ruined the story for me.

The book begins in a modern day setting as Andrew Westley visits Kate Angier to find out why she's sent him a journal. It soon turns out that both are related to a pair of stage magicians from the 19th century who developed a hatred for one another.

Then, via the mechanism of these journals and diaries we read first Alfred Borden's and then Rupert Angier's life stories in their own words. As they improved as magicians, they invented ever more elaborate tricks until both achieved something incredible.

I don't really want to say much more about the book except to mention that you will find it in the SF section of your bookshop. There are some very strange things about this story.

This novel won The Independent's Foreign Fiction Prize earlier this year. Per Petterson is Norweigian (well - it's a while since my last Scanidnavian title), and is very well regarded in his homeland. Out Stealing Horses is a wonderful novel telling the story of Trond, both as a child in 1948, just after the war was over and the occupation finished, and as an older man living in a cabin in rural Norway with the Millennium approaching.

The novel is nicely placed and the characters and events feel very real and not at all contrived. Something happens in Trond's childhood which is change things forever and how he sees the world around him.

I loved the descriptions of life in the country realistically portrayed through a young teenager's eyes as things are slowly revealed to him. Well worth a read.

If you're really quick, you can get this book from Penguin in 10 weekly paperback chunks for £25. They're serlialising it in a Dickens manner, before publishing it in hardback in January (for less than £25).

Obviously, if I've read the book, I've done none of these things - it was published in the States in August and I read the American edition.

But on to the novel itself. It's a Victorian world, set in, well a kind of England, although that's never specified, even if there are many English names littered around the place. None of the places exist, and the geography doesn't quite make sense. Other parts of Europe are mentioned however, since many of the characters come from these places.

We follow three characters - Miss Temple, the Cardinal, and Dr Svenson as they take on the forces of mysterious cabal who seem to have developed some kind of technology with dastardly powers.

If that last sentence makes the plot sound like hokum, well then, that's because it is. There is much chasing around the "city" and the countryside, with strange parties at mansions, sinisters doctors and femme fatales.

At 700 pages, there's quite a lot of things going on, but at times it felt like the book's universe needed opening up a little. And there was far too much of people getting knocked out and coming around unguarded in a locked room or whatever. I suspect that much of this is to give a certain pastiche feel to the book, but at times it can be a little tiring.

However, you do care about the characters and each of the ten very long chapters leaves you on a cliffhanger that almost certainly won't resolved for many pages to come as we jump to another of the three protaganists.

So overall, I'd probably wait for the paperback, unless you fancy a quite collectible series of paperbacks now.

I saw Tom Reynolds give a talk about blogging from work a year or so ago at an NTK event, but I must admit, that I hadn't really spent much time reading his blog.

Blood, Sweat and Tea is a compendium of entries he's made over the last couple of years or so, which means that it's actually all available free on the web. In fact, better than that, you can download the full text of the book from the publishers' website.

But I still went out and bought a copy of the book after I'd read a few pages online. A properly bound book is still easier to read than pages of A4 from a laser printer.

The author works for the London Ambulance Service, practising in Newham and the surrounding east London area. As such, he's called on to tend to the needs (or not) of many of life's less appealing subjects. This he does with humour - there probably isn't another way of doing it mind you.

The book is written in short chunks - well it is a series of blog entries - with only reader comments missing, although they're referred to on a few occassions. You certainly learn about life for Ambulance crew, and learn a few things you'd perhaps rather not. TV, it seems, is not really all that accurate - a lot of people end up dying no matter what you do.

My only real criticism of the book is that read in a day or so, it can be a little samey. Reading the blog over a year spaces similar stories out so that you just begin to realise that the same things happen over and over. But reading about them in a book feels a little repetitious. I'd have liked to have read more of his general entries that talk about the sorts of things that can happen rather than a strict diary of that particular day.

You may know Gary Imlach. He's the man who for years has presented UK coverage of the Tour de France, first on Channel 4, and then more recently on ITV (with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin providing race commentary). Before that, he was a face on the Channel 4 coverage of American Football alongside sometime radio DJ Nicky Horne.

But unbeknownst to me - well until last year, at least, when this book first came out - he's the son of a Scottish footballer named Stewart Imlach. When I gave a copy of this book to my dad a while back, he said, "Oh, Stewart Imlach? I saw him play." That's more than Gary ever got to do.

What his son has done is write a book that in one part is an historical record of one single professional footballer's life, but also acts as something of a social history of the game during the fifties and sixties. Imlach started his career in Scotland, before fighting adversory and moving down to England to begin his professional career.

His son traces his career through interviews with friends and colleagues, since his father has died, and he realises that he didn't really ask all the right questions when he was alive.

We learn about years at such clubs as Bury, Nottingham Forest and Luton. And we also learn what it might have been like to appear for your country in Sweden for the 1958 World Cup (The Scottish FA neither awarded caps nor let you keep a shirt), or to appear in the 1959 FA Cup Final.

But mostly, we learn about the tough life a footballer had with a punishing wage cap that kept players in their place unless they could make a big money move to somewhere like Italy. We learnt that a club could sell you to any club they cared to at a moment's notice, and that you'd only have a contract lasting a single year.

Compare and contrast as they say.

Has anyone sent a copy of this book to Ashley Cole?

Thoroughly recommended and very deserving of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

Temeraire is set during the Napoleaonic wars. Nelson is battling against the French and he's got Villeneuve and his fleet on the run. The Battle of Trafalgar has not yet been fought. Against this background we meet Captain Laurence who's ship has just captured a French "prize". On board is a large egg which he also takes ownership of. All very Patrick O'Brien so far. Well I say that - the closest I've got to Patrick O'Brien is seeing him dominating the 'O' section of a bookshop and having seen Master and Commander at the cinema.

There is one small difference in this book. There are dragons.

Dragons are used by both sides as an aerial force. And the prize that Laurence captures is a particularly rare dragon's egg. He takes on the dragon, and so we get a swashbuckling epic tale of ships, soldiers and dragons. Oh, and as everyone knows, dragons talk.

I haven't really read a fantasy book for months - possibly years. Indeed, I suspect it would have been a re-reading of Lord of the Rings around the time of the first of the trilogy. And that's a worthwhile point to make, because my interest in this book was piqued when I learnt that Peter Jackson has bought the film rights to this book (and possibly the series).

I did thoroughly immerse myself in the novel, and enjoyed the page turning appeal that it had. But I did think that it was just a little too set-up for future installments. I was perhaps expecting a bigger climax to the novel. But that's all to the good, since come January, I will be getting the second book in the series (already available in hardback).

A few weeks ago, I read what turned out to be the second in the Martin Beck series of novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. The first is Roseanna, in which we're introduced to the detective and his colleagues. This book, in a newly published imprint, is introduced by Henning Mankell, a long time favourite of mine. The Sjöwall and Wahlöö series undoubtedly had quite an influence on him.

What's notable about this book is the sheer length of time that takes place between the body turning up and the case being solved. It takes them months to even find out the name of the dead girl. Evidently the police forces in Sweden at the time were not as heavily over-worked as current day British police are, since it'd take a real high-profile case to afford that much time over a mystery body.

But Beck plugs away and slowly but surely he inches ever closer to solving the case. There's something wonderful about his communications with another detective who he never meets but is named Kafka.

The next pair of books don't get the snazzy new covers until January, so I'm just going to have to wait. And it's not as though I couldn't read solely Scandinavian fiction between now and then, given some of the titles I've got stored up!

The fourth in the Erast Fandorin sequence sees our Holmesian Russian hero returning from the far east with a Japanese colleague in tow. In Moscow he's given the job Collegiate Assessor, but no sooner than that has happened than his old friend General Sobolev is found dead in vaguely suspicious circumstances. At first, we are to believe that it was a natural heart attack as Sobolev had been visiting a woman of easy (or indeed, expensive) virtue at the time of his death.

But soon we're embroiled in a political conspiracy involving the Russian state. Fandorin is of course the man for the job. What I hadn't realised, until I consulted Wikipedia to find out what the next in the series was, and then went on a search to find when it would be out, was that Sobolev is a real man (with his name spelt differently).

So overall, I'm loving this series with devious multi-national agents, and glamorous women. Roll on the next episode.

I think that Black Juice, a collection of short stories with a vaguely fantasy/science fiction feel to them, might count as kids fiction, since the protagonists in most of the tales are children - well apart from the one that's an elephant.

I found the overall collection a bit hit and miss. It opens quite strongly with Singing My Sister Down set at a tar pit. The tale involving elephants is also quite enchanting. And the Wooden Bride is also good, while Red Nose Day was michievously funny. But some of the stories I wasn't as enamoured by.

Author, Margo Lanagan, is certainly incredibly imaginative, and I'd be curious in reading a full novel set in one of these worlds.

With a never-ending stream of Nordic authors currently assailing UK crime fiction publishers, it probably wasn't going to take long for someone to dust off the novels of Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Together they wrote a series of detective novels based around the character of Martin Beck. Some while back, on the back of a recommendation, I did pick up The Laughing Policeman which appeared in the Orion Crime Masterworks series. But I must admit I hadn't read it.

Over the weekend, I saw The Man Who Went Up In Smoke in a local bookshop, and picked it up. This is the second in the series, and involves Beck searching for a journalist who's disappeared in Budapest while he was on a story. Beyond that, I don't really want to say much about the plot as that's part of the fun of the novel.

You can easily see how Sjöwall and Wahlöö's main protagonist has informed the way other Swedish and Nordic crime fiction has developed over the years. Beck seems to be something of a loner - he has a wife and kids, but they hardly feature, with cameos at the start and finish. He has a cynical world view.

I liked this book, and look forward to the republishing of the whole series. It seems that each novel will have a new introduction by a contemporary writer (Val McDermid writes here), as well as notes in the back as part of the HarperPerennial's P.S. series.

Electric Universe is this year's winner of the Aventis Prize for Science Books. David Bodanis has written a great little book that skillfully and simply tells us the story of electricity.

Although much, but by no means all, of what he relates in his book had been taught to me in A Level physics lessons years ago, I didn't recall it nearly as well as I'd have hoped, and I don't think my understanding of it was ever as good. Bodanis gets stuck into the interesting sides of the story and launches into a few areas that could easily be entire book subjects in themselves, including laying the underwater telegraph lines (actually, this is a good book on that subject), radar, early computers and the discovery of how our nerves work.

Actually, one of the delights of this book is that you read it on several levels with a basic rattling 240 page story, notes for those who want further detail, and an impressively substantial "futher reading" list which is much more than just a bibliography.

If you don't actually know how precisely a telephone works, or a radio wave is sent, then you need to read this book.

Minette Walters is a crime author I'd not previously read. A few of her books have been adapted for TV - actually probably more have than haven't - and I've watched a couple of those, but the review of this from it's hardback appearance caught my eye a few months back, so I snapped it up when it reached paperback recently.

Connie Burns is a foreign correspondent of Zimbabwean origin who works for the Reuters news agency. In Sierra Leone she comes across a British ex-soldier out there who's given a wide berth and who she believes may have been responsible for the murders of several local women. But with no proof, she can do nothing and thinks nothing more of him (although she had previously run in to him with a different name elsewhere in West Africa).

Fast forward to 2004, and Burns is working in Bagdhad. As we know, the place is swarming with ex-soldiers working for private security companies, and once again she spots the same man. Could he be a serial killer? Have any Iraqi women died in suspicious circumstance? Nothing's really being investigated in a city ravaged by insurgents and effectively in the early stages of civil war. But digging around she does find a couple of cases. But the man she's investigating realises that she might be on to him.

Her tour of duty in Bagdhad comes to an end and she heads off to the airport. En route, her car is pulled over and she's kidnapped - seemingly just another victim of the local groups who can earn money by kidnapping Westerners for the various factions. Three days later she's released, but will say nothing about her ordeal.

Back in England, she's convinced that the man, MacKenzie's after her, and she heads down to a small Dorset village to seek refuge and privacy. A secondary set of characters have their own secrets in the village. Somehow you know that events are all going to collide.

A little unlikely, perhaps, but a good tale well told.

I was intrigued by this book sometime last year when I heard Michael Connelly plugging the hardback edition on the Simon Mayo book panel. A regular Thursday afternoon fixture, authors face the potentially tricky prospect of sitting in the studio while a couple of invited guests and some listeners critique their books practically to their faces. What happens if they really don't like a title?

Anyway Connelly's novel was well reviewed and having ignored his name regularly appearing high in paperback fiction charts, I finally succumbed and picked up a copy of The Lincoln Lawyer. He's called that because Mickey Haller is a defence lawyer who doesn't have an office as such - instead he deals with most of his unsavoury clients from the back of his Lincoln town car (it turns out that he bought a fleet of four in one go to get a good price). He spends his time driving around Californian court houses.

The character's well drawn with ex-wives scattered about the place, as well as believable investigators, police and bail bondsmen. I can honestly say I learnt plenty about the Californian legal system reading this book.

The plot at first seems straightforward, and you almost despair that the book seems to run to over 500 pages to clear up such a simple case. A woman has been viciously beaten, and a well-to-do young man is being charged with the crime. He seems innocent, but he's definitely a victim of circumstance. Who's set him up.

But as the book the goes on, the plot twists as all plots tend to, and you're kept gripped wondering how everything's going to resolve itself. Great fun and perfect for a beach read.

Just a word of warning: Richard & Judy picked this book for one of their programmes (or rather their producer who actually choses the titles did), and you will need to swiftly remove the sticker from the book's cover.

Another day, another Scandinavean detective. I'm quite probably addicted to them now. Ake Edwardson is a popular Swedish crime writer who's written a series of novels featuring Inspector Winter. This is the first of them to be translated into English although it's clearly not the first in the actual series. It always perplexes me a bit that we invariably get series such as these published out of order. I bet the Swedish versions of Harry Potter have been published in order.

There seems to be a relatively well-observed law in crime fiction that either we open with the crime, or scene of the crime, or we have some prose that's coming from inside the mind of the killer. While we do get a bit of the latter, unusually, this book takes a leisurely 150 pages before we actually learn of the crime committed.

That's not to say that nothing's going on as that couldn't be further from the truth. But nothing in this book is really rushed. The investigation takes time, and we pass that time.

I thought it was a great book and Edwardson's next in English has just been published in hardback so I'm sure a few more are to follow.

You may well have heard of the Long Tail by now. It's all based on an article that this book's author, and Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published in said magazine a couple of years ago. Simply put, it's all about the value of the "long tail" of sales beyond the bestsellers, with plenty of case studies examining iTunes and Amazon data that shows that the vast majority of their sales are in much smaller units further down the tail.

The theory is fine as far as it goes with plenty of cases where it is true. I suppose it works best when keeping a vast inventory is minimal in cost - think eBay where it's the vendors who hold stock, or iTunes, where the virtual inventory is a bit of hard disk space. But it's true that it doesn't work absolutely everywhere, and I'd have liked a few more "real world" examples beyond the well examined tech companies.

The book's relatively short, but it still feels as though the argument could have been made in slightly fewer words.

Slate had a worthwhile piece on the book the other day.

Amazon is running a video commercial on their site for a book called The Death Artist. You can currently see the ad somewhere around the crime book section (I suspect that like other ads, it's only shown a certain number of times, so it's tricky to link directly to).

Anyhow, the reason that this is worth noting is because the ad, while somewhat amusing, is actually quite bloody - it would have garnered at least a 15 rating if it was on at the cinema, and it's safe to say that it wouldn't get shown on TV at all.

So what are Amazon's internal rules about delivering such ads? Does it know that I'm an adult visitor who can take it? Just curious.

I picked up this novel by Italian crime writer Andrea Camilleri purely on the basis of it being 99p in Waterstones. It just goes to show that such promotions can work, as undoubtedly be buying more in the series about Sicilian police inspector Montalbano.

In this first novel in the series Montalbano is investigating the death of a local diginitary in somewhat embarrassing circumstances. It seems to be a case of death by natural causes, but Montalbano suspects otherwise.

This is a light and breezy novel with a colourful collection of characters in a typically corrupt Italian setting. It's very dialogue heavy and makes for good reading on a hot summer's day.

Martin Lukes is the creation of Lucy Kellaway, and has been a regular feature of the FT for years. He's the ahead of a-b global (I've left out the fancy characters), and what we've got here is a year in his turbulent life as he goes through his highs and lows via his email.

If you've ever read E by Matt Beaumont, you'll know the sort of thing. I could say, if you've ever read Les Liaisons Dangereuses you'll know what I mean, but this isn't quite the same kind of epistolary novel.

I found it enormously amusing, although the regular emails from Luke's "Coach", Pandora, bored me. I think we got the joke quite quickly thanks. Leave it and move on.

I don't think that this books is a straight cut and paste job from the columns because obviously Lukes needs introducing, and there is an ending to the book. As something to read to and from work on your daily commute, it'll keep you occupied for a couple of days.

I'd not read any Christopher Brookmyre before, although he seems to be getting something of a push from his publisher at the moment, with reissued covers for his novels, and a new hardback also out. I've read comparisons of him with Carl Hiaasen, but on this reading, I wouldn't place him quite on that level yet.

This book features a very normal Glaswegian housewife in her forties joining a strange undercover bunch of "security experts" as they search for her missing son. He's developed some kind of weapon that a lot of people are after.

The book jumps around James Bond-style, with helicopters and gadgets. Much of the action takes place in France, and it's all great fun.

The only problem is that it's so grounded away from reality that you just go along for the ride rather than look for parallels in society. The books of Hiaasen, for example, will always feature greedy property developers or insurance scam artists - people you can easily identify with.

I may well give another title a go at some point.

I've been meaning to write about this for ages. A For Andromeda was famously first a BBC science fiction series from 1961 starring Julie Christie. Sadly, as is the way of these things, barely any footage remains of the original seven part series, with the exception of a recently recovered copy of part six. Those who saw it said it made quite an impression.

The series was followed by a book adaptation, co-written by series writers John Elliot and Fred Hoyle. I guess that it's Hoyle that most interests me since he's quite an interesting chap. An astronomer, he became very well known in the fifties with a series of ground-breaking radio talks which included the first usage of the phrase "Big Bang" to describe the beginning of the universe.

The book tells of a signal being received by earth-based observers - the signal being sent by an alien intelligence and providing instructions for something to build. It's a fascinating piece of work, and seems to share plenty of ideas with Carl Sagan's later Contact.

This year has also seen a new TV version of A For Andromeda, adapted by Richard Fell who also (re)made the Quatermass Experiment last year. Unfortunately, we don't have an opportunity to compare this remake with the earlier version. It'd be fair to say that I was a little disappointed however, with the tension not quite working for me.

The book's pretty good though, and worth hunting out.

A couple of years or so ago, I read Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them which took aim at the conservative right wing broadcast media. In many respects this is just too easy to do, but then they stay on the air, and millions of Americans listen and watch them.

This time around, he takes George Bush as his subject. He goes through the reasons why Bush won the 2004 - fear mainly. He gets into Bush's ill-fated and ill-conceived attempt to take Social Security private. And then gets into the administration's dreadful handling of Iraq - before, during and "after" (although that might still be during).

Although he begins this book acknowledging that the conservative right are soft targets and he won't lay into them time. But sometimes it's too easy not, and he still fires his guns in their direction.

The book's accompanied by plenty of notes and sources towards the back, which I always think is essential in this kind of a work.

All in all, well worth reading, even if none of it is all that surprising.

Bill Carter is a TV writer on the New York Times who previously wrote a book called The Late Shift which detailed the events surrounding the battle between Jay Leno and David Letterman to take over The Tonight Show on NBC. Obviously, this didn't have an exactly massive impact in the UK, although the TV movie based on the book gets late night airings on TV once in a while.

This books takes a look at whats been happening at the four major US networks over the last few years, with plenty of firsthand testimony from the major players. How American Idol only made it onto Fox thanks to an intervention from Rupert Murdoch himself. How Lost, Desperate Housewives and Greys Anatomy have turned around ABC in one single season. How Les Moonves have overseen the renaissance of CBS with shows like CSI and Survivor. And how NBC hasn't managed to replenish hit sitcoms like Friends, Seinfeld and Frasier.

Some of this stuff you'll know about, and some you won't. The book's written in a very chatty style, and could quite easily be read chapter by chapter in a completely random order, since we're reminded of information we've already learnt as though we'd skipped three previous chapters. I must admit that this irritated me a little. It's not as though anyone's going to be struggling to get through this book for weeks and weeks.

The process by which hit shows reach the air in America just seems ever more random, with one or two people being basically responsible. If they personally don't like the show, then it doesn't reach the airwaves. And of course if it does and is a hit, then success has many fathers. The reverse can be true - the guy who effectively created Lost, lost his job before the show hit the airwaves.

If you want to learn more about the creation factory that is American TV then this is the book for you. The only thing I'd say was missing was a look at some of the really creative stuff that's emerged on cable over the last few years - not just HBO stuff like The Sopranos, but all those FX shows like The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me, and Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica. Between them, they're as good, if not better than most of the network fare.

Frank Gardner is the BBC's Security Correspondent, who was shot five times and nearly killed in Saudi Arabia in 2004. His cameraman, Simon Cumbers, who was filming with him at the time, did not survive the attack.

Gardner opens his biography with that attack - no waiting around until page 300 for the inevitable. Now wheelchair bound for the most part, that was undoubtedly a life-changing moment.

Gardner bounds through a seemingly pleasant upbringing in which he developed an interest in learning Arabic, met Wilfred Thesiger fairly regularly, and headed off to spend a year in Cairo, travelling around the region at the first opportunity.

He then moved into banking and found himself back in the gulf living the life of a rich ex-pat. His story is well told and he's an engaging writer who's never too full of himself. He's certainly lived a full life. Or at least he did until that moment in the streets of Saudi.

Then we get details of how he spent his recouperation period, and it certainly doesn't seem to have been easy. It's not over yet, and no doubt never will be really.

Overall, a fascinating book, with a worthwhile look at an earlier period of north African/Arabic life. The biggest shame is the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to follow in his steps today, staying in the regions of Cairo that he did, and visiting some of the remote areas on the Sudan or Algeria.

One of my favourite books, and possibly my first Douglas Coupland novel, was Microserfs published back in 1995. jPod is essentially a sequel. Not in the sense that it has the same characters. But in everything else it is. Except that we're all older and wiser. Well not the characters. They're still mid-twenties to, maybe, mid-thirties. There are six characters who site in the jPod, an area in a Vancouver based games company. They're sat there broadly because of a computer fluke that sits people sharing the same surname initial in the same place - J.

Ethan's the main character. He has some seriously screwed up parents - a mother who grows cannabis on an industrial scale and then deals it, and a dad who in the latter stages of his life has decided to become an actor but even in production-heavy Vancouver, can't get that speaking part.

But it's the fellow jPodders that we concentrate on: Bree, Evil Mark, Kaitlin, Cowboy and John Doe.

The story rolls along at a breakneck pace, and I sit there and can't help feeling that Coupland has my life pretty much spot on. It's amazing to learn, as I did on Wednesday evening when I attended a talk and book signing, that Coupland's never worked in an office. But he's spoken to a few people who have, and he's got it right.

OK - so I don't work in a games company who's had their generic skateboarding game bastardised so that it includes a turtle because one of the manager's sons really likes turtles at the moment. And I'm certainly not attempting to build a hidden Easter Egg slasher gorefest starring a certain fast-food derived character "Ronald".

Aside from a couple of things like that, he's got it right.

Actually Coupland himself is a fairly important character. Coupland says that he's seen so much misinformation about himself on the web that I think he quite enjoyed perverting his own life. The Coupland in here is a manipulative bastard.

When you see this book in the shop you might notice that it's a somewhat weightier tome than previous Coupland novels, but if long novels scare you, fear not: there are large chunks of, er, interesting text. Coupland is still an artist as well as a writer, and he enjoys the shape of writing on the page. So when there are several pages of large Chinese text it's not just the literary equivalent of writing everything doublespace in college to make your reports or essays feel bulkier. Similarly, when you're facing twenty or more pages of prime numbers or four pages of three letter words that are permissable in Scrabble, it feels completely right.

I completely loved this novel, racing through it far too fast, because it could be another ten years before Coupland next returns to this milieu.

Now a general rule of thumb I'll always make when deciding if I'm going to read a book is this: if Davina McCall gives the book a ringing endorsement, then it's probably not for me. (As an aside, I learn with shock that some publishers are actually embossing the Richard & Judy Bookclub logo on their books rather than the more traditional, and eminently removable, sticker. To those unfortunate enough to have such a title in their possession, I can only recommend placing a "3 for 2" sticker over the top).

But I made an exception for Yes Man, because I'd quite liked Danny Wallace's previous book, Join Me. This time around Wallace decides to say Yes a bit more, with over the top consequences. We get a year in his life and there are some real ramifications of doing it. Obviously, we get the humourous take on things, and you're always slightly suspicious that as the costs are stacking up, they're going to mitigated somewhat by the book deal. I'm being unfair though. Of course you want him to travel around and do off the cuff things. I wasn't entirely convinced by some of the cod religious stuff (Did he really meet a reincarnation of Jesus on the back of a bus? Or was he actually just a teacher with a positive frame of mind).

However, I can happily recommend this book which has some laugh out loud moments that certainly made some of my fellow tube passengers think I was mad.

This is the book for which Indriðason won the CWA Gold Dagger award last year. I enjoyed the first book in the series, Tainted Blood (or previously, Jar City), and the return of police detective Erlendur is welcome. As before, he's struggling with his private life. He lives alone, but his dug-addicted daughter has miscarried and is in a coma.

In the meantime, some bones are uncovered on a hillside... Flashbacks to a time when Reykjavik is under Allied occupation during the Second World War, and a husband who beats his wife and taunts his children including a disabled daughter. It's pretty horrible what she's having to put up with.

The question, then, is how does this relate to the bones that have turned up in the present day?

This is a short book, but a very good one. On the surface everything seems very simple, but digging into the past unearths complexities and complications. We learn some more of Erlendur's background, and begin to understand why he's had such a tumultuous personal life.

This book comes garlanded with awards - it's the FT business book of the year, and the author's won many a Pulitzer prize. In short it's a book about globalisation, although that's far too simplistic a word to truly explain what Friedman's getting at.

The "Flatness" of the world that he's talking about is the way that we can now outsource so many different services to far-flung parts of the world. For some time now, manufacture has happened everywhere, but now we can have people in India or China do many of the jobs we hadn't previously thought of sending abroad. More and more work is shifting there. So what does this mean for the societies we live in (particularly America) and our futures? What are the good and bad things that are likely to happen as a consequence?

This book has been substantially rewritten between its hardback and paperback editions - rightly so, since the world's moving pretty fast. And while you may have known many of the things that Friedman talks about, he crystalizes them well. At times you almost feel that you're being brow-beaten into understanding a point as the same subject is returned to over and over, but it's all very readable.

I suppose the biggest criticism I have is that at times the book is written from a too-American point of view. But Friedman is not afraid to confront some very uncomfortable subjects, and it's to be hoped that the mass appeal of this book will lead a few more Americans to sit up and take notice. When you read about how many additional new cars are hitting the streets of Beijing every month, it's not so difficult to understand why the price of oil is only ever going to get higher and higher.

Incendiary had the misfortune, last year, to be published in hardback on July 8. I must admit that I thought that it was a run of the mill thriller. Well I couldn't have been more wrong. Obviously the cover isn't really right, and the book is about 200 pages shorter than the average thriller.

The reason I got this mistaken idea is that the book effectively opens with a bomb going off at Arsenal's new stadium while they're playing Chelsea.

The book is told from the first person point of view of a woman who has just lost her husband and her son, while she was making love with another man. And then it goes on to deal with the aftermath of the terrorist atrocity as we see how she deals with the trauma.

I'm not sure how much I believed in the characters, although they are interesting. There's a certain feeling of pastiche about them - as though they're supposed to be stereotypes. I could believe their actions, but not necessarily their behaviours or words, if that's not a contradiction.

A worthwhile read that's not going to detain you too long, but it could probably have been better.

First of all, it's probably worth pointing out that this book is Science Fiction. It's not immediately obvious from the cover that it is, but publishers are nervous of "condemning" a novel by a mainstream author into the ghetto that is genre fiction.

The story is narrated by Kathy from some time in the future, and it tells the story of her life from the time she was "educated" in the seemingly exclusive Hailsham.

I don't want to say a great deal more about the plot, as it should unfold naturally for the reader as they discover what's going on. I've read a couple of Ishiguro novels before and this is yet another departure for him. He's never scared to examine genres that he's not previously attempted.

Overall though, I was only moderately interested in what happened in this book. It is carefully set-up as I've said, but I found it harder than perhaps I should have caring what the characters did and how they ended up.

It's worth noting that this novel is up for the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction (the award is due to be made next Wednesday, 26 April). Not having read any of the other shortlisted novels, I couldn't say how it compares.

I can't remember precisely how I first came across Richard Feynman, but I'm pretty sure it was reading Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman.

Later, I'd see one of the best hours of Horizon ever made in Christopher Sykes' The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

But aside from a couple of other documentaries, and famously his part in the Rogers Commission Report into what happened to Space Shuttle Challenger in the tragic accident of 1986 (a tragedy that I vividly remember John Craven's Newsround covering live at the time). He demonstrated the brittle nature of the material used in the O-rings.

This book gathers together much of his correspondence, which makes for fascinating reading. I didn't know that Feynman married his first wife despite her already having contracted TB - something that was to kill her. Feynman was, at the time, working at Los Alamos on "The Bomb".

Feynman was a very particular individual in that he took principled stances about certain things - for example, not travelling to the USSR to attend conferences since they didn't allow their own scientists free travel to the West. That said, there's a very funny sequence of more and more desperate letters to various Federal agencies requesting advice on whether he should go to the first conference he was invited to. The slow wheels of bureaucracy meant that he barely got an answer in time.

Feynman also had a massive interest in how science, and physics in particular, was taught. That's why his books are still read today.

Thoroughly recommended, with few letters covering really technical subjects and ably edited by his daughter.

Michio Kaku is one busy guy. When he's not presenting a weekly programme on US radio, he's presenting a four part BBC series on Time.

In the meantime we've got this book, who's subtitle is The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. What we get is a whistlestop tour through basic cosmology, learning a lot about Einstein, Hoyle and others along the way.

It's the latter part of the book that really brings us up to date and if you're not careful, it's very easy to get completely lost. I admit that I did in a few places.

Kaku is fantastic at using science fiction novels to illustrate some of the ideas, and I have a long list of books that I feel must be worth reading after hearing Kaku on them.

I think that it's things like this that make the book as accessible as it is. I note that it's on the long list for the 2006 Aventis Prize - the shortlist is revealed in a couple of weeks or so.

I certainly came out understanding a lot more about the multi-dimensional nature of the universe, and things like dark matter. Exceptional.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History to give the book its full title, explains how one of the most famous tricks on earth has actually never existed yet has continued to develop a life of its own.

Let me direct you to a great review from a last year from Teller - the silent half of Penn and Teller. This does the book far more justice than I could ever.

The book is written in an enormously chatty style and is excedingly accessible. Author, Peter Lamont, has plenty to say about lots of other things along the way too.

I'm a bit behind on keeping up to speed with the latest books I've read, so here's a whistlestop tour.

A Matter of Death and Life is the latest Andrey Kurkov novel. This time around our hero decides that life is meaningless and contracts a hit man to kill him. Things quickly get complicated and once more we're faced with the strange life of a contemporary Ukranian.

This isn't so much a novel as a novella. As such, I think it's a bit cheeky that Vintage feel able to charge a £6.99 on it. Recommended nonetheless.

David Wolstencroft was very successful with his first book Good News, Bad News. It was pretty well reviewed, and then had the book chosen to be a Richard & Judy bookclub choice, which is never exactly bad for sales.

As a co-creator of Spooks (you can't miss this fact as it's all over the cover, and there's a special offer for the DVDs inside the back), he's already set lots of action in MI5, so this time he chooses MI6.

Four "lilywhites" are involved in operations that go spectacularly wrong, and with their own government offering them no support, they're forced to seek out the mystical Contact Zero - an organisation or person who can make spies disappear forever. They're forced to go on something of a "quest" that leads them half way around the world, while various other powers are on their trail.

This is good old-fashioned populist stuff, with plenty of action to keep the reader turning the pages, but nothing too deep. Comparison's with Le Carré are seriously misplaced (incidentally, aren't we due a new Le Carré by now?).

However, it's pretty obvious that Wolstencroft's publishers must have had a conversation with the man that when something like this:

"The first book did really great David, but have you seen who's still top of the bestsellers? Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. If you can find a way to get a bit of that kind of thing into the book, then you'd really have a blockbuster on your hands. You know, historical secret societies, a plot from A to B to C. You'll sell millions."

And so, while it is a pageturner, the comparisons are not to be made lightly. Where Brown insisted (and readers believed) that everything therein was true, Wolstencroft begins by telling readers, seemingly with a straight face, that the D-Notice Committee can censor books, and this is out of the author's control. Thereafter, at points throughout the book, odd words, phrases and names are "blacked out". It's an unnecessary trick.

Worth a read? Maybe. But I'd wait for the paperback if I were you.

Purity of Blood is the second in the Captain Alatriste series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte - and there are plenty more still to come.

These are slight novels; not a great deal happens. The story is being told from the point of view by Alatriste's protege, Inigo, at some indeterminate time in the future. And because of this, we learn about future events from time to time. I won't spoil the "surprises" here.

The plot revolves around a bungled operation to rescue a damsal in distress - well a nun from a convent - where she's in danger from less than holy prists. And the action soon moves on to the behaviour of the Inquisition.

Overall this is more entertaining fare in swashbuckling style. At the moment, it seems as though we're going to have to wait for another year for the next in the series, but at least the film might reach us sooner, and with it, more coverage of the Alatriste series.

This is the breakthrough "business" book of the moment. Economist Steven Levitt and New York Times writer Stephen J. Dubner, take us through a very strange selection of essentially interesting facts and stories.

At the outset of the book, they explain that there's no real "theme" to this book. Instead they jump around the place. What's different is that the subjects attacked are looked at from a slightly different perspective. So we get everything from cheating in Sumo Wrestling to the success of children based on their names. Most controversially Levitt draws a conclusion that the falling crime rate is likely to be directly related to the introduction of legalised abortion.

It's not all as serious as that, and this is a very accessible book that's going to leave you wowing your friends at the pub for many weeks to come as you regurgitate facts. Indeed only this evening I heard the first episode of the very fine Geoff Show on Virgin Radio talking about the Ku Klux Klan story. OK, so it was more a question of the fact that the racist organisation's name is the "Ku" Klux Klan and not "Klu Klux Klan" as many of us had previously thought that was being discussed. I'd hoped that they'd talk more about the fact that a guy joined the Klan undercover and then passed on all the secret codes and passwords to the producers of the radio serial Superman. They then included them in their scripts so that the next day all the kids were running around spouting supposed secret codes ridiculing the organisation. But, a discussion about whether "Ku Klux Klan" is onomatopoeiac or alliterative. It's the latter.

The only thing I didn't like about this book were the rather portentious pieces that were lifted from an article that Dubner wrote about Levitt in the New York Times Magazine. He said lots of wonderful things about Levitt, but it seems a bit like you're blowing your own trumpet to include those excerpt in the book itself. Having praise on the cover is fine - we seperate that from the book's actual content.

Overall, a fascinating read. And it comes out in paperback in a couple of months (although you can buy your paperback at airports now, and I believe it's half-price in Borders' sale).

A few years ago Rob Long, sometime writer on Cheers and several [less succesful] US sitcoms, used to write a very entertaining column about the industry in The Observer. These either came from, or made up (I forget) a book called Conversations With My Agent which is now seemingly out of print. It was very funny.

This book is the follow-up and is a "novel" in the sense that if it wasn't there might be some legal issues. Actually, there are also plenty of imaginary stories. This becomes obvious if you check out the Martini Shot website at KCRW (also available as a podcast). Indeed, you don't have to listen too far back into last year to hear the same stories told in this book. But they're funny stories, and most readers in the UK won't have heard them. Similarly, listeners in the US are unlikely to read them since this book has only really been published in the UK.

It seems a pretty accurate account of how a writer/producer lives his or her life from show to show in the States. I say that, but obviously there's no reason why I'd really know. But I do read quite a lot about the state of US TV so it certainly seems to be true.

Overall a funny book. And scary too. It won't take you too long to read, however. With lots of script excerpts (conversations with his agent once again) and the book only being around 200 pages long, this really only needs a couple of sittings to get through. Worthwhile though.

This is the fist Annika Bengtzon book published in the UK, but might actually be the second or third in publishing order in Sweden. Whichever way around, it's the first in chronological order.

Anyway, junior reporter Annikia is introduced in this book working for a fictional Stockholm evening newspaper. She gets randomly assigned to a murder victim discovered in a park, and keeps at it, digging up new information. At the same time, there's a political connection, and a radio programme, Studio 69, is reporting the same case with its own agenda.

Marklund, according to the publishers' blurb on the cover, is a working Swedish journalist, and if Swedish newspapers are really put together in the manner described in both this book and Paradise, then I worry for them. I realise that British law is a lot more restrictive in what can and cannot be said in regard to an ongoing investigation that other countries, but there's something of a free-for-all in Sweden according to this.

I also detect that Marklund is no great fan of Swedish state television. In a prologue, seemingly written for the international readership, Marklund explains that only relatively recently has the broadcast media been given a commercial competitor. This hasn't come too soon for Marklund (or her protagonist). I note that in the acknowledgments, it's producers from TV4 that get the credit rather than state television.

Overall, an interesting book. Annika's a little too highly strung for my liking, but she's in a male dominated world, and as an outsider, it's hard to know what kind of obstacles women have had to overcome professionally in Sweden.

First of all, if you haven't already heard it, dash over right now to the BBC Radio Player and listen to last Wednesday's first episode of the second series of Ed Reardon's Week.

Ed Reardon is quite the funniest creation I've heard (or seen) in some time; a writer by trade, although he has trouble making ends meet. He did once write an episode of Tenko, and had his first novel made into a blockbuster film by his friend Jaz. But now times are tough, and in between writing books to order like Pet Peeves or Jane Seymour's Household Hints, he's struggling to turn in scripts for Holby City, or write The Old Lock Keeper's column for his local free newspaper.

This book is basically the first series of the Radio 4 comedy. Quite why Radio 4 insisted on broadcasting it at 11.30am rather than the somewhat better 6.30pm slot is a question I don't entirely understand. It'll certainly get a 6.30pm repeat, but it deserves the bigger audience from the outset.

Ed is a fantastic creation, lovingly crafted. He lives with his cat, Elgar, and has a family from a previous marriage that seems a little estranged. He plays in a jazz band with his old mucker Jaz, even though he's insanely jealous of the big-time director who bastardised his novel for a movie tear-jerker.

Sadly BBC Audio haven't seen fit to release the first series on CD, so you'll, er, just have to find someone who might have some mp3s if you want to hear the first series.

And in the meantime, get listening to the second series - Wednesdays at 11.30am, Radio 4.

If you fancy yourself as the next Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson or Reginald Hill, there are a few things you really need to know when you start your detective crime series. First of all, you should think of it as a soap opera. You have to lay some clues well ahead of using. Not in the story you're telling, but for future novels in the series.

Your main protagonist is likely to be male, and if he was ever married, he shouldn't remain that way for long. That way, he can have a will they/won't they thing with a slightly junior female colleague running through several of the books in your series.

Cases will involve friends and family with surprising regularity. In all likelihood, you don't know anyone close to you who's been murdered. Your detective will have deaths in his immediate family.

These are just some of the rules to be going along with. I've been reading the fifteenth in the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson and it's not too bad, yet not too good. Not too good in the sense that like The Summer That Never Was, Banks' close family is involved in the story to far too great an extent. Previously it was a childhood friend who'd died, this time his brother is involved.

And the start of the book really annoyed me with Banks supposedly incommunicado lasting something like 150 pages before, with reports of a murder from his patch attracting front page attention, he finally speaks to someone who's looking for him.

As before, Robinson doesn't worry about repeating himself and hammering home some of the plot points in case some readers didn't fully appreciate what was going on the first time. I suppose that makes these books excellent travelling fare, with you perhaps not paying full attention at all times.

But all said and done, it was an interesting and compulsive story. You wanted to know how it panned out.

Robinson resides full time in Canada and can seem a little keen to show the results of some research trips that he obviously makes. Sometimes it's spot on - this book was written quite a while ago, so a security alert at Kings Cross Station is quite sobering. But occassionally something slips through the net - Banks using a phonecard to make a call from a public payphone.

I will, of course, be persevering with the series.

Yet another Hard Case Crime novel, and, like the Stephen King novel, this one is also has a contemporary setting. Not only that, but the contemporary setting is Edinburgh (and Kirkwall in the Orkneys)!

Joe is an enforcer for a dodgy Edinburgh loan shark. Are there any loan sharks who aren't dodgy?

Anyway, everything changes when his daughter dies and then other tragedies befall him. Someone's setting him up. What's happening?

Very gritty. Very slick. Good fun.

I'm going to have to check out Guthrie's other book - Two Way Split.

And just a thought. Guthrie's not a pseudonymn is it?

I was very impressed that the Åhleans department store stocked an entire section of books by Swedish authors. It was mainly made up of Henning Mankell novels, but having read all them, and wanting to read something Swedish I picked this up from the Stockholm based journalist Liza Marklund. This seems to be the third book that's been translated into English, but was the only novel in stock.

Annika Bengtzon is a young newspaper sub-editor who's been recovering from events which I daresay happened in previous novels in the series. She comes into contact with a strange organisation that claims to be able to take people who are trying to escape spousal abuse and the like, and anonamise them - remove their records.

At the same time, there are murders afoot in Stockholm with Yugoslavian drug barons seemingly having a turf war.

Annika is a troubled character and we get plenty of her personal life - indeed it enters into the plot in a not inconsiderable manner. Not a bad book, and I'm curious to see how Annika's character develops. This book was published in Sweden in 1997, so I'm guessing that there are fair number of additional books to be translated.

Yes - another Scandinavian novel. Does Iceland count as Scandinavia?

Indriðason is the man who's just won the CWA Gold Dagger, and inadvertently caused them to change their rules regarding the language of first publication. This wasn't the book that won the award - that's still only out in trade paperback. But this is his first novel, and a thoroughly good one it is too.

We're introduced to Detective Erlendur of the Reykjavik CID. He has to investigate the murder of an elderly man in his basement flat. As the investigation proceeds, we're taken on a story that involves a serial rapist from the sixties, and a story that takes in a rare genetic disease.

I believe that the Icelandic Genetic Research Centre which enters into the plot is a truly unique research project in reality. Was it not used to establish who's most likely to have Viking blood?

Anyway, a great little thriller and I look forward to reading his next novels.

I believe that this is the thirtieth entry in the Discworld series, and that means that Pratchett has been publishing more than one title a year on average. I understand that he's slowed down a bit more recently, but the guy's a publishing phenomenon.

This time around we meet Moist von Lipwig, who's a cheat and a conman who's facing a death sentence. At the last minute, he gets a secret reprieve in return for being put in charge of the Post Office in Ankh-Morpork. We meet a lively gaggle of characters and some awfully evil ones too.

As usual Pratchett has peopled his world with characters all too close to those that we know in our world, and it doesn't exactly take a giant leap to see the similarities between businesses and behaviours in Discworld and those in our own.

A great novel, and another reminder that I really really definitely should get around to reading some more of the other twenty-nine or so novels in the series.

I guess that Hard Case Crime must have been over the moon when one of the kings of fiction deigned to write a novel for them. I'm also guessing that he's so powerful a literary figure that he doesn't have to worry about his publishers getting upset when he writes for another one.

I'm not really a Stephen King fan, although I do admire him from afar. The last of his books I read was Christine when it was published in paperback - probably when I was still at school. But loving this publishing house's work, I didn't hesitate to jump on this novel.

Unlike any of the other novels I've read in this series, this one has a contemporary setting. That's not to say that it doesn't mostly take place in the past, although not as far into the past as the usual 50s/60s settings.

In this instance a junior reporter is being basically told the tale by two elderly newspaper editors of a dead man who'd shown up on the remote beach of their small New England island. At first there was no clue as to his identity or how he'd ended up there. Slowly the mystery begins to become unravelled, but this is an unusual tale. It's particularly unusual in the sense that the ending is not what you expect. And I don't mean some kind of twist in the tale. In case you read this, I won't say any more.

This is the third of the Fandorin novels to be published in English. I'm not all together convinced that they've been published over here in the same language as they were in Russia, since this one seems to follow on more from the first UK published novel than the last.

In this instance our hero is heading towards the front during the Russo-Turkish War. I must admit that I didn't even know that there had been such a war, never mind any of the ins or outs of it. Also heading in the same direction is the headstrong Varvara Suvorova who's trying to meet up with her husband.

We're soon thrown into a plot steeped with spies, foreign correspondents and double crossing. It takes a while to reach the conclusion but we get there eventually, and this novel is taken a little more seriously than the Agatha Christie style Murder on the Leviathan.

I look forward to reading more Fandorin novels published in English - I think we've got a few more to go.

This time two years, Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves was the de facto gift for those people you hadn't already bought a Christmas gift for. And yes, I do know that we're not in any way close to Christmas yet. It really annoyed me seeing the "gift" sections of Waterstones and WH Smiths today.

But I digress. I read this book, in its entirety, on the way home from work today. Yup - all 200 pages in one go. OK, so I did take a somewhat roundabout route home, going via the Hammersmith Apollo, where I was unexpectantly turned away from a Sheryl Crow concert by virtue of the fact that my ticket is actually for tomorrow night. How stupid do you think I felt?

Anyhow, this book is basically a 200 page rant about manners and rudeness, and as such, you can find nothing really to argue about. It's like being stuck in a pub with an eloquent and intelligent friend who's full of anecdotes largely based around being served rudely in shops and poorly from call centres.

Great fun for an hour or two.

I read this because it was slim, and came for just 99p with a copy of the Telegraph in WH Smiths this week. I knew next to nothing about the book, and having it read it now, I'm not entirely sure that I know a great deal more now. The book is presented from the viewpoints of various characters all linked a hotel in an unnamed town somewhere in England.

Some of the stories were interesting. Some, much less so. I can't exactly recommend this.

My second Ian Rankin Rebus novel, and unlike the first, I liked this a lot more.

A the theme of the novel is race, and we get everything from overt racism in our inner cities to Morecambe Bay-style cockel pickers. There are several stories going on simultaneously, that may, or may not be interlinked.

A good read.

The latest Henning Mankell novel's recently been published, but it's not actually his latest book. It just happens to be one that's out of sequence. Actually, we've had loads of Mankell novels out of sequence, but this one jumps back quite a few years and characters who were last known to be dead are suddenly alive. And a character who'd previously just appeared out of thin air, is now introduced.

At first I was slightly concerned because I caught a glimpse of a review somewhere that spoke of this being the "last" Wallander book, but that's more because Mankell's concentrating on Wallander's daughter now.

Anyway, enough of the background and on to the book itself. It opens with a small town solicitor being murdered on the roadside - a murder that's later made out to be a traffic accident. This is swiftly followed by the murder of his son. Wallander's soon on the case, coming out of sick leave to take it on, and we're into a case that revolves around a reclusive Swedish tycoon who lives in a castle. Is he to blame, and can the evidence be found to prove it?

Once again, the novel's full of Swedish melancholy, and I never fail to be amazed at the long hours they all seem to work there.

The only Philip Roth book I'd read before this was The Human Stain, which ultimately I found unsatisfying. I haven't been to see the film.

But when this came out in hardback a year ago it was so well reviewed that I thought that the man who's regarded as one of America's greatest living novelists probably deserved another go.

This book is stunning. Roth sets the book in a parallel world as a young Philip Roth grows up as World War II is underway. He presents a USA where Charles Lindbergh, who'd become an American hero when he crossed the Atlantic in 1927 in his plane, was elected president.

What I hadn't realised until reading this novel was what an anti-semite, Lindbergh was. His family suffered a tragedy when a young child of his was kidnapped and murdered, and he'd left the States to live in England. But from there it was a short hop to Nazi Germany where he looked on, seemingly with some admiration for what Hitler was doing. He received a medal from the Fuhrer and then returned to the States.

Fiction takes over as he wins the presidency and the Roth family, part of a Newark Jewish community, is aghast at what's going on in their own country.

As a result of the change in history, America no longer wants to become part of the European war.

What's presented to us in this vivid depiction of those war years is very scary and all too believable. None of the events are too far fetched, considering the large number of European immigrants that lived in America at the time, but the way events are presented is all too believable.

Goodness, we can see today, that if you want to present one side of a story it's still very easy to do, and easy to win over the people to your side of the story. Only later does the truth emerge.

The novel ends with a series of very useful summaries of what the major characters really did do in those all important years. This isn't just to show off some very impressive research, but useful background into proving that events needn't be so far fetched.

Thoroughly recommended.

I stumbled across this slim volume by chance in the bookshop and it intrigued me. It's a basic (very basic) introductory guide to probability. The trouble is that it's just too small and light. While the author's not afraid to include some equations in the text, he embarks on a chapter on, say the normal distribution, and three pages later it's over. There's no mention of the other distributions that also exist which might lead the unwitting reader to believe everything's distributed normally.

In fact the book finishes after around 130, small, pages. And is almost padded out with an afterthought by a co-author whereby we're run through several real world examples and the probabilities are explained some more.

I suppose I just wanted more out of this. We're all using probabilities every day and some explanation about how lotery systems work or what your chances are in casinos are to be welcomed. (There is some coverage of roulette within this book).

So maybe this acts as a primer, but you're definitely left wanting more.

I thought I'd catch up with the books I've read recently.

I'm quite a Michael Dibdin fan, and this is the latest Zen novel. He spoke to James Naughtie on the Radio 4 programme, Bookclub recently, and you can hear the conversation here (with Realplayer). On that occasion he spoke about Blood Rain which is set in Sicily. But this entry in the series is, as the title indicates, in Bologna where Zen is sent to investigate the mysterious death of a football club owner. Things aren't simple of course, and there's a ridiculous subplot involving a singing chef. Maybe they really have such things in Italy?

Anyhow, this probably isn't the most serious book in the series with a ridiculous character who's a not-veiled-at-all Umberto Eco character (his name's Professor Ugo and he too works in semiotics).

But all said and done I enjoyed the novel, and if what Dibdin told Naughtie is true, then there should be plenty more episodes with Zen to come.

Another Hard Case Crime series novel, and it's a brash and trashy as the rest of them. Swede is big and big-hearted sailor, fresh off the boat with a pocket full of cash after three years at sea. He's planning on finding himself a wife and setting up a farm in the mid-west where he was born.

But when he wakes up in a motel room after a night he can barely remember, what happened.

And so we're led into a tale involving beautiful blondes, tough guys, the FBI and others.

Not the highest form of literature or anything, but you know where you're going and what you're getting when you read one of these.

I'd not read any of Kate Atkinson's books before, although I've seen them riding high in the bestsellers for a while. So I didn't really know what to expect when I started Case Histories.

What we have is something akin to one of those Barbara Vine or Minnette Walters crime things you see on TV (I know they're authors, but I haven't read any work by either writer). Several seemingly unrelated actions take place across a period of time from the early seventies to through to more years in the Cambridgeshire area. Finally we're introduced to Jackson Brodie, a private investigator, who begins to get involved with some of the people linked with each of the cases.

As things progress, more deep and dark secrets reveal themselves.

I won't say much else because it'd spoil it. Overall it was a perfectly good book - not great, but not bad either.

I've only read a handful of McEwan's previous books. Amsterdam won the Booker a few years back, and I've never quite understood why, since it has no really likeable characters. Enduring Love and Atonement are far superior - pleasurable books.

So along comes Saturday, which had vast swathes of press devoted it to it back at the start of the year when it was published. It's set against a backdrop of the Stop the War protests of 15 February 2003.

We follow the day through the eyes of Henry Perowne, a neuro-surgeon, and his family. Things go wrong when he has a car accident with the "wrong sort of person" in the morning. And you just know that things are going to catch up with him later in the day.

I found the first half of the book a little slow, with extended sequences describing a game of squash for example, but it's undoubtedly exquisitely written, and things certainly do hot up later in the day. The fact that it's set against the protests is reasonably relevant to the plot, but far from essential, and I suppose the backdrop might have been better used. It seems unlikely to me that anybody would have attempted to drive around central London that day.

A very worthwhile McEwan, but not quite as good as his best, and I say that as someone who's very aware that he's not read the earlier works.

Jose Carlos Somoza is the talented Spanish (or maybe Argentinian) author of The Athenian Murders, a very clever mystery set in both present day Spain and ancient Athens.

His latest (well, I say latest, but I'm not completely sure of the original Spanish publication dates) is set in the art world. Well I say, art world, but it's an art world in a strange parallel universe where a new form of art - hyperdramatic art - where models are painted by superstar artists, and are treated as part of the work of art themselves.

So we get a pretty vivid picture of this world. But there's a murdered loose - The Artist - hell bent on destroying (ie murdering) some of the most famous and valuable "canvasses".

It's quite a page-turner, and the multiplicity of characters means that we're never quite sure who could be guilty. The idea of hyperdramatic art is pretty hideous, and is several steps removed from something as simple of body-art, but morals don't really enter into it; we're living in a world where it happens at that's all.

In Spain, the fictional character, Captain Alatriste, has appeared on stamps. And now, the biggest budget film ever produced by Spain is being made about the man, starring Viggo Mortensen (of Lord of the Rings fame).

So who is this man?

He's the creation of Arturo Perez-Reverte, the Spanish writer, some of who's books I've previously read and enjoyed (The Seville Communion, The Flanders Panel, and The Dumas Club). Captain Alatriste is his version of Alexander Dumas' musketeers books.

Set in seventeenth century Spain, Alatriste is an ex-soldier, and general sword-for-hire. But he finds himself being drawn into a web of political machinations between the church and state. We learn his story through the eyes of the young Inigo, a lad he's effectively forced to take on.

The book is a complete romp of a read, and the parallels to be drawn with The Three Musketeers are clear. There's a Milady charater who we learn little about in this novel, but is obviously being set-up for later in the series, and a Richelieu character as well.

This is the first in a series that currently number five in Spanish, and are seemingly greeted locally in the way that we greet a new Harry Potter. A fun way to pass a couple of days' journeys to and from work.

Nick Hornby's latest actually took me a little while to get through, and I really couldn't put my finger on why that was. But, much as I always seek out the latest Hornby fiction (must admit to giving 31 Songs a miss), I'm not enjoying his books as much as I did when he was in High Fidelity mode.

A Long Way Down begins with four disparate people meeting on the top of "Toppers House" a well known suicide spot with regular jumpers. They all run into one another on New Year's Eve and essentially talk themselves into all coming down.

Little by little we learn about their lives from the hum-drum Maureen who looks after her disabled son, and has done for about 18 years, to Martin, the breakfast TV presenter who did time for sleeping with an underage girl (he didn't realise) and consequently saw his career ruined overnight.

The story jumps forward in fits and bursts, and the four unlikely characters remain close. It's an interesting premise if not quite carried off to as satisfactory a conclusion as the reader might like. That makes it more realistic I suppose, but then I never feel that realism is really entering into the scheme of things.

Some of the details are lovely, and the details about the shoddy satellite TV channel that Martin now works for suggest that Hornby is spending far too much time in the outer reaches of his Sky system. I could probably have done with teenage tearaway Jess not being the daughter of a politician. It didn't really add anything to the story, and two people linked to fame in one story about four random souls, is one too many.

Worth persevering with, but I fear that I did need to persevere to the end of this book.

Top Of The Heap is another in the Hard Case Crime series. This time it's by Erle Stanley Gardner and details a complicated investigation involving seedy motels, mob leaders, shady companies, strippers, and illegal gambling dens. All the ingredients to make a good noir thriller then.

I'll admit that I didn't find it quite as noirish, or as entertaining as Grifter's Game did, but I'll stick with this series as they're trashy enough to make great reads, but not so trashy that they're not actually worth reading.

When I saw the film I mentioned that I hadn't read any of the comics, so recently I picked up this first volume.

Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez used this and a couple of other stories as the basis of the film and it's quite remarkable how closely they kept to the comic. Indeed I don't think that there's a single thing that's changed and they did use the comic strip as a movie storyboard.

Excellent stuff, and plenty more to read!

The other day, I mentioned this piece about the writing of a book called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists.

Well, on Monday evening I paid a trip to Waterstones to try to find it. First stop was the large 3 for 2 tables that most people seemingly don't get past. No luck. None either in the New Titles section.

Waterstones have recently made their computer terminals user friendly and you're encouraged to use them. So, without having the full title of the book, I endeavoured to search. As it turns out, this wasn't the easiest thing in the world, and it quickly became apparent that you need to use the "!" in the title to find the right book.

But I was in luck, they had it in both hardback and paperback. Obviously I wanted the cheaper version. (When the author, Gideon Defoe, becomes the next JK Rowling, and first editions of this book trade hands for hundreds of thousands of pounds, I may regret that decision)

Both were to be found on the first floor of the enormous Piccadilly Waterstones, in the fiction section. But I had no luck there, where I instead found copious volumes of work by the slightly more famous (and possibly related) Daniel.

Much stalking around Waterstones eventually turned up the book, out of alphabetical order, in humour. And I can see why. For the paperback, the book has been sized down to look like one of those books you see on bookshop sales counters when you invited to think "Brilliant, '101 Calming Meditations in Crap Towns' would make a wonderful present for my nephew!"

But enough of a fairly pedestrian story about how I bought the book. What's it like?

Well it's quite funny really. Not laugh out loud funny. Nobody's going to shift nervously in their seats while you chuckle on the tube. Not unless you chuckle on the tube anyway. But it's pretty witty. And Defoe has a nice turn of phrase, and makes good use of footnotes.

This is not a demanding book. Let's put that another way, the Guardian Guide on Saturdays is more demanding a read than this. It does however include a "Comprehension Test" at the end of the book, and you've got to give it marks for that.

Shall I talk about the plot? No - not really. Mark Gatiss's Vesuvius Club is the closet thing I've read to it recently, but the plot of that just about held together. I wouldn't want to examine plotholes in this too deeply. Still, it let one and half journeys into work and home again pass very pleasantly.

If you've ever fancied writing a book (I have), then this is definitely worth reading. It's the story of how a book called Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists which sounds like a fun read. All the more so since it was conceived in a pub round the corner from work.

This is the first of the Hard Case Crime books that started being published in the States last year. They feature fantastic period-style covers and are a combination of newly published works and re-published older pieces. In this case, it's a 1961 vintage book that was originally titled Mona. Block, of course, continues to be a bestselling crime author.

This book is short and to the point. A seedy, world-weary grifter gets embroiled in a block of heroin, a girl and her husband. Things happen quickly and I won't spoil the story. It's first person, and obviously owes a lot to those 40s noir films. Great fun.

A new Mankell book is always welcome, and I've waited for the paperback this time. Before The Frost is the first Linda Wallander novel, and featuring our favourite Swedish detective's daughter on her first case.

Actually it turns out not to really be her first case since the majority of the novel takes place before she has actually started with the Ystad force. As usual, dark doings are taking place in Skane, and while her father's leading the case, we see things from the eyes of Linda who tends to lead things along. Indeed her friend may be caught up in things.

We open some twenty years earlier in Guyana where a sect has committed mass "suicide". As ever with these prologues, you're not sure where you're going. But things clear up as the novel progresses.

The Mankell novels are popular throughout Europe, and you feel that they're finally breaking through properly in the UK now. Indeed Random House have set up a website - mankellholicsanonymous.com to promote this latest paperback.

Good fun - well fun's probably the wrong word - and well worth a read. Roll on - The Man Who Smiled in the Autumn.

Oracle Night by Paul Auster is his most recent novel, following events that have happened to Sidney Orr in the early eighties. A struggling writer, he's recovering from a near fatal accident. He starts a new book once he buys a notebook with almost magical properties that help him reinvigorate his writing.

Nothing's straightforward as one would expect and the twists and turns do not pan out as you might expect.

The books's well worth a read, and I'd recommend it.

The latest in the Alexander McCall Smith series of "detective" stories set in Botswana is more of the same - no more, no less.

To be honest, I'm practically reading these on autopilot now. I'd say that this took me no more than 3 or 4 return journies to work to get through. It's perfectly adequare and I daresay I'll carry on reading these while McCall Smith continues to publish them, but I don't know that they're exactly stretching me. But I'll leave the stretching to other authors.

Penguin Lost is the sequel to Death and the Penguin and third of Andrey Kurkov's translated works following The Case of the General's Thumb.

We rejoin Viktor, who has returned from the Antarctic where he fled in place of Misha the penguin at the end of the first novel. Things have changed, and he starts work for one of the new breed of politicians facing an upcoming election. But Misha's gone, and he has to track the Penguin down. The wild goose chase takes Viktor from Kiev to Moscow and then to deepest darkest Chechnya.

As ever, the world is both real and surreal. Choices are simply made, and although all manner of things happen to those around him, our hero is blessed with a certain amount of luck to avoid the pitfalls that await at every turn. So there are glamorous, and not-so-glamorous women, and strange men who drive 4x4s around the former Soviet Union.

A Matter of Life and Death is the next Kurkov book up, having just been published in hardback.

Snobs, by Julian Fellowes, is a story set in a world that I've not entered in contemporary fiction. Think the world of Jeeves and Wooster. Think the world of those people you've never heard of in the diary columns of Associated Newspapers' publications. Think of the nonentities whose marriages are afforded lavage multi-page coverage in Hello magazine.

Yes it's the world of old-money and the titled. We follow a character who one feels might be based around Fellowes himself. He's an actor who has a haughty public school sensibility about him and feels very comfortable with the kind of person who lives in a house that others pay an entrance fee to visit. And then there's the social climber who marries into the family for money and the title, but not love.

Things go predictably wrong, but the novel's slight and the tragedies are not immense. Money is not an over-riding concern of anyone in this book, but status is. And without status, you are nothing.

I thought it was an honest portrayal of what must surely be practically an endangered species. I did pick up a few tips about etiquette should I ever find myself in such splendid surroundings, but otherwise, the plot doesn't really linger. It's light hearted fare that gives you a little taste of how the other half live. Go out into the world with your head held high, your back straight, and a solid belief in yourself. That's what I took from this book - not that I'd paint it as a self-help manual or anything.

If you happen to buy The Shadow Of The Wind, there is one really important thing to do before you start reading it - peel off the Richard & Judy Bookclub sticker on the cover (You'll probably also want to peel off the '3 for 2' sticker that will almost certainly also adorn the front of the book).

Now I wouldn't want you to think that I'm a snob... Let's start again. I'm a snob. And there's no way that I'm reading this book on public transport with those people on the cover. Obviously this association is having a massive effect on the sales of a book that otherwise wouldn't have entered the public consciousness in quite the same way, hence it's riding high in the book charts. And then Open Book did a Spanish books special - notably failing to include Arturo Perez-Reverte.

But back to The Shadow Of The Wind. Its popularity owes something to the mystery aspects of The Da Vinci Code and the magical realism of the Latin-American writers. I liked it a lot - although it was a tad long, and I didn't buy the overly detailed flashbacks when one character was telling another about things that happened in the past with the kind of detail that only a novellist can muster.

But a thoroughly readable and enjoyable novel. Now I feel I must check out the rest of the authors from the aforementioned Open Book.

Last year, when the BBC started showing Hustle, I read a piece by one of the writers explaining where the inspiration came from. Obviously there've been plenty of films covering this area, more of which later. But one book he mentioned was The Big Con by David Maurer.

It was first published in 1940, and followed some exhaustive research work into the lives of America's con artists. In the book, he details precisely how some of the more commonly found "Big Cons" worked, as well as other variants and devices used. It's an amazing insight into a world full of "ropers" and "marks" (a roper is the person who goes out to find the sucker, or rather, mark). He then "tells the story" and brings the mark back to the "store".

The lengths these teams went to, and the awards that were available to them were remarkable. Certainly policemen and other officials had to be paid off, but the insights are fascinating.

The key with many of these cons is that the mark has to be essentially dishonest. The "games" only work if the mark is willing to do something a little suspect, like bet on a fixed race, or take part in a dubious syndicate of stock brokers. If you're completlely honest, you won't be taken.

The book is obviously detailing life pre-war, but you can see how variants of some of these things could carry on working today. My question is how many big teams really continue to work like this?

Over the weekend I had a bit of a "con-man" film festival.

First up was Matchstick Men, which is one of the few Ridley Scott films I hadn't previously seen. Nicolas Cage plays a small time con-artist who works with Sam Rockwell. But then Cage is reintroduced to his daughter. Like many of the films in this genre, there's a sting in the tale, and I was caught out. I quite enjoyed it - and there were some neat short cons played out.

Then I watched a classic - House of Games. This was David Mamet's debut film, and starred his wife of the time, Lindsey Crouch (featuring his actress wife is something of a Mamet hallmark, with more recent films featuring his current wife, Rebecca Pigeon). Crouch played a psychologist who is "roped" by Joe Mantegna into the world of conmen. We see tricks played, but of course something else is going on too. There are some great plays, and it's an excellent film. Mamet later revisited much of this territory with The Spanish Prisoner - a "game" you'll find referenced in The Big Con.

My final film was the Stephen Frears movie, The Grifters, starring Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening as a trio who live by dubious means. Less a straightforward con movie than the other two, it does feature some basic small scale stings. But then organised crime has more of part in this film. It's based on the novel by Jim Thompson written in 1963. Although the film is set in the present day (well 1990 when it was made anyway), it still feels as though it might be set in a world 30 years earlier than that. Some great performances though.

Now we just have the second series of Hustle to look forward to.

When I was reading Good News, Bad News, one of the characters talked quite a lot about locked room mysteries. I decided that I probably hadn't read enough of them myself. So I picked up this classic novel. John Dickson Carr is one of those people who turned out novels by the dozen, having to retain more than one publisher so that they all came out.

But having been so prolific, this is about the only novel of his that's currently in print. It's London-set thriller with a series of seemingly impossible deaths, investigated by Dr Gideon Fell, an expert in such things.

It's all carried out very well, and the solution, however unlikely, is not remotely impossible and does make sense. I suppose Jonathan Creek is the only real current day successor to this type of work.

Over Christmas, I was thoroughly engaged by I Capture The Castle on BBC2. This film came out in 2003 and I must admit that it passed me by. The film stars the then newcomer Romola Garai (who I knew as Zoe from Attachments) as Cassandra as well as Tara Fitzgerald and Bill Nighy. I loved it.

So I was in my local Ottakers a couple of weekends ago, and the Dodie Smith novel was in the staff recommendations case. (I'm led to believe that certain bookshops now "specify" the books that their staff should recommend. Surely not?)

The first thing to note is that the film is an exceptionally accurate reading of the book. No important plot point is missed and I didn't recall any changes. The book is completely told from the point of Cassandra and is broken into "books" that represent her exercise books as she fills them. The introduction to the book, which of course I left until I'd finished it, talks of all the writers who've been inspired by this novel, and if I'd read it aged 14, I think I would have been too.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it - I did enormously. It was thoroughly charming and well worth reading.

Incidentally I had no idea that Dodie Smith wrote One Hundred and One Dalmations, the work for which she's best known. Of course given my sometimes irrational hatred of all things Disney (with the exceptions of Fantasia and the Jungle Book), I'm not quite as familiar as some. But there always seems to be a documentary about her on BBC Four which I completely fail to watch.

David Wolstencroft has been busy about the place plugging his new novel, Good News, Bad News. I heard him with Mark Lawson on Radio 4's Front Row, and he was also with Simon Mayo on Five Live (I missed this, and hoped to catch on the BBC's Listen Again feature, but they don't do Simon Mayo's show beyond the previous episode - I was trying at the weekend. As it happens, the Beeb are updating their player today and tomorrow, adding loads of additional programming to the player. I look forward to experimenting with it after 5.00pm tomorrow).

Wolstencroft was one of the writers and creators of Spooks, so it doesn't take an enormous leap of faith for me to give his book a try, especially as it's based around spies.

The setup of the novel is that there are two characters that are both working undercover in the same tiny photo booth in Oxford Circus station. Neither of them initially realises that the other is also a spy. The opening of the novel sees the two characters toss to decide who makes a phone call from a booth. One wins, and one loses - he makes the call. The phone box is hit by an RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade - if you didn't know, you haven't been watching enough Ultimate Force).

The action then jumps to two days earlier and I was suddenly wary that the novel was going to be enormously limited. Fear not - it isn't. I was pleasantly surprised by what then occurred, which I won't spoil here.

The novel is grittier than Spooks with fewer young handsome agents and designer clothes. It's a bit more Le Carre than Spooks, but not completely so since the action moves around a pace, and I feel sure that if you stopped and thinked about it too hard, you'd spot a few flaws. But I can't complain and it's entertaining fare.

A couple of weeks ago - on January 9 to be precise - The Observer recommended The Oxford Murders as its paperback of the week (incidentally, I can't find the piece on The Observer's website strangely!).

I was intrigued as it was a book written by an Argentinian, but set in Oxford dealing with a murderer who seems to be leading a mathematical trail behind him. The first victim is a woman who worked at Bletchley Park during the war.

This seemed right up my street so I dashed out the following day to get, only to discover that it wasn't published until January 20th.

The dates that books appear in the newspapers compared to when they're actually published is a very strange thing, that I often find completely unfathomable. Of course if the book's a massive release, then it's reviewed immediately. But sometimes, reviews appear ages after publication irrespective of them being big new releases. Michael Crichton had State of Fear published back on November 29, for example, since it was in plenty of time for the Christmas rush. Yet The Observer published its review only this week!

That's quite unusual for a hardback which tend to get better treatment. Ordinarily, it's the brief reviews of paperbacks that get shunted back in the schedule, appearing sometimes weeks after the bookshops have had copies. And yet of course, with a couple of honourable exceptions, paperbacks sell many more copies that hardbacks, so one would think that many people are awaiting paperback publication of titles they're looking forward to. When I was younger it was always a real puzzle to me that paperbacks didn't get a proper review when that was likely to be the point at which most would get to read them. And to an extent, this puzzle remains true. Videos and DVDs get very limited reviews, but then they sell fewer copies compared to the numbers who see in cinemas.

As to the book. Well at 197 pages, you're not going to be unduly troubled by it. The plot rushes along and is entertaining, with a backdrop of mathematical life in Oxbridge around the time of the Andrew Wiles was proving Fermat's Theorem. The mathematics, however, isn't that complicated, although things don't quite run as you might expect with an obvious suspect fortunately discarded. I don't know if the author, Guillermo Martinez, has really spent time in Oxford, but the police don't often carry guns here, and journalists do not travel around Oxford in vans - they tend to be the delivery drivers. But small points like this aside shouldn't detract from an entertaining romp.

In one of David Lodge's campus novels, there's a now very famous game where members of the English faculty have to admit to one another which books of monumental importance in English Literature that they haven't read. I seem to remember that the trump book was Hamlet.

My version is less likely to be books (many of which I have read, a whole lot more I certainly haven't), but rather films or TV. Particularly award-winning TV, or programmes that everyone else has watched. Sometimes it's sheer bloody mindedness. I've never seen an episode of Coronation Street in my life, and I don't intend to start now. I certainly refuse to watch Celebrity Big Brother - I only have a finite number of hours left of my life, and don't intend to be too frivolous with them.

But there are more unlikely programmes that I should have seen. I've never watched Phoenix Nights. Well that's not entirely true. I saw one episode and thought it was very funny. I've even got a couple of VHS tapes recorded from E4 when they ran "Complete Series 1" and "Complete Series 2" nights. So they're there - just waiting to be watched. But I suppose my darkest programme is The League of Gentlemen. I just haven't watched it. I've seen bits. It seems oddly dark and comic and I suspect I'd really like it. But I just haven't seen it. I never listened to the radio series either. I don't even have the video tapes for that rainy day to watch.

(As a further aside, I have so many tapes to watch that I sometimes wonder what kind of occassion would enable me to ever watch them all. It's for reasons like this that I don't think I could cope with a Sky Plus since however much capacity it has, I need more. I think the only way I could get through them would be if I were to suffer a particularly debilitating leg break affording me much time at home. Although that time would have to compete with the lures of my equally large pile of unread books, and things like the internet which'd be a constant distraction. "Would be"? It already is).

But back to this book. The Versuvius Club is written by one of the writers and performers of The League of Gentleman, Mark Gatiss. I've heard him interviewed on radio a few times and he seems an interesting sort of bloke. He has geekish tendencies that appeal to me as well - he's a Dr Who fan who's written Dr Who novels in the past, and has also written a story for the upcoming BBC series starring Christopher Ecclestone.

The ludicrous nature of this slim novel (half price in the Waterstones sale bargain hunters!) appealed to me, and it doesn't take long to dash through. Lucifer Box is a kind of Edwardian James Bond, killing enemies and bedding those he meets along the way. He gets caught up in seemingly inescapable positions - and frees himself. The masterminds are fiendish and their plans practically demonic. The book's an entertainment. It's also quite obviously the first in a series, and personally, I look forward to more adventures.

Having recently read The Dumas Club (not to be confused with the more recent Dante Club), it did occur to me that I probably had most of my knowledge of The Three Musketeers from Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (altogether now).

So I felt duty bound to read the original, and what a barnstorming read it is too. The episodic nature of its original publication is very clear, and it's also very apparent that the over-arching story could be extended or shortened as was seen necessary. I suppose I ought to move on to The Count of Monte Cristo, but there's a daunting read. And to think that Dumas (with help) wrote them both in the same year!

The Dumas Club is another of Arturo Perez-Reverte's novels with historical riddles seemingly leading our hero on the trail of something.

In this instance, we have a book collector who's after a collection of three copies of a demonic books, of which only one copy can be the real one. At the same time, there's a seemingly original chapter of Alexander Duma's classic novel The Three Muskateers that's somehow linked. And there are people relating to the novel's characters who are chasing after either one thing or another, while others are being killed.

What's going on?

Perez-Reverte leads us on a clever chase across Europe as the story is slowly unravels.

I've not seen the film that was based on this book - The Ninth Gate - but what I've read about it on the web makes it obvious that the story has been simplified in the extreme for the film. Roll on the next Perez-Reverte novel!

I first came across Redmond O'Hanlon in an early edition of Granta magazine, which included an excerpt from Into the Heart of Borneo, the book detailing his travels with James Fenton. I was quite a fan of James Fenton as well at the time, who was also being excerpted in Granta and was The Independent's far eastern correspondent.

Anyway, O'Hanlon went on to write a couple more travel books including In Trouble Again, and Congo Journey (which I must confess that I haven't read).

Trawler,
is O'Hanlon's most recent book, and is set in a less exotic part of the world - the North Atlantic. He sets out on a trawler in a force 12 hurricane in January to try to experience life as a trawlerman.

This isn't a bog standard travel book, because once they leave land, that's the last you see of it. Their vessel is obviously quite small, and the conditions reasonably primitive. The men also have a clear idea of the mortality of their jobs, but they seem to love it.

The book consists largely of conversations - in particular, between O'Hanlon and Luke, the man from the ministry who's sorted out his berth. Sometimes these conversations go on for pages or even chapters at a time, and I do have to ask how anyone can them with such clarity, particularly towards the start of the trip when violent sea-sickness is the order of the day.

But it's an extraordinary other world that we don't think about, even as we eat our cod and chips, the cod probably having been flown in from Iceland.

On a supplemental note, there's a major report being published this week examining the future of the British fishing industry which really will be worth reading.

And Radio 4 have just completed a two part documentary entitled Future Fish (not currently available in the science archive) investigating possible solutions.

First of all, don't do as Amazon suggests, and also pick up Our Final Hour - as this is the American edition of the same book. Quite why the future is somewhat more bleak for our friends across the water, is not immediately clear, although it may have something to do with their refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty. And now the BBC are dramatising what will happen when the supervolcano below Yellowstone Park erupts.

The book itself is fascinating. It's only a short book at around 200 pages, but it's very readable and you don't need to be an expert in many subjects to understand it. It's author, Martin Rees, is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Trinity in Cambridge and is obviously widely read. In fact the only thing this book is lacking is a bibliography because there are several books mentioned in the text that I'd like to read at a later stage.

The book is divided up into sections taking into account the different disasters that may befall, mankind, the planet or indeed the universe. So that could be nuclear, chemical, biological, natural, or the advancement of science (from Prince Charles' grey goo, to the possibility that an experiment in one of the particle accelerators at somewhere like CERN might cause the formation of strangelets that attract all the matter in the universe effectively ending it all.

One of the most interesting ideas about the future of life on the planet was from an almost philosophical viewpoint. Broadly speaking - and forgive me if this summary loses some of the niceties of the true argument - the fact that there have been around 60 billions alive so far (10% of whom are alive now), actually leads us to suspect that we're probably around mid-way through the lifespan of the human race. To explain a little more, Rees uses the example of a pair of urns. The two urns each have a number of lottery tickets in them, the first with the numbers 1 to 1000, and the second with the numbers 1 to 10. If we select an urn at random and then select a ticket at random from it (paying no attention to the quantity of lottery tickets within it), and we draw number 6, then we know that it's far likelier that we've drawn from the second urn to have such a low number. Another example was of someone who visited two structures in 1970 - the Berlin Wall and the Pyramids. The wall had stood for 12 years (I think) and the Pyramids for 4000. Therefore we expect that the Pyramids will remain standing a lot longer than the Berlin Wall, which did indeed come down less than twenty years later. It's an interesting argument.

Anyhow, making you think is what this book is about, and it's well worth a read.

I think Playing With Fire is something like book number fourteen in the Inspector Banks series and it's the latest edition out in paperback. Banks is on the case of an arsonist who's killed two people in a barge fire as the novel starts. As usual, we get to meet a colourful handful of likely candidates and there are a few twists before a few hundred pages later we reach a conclusion.

I've now read the last five novels, and there's a new hardback out in January, while I've missed a non-Banks paperback (the Amazon review that's there at the moment doesn't make it likely I'll be rushing either), and we're still due a mass market paperback edition of some collected stories that were published a couple of months ago.

Why all this publishing at the same time? Well this story from earlier in the year goes some way to explaining it. Despite his phenomenal sales, Robinson hasn't actually had all his books published yet in the UK (he resides in Canada). I don't know if there's a time limit that Pan Macmillan are working to, but it must have something to do with it all.

But back to the book. I did enjoy it, but I just felt that some things seemed to be mentioned a couple too many times. It's almost as if we're hostage to some of the slow readers at the back of the class who may not recall something that happened a hundred pages earlier. But I'll be reading the next Banks novel, and have plenty of back copies to get through.

Incidentally, I think that my reading this is testament to the fact that Ottakers occassional 99p book promotions really do work!

I fear I may have just read my first "Chick-lit" book. Ralph's Party is the work in question. I picked it up a few months back on the basis of something I read somewhere at sometime. Let's just say that I wouldn't recommend it.

Absolutely nothing happens in this book.

Well not quite true. So there's this flat somewhere in south London with three sets of people and they all end up getting involved to one extent or another. By the end, and look away now if you don't want to know what happens, only one pair of these people are happy. So that's nice then.

It's perfectly readable, but I just couldn't care for the characters. The one you start out liking, you're suddenly supposed to hate. And vice versa. Does that mean that these are true to life well rounded characters? Well only a bit. But recognising yourself or people you know in a book isn't enough to make me like it - quite the reverse.

This is a book that I read in fits and starts. Sometimes it really gripped me and I read page after page, but at other times it left me a little cold, and I didn't care enough about the characters.

We get the dual stories of present day Lisbon, where a young girl is found dead on a beach, and the goings on during the second world war when a young German businessman is giving the task of exporting a substance called wolfram (more commonly known as tungsten), vital for tanks, back to the motherland.

Obviously their stories meet. The book has plenty of twists and turns, but somehow I just wasn't completely taken with the characters. Not bad, but not enormously special.

It's ages since I read a Discworld novel, and that's my fault really. I've had a couple of false starts over the last few years, but I plan on making good on this. First up was the latest Discworld paperback - Monstrous Regiment.

It's not really worth explaining the plot here, except to say that it involves young Polly joining the Ins-and-Outs regiment disguised as a man so that she can go and find her brother who went to war some time ago. The rag tag bunch of recruits she hooks up with have some, er, secrets of their own.

The whole thing is obviously a parody of the stupidity of war and all that involves.

The book's entertaining, if not one of the best, and can be demolished in nearly a single sitting - just as long as you have quite a long sitting to get through five hundred pages or so...

A new book by Carl Hiaasen is always worth reading. Skinny Dip is his latest, and with a new publisher in the UK, there's been quite a bit of attention made of it: a major feature in The Guardian Review, and an appearance on Radio 4's Open Book.

This is Hiaasen at the top of his form with the story of Joey Perrone, wife of Chaz, the rather stupid biologist who doesn't seem to care enormously for the environment. As the book opens, Chaz is throwing his wife off the deck of Florida-bound cruise-liner.

It'd be a shame to spoil the carefully layered plot details, but it all ties together very neatly and visits some familiar territory, confronting the despoiling of the natural Florida habitat, and the corruption that it engenders. If you haven't read Hiaasen pick him up, and don't let the disaster that was the movie adaptation of his novel Striptease put you off.

Death by Hollywood is famed TV produced, Steven Bocho's first novel. Bocho, you'll recall was the mastermind behind many award winning TV series including Hill Street Blues, LA Law and NYPD Blue.

He hasn't really departed from what he knows, combining an engrossing look at behind the scenes Hollywood wheeler-dealing amongst agents, writers and actors, with your basic crime novel. Told from the point of view of a nameless agent, we learn the story of Bobby, a writer who's had his ups and downs, who witnesses a murder and begins to realise that he could turn it into a killer screenplay.

Along the way, we're entertained with amusing anecdotes that you feel may not be too far away from the truth at all. In particular, towards the end, we learn about "Daniel" an actor who hits in big in the first season of a new series that sometimes shoots in New York. He decides to head for the movies, and after making completely unreasonable demands that he knows the TV company won't be able to make, he heads off to make films, and notably fail to find the fame and fortune he was expecting. I'm sure that anyone mistaking this as having at a go at David Caruso, who famously left NYPD Blue after being a hit in its first season, and then notably falling short in the movies (before ending up back on TV in CSI Miami a good few years later), would surely be wide of the mark. I don't know how many of the anecdotes that appear in print here are based on reality, but I'd guess that more are than aren't.

As a book, it does its job well enough, although it won't last you much longer than a made for TV movie in terms of length.

UPDATE: This is really worth noting! Somewhere around the middle of the book, we get to read the treatment for a movie about a talking dog who becomes president. In fact, it's more the case of a talking dog supplying the script idea for the talking dog as president movie. The dog goes on to supply a couple more ideas, including one where a popular professor at a college is also a covert member of the CIA (think original series of Alias), and a cop series where a detective in blinded but instead of then taking a desk job, remains in the field and has to rely on others and use his remaining senses to the full. This was going to be called Blind Justice. In the book, it gets pitched to producer.

Well guess what? Steven Bocho really has produced Blind Justice and it hits our screens sometime next February. The premise of the series is exactly the same!

Robert Harris sells books by the truckload, but when it comes to it, he hasn't written all that many. And the only book that I'd previously read of his was Enigma - a book that I'd bought on the basis of the subject matter, before leaving on the shelves for some years, until finally reading it some time around the time of the film coming out.

So Pompeii is my second Harris novel, and a rip-roaring read it is too. I imagine that it's not the easiest thing in the world to set a novel against the backdrop of the volcanic explosion of Vesuvius, when everyone knows basically what's going to happen.

Since the explosion at the end is no massive surprise, the novel essentially tells you that it's four days out from the explosion right at the start, as we're introduced to our protagonist, Attilus, who's recently arrived from Rome to become the 'Aquarius' - the man in charge of keeping the aquaduct running smoothly. Things are not running smoothly as the aquaduct is very quickly damaged by tremors from the soon to erupt volcano.

The action largely follows Attilus, but we jump around a few other characters including both Pliny the Elder and his nephew, people who really did record the events of that cataclysmic time. Otherwise the action jumps around between the main players as you'd expect in a thriller, which is what this really is.

I don't know an awful lot about the true happenings at the time, but from what I've gathered from brief research on the internet, many of the characters named, really did live in those places at the time.

All in all, a good read them, although if you pick up the paperback, the several pages at the front pretty much attest to that themselves (I've never seen quite so many quotes from newspapers and magazines in the front of a book).

A new Michael Dibdin Aurelio Zen novel is always to be welcomed, and this time we've moved away from the comic aspects of some of the series. This time around there's a cover-up underway, when a body is found in a deep tunnel by some mountaineers. The different aspects of Italy's judiciary are left fighting one another to either expose or keep hidden the dark secrets that emerge. And more people are dying in the meantime. Good stuff.

I started reading this book a while ago, but had to put it to one side for a bit. The story begins with a concert being given in a South American country by a famous opera diva for the benefit of an executive from a Japanese electronics manufacturer that the country's hoping will build a factory locally. The country's president should be there, but he can't miss the primetime edition of his favourite soap opera, so he's feigned an illness.

But it's at this concert that a rebel group decides to invade the house and take the president hostage. When they realise that the president's not there (only the vice president is present), a prolongued hostage situation begins.

The way that this unfolds is quite gentle, and I guess it was the sudden real life tragedy of Beslan interrupted my story, and the so far rosy image of life as a hostage was suddenly thrown aside by the grim realities we were hearing about from Russia.

But it's a great book, and so I picked it back up, and continued reading. I won't spoil the ending, but it doesn't disappoint.

The other week I noticed that Palm had updated their eBook software with eReader, their new improved version. The way they make you set it up is that you get the full "Pro" version for 15 days before it defaults to the normal version. And you also get to look at some ebooks for that period. I downloaded a pile but Black Ice was the only one I got into. The trouble came when my 15 days neared completion and I hadn't finished it.

The last time I read a book against the clock was probably when I was at school. The software expired at midnight last night, and I finished the book at about 11.40pm.

What did I think of the book detailing the adventures of LA detective Harry Bosch? Not too bad. Quite potboiled in all the correct ways. I wouldn't rush to read another in the series but I might quite easily be tempted in the airport. (Actually, as an aside, I love airport bookshops. They always have those trade paperback versions of new hardbacks for around a tenner. I was in Heathrow last week for a brief excursion to Scotland, and was sorely tempted by the new David Lodge book. Indeed, I've seriously contemplated heading off to Heathrow in the past, just to do some book shopping!)

Not too long ago I finally got around to reading The Seville Communion, and I must admit that it made me want to read more of Arturo Perez-Reverte's work.

The Flanders Panel is set in current day Madrid with our protagonist Julia, an art restorer, working on a painting that depicts a chess game from the fifteenth century, and a hidden message uncovered via x-rays that suggest that the match actually reveals who committed a murder several hundred years earlier. But on top of this, murders are taking place in contemporary Madrid, and they all seem tied into the same picture.

This is probably the only novel I've read that included chess positions in the text, and to be honest if you sit back and think about it too much, the plot is a little mad. But in a strange Umberto Eco manner, I really enjoyed it. So roll on the next one.

As you may or may not know, I'm quite a fan of the film Ice Cold in Alex, but until now I'd never read the book by Christopher Landon on which the film was based.

It didn't take much to devour this well-written and authentic feeling novel. I'm not going to get into the plot too much here, since many will have at the very least seen the film. Let me just say one thing - the film is a remarkably rendering of the book. There's one slight change that the film-makers must have made because of who they had as actors, but otherwise it's faithful to a tee. Well worth reading.

Boris Akunin is a successful Russian author who's written a series of historical crime novels set in Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century. The Winter Queen introduces us to the young detective Erast Fandorin and his investigation into a seemingly motiveless suicide in a park. The story leads away from Moscow and St Petersburg by way of London, before returning, as a global conspiracy is uncovered.

I can thoroughly recommend this book. Sometimes the protagonist seems to stumbled from crisis to crisis, but you can't fail to like him and enjoy the story where nothing is as it seems. I'm already looking forward to the paperback release of the follow up, Leviathan, later in the year.

It took me two or three attempts to get through this relatively short novel which I think says something about what I thought of The Light of Day.

The story takes place on a nominal day, and as our protagonist, a former policeman and now private investigator heads off to prison to visit someone. I'll be honest and say that I found it hard work. I couldn't easily empathise with any of the characters - something I find I really have to do in most novels. So I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. I notice that some of the reviewers on the cover talk about reading it in one sitting. That's certainly not the case for me!

First of all, don't be put off my by the fact that Starter For Ten features in the Richard and Judy summer book club. Now I might be a bit of a snob about these things, but featuring on a not-particularly intellectually demanding afternoon talk programme does not put a book high on my agenda.

But this is quite a funny read - and takes me back to the early novels of David Lodge. Brian Jackson is spending his first year at his unnamed new university where he's studying "Eng-Lit". First task is to get into the University Challenge team, where he can try to woo the beautiful Alice.

This is a pretty amusing tale of university, that's helpfully set about three years before I did the same, thus making it all the more accurate for me. Sometimes the naiivity does seem a little over-egged, but there are laugh-out-loud moments, and it's a thoroughly good read. It also really doesn't end up how you expect it to end, but I'll say no more.

I guess that it was coming out of the Bill Bryson book that made me pick up this biography of Newton (I'd love to read a good biography of Charles Darwin too).

I've not previously read any of James Gleick's popular science books, but I wanted to learn more about Newton who strikes me as a fascinating character who's brilliant at the same time.

This is quite a slim biography, and this is because that we don't get to delve too greatly into his personal life, but concentrate on his scientific life. Even then, one feels we're being given the abridged version.

I wouldn't say that one comes to particularly like Newton, since he had plenty of character flaws - not least his habit of keeping his work secret. In another time, he might have suffered far more, but fortunately he had people to promote his ideas and help him deal with some of his issues.

A pleasing insight into the life of this brilliant man.

This is the first Donna Leon novel I've picked up, featuring her detective Commissario Brunetti. This features quite late in the series, but I thought I'd give it a spin.

The series is set in Venice, and this installment sees the investigation of a mysterious death in a boy's academy. This leads into a tangled tale of politics and society in the underbelly of the Italian state.

Enjoyable enough, but not too demanding, and frankly I prefer Michael Dibdin's Zen.

This is a great new book from Bill Bryson. Moving away from his regular haunt of travel writing layered with irony, he's moved onto the altogether far more complex task - explaining pretty much how the universe works, how the earth works, how civilisation came about and all points in between.

Bryson won the Aventis science award for this book, and rightly so, since it's a labour of love and immensely readable. Even though I suspect that many people won't finish this book, I'd be amazed if there's anybody who didn't come away learning something new.

There are sections that enthrall more than others. Depending on your own interests, sections on fossil hunting or the nature of cells may not hold you as strongly as other parts of the book. But whenever your interest may start to lag, he introduces new characters and the story may suddenly take a different turn.

Thoroughly recommended!

Book 5 in the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is more of the same really. There's not a great deal of "detection" going on here - a lady who's trying to choose between four suitors. And we only meet two of them! Then there's a sponsored parachute jump, and maybe a wedding.

Nothing much ever happens in these books, but that's taken to an extreme in this instance. I finished the book last week, and already I'm struggling to recall too many specifics. Of course I'll carry on reading the series, but lets have some better books. Some more detection please.

A bit late to the party with this one. The flyleaf of this books says it was written in 1991, so that's a short while ago. And I'm someone who reads pretty much everything Coupland writes. But somehow his debut novel had passed me by. Of course I've owned a copy of it for quite a few years - just never really got down to reading it (there are many other books for which this is true).

And of course it's a thoroughly wonderful book and not at all what I was expecting. I suppose I thought that Generation X really meant Seattle grunge. Well it doesn't. Instead we have three characters and their meaningless lives and McJobs. Did Coupland really come up with that first? Who knows, and all the other clever phrases throughout. But it's a great read nonetheless.

Recently Penguin commissioned one of those spurious polls which suggested that men who read are more attractive to the opposite sex. This isn't something that I'd previously noticed.

Anyway, there were various followups on stations like Five Live where I heard a discussion which threw around a few books which should do the trick. One of these was The Outsider by Albert Camus. So I eagerly consumed this short tome on the tube (prior to today's strike) to see if it worked. I can report no luck at all. I did get nudged in the back by one woman, and another gave me a dirty look when my rucksack toppled over onto the back of her calves. But I don't really think either of these count.

The protagonist, Meursault, really is an outsider, and I thought the snappy postscript was quite a good summary of the book. Despite not being the most descriptive of books, I certainly got an understanding of what it might have been like in Algeria in those pre(?)-war years.

Krakatoa is one of those volcanoes that everyone knows about, and in 1883 it exploded in the largest recorded manner killing thousands. This brilliant book sets the explosion in its full historical context, filling the reader in on both the scientific and social situation. Well worth a read.

One of those books that I picked up largely because it was award winning. In this case it's the winner of the Crime Writers' Association Steel Dagger. Set in Germany, Serbia and Italy, it's a postwar story set among the investigators of the International War Crimes Tribunal. In fact it's a well constructed very modern day thriller written by someone who knows his stuff. I read it eagerly.

I've never previously read any Jules Verne and with a "suspicious" new big-budget film version upcoming, I thought I'd read the original.

I suppose the version of the story I'm most familiar with is the Willy Fog cartoon version - famously originating in Spain, and with the dubbed characters speaking rapidfire English over a massive 26 episodes. So it was quite interesting to read the original as the suave, yet aloof, Phileas Fogg. The books a real page-turner, and the story still holds up well with the oddly named Fix tracking Fogg around the world. Note to self - read more Jules Verne.

UPDATE: Hmm. The first review I've seen of the film is pretty poor to say the least.

My first Ian Rankin novel about his famed Inspector Rebus. It was a reasonably pleasurable way of passing the time, but I can't say that this procedural over-inspired me, and I don't see myself rushing to buy the rest of the Rebus novels. Certainly not at full price anyway.

There's been a Dunblane type attack in a school and the murders don't really make sense. Alongside that, Rebus is suspected of murder himself. The novel does a perfectly good job of telling the reader enough about a detective that many of its readers will be massively familiar with. This is what I always find trickiest about longrunning series of books - how to keep them accessible to new readers whilst not annoying diehard fans. I can't really say how well this latter works until I've read some other books. Overall - so-so.

If there's one book that I've been meaning to read for about the last ten years it's this one. I've know for ages that it's a great book, but for some reason, I was never quite "in the mood" for it.

But now I've finished I realise that I've been missing a really good work of fiction. Enough other people will have read the book for it to be a waste of time to go into the plot, but do those kind of educational establishments still exist in the US? I suppose it's the equivalent of some of the smaller Oxbridge colleges in the UK - maybe those not quite affiliated with the actual universities.

I suppose that the book has something of a timeless quality. It was first published in 1992 and there wasn't the current proliferation of mobile phones. Email wasn't quite what it is now (even if I'd been using it for about four years by then). Still, for what it's worth, I think that there were only two people in our school who studied Greek. Latin was a different kettle of fish, and there was quite a full class of whom I was one of it's number. But please don't test me these days. I was poor then and worse now. How I got a 'C' at O-Level I'll never know.

I suppose the character who disappointed me most was Julian. I just thought that for someone who'd had the life he had, he'd have been slightly more astute about what his pupils were up to, even if he was the kind of character who has his head in the clouds most of the time.

People who've read Donna Tartt's new book (well not that new), The Little Friend, seem to be a bit disappointed. When I get around to reading it, hopefully in less than ten years' time, I'll say what I think.

I'm not entirely sure why I picked up this book. But it may have had something to do with being cheap, me not having anything to read at the precise moment, and being near the hated Tesco.

Zoe Heller is one of those newspaper columnists that on the whole I can't abide. So why then did I pick up this book? Well it was the best of a bad lot certainly, but it did get shortlisted for the Booker, so it's worth giving a shot.

The story is told from the point of view of a middle aged schoolteacher and details the actions of her younger (but not that much) colleague, Sheba. Sheba has had an affair with a schoolboy and the story is out. We hear the story and pick up more than maybe our protagonist would want to let on.

Although the novel is slight, the subject is dealt with in a real manner, and is sensitively and truthfully handled. I read it in about two sittings which probably says quite a lot for it. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting.

Can you tell that I've been away with very little to do? The Kalahari Typing School for Men is the fourth in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.

You either like these books or you don't - they're slight, and inoffensive, but they take you away to another world. And although AIDS doesn't really raise it's head in a country (Botswana) that's ravaged by it, it's inferred.

Mma Ramotswe has a particularly slight case to deal with this time, although she faces a competitor who's worked for the Jo'burg CID and has once visited New York. This impresses a lot of people. Meanwhile her assistant, Mma Makutsi, has started a typing school for men who are embarrassed about their lack of skills, and may have found love.

If I say that I read this on the train from Norwich to Liverpool Street, and the train wasn't delayed, you'll get an idea of how long a book like this really delays you.

As an aside, isn't it annoying when ask for a single from Norwich to London and it's GBP30.30. Then you ask the cost of an off-peak return and it's GBP31.30? I payed the extra pound even though I'm not sure how I can use the ticket. It can get me one way to somewhere like Colchester, Ipswich or Diss I guess!

Regular readers will know that I'm something of a Mankell fan. Firewall is the latest to appear here in translation, and apparantly the penultimate Kurt Wallander novel.

Firewall starts with someone dropping dead at a cashpoint and a seemingly senseless murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls, before the plot thickens and a global conspiracy is revealed.

I found this to be quite a breezy page-turner, and it was good to get back to the bleak Skane setting after the aside of northern Sweden in The Return of the Dancing Master. Wallander is getting ever more grouchy, with office politics the latest of his problems. And someone should explain to him that mobile phones are best left switched on.

Now this is more like it. After the disappoitnment of The Da Vinci Code, it was good to read a literary thriller that held up to all that it was trying to be. Set amongst the literary elite of New England in the late 19th century as they battle to help Henry Longfellow put together the first US translation of Dante, a murderer is killing people in the style of Dante.

Packed with detail, it's a cleverly written thriller, and you really feel that you're learning as you go. It certainly made me want to read Dante.

I don't really want to say too much more about the book except that it's one of the best books I've read in a long time, and was enough to keep me page turning in every spare moment until the conclusion.

What can you say about this book? I knew for ages that it was a really good book, and the fact that it's won awards left, right and centre just added to it. Finally it's out in paperback (3.49 in Borders this week - always a sucker for a bargain), and I read it in a sitting.

I loved the details that Christopher, our protaganist picks up. But easily the scariest thing I found about this book was that I've forgotten way too much of my maths A level details. I too got an A grade, but even the question in the appendix which is worked through had me struggling.

Well worth a read.

The second of Russian author Andrey Kurkov's translated works, following Death and the Penguin a year or two ago.

Kurkov seems to specialise in slightly off-kilter novels set in Russia, and other former Soviet states, where the absurd still seems to be the norm. Part farce, and part serious consideration of the state of play today, they make enjoyable if slight reading. I probably didn't enjoy this book as much as his first, but then it has a slightly more serious tone to it.

I note that Death and the Penguin now has a sequel, Penguin Lost, which I'll look forward to.

The latest Douglas Coupland novel, just out in paperback, is set in the aftermath of a high school massacre, not unlike that which happened at Columbine. This time it takes place in Vancouver, but there are plenty of quite purposeful similarities.

We follow the story from the point of view of four people over a period of years. The links are made between each of the four, as they each tell their story in turn.

I felt a little disappointed by this novel to be honest. Is this ground too well trodden now? Maybe not, but I felt that it was just that bit too similar to other Coupland work.

Some years ago, I bought this book because an Islington Waterstones manager (or someone similar) mentioned that it was selling really well in a column in The Guardian or Independent. I obviously decided that this was a really cool and trendy book to be reading, went out and got a copy, and then thought better of reading it.

Now I'd hate you to think that I'd be so shallow as to have to read whatever's cool in Islington. This is obviously not the case, since a closer examination of the book suggests that I bought it in 1998 or 1999. Not exactly top of the pile then. For some reason, I turned to it last week.

It's a thriller set amongst bankers and clergy in Seville, with the investigating "officer" being a representative of the Pope, and all the politics that includes. It's not a bad book at all - quite intelligent really. There are the comic characters, and although our "hero" is not necessarily the most likeable guy, he does mellow a bit. And typically, there's a femme fatale for him to get involved with.

Arturo Perez-Reverte seems to be a pretty popular author across Europe, and of course his books would never make the best-sellers in the UK since he appears in translation, and the only books that sell in translation here are classics. I might give some of his other books a read at some point (hopefully it won't be another five years), since there are quite a few available, and people say awfully nice things about them on Amazon.

This is one of those books you just pick up at the bookshop without knowing anything about at all. Well that's how I came to it at any rate.

It's a slim novel that details a short period in the life of Damian, who suddenly inherits an uncle's house on the island of Ionia somewhere off Cape Cod. To say that the novel goes nowhere would be to do it a disservice, but I couldn't too easily summarise the plot and not suggest that it meanders. Damian moves in, meets some of the people who his uncle knew, reminisces about his childhood holidays there, and tries to learn more about his uncle.

The culmination is a short story about Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's cleverer brother. Is this a clue to real events that happened on the island?

One of the reasons I bought this title was that it had won a Somerset Maugham Award. I suppose that given the kind of books Maugham wrote in his day, I assumed that it would mean that there was more of a thriller or whodunnit element to this. There isn't really and that's no bad thing - nobody needs to read too much crime fiction, least of all me.

Would I read another Marcel Theroux book? Certainly. Oh and yes, Marcel is son of Paul and brother of Louis. How many more Theroux family members are there exactly? And will they leave some space for the rest of us?

An enormous bestseller in the US, this was finally published in paperback last week in the UK, and I felt able to pick up a copy for less than four quid in Tesco as a result (I suppose I should write something about supermarkets and their impact on booksales sometime soon, since everyone else is - incidentally, my copy of Road to McCarthy didn't have a price on the back I noticed.).

The first thing to say is that The Da Vinci Code is very readable. Very easily readable. There's nothing taxing in this book at all. The story all takes place over a period of less than 24 hours, primarily in Paris, as lecturer Robert Langdon finds himself embroiled in a tale involving the death of a curator from The Louvre, Leonardo Da Vinci, Opus Dei, The Vatican, The Holy Grail, Knights Templar, secret societies and much more. I certainly couldn't fault the book for entertainment - at nearly 600 pages, I still finished it under two days, but then you never have to re-read anything. If you didn't quite understand something first time around, don't worry, another explanation will be along shortly. Maybe I'm being unfair, but there weren't really the number of twists or turns that a thriller like this should probably have. Everytime our here and heroine got into a scrape, they got out of it within half a page, so there was very little allowance for build up in tension.

Then there's the plot. I'll leave aside the subject matter since that kind of lore is bound to be unrealistic, but the same could be said of SF, so I can buy into it all. I suppose that I'm more bothered by US authors setting novels in Europe and not really understanding things properly. Certainly author Dan Brown has done his research, and I can quite believe that a lot of architectural descriptions are accurate along with much of the historical fact that's injected into the story. I just have problems with systems that work to an unbelievably accurate degree. So Interpol is the most powerful police presence ever, and anyone on the run is likely to be picked up within hours of hitting the wires. The understanding between British and French police is far greater than I've ever realised (Why, I'm certain that French police would be welcomed on British soil without a murmour, instead of leaving the job to the local force).

Then I have a problem with the simplicity of the book - everything's too linear. It's like a computer game in that you can't get to level 2 until you've completed level 1, and there's no question as to how you complete level 1. None of the protagonists are baffled for more than a page or two - they invariably come up with a brilliantly simplistic solution, cuing a new chapter, before we the readers, are let in on it. And given that the book does run to nearly 600 pages, a few more characters wouldn't have gone amiss. By the end, we're left with so few possibilities about who the arch nemesis might be, that it really doesn't come as a surprise.

But my biggest problem was with the writing itself, and more particularly the idioms that were used, and used, and used again. Every time a gun was pointed it seemed to take "deadly aim", and I don't think that in any book anyone should "gun" an engine more than once. Let alone four times.

I expect that I'm being ridiculously harsh about all this, but I was just that bit disappointed with it all. The Broken Sword series of computer games are far better. Indeed has this author played the first Broken Sword?

And of course, I've read a superb book which covers much the same ground - Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Eco's book had far greater breadth, and handled the subject matter much better.

The Da Vinci Code is a beach book really, and to that I extent I can't complain. But since a movie is reckoned to be in the offing, they're going to have to be very careful not to make the film feel completely stupid.

If you're tickled by the prospect that a sportswear company could release a fabulously expensive pair of trainers, but then choose not to market them, until demand reaches fever pitch levels leaving the company to dump thousands of pairs onto the market, thus turning a colossal profit overnight, then this book is for you.

Set in a near future in which commerce has gone mad, and big business rules the world with their all powerful "loyalty card" schemes, Jennifer Government is a comic thriller. Some of it is a little heavy handed, but full marks for some of the merciless ideas that author Barry presents.

To be honest, I thought that the book could be a little shorter, and it wasn't as well done as Mammon Inc which was set in a slightly less mad world. An entertaining tube read nonetheless.

Another author that I'm reading backwards is Michel Houellebecq. His breakthrough novel was Atomised, almost an architypal tube book. His most recently translated/published paperback was Platform which I read last year. I see that Lanzarote is published this summer, keeping up the cover theme of having a scantily clad model on the cover.

I'm not too sure about Houllebecq - his work is eminently readable, but sometimes the authorial voice sounds ever-so unreconstructed. Now that might be the characters, but on a reading of two of his books, he seems to do those attitudes awfully well.

He's certainly an elegant writer, who's supremely translated in a chatty style. The ideas are intelligent - there's no doubt that he's French. Philosophical ideas are important to him.

Atomised tells the story of two half-brothers who were brought up separately, neither of them in great surroundings, and with sexual identity problems. Mixed into this is lots of sex and some interesting mathematical and genetic ideas.

To be honest my mind was drifting off towards the end of the book - although the process of reading the book was somewhat enlivened by my "losing" the book, having to purchase another copy, and subsequently finding my "lost" copy. Still Waterstones were kind enough to let me exchange it for something else.

Giles Foden's first book was this Whitbread winning novel from 1998. We follow a young doctor who accepts work in Uganda around the time that Idi Amin was coming to power, and who eventually becomes both Amin's personal doctor as well as a confident of sorts.

As such, Idi Amin is a fictionalised character in this novel, coming across as a very real person. That he was quite possibly psychotic is never far away from the surface.

That completes the published Foden oeuvre to date. The next Foden novel is Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure due in September, so I shall look forward to that with pleasure.

Sticking with SF then. Eastern Standard Tribe is the first book that I've ever read digitally, since it's published as a download as well as in dead tree format.

I'm not sure about the whys and wherefores of this. Microsoft gave away a load of books during the last six months of last year, all of which I dutifully downloaded (aside from the first one which I missed). But now I have a Tungsten E, I can't read any of those books on my palmtop.

But getting back to the book - I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I notice on Amazon that it runs to 224 printed pages, and it does feel quite a short novel. But it painted an interesting and believable picture of a very near future, intellectual property, and industrial espionage.

It's absolutely ages since I last read an SF novel. Indeed I can't actually remember what it might have been. We're talking years, which is odd, because I used to read quite a lot of it, and I have no problem whatsoever with genre fiction (OK - I might avoid the likes of Mills & Boon or Black Lace). Probably William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, both of who have books awaiting to be read by me in my pile.

It's one of those strange things in life that I've read everything by Iain Banks, but nothing by Iain M Banks (note for uninitiated - they're the same person - the M signfies an SF novel).

Iain M Banks actually supplies a glowing cover quote for this book by M John Harrison - "Light is Brilliant".

Well I don't know if I'd quite go along with that. Maybe, having been out of the SF literary scene for sometime I'm behind the times, but this isn't an easy going book. You're truly dropped in the deep end with three strands of the novel running alongside one another with little seeming to keep them together. I wouldn't dream of explaining the plot, and how it involves a present day homicidal mathematician, a space pilot from some indeterminate future and a "twink". It's certainly mind-expanding and for that reason, I don't suppose it'll be that long before I return to SF.

Paul Auster has a new novel out next week, but I'm a bit behind only having read the odd work here and there.

The setup in this book is quite good. Hector Mann is a silent era movie star who disappeared around 1929 and was never heard of again. It was assumed that he was either dead, or had given up his career. The novel's protagonist becomes interested in his career following the tragic death of his wife and kids. Then lost films start reappearing and he writes a book on them. But then he receives a letter suggesting that Mann may indeed still be alive.

The novel flows very easily, with long descriptions of Mann's life, as well as detailed expositions of some of his films.

I suppose it harks back a little of William Boyd's New Confessions, although there are no real attempts to introduce real-life characters into the story. A thoroughly worthwhile book.

A Dedicated Man is the second in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series. It was originally published in 1988 and it actually seems to date from a few years prior to that in the way it's written and the cars people drive.

A fairly well liked local man is found dead in the Yorkshire countryside, and it all seems to be related to something that happened in the past.

I'd been holding off reading this book for sometime since it was the second, and I thought I should really try and start at the beginning of the series (the latest hardback has just been published). In fact it doesn't make a great deal of difference. I suppose the most notable differences I noticed between this novel, and those that come later, is that Bank's family life is very much on the periphary.

So five books down, nine to go. But I've discovered some interesting things looking at Robinson's website: some of his books have yet to be published in the UK. Cademon's Song was only recently published in the UK, getting a hardback release in September despite being released originally in 1990. There's another book, No Cure For Love, which has yet to be published in the UK, and a limited edition book Not Safe After Dark which has short stories including three featuring Inspector Banks. No doubt these will all be published in the fullness of time in the UK under the uniform cover design now used by Pan.

After reading as many Mankell novels as have appeared in English (at least in the UK), I decided to stretch a little further afield and move from Sweden into Norway for my next detective fiction.

Karin Fossum was a name that was mentioned, so I picked up the slim Don't Look Back, and fairly rattled through it. It's an "Inspector Sejer" Mystery, and although not the first in the series, it is the first to have made it into English.

The book is set in a village on the edge of a mountain, somewhere just outside Oslo, where a young girl is found dead. As might be expceted is such a novel, there is more going on in the village than might at first be apparent.

I quite enjoyed the book, although the descriptor "procedural" might be a little more accurate than normal in this case. There aren't any unguessable plot twists, although the story is disturbing. In many respects these Scandinavean novels are really very British in their outlook.

And so to the latest English translation of Henning Mankell. This is the first Mankell novel that I've read which doesn't feature Inspector Wallander. In this instance we follow Stefan Lindman, a policeman with cancerous tongue, worried about his forthcoming treatment, and on sick leave.

When an old boss of his dies in the north of Sweden, he can't help but go there to see what's happening, helping and hindering the official investigation being conducted by the local police.

All the familiar Mankell traits are to be found with a similar work ethic and certain bleakness to be found. I must admit that I just want to go and visit that part of Sweden if it's anything like true to life.

Amazon speaks of this as heralding the end of the Wallander era, yet by my reckoning we still have several novels still to be translated into English. Harvill have done a fine job so far with Mankell, but the order that they've published the books is still something of a mystery to me. Indeed at the beginning of April we should get Firewall, the last of the Wallander novels, even though we've still not had the first. Then in September, we are due for Before the Frost which features Wallander's daughter Linda. And in April 2005, it should apparently be The Man Who Smiled, an earlier Wallander novel. So if you can explain the publishing sequence, please do let me know!

My sister dutifully gave me book tokens for my birthday and for my Christmas present. It might seem a bit boring, but when you consider that my brother bought me a book I got myself two months ago, then it's not a bad thing.

So on the 27th off we trot into Norwich to size up the sales. For some reason, Next felt it needed to open at 5.00am, and I see exhausted men standing staring into infinity with 6 large Next Sale bags, as they wait for their other halves to return with more clothing. I won't go into a shop as crowded as that.

I do head to WH Smiths, Ottakers and Waterstones, and do you know what, it's a pile of books that I come home with. All are hardbacks that are happily half price.

The first is the new Iain Banks book Raw Spirit. This was serialised on Radio 4 just before Christmas, but I must admit that I haven't listened back to it yet. So reading the book is a fresh experience. Radio 4 often do serialise good books, but I never know whether to listen to them or read them first. Much is obviously cut to end up with a cumulative running time of just over an hour, but the end is surely given away?

This is Banks' first non-fiction book, and if you didn't look too closely, you surmise that it's a book about whisky and whisky distilleries. And you'd be close to being right. That is what the book's "about", but in reality it's a few months in the life of Iain Banks. It's much closer to a Bill Bryson book really, with stories about the places he visits, and lots of personal anecdotes that tend to wander into autobiographical territory. It's not even that much a travel book, as Banks has been to many of the places he's visiting before (if not the distilleries themselves), and as likely as not has friends living locally. And since he lives in Scotland, he's "commuting" to many of these places without stopping over for more than a night or so.

That all said, I loved it. I did learn more about whisky, and I speak as someone who'll happilyt visit a distillery as often as I pass one. Indeed I went out and bought a close relative of a whisky mentioned in the book at Sainsburys just the other day. (A brief aside here. Struggling home with six bags of shopping and not taking a taxi is a really really really bad idea in retrospect).

Banks is something of a raconteur, and he has strong beliefs. This tour took place to the backdrop of the war in Iraq and he has some strong views which don't so much seep into the book as stop the book dead in its tracks while he extolls them. I don't have a problem with this in the slightest. The new Le Carr� which is close to the top of my reading pile has been criticised for similar views. We'll have to wait and see.

You have to laugh at this book. A terrible pun and yet a best-seller. I read it swiftly before Christmas, and I'd like to think that my punctuation is already improving as a result.

I know that I'm terrible at sticking dashes and brackets in all over the place, as I leap from one thought to another without structure. It's probably a consequence of the way I write emails, and the fact that I barely ever read what I've written. That's especially the case on this site, although when I post something on a message board somewhere, I'm a lot more fussy about re-reading my text. Maybe I should aspire to higher standards?

Al Franken is only a name that I am very feintly familiar with, since he's best known as an American comedian who's regularly appeared on Saturday Night Live - not a show we get especially in the UK.

I'd read about this book on liberal-leaning websites, so it wasn't much of a stretch for me to go out and get a copy. Franken takes apart the lies and untruths served up by the prevalent right-wing media in the US in a style not dissimilar to Michael Moore.

Interestingly, it took a little hunting down in Borders on Oxford Street. I first tried the best-sellers on the ground floor. No dice. Then I went upstairs to politics, where there were shelves of books by Moore. No luck again. Finally I traipsed up to the top floor to the media section where once again I was out of luck. Sold out then. But I went to the customer service desk to be told that they had plenty of copies - in humour. Obviously!

As to the book? Well I've only had very limited direct experience of that kind of talk radio, and I don't get Fox News. But I've heard Sean Hannity on the net, and hilarious listening it is too. So self-righteous and certain of himself. And I've never read a book by Ann Coulter (although I'm never likely to either).

But it's an excellent read, and the lies depicted through osmosis can be spread quite as easily through the press in Britain as they can in the wider media in the States, and for that reason alone, it should be read.

I didn't get around to reading Pete McCarthy's first book, McCarthy's Bar, although my sister left a copy around my flat a while ago, so it's there for me when I get a chance.

The fact that Tesco had this (not a Tesco link) on sale for 2.99 may have swayed me, but this was an entertaining travel book in the style of Bill Bryson.

I used to enjoy the various travel TV shows that Pete McCarthy used to do a few years ago, and the same kind of humour still emerges. A good read then - maybe learning a couple of things along the way.

But I still have a slight problem with this type of book. When you have your first hit book, effectively backpacking around the world, maybe with a few more quid in your pocket than a gap-year student has, that's fair enough.

But when you've earned many thousands from sales all over the world (McCarthy sees someone buy a copy of his last book in Tasmania), then I know that all your moans about travelling economy are a little misplaced. We know you could pay the business fair if you wanted to. You can get the good hire car. There's no real need to eat too economically etc. I suppose that if I was travelling and loaded, I certainly wouldn't be limo-ed around and stay at only five star hotels; indeed I'd probably do much as McCarthy does. So where's the contradiction?

Uh... good point.

Morality for Beautiful Girls is the latest in the Abacus republishing of the Alexander McCall Smith No.1 Ladies Detective Agency novels set in Botswana.

Never a long read, it's still entertaining, although not quite as good as the previous couple. Mma Ramotswe is to be married to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, but he's suffering from depression (and consequently plays little part of the novel). Similarly, the newly adopted children are sidelined sharpishly, and the most interesting sounding case about a speechless child who smells of lions, doesn't really go anywhere. I admit that I don't see how we could have had a conclusion to that investigation, but I'd liked to have learnt more nonetheless.

Of course I'll continue reading this series!

I've been reading this since I saw Stephen Fry's film version a couple of weeks ago. It's been some years since I originally read the book, and I think I was probably quite young and missed an awful lot of the references. The Penguin Classics edition is finely annotated and it's a great fun book all round.

The film is actually remarkably close to the novel, with only the most inconsequential of sub-plots dropped. I'd have liked to have seen the party on an airship (which sounds great fun), but I can quite see why the Wesleyan film subplot was dropped.

Plenty more Waugh to work my way through in his centenary year.

Well our recent school trip to Milan afforded me the chance to buy the airport paperback version of Michael Moore's latest - Dude Where's My Country.

Never the toughest read - but that's why he sold so many of the last book - it does what it says on the jacket in an efficient manner.

I suppose I'm a little disappointed that there's not more. Somehow I feel that his forthcoming film, Farehenheit 9/11 will cover some of the detail a lot more effectively, but maybe it's because I agree with it all too easily.

This book very much focuses on America, and that's definitely his strong suit. I felt before that his coverage of other countries, in particular the Irish problem, was a tad simplistic to put it mildly. Mind you, he's visited Northern Ireland now (something I've never done) and is likelier to have a more balenced view. On the other hand his Middle East bit is again a tad over-simplified.

But you just can't knock the guy, as he's just trying to shake the whole damn country out a political hangover that somehow left George W Bush as the singlemost powerful man on the planet - a scary thought for anyone. Anything we can do to fight this apathy is good by me.

I guess that I was a little disappointed that by the time I got just over page 200 the book was over, and I was left with (plenty of) footnotes. But short and to the point isn't a bad thing.

I remember this coming out in hardback, and wasn't too sure about it at the time. I haven't read The Virgin Suicides, and I hadn't seen the film either (still haven't).

But I heard good things about it, and when I was down in Sheringham, I had plenty of time to get some reading in, even if I still brought too many books with me. What a cracking read it is. I've never really properly considered hermaphrodites before, even if there do seem to be quite a lot of them around.

It's a fascinating story beginning in Greece of the twenties, and leading up to more recent times, but thoroughly engaging the reader with the history of recent American life in Detroit.

So then I continued my backwards voyage into Giles Foden's work with Ladysmith, which I got in some book buying spree a year or so ago.

Set in the middle of the Boer War it tells the story of several participants both inside the embattled Ladysmith town itself, as well as outside. At first we focus around many of the characters but slowly we begin to concetrate more on Bella, the daughter of the Irish landlord of the town's hotel.

Real newspaper journalists and even Winston Churchill are included in the characters, as well as a chap called Gandhi, and not knowing a great deal about the Boer War, the book was well conceived.

I'm a bit surprised by the low user ratings that this, and Zanzibar are getting at Amazon. If you can honestly say that this is a 2 out of 5 book, then you're not reading a great deal of dross that gets published.

I will seek out Pakenham's The Boer War at some point to get a fuller picture of what was going on back then.

I've had this Giles Foden book kicking around for a while now, and thought it was about time to read it. It's set in, well, Zanzibar, with a backdrop around the embassey bombings in east Africa from a few years ago - particularly the one in Kenya.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, with its attempt to try and get inside the heads of the members of Al-Qaeda who carry out the atrocities.

I suppose the one thing that you know is going to happen in this book is that at some point a bomb is going to go off. Yet when it does, it still surprises and the horror is well conveyed.

All in all a thoroughly good book.

Indigo Slam is the latest book to featured in an Ottakers 99p promotion. And if anyone says these things don't work, then I'm the reason that they do. I've only read all the Peter Robinson novels because they had one for 99p.

Robert Crais is an author that I must admit I hadn't previously heard of. His detective is Elvis Cole - who sounds like a musical detective to my ears. Maybe he is, but there's no indication of it in this novel. It's all first person, and all Cole. If Cole's not there, we don't hear about it. There's no switching between storylines or other characters, and you can't fail to understand the plot, because we hear his thoughts after spoken words.

So it's simple, but it's quite pleasurable, and I learnt more than I thought I'd need to know about printing phony money. I may easily read more in this series.

Platform is an interesting book, and I must admit that I have no idea what the title refers to.

Michel Houellebecq's previous novel (at least in English) was Atomised, and it's striking cover was a regular in bookshops. It didn't appeal to me however (what's that phrase about books and covers?). I may go back and re-explore it now though...

In any case, I read a snippet review about Platform somewhere (why do all book reviews treat paperbacks so poorly? Most of us only read paperbacks) so I picked it up at the weekend. It's a strange book initially about a man who's father has just died and decides to take a group package holiday in Thailand, where he participates in the usual sex-tourism thing. He meets Valerie while he's there and they begin a passionate (and I mean passionate in a very explicit sense) affair. She works in the travel industry and they decide it's sex which drives the industry. This leads to some interesting conclusions and quite an ending.

To say that many of the characters are amoral, would be an enormous understatement. But they're nothing if not fascinating and the story moves along apace in a very easy to read translation.

It's interesting that like the last French translation I read, £9.99, it deals with consumerism and real companies in a fictional manner.

I picked up the most recent Alan Banks novel in Asda last week at a bargain price, and devoured it in a couple of days.

I do like these Banks books, even thought they're not especially demanding. Of course there's been something of a backstory build-up towards this for a while (how far back I won't know until I've read the earlier novels), with Banks' childhood friend's death playing on his mind.

The next book isn't out in hardback until January, so there's probably a year to go before I get to read it!

Alexander Graham McCall has now written five novels in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and this is the second, published here in its Abacus imprint.

To be honest, not a whole lot happens in these books, with a couple of cases being solved with relatively minimal effort, but we learn lots about the lives of the people of Garabone in Botswana. I absolutely lapped up this book (finishing it very quickly indeed - demanding they're not). So when's the next novel published in Abacus? Answer: December, March and May for the next three!

In his new forward to this book, Michael Frayn runs through some of the titles under which the book has previously been published. To be honest, I'm not sure that Towards the End of the Morning is quite the right title still, but it's the one we're left with.

Since Faber republished this book a year or two ago, I'd been meaning to read it, as it has been described as one of those essential novels about newspaper journalism - right up there with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop (which of course I absolutely adore).

I don't think I'd rate it quite as highly, although you can totally believe that it was thoroughly accurate for its time. Somehow, one doesn't see newspapers being quite as overstaffed as that now.

An entertaining novel, and very amusing.

It sometimes seems like everyone and their mum heard about Salam Pax and his blog from downtown Bagdhad in the run-up and lead into the Gulf War. At one point The Guardian republished extensive excerpts from his blog.

Anyhow, this book is basically that blog in book form, re-ordered a little, and with a couple of Salam Pax's Guardian columns thrown in. It certainly makes for an entertaining and thoroughly enlightening read, although there's probably little point in reading it if you've read the blog over the last year or so. I thought that perhaps there'd be some extra material, but it must be said that everything here is published elsewhere on the web. Having said that, a book does lend authority, and is now saved for posterity. If you hadn't read the blog, then I'd wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Well I sat down on Saturday night at a loss for anything to watch on TV, and on a whim, decided that I'd rewatch The Perfect Storm on DVD. Not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of fun. The interesting thing about it is that obviously it has stacks of CGI throughout it, a lot of which takes place at sea. And they don't do a bad job with it. Not totally brilliant, but pretty damn good. Now compare and contrast with Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which has a big sequence that takes place on a watery planet. This film was made two years later than The Perfect Storm and it's rendering of a stormy planet is much worse. OK, there are bigger problems anyway with this film, since there simply is too much CGI throughout, leading to the film looking more like a cartoon than a live-action film, but I simply don't think that Lucas has the best technicians in this regard anymore. Peter Jackson seems to have those - a make believe world you can believe in!

Anyway afterwards, I recalled that I got the book years ago, and had never actually read it. So I picked it up, and by the next day I'd finished it off.

The first thing to say is that the film is actually quite a good adaptation of the book, bearing in mind that nothing that happens on the boat is known about. The book makes clear it's all supposition, but the film has to tell a tale. They use events and other things that are mentioned in the back as the kind of things that can happen on a fishing trip. I guess that the trip detailed in the film really is the worst ever since many eventful things happen before they even hit the storm. There are contractions of plot and characters, but it's all told fairly well.

The book reads well, and it's no surprise to discover that like the story of the Everest disaster in 1996, Into Thin Air, it started out as a magazine article for Outside. The book just has a certain style to the way it's written. Still, it's quite eye opening, and a story well told.

Join Me is one of those internet things (well not strictly internet) that passed me by. What a terrible thing. I like to think that I'm ahead of the game with this stuff, but nope - I had no idea about any of it, until I read something about the book somewhere.

I tried not to read too much about it until I read the book, and I really didn't know where it was going.

But I must say that it was a most enjoyable read. So enjoyable, that I sat for an hour outside the British Museum in the sun this evening, reading it. Why was I outside the British Museum? Well it's a fantastic museum, and should you choose to walk from Soho to King's Cross rather than take a tube, then it's en route.

I got this book for two reasons.

1) it was advertised quite heavily in the national press, and anyone who says that it doesn't work is deceiving only themselves, and

2) I read an interesting piece about it in The Guardian Review a few weeks back, which recommended it.

The book was first published in Hungarian in 1942, and then was reissued a few years ago in both Italy and Germany, where it sold by the bucket load.

I quite enjoyed it, but wouldn't say that it was anything special. It's quite a short novel, and basically is set over the course of one evening, as two old men meet for the first time in 40 odd years.

Most of the second part of the book is the ensuing conversation, meaning that it's highly readable, if slightly rambling. But I got fed up with the one-sided nature of the conversation.

Not bad, and a quick read.

Enduring Love is the third Ian McEwan novel I've read. The first was the very poor Booker winning Amsterdam, which was more of a short story than a novel, and hence exceptionally poor value at 6.99 for 178 pages (of largish type as I recall). None of the characters were particularly likeable, and the whole thing rang very hollow.

Next up on the list was Atonement, which I read last year, and once again I fear the entry here has been lost. This was an execeptionally good novel, and it was reading that which made me pick up Enduring Love, as many had recommended it.

It really is an interesting idea. A freak ballooning accident gathers together a disparate group of people as they try to save a child. Tragically one of the strangers dies and an another forms a seeming attachment to our story's narrator Joe. As the story unfolds, it becomes unclear who's head is messed up. Maybe the conclusion is a little unsatisfactory, but overall a thoroughly entertaining novel.

I've only ever read one previous Scott Turow novel - Presumed Innocent which of course was made into a Harrison Ford film.

I don't know how many books he's written since but when this came out in hardback, it seemed to receive good reviews, so I thought I'd give it whirl.

I was a little disappointed overall though, as while it was a perfectly good book, it was nothing special. I've never read a John Grisham novel, and I'm quite prepared to believe that it's better than an average one of his, but it really isn't that special.

It's an easy read, although heavy on US legalese as one would probably expect.

This is another of those books that was sold to me on the cover alone. Actually, it was the title alone that did it.

I saw this book all over the place before finally picking it up in a buy 2 get a third free promotion.

Anyhow it's a very entertaining book set in Botswana - effectively a series on short stories as Mma Ramotswe sets up her detective agency. The next book is out shortly.

This was the Booker winner earlier this year, and I wasn't totally sure about it. It had received good reviews, but since it's the story of an Indian boy (not Greek as maybe the title suggests) travelling across the ocean in the company of various animals including a Bengal tiger, I took the book to be some kind of allegory - perhaps a fable.

Well I can report back that this isn't the case. I found the start of the book a little slow and all over the place, but the heart of the book was excellent.

My book reading is playing its usual game of jumping around a little, but having quite enjoyed slugging back the last Inspector Banks book I read, I picked up another at the weekend. In Aftermath, the crime - a very grisly one - has already been committed and the killer is fighting for his life within the first pages, so where does that leave Banks?

Well things aren't quite that simple, and the story moves at a pace, picking up threads of plenty of contemporary and less contermporary crime stories of the time (well 2001 when this was written) - with a fictionalised Tony Martin who shot a burglar to his house as a bit of a backstory, and references to the Cleveland abuse scandals of the early nineties.

Anyway, a quick page turner, and now I'm in a dilemma. The next volume is out in paperback in September according to Amazon. But in the meantime, I could start at the beginning of the sequence. Not that I don't have a lot to read already...

I suppose here's an example of advertising getting a sale. I think that I only really picked up this because I'd seen it advertised quite a lot in the Guardian Review.

It's an interesting crime novel set amongst the world of antiques in Glasgow - with barely a policeman in sight. It has a promiscuous gay protagonist, and it' set in the seedier side of street.

I rattled through this, and was quite entertained by it. Recommended.

The second Inspector Banks novel I've was probably slightly better than the first and I rattled through it at a rate of knots.

I'm reasonably taken with this detective, although sometimes you do feel that there aren't enough dead ends. Everything in this book lead in the same direction - but I suppose the same could be said of all crime fiction and TV series. There's rarely a totally innocent character involved. I'll be reading some more, once funds allow, and my "to read" list dwindles a little.

Any Human Heart reminds me a lot of a previous William Boyd book, The New Confessions, in that it's a life story.

A couple of years ago, William Boyd published a book that I've yet to read called Nat Tate - an American Artist which is fake biography. I believe that when it was originally published, it wasn't made clear that it was a fiction.

This book takes that a little further and we follow the life of Logan Mountstuart, an interesting character, hitherto unmentioned in history. Yet he rubs shoulders with many of the great and the good of the 20th century, and is always somewhere interesting.

The book takes quite a wide view of the years it examines, and I must admit that I absolutely loved it. I suppose if I had one criticism, I was personally disappointed that Land disappeared so early in procedings. I suppose the reality is that we do lose contact with some of our closest friends far too easily.

It's all very well living in the age of the internet and friendsreunited (if you were such great friends, how did you lose touch quite so quickly), but we meet many people on our travels.

The book takes the form of diary entries from Logan's journal, and that certainly means that we can only concentrate on those who surround Logan at any given moment.

I must admit that the novel is the first for some time to actually make me sit back and consider my life so far. Profound? Maybe. Deep? Possibly. Worth reading? Certainly.

I must admit that it's taken me a bit longer than usual to work through this particualr Murakami book. Without checking, I'm not quite sure where in the oeuvre this fits, but it truly is a wild "sheep" chase. It involves a typical Murakami protaganist, a small-time publisher, who's dragged into a neverworld built around a mythical sheep. I know it sounds unlikely, but it works. I noted that there was a second appearance of a Dolphin Hotel as well.

Reading the reviews at Amazon, it seems that this is one of his earlier works.

And while I'm talking about Murakami, you simply can't move for his books at the moment - he's being promoted like he's a Messaih or something. Even my local Virgin Megastore, which carries barely any books, has a selection near the cash desk. I am surprised, since I don't see them as being that populist a series. Leave those people to their new Harry Potter books (I happened to be in Kings Cross station around midnight on Friday as the new book went on sale. There were several hundred people queuing outside the WH Smiths there, with celebrities Dermot Murnaghen and Linda Robson is attendance. I'm not sure I'd ever turn out for an event like that unless I was specifically after a book being signed).

It's a long time since I read 1984. I'm fairly certain that it would have been prior to the year 1984. It's one of those books that many of us study at school (although it being a twentieth century novel, it played no part in my 'O' Level). It has also just been named as one the top 100 favourite novels in the country, in the BBC's Big Read.

Of course, despite the lingua franca of the time the book's set in being Newspeak, it has leant us two main additions to the English language, or perhaps has ripped away from their true meaning two phrases.

To many people Room 101 now refers to a Nick Hancock/Paul Merton hosted series, but Big Brother is what has truly entered the common language. For years it has been the expression of choice to describe governments' attempts to ever more closely monitor citizens' behaviour. But now, sadly, it's mind-numbingly dull "reality" gameshow that bears its name. I daresay that the average man in the street considers this to be the meaning of the word, and fails to realise the despotic overtones that it should bring to bear.

But let's return to the novel. Tony Benn spoke the other week of reading it, and I guess that made me pick up a copy. I suppose it's the overnight switching of enemies between Eurasia and Eastasia without a moment's thought; now one is our enemy while the other is our friend. Iraq anyone?

I undoubtedly took more out of the novel this time around, although I do recall that I was just as bored with the long extracts from Goldstein's alleged book this time around as last time.

Certainly it belongs in the pantheon of favourtie British novels (even if one believes that it's really there because so many of us had to read it at school - the same could be said of many on the Big Read list).

I picked up this purely at random one lunchtime when I was feeling the need to read. Well it was only a pound in HMV since it's the Penguin Popular Classics edition.

This is a book that for years I feel I should have read. We always used to keep a copy in Sheringham and despite the action taking place in the main along the northern coast of Germany, the sands rang true in North Norfolk.

It's a turn of the century (the last century) spy thriller, albeit at quite a sedate pace. But the way the book's put together easily sends out signals of the true fears people must have suffered at the time. I think it's safe to say that the onset of the First World War would not have surprised Erskin Childers.

I got hold of this book after hearing it's author Greg Palast speaking on the Simon Mayo programme on Radio Five Live.

I suppose he's a slightly more literary Michael Moore. The book is written in the same freewheeling style, but there's just a little bit more depth.

Sometimes he's a little off the mark in my view, but most of the time he's hitting pretty accurately. And he does at least have a slightly more accurate view of how Britain works, including it's underside.

I got this at work, and was really only reading it, as I had no other books to hand and wanted something to read. I fairly raced through it, but must admit that I skipped entire extracts.

I suppose that I've never really got The Goons, so complete scripts of various episodes make fairly hard reading.

What were excellent were the war memoirs and nonsense verse.

This book is extremely popular in medialand, a bit like E. And also like E, it had been sitting on my bookshelf for quite some time.

I only really picked it up because it was the morning after our party at work, and my bag was still at work. As it turns out, it was perfect hangover reading. Easy going and very easy to identify with. To be honest, not quite enough happens in this novel - we get plenty of background painting a very real picture of life. But then the plot doesn't develop enormously.

Will I read more John O'Farrell? Quite possibly.

I read this whilst studiously avoiding The Guardian's review last Saturday, when I saw "Reviewers of thrillers usually remain tactfully reticent about plot details" in the first line.

To be fair, when I came back to the review after reading the book, it wasn't as bad as I thought in terms of giving away the plot. But I don't like reviews that spoil any plot. I guess that if I know that I'm going to read a book come what may, I'm not likely to read the review at all. Reviews are really to point me towards books I'd otherwise have ignored.

So what of The White Lioness itself? Well despite being published completely out of order (it's the third), it sits well withing the Wallander universe. His father's still alive, and he's missing Baiba.

The big difference with this book is that a considerable amount is set in South Africa and involves real people. I don't suppose that the plot is that far-fetched, but somehow when you read a novel that tells you what real people are thinking in a fictional set-up, it seems wrong.

Roll on the next one in September!

This was a wonderful book, that I've been looking forward to since it came out in hardback last year. I was a bit uncertain when I realised that the author, Brenda Maddox, publishes a new book every couple of years (her biog of Maggie Thatcher has just been published), but I needn't have worried.

Next week Life Story is repeated on BBC4 after a new documentary following this book. I'd also be curious to read the much maligned James Watson book The Double Helix, in which he talks so dismissively of "Rosy".

I don't think that before reading Michael Frayn's previous novel, Headlong, I'd read any of his work.

I've certainly seen some of his plays - most notably Copenhagen about the meeting of Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen during the Second World War. I taped it not too long ago, when it was shown on BBC4.

I've also seen a production of Uncle Vanya which he's translated.

So it didn't take too big a decision, to pick up his latest Whitbread Award winning latest.

I try never to read too much about what a book is going to be about before I start, and I only really knew that this took place amongst children in wartime Britain. Well I suppose that's all you need to know.

To begin with, I thought that it was going to recover the ground covered by Atonement, where a child's lie has massive repercussions. But this isn't a story on the scale of that, even though it revolves around a similar incident.

I raced through this and am looking forward to trying some Frayn's reissued older work. In particular, Towards the End of the Morning which is supposed to be a Fleet Street classic (can get it in a 2 for �10 offer at Blackstones, maybe with Lucky Jim).

In the meantime, I'm torn over my next book. The Dark Lady of DNA has just been published (and I got it yesterday lunchtime in another 2 for �10 offer - this time at Waterstones, with The Secret State itself an interesting read). And when I got home, I found that my trade paperback copy of The White Lioness by Henning Mankell had arrived.

All in all I have a lot of reading to do!

Another Murakami book, and very entertaining like the others I've read. (I have a couple more awaiting my delectation, and it's interesting to note that Vintage are reissuing the whole series currently in a new style of jackets following parent company Random House's takeover of Harvill last year).

After The Quake is a series of short stories, all of which take place in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake in 1995. None of the stories is interlinked, and I liked some more than others. Murakami tends to stick to themes he knows well - disillusioned young at college or at work, broken marriages, and the imagination.

It's interesting to read how long his works take to be translated in the west. His last paperback in the UK was Sputnik Sweetheart which was published in mass market paperback in the UK in October 2002 following a trade paperback publication in May 2001. The Japanese original publication was April 1999. Probably quite quick considering the usual pace of translations appearing in English (I still remember seeing that the latest Donna Tart novel appeared in Dutch in the week of its English appearance). After the Quake doesn't follow this pattern because the stories were originally published in various publications over a period of time.

He has a new book out...

[Update #1]
Well I popped into Enfield earlier, bad back notwithstanding, and Ottakers were the only shop to have it. Sadly the RRP is 14.99 and that's a bit steep for me just now. WH Smiths and El Cheapo bookshop both have the recently published popular paperback version of One Step Behind, but neither had a discounted copy of The White Lioness (seemingly the only current hardback not discounted by Ottakers).

Henning Mankell is evidently becoming ever more popular, and Harvill seem to be trying to squeeze more cash from the series. Last time around, One Step Behind was published as a trade paperback, but that was only back in September. Now April swings around and we get a hardback. And then there are only a few more months until the September release of the next title, The Return of the Dancing Master.

I shall check around the chainstores in London over the next week to see if there's a better deal to be had (of course I realise that the Amazon link above features a fairly decent discount, but P&P mitigates against it).

[Update #2]
Hooray. BOL had it for 6.99 including postage, and I'm a member!

I've been wanting to read this since it came out last year, so the release of it in paperback meant I could get around to it. Now while I do idly follow Serie A (well done to Eurosport for showing it once more), I must admit that I didn't know what would be the outcome as the season progresses and Verona fight a relegation battle.

Parks follows Verona at every fixture throughout the season, home and away. In some ways you could draw a parrallel with Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, but there's so much more background about life in Italy.

Roll on the next Michael Dibdin novel!

Andrew Collins, sometime Eastenders script writer, Back Row presenter, regular contributor to Top Ten xxx and I Love the 19xx, and now Radio Six DJ has written this entertaining memoir of life growing up.

Based largely on a diary he kept throughout his childhood, this brings homes the minutiae of toys, comics, TV programmes, music and life in general as a child at that time. I'm about five years youger than him, so it isn't quite the right age for me, but it's close (and it also demonstrates how just a few years can have quite a significant difference in terms of toys, games and the like, with technology coming on with leaps and bounds).

This book is subtitled, Fifty years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3.

I picked it up cheaply in one of those Soho remaindered bookshops a few weeks ago on the recommendation (well mention really) of a friend. I've got to say that it's a fascinating read about one the cultural aspects of which Britain can be really proud. Radio 3 has always been pretty elitist, and regularly there have been moves to dumb it down (in today's parlance).

I suppose as an employee of Virgin Radio, it's interesting to learn it's history since we now occupy the medium wave frequencies that used to belong to Radio 3. I particularly liked the story about the early stereo broadcasts that took place between Radio 3 and BBC Television (as it was then, since there was only one channel). Radio 3 broadcast one channel, and BBC TV the other to give a stereo image to the listener who'd arranged their radio and TV alongside one another.

There have been some wonderful people down the years working for the station, and some talents that have been brought to bear, grew up with the Third Programme. Simply speaking, it'd never happen in a commercial environment. And for that we can be proud about the BBC.

The latest in my reading of the full Graham Greene oeuvre. This novel is about the life of Castle, a middle ranking official working in intelligence within the Foreign Office.

There's a leak within the department, and the devious Dr Percieval is on the case. There's no major scandal going on - it's all very slight, but Castle used to live in South Africa where he married a black woman.

Overall quite enjoyable in circus era Le Carr� manner. Speaking of which, when is the next Le Carr� likely to be published?

The latest book I've been reading by Murakami, it's a little different to the previous two that I've read. The same themes of loneliness and isolation are there, but this is a slightly more straightforward love story. And although some the behaviour of characters is maybe strange, there's no supernatural element to it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which was something of a publishing phenomenon in Japan by all accounts. Already scouting out the next one - although my unread bookshelf remains groaning...

Well I did say after I read Dance Dance Dance, that I was going to read more Haruki Murakami, and this is the next one I picked up. The most recently published paperback volume, it tells the story of a couple who never become lovers but never don't.

I suppose the book enters areas a little like Dance Dance Dance did before it, with some apparantly impossible things happening later in the book. In particular, one of the characters' hair turning white overnight is straight out of Twin Peaks. Leland was it?

Didn't take more than two days to read on the tube, and not everyone thinks it his best. But at least there are plenty of other books to go through. I've now started Norwegian Wood so we'll see what that's like.

The book chain Ottakers occassionally runs special 99p promotions on novels to introduce you to a new series. So I picked up In A Dry Season by Peter Robinson as a result of one of these promotions.

It's one of a long series of Inspector Banks novels, and very good it was too. I must admit I like to read the odd crime novel, and this hits the spot perfectly. I think I'll be seeing more of Inspector Banks sometime soon.

Some years back, back when foreign language films were shown on terrestrial television, there were a couple of series I used to watch religiously. One was Moving Pictures presented by Howard Schuman, and the other was Moviedrome, presented originally by Alex Cox.

Now I can't remember which of these two fine shows it was I was watching, but one of the films they were talking about was The Leopard. Thinking again now, I believe it may well have been Moving Pictures, as I seem to recall Howard Schuman imploring us to watch the screening of The Leopard later that evening as a rare treat. I duly set the video, as it was on late at night. And of course, I never quite got around to watching the film - well it's over three hours long.

Schuman also explained it was based on a book that I hadn't previously heard of. The title was intriguing nonetheless, and over the years I saw it a few times when browsing Waterstones. At some point last year, I decided it was a travesty that I didn't read nearly enough foreign fiction in translation. I think this came about around the same time I discovered Henning Mankell, and realised that there was an entire imprint, Harvill, that specialised in translated material.

At Christmas, I finally got around to picking up a copy of The Leopard, and I finished it on the tube this morning. It's actually quite a short book, though densely written book, so it's not light reading. But it's covers a fascinating period of Italian history of which I knew nothing of course. That seems too familiar a phrase to me at the moment. I obviously don't study nearly enough history. Well worth reading.

So I shall now dust off my video - which does indeed seem to be rare since this film is unavailable on video or DVD (apart from in Italy) - and watch what is also supposed to be a masterpiece.

I picked this up in the Waterstones sale quite cheaply. I quite like John Pilger, but was annoyed with myself when I missed his last TV documentary - a documentary that Michael Green, Chairman of the TV company that made and aired the programme, attacked!

The book is in four sections, covering many of the issues today, with good sections on the "War on Terror" and a fascinating chapter on the hidden disgrace that is Australia's contiuing treatment of its Aboriginal people.

It's remarkable how current everything in the book still is, considering that it was published in April this year.

In particular in continually lambasts the media's lack of objectivity, and the ease with which stories are presented in a simplistic and one-sided light.

Recommended.

I must admit that the only reason I bought this book was because I saw it for just �2.99 last Thursday when I was shopping in Tesco (incidentally, this seems to have been an instore only deal). Well the subject matter interested me - an Englishman making a Bollywood epic, and it was serialised on Radio 4 earlier this year.

So for a small investment I bought a copy, and I haven't regretted it at. It's written in a very easy style, and details in a cricket tour diary style, the film-making process of Lagaan, a massive Indian movie about a village cricket side who are novices at the game taking on the might of the British army team in the 19th century.

I guess that it's clear that Chris England has read plenty of Bill Bryson books and the like, but it means you can race through the book, while learning plenty about the culture.

I also really want to see the film - all three and three quarter hours of it!

Well I did promise myself that I'd read more, or indeed all, of Graham Greene's oeuvre this year. Stamboul Train is one his earlier works - 1932 off the top of my head - and takes an interesting third person stance, following the fortunes of a number of passengers aboard the Orient Express. Not quite as good as some of his later stuff, but enjoyable all the same. I note that Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was published two years later.

The latest in the Kurt Wallender series by Henning Mankell was recently published in English in the UK, and I love these books. The trouble is that I came to them late, and was able to lap them up until now. They were published out of sequence, but we're back on track, but sadly some years behind the original publication dates. There is an American edition of Firewall available, but do I wait for the Harvill version?

More of the same with a particularly nasty killer choosing seemingly random targets, and a policeman's death to kick start the investigation. The atmosphere is wonderful, and I'm addicted.

I promised recently that I was going to read more Graham Greene, so this was the obvious next title. Obvious, because I managed to not get around to reading it before visiting Cuba last year.

Reading it, I found it very familiar but from long enough ago, that I'd forgotten the ending. Later, on returning from France where I read it, I found that the familiarity was not from the film, but because I read it a while ago, and managed to find a second copy - not the first time this has happened.

I love the way Greene takes a the desperately dull Wormold, and develops him. The latter part of the book is especially funny, and the spy background seems scarily accurate. Now what Greene should I read next?

I bought this on a total whim a while ago, and my recent few days in a wet and soggy Cote D'Azur afforded me a chance to read it. Haruki Murakami seems to be quite a popular author in Japan, and on this reading, I'm going to have to investigate some of his other work that's been translated - there are a few books available.

I don't know where to begin with this, except to say, that it's the literary brother a David Lynch film - Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. or Twin Peaks. Set in a well described early eighties, it takes a cynical look at the world around us, and in particular the expense account.

Well worth checking out.

I finished the Graham Greene novel the other day, and immediately promised myself that I'd read much more Greene in 2003.

Obviously it's an excellent work, and I was pleased to see just how closely the recent film adhered to the novel. Certainly there were contractions and fewer characters but overall it was a very accurate portrayal.

Now about those Norman Sherry biographies...

Kim Philby died some years ago, but fortunately, his autobiography has just been republished in the States. (A quick note that I ordered this book from Amazon.com in the States some months ago before it had been published. Once it had been published, it shows up on Amazon.co.uk at a significantly cheaper price - particularly when postage is taken into account).

I decided to get it after watching the TV Play Philby, Burgess and Maclean on BBC Four a few months ago which was made in 1977.

Philby's own story is quite interesting but sadly lacking in some of the necessary details. You'd want to hear more about the how's, but of course he speaks nothing of that, nor details about how he passed on information to his handlers.

I suppose the most fascinating part is when he's been effectively chucked out of the service, and yet he's not arrested for treason. Then he works as a journalist in the Middle East for a number of years before finally, out of necessity, being spirited away. I really feel that I need to read a third party book about his effect on the service to gain some idea of the problems, and indeed, deaths he'll have been responsible for.

John Sergeant's autobiography is a thoroughly entertaining read, taking us on a whistlestop tour of his journalistic career, and his early start in comedy.

Sergeant's career has taken him over the place, and he tells his story with humour and honesty. You can get some idea of the internal struggles he has as he tries to make his way in a political world, and you certainly get the picture that he was always on the career ladder. Must get around to reading John Cole's book, as well as Michael Brunson's.

Well I could not have timed reading this book any better than I have. Written by William Rivers Pitt and based on an interview with former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, this short booklet is about as well timed as it could possibly be. The interview that forms the heart of the book was given in the latter part of August this year.

Essentially, the book refutes many of the allegations that are being made by the Bush camp, as they try to win over American and world support for a war with Iraq. The raw facts seem to be these:

1) Saddam Hussein does not have nuclear weapons. If he did, we'd know about it. If he tried to buy the parts to build them, we'd know about. If he tried to develop them himself. we'd know about it. You can't just build up lots of radioactive material without sensors detecting it.

2) The same really applies to chemical and biological weapons. We would know about it. Also, any chemical or biological weapons that were stockpiled, and kept hidden from investigators until they left in 1998, would be goo by now, since they decompose after 4/5 years.

So when Bush talks about Saddam Hussein's "Arsenal of terrror" he's really scaremongering. There may be new buildings going up, but that's hardly surprising. Just because an engineering plant is "capable" of building parts, it doesn't mean that they. And as soon as they actually start trying to manufacture nuclear elements, we'll know about it.

The next problem is what we do if somehow Saddam Hussein is deposed. The majority population is actually Shi'a Muslims aligned to Iraq. And Iraq's pretty anti-American, and much more extremist. Then there are the Kurds who form 23% of the population but who are really seeking an independent Kurdistan, not government of Iraq. Then there are minority Sunni Muslims who are the ruling class. They are lead by one family, of which Saddam Hussein is a memeber. If he were to be overthrown, the likely leadership would come from the same group of people. This would not be a democracy either.

Finally, why is Osama Bin Laden linked with Saddam Hussein. The two hate one another, since Bin Laden is an Islamic fundamentalist, and Hussein has spent 30 years declaring war on Islamic fundamentalism. The two have nothing in common. So where's the link?

I cannot reccommend this booklet highly enough.

At least Americans, while supporting military action in the Middle East, want time for weapons inspectors to give it a go. This is imperative. If there has been a re-established weaponry programme, it can be stopped. "Taking out" Saddam is not the right option.

I read Stella Rimmington's book a couple of weeks ago, and must say that I'm a little disappointed by it. I don't think it's the best written book that I've ever read, and somehow it doesn't really deliver. I know we were never going to get lots of operational detail, but something a little more would have been nice.

The one thing I did learn was that MI5 used to have buildings all over the West End. This lead to me and some of the guys at work scanning rooftops and trying to establish what a nearby building which seems empty might be. Having pretty much convinced ourselves that it was an operational building for the security services, it turns out that Trenchard House was a police section house until it was closed down a year or so ago. (This would explain the "This Section House is Now Closed" notice on the door). And it would also explain the large antenna on the roof, that our station engineer said was definitely not a mobile mast.

I'm a bit of an Iain Banks fan, although strangely, I've never read any of his SF stuff. I say "strangely" because I don't mind a few science fictions books here and there. Oh well - there'll be plenty for me to read at some point.

Anyway, back to the present and Dead Air. I must admit that I don't know how well or not this was reviewed since I never read reviews of books I'm absolutely certain to read myself. Perverse? Maybe. The way I see it is that nothing you can say to me is going to put me off, and I prefer not to have the plot spoilt in advance. I do read lots of book reviews, and The Guardian on Saturdays is now unmissable.

Hang on. Following that logic, you won't read any of this if you're going to read Dead Air! OK, it's flawed thinking. Quite enjoyed Dead Air I must admit. Working in radio, it's a little interesting to read about a character who works in the industry. Capital Live is supposed to be a sort-of Capital FM except it's in Soho Square not Leicester Square (or Golden Square). And no major station in London has "shock jock" on during the daytime (or the evening really - it's all "Confessions" these days).

That aside, it's an entertaining read about someone getting into more and more trouble, without ever being really in terror. And the rants are great fun. From the heart I would say.

Well I've finished the first book on my list of yesterday. I did start it last week however - I wouldn't have ordinarily been able to get through 440 pages within 24 hours without devoting a lot of time to it.

As it was, in typical fashion, I was left with ten pages to go when I got off the tube this morning. Being already a couple of minutes late for work, I couldn't stroll along Carnaby Street (warning - crashed my browser) in a leisurely manner finishing it, so that pleasure had to wait until lunchtime.

White Teeth has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite some time, since in many ways it seemed a daunting read. Sometimes you're all set up to attack something that doesn't feel to easy - Moby Dick, War & Peace, etc. But other times you just want something that's around 250 pages long, is not too intellectual, and goes down nice and easily. I bought it on a whim in Tesco a year or so ago, mainly because it was priced at the unlikely �3.84 price point. I note that the ".84" pricing policy is still adhered to in Tesco. I have no idea why. Anyway, I finally pulled it off my shelf last week since the Channel 4 series starts on the 17th, and I hate to have seen a TV series but not read the book.

I must admit, slightly to my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I say "surprise" because although it was roundly praised in reviews, and is no doubt multi-award winning, I hadn't exactly had glowing reviews from people I know who'd read it. A couple of people told me the middle section was tricky going, one person admitted to fast forwarding towards the end of it, and another didn't even finish it all, disenchanted by the "dialect" used. Can't say that I found any of these problems, and the end came totally out of the blue for me.

Zadie Smith's new book The Autograph Man has just been (or is just about to be) published in hard back. I have plenty of literature to keep me occupied at the moment, so the paperback next summer is more my thing.

Autumn arrives, and a flurry of books to read. So here's what are upcoming on my "to read" list.

1. White Teeth - making sure I read it before the Channel 4 series starts next week (it's been on my bookshelf for about a year).

2. Dead Air - Always got to read the latest Iain Banks. This one is post September 11.

3. Churchill - Bit of a monster 1000 page tome this. Finally got around to watching my tape of The Gathering Storm at the weekend (told you I was lain up), and this got my interest up.

4. Give Me Ten Seconds - John Sergeant is very amusing, so I have high hopes for this political memoir.

5. Open Secret - Not staggeringly well reviewed, but you can't beat some real life spying.

6. One Step Behind - The latest Henning Mankell Inspector Wallander book. Or more to the point, the latest translation. There's another book coming out in hardbook in November - Firewall. A new publisher for this latter book - maybe something to do with the reorganisation of Harvill following its sale to Random House. I note the paperback of Dogs of Riga is coming out as a Vintage imprint.

That little list should keep me going a while. I have no doubt that other books will creep into the list in ahead of their place in this order.

Finished reading this a couple of weeks ago and fascinating it was too. I'm a sucker for any stories about codes or ciphers so this is right up my street. I must admit that I know/knew absolutely nothing about the Napoleonic Wars either.

Since reading this I went out and bought a book on the Napoleonic Wars to remedy this shortcoming. I guess it's all a question of what you cover at school for history. My O-Level was 20th century British history, from WWI to the beginning of WWII. Before then, lots of Roman and Viking stuff. That leaves 1500 years or so out. Worth catching up. Will have to read Simon Schama's books some time.

Wow. This book is pretty good. Translated from the French and reset in London (not totally convincingly since the protagonist is called Octave). Maybe it's because I'm a total cynic, particularly where advertising is concerned - despite working in the industry - but I empaphised with the feelings expressed here a lot.

The book is about a very senior agency creative who's trying to get himself sacked. This plan is not quite working. At the same time he's left his pregnant girlfriend, and taken up with a prostitute.

Anyway needless to say that �9.99 costs �9.99.

A concise book detailing the Clinton presidency by the author of Primary Colors. I must admit to having only really having read his novels, but he does seem to have a good understanding of Bill and Hilliary - at least in so far as anyone can have an understanding. Must get around to reading Stephanopoulos's book which has been sitting on my bookshelf for the last 12 months.

It's a shame that Klein's recent series of articles for The Guardian don't seem to be available online.

James (Today Programme) Naughtie's The Rivals isn't as easy a read as Andrew Rawnsley's Servants of the People, but was well worth the read.

It consider's Blair and Brown's relationship since Labour came to power in 1997, and despite being a little on the heavy side, definitely gets under the skin of the problem - that Brown feels he should become PM at some point, and believes that Blair promised this to him before Labour came to power. Recommended.

My very first weblog entry. Somehow I feel that this is a fancy way to allow me to ramble at random. Must get the hang of this interface, and I'll soon have a professional weblog up and running.

Just read a great book called The 25th Hour which I can heartily recommend. Read it in well under 24 hours.

Umm. That's it really, until I can get everything properly set up.