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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.