Category: Books

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…