Freewheeling Andy

I wouldn't normally. But, as with all genres, there is some brilliant stuff out there. The one that's really stuck with me is Lonesome Dove which is a stunning novel. Cowboys on a massive cattle drive north to Montana from Texas, and a properly epic sort of length (and, actually, one of those books where I've been sad that it ended).

I would say Heart of Darkness. I'm still undecided years after reading it, whether I really enjoyed it, or really didn't. But given the kinds of stuff you like, I'd think you'd find it interesting and worthwhile precisely because it's that kind of book. A propos playing with conventions - if you've not read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or A Debt To Pleasure by John Lanchester, they may well be up your street.

I really can't borrow books because I treat them so horribly. Not all of them, of course. Some survive fairly unscathed. But I'm almost completely apathetic about the condition of books, so I really can't just borrow them and return them torn and tatty, covered in coffee rings and chain oil and tatty round the edges from being rained on...

I buy, most often new. I try not to borrow because I already have too many books to read. I have begun giving away my old books to charity, now.

It's interesting thinking of the comparison with other travel booksin Russia. The most direct comparison is possibly Colin Thubron's In Siberia . Thubron, too, was travelling around the Siberian wastes in the 1990s. The difference, though, couldn't be more stark. Thubron seems to be completely unaware of the magnitude of the history surrounding him, seems totally uninterested in describing the experiences of his travel, and spends ages with turgid, unending descriptions of the landscape washed through with trite and annoying metaphors dribbling on about things like the spider web of silver threads of the estuary rippled like a million gossamer threads trapping the landscape in its grip, a low watery sun shimmering and reflecting like a .... Although basically the same subject matter, they're so far apart stylistically and in terms of the core content it's hard to believe. Two travel books around Siberia - one feels like an opportunity for an author to show off his use of language; the other feels like a full blown overview of a critical point in history. A third comparison might be Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean (which I've raved about elsewhere, long ago, on this board), which is the far other end of the spectrum. It's just the boys' own style adventures of a lunatic Brit thoroughly happy to ignore the NKVD and go to places he wasn't allowed to be in the 1930s in Russia. A wonderfully fun book, but really, it too offers very little insight into Russia despite being the other end of the spectrum - all about the author's adventures rather than all about the landscape.

I'd normally nag people to read the books I love, but although this is fairly easy to read I won't actually nag here. If you find it in a bookshop it's probably worth reading a couple of pages to make sure it really is your thing. It's hard for me to detach properly the fact that I'm pretty interested in the subject matter, so I'm not sure I can objectively say that the book will be interesting for everyone. I think it would be, but I'm not sure I'm completely reliable.

Kapuscinski was a fascinating man, born in what is now Belarus in the 1930s, he lived through the war and grew up in Communist Poland. He became Poland's only foreign correspondent, and with that job had access to places in the third world that welcomed Warsaw Pact journalists in a way they didn't welcome journalists from the west. Combine this with his obsession with being where the action was, and apparent lack of fear, and he saw something like 27 revolutions, coups and civil wars through the 60s and 70s. This book was written later, but draws on his background and experience, and his ability to get into places others wouldn't even try to is part of the key to it. It is his travels in the former "Imperium", the Soviet Empire. It starts off with his first experience of the Soviets, as they invaded in 1939 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the Stalinist horrors that surrounded him. The second and third parts are also brief chapters on his early experiences; on the Trans-Siberian in 1957, where nobody dares to talk to a foreigner; and as he gets into the Caucasus in 1967. The main body of the book, though, is his travels around the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1992, as it opened up and also as it collapsed. The chapters all seem like individual vignettes. He talks to real people - something that most books on the Cold War completely ignore. He finds the tales of individuals, in Moscow or Armenia. He reveals the real horrors of the mining camps at Vorkuta in the north, and the horrendous Gulag Archipelago around Magadan in the far east of Siberia. This is all covered with an incredibly light touch, there's humour everywhere, something that's vitally needed when dealing with such horrific subject matter. He can also write about anything - his trip to Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that was at the heart of a war, involved him not leaving the apartment he finally got to. But because he's such an astonishing writer, it's one of the most thrilling things in the book. The collection of individual tales, the collection of essays each from a different location around the former Soviet Union, when combined with the early reminiscences, gives as good a picture as I've read of the general condition of that empire, how the Stalin years remained the core ones that were still dictating life 40 years after his death, and how the lack of freedom and the brutality turned Russia, in particular, into the country it is today. The final section is his overview and predictions of how Russia would pan out after the reforms played through. It is astonishing to read it now, 15 years after it was written, for the perceptiveness and insight - he could hardly have been more right, predicting Putin long before anyone knew Putin's name. This is a fantastic book, and I could hardly recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in the Cold War and Russia, particularly if they want to read something of the personal, rather than merely to think of athropomorphised nations "Russia is a country that demands a strong leader, and felt shamed when..." etc. It is hard to know how to classify it - it's part travelog, part history, part autobiography, part political analysis, part reportage. But the whole feels is more than the sum of the parts.

I got distracted from The Human Stain for holiday related reasons, and have read Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium in the mean time. It's an astonishingly good book. The insight of one of the great foreign correspondents of the 20th century on the Soviet Union, and in particular his travels in the country during the course of its disintegration from '89 to '92. One of the best books of reportage that I've ever read. He's a man who's been there and seen it, all over the world, and he brings home quite what the horrors of the Soviet Union were, and how they hit individuals, and how the country was falling apart finally unable to control its constituent parts. Genuinely brilliant.

I'm trying to remember the links between Ghostwritten and Black Swan Green. It's just that some characters crop up a couple of times. I think that link is Neal Brose, who's a schoolboy in BSG, and who's working in Hong Kong in GW. Timothy Cavendish is in, I think, GW and Cloud Atlas; Madame de Crommelynk in CA and BSG. There's no direct narrative link. It's just a bit of a game to spot minor characters cropping up between the books.

By all accounts it's a very good book. It's the basis of Schindler's List, but hasn't been Spielbergised. I'd recommend giving it a try and if it's insufferable garbage you can return it fairly with that response.

I'm still reading it. It's great, but quite hefty. I really enjoyed The Plot Against America when I read it last year.

1. Who is your all-time favourite author, and why? Hmm. Can I answer this? There's probably three or four, but it really depends on my mood. 2. Who was your first favourite author, and why? Do you still consider him or her among your favourites? My first favourite was AA Milne, of course. My first favourite as a "relatively grown up reader" was JG Ballard, really the first "serious" author I chewed up tons and tons of books by. I'd gone through phases of loving the Biggles stuff, and then a bit later all the Sherlock Holmes books. But my aunt gave me Ballard's Hello America and it just clicked. A dystopian post-apocalyptic USA, and Ballard's fantastically poetic writing took me in. I think I was too young and naive to properly understand all that was going on with his fragmented and fractured outlooks on how the psychology of individuals is the key to behaviour and how the modern world pushes it way beyond its limits, and how he was playing with the evocation of combinations of the mundane and everyday combined with ever more extreme situations. All that went straight over my head, but I loved it, and I think I knew there was something deeper going on even if I didn't understand it. 3. Who’s the most recent addition to your list of favourite authors, and why? Probably, I guess, Philip Roth 4. If someone asked you who your favourite authors were right now, which authors would first pop out of your mouth? Are there any you’d add on a moment of further reflection? I guess I'd start the list: JG Ballard (still), Ismael Kadare, Haruki Murukami, David Mitchell After that, I'd probably delve deeper and come up with Primo Levi and Philip K Dick and William Dalrymple (and Tibor Fischer if his last two books hadn't been such dross). There are others who'll probably be there soon, but I don't think I can call authors I've read one or two books by "favourites".

They're obliged to give you any information they hold about you, but that's it, I think.

I find that it's written very correctly, but that for all the lightness of touch in the writing, absolutely nothing of any note really happens in the books and I find myself spectacularly underwhelmed by the wetness and lack of substance. Atonement was the worst of the lot for me, but that might be because of the insanely high praise it received. It read, very much, like someone who's read too much Bronte and Austen stuff and wants to regurgitate it for the 21st century.

Highly recommended by many people. I can't stand his writing.

How are we defining "classics" again? My guess is "part of the canon" and "pre-world war one", are probably the two criteria - post WWI and you begin to get into the realms of stylistically modern fiction. Anyway, 1 - War 2 - And 3 - Peace

I quite enjoyed it, most of the way through (there were a few places where the arguments were a bit wet). But as it was just reinforcing all my prejudices and beliefs, that's not surprising.

I fear it's a bit like a modern version of having "read Joyce". It's hard work, and you almost feel embarassed to be reading it on the tube, because they'll think "Christ! What a pretentious you-know-what", but fundamentally it's actually very good. (Well, I never managed with Joyce beyond Dubliners, but I assume that he's actually good).

This is one of those moments where I feel like a shamed, ill-read, uneducated fool, isn't it? How long have I been thinking "I must read some Updike (and, by the way, Bellow, too)", and always had other stuff I wanted to read more.

Well, I doubt you're going to be disappointed by those two. I only picked it up because I was away and had nothing to read. I seem to remember it having good reviews from elsewhere, though. The opening premise is very similar to Disgrace - ageing professor has to leave university due to pressure from peers after he behaves in an un-PC way. So far, though, it's delved far deeper into the same issues, of race and conflict, that pervade Disgrace. I think there are strong similarities between the two books.

Reading this at the moment. It's good, isn't it?

I guess it depends on your tastes. I started with Cloud Atlas and think it's magnificent, and is possibly the place to begin. If you're more of a fan of conventional linear fiction, start with Black Swan Green, which is great but much less challenging in terms of the structure. You might think you need to start at the beginning because, as people will tell you, characters appear appear from book to book. But they only fleetingly cross-exist, so it's not actually a problem, it's just another playful entertainment that you get from reading, to discover that Mme Crommelynk crops up in two different books, say. If it were up to me, I'd say read them in this order: Cloud Atlas Number9Dream Black Swan Green Ghostwritten Because I think Cloud Atlas is the best, and you should separate it a bit from Ghostwritten as they have similarities.

My favourite modern author. Amongst many things I think, he really makes a strong, strong point against much modern British literary fiction. So much of it lacks ambition and scope, and you read Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten and find yourself realising that you can write serious books that aren't just about a posh couple in the 1930s having a problem with romance, or about an author having difficulty writing. There's so many things to say, too. I love the way he uses structure as well as plot, so the nested but interlinked stories in Cloud Atlas, or the multiple narratives in Ghostwritten. Even Black Swan Green works with it, where each chapter is effectively a short story. And there are 13 chapters, each one set in one of 13 consecutive months, in the 13th year of the narrator. Black Swan Green, of course, is not as overtly ambitious, although I loved it, too, because I think Mitchell could write anything and it would be great to read. Number9Dream, from what people I know tell me, is his least popular, perhaps because it is so Japanese, and has a more obvious debt to Murukami. But I find it very exciting and sufficiently innovative to still dwarf most modern British fiction. Anyway, I absolutely love David Mitchell's books (and get a bit depressed when I hear that David Mitchell is on TV or Radio and find it's the bloke from Mitchell & Webb). I love that he's genuinely ambitious. I love that he's completely capable of so many styles, from Riddly Walker style post-apocalypse to sedate Worcestershire 13 year old to Murukami derived Japanese fiction.

Hmmmm. That would assume that my memory isn't addled by years of abuse and that I can give you some worthwhile insight, despite not having read it in 10 years.

Yep. I'm the same. It's donkeys years since I read it, but it's a fantastic book. One of the weird things is how the lack of mobile phones spectacularly dates it. Sherman's inability to contact the "safe" world is an absolutely crucial plot device, yet if the books was written even 3 years later, then the master of the universe would have a(n admittedly breezeblock sized) car-phone, and the plot wouldn't really work.