Freewheeling Andy

Yep. It's very long, a classic family saga book, really. I read it on a (very long) holiday once. I found it very easy to read, and kind of absorbing, but a little like soap opera, in that you kept involved but there wasn't a huge amount of depth.

Well, I'm still reading Jonathon Schneer's The Thames, which is an interesting history, but which seems a bit too London-centric, and perhaps just a little shallow in places and too deep in others. (Like a river?). I also started, over Christmas, JG Farrell's excellent The Singapore Grip, which is a very, very readable novel about the breakdown of Imperial rule in Malaya during the course of the end of 1941 and the advance of the Japanese. At least, that's what the first half is.

I'm trying to restrict my Murukami to one every few months. I love his books, generally, but sometimes they seem just a bit too similar and if I don't break them up with other stuff it begins to overwhelm me. Which means I still have the very hightly rated Hard-boiled Wonderland, and the much derided Kafka on the Shore up my sleeve, along with Sputnik Sweetheart and After the Quake.

I really don't care about the number of books I've read. I could read 300 badly written short thrillers a year, and get nothing from it; or read 5 genuinely classic, moving novels that make me examine my life and the world, and emerge a far better person. I'd rather the latter. I'm not sure I've read much this year which genuinely shifts my outlook - possibly 1812 which is a history; and possibly The Singapore Grip which I'm reading now and which is introducing me to a cynicism of Empire which even I didn't have before. And Cormac McCarthy's The Road which is deeply moving and harrowing. I am thoroughly pleased with my reading this year for one thing, at least. I am deeply proud of myself for finally having read War and Peace (which is, of course, actually very good). But it probably hasn't changed the way I look at the world. And I'm also proud of having read Eminent Victorians. There have been a number of other thoroughly enjoyable reads, but the latter part of the year has mostly been defined by disappointments, particularly Atonement, Life of Pi and Inheritance of Loss, all of which seem to have been written to please Booker judges rather than to have any genuine quality about them.

Long journeys need longish books to last the journey, but ones with good narrative drive to keep you occupied, and also not too heavy going - they have to actually be relatively light, I find, otherwise it's too easy to get distracted, look out of the window, or fall asleep - Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce are bad travelling companions, for example. I am currently reading JG Farrell's The Singapore Grip which would fit the bill nicely; I'd always recommend David Mitchell's books, but they fit the criteria well, too. But I've read so much while travelling that it's almost impossible to choose. I do, often, like reading books based around the areas I'm travelling - perhaps that's a good place to start looking.

So, in anticipation of lots of Books of the Year type thread, I'll get in first. I've not actually read that many books, so this should be easy. All the books are ones I've read, rather than ones published in 2007: Book I'm Most Proud To Have Read: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Ace History of The Year That Was So Good It Got Me To Read The Above: 1812 by Adam Zamoyski Really Good Modern Novel: The Road by Cormac McCarthy Most Frustratingly Overrated Pile of Garbage: Atonement by Ian McEwan (with competition from Inheritance of Loss and Life of Pi) Autobiog of the year (easy one, this, as it's the only one I've read): The Autobiography of Malcolm X Best post on Book Club Forum: The one that got the Free Penguin Classics so I could read the above Political stirring of the year: Murder in Samarkand by Craig Murray Other books I've really enjoyed this year: Dance, Dance, Dance and After Dark by Haruki Murukami; Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey; All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque; The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

I'm probably 60% fiction, 40% non-fiction in terms of books; but probably 25% fiction 75% non-fiction in terms of time readin. I tend to fnid non-fiction, with its innate lack of contained, constructed narrative, takes me longer to read. I think my percentages would be higher for fiction but for the fact that everyone buys me non-fiction books as gifts.

Well, I suppose that's true. I remember thinking he was the hero, until right at the end when he was killed and I decided I had to think outside the confines of how he was presented in the book itself.

The classic example of this, for me, is the fantastically nasty and unpleasant narrator in John Lanchester's A Debt To Pleasure. It's all the worse because you really know the narrator is a nasty, venal, vindictive character, but you just keep sympathising with his opinions on all kinds of things. And it's one of my favourite books of all. Long before this, I think it was The Day of the Jackal which really surprised me as a teenager. I think it was the first book I'd read where the principle character is basically a bad guy, so when he failed and the French policemen got him, at the end, I was really disappointed. I think that was more the shock of discovering at the end that I'd been supporting the villain that means the book has stuck with me a bit.

Finished Inheritance of Loss. What an annoying book. Why do I keep finding such highly acclaimed books and discovering they're rubbish. For the first 80% nothing happens yet everyone behaves as pathetic Indian stereotypes with no substance at all. So no plot, and no plausible characters with any depth. Just bad Indian-ness. I know Booker judges love India, as it's a weird magical place but still has enough links to the UK that they can understand it. But please, just because there's a book about families and India, with a bit of independence/separatist violence thrown in, it does not make it Midnight's Children. Bleck. No reading a history of the Thames

Where I find that second hand books are great (in the same way that some music sharing stuff is great) is that they introduce me to authors or styles that I wouldn't normally spend £8-10 on, but for 50p from Oxfam it's worth giving something a try. And maybe 1 time in 4 I'll follow on and buy full price books by the same author. There is a symbiosis, because although the author is missing out first time, in the end they benefit. The other place second hand books are great is when finding some old books that are out of print or almost impossible to find. As mentioned elsewhere, I like the old short story anthologies of SF from the 50s and 60s, and although the authors are still missing out on royalties in theory, these are books that just aren't even in the biggest Waterstones or Blackwells or Borders. I'm sure that sometimes authors have missed out on royalties when I've been buying second hand, but it's not a completely obvious split.

Oddly, that's almost exactly what I thought - even to the point of "don't let it out you off". Because so many people that I trust loved it, give it a chance. Although to me it was a bloated mess with no structure or style or direction...

Reading the autobiography is inspiring. But I also feel that Malcolm was very wrong in a lot of his separationist ideas. Early on he appears to be positively anti-white, and whilst this softens out dramatically by the end of the book, his view remains something closer to "Equal but different", rather than merely "equal", and that's the kind of attitude that led to, for example, the creation of the South African "homelands" like Bophuthatswana and so on. It still gives a lever to the racists, and is also wrong. And Malcolm's drive to have Black America exist as something close to a separate nation/state, is on very very dangerous ground.

I'd agree with this - SF up until maybe 1970 was mainly published in SF magazines, so lots of the material was in the form of short stories. I got a good feel for which authors I enjoyed by finding second hand anthologies from the 50s and 60s. The earlier stuff was often really "pulp", in a "Hero saves the universe by shooting aliens" kind of way, but by the 50s and 60s authors were working much more with ideas. Although, as I said earlier on, I find the short story form to be far better for SF-of-ideas. As quite a lot of SF authors have been more concerned about the S than the F, and weren't really that good at characterisation and building up plausible relationships between characters, the short story, where the characters are often just 2 dimensional and a way of basing a story, becomes a good medium for playing with ideas. I think my favourite SF short (although I've read so many and hardly remember any) is Harlan Ellison's "I have no mouth and I must scream".

Now reading The Inheritance of Loss

I finished After Dark, which I enjoyed a lot. As I said earlier, I like Murukami; all the more so when, like this, he's not pushing it too far. It's quite engaging despite very little appearing to happen, and is remarkably warm for Murukami. All set in a single night with the interweaving parts of peoples' lives. Here, too, it feels like the surreal/fantasy elements actually play an important role rather than just being put there pointlessly.

I don't even think it's about "wasting time". It's deliberately left unsaid so that it's clear that the examination is of the relationship of father and son in extreme circumstances rather than a novel of predicting the future. You don't end up wondering "How did that happen?"

It really depends what kind of SF you're after. Asimov is great for big picture romps across the galaxies, but not really much for characters or difficult ideas. My personal favourites tend to be more fractured future fiction, of the sort written by Philip K Dick (particularly Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, and The Man In The High Castle); and the stuff on the edges of SF, like JG Ballards books set in a very near future with some societal breakdown. Of the best modernish space opera stuff, Iain M Banks's books are good, and Orson Scott Card, particularly Ender's Game. Older stuff - like Heinlein - is often good, but sometimes quite shallow. Authors of that end, the American SF in space stuff, that I've enjoyed are Fred Pohl and AE van Vogt. Back with the fractured future stuff, the English have tended to write the stuff that appeals to me more by being slightly lower key. Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock in particular sometimes wrote utter rubbish, but sometimes nailed it with more interesting ideas than general SF. Lots of end of the 60s psychedelic influences on that stuff. I'll also add that I find that the big "SF in Space" hard SF stuff is generally better in short sotry form, or as really big grandiose epic style like Herbert's Dune or Asimov's Foundation (although they both went too far in their series). For a normal novel I prefer something a bit more grounded in reality, something that's clearly a development of modern society, which works in some respects as an exploration of how people cope in extreme versions of what we already have here.

I'm really enjoying After Dark. After hearing very bad things about Kafka on the Shore, I'm glad I skipped it and got onto this instead. It's strangely compelling, although I remain unsure quite what's going on yet. As usual it has the mix of mundane Tokyo and the slight paranormal/surreal. But sometimes Murukami feels like he's trying too hard to be Murukami, and here, instead, it all seems to feel natural.

I have no idea. I think I probably have about 200 on the shelves at home, and then have far, far more in boxes in storage; about 5 or 6 large boxes full of books, so at a guess a couple of hundred books per box. So probably in the region of 1000. I'll be getting rid of loads of them soon, though, as I'll be moving again and don't want to keep the storage and the GF has convinced me that there's no reason at all to keep books that aren't reference and aren't a source of obsession, just for decoration.

I will say that a lot of the "atmospheric" passages of the opening part reminded me of The Leopard by Lampedusa, which should be a very good thing indeed. But those are largely the pieces surrounding Emily, the mother. For me, that mood is spoilt by everything going on around it, again something "good" in the book being scuppered by the rest of the structure and so on.

I picked up The Road on a whim (and the recommendations here) on Friday because it was in a 3-for-2 deal. I read it in two sittings on Sunday, because it is so gripping. What an incredibly fantastic book. It is bleak and dark and depressing, but as everyone says, it is also incredibly redemptive. The underlying core of the book is still upbeat, despite living in an evil world full of death. I love that the son is so much more naive than his dad and therefore so much more positive, and that it's only through experience that the man has become cynical. With the implication that the natural state is to be much more open and positive and trusting. The fact that you learn nothing - no times, no places, no names, makes it all the more absorbing. Really, one of the best things I've read all year. And I'd never read anything by McCarthy before.

Remember that I'm in a minority of one, Kell. Also, the sections during the war are both really very good. Although that turns out to be all the more infuriating when we get to the twist at the end.

Books about authors Tedious period pieces Books with over-emotional flighty main characters who change their opinion on everything on the basis of the utterly trivial

Atonement is a shocker. Almost everything I hate in a book in one place. And, as always, because it's a book about authors and writing, it's loved by book reviewers and Booker types, despite being a desperate failure of imagination on the part of the writer, and despite Booker judges being all authors and therefore, really, the only people who "get" it. Utter pish. Read Cormac McCarthy's wonderful, bleak, dark, bleak, upbeat, wonderful, bleak post-apocalyptic "The Road" afterwards, and it's a maginificent change. Sparse, clear language rather than pointless dense prose. A plot, a drive, stuff happening, real people, proper emotions, not fluff and guff. I loved it. Now read the new Murukami, After Dark