Freewheeling Andy

I love the Evelyn Waugh books I've read (particularly Scoop). But I never got round to reading Brideshead. I'll be interested to hear what you think.

Delicatessen The Big Lebowski The Right Stuff Lawrence of Arabia Fargo Amelie School For Scoundrels (original version) Volver Dr Stangelove Das Boot

Ooh! That looks interesting. I'm still fighting to reduce my TBR pile of the books that have been there for ever, so trying not to buy anything new for a while (The Roth is a failure on that front). But it looks like a facsinating book (one warning is that I'm not always convinced by novels that shift in and out of reality and dreams, unless it's done very well). The Roth remains fantastic and I'm spending my time sitting at work reading it rather than working. Lots of very deliberate playing with history to provide parallels with modern America, but despite it being fairly obvious, it's not done in a clunky and annoying way.

Hahaha! Very true. I actually really enjoyed A Suitable Boy, but it was just a great big meandering family soap opera saga with very little apparent depth. I think it would have been insufferable had I not read it fairly quickly during a very long holiday.

And now I'm some way into the so far completely and utterly genius "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth, which is almost infinitely better than its awful title.

Humble Pie was quite enlightening about kitchen stuff and had good narrative - very good for celeb biog, but there were quite a few annoying things. A lot of the book is self-defense against claims made in the press in the past. And there's a bit too much focus on individual events that were on TV programs but aren't actually important - they feel tagged on by some ghostwriter or editor who thought that celeb-biog purchasers only really cared about what some TV idiot said to another TV idiot. The editors are also to blame for the two biggest annoyances. Clearly someone was leading Ramsay through the writing, at best: so there were loads of rhetorical questions included in the writing "What are the things that annoys me most in the kitchen? Dirty fingernails, and pointless rhetorical questions, I think." And there's gratuitous use of swearing - which again celeb-biog readers may expect to, you know, make it f***ing authentic. But really, once something is written down you don't need to superfluous expletives. They were just distracting.

The order you read the books doesn't matter at all - indeed, the books are basically independent. It's just fun that characters from one book crop up in other books, so the composer from the music section of Cloud Atlas is referenced in Black Swan Green; and one of the kids in BSG shows up in, I think, Ghostwritten. And there's a dodgy Mongolian who's in both Number9Dream and Ghostwritten. It's a sort of inter-weave of stories but there's no dependency. Superficially true, definitely. But I think actually it has similarities - in that it still plays with structure. There are 13 chapters, each sort of independent, in each of the 13 months during which the author is 13. And each of the stories still works around similar sorts of themes of redemption. It certainly feels more traditional, but even within traditional narrative Mitchell is doing similar things to Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten.

Same as Eddie, I'd be more than happy to re-read Cloud Atlas, for all kinds of reasons. Particularly as I've now read the other Mitchell books and can play with spotting all the inter-linked references and stories and characters.

Finished AirMail. Deeply light and trivial, but rather entertaining (in an utterly puerile way) none the less. About to start on Gordon Ramsay's autobiog thingy Humble Pie.

I've had Vineland by Thomas Pynchon since 1999 or 2000, I think. Left by a girlfriend by mistake one weekend it was never reclaimed, and after the struggle with Mason&Dixon I decided to leave it for a while. It's still left.

I know I'm repeating myself (yet again), but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that it's the best book of the 21st century so far. Only vaguely challenged by other books by David Mitchell. How it failed to win the booker is beyond me. My only problem with Cloud Atlas is that someone has my copy and I don't know who.

There are lots of books I shouldn't have finished. Having finally read War and Peace, now the only books I've failed to finish that I might finish are Don Quixote and Peter Ackroyd's immense Biography of London, which I got half-way through and thought I'd wait before I ploughed on with, and which has been in that state for about three or four years now.

Right. The Cyclist was probably worth $2, in hardback. The conceit - a narrator who is a potential terrorist in the Middle East who was a food and cycling obsessive, and who plans to deliver his bomb as part of a bike race, is the kind of thing I should love. But the prose is insanely annoying - lots of playful but pointless alliteration; lots of utterly pointless rhyming, things just thrown in for no reason. Like adding chalk and sawdust to season. (yet, really, that bad). And the structure, too, floating back and forwards, no narrative flow, incredibly short chapters, again, without any point. Gah. Grr! So now I'm on the funny and simple Air Mail by Terry Ravenscroft.

Right. I've read no Harry Potter. I have no intention of going to the shops at midnight. Therefore, I'm going to play "guess the spoiler" random possibilities top 10: 1 - Harry wakes up and it was all a dream 2 - Harry and Hermione get it together and get jiggy 3 - And then Ron Weasley joins in for a kinky threesome 4 - Voldemort tells Potter that Potter is his son, and that he should join the dark side 5 - Hogwarts is sucked up in a Tornado and Dumbledore ends up in Kansas with a small dog 6 - In a freak dining accident Harry falls asleep just as his gazpacho soup is being served and drowns in the bowl before Hermione can save him 7 - Harry decides that he's had enough of fighting evil, and uses his magic powers to move footballs around, and agrees to sign for Chelsea on

I thought The Riders was a really, really weird book. Very interesting, though I preferred the other book of Winton's that I've read: Dirt Music, which I loved.

If a critic refuses to criticise are particular work because of a friendship, then they're not a very good critic I would have thought. If the author expects nothing but adulation from friends, then it would be best not to make friends with someone whose job it is to publish reviews based on their judgement of the book. There's actually a serious problem in the UK in the newspapers with this sort of "nepotism", where authors who are friends write nice things about each others books.

I was thinking 2007 hadn't been that good for reading, and then went back to my blog to see what I'd actually read this year and it's much more impressive than I'd imagined. These are now probably in order of how much I loved them (all novels unless I say otherwise), but all these books have been truly, utterly wonderful 1 - War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, if I needed to say 2 - All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque 3 - 1812, Napoleon's fateful march on Moscow by Adam Zamoyski (history) 4 - Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murukami 5 - Disgrace by JM Coetzee 6 - Murder in Samarkand by Craig Murray (politics)

I don't think I've ever succesfully achieved anything before by nagging. I feel a sense of great achievement.

I finished Unspeak. The premise was solid, and the writing OK, but it was somehow a bit underwhelming. Oddly, one of the most underwhelming aspects was the way it focussed on US and UK governments, and took a very traditional lefty approach, so although early on it mentions Friends of the Earth, most of the time the criticism is of Freedom and War on Terror and Bogus Asylum Seekers. All, admittedly, horrible abuses of language. But the one-sidedness of it got frustrating and some of the time it felt a bit like reading a Ben Elton monologue from the 80s. There was enough that was enlightening, though, to make it worth reading. I'm now reading something called "The Cyclist - A Novel" (which should please various people on the board), which I picked up for $2 in Newhaven, Ct when I had nothing to read a couple of weeks ago.

Ha! The eternal US/UK biscuit confusion. What UK calls biscuits the US calls cookies. What the US calls biscuits the UK would call something a bit like scones, but more bready. Telling someone from the UK that people eat Biscuits and gravy, or even have biscuits with their KFC, would cause deep bemusement.

That was the initial reason. But watching a few miutes of one of the films and hearing 10 minutes of a radio adaptation read by Stephen Fry pretty much reinforced all the prejudices I wanted to have.

Cloud Atlas is the best book of the 21st century so far. It's wonderful, and I didn't find it at all disturbing. Even the dystopian future section wasn't disturbing - but the book as a whole was just glorious. My Idea Of Fun is really disturbing because it's a book about a man whose alter-ego is off committing American Psycho type crimes, but who is absolving himself from all the blame by blaming his alter-ego. And Marabou Stork Nightmares is the story of a man in a coma, going through how he got into the coma through football related violence, and is gruesomely unpleasant - the end scene is maybe the nastiest "redemption" I've ever read.

Clockwork Orange is a good call. Also Marabou Stork Nightmares my Irving Welsh and Will Self's My Idea of Fun were pretty grim and upsetting.

I've never had the misfortune to read third person present tense; but I'm reading a first person present tense book at the moment and it's really, really annoying. For one thing, it feels like a conceit which is designed to allow the narrator to die at the end of the book. I don't mind the "nearly present tense" of a diary format, one which therefore doesn't know what the outcome will be. But the literal present tense drives me insane. But I'm equally happy with first and third person books; they offer different insights, but I don't think one is worse than the other.

I was at the Crowded House/Peter Gabriel thing in Hyde Park on Saturday. It was very, very wet. Crowded House were great. Peter Gabriel was very boring indeed and insisted on playing what he felt like playing and ignored the fact that there were several tends of thousands of very, very wet people who would have liked to have been entertained.