Freewheeling Andy

Normally, I'd agree with you. Celebrity chefs usually aren't the best chefs. They're the people who are best on TV, or who can write best (and there's even a distinction between those two). But, as it happens, Gordon Ramsay is a spectacularly good cook, as you have to be to run a restaurant with 3 michelin stars.

I read Oracle Nights a while back. It's a very, very interesting read. But somehow, it wasn't quite right for me. I'm not sure I'll go back to Auster, because the style felt, well, detached maybe, or something like that. So I guess I'm like Still here. The story's good, the writing is good, but there#'s something slightly awry.

The limit is my bank balance and my mood. Given the right circumstances I'd pay anything.

I always drink local beers when I'm abroad, but they're often pretty similar once you're out of the UK and Belgium and Germany. I would miss good cask conditioned English beer.

What brand beer are you after? Well, all the English bitter beers, of which, almost without exception, the mass produced brands are rubbish. So on the rare occasion you find Courage or Bass or Newcastle Brown abroad, it's horrid. You can never find the good Timothy Taylor or Deuchars or Harveys and Archers beers.

Where are you going off to that you won't find pies, beer, tea and gravy? :? Well you wouldn't get the kind of beer we're used to, nor cornish pasties or steak-and-kidney pies. I'd also miss crumpets.

Pies. And beer. Other than that, it depends where I ended up. I'd probably find myself desperate for things I almost never eat now, like pork scratchings. That's what I discover happened to friends who moved abroad, who send out APBs for Branston Pickle or PG Tips when someone goes to visit.

You do know that I'm on a mission to convince everyone to read this book, Ace. I take no responsibility. It's now beyond my control...

BlackSwanGreen is great, too. Very different to Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, but wonderful.

1 cup = 1/2 US pint = 8 fl oz. I think

Yeah. It's like a lightish tasting beef. It's red meat, though. Very nice.

I'm really worried about the number of half drunk bottles of decent malt and cognac. The girlfriend will be unimpressed...

I had a couple of bottles of Erdinger hefeweizen last night, which were lovely but not wine. I'm desperately trying to reduce the amount of stuff I'm taking when I move house. White or red wine tonight, no idea what, though.

I spotted a trailer for this in the cinema the other day, too. I can't imagine how they're going to film it, though.

Rose is not for spectacular taste. It's something lovely and light and refreshing in sweltering heat, I think. With rose I mainly want it to be very cold, and inoffensive.

I'm struggling badly with Snow, despite it getting good reviews from reliable people. It's not bad, but it's just not what I can focus on at the moment. I've just read, over the last 24 hours, a book called Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich, which is a really to easy read true life story of a bunch of geeks who found a cool way of winning at blackjack, made loads of cash, and ended up in a lot of trouble as a result.

Had a bottle of chilled gamay last night, which was interesting. Drinking chilled red with lightish meats seems to have gained some fashion. I'm drinking not very good champagne tonight, just because I felt like it having been in the office 'til 9:15. Champagne makes me happy.

If you didn't like the first, I think you're well off leaving the second alone. It's easy and harmless, but you'd be wasting your time as it's the weaker of the pair.

Number9Dream is the one of his that I haven't read. It's in the pile by the bed at the moment. I've heard widely varying reviews, though. Black Swan Green is unlike Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, and is much more a conventional novel, but is no less wonderful for it.

Ghostwritten was David Mitchell's first novel, and showcases how he came to write wonderful books like Cloud Atlas. It is, like Cloud Atlas, a collection of apparently separated tales, although these ones run concurrently and eventually combined in the end in a most spectacular way. From Tokyo to Leningrad to London to New York, through Hong Kong and Mongolia, it's a spectacularly brave book. Arguably it's over-ambitious, but it's all the more wonderful for trying to achieve as much as it does. The basis is people, but there are real ghosts, and virtual ghosts, there are terrorists and wars, there's a feeling of apocalypse that appears at times and then disappears with the banality of normal peoples' lives. Mitchell plays around with his characters, and you'll find people from Ghostwritten cropping up in the later books. In Ghostwritten there's much more of the Japanese influence than there is later, as he uses a lot of Zen and Buddhist imagery. But also there's a stronger link to Murukami, as a lot of the incidental background is food and music. Sometimes the book is a little too showy, it's a bit too much of a first novel, where Mitchell feels he needs to prove himself. But it's a great first novel. Wonderful to read, all the little vignettes are great on their own, but even better as they merge. A really, really good book.

I was in Waterstones chatting with the staff, asking what they'd recommend as an extra book in the 3 for 2. They recommended Kurkov after discovering I was enjoying Murukami and David Mitchell and seeing the books I'd already picked up. It's as good a way as any to discover new books. The two Penguin Novels are now collected in one volume, and they seem to sit together nicely. They are the story of Viktor, a failing author who can never get anywhere close to writing his novel, and his pet penguin Misha, who he picked up as Kiev zoo was downsizing. Viktor gets employed as an obituarist for a Ukrainian paper, but he writes obituaries of the still living. It's only after they begin to get published that he realises what a mess he's in, involved with the Ukrainian mafia and organised crime. It would probably begin to ruin the plots if I write any more here, so instead I'll give a feeling of the books. They're written in a slightly comic style, possibly close to Bulgakov in the absurdity of what's going on; but perhaps in terms of the characters, and their strange shallowness yet interest, it could be closer to Murukami. The plot devices are odd, sometimes things aren't at all clearly explained, and the coincidences begin to become frustrating. The first book is probably better than the second, yet they belong together nicely, and some of the frustration of the ending of Death and the Penguin is removed by reading Penguin Lost. I'd certainly recommend them. They're fun, and easy to read. Effortless. But they're probably not as good as the bloke in Waterstones suggested.

Done Ukraine and Turkey

Hmm. I have a feeling I must have read something in the two weeks before I went on holiday, but can't remember what it was... Ah. Yes. Got it. Holiday's in Hell by PJ O'Rourke, a slightly sneering, excellent fun bit of travelog from the time he was Rolling Stone's foreign correspondent. It's all a bit out of date, having been written in the 80s, but it's amazing how many of his spots are still unsafe (or perhaps it's amazing how many places have recovered). Entertaining and light. Then, on the holiday: Andrey Kurkov's two Penguin novels, which are spectacularly easy, and utterly bizarre. I did really enjoy them, though. They aren't the most serious books I've ever read. They belong in the tradition of the more bizarre Russian/soviet novels, but also in the tradition of the thriller. Then it was Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which was excellent, a great book, although it's also fairly obviously a first novel in comparison to the other books of his I've read. It's a bit more obviously showy and flash, and borrows more obviously from other sources, and feels a bit like someone desperate to make themselves heard. But, for all that, it remains a wonderful book and closer to Cloud Atlas than Black Swan Green is. It's all very big themed stuff, starting small scale, but with terrorists and art thieves and ghosts, and heading towards a dystopian very-near-future. Now I'm reading Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. Much easier to read than My Name Is Red was, but with probably the same bad translation. It feels clunkier than it should for such a spectacularly highly rated author. Set in modern eastern Turkey, it seems to cover the battles between secularism and traditional Islam in a border city cut off by snow. I'm enjoying it, but it's taking a bit of an effort to read.

I dind't know Black Swan Green was a Book at Bedtime. I'm not sure anything works very well in that format, condensed down to 5 half hour slots. For one thing, in terms of the structure BSG has to be 13 chapters long. To an extent it only really makes sense that way.

Well, I managed to pick up the other two, and will probably read them on my hols.