Freewheeling Andy

I've not read any of your Steinbeck or Hemingway choices. My Steinbeck is limited to the obvious Grapes of Wrath, Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. All of which are great, of course. I think Stewart's been reading Steinbeck this year.

On the grill 1 - pieces of aubergine (salt and dry them to draw moisture out). 2 - Wide cup mushrooms brushed with olive oil on both sides, when cooking the back put some brie in 3 - veggie skewers, as earlier 4 - corn on the cob

My Idea Of Fun was quite good, although felt very derivative - if you tried to write a Martin Amis book with Irving Welsh's attitude, it's where you'd end up. I tried the short stories (can't remember what they were called) and found it was more of almost exactly the same, which doesn't work if your trick is to shock.

I tried when I was a teenager and got very lost after about 100 pages, confused particularly by remembering which count or baron or whatever was which, particularly as they switch between proper name and the russian patronymic.

What a good and interesting list. Broken April is a woinderful book by one of my favourite authors. It's so dark and nasty and unredeemed, though, and some people I know have had problems with it. If you want to read more I'd most recommend The File On H, followed by the spectacularly dark General Of The Dead Army. A few of Kadare's books end up as being rather simple, and might frustrate. The second most recent - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, for example, is nothing like as good as some of the earlier stuff. - A quick big up to Dirt Music by Tim Winton, too, which I loved. The only other of his I read "The Riders" is very weird and disturbing, but nothing like as enjoyable

But just because there are other books that cover autism, say, or emotional vacuum better than Curious Incident, that doesn't mean Curious Incident has no value as an adult book. That would be like arguing that because Kafka's Amerika covers the feeling of alienation in immigration better, there's no value in a book like Jonathan Raban's Waxwings. Anyway, I found Curious Incident not only enjoyable, but I thought it had more depth and told more stories than would make it exclusively a childrens' book. Perhaps Haddon is not a magnificent writer who can show even more subtleties, but that doesn't stop the book itself being both and adult and childrens book - which is, I always feel, something of an achievement in itself.

I think you two are misreading the book. It works as a kids book, but it functions as an adult book too. I never read Paddy Clark, so can't fully comment on the comparison, but the emotional vacuum was part of what was engaging about the book. The things left unsaid by the narrator gave the book subtleties and depth that will never be picked up by, say, a 12 year old. Just because a book is short, and simple, doesn't mean it doesn't bring impact. It also has to be linear, I think, given the subject matter.

Hehehe! Lovely pun. I really liked the very contrived but very tenuous connections between the layers. That was, to me, one of the real delights of the book. The connectedness of the stories gave you a pointer to the connected themes. If they'd stood alone it would just be a colleciton of short stories; if the links had been stronger it would have been clunky.

I'd agree with that, Philip. It is an easy, light, amusing read without being complete airheaded fluff.

The tiny font and thick spine and depressing material make it a fairly big task to read, but the writing is relatively easy and the subject is fascinating and spectacularly wide.

Fragrant Harbour is very different, but I loved it. It's a bunch of intertwined stories, fragmented in time, set largely around Hong Kong. Excellent, but less dark. Mr Phillips was a bit pants. I've not read Pale Fire. I was generally advised (by usually reliable people) that whilst Lolita was great, Nabokov's other books are pretty hard work. I'll keep an eye open for it.

Thanks for the pointer, Stewart. Unfortunately, at the moment I've forbidden myself from buying new books because I'm getting through current ones too slowly.

I've started on John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces which seems to have acquired serious cult status in a lot of places. It's quite odd to start with, but I'm beginning to get it now.

The Vikings reached Greenland near the end of the first millennium. They didn't reach a "green land", and they didn't find massively fertile valleys. This is how the Greenland of the Vikings is sometimes depicted, because they arrived and lived for several centuries during the climatic "Mediaeval Warm Period". It is often simply characterised that the change to a colder "little Ice Age" around 1350 led to their demise. Although this is partially true, Jared Diamond thoughtfully assesses a more accurate view of the Greenland Norse, how they arrived in an already fragile environment, imported cultural mores from Europe that weren't appropriate, damaged their own environment as a result, and didn't learn from the Inuit. The decisions made by the Greenland Norse led to their initial survival in a fragile environment, and then the failure of the society. Assessing not just Greenland, but a number of other civilisations such as the Maya, Anasazi, those on Easter Island and Pitcairn Island, Diamond traces the causes of failure, and looks for connecting patterns. He also looks at societies which have succeeded against the odds, such as the Vikings in Iceland (whoever thought it was the world's most environmentally damaged country?), the Japanese under Tokugawa and others. He then tries to thread the history with the present, looking at the damage we are doing to the planet now, and how we are pushing the limits of sustainability, and the risks we are now under, and he tries to point us to the lessons from the past that we can learn, to prevent repeats of disaster. The prominent piece of all this is damage to the environment, largely through deforestation and soil damage. Do not, though, mistake this book for something like Silent Spring. It's not an eco-warrior's polemic. It's a serious assessment of where we are in terms of previous societal collapses. The book is chunky, at 525 pages of small font. It's full of history, of archaeology, of science. But that doesn't make it hard to read. It took me a while to get through because it's inevitably fragmented into various narratives of different societies (and you know the ending). Diamond's writing is easy, fluid, and he gets serious information across in a very readable way. If I have any criticisms, it's the self-referential way he writes, always talking about the book's own framework and structure, making it sometimes feel like an academic paper, or a lecture course (and it was based on a lecture course). I also found the way he repeatedly defended ancient cultures with the "They didn't have the technology to know the mistakes they were making, so we can't blame them" line. The line is correct, and reasonable, but in the introduction he already made it implicit, and even (correctly) had a bit of a go at the new-age nutters who claim that, say, native Americans know how to tend the land so how can you say the Anasazi ruined their own environment. So it didn't need rehashing repeatedly, making the first half of the book on ancient cultures seem defensive at times. The second half of the book, about the modern world and the damage we're doing is more judgemental, and better for it, although to me it becomes a very depressing read, where Diamond feels like he clutches at straws to give us optimism for the future. A fascinating and enlightening book, though, which offers strange pointers to the future, and challenges your preconceptions on what is right and wrong, good and bad, for the future of mankind.

I really enjoyed seeing Henry V at the Globe. There was lots of pantomime style booing of the French.

Titus Andronicus is nasty. My favourite of his, I think, is Troilus and Cressida, which is wonderfully dark and nasty - it has such a bad ending. I'm not a big fan of the comedies, but the histories are fantastic. And Hamlet is great.

Oof! Finally finished Collapse. Heavy, heavy going when I've not had that much time. And excellent book, enlightening. But dark and full of info and 550 pages of highly packed words. I'll do a review in a bit, I think.

Ah. Mamacita's tale reminds me of something I do when I'm cooking something novel and (possibly) interesting for the first time. I always have emergency back-up, even if it's just cheese on toast or filled pasta, on hand, at all times.

ciabatta with ham and emmental.

IMHO, having a wide knowledge and long attention span does not necessarily equate with intelligence. Part of it, yes, but there's alot more to being brainy or intelligent. Plus, do brainy people only enjoy heavy books, that are hard work? Why not a good thriller / horror / sci-fi etc? Not at all. You're mischaracterising what I said, I think. For one thing there are many aspects to intelligence. But some books are very cerebral, and I think those books are limited in terms of who can read them. I specifically didn't say that "intelligent" people, however that's defined, don't enjoy reading other stuff, but some people are going to struggle with, say, Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon. I don't know anyone who only reads cerebral novels, though. There's nothing precluding anyone reading Sci-Fi or thrillers or whatever, although there are better and worse, and trashier and less trashy, in any group of books. Some of the most intelligent people I know only read SF when reading fiction, but that's because they read for the ideas, rather than plot or characterisation, for example. Interestingly, the SF I most enjoy is exactly the same as Stewart's. JG Ballard and Philip K Dick.

I would argue that non-brainy people would have a lot of difficulty with Foucault's Pendulum, Michelle. It's a chewy, heavy book. Very hard work. Perhaps the word brainy is wrong, but people with wide knowledge and long attention span can read pretty much any kind of book. Those without are going to struggle with some books. Foucault definitely falls into that category.

I find the focus on food in the books (and for some reason it's normally spaghetti and beer) is part of the fun. But I can see how it would grate (like parmesan, perhaps?). He's definitely a love-hate author. Many people I know are completely obsessed by Murukami and reading all his stuff at the moment. But others are left utterly bemused by the attention.

In The Shape Of A Boar was dreadful. I really enjoyed both Lempriere's Dictionary and The Pope's Rhinocerous (although I can see where you come from about their impenetrability - it took a while for me to click into both books, and the same was true of the one Pynchon I've read - Mason & Dixon). But Shape Of A Boar was all of the pretension without any of the fun, none of the entertainment and worthwhile stuff. It was a slog of first 1/3 fake(ish) epic poem, 2/3 story of author in 1960s Paris. It really did very little for me. There were moments when it felt like it was going to become a good story but it just failed miserably. And it was utterly dominated by pointless footnotes. If you want a book full of irritating footnotes, you're better off, far better off, with Paul Auster's Oracle Nights, which is a deeply interesting book (although I don't actually know whether I enjoyed it, still).

Actually, Stewart, I've still not read Dance, Dance, Dance. Have you read Wild Sheep Chase yet? I reckon Wild Sheep Chase is a fantastic book. But then I love Murukami. Wild Sheep Chase and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are my two favourites. You might struggle with them, given your reviews, because of the way he treats his characters. He's really really cold, particularly about sex, but it works with the rest of the treatment, to me. All of the books I've read of his (apart from Norwegian Wood) have this weird feeling of being something close to cyberpunk novels, except they're set in middle class, quiet respectable modern Japan suburbs, rather than a strange discordant high tech future.

I blame a super-indulgent weekend in Barcelona, eating in top end restaurants, and flying back this morning, so I'm more than a little more dull-headed even than normal...