Freewheeling Andy

I've refused to read this precisely because of the two previously mentioned books. I read Holy Blood & Holy Grail, which is worth reading just for the spectacular comedy value - I read it first as a 14 year old with no critical faculties and took it at face value. I then re-read it about 5 years ago and could hardly stop myself laughing. It's up there with von Danicken. And then Foucault's Pendulum, which I enjoyed but is perhaps a bit too over-wrought largely rehashed the same stuff. I think I was disappointed by Foucault's Pendulum because it wasn't as good as Name Of The Rose, but it satisfied my need for novels about rosicrucians, templars, cathars, secret societies, the elders of zion, and so on. I will say, though, that people who've read the Dan Brown say that the religius conspiracy nonsense really just acts as a backdrop for the thriller. So really, you're just reading a thriller with a backdrop of rosicrucians rather than with a backdrop of nazis or aircraft, or whatever. On that basis, apparently, it works perfectly well. It's "just" a thriller.

Except they probably said "nothing of note happens" because they can type.

This seems to be a love/hate book. I've not dared try it yet, but I would say by a 4:1 majority my (reliable) friends think it's incredibly dull where nothing of nore happens and too much time is spent creating lovely sentences. The others think it's just about the best book they've read in years.

Ah. It's a great book. Although his best is Cats Cradle, and if you want a better anti war satire, you're almost certainly better off with Catch-22. I'm not sure a book like Slaughterhouse 5, which is all about the ideas and the concept of death and how life becomes trivialised really wants to build the characters too far.

Baguette with parmaham and salad, and a nut ritter sport, and a bottle of coke.

Ooh! Some interesting stuff in there. Particularly intrigued by the Kite Runner, and by The Oxford Murders. Jonathon Livingston Seagull I loved, but I think you need to read it when you're in a particularly hippy state of mind.

The books are fantastic. The TV series caught the mood very well, but you acn't quite get Wodehouse's writing style onto the screen. I've only read 3 or 4 of them but they're such good fun.

Since I last wrote on this I have at least read The Age Of Kali, by William Dalrymple. It's a lovely book of essays about his 10 years in India from 1990 to 2000 (give or take). Sometimes there's perhaps too much obsession about details of temples, and or architecture (which I've spotted in his writing before, and which probably ties to the person he's most closely following in terms of obsessions, Robert Byron), but when he gets the human stories, or the big political stories, his writing is fantastic. I'm now reading Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is quite dark, really. It's an assessment of how a variety of different societies and civilisations have collapsed, whether it's due to environmental change, or due to trading failures, or whatever. fascinating and dark. So far I've only read the chapters on Montana and Easter Island, and started on the one on Pitcairn and Henderson.

Well, my birthday has added so much to this list. Quite a lot of it looks like heavy, serious, factual reading, too. Orhan Pamuk's memoirs of Istanbul, the 1812 book, about Napoleon's march on Moscow, Marco Polo's travels, a book on the Persians, a strange looking Indian novel, the new Ismael Kadare novel, so much stuff.

I do actually think High Fidelity is useful for allowing girls to understand rather normal but slightly geeky blokes (that would be almost all of us). And Fever Pitch for those girls unfortunate enough to find themselves with blokes with a footy fetish.

He remains spectacularly popular, though, and I can understand why. It's very easy to read the books. The fact that the characters are pretty two-dimensional and the plots fairly mundane are probably neither that relevent, because the books address people who aren't normally addressed by fiction. Chick-lit in its various guises has existed for ages, but lad-lit really started with Hornby, so there are loads of blokes who read Hornby and finally have "serious" fiction address their lives.

I've not read either of those two, but Hornby seemed to struggle with women characters in About A Boy and High Fidelity. They were very "bloke fiction", and highlighted the male characters, which is why they were so succesful. I loved Fever Pitch when I read it, and like High Fidelity a lot. But the books seemed to get more trite and less personal and more mundane as they went on, and seemed to deliberately target a very uninteresting demographic, of 30-40ish blokes who are English middle class, and who don't really have a lot to say about anything much. I think the hype is overplayed, and it mainly comes from the opening two books being about football and music and therefore appealing to a bunch of people who are obsessive about those subjects, whilst also being easy to read, and meaning football and music journalists would rave about the books getting them lots of hype where other books would be ignored.

Well, I've raved on and on about Cloud Atlas, so I'll rave a bit about my other favourite modern novel. I wandered in to Waterstones today to get a coffee, and there it was, sitting lonesome on the shelf, next to about 20 copies of the spectacularly inferior Mr Phillips, and, amazingly, no copies of the excellent Fragrant Harbour. The Debt To Pleasure, by John Lanchester. I picked it up as a gift (and because I can't lend my copy as that was lent about 3 years ago and not returned). By the time I finished the coffee I was again 20 or 30 pages in, and wanting to finish it. I refrained, because it is, after all, a gift, and I don't want to give it in a tatty, already-read state. I don't know what to say about it without giving it away, but it's the funniest, most brilliant, most obsessively foody, fun, and wonderful book. You love and hate the narrator, you love some of his comments, and his outspokenness, you despise other parts of his snobbery. But he is not really the narrator. He is the first person author of a cookbook. The novel is written as a cook book and offers fantastic cooking advice, apart from anything else. I can't tell you how utterly in love with this book I am.

I shall be baking hot cross buns tomorrow morning. Anyone else?

Life of Pi is definitely in my "To Read" list, although not yet in the bought pile beside the bed.

I read then first book, Titus Groane (I think), ages ago. It's quite a peculiar book. Definitely in the realms of fantasy in terms of the environment, but it lives with the fantastical descriptions of what's going on in the Gormenghast castle rather than having a great deal of plot. At least that's what I remember of it. It was way too far outside of what my normal reading zone was for me to really "get" it. I was much more into narrative than descriptive when I read it. It's clearly brilliant, but it's one of those things that won't be to everyone's taste.

I know. It's shocking, isn't it. But it does happen every now and then. I'm back on the obscure stuff now, though.

I agree with Kell. It's one of those books that takes half an afternoon to read, and which any age could (and should) read. But that doesn't take away any of the impact. It's an excellent, excellent little book.

You've tried my Nike-steak, then?

It's because BBQing is so easy that anyone can do it, and it makes men feel as if they offer something in terms of food. And it's playing with fire. Honestly, though, amongst my friends I think the men enjoy cooking more than the women.

And James Joyce? Well, I read the Dubliners. Then read the first two paragraphs of Finnegans Wake, and it took me about four days to get that far, and I decided it was probably a lost cause... So no more Joyce for me.

The biography/autobiography thing is interesting. I can't face reading auto-biogs that are actually ghost-written. And if I'm reading biog/autobiog I want it to be someone who's lived a full and interesting life. Charles Darwin biography is OK. Wayne Rooney biog is not. Not that I read much of either, but a 20 or 30 year old can't have that much to say about their own lives. But I also struggle with how friendly and personal biographers are about their subjects. I hate it when reading, say, a Darwin biog the author always talks about Charles, as if they were good friends. Not reading the Mills&Boon/Jilly Cooper/Danielle Steele stuff should be taken as given from me, too.

I think so. Either into a tv series or a film.

I've only ever read one "Western" book worth reading - Lonesome Dove. But it is a bloody fantastic book.

I stubbornly refused to read the HP books, too, after seeing a bit of one film, and hearing some of one read by Stephen Fry on Radio 4. The whole thing seemed so utterly risible, but now I'm refusing out of stubbornness rather than out of any rational, thought-through process.