Freewheeling Andy

I've not got much further in, thanks to too much alcohol abuse and too many hangovers, but I've a real problem with the implied Calvinism of the whole thing so far - Henry knows what he's going to do, anyway, so why couldn't he just sit around and wait for it to happen, rather than participate in the doing? Wouldn't you experiment to see if you could break your own past, and see what happened?

Hmm. I'm only 30 pages in (been busy the last few days), but I'm already getting deeply frustrated with the usual time-travel paradoxes. It'll be interesting to see if the book tries to resolve them. I'll say nothing more for the time being, and I guess I don't want anyone to tell me. It's just a broad comment at the moment.

London This a big smelly town, which was built on some marshy land on a river in the south of England. It's got a fair bit of history, has been burned down a few times, and rebuilt, and has some interesting buildings and some very horrible ones. Lots of people live here, and most of them are actually rather nice and friendly, if a bit weird. They have a reputation for being rude, but that's probably a bit unfair. Everyone is obscenely rich but quite, quite ugly, and the streets are paved with gold and dirt. The people who run the world live here, working in an underground secret society that exist in tunnels attached to our underground railway. It is a continuation of the old East India Company, and they own everything on the planet, and pull the strings of governments. Living underground they've evolved to be only 3 foot 6 tall, and are very pale, and are blinded if they ever encounter real sunlight. It is the best city on earth.

As if by magic, it's changed (which is what comes from visiting the second hand book market under Waterloo Bridge): The Final Solution by Michael Chabin Snow by Orhan Pamul Travels with Myself And Another by Martha Gellhorn Oracle Night by Paul Auster The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murukami Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and the unfinished half of London - a Biography, by Peter Ayckroyd. A Traveller's Life - Eric Newby Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey Fragrant Harbour - John Lanchester The Age Of Kali - William Dalrymple

Ah. Michelle has me understood. It was just a bit more interesting than Andy's Books would have been. The list has been slowly depleted and not added to. There's quite of lot of substantial books on the list, and I've not had much reading time.

Because, well, they're magical books. Some of them seem to be taking a while to read...

I could lend you a couple of books if you do have nothing to read.

The Time Traveller's Wife is next on my list. That's an interesting looking list, Lori. Nice and varied.

I've probably never been as angry or as sad as I was after finishing this book. For those that don't know it, Dallaire is the general who was running the UN Peacekeeping force (undermanned, understaffed, underequipped, underfunded) that was overseeing the peace accords in Rwanda. He describes the impotence of his force, and their failings and the failings of the international community as the build up and racial hatred got worse and worse before finally overflowing with the genocidal murder of 800000 people within 100 days, in 1994. He describes how the French and the US kept deliberately undermining his mission for domestic reasons, how UN beaurocracy hamstrung him, how humanity failed Central Africa. It's a depressing read - and even more so as, at the end, he hints at how the stupidity of the international community in not listening on the ground and instead offering high-profile aid to the regions that were media heavy led to increased instability and the 2 Congolese civil wars, the Burundian civil war, increased instability in Uganda, and even indirectly led to the current problems in Darfur - a failure which appears to have cost something close to another 4 million dead. But this end-game only comes after reading of the plight of the tiny team of peacekeepers who did all they could, but which was not enough. This really is a horror book.

I've always had a problem with poetry. I just never really got it, most of the time, except in the comic-spoken form. I guess in terms of "real" poetry my favourite poet is the rambling drug-crazed nonsense of Coleridge. My favourite poem of all, though, the most moving of the lot, is Dulce Et Decorum Est

Ouch!

Cooking Rocks? What a fantastic name for a book.

It's a mood thing. Also, if I've read a big, heavy book which has taken a few weeks, I quite often want some relative fluff. If I've read a couple of fluffy books I'll often want to go for something chunkier and chewier. It largely depends on what's in the pile, though.

As the only one in a flat full of books, I suppose I must be,,,

To Kill A Mockingbird's great. Of Mice And Men is good, but there's much better Steinbeck, I think - although the stuff I read, I read when I was in my teens. I much preferred Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat and The Grapes of Wrath.

I think the thing I was forced to read at school that I'm most pleased they made me read was To Kill A Mockingbird I still haven't forgiven them for making me put up with the first world war poetry, nor with the awful A Merchant of Venice, which is amongst the worst of Shakey's plays (and we didn't even get to see it as a play, only read the script).

Using a foodstuff as a bookmark (even bacon rind) is so flawed in two completely different respects that I find it hard to consider.

I'll put in a word for one of my favourite ever books. How many of these are there? I being to hear you cry. Too many, of course, is the answer. Anyway, this one is "Eastern Approaches" by Fitzroy MacLean. It's all a true story (although you do begin to wonder how much the author embellished and polished the story to make himself seem even more brilliant). He was a diplomat in the foreign office, and a bit bored posted in Paris. So he was the first person ever to ask to be posted to the fairly new Soviet Union in the mid 30s. Off he went, hoping to see a more exciting side to life. Which he did. Partly by travelling completely illegally through Stalin's Russia, through to the Caspian and Caucasus, which were out of bound to foreigners, whilst he was being tailed by the NKVD (precursos to the KGB). He jumped ships and ended in the middle of nowhere. Later on, he travelled into Central Asia, which was even more forbidden and closed. He kept deliberately losing his NKVD tail when going off to see the ancient cities of the silk road. Wonderful adventure stuff. But it got better, as he was also the only westerner to see the legendary Stalin show-trials. This is just the first of three sections of the book. In the second section, it's the beginning of the second world war, and he's in the government beaurocracy, but wants to get out and fight in the war. He's stopped because the authorities say that they need him in the diplomatic corps, and he can't be released from the government. He works out that the only way to do this is to become an elected MP. If he's an MP he can't be a civil servant. So he gets himself elected, gets kicked out of the civil service, and promptly joins up with the army leaving a friend to run his constituency. This lead him to Cairo and Alexandria, where he met up with a disorganised group who were starting a special squadron, which later became the SAS. Maclean writes about the beginnings of the SAS, their early assaults (and occasional mistakes), before the North Africa part of the war begins to come more under control. The third part of the book is in Yugoslavia, where he is posted to liaise with the Partizans. It turns out that he ends up as a confidante of Tito, and as the point man between the Allied generals and Tito's Partizans. A fantastic account of war, an amazing adventurer, and a man who did more in 10 years than most people would do in 100 lifetimes. Andy McNabb, eat your heart out. This man is the business, the proper dog's rubbish. This isn't the kind of book I'd normally read, but it's seriously good dope.

Well, I'd certainly recommend it as a reading circle book. Not too big or heavy, but very good. Trouble is that I'd be at an unfair advantage of having already read it, and an unfair disadvantage that I last read it years ago...

I bought this on the basis of the name alone, and the fact that it was half-price and looking prominent as I walked into Waterstones on Gower Street, a few months ago. It was a good thing that I hadn't spotted that it had crept on to the Richard & Judy Book Club thingy, because it would have driven me away, running and screaming. Which would have been the wrong thing to do. The book is an amazing layered onion of stories within stories within stories, moving forward in time, and then backwards again, bookending each other. I found it an ingenious and thoroughly worthwhile mechanism, not just the pretentious nonsense that you usually get with postmodern writing devices. I think it works because each of the stories is, itself, a proper, interesting, well written story, and easy to read. The book starts as the diary of a traveller in the south pacific in 19th century; moves through the letters of a feckless early 20th century dilletante; on to a 1970s eco-thrillier; and into a hilarious tale of a modern publishing executive; on to a semi-dystopian future world run by the Koreans; and finally into a basically post-apocalyptic world in the distant future. It covers a rise-and-fall-of civilisation, and each of the stories links in to the other stories, often with very similar themes. I can imagine that the plot devices would really wind some people up, and be found to be very annoying, but to me, the book works brilliantly, and explored some very big themes about truth and civilisation without being particularly pompous about it. I heartily recommend it.

I'll drag this back to the top, because I think that all of you people who want to read a bit outside of your normal field might like to try Broken April. It's both mad and alien enough, I think, to appeal to the horror and the fantasy people. Even though it's set in the real world, with real people and real things. And it's also pretty high profile at the moment with Kadare having won the international booker. Before you mention it, yes, I am nagging.

Is this the great big huge monster pile of books by my bedside? If it is, it's (largely) as follows: Shake Hands With The Devil by Gen. Romeo Dallaire The Final Solution by Michael Chabin Snow by Orhan Pamul A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka Travels with Myself And Another by Martha Gellhorn Oracle Night by Paul Auster The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger In The Shape Of A Boar by Lawrence Norfolk Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murukami Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and the unfinished half of London - a Biography, by Peter Ayckroyd. Apart from that my bedside is empty...

The top number one favourite childrens book of all (with the possible exception of Winnie-the-Pooh) is Russel Hoban and Quentin Blake's How Tom Beat Captain Najork And His Hired Sportsmen. I think it's aimed for sort of 5 to 8 yearish range, but have no idea. I first read it when I was 27 and still loved it. (And I read it to myself, as I don't have any kids to read it to).

I have a few. I've retained a card one from Dillons, back when it was Dillons, for nostalgia purposes. I've a card Stanfords one, for when I'm being a map geek. And then there's the random stuff. Which mainly seem to be the tear-off tags from aeroplane tickets. Plane tickets make great (if slightly clunky) bookmarks.

I really enjoyed The Postman. As a late-teen I was always really into that post-apolcalyptic stuff. My obsession with it started with JG Ballard's Hello, America. I remember The Postman being excellent first time around, but a bit less impressive when I went back to it. I seem to think I read some other David Brin, but it was much more space-opera-ish, which wasn't my thing at the time.