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Thanks to Charlotte's book club, I have been reading a very mixed bag recently. The downside is that I have limited reading time and book club is taking 80% of it, but I do manage to sneak in the odd personal choice.

Therese Raquin by Emile Zola was a book club choice and I only managed half of it before losing the will to go on. Having previously read and enjoyed The Beast in Man, I was expecting a lot better, but there you go.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro was another book club choice, but it was my nomination. It is an original and very engaging book that follows the lives of a group of clones who have been created purely to be organ donors. It could have been darkly depressing, but it is written with an almost surreal optimistic lightness. Ultimately it is a book about humanity and love, and one might conclude that the latter defines the former.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech by Neal Asher is a lovely piece of sci-fi escapism. I have to be nice to Neal since he is the unofficial flanerie.org Laureate, but I would have enjoyed it even if he wasn't. If you like a bit of sci-fi and you haven't read Neal Asher yet, start with Gridlinked then keep on going.

Earlier on in the year was The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. It is sactimonious twaddle and should be avoided.

And now I have just started on The Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Another book club choice and a book I would never otherwise have read.

Meanwhile my pile of books to be read keeps growing. I need to resist buying any more until I can catch up, although that would take about a year or a major illness.

The Promise of Happiness is a dissection of the family and is chock full of intelligent observations. Everyone will see elements of their own family in here, and Cartwright does not need resort to charicature in order to connect with the reader.

It is a somewhat tense novel, due to the storyline, and there are emotional undercurrents everywhere, but there is also plenty of subtle humour which keeps it from becoming leaden. Meanwhile the story itself is a slow-burner, gradually drawing the reader in to what becomes a compelling novel. Highly recommended.

Five stars (out of five)

I have been trying to compile a list of my top 10 books but have been struggling. So in the meantime I decided to produce a list of my favourite authors.

Even that ran into trouble when it became clear that there are two distinct group, so I ended up with two lists.

My list of authors is distinct from my (eventual) list of favourite books - to be in the authors list requires repeat success, while a book can be a one-off. Clive Barker is not in my favourite authors list, despite his undoubted talent, but will be in the top 10 books,with Weaveworld. Interestingly Barker himself observed that Weaveworld is a book he could not write now - it isn't what he is about these days.

So the authors are my guiding lights for fiction - if they release a new novel, I will read it. They are my trusted friends, my old mistresses, my favourite pub.

General Fiction

• Kate Atkinson


• Iain Banks


• Julian Barnes


• William Boyd


• Jasper Fforde


• Howard Jacobson


• Ian McEwan

Science Fiction

• Neal Asher


• Isaac Asimov


• Iain M Banks


• Arthur C Clarke


• Michael Marshall Smith


• Alastair Reynolds


• Dan Simmons

Feel free to post your own lists in the comments, or trackback to your blog. Also I realise I should have a list for Classics but I have not read nearly enough to form any kind of decision.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a love story - Henry, aged 36, meets Clare, aged 6. But Henry is time traveling - his body jumps backwards and forwards through time, without warning, and he arrives naked at some point on his own personal timeline. Minutes or hours later he will jump back. He regularly meets himself, and while he meets Clare many times as she grows up, he also meets her for the first time, when he is 28 and she is 20. His 28 year-old self doesn't know that in his later years he will meet Clare as a child, so while she greets him as a lost love, he has never seen her before.

It sounds confusing and unlikely, but is written with such a deft touch that time travelling Henry seems perfectly ordinary. This leaves room for the love story to develop, and it does so with a gentle passion that grabs the reader by the lapels.

This book has been compared the The Lovely Bones, and it is a fare comparison - original, engaging, enchanting and deeply moving.

Five stars (out of five)

'Rodkey King (song for Lenny Bruce)' by the Boo Radleys

Do you know my name
before you tear me apart?
Do you care
who I am?

Jimmy Rabbite Sr is unemployed and struggling with the responsibility of being the man of the house. He is a proud man, and his pride is wounded when his son lends him a fiver to go out drinking. But 'a few scoops' of an evening with his mates is emotional sustenance for an unemployed man, for the crack and the companionship.

So Jimmy can't hide his delight when his best friend Bimbo is laid off, and they kill time playing golf. Bimbo has ambition though, and decides to go into business with a chip van. Jimmy joins him as a partner, thinking it will be a good laugh if nothing else.

What follows is the rise and fall of Bimbo's Burgers, and also a lesson in why it is a bad idea to go into business with your best friend.

Throughout it is simply hilarious. From chuckles and laughs through to guffaws and snotting on yourself. Not a book to read on a train, but definitely one to revel in and then pass on to your friends.

While Jacobson's humour is in wry observation, the running gag and the wit of a cleverly crafted sentence, Doyle's is in conversation and farcical situations - very much in the Lesley Thomas vein. But Doyle writing is so distinctive you would recognise his work without seeing the cover, and it is so natural that it is only after a few pages that you realise you are reading in a broad irish accent.

Marvellous.

Five stars (out of five)

The Nymphomation plot is National Lottery meets fractal mathematics meets dystopian future, and the cast an irregular bunch of misfits. Everyone is a misfit in Noon's future, everyone scarred by birth or by life. Or death.

This book is clearly not for everyone, but if like your fiction on the corrupted side, if you have ever been jacked into the bass of the 3am eternal, and if the idea of tripping on garlic appeals, then you might well find much to enjoy here.

Four stars (out of five)

At around the same time that Amazon.co.uk lowered its free shipping threshold last month from £19 to £15, the price of back-catalogue books was increased by 25%.

The Guardian was certainly suckered, running the headline "Amazon cuts costs for UK shoppers as growth slows"

As someone that only buys paperbacks, and generally buys from the back-catalogue, the change in the pricing policy has hit me squarely in the knackers.

For example, Kate Atkinson's Not the End of the World was £6.39, being 20% off list, and is now at the full list price of £7.99.

Likewise Howard Jacobson's Who's Sorry Now, up from £5.59 to £6.99 and Iain Banks' Complicity, up from £6.39 to £7.99

As part of a cost-cutting drive I have already been buying some of my books from charity shops, and this looks set to expand. I give away my books after reading them, so I don't mind thumbing a second-hand copy.

Thankfully Play.com have been deeping their catalogue recently and offer all of the books mentioned above at tasty prices (respectively £5.99, £5.49 and £5.99, all with free delivery on a single item), so hopefully competitive pressure will help Amazon to see the folly of their price increase.

In the meantime, to paraphrase an old maxim, there is no such thing as a free free-shipping offer.

P.S. If any of my UK readers want some free books, just peruse my 'available' books here, and send me a mail letting me know what you would like. The only condition is that you pass them on in a similar fashion.

Once that ended it was time for something different, and Century Rain fits that bill even if it does fall rather short as a piece of writing.

It is the twenty-third century and earth has become uninhabitable due to runaway nano-machines. Humanity has split into two groups, those who (quite reasonably in the circumstances) have decided that nano-technology is a bad idea, dubbed the Threshers, and those who think that the accident with earth is good reason to keep working on perfecting the technology, dubbed the Slashers (named after SlashDot. ha ha.)

The Threshers have the solar system and the Slashers have expanded into the galaxy with the benefit of a wormhole network they discovered.

On their travels they discover several system sized solid structures, which appear to contain planets.

By a stroke of luck they find a way into one via the wormhole network and discover that it is a replica of earth, people included, from the 1950s. E2 as it is dubbed is not quite the same as earth - it's history diverged sometime in the 1930s and the second world war never happened.

The Threshers get access to the wormhole and send operatives to E2 to find what is going on. One of them is murdered and Verity Auger is sent to E2 to recover some documents where she runs into an Wendell Floyd, an American private detective who is investigating the murder.

All of which is a very long-winded set-up for a chase thriller and love story, which is what occupies the second half of the book. Will they be able to save the planet? Probably. Will they get together in the end? Probably not.

Where Reynolds' previous books have made the implausable seem perfectly ordinary, this book uses plot devices like it is going out of fashion, has paper-thin characters, doesn't bother explaining why most people are doing what they are doing, and generally tries to be a pot-boiler.

But for all that it does succeed in being a page turner, albeit one with only the most predictable plot-twists.

Which leads me to conclude that while I didn't particularly rate this book, it was more because the author is capable of better rather than the story being a bad one, and if this was a first novel by someone else I would be noting them as a future prospect.

Two stars (out of five) if you have read Alistair Reynolds before
Three stars if you have not

Instead it is a defence of the inclusion of the Harry Potter series in my 'ten books I should have read by now,' since two-thirds of the comments received were somewhat critical in this regard.

My defence rests on two arguments.

One - Consistency

Are you quite mad? I am wide open to abuse (no tittering at the back!) when it comes to quality. Included in the list were Elmore Leonard, Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling. These three authors write popular fiction of the sneering mass-market kind, and while each is in the list for a different reason, they are equally open to derision.

My first argument therefore is one of consistency. Potter is wizards and magic shite that captured the imagination of children. The da Vinci code is conspiracy theory shite that captured the imagination of adults. The case against Rowling is a malicious prosecution against a book which can clear any bar low enough for Dan Brown.

Two - How did it do that?

The Harry Potter books reversed the decline in childhood reading single-handed. Given the marketing dollars behind games consoles, television and crack cocaine, that is a very impressive achievement. The first in the series, after being slated by the crtitcs, became a hit by word of mouth.

I am not expecting it to be one of my best reads ever, but I am hoping to find the same magic that inspired millions to read some more.

My second argument therefore is that these books did something special and I want to read one of them to find out how. It is more to discover the phenomenon that to have an enjoyable read.

I conclude my case.

Footnote:It is Da Vinci that is indefensible. It is only in my list because I promised someone that I would if it reached sales of 10 million in the UK, and this is a real and terrifying possibility. I know it is a bad book badly written, but a promise is a promise.

I have been toying with the idea of reducing all my reviews to one word, but I suspect that I would use only a narrow range of words (great, entertaining, cracking, marvellous, epic, shite) and would rapidly become repetitive.

But if ever a book could be distilled into a word, it is this book and that word.

In a story told through the innocent eyes of a child, but with the wisdom and wry humour of an adult, we follow a family full of tragedy, but which never abandons hope.

Our narrator is growing up in the 1950s, and interspersed between her childhood tales are family histories which range from the late 19th century through to the second world war. The histories illuminate the present day, adding a brilliant depth of colour; and they also remind us that it isn't so many years ago that life was brutally hard for all but the most priveleged.

This is a novel of loss and sorrow, but also humour and farce; a sheer joy to read. And, incredibly, a debut novel. I laughed and cried, and you probably will too.

Five stars (out of five)

In author order for lack of any other ranking:

2. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

3. Anything by Dostoyevsky

4. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

5. Anything by Elmore Leonard

6. 1984 by George Orwell

7. A Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling

8. Henry V by William Shakespeare

9. Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

10. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The stories are delicately written, in a range of styles and with unnerving realism and precision - it is easy to imagine Barnes sweating for hours over a single sentence.

But for all that, it didn't do anything for me. I can recognise that the stories are good, but I ended the book no richer than when I started. This is often the case with me when I read short stories. There have only ever been two exceptions - Kate Atkinson's Not the End of the World and Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which is almost a novel.

Perhaps I am just not wired to enjoy short stories, or not smart enough. But then there are those two exceptions. Shrug.

So although I didn't especially enjoy this book, I am not saying that I don't recommend it.

Three stars (out of five)

...is one of my favourite authors. At the risk of a simplistic stereotype, he is a very french writer. His novels have a recurrent theme - Life's a bitch and then you die. He would call it realism. He might have a point.

Both characters are tragic, but Houellebecq finds comedy in tragedy, and a novel which is sad from start to finish has enough levity to soften its blow.

As an observer of humanity, of the human condition, Houllebecq is second to none. And he also makes a compelling pervert. There is more filth in his books that the average porn novel. Although, conversely, it makes a poor advert for sex. It never satisfies, and only adds to a lack of self-worth. See? Typically french.

An A to Z written by Houellebecq was published in the yesterday's Guardian, and it contained several gems:

Depression

This is the archetypal modern disease - hysteria is over. Everyone will end up prone to depression after a certain age. There's not really anything you can do about it because while the demands people make of their lives are going to go on growing, their ability to achieve them won't. There may be a chemical solution.

The advantage is that depressives can often be extremely funny. There's nothing like a good depressive for having a humorous and perceptive take on the world. I am very fond of the depressive narrator as a character. Perhaps too much so.

Femme (Woman)

My problems with women are not going to get any better. Women often find it difficult to accept pure negativity, and the fact that I have more and more female readers creates an insidious pressure to be more positive. Rather disconsolate women often ask me: "Do you really find life that disappointing?" I have to reply that I do, I don't like life, I don't like the way it's organised. The fact that a heartbreaking read can be deeply heartening is an argument that women sometimes come to understand but not always. Sometimes they want something simpler.

Nothingness

My typical narrator is often in the position of zigzagging between holes of nothingness. And strangely enough, he doesn't fall in. In practical terms, in life, I get by pretty well with nothingness. I can handle it, it doesn't frighten me.

Q / Cul (Sex)

People often say there's too much sex in my books. I don't feel there is. I've tried to understand why people get this impression. It's probably because in my books sex is treated or happens in an inappropriate way. The jump-cut style gives this impression: there's no preparation, sex happens a bit suddenly. But I think it's the fact that it's unsuccessful sex that has shocked people a lot. The impression of obscenity is much stronger with a scene of unsuccessful sex. And even so, I haven't gone that far: a few inadequate erections, but no scenes of real vaginal dryness. I could have made it even more unsuccessful. I could describe it in a totally disastrous way if I wanted to. And if people annoy me, I will!

Religion

I still think religion is needed. A society can't work without it. This is one of the roots of my pessimism: the impossibility of having a religion, given the state of our knowledge.

As well as being entertained by Henry and Rio, I also occasionally listen to internet music streams.

My current source of profound sounds is totallyradio.com which hosts weekly and daily radio shows which are available for free while they are current (typically for a week), and then available in an extensive archive for paying customers.

I am prompted to post about it by this week's Solid Steel show which is a scorcher. Solid Steel is an eclectic, slightly downtempo show that has no bounds to its range, and while hugely varied manages to flow smoother indian head massage.

The scorcher in question is Solid Steel 9-Sep-05 and should be on free play for another day and a half from time of writing. Tune in.

I am his second owner, making him either second-hand or vintage, depending on your spin, and is a 2nd Gen 10Gb job.

Now he pauses for a second every 5-10 seconds, which doesn't do much for the flow of the tunage. I have tried both traditional and alternative medicine but it looks like he has had his chips.

Thankfully, I have a second mp3 player, a 5Gb Rio Carbon. This is like when you have an old dog and you get a younger one. Outwardly this is done to keep the old dog company, but inwardly it is to reduce the pain when the old hound goes to the big cosy basket in the sky.

Henry and Rio have transformed my listening habits over the last few months. I used to have several boxes of old CDs in my loft. Now I have several boxes of old CDs in my loft, but I have ripped them all at 256k onto an external hard disk.

Henry holds dance mixes, including a prodigious amount of Deep Dish, while Rio takes care of downtempo electronica, jazz and old school indie. This seems arse about face - the old duffer should be home to jazz, but anyway Rio will now need to maintain a sample of both while I decide what to do about a sudden decrease in capacity.

Plan A for Henry is to freecycle him. I figure he will be useful to someone for spares. Plan B is to bury him with full honours, although that might not constitute an ecological disposal.

Plan C is a new life as a paperweight.

Rest peacefully Henry.

I am also troubled by the earn/spend and borrow/spend society we seem to be in. If you work harder to earn more, but then spend all of the extra money, aren't you no better off? And if you borrow to spend, doesn't that mean you are now beholden to others, working for their benefit not your own?

Thankfully I have a friend on Tom Hodgkinson, and How to be Idle is not so much a book as a lifestyle manual.

Not that I am ready to take the plunge into the independent freelance life of the idler but at least I now know that my idling has solid foundations, a noble goal and some august companions, from Samuel Johnson to Keats.

Hodgkinson writes as a visionary looking not to convert, but just looking for fellow travellers. He explains rather than hectors and draws widely from history and the writings of idler heroes. He proves, rather too easily, that idling was the natural order until the industrial revolution ruined things for everyone.

And how can you not like a book with chapters called 'Waking up is hard to do' and 'Skiving for pleasure and profit'?

Five stars (out of five)

The aforegoing notwithstanding, I have just increased my average syllables per word. Ha, ha, indeed, ha.

Well no, what I was going to say is that despite my bile at the best painting in Britain nonsense, I was above averagely interested in the Booker prize shortlist announced today.

Not that I care who wins - any selection is arbitrary and more importantly I have not read any eligible novels.

I only read paperbacks (I have weak wrists and small pockets) and the Booker is for hardbacks, or more specifically for "full-length novels with scheduled publication dates between 1 October 2004 and 30 September 2005", meaning that I will not get to read them until sometime next year.

So my interest in the Booker is as an introduction to authors that I might not otherwise discover. The shortlist, combined with Amazon's customer reviews and 'people who liked this also liked...' steers me towards one or two treasures each year.

I will be reading Julian Barnes' effort anyway, since me and him get along quite well, and hopefully one of the remaining five authors will become a new-found friend.

Henry Nagel is a bitter 60 year-old. He didn't become bitter - he was always that way. Bitter at the fortune of others, at their perceived breaks in life, and always caught up on events from his childhood that didn't so much shape him as enslave him.

Out of the blue Henry inherits an apartment in St John's Wood, with its source hidden behind a firm of solicitors. He meets Lachlan, an equally bitter neighbour, and Moira, a waitress that seems to like him for who he is. Henry's life might be taking a turn for the better. Not that Henry accepts good fortune gracefully - it is not easy to skip with joy when you carry tons of emotional baggage.

But some gift horses wait patiently while you look them in the mouth, and perhaps, after all these years, could this be the making of Henry?

Five stars (out of five)

Joe, a popular-science writer, takes his partner Clarissa on a picnic in the Oxfordshire countryside, but the planned blissful afternoon is shattered by a ballooning accident.

Joe joins several other bystanders in rushing to the stricken balloon, but tragedy cannot be averted. Jed, one of the other men, urges Joe to pray in the aftermath, and Joe, the rationalist, feels embarassment and discomfort in refusing.

A traumatic and troubling day, but as Joe lies in bed that night he receives a phone call from Jed, who says "I love you."

What follows is part psychological thriller, part exploration of love and humanity. Joe struggles to fit Jed into his rational world where everything can be broken down like a machine, and Clarissa is the main casualty of his confusion.

Enduring Love somehow manages to be an addictive page-turner and a piece of touching and thought-provoking literature, and is highly recommended.

5 stars (out of 5)

Transmission follows three separate, and only tenuously linked, characters - Arjun the Indian programmer, Guy the English marketing consultant and Leela the Bollywood actress.

We start with a computer virus released into the wild and then learn the backstory of Arjun, who we (safely) assume was behind the virus. He moves from India to California, to the land of milk and honey. But nothing is ever as good as it first seems and Arjun becomes embittered by corporate America.

Guy runs the Tomorrow* marketing consultancy. He is something of a charicature - all cliches, excessive optimism and dotcom bullshit. His grip on his business, and his life, is increasingly illusory as the investors start to chase results.

Leela is a packaged product of the movie industry, dominated by her mother and uncomfortable in the limelight. Having her image as the centrepiece of a worldwide virus affects her deeply, while others suggest it was all a marketing stunt.

The book is well written, and while the disparate threads make it a little disjointed, they do gradually mesh and successfully deliver their underlying message - that everyone is owned by others, and no-one is in control of their lives.

The ending is deliciously ambiguous. Not to everyones taste, but enough for me to consider 5 stars. However, it falls short due to a slight lack of polish

4 stars (out of 5)