MARCH 2012

March 2012...... 10 books this month

Anna Funder – Stasiland

James Ellroy – Blood’s A Rover

Dave Zeltserman – The Caretaker Of Lorne Field

Tony Black – Truth Lies Bleeding

Nigel Marsh – Fat, Forty And Fired

George Pelecanos – The Cut

Joseph O’Neill – This Is The Life

Kevin Booth – Isiris Unveiled

Neil Cross – Luther The Calling

Dominic Streatfeild – Brainwash

I’ve read and enjoyed most of Ellroy’s work over the years. To be honest, I’ve struggled with most of his recent ones, reading more from a sense of duty or loyalty to the genius that brought the unforgettable LA novels;

L.A. Quartet

• The Black Dahlia (1987)
• The Big Nowhere (1988)
• L.A. Confidential (1990)
• White Jazz (1992

In my opinion the last few books he’s written have been a vehicle just to show us all how clever he is. I think I’ve enjoyed the ride, but I’m jumping off the Ellroy wagon now.

I’ve read all of Pelecanos’ output and I’ll stick with him, even though his last few haven’t been overly fantastic. Still an ok’ish book from him generally tops a lot of other writers.

Most of the rest were ok. Forget the Isiris book, as it’s a banned racing book designed to give punters an inside track on the devious bookmaker. Don’t think I’ll be making a fortune after reading this.

Streatfeild’s earlier Brainwash was a bit flat after last month’s History high.

Pick of the month boiled down to Neil Cross’s Luther or Anna Funder’s digging into the methods and madness of the former East German state’s secret police.

Despite my love of Luther and the iconic Idris Elba’s portrayal of him.

Book of the month is Stasiland

Blurb...........

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary "Mik Jegger" of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to "no longer to exist". Written with wit and literary flair, Stasiland provides a rivetting insight into life behind the wall.

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FEBRUARY 2012

February 2012......11 books this month,

Dave Zeltserman – Pariah

Dave Zeltserman – 21 Tales

Tom Sharpe – Riotous Assembly

Allan Guthrie – Killing Mum

Phillip Roth – The Humbling

Dominic Streatfeild – A History Of The World Since 9/11

Chip Kidd – The Cheese Monkeys

Greg Bardsley/Kieran Shea/Jedediah Ayres ed. – D*cked

Oliver Harvey/Mick Quinn – Who Ate All The Pies

Allan Guthrie – Bye Bye Baby

Bill Frey – Letters From Nam

Guthrie’s “books” were short novellas, but I’m the one keeping score here.

Chip Kidd, proves the adage never judge a book by it’s cover – this one had a great cover.

Letters From Nam..............touching and sad,

Book of the month – A History Of The World Since 9/11

Synopsis

In A History of the World Since 9/11 Dominic Streatfeild expertly combines history, biography and investigative journalism to show how a massacre on a clear September day in 2001 has touched the lives of millions of people around the world. In a series of brilliantly interlinked chapters he shows how an Afghani wedding party; and a gas station proprietor in Texas; and a planespotter in Mallorca have been affected, sometimes devastatingly, by the American response to the attacks on the Twin Towers. Streatfeild shows how the sleep of reason and good sense in successive US administrations post-9/11 has brought forth the monsters of extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, extrajudicial execution and wholesale contravention of international law. This is a work that informs as it entertains and induces outrage as it inspires.

Recommended

 

JANUARY 2012

January 2012.....9 books this month

James Ellroy – Killer On The Road

Dave Zeltserman – Julian Katz

John Warburton/Shaun Ryder – Hallelujah

Michael Connelly – Nine Dragons

George Pelecanos – The Way Home

Martin Amis – The Second Plane

William Boyd – Fascination

Graham Greene – Dr. Fischer Of Geneva

Donald Ray Pollock – Knockemstiff

Nothing stand out, Pelecanos fairly good, not his best though. Connelly – a bit of an improvement on the last couple of his I’ve read but not his best.

Amis’s Second Plane was interesting enough; essays and articles on post-911 world.

Boyd – I struggled with some of the short stories, just wasn’t interested in them.

Graham Greene was enjoyable.

 

Short stories from Pollock – the pick of the month – Knockemstiff

Blurb... Knockemstiff is a pitch-dark and often hilarious collection of stories set in the tiny Appalachian town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, a community so deprived and diminished it no longer appears on any map.

The youth of Knockemstiff grow up in the malignant shadow of their parents; raised on abuse, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, they are stunted in every possible way: emotionally, mentally, sometimes physically. They talk a lot about escape but they never so much as cross the county line.

The stories in Knockemstiff are simple and compact, blunt and brutal, but are also infused with a deep sympathy for the incapacitating loneliness of poverty, neglect and severely limited horizons.

Knockemstiff is a human, very funny and unforgettable debut from a stunning new voice in American fiction.

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2011 SUMMARY

2011 summary......

Target as ever was 100 books to be read...total I managed was 77 – a shocking failure!

Highlights....... Le Carre, Steinhauer, Zusak, Faulks, Loyd, Colfer

Lowpoints..... Donoghue, Murakami, Breslin, McLynn, Koontz

Trivia........

Longest book 672 pages - The Face - Dean Koontz

Shortest book ......... 49 pages - Tom Piccirilli – Fuckin’ Lie Down Already

August.......... 4556 pages read

March......949 pages read

DECEMBER 2011

December 2011......4 books read

John McFetridge – Swap

Michael Connelly – The Brass Verdict

Charles Cumming – Typhoon

Stephen Fry – Moab Is My Washpot 

A bit of a flat end to the year, as I got a bit disheartened at my failure to hit my target of 100 books. I was never on pace all year, though August briefly gave me a glimmer of hope, which was short-lived. I think I had to force myself to read anything this month.

McFetridge has been likened to Elmore Leonard and once I got into this I enjoyed it. I’ve read Dirty Sweet previously, and will read him again in the future.

Michael Connelly, I have enjoyed for years; voraciously gobbling up his books one after the other. I think though that my enjoyment has waned considerably with the last few. As a writer has he peaked and is he now writing as he descends the other side of his creative mountain? It seems that as his books get longer in length, my enjoyment has contracted. If I was clever enough I could probably come up with a graph linking book length with satisfaction quota, as I’m sure there’s a definite correlation between the two.  

Cumming  - a bit disappointing to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped to. Would give him another go though.

Stephen Fry divides opinion in my house. I think he’s witty, clever, entertaining and interesting. The rest of the household think he’s a knob.

His first autobiography was funny, sad, enjoyable, amusing, and a decent enough book to end the year on. Book of the month – Moab Is My Washpot.

Blurb..........

 Moab is My Washpot is in turns funny, shocking, tender, delicious, sad, lyrical, bruisingly frank and addictively readable.

Stephen Fry's bestselling memoir tells how, sent to a boarding school 200 miles from home at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love, ecstasy, carnal violation, expulsion, imprisonment, criminal conviction, probation and catastrophe to emerge, at eighteen, ready to try and face the world in which he had always felt a stranger.

When he was fifteen, he wrote this in a letter to himself, not to be read until he was twenty-five:

'Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat.'

Whether the real Stephen Fry is the man now living, or the extraordinary adolescent now dead, only you will be able to decide.

Recommended.

 

NOVEMBER 2011

November 2011.......... 6 books read

Pauline McLynn – Something For The Weekend

Jimmy Breslin – I Don’t Want To Go To Jail

John McCabe – Paper

James McClure – The Song Dog

Jake Arnott – The Long Firm

James Dodson – Final Rounds

All six of these were start-stop-start again books that previously hadn’t floated my boat.

If I was ever to write a book myself, it might be titled............I’d Rather Go To Jail In Preference To Reading Anything Else By McLynn or Breslin!

Others were ok, nothing stand out.

Book of the month for no other reason than it had a cool cover.....McClure’s Song Dog.........pre-Apartheid black and white pairing of policemen in South Africa. I think it’s the first in his series, though not the earliest written. 

OCTOBER 2011

October 2011........5 books read

Charlie Williams – Stairway To Hell

James Frey – A Million Little Pieces

Donald Westlake – The Hot Rock

David Morrell – The Fifth Profession

Malcolm Pryce – Aberystwyth Mon Amour

2 x ok, 2 x disappointing, 1 x superb

Williams and Pryce were okay, in a not annoying, but not totally satisfying way either.

Westlake’s first Dortmunder book, I had high hopes for and felt a bit let down  by the time I finished. Maybe I prefer him with his Richard Stark head on?

Morrell has written much better books than this one, unfortunately I haven’t read any of them for a while.

 

Frey’s Million Little Pieces – fact, fiction or fantasy?

Don’t really care I was totally absorbed by it.

Blurb....... James Frey wakes up on a plane, with no memory of the preceding two weeks. His face is cut and his body is covered with bruises. He has no wallet and no idea of his destination. He has abused alcohol and every drug he can lay his hands on for a decade - and he is aged only twenty-three.

What happens next is one of the most powerful and extreme stories ever told. His family takes him to a rehabilitation centre. And James Frey starts his perilous journey back to the world of the drug and alcohol-free living. His lack of self-pity is unflinching and searing.

A Million Little Pieces is a dazzling account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed. It is also the introduction of a bold and talented literary voice

Looking forward to more of him in the future.