Well I've had little time for reading (or posting) recently, but I have made it half-way through Brighton Rock and, so far, I'm quite enjoying it.

However, this week I've been on holiday, visiting the in-laws in Somerset and the law demands that when on holiday you read something crap, but entertaining - and no five words in the whole of literature can better denote a novel fitting that description than the cover legend, "Now a major motion picture".

Hence I found myself taking on Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (no, not that David Mitchell - a different one), which actually turned out to be a bit of a gem of a book.

Or, rather, 6 books. The novel is structured like an onion, with 5 stories split into 2, the first half of each ending at a critical moment in the plot, and a centrepiece story, told in completeness and then succeeded by the 2nd half of each of the other stories.

So the opening and closing story is that of an American notary's journal of his travels in the Pacific during the 19th century. The published form of the first half of this journal is then read in the 2nd story by an impoverished and disinherited young English composer in 1931, who describes his adventures travelling Europe in search of a benefactor in a series of letters to his Cambridge friend and lover. Forty years later the death of the correspondent sends a cub reporter into a life-threatening hunt for a report he wrote, describing major safety failings at a newly opened nuclear plant. In turn her story becomes the first half of a novel sent to a vanity publisher, trapped in a nursing home against his will. His adventures become an old movie, seen by the protagonist of the 5th story, a clone created to serve for life in a fast-food restaurant, in a darkly dystopian future Korea, run by corporations. What she discovers and writes about her society survives not only her own short life, but the fall of mankind, to become the religion of a peaceful group of farmers living the iron-age existence that follows the collapse of civilisation in the final story.

There is a suggestion that we're seeing the journey of the same soul through the ages in these stories, but also each story, in some way, suggests that the preceding one was fictional. There are a number of recurring themes - ascent and descent, dominion of the strong over the weak, the birth and death of political ideologies and the changing nature of language.

Obviously a book like this lives and dies on how well the author pulls off the trick structure, and Mitchell does a superb job. The changing narrative voice is convincing, each story stands well in isolation (except maybe the 2nd, which seems quite thematically different to the rest, and is vaguely unsatisfying) and spotting the linking elements is enjoyable.

If I had a criticism it would be that none of the stories is particularly new in its own right, and several times they felt so familiar I was almost convinced I'd read the book before, but overall it works very well indeed.

So, it turned out to be not lightweight crap at all, but actually a fairly challenging and very enjoyable read, although I can only imagine what a god-awful mess they'll have made of the film

One by an author commonly thought of as science fiction, but this, somehow, isn't... China Mieville, "The City and The City"

Imagine a place in the back of the beyond of Europe where two city-states share the same physical location. Some streets belong to one, some to the other, some are separated as finely as individual houses or trees in a park with different branches in each city.

People simply don't see members of the other state; they're trained from birth not to, but just in case, there's a secret oversight agency - Breach - to make sure.

And there's a body which appears to have been killed in one city and dumped in the other...

Interesting, thought-provoking, evocative, and a damn good thriller on top of it all.

Recommended.

Now all I need is one of you guy's to review the Kindle version of my book > The Lawn Guide

Go on, it's the right time of year

Looks thoroughly professional, Patch, but you'd be hard pushed to find someone less well qualified than me to judge the content! I hope it goes well.

Well this thread seems to have fallen in abeyance again, so ...

Last week I read a book with no wizards in at all!!! It was called The Casual Vacancy and it was written by a little-known children's author, called J K Rowling.

The book opens with the sudden death of well-liked Parish councilor Barry Fairbrother and then watches the news of his death filter into his home town of Pagford, sending it into a death-spiral.

The conservative (small 'c') members of the council see it as their opportunity to replace Barry with somebody who will not stand in the way of them redrawing the parish boundaries so that The Fields, the council sink estate they were lumbered with in the 60s, will fall under the remit of their neighbouring city, Yarvil.

Meanwhile, Barry's friends try to hold the seat, to keep The Fields part of Pagford and also to extend the lease for the parish building that houses the local addiction clinic.

This polite, political battle also has a sweeping effect on five of the local children; Andrew (scared that his father's candidacy for the position may expose to the world what an uncouth, abusive bully he is), Fats (virtually a sociopath, driven by his hatred for his terrified father), Gaia (who longs to leave Pagford behind and return to London), Sukhvinder (daughter of the local GP and silent victim of Fats' bullying) and Krystal (vicious and foul-mouthed daughter of a local heroin addict and prostitute).

What's immediately striking about this book is how utterly unlikeable all of the characters are. The conservative elements of the council are little Englanders; small-minded, Mail reading curtain twitchers and those who stand against them do so because they either believe it's what Barry would have wanted or for their own ulterior motives.

The book's emotional heart is in Krystal; initially we see her only as a problem, she truants, she smokes, drinks, swears, hits other children (knocking teeth out in the process) and even tries to get herself pregnant in order to get a council house. However, she's pretty much the only virtuous character in the novel, and we also get to see her be the only carer for her 3-year-old brother, try to get mother off heroin and see that Barry Fairbrother was the one adult who actually understood her and believed in her.

In true Harry Potter style a magic wand is waved and Krystal is transported out of the slums and becomes a princess. Except that doesn't happen. Not even a little bit. None of the characters have a happy ending, and Krystal's story is utterly bleak.

The Casual Vacancy is actually a really good book, and Rowling quite deftly uses the descent into the pit of depression at the end to make some excellent points about the nature of our society, but (and it's a big but) like the social issues that this book addresses it doesn't attempt to wrap them all up neatly and fix them, you have to be prepared to leave a lot of the stories unresolved by the final page.

All in, though, this is great first adult book and one that's really raised my opinion of her as an author.

So, just me reading this month, then? Shame, as it's nice to sit out of an evening in this weather and take in a book (and a cheeky glass of wine).

Which is what I've been doing with The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

Our unnamed narrator, in his early 40s, finds himself detouring to his childhood home as he travels between a funeral and its wake. Although the house he lived in as a boy is long gone a farm at the end of the lane is still there and a visit there triggers his recollection of a strange series of events that took place when he was 7.

The chain of events kicks off when his family's lodger steals his dad's car to use to commit suicide, but, as this is Gaiman, rapidly expands to take in other worlds, magic and malevolent creatures which threaten our young narrator's life.

As always Gaiman's creations are rich in imagination and the resulting story is one that will please adults and older children alike, although it's probably a little too intense for under-12s.

So tired at this time of year, no chance to read before falling into a nighttime coma. I'm stuck halfway through the latest William Boyd... Looking forward to a few days off and hopefully Iain Banks' final work.

Well, a week off camping in (surprisingly) sunny Brittany gave me the opportunity to finish Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd.

Boyd is one of my favourite authors and although it took me a while to get into this story, that was more due to my own lack of reading time than the book itself.

The improbably-named Lysander Rief is a slightly foppish British actor, taking time out in 1913 Vienna from his career and his engagement to seek treatment for an intimate performance problem. He is a convert to the new science of psychoanalysis and Freud's home city provides plenty of options.
From this rather staid beginning, things pick up speed after an affair ends badly and the world is plunged into war. Although some parts are a little clunky, or even contrived, I enjoyed it greatly and ended up trying hard not to finish the last 50 pages, knowing it would mean the end of the story.

I'm now starting Small Wars Permitting, the memoirs of War Correspondent Christina Lamb. This promises to be a rather more sobering take on conflict, though the writing style is so-far very readable...

Nobody read anything since September last year?! Me neither. However I have just completed a (for me) unusual double: two non-fiction works in a row.

The first is a tale most people of a certain age/background are aware of - if not in depth.

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre is the fullest account yet of the WWII "deception" to put fake secret documents concerning Allied plans to invade Southern Europe in front of the German High Command by the apparently unfortunate death in a plane crash of a courier over the Mediterranean.

The conception, development, implementation and aftermath of the operation are covered in thorough, yet very readable, detail. New information emerges, notably about the rather inaccurate description of how Glyndwr Michael and his family were treated in the previous account.

The author's previous work Agent Zigzag was also a ripping yarn of wartime derring-do and also worth a look.

The second book was a lot more frivolous and less satisfying. I Am The Secret Footballer is the result of a Guardian column written anonymously by a professional player in the English game*, revealing what life for those at the sharp end of the Beautiful Game is really like. Sorry for the cliché, but that is basically what the book is. Try as I might, I couldn't find myself surprised that footballers earn a lot (but wouldn't you, given the chance?), are cynical, sometimes don't get on with their managers, sometimes do get on with women they aren't supposed to and frequently behave like any teenager with minimal responsibilities and a million quid would.
The only bits that were vaguely redeeming were our masked hero's genuine disgust at the racism that still besmirched the sport, and his reasonably frank description of his battle with depression. Because it was serialised in the Grauniad, I think we are supposed to be impressed that a footballer brought up on a council estate can appreciate art, literature and fine wine. I'm afraid I want a bit more than that before I start to empathise.
*It's Dave Kitson, apparently.

I've just got out of the habit of reviewing!

Miles Jupp - Fibber in the Heat. His attempts to be a journalist on England's post-Ashes tour of India in 2005/6. It would be necessary to understand cricket and its byzantine traditions, and also helps if you find the sort of gentle, whimsical humour which Miles Jupp delivers funny, but I qualify on both grounds, and it made me laugh.

Roy Hattersley - The Edwardians. Made me realise how much of the modern world was forged in those years between the death of Victoria and the start of the Great War. Everything was changing, from the role of women, the way we worked, the interaction between Government and Monarch, social structures generally, technology, Empire, you name it. Fascinating.

Rowland Wright - Vulcan 607. The story of the bombing raid on Stanley Airfield during the Falklands Conflict. Despite a ringing endorsement from Jeremy Clarkson, this was actually really good. He must have been in non-cartoon mode at the time. The book demonstrated a sort of make-do-and-mend approach where someone decided that we needed to do something that the RAF did not have the equipment or experience to do, and to do it now. Some of the snippets are breathtaking - we had not done air-air refuelling on Vulcans in years, so the RAF had removed the equipment from the planes. There were none of the probes for the connection to the tanker in RAF stocks. We resorted to going to airframes that had been donated to museums to recover the components. Amazing. In any sensible analysis bombing Stanley was insane, but it was done to send a message, and in that sense it was a total success. Hard to imagine us doing the same now.

I'm sure I've read much more than that, too.

I've just leafed through and it appears my last contribution to this was in 2010. Ooops!

Yeah, I'm sure I've read books recently that I haven't reviewed on here, but I'm blowed if I can remember which ones.

Also, I'm about to start on Godel, Escher, Bach, a book not known for being an afternoon's light reading, it could be some time before you see me back here.

Must be twenty (thirty?) years since I read GEB. I recall the library had to order it just for me and wasn't all that happy!

Agree with Mansilla about Vulcan 607 - something was done that we could barely do then and can't do now...

Recent reads chez barnacle:

Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton. An SF murder mystery set in Newcastle (and incidentally an alien planet): a well-known clone family member has been murdered, but none of the clones are missing. The way in which he has been murdered is a carbon copy of a murder on the alien planet twenty years earlier, which one of the protagonists - the only survivor of the attack - claims was done by an alien (on a planet with no animal life). She has served twenty years of a life sentence for the murder.

Nice, complex plotting with a lot going on and a slow reveal of who did what to whom... long, but recommended as is pretty much everything by Hamilton, if you're into hard SF.

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Discworld, and more of his exploration of societal change by taking things to ridiculous extremes. Competent enough but not really in the same style as his earlier work - I suspect there's a lot of editing in what he is producing of recent years. To be honest I preferred a book of his that I expected not to - Dodger - which was released last year and is set in London and seems - apart from a slight timeline glitch because he wanted to include a number of historical characters who weren't all around at the same time - to be quite accurate with the representation of mid-Victorian London. Definitely recommended.

I like that book too. An easy read for history non-fiction. Just shows how behind the times we were when the conflict started... and it was still the Cold War era when we presumably had a bigger military budget. This is why I don't like the idea or shelving air craft carriers and the planes to go with them !

I think I may have read the Ladybird version: Kurt, Maurits and Johann go for a walk.

I don't get into bed for less than Umberto Eco's Foucaults Pendulum. And even then, I prefer to read it in his native Italian.

I listened to (ok, I'm lazy) Great Britain's Great War by Jeremy Paxman

I thought it was very good - really interesting in-depth insight into the war both at the macro and micro level. The only bit that irritated me was that he seems to jump either side of the Lions Led By Donkeys argument. I certainly understood the war better than I ever have as a result of "reading" the book.

So, based on your new learning, is our beloved education secretary talking out of his bottom-hole?

Fundamentally, yes.

Right, a string of factors, (not least of which is me being on my tod for the last month) have culminated in me finishing, about 10 minutes ago, Antony Beevor's The Second World War.

This is an 800-page volume that - I hope - has now scratched my WWII itch for good.

I've long felt that this conflict (which ended 20 years before I was born; that's the length of time since Pulp Fiction was made - not that long!) has had an influence on almost every aspect of life that goes beyond its 6-year (give or take) duration.

The British Army has been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq for well over twice that long, yet when in Britain we talk about "The War", everyone knows which one we mean.
As a result, I've always had the feeling that there must be a lot more to it than Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, Monty in the desert and Band of Brothers.

There is.

This book (recognised as a pretty decent one-volume attempt at a history), covers everything from the sense of humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles that allowed the Nazi infection to germinate and thrive, the appallingly brutal Sino-Japanese War that was already in full swing before the rest of the World got involved and how it was crucial in drawing (or not) Soviet and Japanese resources away from other theatres all the way through to the petty rivalries between commanders and politicians on all sides and the repeated and shameful betrayal of promises at every level from the personal to the continental and ending up with "half of Europe enslaved as the price for liberating the other half".

I now at least feel that I have a better understanding of how the whole thing fitted together and thanks to the brilliantly readable style, I didn't become too bogged down on one front or another.

I haven't fully digested it yet, but the things that strike me immediately are the numbers: I can't assimilate another 1,000 or 50,000 or 400,000 or 2,000,000 deaths, casualties or refugees. They are just too great to take in, especially when so many are inflicted by regimes on their own people.
Secondly, few nations (in Europe, at least) got such a raw deal before, during and after the War as the Poles. They got shafted by absolutely everyone.

For anyone who wants a reasonable overview of the conflict we just can't forget, this is a pretty good attempt.