Good review Andrew.I picked up Cats cradle and Galápagos while at the Hay book festival a few weeks ago. I have just finished Galápagos, a strange book indeed(I'll do a review later). Looking forward to Cats Cradle, which I will start tonight.

Well I've been back on non-fiction recently, with Voodoo Histories: How conspiracy theory has shaped modern history by David Aaronovitch, a book which I felt didn't quite deliver all that it could have done. It does go through some of the most significant conspiracy theories of the past 120 or so years, and covers them in some detail, but it never quite engages.

It falls at the first hurdle by trying to go with a chronological structure, so it starts with the late 19th/early 20th century theories about Jewish cabals dominating the world, as laid down in The protocols of the elders of Zion. It was undoubtedly a huge conspiracy theory, and one which Aaronovitch has no problems debunking and it did, almost certainly, have a major effect on modern history. However, it's no longer a popular conspiracy theory and, thus, makes a pretty staid start to the book.

Aaronovitch moves on to the show-trials of Stalin's Russia, which attempted to pass off the pain of the USSR's rapid move from an agrarian economy to an industrial one as the work of an army of Trotskyist conspirators and saboteurs. While, again, this was undoubtedly of historical significance it's not that sexy a story any more. It also, bizarrely, seems to be more of a case of a conspiracy theory going right. The Soviet government did hoodwink its own people, and most of the Western world, into believing that Trotsky commanded a vast army of communists-turned-fascists, and it was only patient detective work by a few people who refused to swallow the government line that exposed the show trials for what they were.

From there the ground covered is more familiar - FDR's knowledge/planning of Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination ... and so on, right through to the 9/11 truthers, the death of Dr David Kelly and the complete non-starter conspiracy theory of where Barack Obama was born. Although this ground is more familiar it's less obvious how the conspiracy theories, as distinct from the events themselves, changed modern history. Aaronovitch debunks with glee, but needs to put in a little more spadework to show what the bunk amounted to, other than a bit of unnecessary government spending on public inquiries.

This book is at its best when its looking at who starts conspiracy theories, who believes them (i.e. insignificant lay-persons who delight in having the intelligence to see the truth, unlike the stupid sheep around them) and how theorists pick apart tiny inconsistencies in plausible stories to show how they must indicate massively unlikely events. However, on a lot of other levels it fails. It's not a comprehensive list of modern conspiracy theories (no mention of the moon-landings, for example), nor is it a full debunking of every aspect of any one of the theories it does devote time to.

Falling between these stools it becomes a bit too deep for casual, light-hearted perusal, but not a full in-depth investigation of any one theory. It's not a bad book, but it is a struggle at times and, given the self-contained nature of the chapters, it might be best to just read up on the theories which intrigue you personally.

Sounds interesting. I love conspiracy theorists, they are just great people to tie up in their own logic. The thing is, a lot of the time, their theories are actually based on something real, but they really don't like it when you present them with this truth. I find it intriguing how they so easily debunk real evidence and accept hearsay with gay abandon.

Anyway, this is quite interesting.

To keep the thread on track, I'm currently reading "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson.

I've only ever read "Notes from a Small Island", and didn't find it as side-splittingly funny as was commented on the back cover, so my initial reaction was "Oh... him" when my girlfriend offered me the book.

However... this book is fascinating. If you're into etymology and the history of language, it's brilliant!

I was never that struck by Mother Tongue, but if you like his serious stuff and language then Made in America is absolutely brilliant.

Reading the Bone Hunter by Tom Holland at the moment. He uses bigger words than Sam Bourne, and hopefully knows how to produce a better and less predictable ending than I experienced reading 'The Last Testament'

These books don't really need much of a review. They are just staple 'Boys Own Adventures'. Easily read, easily forgotten. Though that is maybe a little bit unfair to The Bone Hunter.

Anyway I think Slavoj Zizek’s 'Living in the End Times' will be my holiday read, if/when I ever get around to booking somewhere.

As is The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg.

I'm still ploughing through the Millennium Trilogy. And I like it. There, I've said it.

I love the way all the protagonists are so Swedish. Everyone is in a love-triangle relationship or has sex with colleagues or is gay and it's completely cool and they have summer cabins in places with unpronounceable names.

... return of the book review thread.

(Mods, feel free to merge into the last thread. If it still exists, and you can find it ... hang on, haven't we gone into the open credits of The A-Team here?)

Anyway, I digress.

More than quarter of a century ago my parents, being middle-class to the core, discovered gíte holidays in rural France. To a young lad, such as myself, these holidays had many downsides - being stuck in the middle of nowhere for 2 weeks, too young to drink wine, surrounded by non-English speakers, no amusement parks, etc.

One of these downsides was the 2 day drive from North-East England to central France, trapped in the car with my younger brother and my parents (who both smoked).

For one such journey (in, I presume, 1984) I was instructed to buy a book to read in the car. My memory is of making a selection from a low shelf in a shop that wasn't really a book shop, perhaps a newsagents or a motorway service station. The selected book was not one I'd heard of and was written by an author whose name was entirely unfamiliar to me, so it must have been a near random choice - although, as it turned out, one which probably influenced my life to a greater degree than any other book I've ever bought.

When it comes to my favourite books I enjoy them, but I don't really connect with them on an emotional level. I am not Winston Smith, tortured physically, emotionally and intellectually into accepting the repressive state, and I am not Yossarian, whose madness is the only rational response to the insanity that surrounds him, but the book I bought back in 1984 was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend - and there was a protagonist I could relate to. I was 12.

In the 27 years since then I have grown up with 'Moley'. The first books were daring - discussing topics that I couldn't talk about with my parents; sex and sexuality, a teenager's need to be an individual, but also be accepted by their peers, the creative (as opposed to the procreative) urge. The later books have always, in some way, reflected my life. The last book ([Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction) I hated, possibly because some it was too close and too cutting.

Anyway, on with the review - yesterday I bought the latest book in the series, Adrian Mole - The prostate years. I bought it, I claim, only because it was the only other book in Waterstones' "3 for 2" offer that I was interested in (having already picked up Any Human Heart by William Boyd and Why does E=MC^2 by Brian Cox).

At the end of weapons of... we left Adrian bankrupt and living with his parents, as they converted the piggery they'd bought into housing, but emotionally settled with the sister of his ex-fiancée, Daisy.

...Prostate years picks up five years later, with Adrian facing as many worries as ever. His wife no longer loves him and he may be cuckolded, his daughter is unmanageable, his parents are ageing, his employment is coming to an end, his eldest son (from a teenage tryst) is serving in Afghanistan, he still yearns for his first sweetheart, Pandora, and, on top of all of this, he's battling prostate cancer. He's the same age as I am now.

There are a lot of thing I didn't like about this book; I don't think that Townsend adding, with the benefit of hindsight, Adrian's comments showing amazing lack of foresight is particularly funny/clever, the letters penned to famous people should have gone out of the window 3 or 4 books ago, some of the characters and situations ring far from true and there are a number of continuity errors, but...

... the truth is I've hardly read a thing for 6 months, but here I am posting the review of a 400+ page book the day after I bought it. I've really enjoyed this book, and it's left many loose ends to tie up. I've never laughed at the Mole books, but I have found this one far more wryly amusing than any of the others. It's well plotted, although it develops, rather than concludes a number of storylines. I suppose that in the history of one character that is inevitable. I think that I just want some things to be finally sorted, perhaps in the hope that a happy ending for Adrian means a lot to many 40ish people like myself.

I'm moving straight onto Boyd's Any human heart (also about a diarist and frustrated novelist with many loves, funnily enough), but I think this Mole book will stick with me for a while. As with earlier Harry Potter reviews I suppose that if you haven't read the books so far you won't start here, but if you've never missed one then you won't make an exception based on this review. However, I have to say, Ms. Townsend, why did you bring Brett back? He wasn't missed when he vanished from the story 20 years ago, and his re-insertion here was gauche and unnecessary.

Wow, more Mole! I'm off to buy it now! I'm reading "the night shift" by Stephen King, excellent short stories, one of those addictive books you read perhaps more than you should per night because you're enjoying it.

I read the original Mole when it came out, and found it amusing. However as a right winger I found Susan Townsend@s constant left wing bias tiring ( I was about 20 at the time, perhaps on a revisit I may be a bit more open minded, though I doubt it).

I've been reading some Stephen Leather, I find his novels well constructed, with his characters well developed and likeable even when "baddies", though he never makes them deserving of unqualified sympathy. His novels are full of action, without his heroes being able to achieve superhuman feats, or being without their own character faults. I won't attempt to write a review, but I would recommend his books (having not read all of them). Hungry Ghost, Solitary Man and Tango One are all good reads (particularly Hungry Ghost).

Merged, Andrew.

Never could stand Mole, myself.

Any Human Heart in its version for the small screen I thought was a tour de force with breathtaking performances from the cast. One couldn't not give a special mention to Jim Broadbent who hardly needed to utter a word to convey his thoughts. The screenplay was done and kept tabs on by William Boyd himself, something I would liken to a composer rearranging one of their orchestral works for piano 4-hands rather than a third party doing it later on.
So good luck with the book Andrew.

As Jim says the opening chapters of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first of the Millenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, are heavy-going but as the story unfolds there is a gradual release of uncanny magnetism which makes it almost impossible to put to one side. I have now completed the second book, The Girl who Played with Fire, that oddly enough had a slow patch toward the middle. With the benefit of hindsight I would describe it as the calm before the storm, that is the final volume, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest that starts off with a bang and just keeps running. Gripping stuff.
Major issues are about violence toward women backed by statistics collected particularly in Sweden, government conspiracy, computer-hacking and a gentle extended learn-all-about-Sweden/Stockholm geography lesson. All wrapped up in two main characters one of whom is a made-acceptable philanderer with oddly cosy relationships and the other.....The Girl!
There is an interesting article about Larsson and his life-time partner here click
that explains their decision not to get married was to do with the need to keep identity and address as private as possible for fear of reprisals from factions upset by his in-depth sleuthing.
As Proccy is reading this atm I will divulge no more, but have no hesitation in recommending this cracking set.

For those that can't be arsed to read, I'd recommend audiobooks from Audible.co.uk. For 15 quid a month, you can download 2 books. And you can end it when you like.

I've been through the Millenium Triology (above) which is fun (and read by a Swede so you can get the names pronounced properly )

I'm currently listening to What I Talk About When I Talk About Running which is different and interesting.

Listened to The Fry Chronicles which is read by Fry himself and is good (voted Audiobook of the Year)

Ok MRS can you do a phonetic for Blomkvist [a main character in TGWTDT] for me? I keep getting my beard in knots attempting to say it.

good write up Edinburgh - i'm in the middle of volume 2 now so keep schtum please

ps i'm not a slow reader, just get limited time

Bloom quist

(said in a Swedish-style accent)

How people cope with the street names, I have no idea - they sound very complicated

Having a quiet night in reading it now (helped by a rather nice rioja).

I nearly didn't watch past the first part of the TV programme, because I found the whole thing too familiar. It seemed to have echoes of too many other things I'd seen or read. I only watched the 2nd part because there was nothing else on, although I'm very glad I did as it represented a real turning point in the story. Once Logan stopped flouncing around Europe, meeting real life famous people and the programme became his story it was far more moving and interesting.

So far the book's going well, although he hasn't even reached Oxford yet (which ISTR is where the TV programme started).

Quite right, and if it wasn't for Mrs Ed's better judgement against my grudging "oh I don't really fancy watching this, committing myself to four parts" I would have missed it too.

I am an avid Boyd fan, so I read Any Human Heart when it came out. I can't now remember anything about it (for those who know me, apologies for this unnecessary point), except that I enjoyed it more than The Blue Afternoon and less than Armadillo.

I finished the Larsson trilogy with the feeling that if there was a fourth book I wouldn't buy it. I loved reading it, but enough is enough.

Adrian Mole never got me at all. Or possibly the other way around, but in recent years I've sort of wished that I did like it.

I recently read Deadheads by Reginald Hill. I can't avoid reading anything by him, especially the Dalziel and Pascoe novels. For anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing the TV version, please strike it from your mind and read one of the books. The word travesty springs to mind (and not in the French sense).

Before that I was trying to read an autobiography of Salman Ahmad, called Rock n Roll Jihad. Ahmad is a Pakistani rockstar of Bono-like fame across the subcontinent (30 million album sales) and recently he worked on a record in aid of the Pakistan flood victims with Peter Gabriel (called Open Your Eyes, it is as squirm-inducing as most charity records). Unfortunately I haven't completely got to grips with the book, so I've moved on via a reasonably interesting Brighton-set police thriller by Peter James (there's a series about copper Roy Grace) to A Habit of Dying, by David J Wiseman. This is a novel that combines a murder mystery with family history research. I think it's more likely to appeal generally to my parents' generation - both my folks are mad-keen amateur genealogists, but I'm enjoying it so far. I should add that the author is my Father-in-Law, so I might not be entirely unbiased in my assessment of it.

Better late than.......... ta for that, so the V is a W, the opposite of German.

Yup - I had Danish au pairs when I was a teenager (where am I going with this...... ah yes)

Vest is the opposite of east and
West is something you wear under your shirt

Is this a sort of pastry?


Just to keep this on topic, the third vol. of the Millenium Trilogy, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is still going strong at p.450 [only another 300 to go] without letting up. New characters appear all of a sudden to add to the intricacy and are described in such detail, almost laboriously that it's difficult not to be left with an indelible impression of each - more than I can say for the constant referrals to street names and districts which go in one ear and out of t'other.

I don't think I would kill for yet another of these stories even though there is rumour of one. Finishing these three is easily encroaching into my OCD area.

Here we are again and, as promised, I moved from Adrian Mole to Any Human Heart by William Boyd.

This book tells story of life of Logan Mountstuart through his sporadic journals, which document his personal journey through the 20th century.

Logan has a successful early life, moving from public school to Oxford university, the heir to a fortune left by his father. He is a published author and married to an earl's daughter by the time he is in his mid-20s. Stiffled by the sedate Norfolk life of the landed gentry he begins an affair with a BBC producer, Freya, eventually marrying her after a messy divorce.

During the war he is assigned to keep an eye on the Duke of Windsor (the title given to Edward VIII after his abdication) in the Bahamas, but after refusing to co-operate in framing an innocent man for murder he is given a new assignment in Switzerland trying to catch high-ranking Nazis trying to flee to South America. In Switzerland he is captured, treated as a spy and kept in solitary confignment for two years.

Emerging at the end of the war he discovers that his beloved Freya had thought him dead and re-married and then later been killed by a V-2 bomb.

After a long period of mourning he emerges as an art dealer in New York, working for his school-friend, Ben Leeping. He is forced to leave New York in a hurry after beginning a sexual relationship with a girl who turns out to be 16 (thereby making him guilty of statutory rape).

Taking up a teaching post in Nigeria he reports on the Biafran war, before being forced to retire and returning to his basement flat in London and a life of poverty (his family fortune having been lost in the 1929 stock market crash). To make ends meet he becomes a newspaper seller for a small anti-fascist group, who turn out to be a Baader-Meinhof cell. After nearly being implicated in a plot to smuggle explosives into England Logan retires to a run-down property in rural France, bequeathed to him by an old acquaintance, to see out his days writing his great unpublished novel, Octet.

There journals have been edited by an unnamed compiler, who helpfully adds historical and biographical information and ties off a few (although not many) storylines.

I read this book because I'd enjoyed the Channel 4 adaptation and the novel adds a great deal of depth. Logan meets a number of famous writers and artists during the course of his life and the book makes these relationships seem more real, rather than just randomly inserted pop(?) culture references.

The reader is left with a dazzling picture of a human life, the saddness of an old man who has lost almost everything (his one true love killed, his fortune lost, predeceased by both of his children and his two life-long friends), but who continues to cling to the memory of the years of happiness he had. The journals unflinchingly portray a man who is far from perfect and their candor draws you in and makes you care deeply for Logan.

I'll be seeking out some more of Boyd's novels, as he's clearly an author of skill and intelligence who manages to bring the whole of 20th century history down to the size of one man. Recommended without reservation.

Excellent review, Andrew. I love William Boyd and have read all his fiction (I think!). Some I've enjoyed more than others but overall I'd have to say he's one of my very favourite authors. If you haven't read Brazzaville Beach, I'd recommend it most highly.

It just so happens I've got to surf over to Amazon this weekend to buy a 40th birthday present for a friend, so it may be that a couple more Boyd books slip into my shopping basket.

Hmmm, I see there's a Jonathan Coe book I don't have as well. This could be an expensive present.

Yes, good stuff, and reassuring to hear that you have no gripes about the transition from script to screen.

Slight change of tack here: has anyone read The Great Right Hope by Mark Jackman?
The premise looks like it could be really funny or really dreadful.

Sounds awful - even getting through the description was wearing.

I've just finished Agent Zigzag by Ben McIntyre. It's the true story of the most extraordinary double agent of World War Two. Eddie Chapman is a conman and thief from the Northeast, who becomes an early adopter of gelignite and uses his new-found wealth to mix with the glamorous side of the late 1930's London underworld. For various reasons he ends up in prison in Jersey, which in turn is invaded by the Nazis. With nothing to lose (certainly not any loyalty to Britain), he volunteers to spy for Germany. Or does he?
Quite astonishing tale of cross and double cross (or XX as it's known in Intelligence circles), written with access to National Archive information specially released and some secret documents revealed just for the author. Chapman is a hugely flawed scoundrel with no moral compass, and yet compelling.
Thoroughly recommended as a ripping yarn, what? Standard!

I've now moved on to Overdrive, by Clyde Brolin. This is a collection of interviews with (mainly) Formula 1 drivers, about their experiences of being in "the zone", the prime example of which was Ayrton Senna's qualifying performance at Monaco in 1988. Seems a fairly interesting collection of anecdotes so far...

Since I last posted here I've mainly been reading Why does E=mc^2 (and why should we care) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.

Einstein's equation E=mc^2 is probably the most famous one in all of science, known to educated people the world over. Most of us can even expand it out to explain that E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light, but this book takes on the task of getting the reader to understand where this equation came from and how Einstein came up with it.

The book, like Einstein, starts with Galileo's theory of relativity, which says that if you are in constant motion (i.e. not accelerating or decelerating) there is no way to tell if you are moving or at rest without reference to an external point and, even then, you can not say whether you are moving and the external point is stationary or vice-versa. Einstein was also trying to explain the results of the Michelson-Morely experiment, which showed that all observers measure the same speed of light, irrespective of their movement in space.

Initially this book sets off on a well-worn popular science path of explaining the thought experiments that Einstein devised, using light clocks on moving trains to reach the conclusion that time is not universal and depends upon the subject's movement in space.

From this kicking off point, which is presented more as a reminder than a serious attempt to teach the reader something new, it heads off into explaining how this discovery led Einstein to formulate the idea of 4 dimensional space-time, where although different observers may measure different distances and timings for events they will all agree on an invariant amount of movement through space-time. From here the first half of the book takes the reader through each of the steps required to derive the equation which has become short-hand for 'science', E=mc^2.

The book then dots around a little - it explores the implications of this equation, it looks at quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity, which explains gravity and how it warps space-time.

Right off the bat I should say that this book is a hard read. I can whiz through something like A Brief History of Time without any problems, but with this I had to keep going back, re-reading paragraphs and, on occasion, skip back whole chapters to remind myself what had gone before. The maths isn't particularly difficult of itself, but keeping up with what it's describing can be tricky. Ultimately it's worth it, though, because my the end of the book even the lay-reader, such as myself (I got a B in 'O' level physics nearly quarter of a century ago) can feel that they've followed in Einstein's footsteps and can really understand not only the meaning, but also the implications of E=mc^2.

If I had to pick fault I'd say that the book glosses over a couple of assumptions, while I'm sure they're well understood by physicists it did feel like the book could have done with a few hundred extra words to explain an assumption. As an example, it would be nice to understand why Einstein thought that there must be an invariant distance in space-time. In a couple of places the authors also suggest that you skip over the maths if you're not comfortable with it, which I'd say is bad advice - this is very much a book where you have to read and understand everything if you're to keep up in later chapters.

On the whole, however, this is an excellent book for anybody who wants something a bit more challenging than the usual popular science version of relativity and who is willing to put in the time to follow the logic. It's not a book that everybody will love, but I know it's going to be one that I read and re-read, even if only to understand the chapter on bloody Fenyman diagrams