I read a lot and a lot of genres, from classics to modern and from vampires to tear jerkers, but by golly that all sounds a load of old drivel, thankfully I have never read any of them!!

Andrew, I'm a fan of almost all Boyd's work and I really liked Ordinary Thunderstorms. As an expedition into the conventional thriller, I thought it was pretty good. Look forward to hearing what you think.

On the other hand, I stand shoulder to shoulder with JimO on Terry Pratchett.

What is this? Jims Against Pratchett?

I've been reading the Discworld novels since near the start (I'd just read the 1st one when the 3rd one came out), so they tend to be a default Christmas/birthday present for me.

OK, none of them have been great literature, but Pratchett is an entertaining author and he has produced some great characters and a few really memorable stories.

He's not to everybody's taste, of course, but then no author is.

Sorry, Andrew, I completely agree that literary taste is joyfully and proudly eclectic - I wasn't saying you shouldn't like Pratchett, just that I don't. As I mentioned earlier, for years I read every Anne Rice vampire and witch book - hardly likely to be remembered by future generations.
All literature has some merit.

Except Dan Brown, which is shit.

Yes, it's good that we can *all* find some common ground and agree that Dan Brown is shit.

Just wanted to see that again.

Having read "Snuff" I'd agree with most of Andrew's criticisms; it's not one of Pterry's best. I kept thinking of 'Unseen Acedemicals' though, even though that's not a Vimes novel.

I wonder how much of this is down to the Alzheimer's? Is this the last Discworld book?

Portofino...??

Jo Nesbo is OK holiday reading, nothing too demanding or hard work.(Having said that, holiday the other year was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist)

Best book I read recently was called "The Last Hundred Days" by Patrick McGuinness, about a British bloke living under the last gasps of the Ceaucescu regime.

Apart from that recently, I have been clogging the Kindle up with various freebies, modern and classic - you feel an obligation to finish a book you have paid for, but no such feelings if they are gratis.

Or to even start them IME Kindle, the one gadget I didn't need until I bought one.

Last time I posted in this thread I was about to start reading Ordinary Thunderstorms, but I haven't yet for two important reasons:

1. Out of the blue my wife bought me a book because it looked like the sort of thing I might enjoy and shunning it may have been detrimental to bliss within my home.

2. Skyrim.

However, I did read the book my wife bought me, which was The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. From the cover and the blurb I was expecting some sort of Chuck Palahniuk type novel, but what I actually got was an entertaining, but non-fictional, exploration of the influence of madness on the world.

Ronson, who is both an author and a journalist, takes us on his personal exploration of madness in society, starting with his investigation into a mysterious and cryptic book mailed to a few dozen leading academics and moving on to the Citizens' Commission on Human Rights (the branch of the Church of Scientology which aims to discredit psychiatry and its practitioners, often seeking to have them struck off or convicted of criminal offences).

Through the CCHR he meets "Tony", one of the central figures in a book, a man who faked insanity in order to avoid a 7 year stretch for GBH and instead found himself locked in Broadmoor for 12 years, unable to convince the doctors that he was sane.

Ronson goes on to meet Bob Hare, the Canadian psychologist responsible for the clinical checklist used to identify psychopaths, attends Hare's course on the use of the checklist and, from there, goes on to meet a number of potential and diagnosed psychopaths, from Haitian death-squad leader Toto Constant to "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap (a mutli-millionaire and corporate golden boy of the 90s, mainly because he actively enjoyed firing people, often with a smile and a quip ... "Hey, I see you got a new sports car, but do you know what you don't have? A job!) through to ex-MI5 whistle-blower David Shayler, with his firm convictions that he is the new messiah and that not only was 9/11 an inside job, but that the government used missiles disgused as planes using secret hologram technology.

A lot of this book is wrly amusing, and there are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments, but it's also a disturbing book in many ways. It forces us to acknowledge that psychopathy is real, and that there are people out there who will kill without any regret or hesitation, not because they are evil, but because they have a recognised, but untreatable, medical problem. Maybe more worryingly the qualities that mark people as psychopathic also seem to be key to driving people to the top of the corporate world.

Most worrying of all though is that by the end of the book it's hard not to feel that the Scientologists of the CCHR are on to something. A lot of psychiatry does seem incredibly hit and miss; classifying and treating 'illnesses' which probably embrace the majority of humanity, a lack of any clinical rigour in diagnosing mental illness in a lot of cases and wielding the power to incarcerate somebody indefinitely based on a checklist that classifies multi-millionaire businessmen alongside people who will murder a family with a hammer.

Overall this is a cracking read and highly recommended for anybody who wants to lift the lid on a strange and largely hidden world. It's well written, balanced, fun and though-provoking. What more could you want from a book?

I've been on the Glen Duncan again...

I recently read an interview with him in which he said that his foray into the world of Lycanthropy is a deliberate ploy to do something "more commercial". He's writing a werewolf trilogy, the first of which (The Last Werewolf) I reviewed here some months ago. Tallula Rising is the middle volume and is - predictably and slightly disappointingly - more of the same. It's still well-written, witty, quite rude and happy to tackle the big issues of life and messy, life's-not-fair death, but Duncan has set the bar pretty high and I wanted more. I shall, of course, buy the third book when it comes out, but only because I have high hopes for a return to form.

I think I dislike the cliché of the trilogy more than the uncomfortable bandwagon feel of the subject matter...

Well let's blow the dust off this thread, eh? I haven't had much time recently to read (or to post here), but in the time I've had I've been reading Skagboys by Irvine Welsh. This is the prequel to his seminal 1993 novel, Trainspotting, and follows Rents, Sick boy, Spud, Begbie and others through the 80s and into adulthood.

The problem that both Skagboys and the Trainspotting sequel, Porno have is that Trainspotting isn't really a novel, more a collection of loosely interconnected short stories and novellas and, unfortunately, that's the medium that Welsh works best in. I personally have found that he struggles to extend his writing style to a full-length novel, with the exception of Marabou Stork Nightmares and, like all prequels, Skagboys suffers from the reader knowing exactly where the characters are going to end up.

I also feel that for a 500-page novel this book doesn't actually transport the characters very far. From the first page Renton is intellectual, but disillusioned by society, Sick boy is a sexual predator, Begbie is a psycho, etc., the only thing that's missing is their heroin addiction, which is quickly added to the mix.

To Welsh's credit he doesn't take the well-worn 80s retrospective route and have Thatcher all but directly plunge the opiate needle into the boys' arms. Instead, with the possible exception of Spud, the lads enter the world of hard drugs with their eyes wide open, willingly seeking out the buzz of a drug reportedly so good that one fix is enough to get you hooked.

There are also some remarkably good set-pieces in the book, from the laugh our loud funny to the deeply disturbing and saddening. The book also jumps between several different first-person narrators and third person narration, which keeps you on your toes - for a couple of chapters you're two or three pages in before you have enough clues to work out whose voice is speaking to you. Between chapters there are sprinklings of "Notes on an epidemic", which detail the arrival and spread of AIDS in Scotland. These notes, briskly factual, perhaps do the most to condemn the government of the time, by highlighting how little was done to control the spread of AIDS and how it was actively worsened by activities such as closing needle-exchange programmes. Strangely these notes also provide one of the most poignant moments in the novel.

So, the story sort of meanders without going anywhere, but the same could be said of Trainspotting - both books are perhaps more about the journey than the destination, and enjoyable enough for it.

Perhaps my biggest gripe about this book is that in a throw-away line in Trainspotting Renton mentions Tommy and Begbie going toe-to-toe, with Begbie coming out better, but it being a close thing. Nothing else is ever mentioned about this fight and I was hoping that this book would fill in the blanks, but sadly it never touches on this incident.

On the whole this isn't a bad book, not in the same league as Trainspotting, but then few books are.

I've just read this and thought the same, although I felt compelled to read to the end to see if anything happened.

In retrospect I think this should have been more Keezbo's book. As he never appears in Trainspotting, and only gets a quick mention in a conversation between Tommy and Mark, so all we know about him, pre-Skagboys, is that he's been in prison for quite a while and that Renton has never visited him, nor is ever likely to do so.

If this book has a point, however, it's what heroin does to Keezbo and how it lands him inside. The final chapter and the final notes would have meant a lot more if more of the book had been devoted to him.

And I've been reading again.

On page 5 of this thread I wrote a review of Boxer, Beetle, the first novel by Ned Beauman, and ended that review saying I was looking forward to his 2nd novel.

Well, this week I've read, The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman.

The book tracks theatrical set desginer, Egon Loeser, from the social whirl of 1931 Berlin, where he's suffering from a 3 week sex-drought, over the next 10 years of his life and maps the 3 obsessions that dominate his world. The first is with 17th century Venetian artificer Adriano Lavicini, inventor of a mechanical device to teleport actors from one side of a stage to the other, which self destructed on its début, destroying the Theatre des Encornets and killing it's creator, 29 members of the audience and a ballerina (whereas Loeser's own attempt at such a machine merely dislocates both arms of his test subject).

The second is with a girl he used to tutor, Adele Hitler (no relation), who has blossomed into the lust of his life and who is, sadly, willing to sleep with everybody in Berlin, from great composers to stage-hands and waiters, other than Loeser.

And the final is the French picture-book, Midnight in the nursing academy, his only consolation in a decade of unwilling celibacy, as he pursues Adele from Berlin to Paris and on to Los Angeles.

As with Boxer, Beetle a simple plot description doesn't do justice to this novel, which has a brilliantly witty plot and an incredible array of supporting characters (my personal favourite being Colonel Gorge, a bluff car-polish magnate, who suffers from a condition which renders him unable to distinguish between photographs and reality).

This is a brilliant book and well worth reading, Beauman has improved on his first (very impressive) novel and I now eagerly await his 3rd outing.

I've just finished The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin.
I don't seem to be able to stay away from authors I like, even when I know that they are pretty much flogging a very poorly steed.
Post-Rebus, Rankin has moved on to another "outsider" aspect of the police, in the shape of "The Complaints" - the cops that investigate other cops and are roundly disliked by everyone. That the main character is also rather unlikeable is a positive for the book, as it would be a bit incongruous to have a really nice guy being held as a pariah.
The story delves into past extremist Scottish nationalism and current ambition, wrapped in the guise of a complaint of sexual abuse against a detective.
It all works ok and will help you through the train/airport/flight, but I think I'd rather have read Andrew's choice above!

This week I have mainly been reading John dies at the end by Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong)

On a quiet night in a 2nd rate Chinese restaurant in [Undisclosed] David Wong tells a journalist how he and his friend, John, became involved in the world of the paranormal via a mysterious liquid, known as Soy Sauce, which gives its users short-term supernatural powers and permanently makes them a window (or a door) into another dimension.

The story is split into three novellas; David and John's first exposure to soy sauce and their foiling of a plot to open a gateway to hell in Las Vagas; their involvement with Korrok, an evil demon who has possessed the sports presenter on the local news channel; and, finally, their investigation of the disappearance of Amy 'Sea Cucumber' Sullivan, the younger sister of one of their friends who died in Vegas.

This is a horror story, but it's a very, very funny one. There are snappy one-liners, wonderful mental images - such as David and John fighting evil armed with a ghetto blaster loaded up with heavy metal classics and a bible taped to a baseball bat - and running jokes, such as Korrok, for all of his power, acting much like a teenage boy (for weeks he changes the lyrics to all of the songs that David listens to into personal insults and racial slurs). I found myself genuinely laughing out loud time and time again, and the breakneck pace of the writing makes this a book that's hard to put down.

Where Pargin has really succeeded though is in the final section, where he ties together pretty much everything that's happened and shows that although, at times, the proceedings have seemed crazy and off-the-cuff, there is a unifying story behind it all and everything makes as much sense as it has to. Naturally enough loose ends are left for a sequel and said sequel, This book is full of spiders, is due out next month ... I can hardly wait.

Crap, I'm going to have to rob a bank to buy all these books that are being recommended. Although maybe taking a leaf out of e-commerce's book, I should just cut out the middle man and rob Amazon.
Also, I will need to stretch time significantly if I'm going to read more than one book every six months, given the 90 minutes I currently have between finishing housework and going to sleep exhausted.

I know this place has answers to most things, so can anyone recommend somewhere I can get free money (or books) and a time machine?

Jim, I'm confused (not for the first time, I know). I thought you were married?

I am married, Derek, which seemingly involves some kind of equality clause in the small print...

If it helps, Jim, the first 15 pages of the sequel are available free on-line*. So that would be a bit like reading the book, it's free and there's only 15 pages, so it won't take very long.

There you go, all of your problems solved in one easy step.

* Note to mods - this is a link to the author's official web-site, not some dodgy copyright violating site, so it's all legit and above board.
* Note to everybody else, contains some strong language.

So, here we are again...!

My latest read is The Subtle Thief of Youth, by D J Wiseman
It's a mystery, set in modern day rural Oxfordshire, and deals with the aftermath of a freak storm that lashes two adjoining villages, finally exposing a dreadful secret, festering beneath the idyllic shires' setting.
The writing captures the breathless heat, humidity and claustrophobia that surround the unfolding events as the characters are forced to revisit their pasts and contemplate the future in the light of another, potentially similar incident.

I really enjoyed the slow building of the tension and partial unravelling of the protagonists and I didn't see the end coming as it did, but then I never do...

I heartily recommend it...

>Ahem< Declaration of interest: 1) DJ Wiseman is my father-in-law, 2) Askance publishing is MrsC's venture and 3) I helped proof-read the book.

Not one of these factors detract from The Subtle Thief of Youth, it's a cracking book!

Please buy a copy here in any format you fancy and feel free to criticise any mistakes you can spot!

In fact, if you want to try before you buy,

Here is the first chapter - free, gratis and for nothing!

Nice to see this thread over here. I'm a "slow reader", but here's my two cents' contribution about the last books I read. Not new ones, I'm afraid.

My last book was Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. It was in my "to read" list a long time ago, obviously. I wasn't disappointed. First, I enjoyed the sense of austereness it conveyed, as a contrast to the overload of everything, nowadays. Don't get me wrong. That was, of course, imposed by the Big Brother, and that's not nice at all. A totalitarian regime ruled by some intriguing and disturbing concepts of society control. For a book written decades ago, I found remakable similarities to some current national regimes, namely North Korea. Scarry. Anyway, I also found it inevitable to think about western countries' ways of controling people more and more. Right?

So, in such a closed society of "The Party", another interesting fact I found was the human instinct arising in the midst of the system. The feeling of resilience. I mean, the self-reflexion of Winston Smith, about "what is this", "is this the Truth" or "is there a different reality" and the impulse to change something. Not to say the mixed-feelings of Smith regarding everyone around him, namely Julia. And then, the climax between both, always in a tense scennery, I believe. Exciting.

All in all, I found it a very compelling book. It was almost certain that Winston would be caught. But the resistance that he put up throughout his imprisonment... Amazing. Broken by the system, but still with a life to live. Haven't we all? Good book.

Afterwards, I put some faces in the characters by watching the movie, "1984", with John Hurt. Also a stark contrast to current cinema. Recommended.

I am now reading another "old" book: Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. Coincidently, he's now publishing a book about the years he lived hiding and fearing for his life, after the release of Satanic Verses.

And it's back!

As I had a couple of days with man-flu and a few hours in an airport/plane, I managed to sneak in some reading. The first subject I went for was Back Story, David Michell's autobiography (or memoir as he calls it). It is exactly what I expected from David Mitchell - witty and well-written, but without any surprises of note except that he has been plagued by back pain all his adult life, the only successful treatment for which has proven to be walking everywhere. I came away with my image of Mitchell exactly as I would have expected, but none the worse for that. The only really touching part was his falling in love with Victoria Coren. This happens right at the end of the book and is, I suspect, the reason he wrote the thing.

The other book I managed to squeeze in was Stonemouth by Iain Banks. I will always buy Banks' non-sci-fi books as even a bad one is better than a lot of other average stuff. The last Banks novel (The Steep Approach to Garbadale) I thought was pretty underwhelming. I didn't engage with the characters and the "shocking" twist was pretty lame by Banksian standards. Interestingly, I've seen this latest book described as "Banks-by-numbers", but I actually really liked it.

Once again, the book deals with a home-coming to a Scottish setting, in this case the small coastal town of Stonemouth.
The narrator is in his mid-twenties and we learn that he left town 5 years or so ago after upsetting the local Mr Big. The gaps are slowly filled in and you rendez-vous with the (to me, at least) satisfying ending via the usual, everyday Banks fare of alcohol and drug abuse, a bit of sex, some scatology oh, and of course, murder.
It wasn't a hard or heavy read, but I'd still recommend it to Banks fans and those new to his work.

Nice to see the book review thread back.

Recently I have mainly been reading...

This book is full of spiders by Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong, which is the sequel to John dies at the end, reviewed further up this thread.

I loved JDatE, so it was probably inevitable that I'd be disappointed by TBiFOS, and disappointed I was.

The story follows David, John and Amy as they face another attempted demonic invasion, this time by spider-like creatures who can nest inside human skulls, turning their host into a near unstoppable killing-machine.

As the spiders breed and spread in [Undisclosed] the epidemic is seen by America as a zombie apocalypse and [Undisclosed] is quarantined off from the rest of the world, with the hospital becoming a prison for those who are suspected of being infected.

Pargin has a bit of fun at the expense of those armed and ready for the zombie uprising, but mostly this book lacks the humour that made JDatE so much fun. Arguably it's a better horror novel, but it's just not as much fun to read.

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. In the near future a circuit diagram appears on the Internet - a simple circuit, with a potato at its heart, and components which can be purchased from Radio Shack.

The assembled circuit allows the user to 'step' to a parallel Earth, arbitrarily labeled 'East' or 'West' of the real Earth (named Datum Earth). The users can also step from those parallel worlds, potentially traveling hundreds of thousands of steps from Datum.

The parallel Earths are all virgin territory, with abundant animal life, but no humans, although there are some intelligent hominid species.

For most people stepping causes nausea, but some people turn out to be natural steppers, capable of traveling without discomfort and even without the aid of their potato powered circuit. Also about 20% of humans are unable to step at all. Finally, no iron or solid compounds containing iron can be transported when stepping.

Joshua, a natural stepper, is hired by the incredibly powerful Black corporation to travel through the long Earths with Lobsang, a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated into a supercomputer, and they set out to see how far the long Earth extends and to find out what is driving a migration of some of the hominid species.

Joshua and Lobsang's travels are interspersed with some description of events on an near Datum. Mass migrations from Earth have damaged the economy, gold prices have plummeted, there is growing resentment felt by those unable to step and governments are struggling to both define what is their sovereign territory and to maintain law and order there.

So, basically, this is a fantasy/science fiction/cowboy novel come travelogue, with a bit of exploration of the possibilities of divergent evolution thrown in.

And, yes, it is exactly as much of a mess as that sounds. The central premise is interesting, but neither of the authors seem to have any idea where they want to go with it.

This is how the novel felt to me; Discworld, Pratchett's most famous creation, started off as a joke, but has, over the course of 40+ books, been fleshed out into a real world, with geography, history, politics and culture. The Long Earth feels like a deliberate attempt to invent another landscape for such exploration, but it spends far much time mapping out what's going to be in future books.

It's a couple of chapters of "Here's the basic idea" and then, effectively, dozens of chapters saying "Here's something that we're going to explore in future books".

None of the ideas are bad, as such, it would just have been nice if they could have picked a couple and looked at them properly in this book.

The sequel, The long war is due out this summer and it will be interesting to see if this manages to be a real novel rather than a to-do list.

Bringing down the Krays - Booby Teale = crap, don't waste your time.....

Sorry, missed one:

Dodger by Terry Pratchett

Yeah, OK, so my reading hasn't been very highbrow of late.

The eponymous Dodger is a tosher (somebody who combs the sewers for lost coins or jewelry) in Victorian London who, one rainy night, rescues a young woman who is being beaten up by two thugs.

She turns out to be a rather significant person, sought by foreign governments, who want her dead or alive. Fortunately Dodger is assisted by two gentlemen who witnessed the assault; Henry Mayhew and Charlie Dickens.

Various other eminent Victorians turn up; Disraeli, Robert Peel, Angela Coutts, a cameo from Charles Babbage and mentions of Karl Marx.

Really this is just Pratchett's treatise on Victorian poverty. There's a plot, but it's slender, lacking any real sense of peril, and serves only to carry as many bits of trivia about late 19th century London as the author could cram in.

So, that's three books read and a sense of disappointment about all of them. I'm about to start on Brighton Rock, which I'm sure will be more satisfying.

Brighton Rock's ok. If you like that kind of thing.

Pratchett and Baxter: hmm. One of my favourite authors and one of my least favourite... you have not convinced me that Pterry has recovered from his last couple of discworld novels, which have been to say the least, thin. I can see why he would want to leave the place, but I've been looking at Dodger marked down to a tenner in Tescos and avoiding it.

I need to get back into reading. I used to read often when I was at school and college but I've just got crap at it since (the discipline of reading, I *can* still physically read).

I have a shelf with probably a dozen books on that I've started and never finished. The strange thing is, I was enjoying nearly all of them when I stopped for one reason or another.

The only thing I seem to be able to read these days is non-fiction.