Tag: reading

Dune: It Stresses Me

Jumping On The Bandwagon

With the release of Dune Part Two, I’ve decided to blog about how things Dune related tend to end up stressing me out; sometimes for literary reasons, sometimes my own stupid fault. A long, long time ago, the late nineties to be not that precise, I acquired a copy of Dune; a second hand paperback, published in 1987. I knew this was considered a classic science-fiction novel and I planned on reading it at some point.

These were the days before you automatically checked the internet for information, therefore I had no real idea of what Dune was about, or that there was more than what I saw at face value. As it was, it took me a while to realise it was the first of a series of books. I have no problems with a series of novels, but because I am an “all or nothing” type of chap. I knew if I started this I was going to be in it for the long run and so, as I had other things I was reading at the time, put it to one side.

Time passed. I read loads and then moved to Ireland. In the move, I was only able to take some of my books and so my copy of Dune ended up in a box at my parents’ house. It was there waiting for me so I wasn’t going to buy a new copy, but as it was in another country. When I visited home I had other things on my mind than routing through old boxes, and my To Read Pile was big enough as it was

Time passed. I read loads and eventually moved back to England. On my return I was able to finally put together the two parts of my library (the books I had in Ireland and those I’d left behind). In doing so I found all sorts of interesting things, including my copy of Dune.

Looking at the Wikipedia page there are five further books written by the original author, Frank Herbert. The full series is:

Dune (1965)
Dune Messiah (1969)
Children of Dune (1976)
God Emperor of Dune (1981)
Heretics of Dune (1984)
Chapterhouse: Dune (1985)

Then there is all the other stuff, it had become a whole universe. Not only were there loads of short stories and comics by Herbert, but after his death in 1986, his son Brian Herbert, along with Kevin J. Anderson, wrote more, a lot more; prequels and sequels. Just looking at in-universe lists is somewhat overwhelming. For someone like me, this was very stressful; where do I stop? I don’t have the time, or wall space, for all of this. Stress number one. But is does raise a question, at what point dose all this universe building put people off? I’ll be coming back to that.

It was on a trip to Helsinki that I finally got around to reading this now long-overdue novel, and I loved it. The story gripped me to the point I was missing out on seeing the Nordic city I had gone there for. In the long hours of light, I stayed up late to read and read. I got a boat across to Suomenlinna and nearly stayed onboard when we got there, I hadn’t noticed. And then… I always get to an airport earlier than I need to. I’ll happily be in the departure lounge hours before it’s required; and so on my return, I did exactly this. I was safe, I was at the gate, nothing could go wrong. I could relax and just read. I was nearly finished at this point, knowing I would probably complete the book on the plane home. I read and read. I read some more, I had lost all awareness of what was going on around me. As I began to feel the remaining pages reduce I looked up. How had I read so much? I was early, but not THAT early? I looked at the clock. It was one hour after my flight had been due to depart.

I absolutely can lose all track of the world around me, but this seemed excessive. How had I missed the call for the flight? The queues for the gate? I had checked in, had my name been called over the tannoy? How had so much time passed and I hadn’t noticed? I was angry with myself, and quite fairly I thought, I blamed Frank Herbert! Stress number two.

I mean, there are far worse places to be stranded than Helsinki, in fact, I rather like the city and hadn’t really wanted to come home, but it is expensive.

Standing up, I realised I needed to do something about this and so went to find someone who worked for the airline. I asked about my flight and was quickly pointed to one of the displays. The flight had been delayed, and the plane hadn’t even arrived yet. I’d not missed my way home, but even so, if they had announced this I’d been so engrossed that I’d not heard. I genuinely believe that had the plane left I wouldn’t have noticed. I remember nothing of sitting in that departure lounge, other than Arrakis.

Obviously, I was enjoying what I was reading. The story and characters are compelling and the world created is huge, it’s no surprise there is so much space for all these extra stories. It’s inviting as not only is the universe big, it’s so clearly defined.

The problem was now I had read the first, was I committed? It felt like it. However, I decided I wanted to read something else and would decide if I would take up the next novel, Dune Messiah, later. I got busy again and more years passed. All that time I felt like I was a fraud. Yes, I’d read the first novel, but until I’d read more I couldn’t tell anyone, I’d only done one-sixth of the job! I was a cheat! People who knew what they were talking about would roll their eyes and think, ‘He’s one of them.’ Oh, the shame!

And then I heard they were making a new film. As stated elsewhere, I don’t like watching adaptions if I’ve read the book. I don’t see how changing the format can do it justice, so much has to be missed or restructured. (But if anyone wants to make a film of my books, I’m up for it, just show me the money!) I also don’t like what I saw in my head being replaced with new images. For this reason, and others, I hadn’t watched the 1984 David Lynch version and I’d decided that I wouldn’t this new version either, until everyone I know told me I was wrong, that I really needed to see this. They had persuaded me to a degree. If I didn’t, was I missing out? More than this, because it had been some years since that trip to Finland, how much did I actually remember? Did I need to read it again, just to preserve my own personal version of this story, before these new images were put in my mind? These are things I do worry about, so, stress number three.

I did watch the first part, and I enjoyed it. As much as the imagery is spectacular, I didn’t feel it was telling me what remembered was wrong. And so I went to see Part Two, just as good. Have my life’s principles been wrong? More stress.

And now I have to decide on the other books. But as they are books, I will need to read Dune again first as the films won’t have all the detail I need – this is spiralling out of control. Dune is a great book, but it’s very stressful.

Buy Dune – Frank Herbert

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Free Humanity! It’s Out Now!

30 January 2024

FREE on February 1st as a Kindle! Click here!

Middlestead is just a quiet, suburban English town, but when some residents form a local science fiction group, they discover they can manipulate their neighbours in ways they never realised. Soon plans are in place and something is brewing that will lead to disaster… and none of this is science fiction – it could actually happen… couldn’t it?

Have you ever just gone too far? Do you believe everything you are told?

Humanity – Out Now

To celebrate my reissue of Humanity I’m giving away Kindle versions of the novel on Thursday 1st February.

You can buy either a paperback (£8.99) or download for your Kindle (£2.75 or see above), or read as part of Kindle Unlimited. Click here.

‘That’s the point,’ said Tony. ‘We do all believe what we’re told by the radio, just as we’ve been talking about with weather reports. Each time they get it wrong, we complain as if it’s the first time it’s happened.’
‘Yeah, but,’ interrupted Allan, ‘the weather is different to an alien invasion. We don’t know how to predict the weather, the Met Office do. We also know that aliens are not about to invade.’

The 1990s are my decade, and so this is a book set during an era l love, it’s about science-fiction, a subject I love. I’m really proud of this novel and if you want to read something fun, dark and just that bit different, read Humanity!

As posted in my last blog, I’ve decided to re-edit my work as I believe I can improve on the content in various ways. If I’m going to ask for money for these things, they had better be as good as I can make them. One of the benefits of self-publishing is I can do this. What’s more, as a writer you never finish writing your stories. There’s always points that you think in hindsight could be changed, from small details no one else will notice to bits of continuity I missed.

Writing a whole novel is hard work and so at the beginning, during my first novel, Humanity, I had to learn a lot! And I’m still learning. However, during the process of doing this project at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I was really pleased with the improvements.

I was able to run the whole text through better spell-checkers and it found things which, although I’ve read the thing so many times, I’d completely missed! As a writer as good as you may be with English grammar and spelling, being so close to the text means your brain will tell you what you assume it says rather than what it does. I can’t afford an editor, and beta reading can be hard to organise, so it was up to me to do the whole lot, well me and the program I used.

It did make me smile when it decided it didn’t like turns of phrase I stubbornly refuse to amend, for example when a character “dashed hurriedly”, I love that even though half of it is redundant, it just sounds good to my eyes along with “cacophony of sound” (and reminds me of a Doctor Who story from the 1970s – The Deadly Assassin).

I’ve also redone the cover image and I’m so much more pleased with it than my first attempt at designing my own book covers. This is a book that even though it’s been over 20 years since I first wrote it, still has a lot to say about life today… in fact, I’d say it’s more relevant than ever. Happy reading.

‘What if a real scientific person calls up and says it’s all ridiculous?’ asked Allan.
‘Then another scientist will call and confirm everything we’ve just said,’ offered Scott. ‘They tend to do that.’

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2022 In Reading

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

It’s been a tradition of mine for a long time that at the end of the year I collect together every book I’ve read over the previous twelve months, just to see what they look like. This year I took a photograph!. Every year I think I’ve not read as much as I normally do, but when I see the pile I’ve created I realise it’s generally about the same. This year of course I had two lots of Beck’s Game to read, redraft several times and then edit so I’m quite pleased with what I’d accomplished. I’ve even written some new bits and pieces which may or may not see the light of day at some point. I have plans for next year. Ideas swimming around my head. What happens to them, of course, awaits to be seen.

I do love the clean slate of a new year. This time last year I already owned or had planned to read about half of the books I did get through. The rest I picked up along the way.

In total I read about thirty six books. That’s not a great deal compared to some people, but I’m very pleased with that number. In previous years I’ve done this as two blogs with four books a piece, however I’m noting how fast my Suggested Reads is growing and so to add another eight books in quick succession will being to make the list look unwieldy, I need to do something about that next year. But for this year I’ll write about four books (and it was really hard deciding which four), they ended up being ones that I didn’t already have a mental theme to write about for future blogs.

As for the future we’re fast coming up to a new, empty page, that will fill over the next 365 days. I wonder what books will be in next year’s pile.

The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon. This is one of those books that I’d occasionally come across as a reference to something, generally cited as an inspiration (I’m a Doctor Who fan and it comes up every now and then, but also in other places). I was in the brilliant Chapters in Dublin, and there was a pile of copies on a table. I’d never thought about reading it before but I decided on a whim to give it a go.

This is the story of an American solider from the Korean War who had saved his troop and is highly rewarded in his home country. This is just the beginning because unknown to him, planted deep in his conscience, are commands from an enemy agent who can take control of him whenever they please. As this was written in the 1950s it tapped into the paranoia of the age and as a result was soon turned into a film.

To start off with I struggled a bit. I couldn’t place the order of when events were supposed to be taking place in relation to each other, on top of which it seems like Richard Condon had been playing with his thesaurus. As a couple of examples, in the very first paragraph is the word “osculatorium” and on page 23 of my copy it has a sentence that begins, ‘To the extent that wartime zymurgists imperil the norm….’. However once I got my mind in sync with the writing style I soon started enjoying it immensely.

“The apartment was on the sixteenth floor. It was old-fashioned, which meant that the rooms were large and light-filled, the ceilings high enough to permit a constant circulation of air, and the walls thick enough for a man and his loving wife to have a stimulating argument at the top of their lungs without invading the nervous systems of surrounding neighbors. Raymond had rented the apartment furnished and nothing in the place beyond the books, the records, and the phonograph was his.”

― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

The Hare With The Amber Eyes – Edmund De Wall. About eight years ago I bought my copy of this book in a second hand bookshop. They were running a “Buy two, get a third free” deal. I had two books I really wanted and only noticed the offer at the till and didn’t have time to properly look for a third so just grabbed this. I had no idea what it was about but it was a book so that was fine by me, I’d find out when I read it. It’s sat in my To Be Read box ever since. This summer I decided the time had come.

I’d thought it was fiction, it is not. In the book the author Edmund De Wall writes of his own family’s history through some really interesting times via the device of a collection of Japanese netsuke (small ornaments). The collection has been passed down the generations and when they ended up with him he decided to trace their journey from when they were first bought by his ancestors to the present.

It didn’t sound great, I thought, as I read the opening pages and learnt of the concept. The book is fairly thick and I realised it’d take me a while to get through, however, like with the Manchurian Candidate, I soon got into the swing of it and it became very interesting. Not only is it his family history, but how they fitted into the bigger canvas of real world events. I’d say it was how the ordinary people fared, but these people are far from ordinary, yet they still represent a corner of history that we don’t often see. My favourite section is the one in Vienna from the turn of the last century to the start of the Second World War. In the book you see, almost from a contemporary viewpoint, Vienna being built and a Upper Class family dealing with the fast changing world and its fast changing opinions. In the end I was pleased I’d bought this, despite the fact I had no idea what I’d got at the time. Well worth a read, especially if you like history.

“This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.”

― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers. During a wonderful spring (my favourite season) I took this book away with me on a trip which feels like it was a very long time ago. This was the first time I’d properly gone away to be by myself in a foreign country since my trip to Albania, it was much needed and I think back on it as a chance to clear the cobwebs away; as such anything I read would have had positive memories attached to it.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was perfect. It’s written in such a way that you feel properly part of the action. There is a party about two thirds of the way in and it felt like I was on the streets watching events. It’s not the number of words McCullers uses but the ones she chose. I was very jealous and in awe, and she was only twenty three when it was published.

Set in a small town in Georgia, the state not the country, in the 1930s, the novel follows the characters and events that surround John Singer. Singer is deaf and can’t speak. Although he can sign he tends not to, however he has a very amiable personality that draws the locals to him. They begin to open up to him in ways they can’t with anyone else and he soon becomes an important part of their lives. Singer accepts this, but secretly he has worries of his own and he needs to find a way of dealing with them.

It’s a beautifully thought out book which slowly engulfs you as more and more the various personalities develop. I read this in a very warm and far away city that was just waking up to a new Spring and new possibilities. I felt free, completely detached from everything, and with this as my companion I was very happy.

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”

― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Anxious People – Fredrik Backman. I’ve somehow managed to end the year on a quite a strong Nordic note, as it was I read this Swedish novel in February. Anxious People seems to be one of those books that grabbed a lot of people’s attention at the same time; it’s very good.

The concept is that a flat is for sale and during a showing an armed robber enters and holds everyone hostage. The book explores the various different characters who were there that day and what lead up to this event.

First publish in Sweden, in Swedish, in 2019 it was then released in English in summer 2021. People liked it so much it’s become a Netflix series, which I’ve not seen. It’s a really interesting concept and whilst there are a lot of “whacky” elements, over all the more you read the deeper and more intricate it becomes. I’m sure with just one reading I’ve missed a lot of the subtly. I’m actually finding this a difficult one to write about as there is so much I don’t want to give away, it’s worth you reading/ discovering it all from the novel itself.

As the most modern of the books I’ve read this year, I think, it definitely goes to show good literature is alive and well in our day as much as it’s ever been.

“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People


Buy The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Buy The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
Buy The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Buy Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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2021 In Reading Part Two

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

2021 has been a very strange year. I don’t feel like I’ve done much with it, and yet it’s been my most successful year as a writer, I’ve been on podcasts, I’ve had a script for a radio play made and broadcast, my most successful months on this blog and I’ve had over 10,000 downloads of my online novel Beck’s Game. I’m really pleased! Thank you everyone so much for you interest and your support. However in the real world this year has been harder than 2020, not for any specific reason just the weight of the world and feelings of ennui. In one way I’m glad it’s drawing to a close, in other ways who knows that to expect of 2022? Hopefully some good things.

The Power And The Glory – Graham Greene. Like Decline And Fall (mentioned in Part One) I read this due to a love of some of the author’s other works; Brighton Rock I think is an amazingly good novel and I will blog about that sometime I hope. As I read further works I grew comfortable with Greene’s style and began to know what to expect, until I hit The Power And The Glory. Bizarrely only published two years after Brighton Rock (with only one book between them) this is very different. The text is very dense and it takes a lot of concentration to keep focused. Telling a story set in extreme rural Mexico, the hot and humid landscape is conveyed so well that the continued reading of it can be exhausting. I had no idea what the story would be when I picked this up and it takes a while for it to get going, jumping through several sets of characters until you work out what is going on. I therefore don’t want to give too much away as I actually enjoyed working out what the plot would be when reading the early sections of the book. Reading this is a commitment, but it pays off. It’s a very strange story that deserves to be given time, but the journey is as much hard work for the reader as it is for the characters.

“Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

The Vanishing Futurist – Charlotte Hobson. Back on May Bank Holiday, when it was warm, I went to Marlow for the day, (lovely place) and whilst there I decided I needed to buy a book, it was one of those days. After spending too long browsing I decided to go with this. Set in Moscow in 1918. just as everything changes, this tells the story of Gerty a young English woman who, already having moved to Russia, finds herself taking on the Socialist ideals and watching as society grapples with the same struggle. There is a mystery here that is more the backbone of the novel, simply supporting the more interesting points. Gery’s life is far more absorbing than wondering what is going, and I think this is the way it was meant to be. The climax of the book is therefore more character driven, although the answers to the questions do come with the eventual outcome and work nicely. The setting and the immersion within it is the highlight of the book, just because it is so different (and a world I’m glad I’m not in), this is an achievement as it was written so long after the society it describes disappeared.

“Autumn painted Moscow every shade of red, as though for a vast performance. ‘The streets are our brushes, the squares our palate,’ announced the poet Mayakovsky, who planned to revolutionise nature permanently by giving the trees in the Aleksandrovsky Gardens a coat of scarlet paint.”
― Charlotte Hobson, The Vanishing Futurist

Doctor Who: The Myth Makers – Donald Cotton. Target books are a staple for any young Doctor Who fan, at least up until my generation. These were adaptions of episodes from the original series in a book form. (I may blog in depth about them later, but see my blog on Terrance Dicks, a hero to many people.) The Myth Makers is one of the missing stories, it was broadcast in 1965 and the tapes “junked” after so it is thought to no longer exist, however like nearly all the other stories the scripts were adapted and this short novel was released in 1985 (written by Donald Cotton, who had written the scripts). Whilst based around the legend of the Trojan War, this is told as if it it were historically true and The First Doctor and his companions arrive and get involved in the proceedings. This was first written as a “historical” in that no other alien elements are present in the story (which happened a fair bit in 1960s Doctor Who, other examples are The Aztecs and Marco Polo to name a couple), however Donald Cotton had also written this as more of a comedy, just like his earlier script for The Romans, and the novel is told in the first person by an eyewitness, who also has some historical significance. It can be a bit silly at times but knowingly so, and there are some clever puns: “Small Prophet, Quick Return” and “Doctor In The Horse”. I’d read most of the Targets as a child but there’s still a few I hadn’t got round to so I didn’t “know” what happened, it’s good to still be able to read a new old Doctor Who story, like I did in my childhood with so many of the Target books.

“Agamemmnon sighed deeply. The effect was unpleasant, even at a range of several yards. Candle flames trembled, and sank back into their sockets: as did his brother’s blood-shot eyes. ‘There may be some truth in that,’ he admitted, ‘I don’t say there is, but there may be. However, I must remind you these ambitions would have been served just as well if you had killed Paris in single combat, as was expected of you. That’s what betrayed husbands do, damn it! They kill their wife’s lovers. Everybody knows that. And Paris was quite prepared to let the whole issue be decided by such a contest – he told me so. So don’t blame me because you’ve dragged us into a full scale war- because I won’t have it.’”
― Donald Cotton, Doctor Who: The Myth Makers

The Crucible – Arthur Miller. The Crucible is a history, metaphor and play set in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Miller had a point to make with this, it was about the “witch hunts” in the politics at the time – when you know this and understand the context it becomes a lot more powerful. Who are the witches in the town? Who is innocent but forced to admit guilt? How far will it go and is anyone safe? The play itself has a bit of a weird shape, starting by focusing on one group of individuals and then adjusting to a family outside that circle, this in itself raises the question that has been repeated throughout history, can anyone can be safe from accusation and if not, how do the guilty seem to get away with it?

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible


Buy The Power And The Glory by Graham Greene
Buy The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson
Buy Doctor Who: The Myth Makers by Donald Cotton
Buy The Crucible by Arthur Miller

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2021 In Reading Part One

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

Shockingly, alarmingly, it’s once again the time of year where I select some of the books I’ve read over the last twelve months and offer my favourites as suggestions. 2021 has been a bit of a mad year for me, I started the year feeling I hadn’t been reading enough but as time went on and I was looking back I realised just how many books I’d got through, including a couple I’d been meaning to read for years and some nice discoveries. I said it last year and I’ll repeat myself, it’s always exciting to wonder what books I’ll find and love in 2022 that I know nothing about at present.

Lenin On The Train – Catherine Merridale. I’ve be fascinated with the account of Vladimir Lenin’s (which you have to pronounce in the Russian way with the accent Vla-DEE-MEearr) journey from Switzerland to the Finland Station for a long time, so finding this book which gives a full account of the history as well as the effects it had was very satisfying. Spotlighting an event which I feel is a somewhat under appreciated shaper of the 20th Century, this book is detailed and insightful enough that I didn’t feel like it was for beginners but even for someone new to this part of history I don’t think it would go over their heads. Starting with the author’s own recreation of the journey it then takes us right back to March 1916 and talks us though one of the many world changing events that were happening in that era. It can be a job keeping up with all of the people involved and events are so shaded that it’s hard to fully piece it all together, but this was a very enjoyable read and added to my knowledge of important times (if only I could remember it all that is).

“The sound of tramping feet beat out a requiem for the old world – but no one could be sure where it might lead”
― Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train

Decline And Fall – Evelyn Waugh. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Brideshead Revisited last year it was natural I’d pickup a copy of Decline And Fall – not to be confused with the text by Edward Gibbon. (How much changes in a year! I read Brideshead mostly in an Albanian cafe drinking Raki; I read this in my car on an industrial estate in my work lunch breaks.) It’s interesting to compare the two novels. Whilst Brideshead Revisited was written when he was an established author and so has the confidence and skill of someone with experience, Decline And Fall was Waugh’s first published novel. This isn’t a criticism, I enjoyed it very much, but you can clearly tell the lessons the author has learnt along the way. The two novels are sprawling tales that follow the life of the protagonist through a period of time, the later book is over many years however here it’s just one; regardless a lot happens. As a story this is quite silly, some of the humour really works, other parts of it fails to hit the mark, at least from a twenty first century perspective. Set just under one hundred years ago this is the story of Paul Pennyfeather who in the first few pages loses his place at University and has to find a way to survive and so becomes a teacher. Highly unpredictable and more a stream of ideas of “and then this happened” the sum of the novel is greater than its parts. Brideshead Revisted is a far better novel but that is not to say this isn’t worth reading.

“That’s your little mob in there,’ said Grimes; ‘you let them out at eleven.’ ‘But what am I to teach them?’ said Paul in sudden panic. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote. I was always unsure of this book, not a novel but an account of a true multiple-murder in mid America in 1959. From the word go we know who did it and it’s just the historical events, I suppose like a true episode of Columbo in novel form. Very unlike Breakfast At Tiffany’s which I am indifferent to (it’s ok but I won’t be making friends with Deep Blue Something – that’s an out dated… I want to say “joke”?) As such I was never bothered about this book until I saw it for sale in a second hand book shop and I just thought “why not?”. My doubts quickly disappeared. Like an episode of Columbo the interest becomes in finding out how they get the murderers, but there is more. You are asked to follow the guilty party, get to know them and their back story,. After a while I forgot it was real and when the revelation hit me again and again “this actually happened” it’s a bit of a shock, I’m not sure how accurate it really is, how Capote can reveal intimate and intricate details I don’t really know, but he manages to paint the murderers as real people in a way it’s hard to square that they could do what they did. More psychoanalytical than thriller I did really enjoy this, yet it made me feel sad at times – also I learnt there is a lot of interesting things about middle America.

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ . . .The land is flat, the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Born A Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood – Trevor Noah. Straight up I will confess I had never heard of Trevor Noah until I found this book. I was looking for a historic novel set in Africa as I haven’t read that many and did a general search, over and over this book kept on being recommended to me despite the fact it’s not fiction or that historical. After a while the suggestions wore me down and I ordered it. I’m glad I did. As I said I had no idea who the author was as I read this, it was just the story of a young lad growing up to see the end of apartheid South Africa and the changes and things that should have changed but didn’t. However this is no grand epic, it’s mainly a small story of Trevor Noah and his mother (who is both formidable and wonderful and written with such love and clarity) as well the wider family. I’d love to retell some of the incidents here but the best thing is to say “Go and read it yourself”. It’s a cliché to say “I laughed and cried” and although I didn’t actually cry amidst the humour there are statements of which the implications force you stop and think. This is probably one of my favourite books I’ve read this year and I’ll join all those other voices that persuaded me to buy this book in highly recommending it.

“People thought my mom was crazy. Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these things were izinto zabelungu — the things of white people. So many people had internalized the logic of apartheid and made it their own. Why teach a black child white things? Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom: ‘Why do this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?’
‘Because,’ she would say, ‘even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood


Buy Lenin On The Train by Catherine Merridale
Buy Decline And Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Buy In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Buy Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

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2020 In Reading Part Two

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

This is the second of my look back at the books I’ve read in 2020. There were more then appears in these two blogs, some I’ve already written about, some I will do later, some I just read for fun. You can find Part One here (and last year’s batch here and here). So a new year is ahead and it’s quite exciting, I have a blank shelf again as it were. There are many books in my “To Be Read” pile but I’m sure I’ll add to it during the year; in December next year I could well be blogging about a book I’ve never heard of at this moment… well I find that interesting. Happy Reading all.

Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee. As posted elsewhere I try to avoid knowing anything about a novel before I read it. I’d heard of this book in various places over the years and when I saw it in a second hand shop decided I’d see what it was about. The novel opens with a first person account of moving into a home in the Cotswolds at the age of three, it goes on to then describe what living in this very rural location was like. It soon became clear that this was during the First World War and as such the England that is being written about is certainly different from the one I know. Just as the author was over seeing the cusp of a dramatic change in society I too felt I was doing the same, only over one hundred years later and at a much older age than he was. One of the negative points about avoiding all spoilers is that you miss the things you are supposed to know and it wasn’t until awhile into the book that I realised that the viewpoint of the character I was following was male and not female, it was this revelation that made me do a little research and I discovered that the author’s name is LAURIE and not LAUREN as I’d been misreading it all this time! Cider With Rosie is in fact an account of his actual childhood and the first of a trilogy. The title is a mystery until you near complete the book when at only that point does it make any sense. Overall it’s beautifully written, evoking a simpler time deep in the real English countryside; very much like The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanagh, only his is in Ireland. I enjoyed it so much I’m planning on finishing reading the trilogy.

“I had learnt my first lesson, that I could not hit Vera, no matter how fuzzy her hair.”

“Eight to ten loaves came to the house every day, and they never grew dry. We tore them to pieces with their crusts still warm, and their monotony was brightened by the objects we found in them – string, nails, paper, and once a mouse; for those were days of happy-go-lucky baking.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie

The Man In The High Castle – Philip K Dick. The concept of this 1962 novel is intriguing, set at the time of publication mainly in San Francisco (as well as some other other states in the west of what we call the USA), this is a world where the Axis Powers won the Second World War. Nazi Germany rules Europe and the eastern half of America, whilst the west is in the Japanese Empire. There is a book, forbidden in some places, that is a dystopian account of that would have happened if the Allies had won the Second World War. As a world this is very well thought out and and close enough to our own for it to feel totally alien, it’s only talk of going to colonise other planets and unrealistic rocket technology that break the spell. The concept is a good reason to read this novel. The plot, however, is… strange. Generally following the lives of a few citizens in San Francisco, it doesn’t properly lead anywhere. It does feel as if it has things to say, but doesn’t quite get to them. I believe the reason for this is because there was supposed to be a follow up that never happened. The result is with such a great concept and well built world, it feels like this should be amazing but is a missed the opportunity; still worth reading for the setting though.

“Send that,” he told her. “Sign it, et cetera. Work the sentences, if you wish, so that they will mean something.” As she started from the office he added, “Or so that they mean nothing. Whichever you prefer.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

It’s All Greek To Me – John Mole. This was a book a friend of mine had read and years ago commented to me that it was a amusing read. I’d made a note of it and it sat in my Amazon list for nearly a decade. It came up very cheap at some point last year and so I got round to ordering it, where is sat in my “to be read pile” until I decided I needed to read something light and fun. This did fit the bill. Telling the true story of the author’s attempt to build a house (or in fact refurbish a very old house) on a Greek island not that far from Athens. It doesn’t really stretch you as a reader, it does make you feel sorry for him when you realise the size of the challenge and smile if not laugh out loud. He paints a very vivid picture of the small Greek village and the people who live there. Not quite up to Gerald Durrell’s standard but this did exactly what I wanted it to do, take me away from England and think about a simpler life, well simple by watching – I’d not actually like to take that task on.

“Where I come from money isn’t to be talked about or flaunted in front of strangers. But Ajax snatched up the wad and counted it out loud, ceremonially, slapping the notes down on the table while the witnesses mouthed the amounts. It was all so public and embarrassing.”
― John Mole, It’s All Greek to Me!

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark. This was a book that I went through stages of hearing about quite a bit, then I’d not hear it mentioned for years only for it regularly resurface once more. I found it in a second hand bookshop for a pound so decided to give it a go. It’s… eccentric. I had no idea what to really expect and it turns out it’s about a teacher at a 1930s girl’s school in Edinburgh; not generally my go to place for stories. The teacher, the eponymous Miss Jean Brodie is obsessed with her “prime” or the peak of her life in all its ways. She mentors groups of girls in what she thinks is the best for them, but as not everyone would agree with her methods it’s all very secretive. It’s a short book, my copy is 128 pages and this is enough. It’s written from the viewpoint of one of her groups of girls and it goes on to show what became of them, but it’s not chronological. It’s not a book I think I would have read if I had not been curious as to why it keeps coming up in various places, or what people mean when they refer to it; as it is there are interesting things to think about, like what is/ was my prime and did/do I take as much appreciation of it as out title character did.

“The word ‘education’ comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix in meaning in and the stem trudo, I thrust.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie


Buy Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee
Buy The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick
Buy It’s All Greek To Me by John Mole
Buy The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

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2020 In Reading Part One

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

December last year I complied a blog about some of the books I’d read during 2019. I normally do look back over what I’d read over the previous twelve months at this time of year as it gives me a sense of achievement and so I decided, as I had fun doing it in last time, to once again highlight some of my literary journeys of 2020; this is the first of a two parts.

It’s strange looking at last year’s blogs (which can be found here and here) as at the time of writing them I would not have believed what was coming, even only a few months later. If the me that is writing this here and now went back and had a word with myself I would think I too was telling a story.

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh. Before you ask I did know the author of this was a man before I started reading it (that’s important for later). In January when the world was in its previous state I took a trip to Tirana in Albania taking a copy of this with me. I knew a few facts about it before I started, mainly there was a teddy bear called Aloysius and it was set in either Oxford or Cambridge University. As it turns out the teddy bear wasn’t as important as I expected (not that I was thinking he was a main character) and the setting of Oxford is only in part of the grand tale that is woven over many years. I seem to have, by chance, read a lot of books written in the first person this year (a coincidence as I spent the first half of this year completing my first novel told in this style). Set in the 1920s the narrator is Charles Ryder, at the start a new student at Oxford. At first he is looking to be independent, but soon befriends Sebastian Flyte (owner of Aloysius) and ends up very much tied to not just Sebastian but pretty much the whole family. Many think this is a book about the friendship between the two young men, whilst it starts off that way the later parts of the novel deal with the implications of Charles’ dealings with the whole Flyte family. It seems a long time ago I was sat in a bar in Tirana drinking raki engrossed in tales of Upper Class England and I wish I was back there.

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days – such as that day – when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

The Etymologicon – Mark Forsyth. Learning the origin of words is addictive. If you are looking for a fix and haven’t read this book, what’s wrong with you? To be honest this was the second time I’d read this. Starting with the word “book” the author leads you on a trail from one word to the next, as he goes he describes the history of each word as well as the secrets hidden in our vocabulary that once told you can’t believe you’d never noticed before. Words that we think of as unconnected are shown to basically be the same thing, or there are many occasions where meanings change so the original understanding may have been something completely different. “Down” is a great example of this, as is the fascinating connection between “black” and “white”. Also, why do we call some alcoholic drinks a punch? This is the type of book that you can start from the beginning and work your way through or just pick up and read a bit of every now and then, although that one section (generally about one or two pages long) will turn into several. The fun you will have discovering why men are gentle, what chickens have to do with pub games and why a race of people ended up being called British. I wish I could memorise it all and quote it at my friends, unfortunately my memory is not that good for which my friends are very grateful. My only wish is that there was an index as there isn’t one the edition I have, so trying to once more find something I vaguely recall is difficult.

“The medievals often mixed up their Gs and Ws, which is why another word for guarantee is warranty.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Clocks – Agatha Christie. I’ve given up trying to read Christie’s books in any kind of logical order. I see them cheap, I buy them and take a random one off the pile when I feel it’s time for another dose. The Clocks is typical of what you would expect, although billed as a Poirot novel he actually plays a small, although important, part; as it centres on a narrative by a Colin Lamb, who pretty much does all the leg work in investigating why a man was stabbed to death in odd circumstances. The clocks of the title are there for a reason, but the mystery as always isn’t always as straightforward as Christie wants you to believe it to be. I didn’t guess who was behind it all, but that doesn’t give away anything. This is comfort reading as you know exactly what you are dealing with here (rather ironic for a whodunit – but you know what I mean).

“He’s not dead. But I have a feeling he’s bored. That’s worse.”
― Agatha Christie, The Clocks

The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner – Alan Sillitoe. I didn’t realise this was a collection of short stories. It wasn’t until half way through the second that it dawned on me. I previously heard a Radio 4 adaption of the first story (of the same name) several years ago and liked it although I didn’t remember enough of the plot to realise that the whole thing had finished at the end of what I thought was Chapter One; and so I was somewhat confused as Chapter Two was no longer written in the first person and about something entirely different. There are nine prose stories and a long poem in the volume I have and, as is the case with anthologies, some are better than others. The headliner, The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner, is about a young man who has gone to Borstal and had been encouraged to train and compete in cross country races, during the practice sessions, alone in nature he has time to think. The text is very dense, reading a page felt like I’d read two or three, but I did enjoy it. The writer really gets into the head of this young man and presents the world from his viewpoint. The other stories are somewhat lighter, although mainly dealing with the working classes in the nineteen fifties and the tone is generally stark. It sounds like I’m being negative about this book, I’m not – I liked the worlds of which I was privy to, the private small scale worries of people trying to survive in a world that isn’t designed for them; sometimes grim and heavy is good, here it is.

“I run to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth that I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out, and my lungs didn’t seem to be working at all, and my heart stopped that wicked thumping I always get at the beginning of a run. Because you see I never race at all; I just run, and somehow I know that if I forget I’m racing and only jog-trot along until I don’t know I’m running I always win the race. For when my eyes recognise that I’m getting near the end of my course -by seeing a stile or cottage corner- I put on a spurt, and such a fast big spurt it is because I feel that up till then I haven’t been running and that I’ve used up no energy at all.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner


Buy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Buy The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
Buy The Clocks by Agatha Christie
Buy The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe

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2019 In Reading Part Two

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

This is the second part of my look back at some of the books I’ve read this year, including the end of the world as we know it and turn of last century Kenya. Again I’m trying not to give too much of the actual plot away as I like it to unfold as I go along so don’t want to spoil it for you, instead here is a general outline and how I felt about it.

The Day Of The Triffids – John Wyndham. I bought this second hand in 1995 and started it then; for some reason I couldn’t get into it and I decided to have a break. Nearly twenty five years later and it was time for the break to be over! When I started it again I failed to understand why I had such difficulty with it the first time. It’s gripping! I had in my head what I thought I remembered happening in it and was amazed to discover that not much of it was in the plot, I’d invented a whole load of other things. I was convinced they went to Paris at one point, where that came from I’ll never know but I was looking out for it for quite some time. I guess it’s set at the time it was written, the very early fifties (nearly seventy years ago!) and tells of that world changed overnight. It’s bleak reading but the narrator takes you through his story in such away you really feel for the characters, and want to know what they make of the various massive issues they now have to contend with. It’s also quite realistic in how they deal with what is happening, with plenty of human faults on display and some good as well as bad choices made by all. There is a logic to a well thought out plot and I really enjoyed this so I’m not annoyed I put it down so long ago as I think I got so much more out of it this time.

“Nobody is going to be muddle-headed enough to confuse ignorance with innocence now – it’s too important. Nor is ignorance going to be cute or funny anymore. It is going to be dangerous, very dangerous.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

The Double – Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve not much of Dostoevsky’s cannon left to read so I’m savouring what is left as much as possible. However it’s been a while so I allowed myself to read this one now. To be honest I don’t think it’s his best work. It starts of well enough but the style of narration began to get a little wearing. The “Hero” of the piece, as he is called, is somewhat annoying and I can understand why he’s having such a tough time of things. The concept (given in the title of the book so it’s not a spoiler) is that Golyadkin meets a duplicate of himself, the only difference is this one succeeds at everything whereas the original one is failing. This leads to problems. Not just in the actual plot but also as the prose becomes a bit too wordy it’s hard to not lose focus. It’s deliberately vague in places and you only really have the not very pleasant Golyadkin to give us opinions on what is happening. I did get through it and there are some things to enjoy, but it was a bit of a struggle. A further note is that in 2013 Richard Ayoade made a film of the book and it’s brilliant. I watched it after I read the novel, something I rarely do, but because I’d struggled with it I wanted to see what others made of it. There are some changes, it’s not set in mid-19th Century St Petersburg but in a dystopian version of the 1980’s – ish and the main character is very likeable. I’d recommend reading the book if you like Russian literature, but after go and watch the film.

“Sorrow is concealed in gilded palaces, and there’s no escaping it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double

The Making Of Modern Britain – Andrew Marr. This is a follow up to the excellent A History Of Modern Britain. Whilst the first book deals with events from after the Second World War finishes (very thoroughly and with insight that helps you see the whole history given in isolation but also as part of the big picture – go and read that as well) this one keeps to the early part of the 20th Century. It’s subtitled “From Queen Victoria to VE Day”. Over all it’s a chronological account of that exact period, first dealing with an overview of each sub era and then breaks it down into the nitty gritty trying to help the reader see what it really would have been like to have been living through these events and the general changes to British culture and politics. There is a huge amount to learn here and the writer’s style is easy to digest, but not lightweight. For lovers of history I’d recommend both this book and its brother.

“My dream is that by returning to our not-so-distant history, I might remind readers why, with all its faults, this is a lucky place to be living in, and one we can be quietly proud of.”
― Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain

Out Of Africa – Karen Blixen. I vaguely remember the very long film and that is love story. This is the real account of Blixen’s life and it’s not remotely about romantic things at all. Well not romantic in the “woman falls for man” kind of way; it does however show some very pleasant sides to what living on a large farm just outside of Nairobi before the First World War would have been like. It sounds brilliant, although I wonder how much of it is seen through rose tinted glasses as I’m sure it was a lot more hard work than Blixen makes out. She seems a very nice person who values the natives and their culture just as much as she does her role as the farm manager. She writes about individual members of the tribes who live on her land and work for her as well as anecdotes that happened during her time there. She is never condescending but shows real interest in differences in their way of life to hers. It’s a dense read, you can’t really get through it quickly but is well worth the effort to see Africa through Blixen’s eyes.

“No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa


Buy The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham
Buy The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Buy The Making Of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
Buy Out Of Africa by Karen Blixen

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2019 In Reading Part One

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

At the end of the year I tend to look back on the books I’ve read during that time and feel a nice sense of accomplishment. This year I’ve got through some ones that had been sitting in my reading pile for years – I think the longest one had been sitting there unread since 1995!

In this first of two parts are a few impressions of some of my reads as I’m sure others will come up in later posts. I don’t like knowing too much about a book before I read it therefore I’m limiting myself to my impressions of the books so if you like that type of thing you might want to give them ago yourself. The result is there are some spoilers but I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum.

The Good Terrorist – Doris Lessing. I bought this when I was away and it was one of the few English books available in the bookshop. I’d always wanted to read somethings by Nobel Winner Doris Lessing and as an introduction I’m willing to try more. I didn’t know anything about the plot and I never read the back so I just let the story unfold. Told from the view point of Alice and set in Britain in the 1980s this follows the events of a growing group of people who squat in a house in London and Alice’s relationships with them and torn ambitions as she wants to be a free spirit but also look after the house and its inhabitants. At times this can be grim (especially the graphic depictions of the house when they first move in) but is very readable. It’s a clever piece of work as many opinions of the main character are shocking and some of her actions cruel even if she does try and justify them, but there is something engaging in the character that makes you want things to turn out well for her – hence I guess the title.

“There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.”
― Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist

Goodbye To Berlin – Christopher Isherwood. I got this in Hay on Wye last year as I wanted to find something new there that I hadn’t got on my Amazon list. Therefore again I didn’t know much about it before I started, other than I love Berlin and thought it would be interesting to see the tail end of the Weimar Republic from an English eye witness. It is a fictionalised account of his life there and it’s not all cabarets and cocktails, even if the musical based on it is called “Cabaret”. Instead it’s an engaging account of the day to day life of a writer and his friends in the shadow of Nazism. The characters he meets are colourful and as they are based on real citizen of Berlin you wonder their fate in the years that followed. There is little plot here really but, as his style is so engrossing and he is an interesting character to follow, I found I’d flown through it.

“I think’, said Sally, ‘it must be marvellous to be a novelist. You’re frightfully dreamy and unpractical and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they can fairly swindle you as much as they want – and then you sit down and write a book about them which fairly shows them what swine they all are, and it’s the most terrific success and you make pots of money.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

The Last Train To Zona Verde – Paul Theroux. I was surprised to learn the travel writer is Louis Theroux’s father, just thought I’d through that in there. This is one of the last travel books by Paul Theroux published in 2013 and in it you see him contemplating the experience of traveling as an older man. The journey is one by public transport from Cape Town up through Namibia and Angola until he’s had enough. It’s a part of the world I don’t know too much about and as I am unlikely to go there myself (although I’ve travelled to some pretty odd locations) I feel I’ve learnt a lot. In the pages of this account I was educated about communities and ways of life in the harsh deserts and poor towns and villages of south east Africa. Theroux’s observations are of real lives, ones that make my own existence look like luxury. There is a wonderful part where the bus he is on breaks down in a small village in south Angola where everyone is stranded for the night. This isn’t on the tourist trail but a clapped out bus full of locals and it’s just a case of make do with everyone else; what’s nice is Theroux doesn’t complain about this but just gets on with it, thriving on the experiences it’s giving him and the chance to meet those he might well not have done if it had not happened.

“Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others — “the new gang — the gang of virtue” — make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many people do both — animal watching in the early morning, busybodying in the afternoon.”
― Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: Overland from Cape Town to Angola

Claudius The God – Robert Graves. I bought this last year along with I Claudius but only read the first one at the time as I’d enjoyed it so much I wanted to savour the second. Carrying on from the point when Claudius becomes Emperor (if you think that’s a spoiler shame on you) it purports to be his own account of the events that follow up until his death. It’s a very intricate read, but not a hard one as Graves presents this section of ancient history in very accessible text. Admittedly the large chuck at the beginning about Herod is not as compelling as what follows and feels like a hurdle you have to overcome to get to the good bit, but having the experience of reading I Claudius before-hand and roughly knowing what is coming it’s endurable. As plots and counter plots ensue Graves is very good at controlling the story. It’s arguable how much of this is accurate history and how much is creative licence either by Graves or his source texts, but it still is a fascinating slice of Roman history that made me want to learn more.

“On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.”
― Robert Graves, Claudius the God


Buy The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
Buy Goodbye To Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
Buy The Last Train To Zona Verde by Paul Theroux
Buy Claudius The God by Robert Graves

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