Last Chance To See.... - Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

A mix of travelogue and environemental tract, encouraging us to care about endangered species by describing a few of them with affection and comic flair. I particularly liked the kakapo, a flightless New Zealand parrot with a notably useless method of courtship. This book was first published in the eighties, so I just Googled it and found that many of the animals described are still hanging on, although it looks like the Yangtze river dolphin is a goner.

This sums up the tone of the book - melancholy but funny;

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

Cracking survivalist adventure yarn in the H.G. Wells idiom, with an added flavour of cold war paranoia. The opening is particularly strong, in which Our Hero awakes from a stay in hospital to find that the world as he knew it has been destroyed by weird intelligent plants. I was particularly intrigued by the constant warnings not to expect the Americans to get a beleaguered Britain out of trouble, and some very 1950s pushing of the sexual envelope in the depiction of the love affair. The ending is perhaps a little weak, but a fine novel nevertheless.

Ruth

A bit of a cheat this, because there are only 4 chapters making this probably the shortest book in the Bible. Still, it's the most good-natured one so far and could even be read as a parable of female self-reliance.

Judges

The carnage has started slack off a little now; basically Judges is Joshua with the sound turned down. The best bit is Sansom, who may have been a bit of a geezer but clearly had the intellect of a sea sponge.

The Missionary Position - Christopher Hitchens

Who could resist a full-pelt polemic from the indomitable Hitchens attacking none other than...Mother Theresa! The main charges are financial hypocrisy and neglecting the physical needs of her charges in order to emphasise the spiritual ones. Both angles provide some pretty damning arguments, and Hitch gets into a righteously entertaining lather over her apparent belief that the world is a better place for having poverty in it and that the poor should accept their lot and "smile more".

The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell

The third book of the Dance to the Music of Time sequence, and the structure is now pretty clear. Each volume centres on 4 or 5 key social events, in which the same names appear as older (but no wiser) recurring characters. The comedy is understated but acute, and the writing is simply exquisite.

Hellboy: Wake the Devil - Mike Mignola

A continuation of the Hellboy story, but I felt that it was largely a revision and deepening of the earlier story, with an over-emphasis on action rather than moving the plot forward. On the plus side, the art is pretty good and there is some gruesomely fun stuff with an iron maiden.

The Second Plane - Martin Amis

Despite Amis's apparently worrying recent comments on Islam in Britain, I was keen to read this collection of essays and short stories about 9/11. There is nothing offensive here, and his usual fireworks-laden prose and intellectual acuity make it well worth a read.

I particularly liked his insights into the mentality of the terrorists themselves and their nihilist death cult, and the point that none of it could happen if anybody involved had the slightest sense of humour.

And, to continue my recent skepical theme, I thought this was a gem:

To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan

The late Carl Sagan is revered by the current skeptcial movement, and this is the book most commonly cited as an inspiration. The general thrust is that the real world is far more wonder-ful and awe-inspiring than any tales of UFOs, ghosts or religious mythologies could ever be. Teach kids the science, especially the scientific method itself, and a better world will follow.

I agree with the argument, and Sagan may be important in its development, but the case could have been made more strongly. He stays with the UFO thing for too long (he's an astronomer after all), there are some dubious claims about psychoanalysis and the focus is always on an American context.

I'm picking holes, but the overall point remains valid. For a stunning example of how scientific wonder can change consciousness, watch Sagan's clip of the Pale Blue Dot:

Hellboy: Seeds of Destruction

My first comic book for a while, and quite a good one. It's an origin story for the titular hero, involving black magic, nazis and other such fun stuff. The plot is a direct lift from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, but this story is hardly alone in that.

The Fall of Troy - Peter Ackroyd

Not Ackroyd's best, but still a thought-preventing and entertaining read. The central characters are an egotistical archaeologist and his young wife, both working at a site that may or may not be Troy, and the plot is driven by the digging up of truths both literally and metaphorically. Classical parallels abound, of which I probably got about half.

Joshua

Moses is dead, but the Israelites continue raging about the ancient Middle East. This book contains the celebrated episode of the walls of Jericho, which I remember being taught at school, although I think they left out this bit:

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

Genocide sanctioned by God. Charming.

The second half of Joshua covers the divvying up of land between the various tribes, and is very dull.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg

I remember trying to read this more than once when I was younger on the basis of its reputation as a Gothic classic, only to come to a halt thanks to the opaque prose style. Even now, I wouldn't suggest that the writing is easy for the modern reader - it is definitely pre-Austen stylistically if not chronologically. However, it does get easier and the rewards are for ploughing on are great.

It is a satire of religious fundamentalism with the trappings of a classic horror story. The central character is convinced that he is destined for heaven no matter what, so he has a mandate to commit any atrocity in the name of God. His diary (presented after a lengthy "Editor's note") reveals the influence both of his hypocritical parents and the mysterious Gil-Martin, who we take to be Satan, a magnificently creepy creation.

It's both funny and scary, and the relevance to the world today is the most horrific thing of all.

Jilla and Me - Diane Cameron

I need to make a bit of a disclaimer here, for the first ever time; I know the author. We were at uni together, and are still in touch in a Facebook kind of way.

Having said that, this was a very good read. There are 4 long short stories (short novellas?) in varying styles, but uniformly very good. I particularly enjoyed the tale set in India contrasting traveller and local attitudes.

I don't read a lot of short stories, but the last two collections I read were by Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood, and I can honestly say I enjoyed this one more. My own blatant bias or evidence of a serious talent? You decide.

Towards The End Of the Morning - Michael Frayn

I think Frayn is a magnificent playwright (Copenhagen, Noises Off), but a patchy novelist. Headlong is marvellous, but this earlier novel is pretty average. I've seen it mentioned as a classic Fleet Street satire, but next to Evelyn Waugh's Scoop this is lightweight indeed.

Arthur and George - Julian Barnes

Barnes had somewhat fallen off my radar in recent years, despite great youthful enthusiasm for his stuff, particularly the wonderful A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. This fine novel puts him right back up there.

It's the story of an unlikely but true friendship between Arthur Conan Doyle and a rural doctor of Indian descent who is accused of horrific local crimes. The themes covered range through Englishness, race, the nature of belief and the evidence that we demand before we believe in anything. Barnes takes us through these ideas with a page-turning plot and characters that we really care about.

A highly successful novel in every aspect.

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul - Douglas Adams

I have read a few fairly negaitive reviews of this, the second Dirk Gently novel. There are some fair criticisms - overly intricate plots and a rushed climax foremost amongst them. In balance, I merely state that Adams is one of the greatest sentence constructors I have ever had the privelege to read. As evidence, I give you "It was a battered yellow Citroën 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones.", which had me snorting out loud in a crowded train carriage.

Miami - Joan Didion

In her characteristically impeccable prose, Didion crafts a travelogue from 1980s Miami. I wanted alligators on yachts and Jan Hammer, but sadly the book concentrates on the (largely loony) Cuban exile population which is much more important but rather less entertaining.

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

Utterly fantastic Victorian mystery melodrama. This set the template for the classic English detective novel: a cursed gem is stolen from a country house, a bumbling local bobby is soon displaced by a hyper-competent Scotland Yard man who must find the culprit from a range of suspicious types. All we know is that it can't be the one towards whom all the evidence points.

This is both great fun and serious literary ingenuity, particuarly in Collins's trademark use of multiple narrative perspectives.

The Damned United - David Peace

This had loads of hype a while back, and the phrase "best novel about football ever written" was bandied about. It didn't occur to me that the only other novel about football I've read was The Goalkeeper's Revenge when I was about 8.

As a result, Peace's stream-of-consciousness depiction of Brian Clough's career came as a crushing disappointment. It's way too long, saddled with an over-complicated dual narrative structure and the writing is just plain dull. Particularly irritating is the author's conviction that the repetition of banal phrases increases their potency. Statement like this abound;

"Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks."

Bollocks