Preacher: Proud Americans - Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon

I'm not sure that this relentlessly adolescent comic book material can really handle the weight of retelling the stories of the Vietnam War or the Easter 1916 uprising. I couldn't help wincing at times, but the main plot-based section has some very entertaining stuff; think Kill Bill with added outrageous blasphemy.

It's Only A Movie; reel life adventures of a film obsessive - Mark Kermode

Kermode's hugely entertaining film reviews with Simon Mayo are my favourite podcast in the world right now, but this memoir is strangely uninspiring. Perhaps I am too familiar with some of the anecdotes and opinions herein. On the plus side, the prose rattles along as the bequiffed one's voice is heard speaking it in one's head, which is possibly a lot more pleasurable than it sounds.

Breath – Tim Winton

I've been ambivalent about Winton in the past, and I have a strong mistrust of the self-aggrandizing Australian surf scene, so this was always going to be something of a conflict of sensibilities.

Much to my surprise, I really admired Breath. Surfing turns out to be just the central motif in a design built around breathing and notions of self-endangerment in exchange for excitement, intelligently and interestingly put together. The stuff about erotic asphyxiation made me feel very icky, which I suppose it was meant to do.

Dry Store Room No 1; the secret life of the Natural History Museum – Richard Fortey

I went to the utterly glorious Natural History Museum countless times as a schoolboy, so I was interested in this personal history by a long-time staff member and trilobite specialist. It’s less a formal record than a highly personal collection of scientific anecdotes, reminiscences and scurrilous gossip.

It is impossible to resist comparing the reading experience to a visit to the place itself; enlightening, rambling, too much to take in and a little bit boring in the geology section.

Haggai

Tempests, earthquakes, droughts…death, destruction, misery…yada, yada, yada.

Zephaniah

It’s amazing how tedious divine genocidal psychopathy gets after this many books. And yet many still consider the Bible as the source of all morality, it’s all very perplexing.

Habbakuk

The most striking thing here is a vision of God with horns coming from his hands, spreading fire and pestilence throughout the land, flattening mountains and generally having fun. Talking of which, I also enjoyed 2:16 –

"Drink thou also and let thy foreskin be uncovered." Wahey!

Nahum

1: 2 “God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries”

Charming.

These OT prophets are getting very repetitive now. God is alright if you are entirely subservient to him, but express any independence of thought and you will be variously flayed, burned, drowned or otherwise tortured and killed, along with your spouse, children and cattle. We get it already!

Micah

Back to the standard prophetic hyperbole about God’s fury, including this strikingly terrible piece of advice(7:5) - "Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom."

Jonah

This is that funny story about a fella being swallowed by a whale, and as such is strangely entertaining. But, obviously it ain’t necessarily so;

Hunger – Knut Hamsun

The most significant thing about this impressive fever dream of a book is the date, way back in 1890. Although clearly influenced by Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the narrator here is an astonishingly early precursor to the “heroes” of modernist fiction, as well as much of Nabokov’s work.

Obadiah

The briefest of books, but there’s still a fair deal of mayhem at the expense of the poor old Edomites, thanks to a God-inspired “rumour”.

Amos

Just when you thought Yahweh couldn’t get any more psychotic, here he envelops a whole bunch of cities in flame for something or other. Revealing moment (3:6) - "Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?"

The Night Watch – Sarah Waters

I found The Night Watch an unsatisfying reading experience, but the fault was primarily my own. I had somehow got the reviews of this book muddled in my head with those of Waters’ subsequent book, The Little Stranger. Consequently I kept waiting for the ghost to arrive, but of course there is nothing supernatural at all I now realise. I rather wrecked it for myself.

That aside, this isn’t half as good as the authors more celebrated Victorian pastiches. The setting here is wartime London (nicely evoked) but the plot is unengaging and could have been told in 200 fewer pages. To be fair, a walk during an air raid and a gruesomely botched abortion are memorable set-pieces.

Joel

OK, I’m really pushing the definition of “book” here, it’s barely a page, but I started calling every book of the Bible a book on here so there you go. Incidentally, I notice that the 400th anniversary of the publication of the KJV is next year, so I’ll try and finish at an appropriate moment.

As for Joel, it’s the usual bloodthirsty nonsense.

Hosea

I’ll defer here to the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which sums Hosea up better than I could manage.

Hosea is a book filled with whoredoms, children of whoredoms, adulteries between breasts, buying wives with barley, ripping pregnant women apart, and killing unborn babies. What will surprise most believers is that it is God who does the ripping and killing and who tells Hosea to buy a wife and marry a whore. Biblical family values at its best.

Daniel

There’s some infanticide just for form’s sake, but the chief interest here lies in the four dreams that take up the second half of the book. There’s also an early teaser appearance from “the Son of God” – I believe he gets more important in part 2.

Ezekiel

A bit of a nutter is Ezekiel. Visions of four-faced monsters, mass resurrections, psychotically violent misogyny and large-penised Egyptians all feature. It’s quite entertaining if a bit repetitive.

Incidentally, I don’t know what the translation Samuel L Jackson uses but this sure doesn’t tally up with the KJV:

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis

Amis’s first novel made a huge impact on publication in 1973, helped no doubt by its Rothian, explicit treatment of sex and the expectations surrounding the son of Kingsley. Reading it now, the funny/sad coming of age story is ho-hum, albeit written in superior prose, and only the climactic Oxford entrance interview provides a real thrill.

A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

It is hard to briefly encapsulate this sprawling, wild, endlessly funny and inventive book in so brief a space. I have riffed in the past on the predictable themes of Australian fiction (emigration, displacement, environment), but this energetic tale stretches them all out of shape to create something unique and uproarious.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

I hated the first McCarthy I read (All The Pretty Horses), but having watched the movie and heard all of the critical superlatives, I decided to give this a try, and was duly impressed if not enamoured.

In contrast to the film, this post-apocalyptic vision seemed to me less about environmental catastrophe than the end of spirituality/religion. References to God are frequent and the rhythm is biblical, short paragraphs written in plain prose with the odd poetical flourish (“ensepulchred”).

A Positively Final Appearance - Alec Guiness

Charming and amusing diaries from the late 90s, including the great man’s thoughts on Tony Blair, Greta Garbo, failing health and all sorts of other things. I could have done with less about his dogs, but the discursiveness is all part of the fun.

Voodoo Histories - David Aaranovitch

The main problem with most conspiracy theories is that a successful prosecution of, say, a government hoax about 9/11 would involve far too many people to be credibly covered up. I enjoyed this overview of some of the more enduring nonsenses, including stuff like Stalin’s purges and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as the more obvious Diana stuff. The Protocols become important, because anti-Semitism is an unsurprising and dispiriting strand through many of the crackpot ideas.

I was grateful to have my last few doubts about the JFK “lone gunman” theory finally dispelled in a straightforward way.

Deaf Sentence - David Lodge

I am a fan of Lodge from way back, so even though this book is far from perfect I enjoyed it very much. The problems are largely structural. A comic sequence set in Gladeworld (i.e. Centerparcs) and a much more serious passage in Auschwitz are peripheral to the story, burying the more compelling storyline about a disturbed student which just peters out. Lodge’s comic touch remains sure, though, and he works in some ideas about linguistics that are very interesting.

Apparently, my Mum’s circle of friends thought this was brilliant, I suspect that the older and deafer you are the funnier and more meaningful you will find the stuff about hearing loss, which is the central theme of the book.

Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the monumental Barsetshire sequence, a self-evident masterpiece that is at once universal and fascinating in its specificity. The Last Chronicle develops new stories of its own whilst neatly wrapping up various strands from earlier volumes, although not necessarily in a crowd-pleasing or expected manner. As always, a sense of Trollope’s humanism shines through, with even the least attractive characters, such as the memorably odious Mrs Proudie, eliciting a small amount of sympathy.

The closing scenes, describing the funeral of a favourite character, are moving both for their content and due to a sense of a great project coming to a close. Several thousand pages of joyful reading come to a close, but the Palliser novels are something to anticipate with relish.