Recent Reading

February

• Arthur C Clarke and Michael Kube-McDowell, The Trigger – I’d like this book a lot more if it didn’t have an ex-baseball star President who speaks in non-stop sports metaphors. Also, the references to Arthur C Clarke (including Clarke’s three laws and Clarke Orbits) are quite grating. Forgettable
• Thomas Harris, Black Sunday – bad thriller
• Thomas Harris, Red Dragon – okay thriller
• Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs – actually quite good thriller
• Harold Pinter, The Dwarves – this is early Pinter, and about as full of non-sequiturs and strangeness as you’d expect. It strikes me that Harold Pinter would have been great on Twitter.

March

• Charlie Brooker, Dawn of the Dumb – lots of Guardian Screen Burn pieces. I love Charlie Brooker greatly, and this made me chuckle out loud a few times.
• Geraint Anderson, Cityboy – he wrote a column for thelondonpaper and now the guts of it are available in paper form. Again. On smaller pages and you pay for them. I mostly picked this up as a partner to ‘Kill Your Friends’. Of the two, this is much more enjoyable.
• John Niven, Kill Your Friends – horrible, horrible book. Imagine ‘American Psycho’ set in the British record industry in the 90s, but with less imagination and wit. Horrible.
• Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot – Stephen Fry’s brilliant autobiography, covering his life at school up to his 18th birthday. It was released after ‘The Liar’, but I read it first and I’m glad I did.
• Stephen Fry, The Liar – semi-autobiographical novel which (especially having just put down his autobiography) turns out to match his actual school life quite closely indeed. Quite brilliantly funny too.
• Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 – On the one hand, Tom Rob Smith has too many first names and is younger than me. On the other hand, it’s quite a good read, if suffering from a bit of a format plot. Robert Harris could have written it, if you know what I mean. That said, it’s as deserving of bestseller status as anything you’ll find in an airport this year.