All the books I read in 2012

Regular readers (hello Mum!) will recall I write a post at the end of each year reviewing all the books I read in the past twelve months (2011, 2010, 2009). It’s an annual tradition up there with the Queen’s speech or X-Factor. For me at least. 

They're not hugely insightful or long or clever reviews, more just quick observational thoughts on each book as I go. If you have questions, ask below!

So, here we go - in chronological order:

Dark Star Safari - Paul Theroux: A great start to the New Year of 2012, as Theroux heads north to south across Africa encountering interesting people and places, moaning and evangelising in equal measure about what he finds on his way. 

His past life in Africa as a lecturer in Uganda helps, as he can access numerous high-ranking people and knows local dialects too. His disdain for many of the aid organisations he meets is also interesting; some don’t like Theroux for his moaning while travelling but I love it - it’s far more realistic than the endlessly upbeat schoolboy excited TV presenters we get these days who find everything and everyone just wonderful.

The Wonderboys - Michael Chabon: I’ve seen the film a couple of times and finding the book for £1 in Brighton thought it was worth a go and I was right. A great tale of drunken lecturers, the difficulty of writing and the idiocy of love. Recommended.

Watching the English - Kate Fox: A nice little observational non-fiction about the peculiar mannerism and social mores of us mad English people. Tad dry in places but interesting mostly.

The Tiny Wife - Andrew Kaufmann: A short, odd novel about a man’s wife shrinking. It was ok.

A Week at the Airport - Alain De Botton: I bloody loved this; a quick, light yet insightful meander around Heathrow airport by the people’s philosopher (yeah right). As someone who wanders through the bright concourses of Heathrow every so often I enjoyed learning a bit more about the people that keep the big ol’ place humming.

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan: Thought this was a bit overrated but enjoyable. Never a huge fan of 'linking stories' that fuse different characters together, either subtly or obviously, but it was easy to read and better than most stabs at this type of fiction I’ve read.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Moshin Hamed: Enjoyed this a lot; a terse, tight novel about the growing disillusionment of a high-flying western financial expert from India who turns his back on it all for, maybe, more nefarious activities.

Jupiter’s Travels - Ted Simon: Around the world on a motorcycle is always a good premise for a book and Ted Simon’s account is excellent as he makes his way here and there across Africa, South America, North America and onto Asia and so forth. The people he meets make the book, as well as some of his excellent descriptions. He repeated the trip again later in life, although I’ve yet to read that. I may, though.

Engleby - Sebastian Faulks: The more I read of Faulks the more I like him, after finding Birdsong quite disappointing. A dark, somewhat comic novel about a disturbed chap going through life and odd events happening around him, OR DO THEY!

The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good - Matthew Crawford: Read this on a previous blog.

A Short History of Tractor Farming in the Ukraine - Marina Lewcyka: Terribly written story-by-numbers tripe that aspired for comic-thoughtfulness but was just crap. Hey ho.

Americana - Don DeLillo: I started reading this flying back from San Francisco and fell asleep about 30 pages in so it dropped on the floor. When I awoke the woman next to me said “no good then?!” But actually it was very good. The first 100 pages or so are the clear inspiration for Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris but then it veers off into some mad road-trip novel which isn’t as good but the writing is engaging and different and kept me hooked to the end.

Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo: Inspired by the previous novel picked this up (from HMV!) but wasn’t as enjoyable as Americana. They made a film of it with Robert Patterson. Somehow sums up my criticisms.

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink: I really enjoyed this (I’ve not seen the film). A beautifully constructed tale of (too) young love and the inability to escape ones past, it had that rare ability to linger in your mind long after you’ve read it. It did this with simple, plain yet highly engaging language that I found completely beguiling. Highly recommended.

The Stranger - Albert Camus: I didn’t really enjoy this; a bit too short and the main character is a strange lad.

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins: Popular but not all that great. A page turner but dour writing and boring characters. Still, it sold gazillons, so what do I know.

Empire - Niall Ferguson: Ferguson is a contrary character it seems but I really enjoyed this thorough exploration of the Empire from its inception to its demise. It was great to learn so much more about a period of history that looms so large in the past of us Brits but yet we (for the most part) know so little about.

One Day - David Nicholls: Someone lent this to me to read and I can’t deny it had a certain basic charm but why it proved so popular is beyond me. Quite boring characters act idiotically for years on end blatantly in love but without ever acting upon it. I could believe this if we lived in a world without alcohol.

The Crow Road - Iain Banks: My brother lent me this and I really enjoyed it. Lyrical, insightful writing and an engrossing story with nicely realised characters with engaging personalities. I watched the BBC adaption afterwards but it wasn’t as good.

Last Orders - Graham Swift: I bought this book for 20p from the Putney Scouts outdoor stall (oh how we live in south west London) and being a big fan of Swifty I was expecting good things and I wasn’t disappointed. A moving tale of misdirected love and wasted lives. There’s a film but I’ve not seen it yet.

Touching the Void - Joe Simpson: ARGH MY LEG, he screamed as he fell down the mountain. Well, I’m going to die, he thinks. But then the triumph of the human spirit overcomes ridiculous odds and he makes it back to base camp. What a guy.

I, Partridge - Alan Partridge: Funny throughout although the jokes wears thin after a while. A-HA!

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck: Lenny you idiot! Poor old boys, struggling for a living; a bleak tale.

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro: A disappointing effort from an author I usually love (The Remains of the Day) which starts off promisingly but ends poorly.

The Revenge of Gaia - James Lovelock: It’s enjoyable to read a proper rant sometimes and this is most definitely that as Lovelock has clearly had enough with our inability to accept the damage we’re doing to our planet and railing against it all.

Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis: One of the my favourite books of the year with Dixon a truly brilliant character who gets involved in some hilarious scrapes surrounded by a rag-tag bunch of awful people. A treat.

Sunset Park - Paul Auster: Same old Auster - people living on the fringes of society, somehow not wanting for money, and hiding damaged pasts. As always he does a lot of Telling rather than Showing which I always thought was a big no-no in the writer’s world but he gets away with it. I got this from Putney library for free when it would cost you £17 in hardback. Libraries are great.

The Family Arsenal - Paul Theroux: A bleak, grim tale of 1970s London that I struggled to get into until I just sat and read 100 pages plus when at an airport and then suddenly really started to enjoy.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut: A very odd novel but one of the best I’ve read this year. Vonnegut was actually in Dresden when the bombs fell and survived and this novel was his response to that but it also includes time travel, aliens and lots of death. So it goes.

A Week in December - Sebastian Faulks: Didn’t expect to like this as it does that interweaving character thing I don’t usually like (see A Visit From the Goon Squad) but actually I found very enjoyable and when it hit its satirical targets was bang on the money.

London Under - Peter Ackroyd: There’s a whole world beneath our feet in London and Ackroyd does a great job of telling us about it all in lyrical detail.

A Touch of Love - Jonathan Coe: Very odd this as it was written very basically, almost badly, but I think that was the point. It was too short to really care about the characters that much but it kept me hooked.

No Easy Day - Mark Owen: An account of the raid on Osama Bin Laden. The first 150 pages just covers Owen’s (Not his real name) time in the SEALs and other missions leading to the Big One. This was all quite boring but the raid chapters are pretty good and it was interesting to get a first-hand take on the raid. Terribly written, though.

And that’s it: well done if you made it to the end. If not, I don’t blame you; it’s hard to review 33 books in one sitting and make it interesting and insightful throughout. Bring on 2013...

Villas, smarter Londoners and books in bed

Today is official the last day of summer. Yeah, I know, ridiculous right? It's September 21 and only now is it technically autumn, despite it clearly being cold enough to have justified booking a villa holiday and high-tailing it out of here for about three weeks now.

As I said before, though, I like autumn a lot. It's full of colour and change and enjoyable days in the calendar: Halloween, Bonfire Night, that Christmas thing which seems to be as popular as ever. All in all, it's not a bad time of year.

One thing I've always thought about the autumn/winter season in London is just how much smarter Londerers looks during the colder months than in the summer.

From now on long, smooth winters coats, elegant scarves and fancy gloves are the norm and baggy, ill-fitting, garish t-shirts, shorts and flipflops are mercifully hidden away for another 6-9 months of the year.

I've been fruitlessly trying to track down the medium sized version of a great winter coat I saw in a TK Maxx that only seems to be stocked in the large. Curses.

One other nice thing about all this is that you can spend more time curled up inside with a good book, too. There are few finer things in life than lying in a bed on a cold, blustery day with an enjoyable piece of writing that you can plough through as the weather howls impotently outside.

I once read the entire novel The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe on one such day, and it was bliss. Recently I've been doing likewise (pre and post rugby world cup matches) with The Atlantic, Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester, a man who's led a very interesting and varied life as a journalist and writer.

It had a lot of interesting historical, social and maritime facts, stories and topics within its 400+ pages and although not the best non-fiction book I've read of recent years, it was certainly an enjoyable yarn.

For anyone that's had more than a passing interest in the great, grey slab of water that lies off the coast of Cornwall and churns and thunders unstopped until it reaches, by turns, Canada, the US, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, then it would come with a hearty recommendation from yours truly.

Ah, the sunny climes of Brazil and Argentina, it's enough to make you book that winter summer holiday without a thought for the price.

Little known histories

There are so many stories from history. To many to ever be remembered. But here's a fascinating piece of maritime history I read about today. This extract from Wikipedia says a lot:

At 9:04:35 AM, the cargo of Mont-Blanc exploded with more force than any man-made explosion before it. The ship was instantly destroyed in the giant fireball that rose over 1.9 kilometres (1.2 mi) into the air, forming a large mushroom cloud. 

The force of the blast triggered a tsunami, which rose up as high as 18 metres (60 ft) above the harbour's high-water mark on the Halifax side. It was caused by the rapid displacement of harbour water near the blast, followed by water rushing back in towards the shore.

Captain Haakon From and most of the crew that were on the bridge of the Imo and on its decks were killed by the tsunami. A black rain of unconsumed carbon from the Mont-Blanc fell over the city for about 10 minutes after the blast, coating survivors and structural debris with soot.

The spitefulness of TFL

My girlfriend sometimes calls me a grumpy young man when I begin ranting and raving about my dislike of various things, and perhaps in some ways she's right, but my contempt for TFL often feels entirely vindicated.

Two examples from this week:

At Piccadilly Circus the electronic board proclaimed a train was one minute away. We stood there for at least five minutes before it arrived, and then it was utterly packed and getting on was basically impossible. It took two more trains before I was able to board. Why claim a train is one minute away when it isn't?

This morning, at Leicester Square there was a large poster board at the top of the escalators that said "On June 3 TFL and the British Transport Police conducted ticket inspections of travellers at Leicester Square at found X number of passengers fraudulent tickets and X passengers without tickets. £75 was gathered in fines".

This whole thing is idiotic.

So TFL are proudly warning all travellers through the station that all their checks – which included manpower from the BTP for goodness sake – raised a total of £75! Should they be pleased by this? They're boasting about £75? It's pathetic.

What a shocking waste of time, energy and resources that surely could be applied to more useful, meaningful tasks. The BTP in particular should not be deployed in this way, what a hateful thing to do – is that why people become police officers, to facilitate the fining of travellers on the underground to return £75 in revenue?

Also, what' the point in the board? As a warning to travellers, a deterrent? What for? If people try to skim the system then they will regardless and no fines (a total of £75! ha!) will stop it.

The only people that actually suffer are legitimate travellers impeded on their journey because of stupid ticket checks or who, probably due to genuine reasons of forgetfulness or mistakes, forgot to top up or have the wrong Oyster Card on their person, but are ruthlessly fined merely because TfL can – despite running a service at a level that passes as nothing more than competent.

London is so odd sometimes

One time, standing on a train, a man was hunched down, rocking on his ankles reading a book, in the middle of the train carriage, while also holding a cup of coffee in a Starbuck's cup.

This was a packed train during the rush hour and he was taking up about four standing spaces by doing this – he didn't look odd, he was wearing a suit and probably in his 30s and off to work. Eventually someone asked him if he could stand up and regrettably he did so – I wanted to get a picture.

Then, today, I saw a man sat (literally, sat) in one of those Metro paper dispensers they have in stations where people grab their slice of free-news in a morning, reading his book.

The dispenser was empty, so he obviously saw it as the perfect place to sit and finish his novel, as the rush-houring commuters filed by. Again, he didn't look that odd, but it goes to show you never can tell, doesn't it Chuck?

These are just two stories of many that no doubt exist in London, but it's the fact both occurred during the rush hour, where presumably sane(ish) people are merely trying to get from A to B - without encountering any Cs - that makes these people all the more noteworthy.

Still, these people had one thing in common – they were both reading books. So perhaps we should rejoice in their dedication to the printed word.

The Guildford return

I returned to Guildford on Saturday, not for a 10km this time, but to go for a nice long walk (6.2 miles!) with my girlfriend.

We had a lovely time exploring the route I had run at the time (more sedately of course) which involved a blood curdling screams at the sight of a wasp, hurting our necks through staring at a woodpecker in a tree, and arriving at the stunning views of St Martha's Church (see picture).

It's lovely escaping London for a while, even if only a few hours on a Saturday in another town only 30 minutes away. The novelty of seeing a bus that doesn't let you use your Oyster card (that symbol of TfL oppression) is never lost on me.

In the future, perhaps NFC technology will mean all buses will have a standardized computer system for ticket purchases so we are never without money to catch a bus, which would be handy.

Ironically, I had been set to run a 10km today but due to breaking my toe a couple of weeks ago, I was unable too. I am walking normally though, as my 6.2 miles jaunt evidences, but it'll be a little while yet before I strap on my running shoes again yet.

Train whistles

“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”

What is it about trains? Those railways sing bewitchment…as Paul Theroux wrote, and he's right. They are timeless, yet historical, they swerve and glide, sink and shuffle their way across all manner of landscapes, in a manner that no other form of transport has managed to replicate. They get you to B from A, but through C, D, E and beyond, giving you a true glimpse into a world a plane, or car, can never do.

Theroux may have gone around most of the world's countries by train, but even my four hour journey home to Cornwall is a mix of strange pleasures: the stolen glances into people back room windows, the fisherman, dogs being walked, cows, sheep, rivers arcing, the sun streaming in over wide open land that is so English, the rest.

Drowsy too: no need to worry about directions, or control, just recline, stare, read, engage with others. Theroux so often meets interesting, intriguing people (or has the ability to make them seem so), on his trips, and admittedly he is in far away lands, on 20-hour journeys in shared cabins, so perhaps it comes easy, more naturally, but it is still part of the potential thrill of travel.
My cousin traveled from Beijing in Brighton by train after her travels around Asia and said it was fantastic. Trains inspire in a way that many people identify with, but in ways that are hard to fathom, to exactly pin-point.

I've read three Theroux's now, each one a tome to his love of railways, their uniqueness, grandness, ramshackle-ness, and beyond, and each time I left with a sense of something, I don't know, A sense of falling, like an arrow shower, sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain (Too much? Well, more railways in art at least).

This is a video of Lou Reed reading an abridged version of the open page from The Great Railway Bazaar set to music, it is rather great.

On the road

Today is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first motorway in Britain. Interesting no? Why do we call them traffic jams? What has jam got to do with it?

In Cornwall no motorway has dared come within almost 50 miles of its borders, the closest one being the trusty, almost cosy, M5 in Exeter, that leads on to the more workmanlike M4 towards London or Swansea, or upwards to the M6 and beyond...

Motorway service stations are one of the most horrific places you can go to; overpriced, sanitised, drab and soul destrorying. Yet I once knew someone who said they were his favourite places and loved visiting them to have dinner there. He was 20. Yeah I never got that either.

Despite 50 years of motorways in Britain and the roads stretching the length of breadth of the country (though not in Cornwall as noted, or almost the entirety of Wales - too hilly) there is no real 'road trip culture' that is so idealised in the US and to a lesser extent in Europe. Perhaps there is no comparison between saying "I'm driving from New York to Route 66 and on to Las Vegas" to "I'm leaving Reading on the M4 and heading for Taunton."

Anyone got any good motorway stories / thoughts to share?

Troubled Bridge Over Water

Having lived in Cardiff for four years I can only agree with the sentiments made in this story about the toll charge only taking cash. Some of the comments below make interesting reading too.

It’s so pathetic and bureaucratic that in the year 2007 when people can now pay with a VISA Paywave system in shops for payments under £10 in 10 seconds people can’t pay by chip and pin on a major bridge which deals with 10 customers a second roughly.

Futhermore as many people say in the comments there isn’t even a cash machine for people to take cash out on site. Instead they are made to drive back to England to get cash – with the effort of closing two directions of motorway east and west to escort the car across the road – including if you have £5 and not the final 10p that was added on recently.

The answer here is for drivers to form an unspoken system whereby if someone in front can’t pay the fee the person behind, or nearby, pays the fee, they exchange details and send the other person a cheque for their help.

Three trains and a bus

Just to say I took three trains home and a bus from Cardiff to Truro; off at Bristol, off at Tiverton to the bus, Plymouth to Truro on final train. The amazing thing was that it ran like clockwork. Every section. Our much maligned transport network deserves some credit when it does deliver its promise.