Reading Lavinia Greenlaw's 'The Importance of Music to Girls' and just started on the first book of the Forsyte saga (all nine books for £1.50 at my local charity shop), 'The Man of Property'.

Next up is John Niven's Kill Your Friends, exactly two years after everyone else read it.

I've just read it too

Being a bloke - and having good reason to belive that you are in fact the opposite - just curios to know

...and I have to say I'm ever so underwhelmed by it. It's nearly all been said before better by other people, although I quite like the way it is structured. I should like it more (especially as I was brought up only a few (less posh) miles down the road from the Essex village she describes. I had hoped it would have more of a female spin on it, as find so much music writing is on the laddish side.

Still, I'm only halfway through, and I'm finding it easy to read. It may pick up towards the end.

Excuse clumsy sentences and bad punctuation. It's edging towards bedtime chez Jo.

Jonathan Littels "The Kindly Ones" as recommended by the Massive... gonna delve into a bit of darkness.

Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold. Seems good so far. Last one I read also had magic & mis-direction as a theme : the latest Brookmyer. That was good too.

Genuinely disturbing book that sets out to expose lies and propaganda in the media.

Quite refreshing in that he doesn't have this simplistic 'journalists/broadcasters are scum' viewpoint - instead he takes apart the way the media works nowadays and how it makes it impossible for journalists to do their job properly.

The stuff on government and military PR is gripping. Recommended.

I'm currently half-way through "Last Shop Standing" by Graham Jones , which is very enjoyable and most informative.
Graham works for Proper Record Distribution (who are in the advert on your right) and he poses the question "whatever happened to record shops"
From his early days working for HMV, to driving the length and breadth of the UK flogging his wares, Graham has many amusing tales to tell.
I've also got Sir Ranulph Fiennes "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know"
which is pretty topical at the moment.
Next on my pile is "The Rough Guide To Playlists" which i delve into all the time, and it has an endorsement on the front cover by Mark Ellen no less!

"Beyond the Boys of Summer" by Roger Kahn - a kind of "best of" from a truly wonderful writer in that seemingly effortless style that the best American writers have.

"The Power of the Dog". Don Winslow. If you like Lehane or Pelecanos - you'll love this. All the power of James Ellroy without the pointless convolution.

"Collected Works" T.S Eliot. These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

"The Black Swan" Nassim Taleb. All very interesting. I sort of get the thesis - I'm not sure I get what we're supposed to do about it. Just not bright enough probably

I keep the books I'm currently reading - as well as those I've yet to start - next to my bed. So it's quite a list.

Currently Reading:
Ben Goldacre - Bad Science
Hyejin Kim - Jia
Peter Molloy - The Lost World Of Communism
Halldor Laxness - Independent People
Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the Greater Mekong

Yet to read:
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Cory Doctorow - Little Brother
Charlotte Mosely - The Mitfords
Shirley Collins - America Over The Water
David Kyanston - A World To Build
Richard F Burton - Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah
Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things
Theodore Bestor - Tsukiji: The Fish Market At The Center of the World
Herve This - Molecular Gastronomy
Steven Johnson - The Ghost Map
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated
David Simon - Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion
Mark Kurzum - The Mascot
Jonathan Miles - Medusa
Robert Gellately - Lenin, Stalin and Hitler
Oliver James - They F*** You Up

Short story, really - but quite gentle and amusing, as is his way.

I seem to be getting sadder and sadder.

By the bed are recent issues of The Word, Uncut, Record Collector, Mojo and Wisden Cricket Monthly (some sanity here at least). I am racing to get through these before the July issues are published. The Sunday Times colour mag slowed things down at the weekend with a Dylan interview (nicked from Rolling Stone, I used to subscribe to that too).

Inside the bedside table drawer are:
a Maconie book
Red To Black by Alex Dryden (written by an old pal of mine, Dryden is a pseudonym)
soon Netherlands

I need some time. And some help. One of those things you see in mags, The Hepworth/Ellen Makeover or some such.

I'm a bit behind the times. Currently enjoying Gilbert Shelton's The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus edition. Not as laugh out loud hilarious as I thought it would be. But it's on the bedside table, and accompanies me to bog, bath and beyond.

is a ventolin puffer

Homicide by David Simon, 22 pages in, quite good , although I feel that Im gonna have to keep notes

Hold the Enlightenment - Travel writings by Tim Cahill

Waiting for me are Biographys of Mao, Hitler, Stalin and Spike Milligan. I think I´ll start with Milligan

Marina Hyde: Celebrity
Being deliciously bitchy is easy (see the current thread on humour); being deliciously bitchy while making perceptive points about where our society's heading isn't. I was a bit worried that she might have been spreading herself a bit too thin recently, what with three Guardian columns a week on three completely different topics and now a book, but my fears were unfounded. This is like the very best of Clive James and Joe Queenan - i.e. pretty damned good.

Richard K. Morgan: Altered Carbon
A catch-up for me (it was first published five years ago and he's since completed a trilogy with the same main character). "Cyberpunk noir" is what it says on the tin, and ye cannae gan wrang wi' that. I'm only half way through it, but so far I'm enjoying it even more than Snow Crash.

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a sumptuous two volume collection of the great man's cases.

...The Baader Meinhof Complex. I watched the film and felt I didn't know enough about modern German history.

Stuart Maconie. Not as good as they say. Bill Bryden he ain't, but he's getting there. Certainly makes me smile and it is at least amusing to see his 2 track mind referencing football and bands to everywhere. Everywhere.

Flann O'Brien - The Complete Novels, always kept close at hand, the one (collection of)book(s) I'd recommend to anyone. The writer that everyone tells you Joyce is.

Like everyone else, David Simon's "Homicide" is also there, which I've just started.

Got about three chapters into Homicide and just couldn't get any further. I think he can sometimes come across as being a bit too pleased about being David Simon. Am now trying Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, and retrying Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair as I loved it first time around and want to know even more. I'm also doing one episode per night from The West Wing special Presidential Boxset, i.e. all 154 episodes under one roof, which is rather getting in the way of too much reading. That's the discipline.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I'm up to page 500 (of about 650) and it's starting to feel like hard work. When I've finished it, though, I have the choice of a biography of Terry-Thomas, Che Guevara's Bolivian Diaries or Marina Hyde's celebrity book. The next 150 pages can't come soon enough.

Absolutely hooked on these and I've never been into crime novels before at all. How he gets a provincial Swedish detective mixed up in plots that include drug smuggling in the Baltic states to a plot to assasinate Nelson Mandela is amazing.

A lot of these were flavour of the month a while back but I am just reading them now:

Just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo It was okay as an airport novel, but it could have done with some rewriting. Since the author died just after submitting the first draft I guess that wasn't possible.

I too have just finished Kill Your Friends. Very in debt to American Psycho. Apart from the obvious diatribes against the Music Biz, it had some nice digs at New Labour.

Also read the very powerful The Road by Cormac McCarthy in one sitting. A truly biblical post-apocalypse novella. Apparently it's been made into a film. That's going to be a barrel of laffs.

Currently, reading Blood River by Tim Butcher. A Telegraph man's attempt to follow the footsteps of Stanley down the Congo. This really is Boy's Own Stuff with a soupcon of cannibalism. Having traveled a bit round that region I agree with Butcher that the whole of the Congo basin seems to be going into retrodevelopment.

Next in the queue: The White Tiger and The Gargoyle

Just finished this, after giving it to the better half for Christmas. I read very slowly.

To the guys who, some time last year, were expressing doubt as to its readability and the author's irritating habit of putting himself at the centre of the story, I see what you mean. I know why he's doing it like that, but the narrative does get in the way somewhat. Parts of it extremely good though.

Now wading through Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and there's a Chuck Palhniuk book a-waiting after that. Diary I think. It gives me the evil eye now and again for not having started it.

by Sebastian Faulks. Just finished - very good.

Have just started Angela's Ashes. Yes I know, not exactly up to date, but it's risen to the top of the to do list.

...by John Ajvide Lindqvist. The film has been in my head ever since I saw it, and I wanted More. In truth the film sticks very close though, rarely scary but unfailingly creepy, in some parts even more than the film, and does not shy away from some of the (even) more unsavoury implications that the film chooses not to underline.

After a fair chunk of it was seen off on the bus on the way home after buying it, the Marina Hyde will sit in the smallest room, to be seen off by stealth. Seems to be a collection of her newspaper work, but no less scabrous for that.

Otherwise summer approaches, when the telly stays off in protest against Big Brother and I catch up on the backlog , i.e. the shelf, not the table. J.G. Farrell's "The Siege Of Krishnapur", W.G. Sebald's "The Rings Of Saturn" , Arthur Koestler's "Scum of the Earth" and Alex Ross's "The Rest Is Noise" sit at the top of the pile, with a side-order of Mick Imlah's "The Lost Leader". For now. (That "City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London" by Vic Gatrell looks awfully inviting...)

I seem to have a pile on my bedside table - mixture of stuff I have started but not finished, the current fix and what's next.

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History - David Aronovitch. Just got started with this and am finding it very har to put down. Highly recommend giving it a go.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy. Nearly finished. I'm a bit of a sucker for this genre. Looking forward to the film adaptation. Hope it does not ruin the book! I also recommend The Death of Grass by John Christopher - it has just been reprinted by Penguin. It's about society breaking down due to an environmental disaster. I do like cheery stuff!

Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go - George Pelecanos. Currently on pause... I think I over did it by reading all the Nick Stefanos novels in one go. I will finished it... Pelecanos doesn't let you down.

1) One Digital Radio
2) Two old copies of Uncut
3) George Orwell's Books v Cigarettes (currently reading)
4) One Ventalin Inhaler
5) Door Pass For Work
6) One BT Bill
7) Diary
8) 4 Rennies

To Live's To Fly - Townes Van Zandt biography - John Kruth
The Hurricane - Alex Higgins biography - Bill Borrows
Jessie's Journey - Jess Smith
Notebooks Of A Naked Youth - Billy Childish
Eat Your Heart Out - Felicity Lawrence
No Woman No Cry - Bob Marley Biography - Rita Marley
The Derek Strange Trilogy - George Pelecanos
If You Liked School, You'll Love Work - Irvine Welsh
Dead Simple/Looking Good Dead - Peter James
Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy

Noticed good things written above about Don Winslow, Cormac McCarthy and George Pelecanos....I too would recommend them.

Just finished The Stars' Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry. Haven't read him for at least 10 years. I love the way he plays about with the English language. The book, though a bit far fetched was entertaining enough. I won't be rushing out to buy his back catalogue but I will pick up what I can find in charity shops.

Now reading Star Struck by Val McDermid. I've never tried her before. Crime novel set in Manchester....the protagonist is Kate Brannigan, Private Detective.

... The Adventures Of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Blown away by the astonishing prose, slightly annoyed at the length and suspicious that there may be a bit less to it than meets the eye. Martin Amis loves him. I can see why.

Also reading Going Postal: Rage Murder and Rebellion in America by Mark Ames. It's a sociological look at school and workplace murders which suggests that they are not the random events that the newspaper reports make them out to be and that changes in employment laws since the eighties, and the decline of worker power, has made the mindset of the modern worker not dissimilar to that of a slave. It's pretty persuasive but I'm not far into it...

*cocks gun, walks off muttering to self...*

by Luke Haines - just about to start

Bringing it all back Home - Ian Clayton (nearly finished)

Iain Banks - The Player of Games

and... a volume of Poirot short stories....

...as excoriated in this very forum recently. I finished "Tom Sawyer" last night, as I'm embarking on a program of the classics (they are free, and I'm cheap). A huge advantage of the Kindle is you don't get daunted by the physical size of some of those 19th Century books, so put off starting them. Look out War and Peace...!

I also have real books - something about the Desert Rats, an account of the Battle of the Bulge which wasn't very good; an imported copy of the Word ($9.99), a copy of The Pulse. I've also got a copy of Stiff by Mary Roach, which I bought soon after the death of my mother. It's been two years, and I still haven't steeled myself to read it.

Oh, and a Squeezebox Boom for tunes.

Under The Loving Care Of The Fatherly Leader: North Korea And The Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin.
Fascinating 800-page doorstop about the persistent Axis Of Evil-member. Suddenly became even more interesting when Kim Jong-Il decided to set off some Richter-scale fireworks this week. No mention of Menta Lee-Il yet, though.

I'm a one-book man, so that's the only one on my bedside table at the moment.

Recently read:

The Women by T. C. Boyle
Probably my favourite author. It's about architect Frank Lloyd Wright's frequently scandalous love life, seen through the eyes of a fictional Japanese apprentice. The story of his three wives and one mistress may seem a little oddly sequenced at first, but it becomes apparent in the end why it is told in reverse. Boyle has hardly put his foot wrong through 10+ novels, and to top it off, he's maybe an even better short-story writer.

The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page by G. B. Edwards
Fictional memoirs of Guernsey-man Ebenezer Le Page, who writes about his life from the time he is a young boy till the day before he dies, eighty years old. Edwards' only novel was posthumously published in 1981.

Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia And The Death Of The First Italian Republic by Alexander Stille
An excellent account of two Sicilian prosecutors whose investigation of the Mafia led to the top levels of the Italian government and eventually, to their own murders.

Donald Westlake - 'Don't Ask' One of the Dortmunder series of light New York based crime capers. Great dialogue.

Clive James - 'Even As We Speak' An essay compilation pouring with erudution, opinion and entertainment. A joy.

Stephen Leacock - 'Sunshine Sketches of A Little Town' Gentle.

PG Wodehouse - 'The Code of the Woosters' Prose and dialogue from a bald headed writing machine. Astonishingly well done. I could list some of the exchanges but they'd lose the context here. Just read it.

Guy Sajer - 'The Forgotten Soldier' True story of young Werhmact soldier trudging through the misery of the eastern front from 1943 until the war's desperate murderous end. Frightening and tragic and unrelenting.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (as mentioned above). Very good. The chapter about the compromising of HIV treatment in South Africa by one dogged vitamin pill magnate will leave you boiling with rage.

The White War by Mark Thompson. In WWI, Italy fought Austria for 3 years, mostly by attacking the same heavily fortified mountain range uphill a dozen times. A million died yet the Italians shot their own men for not coming back dead. War stopped for lunch. Romantic poets ran the Italian army. Mussolini was the main result. This is the first major English book on the campaign and it's well worth your time if you're a war history junkie like me.

Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin. More war history, this time about the truly extraordinary lengths the British went to in WWI & II to deceive the enemy. Well written, surprising and only 4 quid in Sainsbury's.

The Great Crash 1929 by JK Galbraith. 79 years later, history repeated itself. If it continues to we're in big trouble.

I've just started dipping my toe tentatively into Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, starting with Titus Groan.

I'm currently reading a book I picked up in the States the other month - 'Comedy At The Edge: How Stand Up In The 1970s Changed America' by Richard Zoglin. It's an account of the rise of alternative comedy in America in the late 60s / 70s, covering comics such as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Robert Klein and so on. A very entertaining book, though it makes the comedy scene at that time look like a rather unpleasant place to be.

Also enjoying Radio 4's Book of the Week 'Radio Head' by John Osborne, an exploration of Britain's radio stations. Does for radio what 'Fever Pitch' did for football, which doesn't sound all that promising on the face of it, but it's been quite good so far. Listened to on the brilliant PURE Evoke 3 radio with record facility (it's great - like Sky+ for radio) which is, of course, on the bedside table.

which I dug out for this:

But you don't get a lot of Jim Morrison. That is what we call a Special -- straight black-and-white footage of Crazy Jim on stage in the old days, with a voice like Fred Neal's and eyes smarter than James Deans's and a band that could walk with the King, or anybody else. There were some nights when The Doors were the best band in the world.
Morrison understood this, and it haunted him all his life. On some nights he was noisy and lewd, and on others he just practiced -- but every once in a while he would get it into his head to go out and dance with the big boys, and on a night like that he was more than special. Jim Morrison could play music with anybody.
One of these days we will get around to naming names for the real rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame -- in that nervous right now realm beyond Elvis and Chuck Berry and Little Richard -- and the talk will turn to names like Bob and Mick, and to tunes like Morrison Hotel.
Play it sometimes. Crank it all the way up on one of those huge obsolete wire-burning MacIntosh amps and 80 custom-built speakers. Then stand back somewhere on the mainbeams of a big log house and feel the music come up through your femurs . . . ho, ho . . . and after that you can always say, for sure, that you once knew what it was like to hear men play rock 'n' roll music.

-from "Generation of Swine", thanks to
http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2005/02/hunter-s-thompson-1937-2005.ht...

Claire Tomalin's Biography of Pepys
Some Restoration poetry to tie in with above (Donne, Rochester etc.)
For light relief - The House of Mystery - a 500p collection of the old horror comics which I loved as a boy, and couldn't resist borrowing when i spotted it in the library.

Aren't they great? Having a son with a thirst for every book ever written for the under-fives pushed me back through the doors of our local library, and what riches lie therein! Sod all that 'buying books for 1p off Amazon' stuff - borrow it and get into some genuine recycling. Unfortunately no signs saying 'SILENCE' but I think I can cope...

Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About it by Simon Singh - I was rubbish at science at school and am trying to catch up in middle age. How boring is that.
Also, The Complete Sailing Manual by Simon Sleight - incorporates some physics too, but am reading it because I've spent the last five Saturdays learning how to sail - an experience which has been both terrifying and exhilarating. I don't like being splashed with water, so perhaps I shouldn't have started in the first place.
There's also an alarm clock and a digital radio with presets to all BBC stations apart from R1 and R3.
And a coaster for my Horlicks.

by Haruki Murakami

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wind-up-Bird-Chronicle-Haruki-Murakami/dp/009944...

A long, Japanese, at times surreal and odd, but generally highly readable tale that's never dull, and is often quite startling. I recommend it. It's marvellous. I'm on page five hundred and something of six hundred and something.

My bedside library is in the bog, my wife's in bed much earlier than me.

Awaydays - Kevin Sampson - read it years ago but saw Sampson's Wirral, wedge haircuts and wanton violence fest last weekend at FACT in Liverpool and have gone back to the book and think this may be a case of a film being much, much better than the book.

The New Politics of Sinn Fein - Kevin Bean - study related

The Murdoch Archipelago - Bruce Paine - the dirty digger laid bare, bit of a whizz in business, apparently.

The Pyramid - Henning Mankell's Wallander short stories which place Inspector Kurt in some historical perspective. Proves Brannagh's much to young to be Kurt. Brilliant.

Homicide - David Simon - keep at it those struggling, it's absolutely brilliant and I don't get any sense of Simonic self satisfaction from it, although there's plenty in much of Simon's other output. It's the price you pay. There are so many set pieces that went straight, word-for-word into The Wire that it's very rewarding.

The Corner - David Simon - got it for a snip on Amazon ($4) but not started yet. If it's anything like the TV show, it'll make Homicide and The Wire look like Carry on Constable.

The Crystal Bucket - Clive James - got this collection of his Observer columns from the late 70s for £1 in a Southport second place. Brilliant loo reading, dipping in and out as it were.

Some people turn to Ulysses before Bloom's Day, but prior to the start of Le Tour I always read former Clash roadie Johnny Green's Push Yourself Just a Little Bit Harder, a great look at the Tour. It's a beezer read from an outsider.

Just finished Made In America by Bill Bryson - still on the bedside table.

Currently reading:
- Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

Waiting to get started on:

- Rip It Up - Simon Reynolds
- Where Did It All Go Right - Andrew Collins
- Bringing It All Back Home - Ian Clayton
- Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
- Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
- What A Carve Up - Jonathan Coe

No-one can accuse me of being up to date...

by Steve Toltz. OK he's Australian. But it's still pretty good.

I thought 'Kill Your Friends' was a great read too. It never really made it to the bedside table though. I caned it in two sittings at my local Borders. (Book Spotify!)

an alarm clock
a pack of wet wipes.
1974 by David Peace - I'm reading Red Riding again
MPD Psycho vol 1 - a rather gruesome manga
Moominland Midwinter - my favourite of Tove Jannson's novels
Volume 2 of The Moomintroll cartoon strips
an untitled book about a bee that flies past a cow and a butterfly and a bird - it was given to us free, with others, by Manchester council when we registered the arrival of the little emperor ... my life has changed soooo much.

A biography about the late great Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson (he´s on Spotify, people), the new Iron Maiden DVD Flight 666 with booklet, a list my mom gave me for her birthday - appears this could be expensive - and my MP3-player. Pastilles. Two tea bags (not used). And that´s it.

- a DAB radio
- a lamp

and currently Jerusalem Commands by Michael Moorcock

.... James Lee Burke' Dave Robicheaux series - I'm up to Number 4 (yeah, I'm slow). However, on the strength of all the rave reviews, have just sent the wife off to the library to get "Kill Your Friends" - she looked at me like I was a psycho - hope they've got it and it's as good as you lot say.

rereading stuff

i bought a second-hand copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow recently, a book my irresponsible other gave me at 16 and which i remember almost nothing about apart from that killer first line 'if i am out of my mind, it's all right with me', and i started rereading it again yesterday, more than twenty years since the first go.

it made me think i might spend a year or so not buying anything new (agree with posts above bemoaning the quality of 'new' stuff bought and read recently) and just reread stuff.

i look at my bookshelves and think, god, i remember nothing at all about that book except i loved it at the time.

so, being dead by jim crace, kafak's the trial, ...staggering genius by dave eggers and kundera's ...laughter and forgetting are next up on the reread list.

spent a frustrating/fascinating few hours the other night wrestling with the collected poetry of dylan thomas, just becuase i'd read a short story oof his and loved it.

made me remember that poetry existed in terms of something to read, you know, for fun and that.