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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel bit of a tome, but enjoyable account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell from humble background to the high post of King Henry VIII's chief minister. A route he took by being in the right place at the right time and backing Henry in his bid to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He was seen as an important man to be aligned with. Mantel fleshes out the dry facts of history, making a Cromwell full of life. The book only takes us up to Thomas More's exectution, so maybe there will be a follow up book.

Strangely the book is sometimes difficult to follow, and at first I though it was just me as I tend to read late at night, but reading reviews afterwards I found that other people also found that Mantel uses 'he' when anyone speaks or thinks , but is also using 'he' all the time for Cromwell. It's hard sometimes to know who it is, so you have to keep backtracking.

The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton by Sathnam Sanghera

Excellent memoirs by Sanghera who is a journalist and a Sikh. His inability to mix his cosmopolitan life in London with his strict Sikh upbringing leads him at one point in his life to complete confusion from trying to compartmentalise two lifestyles. He decides to go back to live with his parents in Wolverhampton for a few weeks despite his mother driving him mad with arranged marriage suggestions. During this time he unearths some shocking family secrets.
I'm not a huge fan of books about people's problem families. I always think there's two sides to every story and you're only hearing one, but this book is different. Sanghera loves his family despite their problems, cos he has his own too and he tells of his family with such warmth and humour that you can't help but empathise with all of them.

Well recommended.

last few:

A Plan For Escape by Adolfo Bioy-Casares
The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein
Hamlet - William Shakespeare

I'm currently reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I'm hoping to finish it by the weekend so I can rent the movie from the video store!

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"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."

Snow Flower and The Secret Fan by Lisa See 4.5/5



Haiku by Andrew Vachss 4.25/5



The Short Bus A Journey Beyond Normal by Johnathan Mooney 4.5/5

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Bleacheddecay

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, the second one of his books I've read. I like him too, he's spare but not terse. He uses language well, being able to build up atmosphere in a short novel is a good gift.


Big Man, Real Life and Tall Tales by Clarence Clemons and Don Reo. Clemons being the Big Man, sax player from the E Street band, Don Reo being a tv producer. A little more of the real life and less of the flights of fancy would've been good. Wasn't that interested in reading Reo's wide eyed name dropping breathless groupie style stuff either. Quite a disappointment.

Drood by Dan Simmons - Daunting, but his works are always interesting.

Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy ------- nice, doesn't do anything really different from the previous two in this series: voyeurism sex crime.

Churchill and America

A thin line through history fleshed out by Churchill's irascible nature & his passion for Anglo-American unity. So strong is his desire that he will portray the two countries as split amoebas that must recombine sexually, amongst other curious analogies. Half American himself (and 1/64th Native Indian no less) he had good reason to delve into US histories & to long for a cultural commingling. It's in the UK's darkest WW2 days that his mixture of American exposure, stalwart 'Anglo Democratising', geopolitical nous & resonant optimism come most strikingly and winningly to the fore tho. His early exploits and latter-day political tenacity are all interesting too, but it's his eventual friendship with Roosevelt that is undoubtedly the 'heart' of this story.

On the downside you seem get his every single quote on public record concerning the States throughout this redoubtable work. It can be a bit of a crawling trawl at times. I feel I understand the bulldog, US/UK relations, & the last political century better tho, no doubt. It's interesting to see Winnie's passions overrunning as well as elevating him. He may decry 'oilism' as the new colonialism, but he was happy with the UK's colonial-style domination of Iran's oil profits (and the UK/US 'regime change' to reclaim them). He may hope, with his earlier racist-nationalism, that the US & the UK are bonded on account of washing regularly, but he seemed to ignore the horror this evoked in some US quarters (mainly amongst those convinced the UK was full of dirty foreigners ).

Say what you will tho, the guy coined the word 'summit', influenced the far-sighted Marshall Plan & eventual NATO & UN attempts at global security, and used his hard-nosed experience to find places for hope to flourish in troubled times.



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Philogelos: 'Lover of Laughter'

Want your history a bit more chirpy? You could try the oldest known joke annual (free multimedia), from the 4th Century AD.

If you skip round the slavery, casual incest, & free and easy approach to death, it's not that dissimilar from modern stand up. Actually, it's practically identical to 70s comedy in the UK, but there y'go

Clunky translations aside, the gags get somewhere close to being funny ....

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

I'm reading From Hell by Alan Moore and art by Eddie Campbell. Quite a landmark for me cos in all these years I've never read a whole graphic novel, a few comics maybe but certainly nothing on this scale.

Very atmospheric black and white inked drawings, and enough notes to almost make another book!

Isn't that thing a beast? I've never read it, but I've seen it in print. It looks like a cinder block.

I'm finally reading this now. Bought the hardback a while ago but then when it was time to sit and read the gargantuan thing, I broke down and bought the Kindle edition. Enjoying it so far... Then again, I like the time period, so.... Next up is Dickens's original take on Drood...

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from hell, some day i will read that again, it's been about 10 years.

lately i've read:

rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, by tom stoppard.
questions questions questions without any answers. a lot of it is very entertaining but instead of presenting a clear picture of hamlet it seems like stoppard wanted to make it even more confounding. i'm open to the idea that hamlet doesn't make sense but i think this play also makes its source seem deterministic at the same time. i don't know if that means anything. i would like to read attempts at clarifying. worth reading. hamlet is a favorite and related work is worth delving into.

also read two by dashiel hammett:
the maltese falcon and the thin man.
maltese falcon is really entertaining. the mystery and detective aspects are good, i particularly enjoyed the main character's mood swings and attitude though.

the thin man is okay. it's fun but i didn't take to the main characters as much. a lot of what they're satirizing isn't all that compelling to me either. dames are manipulative but don't have any common sense (exception being of course the main character's wife). i've heard that the movie has more of an arch comedic thing going on and i'd like to see it now. will also probably check out the movie versions of the maltese falcon that i can find.

yeah it's fat alright! there's a giant chunk of Moore's notes at the back that you really have to read as you go along cos otherwise you'd miss all the background and literary and historical allusions.

linespalsy ... I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead performed live at Carnegie-Mellon during my freshman year and fell in love with it. Seeing it performed really helps with the fun of the concept.

Take it at face value and it gets far more interesting and actually makes more sense: This is Hamlet as seen through the eyes of these two minor characters. And Stoppard gives us a fun glimpse into what might be happening to off-stage characters when they aren't, well, onstage. R&G are confused about their own existence and whereabouts while not in the universe of the onstage play ... and the existential philosophy behind some of that thinking can get a bit heady. But if you start with just the cleverness of it and let it stay there, suddenly the whole thing is far more intriguing.

Then it's much easier to let the odd theoretical philosophy creep in without it being so taxing.

You didn't happen to read this because it's one of my two fave novels, did you?

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Thanks for this. It's here on my shortly-to-be-read list....

yeah, pretty much, and i liked it quite a bit. how you like other detective novels like the big sleep... i'd like to hear what makes you pick this as not just your favorite of the genre but you're favorite novel. is this your favorite genre? like the new avatar by the way, have you read akira?

Houdini's The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Exposé of Successful Criminals (1906)

Lots of fun turn-of-the-century shenanigans here. Many of the scams will be familiar to fans, but there are surprises waiting for anyone willing to trawl for treats. You get everything from burglar skills and superstitions (walking backwards in snow; using human-fat candles), to jailbreaking dames, barefaced Wall Street swindles, Londoners ramming molasses-filled hats over each others heads, & gambling tools controlled by breathing. Probably the best anecdote of all concerns a German tourist in St Petersburg accidentally buying a 'magic cap' (have a search ).



Out of copyright versions online in various formats here.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

I'm planning to read Northanger Abbey soon so I'm seeking out some of the 18th century gothic romances that I've heard Austen parodied in that book. First up was Otranto which is really pretty bad. Maybe it set some sort of precedent for slow-suspensful murder mystery but it does all that pretty badly.

Up next: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. In the introduction to the second edition of 'Castle', Walpole claimed his intention to marry the fantastic imagery of the classical romance with the realism of the modern (mid-late 1700s). He didn't pull it off, unfortunately. Mysteries seems better in this respect so far -- overly precious but it is at least specific and evocative in setting the stage -- I'll see how it fares over the next 600 pages (vs. Castle's meager 110).

Wow, that's some pretty dedicated preparation there l

Are you doing it coz that's a kind of 'birth of the novel' period as well?