Books I’ve Read

At the end of 2008 I decided to start keeping a list of books that I had read in the past month. I read a lot but I tend to forget when I last read a book. This means that every now again I reread a book too soon after finishing it last time. And the really annoying thing about this is that because its longer ago since you started the book as opposed to finishing it you can get halfway through a book and suddenly remember what’s going to happen, or, everything starts to feel a little familiar in a déjà vu on the tip of my tongue kind of way. This happened recently with Paul Auster’s Leviathan, which I was about to read for the 4^th time but stopped after 30 pages.

I tend to buy a lot of books, and I and my family have thousands of the things so every now and again I impose a moratorium on book buying. I’ve only bought 2 of the 14 books I’ve read this year, an idea of the backlog I face. Its in the region of 30 books right now. I’ll never read them all. I spent a year trying to listen to all the music on my ipod, and I could listen at work, and it was impossible. The result: tinnitus in my right ear. At least books don’t damage me.

So here’s my list.

World War Z	Max Brooks	The Zombie war - Very silly but gripping nonetheless - Fiction	2008
High-Rise	JG Ballard	Dated but curious take on tribalism	2008
Glamorama	Bret Easton Ellis	Gripping thriller. Very black comedy but a favourite	2008
Flood	Richard Doyle	Completely stupid disaster novel	2008
Underground London	Stephen Smith	Historical journey through London	2008
Fierce People	Dick Wittenburn	1980s New Yorker Coming of age	2008
Moondust	Andrew Smith	What was it like to be on the Moon?	2008
Doomsday Men	PD Smith	History of the atom bomb and all things radioactive.	2009
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	Nightmarish to us, but is it really that bad?	2009
Brighton Rock	Graham Greene	The seamy side of 1930s Brighton	2009
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas	John Boyne	An 8 year old's view of the Final Solution	2009
The Welsh Girl	Peter Ho Davies	German POWs in Wales during WW2	2009
Far North	Marcel Theroux	Post-apocalyptic view of Canada	2009
A Rumor of War	Phil Caputo	Personal account of Vietnam War	2009
The Naked and the Dead	Norman Mailer	Fictionalised personal account of the Pacific War	2009
The Day of the Triffids	John Wyndham	Plants take over the world	2009
The Chrysalids	John Wyndham	Post-apocalptic view of mutation and religion	2009
The Kraken Awakes	John Wyndham	Sea-borne monsters from Mars rule the world	2009
Neutral Buoyancy	Tim Ecott	All about Scuba diving	2009
Beyond the Blue Horizon	Alexander Frater	Flying the  to the Far East along the old Imperial Airways Route	2009
A Hoxton Childhood	A.S. Jasper	A personal account of poverty from 1900-30	2009
In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	Account of homicide in 1950s Kansas	2009
Atomised	Michel Houllebecque	French lech and his hateful life	2009
The Wasp Factory	Iain Banks	Mentalist at work on Scottish island	2010
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy	Anthony Beevor		2010
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali	Gil Courtemanche	Romantic novel in Heart of Darkness setting preceding genocide	2010
Regeneration	Pat Barker	Based on psychiatric notes on Siegfried Sassoon in 1917	2010
Every Man For Himself	Beryl Bainbridge	Fictional take on 1st class passengers on Titanic	2010
Alone in Berlin	Hans Falada	Life under the Nazis in 1942 Berlin	2010
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo	Steig Larsson	Overlong whodunnit	2010
London at War	Philip Zeigler	Suprisingly uninteresting - skim read most of it	2010
Run Silent Run Deep	Edward Beach	WW2 submarine warfare in the Pacific. Cracking stuff.	2010
Bad Science	Ben Goldacre	Dismissing scientific 'facts' as reported by newspapers. More a dipper than a full read.	2010
Imperial Ambitions	Noam Chomsky	Outdated critiques of 21st C US Foreign Policy.	2010
Empire of the Sun	JG Ballard	Thinly fictionalised account of internment in Shanghai. Very good book.	2010
The Reader	Bernhard Schlink	Post-war love in Germany in a time of hidden histories. Superb.	2010
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea	Barbara Demick	Fascinating account of life stories of North Koreans	2010
The Forgotten Soldier	Guy Sajer	Brilliant German first person view of the Eastern Front	2010