corblimey has got too many books

L. The Revolution Was Televised (Sepinwall). A short history of some of the more 'influential' [American] TV dramas of recent years. Each chapter is broken down by show, so it's easy to skip the ones you have no interest in (*cough*Lost*cough*) but even the ones I am interested in weren't that great. Quite dryly written, and more time is spent on what happens on screen than off. I want my TV books to be about, as Charlie Brooker puts it, the "ghastly backside of television."

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M. Fade Away (Coben): Not bad, but not that good either. There's an awful lot of filler in the middle, and not much to the whodunnit either. There's a brief epilogue that dips into the hero Bolitar's personal life, which might have been an awesome reveal if I didn't already know about it from a previous book (cos I'm reading these in no particular order)

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44. Ship of Fools (O'Toole). Well researched and, due to its subject matter, infuriating book about the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. Contains a (possibly one sided) account of the thievery, incompetence and corruption that we're still paying for 5 years after the tiger died and will for many years to come. I stopped paying attention to the news around the time this book came out (2009) as it was mostly about this sort of political dishonesty, but if you need a background to things like the Ansbacher affair and what exactly happened in Anglo Irish, this is a decent volume.

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45. Struwwelpeter - English Translation (Hoffmann). I bought this as Christmas present for one of my nephews, so decided to give it a read before giving it to him. When very young, I had a book that contained this and other gruesome (for my age) poetry and prose, so it was nice to delve into the nostalgia, despite not being a big fan of poetry generally. It's a short book filled with about a dozen poems of varying lengths acting as cautionary tales for mischievous children. Classic for younger readers.

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47. That Used to be Us (Friedman, Mandelbaum). I think I bought this this year when I spotted it on someone else's reading log. I wasn't too impressed by the last Friedman book I read, Longitudes and Attitudes, but this was much better fare, possibly because most of the issues raised can be equally applied to Ireland, and probably most first world countries that didn't take advantage of the good years to prepare for the oncoming drought years. Very easy to read style, breaking down the various issues and sometimes offering solutions. Recommended.

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O. Imperium (Harris). I readily admit I spent a lot of the novel being confused by the various characters since about 90% of them have a name starting with C, but then I found the dramatis personae listing at the back and referred to it heavily for the rest of the book. Whether this is a failure of the book, or I lost concentration because I was only reading half a dozen pages per night, I don't know. Pretty good book nonetheless, although it reads like 2 short stories about Cicero rather than a coherent piece. It's based on historical facts with Harris' liberal sprinkling of 'this might be the way it happened' throughout and probably ends up being a lot more dramatic than it actually was.

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P. Very British Problems (Temple). Typical Christmas cash-in stocking filler, so I gave it a read before passing it on. It's from the VeryBritishProblems twitter thing, which I've thought can be applied to Irish "problems" too. Mostly amusing, it's basically a compendium of past tweets with some dodgy filler material that doesn't hold up. So half the book is pretty good.

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Q. The Great British Tuck Shop (Berry). A treasure trove of half-remembered and never-encountered sweets, chocolates and drinks from the 'TV Cream' era, a fairly fluid period of time covering the late 60s to the late 90s. Being a UK production, a lot of the contents never made it to my local sweet shop but enough were familiar to me to make it worthwhile. I preferred the nostalgic summary that opened each chapter over the specifics of certain products, but it was all good.

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R. Code Name Verity (Wein). I found myself being slightly irked by the tone of this novel for a long time, as it tended towards "aren't we women silly, it being war time and all", but suddenly about 100 pages in, it just flipped a switch on me, and I realised what I was reading. If you're paying attention, it's a very rewarding book (and if you're not, it'll all be made clear, don't worry). I might have to read it again next year to get the full benefit, so this is one definitely going back on the shelf for a re-read. Recommended.

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53. The Hut Six Story (Welchman). I bought this on location in Bletchely Park several years ago, and never got around to reading it. Unfortunately, I can't say it was worth the wait. It gets very technical in terms of how codes were cracked, almost academically so, but the worst part is that there's never really any indication of how the effort they went through in Hut 6 was applied to the war effort. It's basically we cracked this code today, then we cracked this code the next day, etc. Disappointing.

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T. Kestrel for a Knave (Hines). The book of the film Kes of course, which I've never seen and probably won't bother now I've read the book. It's a fairly depressing and grim slice of Northern England life, the embodiment of the phrase "this is why we can't have nice things". The football game at school in the middle is the only saving grace (Brian Glover joyfully playing PE teacher Mr Sugden can be found on Youtube) amid the deprivation.

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U. An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (Hadfield). It sounds interesting, lessons on life delivered by an astronaut at the top of his game, but it's not. It falls between 2 stools, it's not interesting enough to gain any sort of perspective into what it's like to be an astronaut, and it's not deep enough to act as a sort of self-help book that you can apply to your own life or work. It just sits there.

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And that did it for 2013. It's been an interesting year, a real mix of good and bad, fiction and non fiction. I've found that I prefer non-fiction, although I do need to adjust my preferences for that genre, the purely theoretical ones proving to be not as compelling as the biographical and historical ones.

I failed to count how many books I started the year with, but I read 76 and probably abandoned another half dozen. On my unread shelf right now, I've got 22; I've also got 88 on my Kindle (although some of those I have read already) and about 40 in my Amazon basket, non-purchased but pleading.

So it looks like I'm going to try and keep this up for 2014 - the books on my unread shelf are massive though (damn you Ken Follett!), so I may not get through the same amount, but I'll stick to an hour or so per night and see how it goes.

Good reads:
Non fiction: 28/43 [65%]
Fiction: 20/33 [60%]

2. Mile 81 (King). Ugh, dreadful. I'm not even sure it qualifies as a book, but Amazon are charging money for it, so I guess it counts. Plainly knocked up by King during a couple of lunch breaks, it has no plot to speak of, and the ending is something my 10-year-old nephew would be embarrassed to write. I've got 11.22.63 on my to-read list, but I don't think I'll bother now. Very poor.

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4. The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (Watson, Whates). Over 40 stories of general 'what-if's surrounding events like the sinking of the Titanic, the rise of Christianity and the American Civil War. Thing is, none of the stories are really that interesting, they're just meh. And none of them have anything in the way of a conclusion, for some reason, they just stop (the Titanic one for example, they go through the Panama Canal and- end). Not impressed.

This year has gotten off to a bad start, fiction-wise.

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6. The Law Of The Playground (Blyth). Every now and then, I like to leave the highbrow stuff behind and delve into the lowbrow, and they don't come much more lowbrow than this. It's the book of the website that preceded the Channel 4 show by some years. I've read it before, but I wanted something light to read for a little while. At times very funny, particularly if you can relate to the various entries from your own childhood. Taxi!

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8. War Room (Holley). I've been into NFL for about 15 years, and have always found Bill Belichick a grumpy malcontent, or at least that's the persona he puts out in public. This book is about him and 2 of his shining stars, Pioli and Dimitroff as they handle day to day operations of 3 NFL teams, with particular emphasis on the Draft. It delves a little too deeply into histories of inconsequential people, and it didn't change my opinion of Belichick, but it's a very good book nonetheless. You would need some NFL knowledge to enjoy it though.

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10. Archangel (Harris). Unlikely Stalin-based tale which treads a lot of the same themes as the Da Vinci Code in a sort of 'what if' kind of way. But where the Da Vinci Code annoys with its incongruous 'puzzles' and crime fighting professor, this one tends to be a little more compelling in its execution and character studies building to an exciting but no over-the-top climax. I enjoyed it.

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12. Naked (Sedaris). My second Sedaris book of the year, and certainly not as good as Me Talk Pretty One Day. It deals mostly with his college-age misadventures, roaming the country and doing odd jobs. It's more whimsical than satirical or funny. And then he switches gears entirely for the last chapter to talk about a naturist holiday he went on in later life which is still less "ha-ha", more "huh". Not that great, if I'm honest.

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14. Imperium (Harris). More Rome-based political shenanigans courtesy of Cicero's right hand slave, Tiro. Much the same as Lustrum which I also enjoyed, although it takes place much earlier in Cicero's career. It also suffers from the same trouble of having a large cast of characters with quite similar names, and since it's politics, a sworn enemy one day quickly becomes a friend and ally and just as quickly flips to adversary again. Still pretty good, and I'm certainly enjoying Harris' easy touch with this type of tale.

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16. What Not to Do (Wallace). The last Danny Wallace book I read was The Yes Man about 8 years ago, and I didn't enjoy it, but this is better. It's a collection of short articles (possibly written for the Guardian or Independent, but it's not explained) that are under the umbrella of 'awkward situations for men.' I could relate to some of them, although quite a few are so inherently British, I just couldn't - it's like the Twitter account Very British Problems (also a book) writ large.

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18. Live Wire (Coben). Another Myron Bolitar novel, and possibly the last. Coben's last 2 novels have been about Mickey Bolitar, his nephew whom we meet in this book. I don't think I'll bother with the younger Bolitar novels, as this one wasn't all that great. A lot of padding, a lot of unnecessary retrofitting, and a non-surprise surprise ending.

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20. Total Access (Eisen). I've been a keen follower of the NFL for about a decade and have been watching the NFL Network for the last 3 years, so I thought this would be interesting. It's not. I was expecting a story of how the network came about, or background stories from how the programs are put together, or stuff like that. Instead it's Rich Eisen's tale of how he gets on soooo well with well-paid sportsmen. It covers the off season which isn't that interesting to me anyway, and talks mostly about things that happened on-screen. Off-screen tales are few and far between and tend towards the Alan Partridge idea of story telling - I end up expecting Eisen to say "needless to say, I had the last laugh" after every paragraph.

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22. One Day in September (Reeve). Easily book of the year so far. It tells the story of the 1972 Olympics in which Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli hostages. But it goes further; it explains in short order how we got to this point; what happened next and where things stood in 2005 when it was originally written. Superb book from start to finish, despite the sometimes harrowing subject matter.

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24. If Walls Could Talk (Worsley). In the same vein as last year's Bill Bryson book At Home, this is a book that delves into the origin of various rooms in the house, and spins off into discussions about sex, eating, manners, utilities, all sorts of interesting things. It's quite dry in places, and borders on "weren't the Tudors daft" now and then, but I enjoy this sort of book immensely, so I soldiered on.

I also don't understand the need for every chapter to end with the briefest of paragraphs about life in the 21st century, and it gets a little preachy in the final chapter.

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