corblimey has got too many books

11. Wiseguy (Pileggi). Basically the book of the film Goodfellas, one of my favourite movies of all time and discovering that I'd never read the book came as a bit of a surprise to me. The movie adaptation follows the book pretty closely, although some of the let's call them 'anecdotes' were left out. It takes the form of backstory for the most part, but Henry and Karen give first hand accounts of a lot of it. A recommended read. I'm off now to watch the movie again.

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13. Adrian Mole The Prostrate Years (Townsend). The eighth, and presumably final, Adrian Mole is a bit of a misery fest, veering from melancholy to outright depression with nary a bit of the wit and sparkle of the first 2 books -- still personal favourites of mine. There's an attempt at a happy ending in literally the last page of the book which feels more like something foisted on Townsend by her publisher. Just not a fun read at all.

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15. America Unchained (Gorman). Dave Gorman attempts to buy a car in California and cross the USA, while not paying any money to "the man", staying in independent hotels, eating in independent diners and getting gas from independent gas stations. Nice idea, but it just isn't a very good book. It's not funny, at best it's wry in places, but Gorman seems sort of bad tempered throughout. Also, like most of Dave's books, the project has no jeopardy, so when, as they usually do, he fails to keep up his end, it has no downside, and he continues writing. Bit pointless.

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17. The Princess Bride (Goldman). The movie has been on my to-watch bucket for a while now, but thought I'd read the book first. It's a fairly enjoyable romp, as they say, and fun and easy read, but I don't think much of the plot device that Goldman has chosen, creating a fictional author and book from which this one has been adapted. I thought it might have a deeper satirical reason, but according to wikipedia, Goldman did it because he ran out of steam on Chapter 2. I'll give it a pass for the story within the story, which should have stood on its own.

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19. Think Like a Freak (Levitt, Dubner). A departure from their previous books, this one tries to impart the wisdom the authors have accumulated in the past. They try to teach the reader how to think small, make connections, be a Freakonomist basically. I'm a big fan of the great Freakonomics Radio podcast so it was a bit disappointing that so many of the show topics I've already heard were in the book, sometimes word for word. Whether the book came first or the podcast I can't say but if you've consumed one, the other doesn't add anything.

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21. Detroit An American Autopsy (LeDuff). LeDuff catalogs some of the miseries of life in Detroit after the collapse of the motor industry in that city. He meets the bad guys - the politicians, beurocrats, the pimps and thugs - and the good guys - the policemen, firemen and workers struggling to make a difference. The divisions are very clearly delineated by LeDuff, everything appears completely black or white - there doesn't seem to be any grey there at all.
The stories are clearly newspaper stories written by LeDuff during his tenure at Detroit News and sometimes give a little more meat. I could also have done without the various familial based stories which seemed to be a desperate attempt to personalise the situation. It's quite a depressing little read signposting the decline of civilisation but if you want to know more about living in one of Americas poorest cities, it's certainly recommended.

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23. The Burst of Creamup (Tvcream). Tvcream is a website dealing with what they call the cream years of popular culture loosely the 70s, 80s and the early 90s. Basically my formative years. This "e"book covers some of their writing from the early noughties and runs the gamut from television to music to radio to movies, all delivered in their own inimitable style which largely consists of run on sentences and nicknames for everybody. It's impenetrable in places but mostly very good and as I say I'm the target market really. It was also nice to find out the name of that song we used to watch on hard rotation on Super Channel while in college (Hello by Twinkle, but don't Google it)

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25. Armchair Nation (Moran). A highly recommended history of British television from its first presentation on a screen measuring just 1.5" by .5" through its spread across the country, the advent of colour, cable, satellite and inevitably the reality laden dross we have in the 2000s. There are some odd diversions along the way like several pages about 80s show crossroads and constant references to 50s Gilbert Harding. It also gets a little self important and pompous in places (or to be technically accurate, it quotes people who are a little self important and pompous) but it's easily the best book I've read about television and looking good for book of the year.

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27. Console Wars (Harris). I was a Sega kid growing up, I remember hiring a Mega Drive from Xtravision every weekend I could and staying up all night playing games. This book covers this period, with Sega the young upstarts against the evil empire of Nintendo. It's not in the least bit impartial, but I still have a soft spot for them (I currently own 4 Dreamcasts) so I didn't mind too much, although it got a little wearing towards the end. I was surprised by Sony's involvement in the era too, I had always considered the PSX to be a sort of afterthought when consoles started making tons of money, but Sony are right in the middle.

One thing that annoyed me (apart from the Nintendo bashing) was the writing style, it's done in the style of a novel, and purports to describe what people were thinking and describes conversations between people as if they were transcribed. I'm not sure I believe most of the details, but the business and public side is a lot more dependable.

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29.The News: A User's Manual (de Botton). Quote, Alain de Botton explores our relationship with 'the news' in this book full of his trademark wit and wisdom, end quote. Zzzz.

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31. Sky Maul 2 (Hauser). I have a vague recollection of reading the first Sky Maul book and not being that impressed, so quite why I bought the second one, I have no idea. It's more of the same, most of it too bizarre, surreal or outlandish to actually be funny, although I admit there are a couple of chucklesome items hidden amongst the dross ("around-the-world binoculars" springs to mind). Poor.

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33. How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Lee). Stewart Lee is easily my favourite standup, and I picked up a freshly-signed copy of this at a recent show in Belfast. It consists of 4 heavily annotated transcripts from his first shows back as a standup along with more personal fill-ins describing how the shows came about and what was going on in his life. Quite interesting in the 'how does a comedian work' kind of way, but multi-page footnotes drive me batty and certainly the first 2 shows lose a lot in transcribing to the page.

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35. The Monuments Men (Edsel). Knowing nothing about this, I was expecting a fairly dodgy movie tie-in with the Clooney/Damon vehicle. What I got instead was a faintly interesting tale of the lengths a small team of art experts went to to preserve art and cultural artifacts during the last throes of World War 2. It's not too bad, but most of the time, I was ill at ease that I was supposed to be caring about a picture or a statue when you know that men, women and children are dying all the time. It's like 'hey never mind the war for a minute, has anyone seen a Renoir around here?'. Not for me.

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37. When to Rob a Bank (Levitt, Dubner). As economists of some reknown, Levitt and Dubner don't appear to recognise the law of diminishing returns, as this lazy reprint of blog posts from their Freakonomics website basically proves. Each post is short and pointless, offering no insights but just asking a question. Some of the longer ones get into a bit more, but these are few and far between. This will be my last Freakonomics book and I'll be wary of the podcast too, to see if they're just phoning it in now that the guest lecture circuit is obviously working for them.

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39. Station Eleven (St. John Mandel). Another post-apocalyptic novel, this one not using reanimated corpses for some reason (did St. John Mandel not get the memo?) but a much more likely flu-like virus. The plot is all over the place, jumping from before the virus hit to just after to 15 years later and back and around, and there's a few too many characters who add very little to the story. It also gets a bit silly in places as to how people would react and what they would do, but in terms of pacing and story telling, it's one of the better novels I've read this year and finally puts an end to a run of 5 bleh books in a row.

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