corblimey has got too many books

30. London Underground By Design (Ovenden). I really enjoyed this one, part history of the underground, part in-depth discussions of the various aspects of design on offer, from stations to trains to posters to fonts. It does get a bit 'design-y' in places -- I'm still not quite sure what a finial looks like -- but overall fascinating, and had me wanting to get back over to London.

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32. Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue (Watterson). Yes, it's a catalogue to a show I'll never see, but I bought it for the Watterson interview. Unfortunately, I didn't really learn anything new from it, concentrating mostly on his well publicised distaste for comic sizing and merchandise. It does have some vintage pre-C&H work in it which was interesting and of course most of the book contains C&H cartoons that never get old. In fact, after reading this, I had to break out my Complete... so that took several weeks to read

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34. No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks (Viesturs). After the success of my last mountaineering book, I was looking forward to this, but it's no Into Thin Air. It's actually kinda dull, there's no jeopardy or sense of vulnerability. He goes up a mountain, he comes down a mountain, he goes up a mountain, he comes down a mountain. Bleh.

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36. The Areas of My Expertise (Hodgman). I have no idea what to make of this. Raised very few smiles, and is so utterly dry and bordering on surreal that a lot of time, I was very out of sorts with it. I felt like I should be more entertained than I was, and it was my fault that I wasn't.

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38. The Girl on the Train (Hawkins). I don't know how to review this one without coming off as misogynistic or sexist, but I just couldn't get into the minds of the 3 female protagonists. They made such baffling decisions throughout, that might make sense to someone who gets the female mind. The male characters are two dimensional and only want one thing really. By the end of it, I was willing some sort of twist, but no, if you don't know who the killer is by p50, you're not paying attention.

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40. Yes Prime Minister (Lynn, Jay). This could so easily have been a lazy tv tie-in script book, but it's raised to a new level with the wonderful framing devices that are used: Hacker's diaries, Bernard's conversations, Humphrey's private papers. In the end you're still left with the scripts but performed in a first person way from each character that really makes a difference. And almost 30 years later, still one of the funniest sitcoms on telly.

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42. And the Mountains Echoed (Hosseini). I really enjoyed the other 2 Hosseini books I've read, but this one less so. It has less of the cultural anchoring evident in the previous 2 books, and most of it takes place outside of Afghanistan. So you end up with a banal tale about a brother and sister who are parted early in life and the paths their lives take. Not my cup of tea.

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44. The Wolf of Wall Street (Belfort). Self deluded pr*ck gets rich, gets indicted, writes a terrible book. Ugh.

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46. Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace (Saval). Hmm, I'm not sure what to make of this one. It "explains" the genesis of the office, which is quite a fuzzy concept to begin with, so it doesn't really know what to do with itself until office buildings start coming into play around the turn of the 20th century. It takes all sorts of faintly interesting diversions along the way, but it's not just very interesting, maybe it's the subject, maybe it's the writing style, it's just a bit bland.

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48. Berlin: The Downfall (Beevor). The somewhat-sequel to Stalingrad (which is still on my shelf) tells the story of the Red Army sweeping across Eastern Europe. It's a fairly grim tale, the talk of rape starts around page 25, and contains lots of human misery and killing, interspersed with the spiralling events in Berlin as the Bolsheviks approached. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the period, but I won't say I enjoyed it.

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50. The Great Bridge (McCullough). If you didn't think it was possible to describe the building of one bridge in 600+ pages, this is the book that will change your mind. In fairness, it covers a potted history of bridge building, the people involved, the political shenanigans, etc. But for the most part, it's long technical descriptions of how to build an actual bridge. Unfortunately, I'm not in the least bit architecturally minded, so I tended to glaze over during these long narratives. I'm giving it a pass for the story around the bridge.

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52. Defending Jacob (Landay). I've gone completely off fiction this year, so when I do wade back into its murky waters, it's usually for a book that has been sitting on my to-read list for quite some time. According to Amazon, I bought this in June 2013, so what better time to read it than St Stephen's day 2015. It's not great, really, it's one of those books where you're expecting twists & turns and a satisfying ending that brings it all back around, but it mostly fails to deliver.

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And that's it for 2015: 53 books read, 39 (74%) of them non-fiction. Just over half of what I read in 2014, but this was due to doing something else for the first 4 months of the year. Back to reading full time next (this) year, and I'm considering getting even more done on Saturdays instead of watching the idiot box. Here's my personal top 10 for 2015:

Title|Author
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic |Lansing
Armchair Nation|Moran
Yes Prime Minister|Lynn
Survival in the Killing Fields|Ngor
Santaland Diaries |Sedaris
A Thousand Splendid Suns|Hosseini
Console Wars|Harris
Wiseguy|Pileggi
Human Transit|Walker
The Devil in the White City|Larson

2. Easily Distracted (Coogan). Well the one good thing about reading so many books is that you can quickly form opinions of entire genres. I've decided I don't like memoirs/autobiogs, based on this and the Roy Keane one from last year. I'm just not interested in celebrities enough to make it worthwhile. This one also suffers from hearing Alan Partridge's voice throughout, especially when Coogan is preening which he does quite a bit. It stops just before his "drugs hell" and "whirlwind of drug fueled parties" to quote Daily Mail, so expect a sequel, which I'll be avoiding.

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3. Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country (Bryson). Australia is not on my list of places to visit (although unluckily New Zealand is, so I'll probably go to Australia by default) and this brilliant travelogue really spelled out to me why not. It's too big, too depopulated and too full of things that want to kill you. Bryson's travel writing has gone down somewhat in my estimation after his great history-based books, but this is a top choice, even for those of us who's Australia experience is best confined to re-runs of Neighbours.

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5. The Martian (Weir). Fun (attention Golden Globes: not "funny" per se, just "fun") book although the sciencey bits scattered throughout were a bit above my pay grade. What I liked most about it was how mundane it made being trapped on Mars seem. On the other side, mere light minutes away, the story around NASA's side of the situation is quite cleverly told, albeit just conference calls and team meetings. Easy to see why it was snapped up so quickly by Hollywood.

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7. Yes Prime Minister (Lynn, Jay). It took me a while to realise that I had only read half of the Yes Prime Minister scripts last year and even longer to find a copy of the book online. I finally got a second hand Americanized version of the full series, so started halfway through. Unfortunately, the second half can't touch the first half, the last few episodes get quite preachy and they seem to contain political manifestos from the writers who were taking themselves a bit too seriously by this point. This never happened on The Thick of It. It still has its moments, and perhaps the fact that it turns out I've not seen most of the episodes either makes it hard to imagine the words coming from the brilliant cast, slightly lessening the impact. We'll see, I plan on addressing that last point this weekend.

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10. You Are Awful - But I Like You (Moore). The author buys a terrible car, travels to terrible towns in the UK, stays in terrible places, eats terrible food, etc etc. The question one might raise would be "why?", and the answer could well be "cos I wanted to write a book". It's miserable all the way down, really, with some very brief glimmers of humour or hope buried in the morass.

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12. Penguin Lessons (Michell). A very short book (c200 pages) about a guy who finds a penguin on an Argentine beach filled with dead brethren due to an ecological 'mishap'. He takes it in and ... they solve crimes. No, they don't. It's quite slight actually, nothing much happens, but it's a nice enough tale, mostly containing penguin-led anecdotes. P-p-p-pick it up today (sorry).

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14. Notes from a Big Country (Bryson). I like Bryson, the travel writer; I really like Bryson, the history enthusiast; but Bryson, the column writer - not so much. All the usual subjects are in there, taxes, driving, consumerism, crazy laws, blah blah. Bryson doesn't add anything unique to these old tropes and at times I felt like I was reading Dave Barry which I've not done since I was about 15. It's also strange that Notes from a Small Island is a very good travel book, you'd think the 'Notes from a' strand would be consistent.

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16. Frozen in Time (Zuckoff). Krakauer is also referenced in this book, in a brief exchange between the author and a guy who wants to go to Greenland to find a missing plane. The story hops between this expedition and the original story of 3 planes going down in Greenland during World War 2. For some reason, 2 of the planes are pretty much story non-grata almost immediately, and the plane Zuckoff gets involved in trying to find is one of those, so it's a weirdly structured story. But the historical element is outstanding, well paced and researched and there's a touching "what happened to them after the war" chapter towards the end. Compelling.

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18. Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground (Mason). The author follows all 11 (well 10 and a bit) Underground lines by walking the streets of London. It's an ok read, gets a bit navel gazey in places (expected as he walks some 400 miles mostly on his own and sometimes at night) and the lengthy interviews sprinkled throughout are unnecessary. I think you'd also need a knowledge of the areas he quickly passes through: it seemed more interesting to me when he was describing sections with which I am familiar (which were few and far between).

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20. A History of Food in 100 Recipes (Sitwell). The author describes 100 events in food history and tries to to place them in the context of a recipe of that time. The concept doesn't work very well, the recipes are tangential at best, and the events described are only really getting going when he has to stop and start a new chapter. I would've preferred an unfettered history, although it took me long enough just to read this, I suspect a full food history would take years to read. I'll give a pass for the content.

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22. The Spread of London's Underground (Demuth). On a recent visit to London, I bought 2 books onsite at London Transport Museum. This was one. It's basically a book of tube maps from its inception, and how it appeared at the end of each decade since, drawn in the contemporary fashion. I hate myself that I'm so fascinated by it, and it's really one to dip in and out of, not read all in 1 go like I nearly did. Great if you're into this sort of thing, you weirdo

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