corblimey has got too many books

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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