corblimey has got too many books

Just noticed that If Walls Could Talk was my 100th book since starting this experiment. That's about 10 years of books based on my previous frequency.

25. Orders from Berlin (Tolkien). A bit meh, this one. It's originally split between London and Berlin as the plot unfolds and the Berlin centered stuff is good, but after a few chapters it's all about the plucky London copper and his lady sidekick with moxie. There is not one single surprise in the whole book, and the way things are resolved is unsatisfactory. I'm glad this wasn't my 100th milestone book.

At least he's not as long-winded as his goblin-obsessed namesake!

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27. Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich). Some good old fashioned investigative journalism as Ehrenreich delves into the "bottom 20%" who work hand to mouth cleaning houses, folding clothing, waitressing, whatever it takes. A sort of 'Undercover Boss', although pre-empting that tv show by some 8 years, Enrenreich throws herself full tilt into the lifestyle, staying in grotty motels, working long hours and 1, even 2 jobs and generally having a rotten time of it. Very good, although the final chapter gets a little politicky for my liking.

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29. World War Z (Brooks). I'm not a big fan of the zombie genre as a whole, I've only bothered with the first season of The Walking Dead and didn't enjoy the 2 Living Dead movies I've ever seen. I did watch World War Z on an airplane going to America last year, and it was ok, but this book of the movie plays out completely differently. The big difference is it's framed as a series of interviews with people who 'were there' at key events during the war. This sometimes gets a bit 'well you know yourself what happened next' for my liking, but the author does generally explain these sorts of things eventually. I enjoyed it, although I found the last few chapters where he talks about what the interviewees have done since the war 'ended' to be a bit silly particularly as there's a cast of about 40 and you've no idea who they are by the end.

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31. Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim (Sedaris). I stopped reading this one for a while, so it feels like I've been reading it for about 2 months, which I have. Usual Sedaris, really. Some funny, some strange, some uncomfortable, some whimsical. I have nothing bad to say about it, but I need to take a break from Mr.Sedaris for a while. A year should do it.

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33. The Machine Stops (Forster). If it was written this century, it would be a heavy handed allegorical tale about how we are all cocooning ourselves with social blah blah media blah. Since it was written some 105 years ago, I'm willing to let it pass, the idea behind it is quite startling for its time. However, it's still not a very good story if I'm honest.

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35. Containment (Cantrell). Disappointing really; there's a good story idea in here, but it's hidden behind various futuristic flim-flam, technical tossery and the author just plain showing off how intelligent he is & how much research he did. It's targeted at young sci-fi fans, I think, and I'm neither, but it's just not very well written.

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37. The Power of Habit (Duhigg). Starts well enough, explaining how people go about changing their habits (although like all of these sorts of books, there are far too many examples), but the second half of the book was less compelling with an odd section about the King's Cross fire that seemed to have been written by someone else who thought he was writing a thriller. I'll give it a pass, but since I have no bad habits, it's completely useless

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The 3 W's - weather, work and World Cup - are getting in the way of my reading at the moment, so things have slowed right up.

39. Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (Nyiszli). Okay, so reading a book about the Holocaust is not going to be a comedy fest, but I was expecting some brief glimmers of humanity amongst the cruelty. It was not to be though, it's just an endless list of horrors visited upon countless droves of Jews and other ethnic groups chosen for the Final Solution.

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41. The Railway Man (Lomax). I bought this years ago and never got around to reading it but reading last year's Unbroken and the release of the movie earlier this year put me in mind of it, so I finally got to it. If I'd read it before Unbroken, I might have been more impressed by it, but the fact is that Lomax's capture is mundane in comparison to Zamperini; his incarceration while brutal doesn't seem quite as bad or quite as long and his eventual release is a bit chaotic and ramshackle (as I suspect were most releases in the final days of the war). The last chapter deals with his meeting with one of his captors which a bit too much of a Hollywood ending for my liking, all neatly wrapped up.

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43. The Calendar (Ewing-Duncan). Pretty good history of how we get to where we are with time, months, etc. The early parts of the book are a bit sparse in detail for obvious reasons, but I'm not sure why the author chose to fill it out needlessly with a brief history of the comings and goings in world history. This filler is highlighted by the fact that it isn't necessary as the book progresses and more information is available. It did hold a few surprises for me, mostly in the way religion was involved (as it was in so many aspects of society) and how late the current Gregorian calendar was adopted across most of the world.

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45. How Football Explains America (Paolantonio). A short history of the NFL which jumps around a lot and has far too much 'f**k yeah America' for such a slim volume. The first portion of the book dealing with pre-war college football and how it evolved was a lot more interesting to me, but still fell short of what I was looking for

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47. The Black Box (Connelly). A nicely constructed Bosch mystery. No major twists or turns as there would have been in the good old days of Bosch, and a tad too many jazz references, but well plotted and well paced. Best Bosch book for quite some time.

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49. Orange is the New Black (Kerman). Well that's done it. I can officially announce a genre of book I just can't take to - memoirs. It's my own fault, when I hear "prison" I think Shawshank Redemption, not this. It just isn't that interesting. A woman in her mid-thirties is sentenced to 15 months in prison for crimes she carried out in her youth. How she got to prison was pretty interesting, but then (as I suspect prison life actually is in real life) it just gets dull. Work release, prison programs, meal times and a general undercurrent of racial tension, but it really just moves from anecdote to anecdote.

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51. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Shaffer, Barrows). Not a great book, although I fully accept I'm not the target audience. I was expecting layers, or at the very least some interesting aspects of the German Occupation but it's a fairly trite tale of a woman who goes to Guernsey and falls in love, the end. I wish I'd read the review comparing it to Vicar of Dibley before I bought it.

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53. Kitchen Confidential (Bourdain). I mainly know Anthony Bourdain as that nice man with the grey hair who shows up on the Food Channel from time to time, when they're not showing Jamie Oliver. This book is a frenetic and boisterous account of his life as a chef up to 2000, which is nothing at all like I imagined. There's tales of drugs and debauchery, chain smoking and chain drinking and so many failed restaurants, it really does become the definition of 'warts n all'. The only problem I had with it was it brought back some very unhappy memories of working in a hotel kitchen in the 90s which years of psychiatric medication helped bury.

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55. The Happiness Project (Rubin). Part self-help, part white whine, all rubbish.

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57. Never Coming Back (Weaver). My first David Raker novel, and not too bad, although it's one of those novels where everybody is very talkative, and explains great swathes of the plot as it goes along. A pet irk of mine. It does suffer a little from being the fourth in a series, so I really should have started with the first one, perhaps (I also find it annoying when the fourth book in a series explains things long term reader already know, so I can't have it both ways ). I'll give him another go.

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59. The Turnaround (Pelecanos). It's an okay short story wrapped up in a fairly blah longer story. Far too many descriptions of everyday things going on, that have no bearing on the story - I think the author was going for 'these are just normal people', but I don't want that in a novel, I want excitement and tension and action and an actual bloody story.

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61. Flash Boys (Lewis). Because of its subject matter, another book that is both infuriating and intriguing to me, in equal measure. The descriptions of what the trading companies still get up to in the States really surprised me. I thought since the crash, they'd be flying straight, but apparently not. They're not doing illegal, but it strikes me as at least unethical. Anyway, Lewis' tale is pretty good, mostly landing on the setup of the IEX market, which aims to be fair to everybody. Technical details of how the markets work are well described, although there is a fair amount of repetition between chapters.

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63. Final Witness (Tolkein). The death knell is sounding for me reading fiction books. Described as 'a gripping courtroom drama', with 'political intrigue', it was really pretty bad. The courtroom stuff is just 2-hander dialog, and the political intrigue seems to come from the fact that one of the main characters is in politics, but the plot, such as it is, has nothing to do with that. Rubbish.

After reading this, I was put off several of the other fiction books on my Kindle. I've started the Steve Jobs book now, so after that, just might give up entirely on fiction.

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65. On The Map (Garfield). A great sweep through the history of maps exploration and map making. The chapters are short and engaging and flit about mightily. Some are a bit dodgy in theme, like treasure maps, brain maps and videogame maps. The other issue is the pictures, small, black and white and hard to decipher, they don't go well with the illustrative text, so end up as an advertisement for shops like Stanfords in London.

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67. Dave Gorman vs The Rest of the World (Gorman). Bearded funnyman Dave goes around England (or about 6 cities anyway) playing games with people. The travelogue portion of the book, such as it is, is better than the games-playing portion, and there are some uncomfortable encounters that I'm surprised he left in the book to be honest. I can't recommend it.

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69. What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Munroe). I'm a fan of xkcd.com - it generally contains the right mix of humour and science-nerd theory, so I was expecting more of the same with this first non-xkcd related book from Munroe. And I wasn't disappointed. As the title says, the questions are absurdly hypothetical and Munroe generally runs with it while staying with very loose parameters. Surprisingly (or maybe not) a lot of the answers result in destruction on a grand scale. Very enjoyable.

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71. Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon (Ghiglieri). Actually bought on location in Grand Canyon 2 years ago, and I'm glad I waited til now to read it. Page after page after page of people dying in or around or on top of or boating in or flying over the Grand Canyon. A lot of misadventure, some tragedy and some just plain what the hell? A long book, and I wouldn't read it before taking a trip out there, and I'd recommend everyone take a trip out there.

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73. The Year of Living Biblically (Jacobs). I enjoyed the last AJ Jacobs book I read; it wasn't laugh out loud funny, but the subject matter made up for it. Not so much this time. There should have been some hilarious anecdotes in here as AJ attempts to follow the Bibble as literally as possible, but it's all a bit po-faced really, and the 'experts' he indulges are a bad choice for a humour book. If it is a humour book, maybe it's not!

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