Feckoff.net

I read books. A lot. I have two shelves in my room that are stacked high and starting to bend a bit in the middle under the weight. Its a mystery to me why I haven’t blogged about them until now, so here goes. Most of what I read is fiction - crime thrillers and the like. Stuff that’s likely to be frowned upon and called airport novels by literature snobs. Here’s what I’ve been spending most of my reading time on over the last year:

• Anything Everything by Lee Child. His Jack Reacher novels are proper page-turners. I only stumbled upon his stuff this summer in a bargain bookshop, and now I’m working my way through everything he’s written. For a Briton he sure writes a great American novel!
• Nelson Demille’s “Wild Fire”. Terrorists and mutually assured destruction. Fun! I’ve read pretty much all of Demille’s books over the last couple of years and eagerly await his next one some time next year.
• Everything from Michael Connelly. His books are like crack. I’ve read every last one of them (eh, not all in 2007) and have always been left wanting more.
• A bunch of Clive Cussler books. I’m not fond of the nautical setting of most of them and I find a lot of the characters to be two-dimensional and ridiculously perfect but the adventures are compelling and enjoyable, and that makes the rest forgivable.

And now some non-fiction brain food: I picked up a box-set of Stephen E. Ambrose’s World War II books last summer but didn’t get around to reading them until this year. I found them a very easy and interesting read. If you have any interest in WWII, I highly recommend them. For those who don’t know, Ambrose is the man who wrote Band of Brothers, the book that spawned the critically acclaimed TV series of the same name. Cracking stuff. Sadly, he died of lung cancer shortly after the series aired.

I also picked up comedian/activist Mark Thomas’s “As used on the famous Nelson Mandela”, an investigation into the global arms trade which looks quite interesting. Its in my queue to be read in the near future.