Back to history: "Berlin at War" by Roger Moorhouse

A while since I picked up a meaty history tome as the next read, but I had been looking forward to this one since reading a glowing review in the FT's "books and arts" section. (I probably shouldn't own up to this as work pays for my daily FT, but the Saturday edition is definitely by far the best thumbed of the week. But I digress.) Berlin at War had been surprisingly hard to track down in Nottingham's Waterstones last November, but I had finally found it and it sat on the shelf for a couple of months waiting for Freedom and the filler-manqué One Day to get read.

Light-weighty reading: "One Day" by David Nicholls

6 January 2011 at 14:30

This was one of those books, adorned with the "3 for 2" sticker, purchased on a whim from a very high stack in Waterstones, Nottingham, which was supposed to "fill in" between the weightier tomes queued up on my bookshelf. The cover and the blurb yell Hornby/Parsonsesque chick-lit at you; I duly expected light, quirky, moderately satirical, sort-of romantic comedy out of this.

And, indeed, that's what I got. But not only.

Great American reading: "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen

1 January 2011

With a book like this, I really wonder if there is any point in me saying anything at all. "Freedom" is that rarest of books, the literary fiction super-hit, mega-bestseller, opined about by anyone who has any interest in writing,  at least heard of by millions of people who have not, and perhaps never will, read it. This is a book which has not only generated myriads of reviews, but spoofs of reviews, such as one I saw in the Washington Post which cited the New York Times' view that the main, if not the only, reason some Chinese eunuch invented paper 4000 years ago is so that one day "Freedom" could be printed on it. (In this Slate video: http://www.slatev.com/video/book-reviews-way-outside-box/)