9/11 Reading: "The Submission" by Amy Waldman

After my recent foray into "urban fantasy", something meatier, picked up, like so much else lately, from the podcast "Inside the New York Times Book Review" - this episode. (Fear not, by the way, I didn't read this book in one day, I was just very slow producing the last review.) The NYT touted Amy Waldman's book as perhaps - finally - being the "definitive" 9/11 book, the literary response to an event now ten years old which would somehow put a finger on what that event meant for New York and America more widely. 

Magical police reading: "The Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

Just now and then, a combination of cover design, blurb and the mood of the moment induces a serendipitous book purchase. This is one reason I hope that bookshops never disappear - this can't happen in the same way on Amazon. The bookshop in question was (again!) the small Foyles in St Pancras railway station, which is developing a talismanic status as the home of the random purchase.

The significance of small things: "The Hare with Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal

I suppose I would have picked up on the phenomenon that is Edmund de Waal's singular book sooner or later myself. Since I started reading it, I seem to see it everywhere. But I was actually put onto this by two great friends, not as far as I know particularly coordinated in their reading habits, enthusing in equal measure about this "extraordinary" book as we sat around our regular Monday night dinner table in Strasbourg. I was left unclear about what sort of a book it actually was, but very clear about the fact it had to be read. After all, these were two understated Englishmen (OK, one of them is understated) showing almost Latin fervour about something.

Oddly revolutionary reading: "The Last Hundred Days" by Patrick McGuinness

This one was an impulse buy in Brussels Waterstones, where I had gone for something completely different. My eye was somehow caught by the grainy black and white cover photograph of a motorcade of large boxy black cars progressing through a wide urban boulevard. It seemed to me to be something to do with 1960s America, but turned out on closer inspection to be a scene from 1980s Romania, and to be a novel about the end of the communist bloc's most capriciously despotic regime (save perhaps Albania), that of Nicolae Ceausescu and, to an extent I came to appreciate, his pseudo-scientist and fellow head-case wife, Elena.

Authentic thriller reading - "Rip Tide" by Stella Rimington

I feel a connection with Stella Rimington. Her Mum used to live in the same street as my Mum, in a house to which I, as a boy, regularly delivered the village newsletter, though not, I think, at the time that the aforementioned mother lived there. That came later, and was surrounded by some wonderfully naive gossip about the special protection laid on by Britain's security services for the mother of the head of MI5. Well, this was pre-9/11 and not a lot happened (or indeed happens now) in this place, so it's entirely reasonable that the occasional unfamiliar car parked in the street should provoke a little flurry of excitement about "heightened security".