Here's my best and worst of 2009.

Best fiction:

John LeCarrė A Most Wanted ManThis is a really tightly plotted and paced thriller about the "War on Terror". Nothing good happens. Broken people are further mangled by the system. The ending is inevitable and appalling. LeCarré takes the lid off what is being perpetrated in our name by our ( Read more... )

I picked up a copy of David Thompson's Thai Food yesterday. If you want to get serious about cooking Thai food I think this is probably the book to have. Thompson is a scholar and a first rate chef (he is the only person to win a Michelin star for a Thai resto). He spends a good part of every year in Thailand and he 'gets it'. His recipes are ( Read more... )

The Folio Society got me again. They upped the renewal offer to a choice of sets for $4.95 and included was the Shelby Foote history of the Civil War so I caved in. The book geek in me is mildly amused that among my new purchases are both Xenophon's The Persian Expedition and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea.

This is one of the best Le Carré's I have read and that is high praise. The subject is the "War on Terror" and Le Carré treats it with the combination of style, insight and humanity that characterizes all his work. The point, ultimately, is the depths of Cheney inspired criminality to which the Western intelligence world has sunk. The vehicle is ( Read more... )

What do the following books have in common:

Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Sharpe - Blott on the Landscape
Gide - Strait is the Gate

I promise that this is slightly more sensible than figuring out why Texas is like Lancashire.

via ironed_orchid and others

Take no more than 15 minutes to produce a list of 15 books that have influenced you in style, ideas, relationships, language, or other ways that you find important, and/or books that have really stayed with you -- you keep thinking of that quote, you are always remembering that character, you are frequently reminded of that moment ( Read more... )

I just finished MRD Foot's SOE; a history of the Special Operations Executive, the British organisation responsible for sabotage and resistance in enemy territory during WW2. You would think it hard to make such a subject dull but Foot manages to pull it off. Maybe he considered the more exciting bits too well known to be worth repeating. The ( Read more... )

I've just finished PJ Cain and AG Hopkins British Imperialism 1688-2000. I would have to say it's one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time. The book deals with how British domestic and overseas policies were shaped by the financial imperatives of the economic system that developed in and out of London during the period in ( Read more... )

I ordered a second hand copy of John Aubrey's Brief Lives this morning. I then found myself looking to see if there was a current Folio edition. The Folio site is organised by category; Fiction, History etc. I suppose one would find the Aubrey under Biography but somehow that didn`t seem quite right. (The question is moot as there isn`t a ( Read more... )

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 is a brilliant book. It's a really nuanced and comprehensive account of the rise of the Kingdom of Prussia from the Mark Brandenberg to the dominant player in the German Reich. Like most English speaking people of my generation (who know anything at all about German history) I was brought ( Read more... )