Around the World in 50 Books

Right, if you want to accurately recreate my year you''ll need to read the following books. As I generally take any opportunity to offer an opinion on something, especially if I think it's rubbish (which is most things), I've included a bit of reviewing too.

I did my best to only read good books whilst I was away but occasionally, well, you'll see...

Glamorama - Brett Easton Ellis isn't as clever as he thinks he is.

The Historian - Great yarn, rubbish ending

Joy Luck Club - Don't think I was the target audience for this book.

Count of Monte Cristo - Loved it

Day of the Triffids - better than I feared

A Million Little Pieces - Painfully good (Lana lend me the sequel)

The Alchemist (re-read)

Bourne Identity - Different from the film

The Perks of being a Wallflower - not sure it's the new "Catcher" but enjoyed it a lot.

Breaking Vegas - I read it because I liked the cover. Someimes I'm really shallow.

Harvest - Everyone seemed to love this book. I thought it was bobbins.

To Kill a Mockingbird (re-read)

The War of Don Emmanuel's Netherparts - suitably South American

Personal Days - there was an impressively long sentence in the third chapter, other than that it was entirely forgetable.

The Falls - Always wanted to read a Rankin as he seems like a nice bloke. It was predictably average.

Don Quixote - I never realised this was a spoof. Pretty funny for something that's 500 years old. Pretty postmodern too.

Tibet's Secret Mountain - Check me reading mountaineers' journals

Woman In White - whoever told me that this was better than The Moonstone was mistaken.

Dubliners - I only understood one of the stories in this - guess I'm still not ready for Ulysses

Shakespeare - I've always been a bit scathing of Bill Bryson books, turns out that they're rather good.

Hound of the Baskervilles - I didn't enjoy this as much as the large amounts of other Holmes books in this list but lead you to surmise.

Tortilla Flat - Funnier than Cannery Row (goes without saying that it's also funnier than Grapes of Wrath).

Imperium - Proper beach book.

The Great Gatsby - Nothing happened and not in a good way. Yawn.

Kidnapped - oh, look at how clever i am writing in dialect. Yawn, again.

The Black Tulip - better than Three Musketeers, not as good as Monte Cristo.

Even Cowgirls get The Blues - Tom Robbins is as clever as he thinks he is and that makes me jealous.

The Gate - Okay, I didn't actually finish this but I reckon I read enough for it to count.

High Fidelity (re-read)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Lots of lists of fish.

The Man in The Iron Mask - Nowhere near as swashbuckly as I hoped it would be.

The Polysyllabic Spree - The main reason I made a note of what I was reading - just so that I could foist a whole heap of books onto you, just like that rotter Hornby did to me.

The Three Musketeers - I like reading Dumas. It's pulp trash, but because it's 150 years old it looks respectable.

The Truth (with Jokes) - I've not found many books as shocking as I found this. It made me spit out food and stutter offensive facts at strangers. It also made me glad not to be an American.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - I just don't really like short stories that much. I don't see them as proper reading.

The Throwback - Funnier than I was expecting

A Fraction of the Whole - I'd not heard of this before I started reading it, but really enjoyed.

We Could have been The Wombles - Thought this was going to be the kind of irreverent, coffee-table, music-geek factbook that I love. It wasn't; it was rubbish.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - I hadn't realised that Moriarty only appeared in one Holmes short story - I had figured that he was a presence throughout the series (not that I've read every story but I've made a fair dent in the oeuvre)

Imperial America - Think I'd've preferred it if it had been about the 2004 elections, as it suggested on the cover, rather than a collection of mid-eighties essays.

The Beach (Reread) - I read the Beach about ten years ago. Then I thought it sounded exotic and supercool. Reading it now it sounds some like some kind of hippy hell. The main character lasted five months on The Beach. Me? I doubt I'd last five hours.

Belief in God; Good, Bad or Irrelevant? - I think this was put out by a Christian publisher, which makes it an incredibly brave publishing decision. Cringingly funny watching a theology professor trying to exercise his punk credentials.

The Damage Done - Don't think I'll become a heroin dealer after all.

D_ S__ by P__ J__ - They say all publicity is good publicity, therefore I'm not going to name this book, merely dismiss it as the worst thing I've ever read. On two positive notes: it was so simplistic that I read all 500 pages in a period not much more than 24 hours, so i guess someone did something right; and if this clunking time-waster can get published I'm pretty sure I can. Now all I have to do is write something.

Frankenstein - about a third of this book was unnecessary description. Yawn.

Quite Ugly One Morning - a re-re-read to try and detox from wordy classics and terrible thrillers. The new Brookmyre is out now. Pan-daemon-ium. I'm pretty excited about reading it, so don't tell me what happens. Okay?

Shantaram - two of my travel companions from this year have rated this as their "bestest ever" book; a third met Linbaba and gave him a bear hug.

City of Thieves - Corker of a read

The Island of Dr Moreau - Not sure what I made of it. Enjoyed it, I guess.

Tropic of Cancer - Oooh, how very risque?


Freakonomics - More accessible than I thought it was going to be.

Moby Dick - See Frankenstein, only more so. There's only so many descriptions of bits of boats and whales you can take before you start harpooning strangers.


Superfreakonomics - See, that's how accessible Freakonomics was...

White Fang - Figured that, as this is a "kids' classic" the story woukld be entirely guessable. It wasn't.