Book Revue

Another good thing about long plane journeys is that they give me a chance to catch up with my reading. I like to get a new book or two to read whenever I go somewhere far away. This time round, I was planning to get "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King, but while wandering around the bookshop I noticed "Making History" by Stephen Fry, which I'd somehow never heard of before although it was published ten years ago, so I decided to get that instead by way of apology. When I got to the second chapter and realised it was going to be about killing Hitler as a baby I started to regret my choice - could there be a more overused plot for a time-travel book? Heck, I wrote (or at least started to write) one myself as a teenager. My annoyance with the unoriginal concept lasted until about half way through, when they'd almost got round to actually changing history and I realised that rather than reading it as a novel I was just waiting for it to detail how the act had changed the world. I clicked a few mental cogs into different positions and started paying attention to the characters, and realised that it's actually a really great book. It's funny and clever and very readable, and I'd certainly recommend it to anyone. The basic changing-history bit was pretty similar to mine, too, and while I wouldn't have created a protagonist with the nickname "Puppy" in 1993 it's very much the kind of thing I'd do if I was writing that story now - I suspect that Stephen Fry is also a time traveller and has stolen some yet-unwritten masterpiece of mine. But then, I think that about all good books.

For the journey home I was again going to buy "Lisey's Story", but the airport bookshop only had it in a hardback edition so big I would have had a hard time fitting it through the door of the plane, let alone fitting it in my overstuffed rucksack. So I decided to go for "The Gunslinger", because I've always sort of meant to read the Dark Tower books, and it's only the fact that I don't really like early King as a rule that's stopped me before. But this is the 2003 revision of the original from 1970 or whenever, so I decided to give it a try. But for some reason I still couldn't get into it. I'll try it again another time, but in Minneapolis I decided to get something else, and ended up with "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. This is another series of books I've been meaning to read for ages, and this one has completely hooked me. It chronicles the exploits of Mma Ramotswe, the only lady private detective in Botswana (so no complaints about an unoriginal premise here), and the wide range of unusual cases she has to deal with, her unique thought processes that lead her to the solutions as well as a variety of conclusions about morality and the meaning of life. It's very well written - funny, touching, compelling, dramatic, clever, really everything you could want from a book. I've read the second volume since getting home, and I've just bought "Morality For Beautiful Girls" today.

I know I could be more profitably spending my time writing books rather than reading them, but I really am sort of getting somewhere with "How To Be Clever" too. Honest.