Some of the writing is beautiful, some of it very functional.  There are few hard facts in it: the one that sticks is the mnemonic Piet Koopt Hoge Schoenen (Piet buys high shoes) to remember the order of the main canals – Prinzengracht, Kaisergracht, Herengracht, Singel.  Even so, by the end I felt I knew a lot more of the city, especially the Jordaan district which I have probably wandered through umpteen times without any notion of the historical context.

Here is what I said about it on Amazon:

This series is pitched and described as a sort of alternative travel book, but it is a very oblique sort of travel book, being more of an anthology of literature around the theme of a city, with a mixture of writing from both well-known and obscure sources. These can be excerpts from novels, histories, letters and diaries – including one of the most famous of all diaries: Anne Frank’s.

With Amsterdam being one of my favourite places I was prepared to enjoy this book, and I did, although for me it started a bit slowly. Of course everybody will find some of the pieces better than other, it just happened that all the pieces I liked least were in the first section. I was worried that the book was going to be a disappointment but it soon got under my skin.

There are some pieces from very well-known writers like Albert Camus, Simon Schama, Ian McEwan and Voltaire, but a lot of the book is by Dutch writers, many translated into English for the first time. Perhaps surprisingly it was the pieces by the relatively unknown writers that were more engaging.

The book is split into sections with loose themes: the sea and canals, art, the occuoation of WWII, and the famous tolerance of the Dutch and specifically Amsterdam. The section that is closest to a traditional travel book contains descriptions of various ‘must see’ places, but even this is an idiosyncratic selection, including plenty of places that I had, to my embarrassment, never heard of despite many visits – like the Portugese Synagogue.

This is not the place to come looking for hard factual information on what to do, where to stay or where to eat, but rather it wraps you up in the atmosphere of Amsterdam. Every time I came across the names of places I knew I wanted to be back there seeing it in a new light and every new place described made me want to just see it.

I think this is a very neat idea executed very well and I’m sorely tempted to try the equivalent books on Paris, London and New York if they do them – but not before I have gone back to Amsterdam to check out a few places first.

Some of the writing about the second world war was very moving and thought-provoking, and also uncomfortable reading – but even more uncomfortable for any Dutch readers.

There can be few cities that have generated sufficient writing of sufficient quality to make a similar books – London, Berlin, Dublin, Paris are the others in the series – I wonder which other places could follow?  New York?  Rome?

I enjoyed it on a couple of levels. Apart from the story, there was a more personal level of enjoyment which was an element of nostalgia.   Molly ans Simon, the two main characters, met while at Goldsmiths which was just up the road from where I lived for quite a few years, so parts of the book were set in my old manor, even to the extent of an actual street name ringing a bell.So I was already reading with one part of my mind comparing the descriptions of being young and living in London, but then there was the aspect of Simon’s sexual preferences.  Basically he is gay but has a thing for straight men and gets turned off by other gay men.  It sounds implausible, but when I lived in London one of our friends – well more a friend of a friend – had similar tastes and often told us tales of seducing soldiers from the London barracks and shared the secret of his tactics with us,¹  so I had some sort of real-life template for the character.  I reckon it made the whole thing more believable for me than it might otherwise have been.

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

I am always a little bit wary of celebrity novels, especially those written by comedians who have been on TV a lot, in case they turn out to be weak books sold purely on name recognition.  It is an irrational worry really as I have previously enjoyed novels by Sean Hughes, Eric Morecambe, Alexie Sayle, Ben Elton, Mark Gattiss and Stephen Fry but I can’t shake it. With this book the worries disappeared within the first couple of pages.

There is not a lot of depth to it, although that is fitting as the two main characters are pretty shallow people, sometimes the plot leaps forward a little too quickly, and it certainly ends far too suddenly, but for all that it is a good read. For most of the book I was in a rush to find out what happened next and at least liked the characters enough to be wanting everything to turn out OK for them.

As you would expect from a comedian, there are quite a few laughs in the book, more from lines that characters come up with than from descriptions or situations, but there are some darkly surreal situations too.  I like the way that Clary threw in a few false turns too, where it looks like the story is heading towards a particular place and just as you are pre-emptively yawning at the predictability of it the story goes somewhere else instead.

I read this on the sofa between World Cup games, but I reckon it would have made a good holiday book. By the end of it I decided that I will probably track down his previous books at some point, although I know they won’t give me what I really want, which is to know more about the enigmatic and creepy Lilia Delvard from this story.

Watch out for: Clary ‘doing a Martin Amis’ and putting himself into the book, albeit as an ‘off-stage’ character.

1. it involved very specific videos

I have to start by laying my cards on the table and saying that I have been a fan of David Nobbs since I was a teenager, and read the first Reggie Perrin book. I have ten of his novels on my shelves so I had high hopes when I picked this book up to read it, and was not disappointed; this is one of his best.

There is a crossover between Nobbs’ novels and his TV writing with some books adapted for TV, and other being novelisations of TV shows or at least written in parallel, and his writing style does lend itself to the small screen, making him extremely accessible.

But accessible does not mean bland or shallow. Behind the effortless humour there are some big topics and serious points.  For example, in this book the subject of religious faith is a major thread of the plot.

All of Nobbs’ usual stylistic flourishes are present and correct, including the subtle repetition of otherwise trivial details to make them funny, and the reiteration of particular events of circumstances with slight changes to highlight changes over time.

Many of Nobbs’ books lend themselves to sequels, which duly appear, but this is very much a self-contained story, taking place over an extended period.  It is about two young lovers who run away for a few nights in London, are forced apart by family and circumstances, and spend the subsequent decades trying to re-connect. Along the way themes like religion, alcoholism and bereavement are all encountered and treated very sensitively  without diminishing the overall good humour of the book.

Given the author’s history and reputation in TV sit-coms, an interesting strand of the book is the acting career of one of the main characters, who finds herself involved in increasingly dire comedies after starting with shakespearian ambitions. I did find myself wondering if the passages concerning the TV shows were satire, documentary or just a bit of fun at the expense of the television industry.

The key lesson learned from this book: taxidermists do not stuff.

First off is The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, one of those popular psychology/behavioural economics books in the mould of Malcolm Gladwell or Dan Ariely. Here is what I wrote:

This may be the scariest book I have read for a long time.  The theme is about the way our instincts may not be as dependable as we expect.  Some of that is totally unsurprising, like the idea that we may not notice quite blatant things if we are not looking for them, but it soon gets more relevant.

The book starts with a description of a famous experiment by the authors where test subjects failed to spot a man in a gorilla suit in a video of a basketball game.  Very interesting but hardly relating to real-life I thought, but then the book gets a bit scary, with details of the follow-up experiments showing how the same effect applies to drivers not noticing cyclists and motorcyclists

The next scare is the exposure of the false sense of safety you can get from hands-free kits for mobile phones in cars and how they distract a driver as much as holding a handset.  I sort of suspected that anyway, but its still a worry to see experiments supporting the idea.

The real scary part for me was the section about the reliability of witnesses. Drawing from some examples of legal cases and psychology experiments it completely undermined my faith in the whole idea of trials, making it all too easy to see how false convictions can be made. The book is worth reading just for that chapter alone.

So I’m scared to be on the roads, knowing how distracted everyone is, and more than a bit worried that if I was ever accused of something I didn’t do my chances of getting off are not as great as I would expect.

However, hiding indoors enjoying my memories doesn’t seem to be an option either, since the book makes a plausible case for those memories not being anywhere near as accurate as they feel.  Truly nostaliga ain’t what it used to be.

OK, I’m exaggerating, but not completely. The book is extremely thought-provoking and follows a well laid-out structure: proposing a sort of theory, breaking it into several topics and then tacking each in order. For a book that makes me so uneasy, I found it extremely easy to read, whipping through it at the sort of pace I normally only manage with thrillers.

Anyone who enjoyed the Freakonomics books or those by Malcolm Gladwell or Dan Ariely is almost guaranteed to like this one too.

Overall verdict: not as iconic as the Tipping Point or the Long Tail, better than Superfreakonomics and with a better premise than Blink or Outliers.

Remember Hilary Clinton’s well-publicised campaign-derailing claim about visiting somewhere and having to duck from sniper fire at the airport, when newsreel footage showed that she arrived in one piece meeting and greeting on the runway?   Like many people I thought that if this wasn’t a blatant lie it was a sign of severe delusion.  This book explains how easily we could all make similar mistakes, and probably do.

It is one thing not trusting everyone around you, but when you realise that you can’t trust yourself, you do start to wonder…

Fortunately the book turned out to be so much better than the DVD I watched at the weekend and I thoroughly approve of it.  I have a fair collection of Sherlock Holmes-related books, and will happily admit to enjoying all of them, even when I know they are not good, so I was likely to enjoy this anyway, but I didn’t expect it to be good as well.

Holmes fans are difficult to satisfy completely: they will always pick up on the slightest little thing that contradicts the official canon – even though the official canon itself has some inconsistancies, like the exact location of Watson’s wound form the Jezail bullet – but this succeeds in not setting off any huge alarm bells.

Of course I may be biased because, according to this book the Holmes family home is in Horsham!

Here is what I wrote about it:

Andrew Lane has a taken on a massive challenge with this book, which is to be the first in a series, because he has set out to write adventure stories for teenagers about the young Sherlock Holmes in such a way that they fit in with the established ‘facts’ about Holmes and so will be of interest to fans of the original stories without taking too many liberties.

I’m a long way from being a teenager myself, but I think I would have enjoyed this book if I had read it when I was, and more importantly I think I would have enjoyed it if I had read it before reading Conan Doyle’s books.  As a straightforward boys’ own adventure story, albeit one with quite modern levels of violence in parts, I reckon it works well enough, but does it satisfy the Holmes fan or just annoy them?

I probably qualify as a bit of a fan myself.  As well as all the original books in several formats I have a decent collection of Holmes pastiches, homages, sequels, and rip-offs. This book is more of anhomage in prequel form.

The book has obviously been written by somebody with a good knowledge of, and affection for, the original stories and a familiarity with the accepted theories about Holmes.  It includes plenty of passing references to things that Conan Doyle mentioned like the mysterious Paradol Chamber and Holmes’ French lineage on his mother’s side.  The uncle’s name in this book is Sherrinford Homes, which was actually one of Conan Doyle’s original names for the character.

What this book cannot do is have the feel of the ‘proper’ books, because they are (nearly) all written from the perspective of Dr. Watson and are very much in his voice. It would be too clumsy and implausible for the teenage Holmes to have his own equivalent and so this is just written as a normal third-person novel. Apart from in the prologue, the narrator only follows Sherlock Holmes.

Although sticking to known ‘facts’ as far as possible the author has had to introduce some of his own, necessarily.  It is fine for Conan Doyle to be vague about Holmes’ origins, but if you are writing a book about his early years they have to be set somewhere and in this case it is established that the family home is in Horsham, and Holmes is at school in Deepdene, near Dorking. But although some new biographical details are introduced I am pleased to say there is nothing that contradicts the Conan Doyle originals.

Other attempts to portray young Sherlock Holmes have had him being friends with the young Dr. Watson and the young Lestrade, which is not only ludicrous but is completely at odds with A Study in Scarlet by Conan Doyle, where Holmes meets Watson for the first time in 1881. There are no such gimmicks in this book and the historical details appear to be well researched too.

Admittedly the pace of this book is faster than the canonical stories, to suit the teenage tastes perhaps, and young Sherlock seems to have an un-natural ability to pick up things like horse riding or boxing just by watching somebody else do it, but I still found it absorbing and I am looking forward to more of the same even if only to find out whether there really is more to the sinister Mrs. Eglantine than meets the eye.

There is also a good chance that younger readers of this book will be tempted to read the originals and create a new generation of Holmes fans, and that can only be a good thing.

Remembering how awkward it can feel to go into some of these places for the first time I jumped at the chance to get hold of a book called Do I Kneel or Do I Bow? through Amazon’s Vine programme.  I remember that the members’ lounge at Crawley town hall had a small library of reference books: if it doesn’t include a copy of this book then it should. Here is a short review of the book:

I wish I had a copy of this book to hand the first time I went to a mosque, a gurdwara or a hindu temple!

These days you don’t have to be religious to find yourself inside a church, synagogue or temple of some sort, as more of us find ourselves making friends of differing beliefs and getting invited to weddings or other celebrations. When that happens this book tells you all you need to know to avoid making an idiot of yourself.

The book covers eight major religions and is written in a way that does not assume any previous knowledge of any of them: it is not written just as a guide for christians to understand other religions, but is equally applicable to Sikhs invited to a catholic wedding or a muslim going to a protestant christening.

Each section gives a very high level overview of a particular religion’s beliefs, some details of the main festivals or celebrations, and information about behaviour in the relevent places of worship and what is expected of visitors.

It could be read straight through as a sort of beginners’ guide to religion as the chapters do give a decent, but brief, introductory description, but it is better suited to being a reference book to be pulled out when needed.

I have not read the book all the way through, but I sampled the chapter on Sikhism, having visited the local gurdwara a few times in the last couple of years. Everything in there about behaviour and what happens during ceremonies was accurate as far as my experience goes so I am assuming the other sections provide similarly practical advice and information.

I’m now looking forward to getting invited to a jewish or buddhist event so I can try out some of the other chapters.

You don’t need to be standing for election to enjoy it though!This was another book from Amazon’s Vine programme.  Unusually, this is one that I was going to buy, so when I saw it on Vine’s newsletter I jumped at it.  Having seen Richard Herring doing standup, listened to his Collings & Herrin podcasts, followed his blog, and even been to see one of the live podcasts in Brighton I fully expected to enjoy it, and so I did.

This is what I thought:

This is not an autobiography as such, but the story of the few months before Richard Herring’s 40th birthday and the year or so after it.

As you would expect of a book from a professional comedian it is funny, but it has a serious point to it as well and as the book progresses it becomes increasingly more serious, with fewer laughs. By then it doesn’t matter because you are hooked and wanting to know what happens next takes priority over where the next laugh is coming from.

As the book starts, Herring looks at where he is as he approaches 40 – no responsibilities, out drinking every night and a string of casual relationships. Although most blokes of the same age are probably paralysed with jealousy reading this, Herring himself is wondering whether there might be more to life and whether it really is time to settle down. It is surprisingly deep for a comedian’s memoirs, but never to the extent of being dull; in fact it is very funny indeed.

Fans of Richard Herring will be relieved to know that the contents have not already been covered in his long-running blog or podcasts – not that fans would be put off buying it even if that was the case – but they are going to get something new here, and something with a definite structure and story arc.

I really enjoyed reading this and I think most people would – once they understand the writer’s sense of humour. Anybody who has seen him perform or read his other writing will know how he likes to say bad things that he doesn’t mean for effect. On the page it can sometimes seem like he actually means it.

Recommended for anybody who is 40, used to be 40 or intends to be 40 some day.

As you would expect from Cory Doctorow there are lots of juicy little details about the technology and some great concepts of how the internet may evolve and blur the lines between online and offline.  It is also a glimpse into the different cultures around the world and how they might start to interact, with the younger generation growing up to have the sort of contact with other nationalities that their parents would never have imagined.

I have read a few books during the last month, and built up quite a backlog of reviews to write.  I am probably not doing them justice by doing the reviews now to take my mind off the impending election day, but I did make a conscious decision that I wanted time to let this book sink in before writing about it.  Here is what I wrote about this one:

For The Win is like science fiction set 5 minutes in the future. Parts of it reminded me of the classic cyberpunk novels, although it is a lot more plausible.

Lots of small details in the book tie in with snippets of information I have come across before. That is a bit of a worry: if they are correct and sort-of verified it makes the rest of it more likely to be realistic, and some of the lives described in it are not happy ones.

The background of the story is the globalisation of culture and entertainment, in the form of online games in the mould of World of Warcraft. The games have generated grey market and black market economies where in-game resources are traded in real life for real money. This has led to people in developing countries being employed to generate or harvest those resources to sell to people in richer countries.

The story concentrates on several groups of such workers, almost exclusively children, in different countries and how they use the infrastructure of the internet to organise themselves across national borders and language barriers to try and improve their conditions which are little more than high-tech slave labour.

There are some fascinating little lectures on economic theory and globalisation incorporated into the story in a way that doesn’t intrude too much. In fact one of the characters in the book manages to explain basic economics more concisely and better than an economics book could.

I don’t know how accurate the depictions of life in the slums of Dharavi or under the oppressive Chinese regime are, but they feel right and the idea of workers from those countries joining with workers in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and other places having discovered that they have more in common with each other than with other layers of society in their own countries is heartening for an old lefty like me.

As the story progresses the workers in different countries not only forge alliances with each other, but their trade union of workers in virtual industry makes alliances with traditional unions in ‘real’ industries. It points the way to a potential future where the reaction to globalised industry is the globalisation of labour.

I found the whole book extremely thought-provoking, but felt a little disappointed by the lack of a conclusive ending: I really wanted to know what happened to those characters. Maybe I’m old-fashioned that way.

The whole story is based in the area where my sister lives up in Yorkshire, but in a village a lot smaller than the one she lives in. I was picturing somewhere a lot like the one down the road from where we went camping the other year.  It certainly helped me visualise everything.  Anyway, here is what I wrote about it in full:

This is a very clever book which works a lot better than I thought it would. The story is told entirely through the medium of a bundle of letters stolen from a postbox and recovered, along with a covering letter from one policeman to another and a couple of letters from the other policeman at the end.

The point of the book is not really about the postbox theft or who committed the crime, but rather about what the letters reveal about life in a small West Yorkshire village and the people who inhabit it.  In such a small village gossip is rife and so several characters crop up in different letters and also write their own.

The fascination is in seeing the same events described from different perspectives and with different prejudices and the writer has used the format well to wring every last drop of dramatic irony out of those events.

One advantage of the form is that with the changing styles and voices, if you find your interest flagging you know the next chapter is going to bring a change of pace.

Towards the end I was starting to wonder how on Earth the story was going to be resolved, half afriad that there was going to be no satisfying conclusion, so I was delighted to find a proper ending, even if one or two mysteries remain. We never did get to the bottom of the dog poo question for example – although I have my own theory.

Some of the letters seem unfeasibly long, particularly the first covering letter, but then it is fiction so some artistic licence is allowed, and one of the longer letters is an absolute comedy tour de force – the one that describes the charity auction and all its disastrous consequences.  That letter would stand alone as brilliantly funny short story, although then you would miss the extra layers added by subsequent letters – and the clues leading to the final resolution.

By the end I wanted to know more about the eccentric inhabitants of Burley Cross and would happily read a sequel set there, whether in the form of another epistolary novel or a more straightforward story.

If you didn’t agree with the main point it would make it a hard read, but with What the Dog Saw there are 19 different themes so even if a couple don’t float your boat it leaves plenty of reading.  Such is the subjective nature of reading that everyone will like some chapters better than others, and we will probably have different favourites,

I’m not going to wear my typing finger out by going into detail on all 19 chapters, but will just highlight a few to show the range of subject matter.

Some of the topics that looked the least interesting on the contents page turned out to be the ones I enjoyed the most. For example, a chapter on why there are several varieties of mustard but only one tomato ketchup sounded duller than dull but was very illuminating.  I was half expecting something about market forces, or the power of advertising and brand names, but it turned out that there is a very sound and plausible scientific reason for Heinz’s domination in the ketchup market.¹

I found the third chapter particularly interesting because it is all about Nicholas Nassim Taleb.  I read his two best-known books last year, but obviously they were all written from Nassim Taleb’s own point of view.  Here I was getting some of the same theoretical content but wrapped up in what somebody else thought of him.  The New Yorker article was written before the Black Swan book was published, but actually covers the main concept pretty well.  You could almost just read this article and save the trouble of reading The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.  I think I already commented on how those books were about 30% explanation on the theory and 70% score-settling.

A chapter about the inventor of the birth control pill contained some remarkable material.  If I was a woman I would find it very scary indeed.

A chapter on solutions to homelessness was especially relevent to me, given my involement in affordable housing campaigns, and extremely provocative.  It demonstrated how chronic homelessness could be tackled in a way that is cost effective for authorities but would be almost entirely politically unacceptable because the solution looks unfair. Let’s put it this way: the Daily Mail would hate it.

In a couple of chapters in the third section of the book you can see the roots of Blink and Outliers.  I suspect that Gladwell, having wrote the articles, decided they deserved further exploration and expansion and so turned them into books.  I then found myself wondering if any of the other chapters would later turn up as books in their own right.  There are a couple on the nature of intelligence that might merit a book, but then again that has been done already by other people and Gladwell seems to prefer going into new areas than rehashing things everyone else has already covered.

By the way, when I say the nature of intelligence I mean that in the sense of information gathered by the CIA and not in the other sense.

A couple of chapters cover different aspects of Enron.  I am greatly over-simplifying here, but one suggested that the Enron management were not really hiding anything – that everything about their business practices was public but in effect hidden in plain view, the sheer mass of publicly available information and reports just made it too hard for anybody to understand.   The other article seemed to be saying that that Enron’s problem was more an HR one than an accounting problem, stemming from their policy of fast-tracking ‘talent’ and letting them do their own thing.

Another iconoclastic chapter tries to destroy the myth of FBI profilers of serial killers, as seen in Silence of the Lambs.  From the way Gladwell describes it, they are closer to so-called psychics doing cold readings, coming up with profiles that are too vague to really help but can be made to look accurate after the fact.

So, plenty of variety in the book.  I would be amazed if anybody could not find at least one chapter fascinating.  I didn’t agree with all of it, but then a book that challenges your opinions probably does more good than one that just reinforces them.  Ironically, the chapter that gives the book its title is the one found the least interesting.

For a change, this was not one of my Amazon freebies, although I didn’t buy it – this was a Christmas present.  I have now officially caught up with all my Christmas presents – apart from the tiny matter of actually learning to play the ukulele and electric bass…

1. It involves umamu. I just wanted an excuse to use that word