What I've been reading

The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad

narrated by David Horovitch

"Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong."

Another from my list of 'classics', this was very evocative of the period - horses, gas lamps and the like. And anarchists, whom I've never understood but seem to crop up so often in these stories. Atmospheric, as I've said, but rather dispiriting as the three main characters all die, and all the other people are rather unpleasant.

The Rotters' Club
by Jonathan Coe

narrated by Colin Buchanan

"Birmingham, England, 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school."

The book mainly follows four schoolboys and is set just a couple of years before I was their age, and I was in suburban London rather than urban Birmingham. And I definitely didn't follow the politics of the age and was blissfully unaware of any industrial action going on. My political awareness was born with the election of Mrs Thatcher, but didn't grow and mature very fast. This book was recommended by a male friend who I think related much more closely to the narrative than I did.

The Dark Forest
by Cixin Liu

"Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion - four centuries in the future. The aliens' human collaborators have been defeated but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret."

This is the second of a Chinese science fiction trilogy lent to me by a friend (the same one who recommended The Rotters' Club), and if it were not for that and the fact that I struggle to leave a book unfinished I would have stopped after the first book and definitely halfway through the second. It has really held up my reading progress - my 'waiting to be read' shelf is growing faster than ever. Then it suddenly became interesting for the last hundred pages, and now I'm not sure what to do about the third book, which is even longer than the first two. If only the author had combined all the interesting bits into just one book, it would have been a really good one.

The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien

narrated by Jim Norton

"Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures where he is introduced to 'Atomic Theory' and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but 'sausage-shaped.'"

It cannot be denied that this is a very strange book. The narration was pitch perfect and the whole was enlivened no end by the Irish accent - I particularly enjoyed the pronunciation of 'bicycle', and there were plenty of instances of that word cropping up. I would never have read this had it not been for the list of 'classic books' I'm working through, and on the whole I'm glad I did. I still don't have a clue how to describe it, though. A man with one leg looking for a money box ends up condemned to death in a police station and is saved by a bicycle.

Eat Up! Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
by Ruby Tandoh

"Filled with straight-talking, sympathetic advice on everything from mental health to recipe ideas and shopping tips, this is a book that clears away the fog, to help you fall back in love with food."

A foodie book about how we eat today that is refreshingly free from preaching or agendas, and even contains a few interesting recipes that I'll probably try. Easy to read too. The author was a contestant on the Great British Bake Off a few years back, has a girlfriend and a tendency towards disordered eating, and draws on all these experiences to make her points about food in the UK in this era. And I tend to agree with her, which is always a bonus.