Well, of course it isn’t, but it may as well be.

I’ve just realised that I have read about a dozen books since I last updated my blog.  That’s a lot of writing to do if I’m going to comment on them all.

And that’s where this title comes from.  It seems that I find reading pretty easy.  One of the books that I read goes over 500 pages, yet it was polished off in about three days.

Yet I’ll be damned if I can write about all these books.  It seems to me that I don’t have time.  The illusion is that reading seems to be less consumptive of my time than writing about the books would be.  Utter trash, of course, but that’s how it feels.

To get around the problem, I thought I’d write about the books in a single post, add a comment, and that could be it.

I’ll write about them in order of preference, seeing as it would be unfortunate to put potential readers off by inflicting on them a line on the dull book that is Waterloo, by Andrew Uffindell and Michael Corum.

So, here I, eventually, go …

The Fist Of God by Frederick Forsyth 

The usual high standard. This one stands out because it’s the first Forsyth book I’ve read where I lived through the backstory.

It’s set at the start of the 1990s, with the murder of a scientist, who was working on a supergun for Iraq. The story deals with the Gulf War, the precursor to that being waged now.

I shan’t spoil the book (read: I don’t want to type a lot!), but this, of course, takes a while to get to the point, woven from several seemingly disparate threads.

It was the longest of the books that I’ve read lately, but also the best, and by several degrees of magnitude.

The Adventure Of English by Melvyn Bragg

A book of two halves.

No matter how many books I get on the subject, I love reading about the arrival of the Jutes and Saxons, creation of Alfred’s Englalond, split of the country with the Danes.

Our language has changed so much in a mere thousand years as to be unrecognisable to the untrained eye, and yet it’s not.

Bragg details the adventures of our language over its lifetime. How it was originally the language of invaders, became the dominant tongue as these islands’ original inhabitants were suppressed to Wales and Ireland, survived the arrival of the Danes and Normans, and became the lingua franca of the twenty-first century.

He details with good humour English’s survival mechanism, its immense capacity to absorb, and I found this book to be a great read, having originally dabbled with the audiobook.

I lose my interest somewhat as we move towards the modern era, and I don’t need to read about eighteenth century prescriptivists, whether a patois is still English, or any of the more tedious things.

Our language has matured into a strong, dominant adult, but, as with people, the intrigue and the fun lies in its infancy.

A good book, well worth a read, and probably even easier on the brain than Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue.

Enigma by Robert Harris

Another book from Harris, and the last of the three that accompanied my purchase of Fatherland a few moons ago, which has shown itself to be an inspired purchase.

The story is set during the war, the protagonist being a strange Cambridge don who arrives at King’s amidst secrecy, which he does nothing to lessen by virtue of his preference for isolation.

We find out that he was originally a code-breaker from Bletchley Park. Indeed, he’s the whizz who cracked the Germans’ Enigma code Shark.

The story sees him having fallen in love with a fellow worker, a lady who gets around, as it transpires, and who disappears shortly after our man Jericho finds some stolen code under her floorboards.

I was particularly pleased to see Jericho and this lady’s infatuated housemate pay an overnight visit to Bletchley’s little brother, Beaumanor Hall in Leicestershire, a place I once visited on a school trip.

In the vein of Forsyth, Harris always throws a surprising curveball in at the end, and he didn’t disappoint here.

I enjoyed reading the book. In spite of my wondering where the story was going (since the code-breaking itself was incidental), it flowed from chapter to chapter with the minimum of effort.

Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes & How To Correct Them by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich

No, I’m not money hungry, nor even interested in reading a self-help guide to getting rich. The subtitle to this book should bring to light my interest in it: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics.

My PhD supervisor does all his work in this field, so I thought it prudent to familiarise myself with it. It’s a relatively new part of the spectrum of economics, merging with psychology, and aiming to explain why people make the choices that they do.

That may sound daunting, but I promise you that it’s not. There’s no academic stuff at all. You’ll find a mention of some finding, and then a link that shows you how such and such manifests itself in the real world. In the case of this book, the examples are such things as people continually repairing a poor-quality car, their actions dictated by the psychological hold of already having spent so much on it, the so-called “Sunk Cost Fallacy”.

This book serves its purpose well, being written accessibly and light heartedly, not at all dissimilar to the best-selling Freakonomics that followed it, itself using the magic formula of having a journalist (excellent writing skills) and an academic (profound knowledge of the subject) team together to produce a book that stands as something that could be read during a coffee break.

Good stuff, and only a little over a day needed to put it to bed.

God’s Spy by Juan Gómez-Jurado

A new book, set in the aftermath of the death of Pope John Paul II.

The 115 cardinals who decide on who will succeed him are soon to meet and vote. However, there are two ghastly murders in the Vatican.

The book intersperses each contemporary chapter with flashbacks to a US centre for reforming priests who lead themselves astray from their correct path. In doing so, this book has a novel feature: We know who the killer is; we know his name, his history, his motivations.

What we don’t know is who this chap is in relation to the story, since he’s going by a different name. We only know that he somehow has managed to infiltrate the Vatican.

Our hero is an Italian journalist, who teams up with an American priest who, it later emerges, is not all that he seems, having some history with the CIA.

I found the book fairly reasonable. It’s reviewed elsewhere as some great thriller. I never bought into it so much, but that could possible be because I was stuck in a reading blitz and this book was following on from the excellent books mentioned above, in comparison to which otherwise good books would lose their lustre.

And now for the books that I didn’t like so much.

Warfare In The Age Of Bonaparte by Micheal Glover

I obviously come up short here because of my lack of interest in the details.

It’s not too different to how people with a small interest in foreign languages would maybe take a peek at books like David Crystal’s Encyclopedia Of Language but not be able to invest themselves in every page like I did.

I wouldn’t say that this was a bad book at all, and afficionados of the Peninsular War would undoubtedly get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Unfortunately for me, I’m not particularly interested at all in who wore what. I’m quite happy to know that that jabroni King Joseph of Spain lost all his treasure at Vitoria, the French were routed at the siege of Badajoz, they were starved to near-death when Wellington launched a scorched-earth retreat policy and then unleashed his Lines of Torres Vedres, Napoleon was originally beaten at Toulouse having abdicated before news could reach him, and was finally put down for good in Belgium at Waterloo, 1815.

I was hoping to find out a little more about Napoleon. For instance, it’s always struck me as strange that the French would revolt against the principle of monarchy, chop off the heads of the entire aristocracy, and then replace their king with an Emperor. It doesn’t add up, and I wanted to find out exactly how those people could change from their hostility to rule from above to being willing to die for an authoritarian.

I didn’t get any of that.

There were mentions of previous battles (Marengo, Austerlitz) but I’m pretty sure the author assumed that the reader already knew of the details, because I’m still not exactly sure what happened at either of those battles, nor even where they occurred. Well, obviously at places called Marengo and Austerlitz, but they could be in Australia for all I know.

Waterloo by Andrew Uffindell and Michael Corum

Ah man, I really came up short with this one.

It’s quite obviously meant to be sold to people who are visiting the site, seeing as every chapter commences with directions from the site of the last chapter to the location of the current.

The writing on the battle was very dry. What this book did have going for it were some interesting photos, including one which depicted a certain street during the days of the battle (as sketched by a soldier), some years after (when the area became popular with tourists), and during the twentieth century, where the historical serenity of the site is undermined by the presence of a large Coca Cola advert on the wall.

Not enjoyable to me at all, really

That’s the lot for now.

There were another five books that I read and enjoyed, but they’re going to be a separate blog entry, since they’re all part of a series called Pitkin Guides, and I wanted to draw attention to the whole thing, which I find fantastic value for money.

I read some other books as well, but I’m hoping to flesh them out as lengthier blog entries that encompass a lot more than a mere review, much the same as the approach I took on my post about
Language Death. Fingers crossed that I don’t get spammed to death again this time

Tags: Frederick Forsyth, Robert Harris

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