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 …

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By Robert Harris

Yet another Harris book. I’m working my way through them now, like the lava of Vesuvius through the streets of the Bay of Neapolis.

This story is a little different, though. It’s not a mere historical account. Indeed, it’s a story told through the eyes of several people in the four days leading up to the destruction wrought.

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By Robert Harris

Something of a surprise for me, since I’d never heard of it before. I had been hunting Harris’s first work of fiction, Fatherland, on eBay when I came upon an excellent offer: That book (used) + three others by the same author (new) for, I think, a starting bid of £2 plus postage.

I watched the item over the course of a few days, amazed that no-one had made a bid on it. It came down to the last couple of minutes still untouched, so I bid the minimum and snapped myself up a bargain.

One of my work colleagues asked me what I’d been reading lately, and I mentioned Fatherland. She asked me whether I’d tried Archangel yet. I hadn’t, she suggested I might like to read it sooner than later. I followed her advice.

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By Robert Harris

If ever a film sold a book, this would be it for me. The most obvious counterfactual to people from the western world, I would think, is to imagine the global landscape had Hitler emerged from the ruins of WW2 victorious.

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