The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley

I don't usually like poems, but this reads like a story. I like it.

There is also a neat style worth mentioning. Notley uses quotation marks to separate poetic feet, meaning that every few words you get an enclosure in quotation marks, and there are no words free of these marks. So you get a barrage of quotation marks. And indeed, each break between quote-wrapped feet does make you pause, creating a rhythm that the author says is "intended."

Good for her. I'd add that there's an effect of quotation marks that she doesn't mention... that of creating a sense of irony.

Les Trois Mousquetaires, Alexandre Dumas

Nice, though not as good as Monte Cristo.

The Singing Sword, Jack Whyte

Sequel to The Skystone. Less historically interesting, and more plain fantasy sword-swiping and maiden/matron-groping.

The Skystone, Jack Whyte

Great idea, and well-delivered on the whole, if some details in execution are a little irritating.

Best thing about this book is how it makes you go, "Hey, so what else can I learn about how the Romans got booted out of England?"

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

Mind-numbing catalogs of whale types and sailing activities, descriptions of whale anatomy in overly-romantic terms. There is only a single meeting of the hero and the monster, and that is at the end; makes you miss the old "two unsuccessful encounters before final triumph" story. The actual story is stark.

Yet: this starkness is a testament to overwhelming narrative willpower, and that is impressive. Plus there are so many crazy little bits that I can't help liking it. Watch:

Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Ravage, René Barjavel

I initially thought this was like the French brave New World, but what an appetite for destruction. The author is a masochist. Given how cheerily it begins, the amount of disaster is continuously jolting.

Coders at Work, Peter Siebel

Great idea. Real easy read. Makes me realize that I should become and remain unalterably confused about the work I do every day.

Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

Plotted in two dimensions, hero's power over time, many good books start high, say seven, drop quickly to one and remain there until near the end, when they rise to ten. That return feels amazing.

Monte Cristo is simpler: starting at ordinary five, we glimpse six then drop to one and stay there only a short time before heaving up massively to ten and remaining there for the last three quarters of the story. That long stay at ten feels mind-blowing.

What I like is how it's tempered. Unlike Frye's The Stars' Tennis Balls, a nominal God drives and justifies revenge, and the milieu validates it. Consequently, the punishment is not dementia. More simply, it's fun to watch the star Monte Cristo build up all the little pieces that will eventually act in concert to cause his enemies' overthrow, in many cases the enemy forced to hammer in the final nail himself.

The Stars' Tennis Balls, Stephen Fry

Dementedly good, but demented.

Le Retrait, Frédéric Moitel

When it starts, it feels anchored in something, as if the words were a continuation of what you were living, even though you've never heard those words before. There's that precision to it all the way through, which is guiding although it takes you through alien thoughts, alien houses and alien sex.

That precision gives the book a stunning beauty, in its form and in its narrative. It is depressing, yes, often maddening, but it is something you can look at for a long time.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson, tr. Reg Keeland

Very good.

The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson, tr. Reg Keeland

Very good.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, tr. Reg Keeland

Very good.

The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon

This book is hard. But it is better than any of the books below.

The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker

This took me a really long time to read (see below), because it often gets into this subtlety thing that I just didn't feel like unraveling.

What I did unravel is that some of us have been taught to feel guilty for Western society's achievements, and that perhaps even more of us has gotten used to thinking that reason is the only human faculty worth mentioning. It is therefore stimulating to think that what defines a human being is not just reason, but other faculties and idiosyncrasies that exploration of which may lead to more targeted invention, or more striking art.

Let's not forget that Pinker's a pretty funny guy, and writes very approachably. But he takes on problems of large magnitude: what happens when individual instinct goes up against a carefully constructed community convention? The Language Instinct was more fun than this, and in Blank Slate, it's surprising how much subtle argument goes into a conclusion that Pinker himself admits is self-evident. The book is an academic navigation, a very careful one, and appreciable for the quality of its thought and writing, not for its pull.

Hide and Seek, Ian Rankin

Very nice: captivating but a tad repulsive, so discourages all-nighters.

You know how detective novels are all about some macho guy into whose lap multitudes of chicks and the solution to the mystery helplessly swoon? In this one, the main character is not assigned to the case, is mean to subordinates, bad at lovemaking and although he figures out the case is unable to make the arrest. The broken cliches are nice.

Unnatural Causes, P.D. James

Good read. End is a bit artificial.

You know how detective novels are all about some macho guy into whose lap multitudes of chicks and the solution to the mystery helplessly swoon? In this one, the main character is not assigned to the case, and all but the ugly girls flee him, but he still solves the mystery without effort. The partly-broken cliches are nice.

The Runaway Jury, John Grisham

A Grisham. My first. Exciting, solid, fast.

Le Royaume de la paix, Frédéric Moitel

This was hard to read, since it was rather intensely intellectual, deeply probing of human participation in urban society, exhaustive, cataloguing and of course archetypal. It gives little for the reader to hang on to. Intentionally.

But there are good bits. I like the repetition. I like how he says things like il a le temps ou non d’observer les boutiques qui se succèdent et s’illuminent or il y a la personnalité qui développe ou non des affinités or my favourite: Les fantasmes et les souhaits de rencontres furtives pendant les vacances au soleil ou non apparaissent et occupent durablement les cerveaux ébranlés des hommes et des femmes célibataires ou non, homosexuels ou hétérosexuels, à plusieurs dans une chambre où ils transpirent en jouissant ou pas.

This is really, really hard to read. And I don't feel I did it any justice given the little effort I put in. But it's very, very tight, it's lyrical, it's possessed, it's right.

Harry Potter et les reliques de la mort, Jean-Francois Ménard

Two things distinguished this one from the other potter books: no school year structured the narrative, which suffered, and the story actually ended. I found the part just before the end, the penultimate part, very tense. But the ending was a fight, and Rowling simply can't do fights, and it was, as always, a letdown.

Nice to have things wrapped up for these slightly-more-than-usually-touching characters, but the narrative is not memorable.

Next, Michael Crichton

Interesting to read this while reading Pinker's Blank Slate: many of the arguments are similar. An attempt to find a center between the absolutely against and absolutely liberal on genetic manipulation.

The stories are what I suppose is classic Crichton: hard to put down.

L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être, Milan Kundera

Easy to read. Gripping story, light but firm. Beautiful form and thought.

Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore

I liked the part where he says that this book is not really inventing any new marketing principles, but it is presenting them in a way that high-tech entrepreneurs--typically engineers--can understand them. That's how it feels. It feels like vague, hand-wavy marketing practices are being converted into equations.

I also like when he tells stories about real companies. One could compose an entertaining book just by compiling analyses, in hindsight, of all the failures and succcesses over the last decade of the high-tech industry. I wish Moore had done more of this; but his objective is pedagogy, not entertainment.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey A. Moore

This is the first time I've read a business book, and it went well.

Geoffrey is satisfactory with anecdotes, decent with humour. Most parts of this book are a good read in the way the front page of the economy section is a good read. If there is any discomfort in the style, it is the huge number of typos and linguistic errors in my copy. While I don't find typos and errors significantly distracting, their density in this book at least somewhat checks its humour. I suppose it's like the phenomenon of someone stumbling over a joke.

As for its theses, it's certainly opened my eyes to business in general. Techie that I am, I am grateful to have spent just the short time it takes to read this book, for the number of puzzling marketing and behavioural questions on which it sheds light.

Liasons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos

The other book I know that is written in correspondence, La Nouvelle Heloïse, sometimes gets awkward. There's this one scene in LNH where the hero is writing, in a letter, that someone is opening the door to his hiding place in his lover's bedroom, and so he has to end the letter, and escape. One feels that if the author wanted to narrate such moments of suspense, then he should not have chosen letters as his medium.

LD, on the contrary, is always believable. That is, the action is such that the authors of the letters always have an obvious motivation to write letters. Through this, and other aspects, the book solidly reassured me of its structure.

Other than that, the story is engaging, often exciting, and it is a good read upon which to pass several multi-hour sessions.

Trois jours chez ma mère - François Weyergans

Structurally fascinating, contentually mind-numbing.

Ocalone w Tłumaczeniu, Stanisław Barańczak

The title, in my translation, is Completed in Translation.

I have lots to say about this, but only time to write some bullet points.

• Robert Frost poem: striking translation.

• If I had to pick an example to post here, it would be the e. e. cummings.

• Not only are the translations good, but it makes poetry interesting.

A Son of the Circus, John Irving

I was disappointed that this was not a murder mystery. It starts out like one, but then, way before the end, Irving reveals the whole secret. From then on you're just watching the inevitable tying up of all the various narratives.

Too bad. I had once started this book, but I had stopped before the part where you realise it's not a murder mystery. Thus I actually read that beginning part twice. I had really been hoping tha Irving would put his considerable powers towards the very crafty plot needed to obscure and then reveal an assassin. He did not; it's just another Irving.

Harry Potter et le Prince de sang-mêlé, J.K. Rowling, tr. Jean-François Ménard.

Yet another book that is strangely addictive despite not being that good. In trying to resolve this puzzle, I've got a lot to say about it.

There were many technical things that this book made me consider. Rowling is definitely avoiding many existing formulas for this kind of narrative, and she's doing it admirably. For example, Harry is not a great sorcerer, nor really great at anything supernatural except flying on a broom. He's just courageous, really. In a book set in a supernatural world, we could forgive Rowling for making the hero supernaturally powerful. But he's average and just tries hard. So, Rowling is taking a harder road. Throughout this, her complex structure stays intact.

This structure is another thing. I'm satisfied that every piece that Rowling introduced throughout the series has fallen into place. Harry's ability to speak to snakes was introduced very early, but it has found a consistent explanation; some other details about Sirius that I've now forgotten were also tightly integrated; and generally Rowling resolves all details that she raises, no matter how long ago in the series. This is impressive considering the number of years she's been writing the series. And reading a book that does this well is rewarding, in the way laughing at a sitcom is rewarding.

What disappoints me about this sixth book is how few details are left to resolve. I'm worried that the last book will be nothing but a long, tedious battle between hero and villain, and Rowling sucks hard at battles. I don't know what's wrong with her, but it's like whenever she narrates action, she tries to describe every little detail separately. She never takes advantage of the spontaneity or the poetry of action. She's strong when she sticks to her mathematical unknotting of the structure she's set up, and that's what I'm afraid will be lacking in the seventh novel.

What's left to resolve? Why do I want to read the last book? It's not to learn if Harry wins; he will win, by definition. I suppose I'd like to find out anything else about Voldemort, like where his evil really comes from. And I'd like to know what side Rogue (Snape, in English) is really on, and by extension what Dumbledore's plan has been all this time.

This is the only way the last book can be interesting: if it's all a long, slow revelation of Dumbledore's somehow eternal and all-encompassing plan. If it resorts to cheap lightning bolts shot from magic wands, I'm going to feel like all these previous weeks invested in reading this series have been wasted.

The Cider House Rules, John Irving

What surprised me was how easy John is on us. Several times, just as the jaws of narrative are about to clamp down hard on our favourite characters, he rescues us from tragedy. I continually felt that I was on the verge of disaster, when he would circumvent it by such devices as the villain announcing that she was no longer interested in revenge, or by a key confession arriving early, while we expect it to remain as a point of tension until the end of the story.

But, I'm just thinking: it reminds me of Dickens' style, the works of whom feature so prominently in this book. John must have intentionally planned these plot rescues, these "happy twists" that simply end a sub-narrative before it has a chance to get ahead of him. Remarkably, these moments, which should upset the rhythm, never deprive the story of an ounce of its powerful engagement.

I'm not saying that I felt "happy twists" in Dickens, though; rather, Dickens' abrupt halts to sub-narratives feel like unfulfilled forays. John does it WAY better. I wonder if all this, mentioning Dickens so much, then doing better, then mentioning Dickens again, is intentional?

L'oeuvre au noir, Marguerite Yourcenar

A bitch to get into, and a pain throughout, unread it would have left me in shame.

Its redeeming quality is Yourcenar's apparent superpower. I cannot imagine how or why a being would take on such projects. It's because I admire this book that I enjoy it. It has an insistently bleak aesthetic, and its structure, as far as I can tell, is at best elusive. How can anyone consistently write this? Yet she writes perfectly.

Those are my thoughts on the form. My thoughts on the theme are as follows: one of the things that I find alternatively annoying and reassuring about Yourcenar is that she takes on some of the worst human fears, and poetically renders them natural and befitting our cycles of existence. Any horror you can think of, on a scale from personal to worldwide, Yourcenar can balance against other human traits until she convinces you that it is nothing but a barely existing neutrality. Her resigned way of writing about carnal pleasure in the same vein as about genocide is simple comforting.

My thoughts on the content? I don't think much of it. I don't get the feeling that the story is the most important part of this narrative.

Complete works, vol.1, Harold Pinter

Each violent, familiar story is a metamorphosis. Subtle, but grating when read in sequence. Makes me curious about Ovid.

This volume includes The Birthday Party, The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, A Night Out, and stories "The Black and White, and "The Examination".

I am certain that The Dumb Waiter, which I have read before, is the basis for most of Tarantino's films, especially Reservoir Dogs.

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene

Pretty good. Tells a crazy story in a low-key style. I'd read more Greene.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

Very easy to read, very rewarding, very enlightening.

I really can't fit Bryson's argument into any popular topics that abound today. He seems to go beyond many of them, though never arrogantly; just out of pure curiosity. And because of this curiosity, he manages to ask a much more pertinent question of humanity than any media, government or international organisation is currently screaming about.

I'm also impressed at the amount of work Bryson did to write this, all the more impressive in that he doesn't come across as hard-working.

Age of Reason, Thomas Payne

For a work titled "Age of Reason", I was somewhat disappointed at how much spleen it showed. Payne's tone made me expect one of those rock-solid philosophical treatises that edifies an impenetrable structure out of pure logic. I'm not sure if I can remember the books I am talking about, but they turn up every once in a while in philosophy, or math, or in a newspaper column, and we all recognise them by their comforting foundation and incontrovertible attention to detail. While Payne starts out this way, he does not follow up, and it's too bad, because his topic merits the care.

I will give one example of a disappointing premise. Near the end of the work, Payne declares that "[The religion of Deism] must have been the first, and will probably be the last, that man believes." By Deism, Payne means the belief in a single god, whose only manifestation to human beings is the world in which we live: no scripture, no apparitions, no communion, or so on. It certainly sounds reasonable to state that this type of religion "must have been the first" that man believed, but the point is very debatable. Personally, I doubt it, and I doubt it because of the excellent and precise survey of religions published by James Fraser in The Golden Bough, which establishes that all humans throughout evolution have tended to supernatural beliefs before settling on the natural. Besides which, Fraser found that humans more naturally believed in a multiplicity of anthropomorphic gods than in a single superhuman entity. Isn't it easier to think that "people like us" are causing thunderstorms than in thinking that simple physical principles guide the particles that produce all phenomena we experience?

Whatever the truth, I find Payne's failure to treat certain such obvious questions as a weakness considering the argument he put forth.

Nevertheless, there is a good deal of the edifying in here. For example, and for this I am truly grateful, this is the first time I have ever seen anyone clearly question and examine what the Bible really is. Never before have I heard anyone trace the claims about the Bible to their logical sources. Payne defines the boundary we have if we want to consider the Bible logically. Besides which, he is the first I've ever read to show that "revelation", that is, the communication of god to man, is entirely unremarkable, because as soon as it is written down, or spoken out loud, it becomes hearsay.

Needless to say, the argument bodes poorly for the Bible. I am very curious how the churches have responded to these observations.

So in the end, I like this text for the very basic, fundamental questions it poses, questions so fundamental that I'm ashamed not to have thought of them. I also like the fun literary exercise that it goes through of undermining the Bible's authority by using only the Bible text. On that note, I think my recommendation is pretty obvious: don't read, unless you're into secular Bible theory.

Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, tr. James Strachey

This is good. I read it very slowly over a year, and I started to pay more attention to my dreams because of it.

As a scientific work, it's pretty rigorous. Although there are numerous parts where I felt that Freud was not addressing some obvious objections, most of his theory is a hundred times more solid than people seem to give him credit for. I get the feeling that people generally expect Freud's dream theory to explain up front the content of any possible dream. But it's not that: instead, he meticulously examines what the limits of our knowledge of dream, given of course that we can never record them nor ever really be sure what anyone actually dreamt. He establishes the limits of what we can know, and then without trespassing these limits he argues his hypothesis.

While it remains a theory, and one that demonstrates a few faults, it's still the only theory I've ever heard about dreams that reaches this level of completeness. So, until I find a better theory, this one has a lot of potential.

Is this a good read? The first chapter is super boring. Then, it gets much, much better. I would almost recommend skipping section one, or just skimming through it, or maybe reading it last if you feel interested.

The Endurance, Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, Caroline Alexander

Although it is somewhat immoral to read a book the title of which is subtly intended to inspire my wife to stay extra unpaid hours at work, I enjoyed this.

It traces the voyage of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton, in his failure to complete his most famous expedition, and the miraculous endurance that he and his crew had to suffer as a result of that failure. The conditions of navigation and trekking in the antarctic are spectacular, and while the word "chilling" is appropriate literally, here it is its figurative sense that is the more haunting.

The book has two main parts: in the first, the narrative of life on the ice is slow, and the categoric descriptions of all the men involved often ponderous, but it is rescued by the mountains of stunning photographs of Frank Hurley, taken with the professional aim of paying for the expedition; in the second part, with camera equipment no longer available, the story itself, which describes why the camera equipment is no longer available, is incredible. Which, in sum, means that this is a good book.

The Endurance was a year-end gift to all employees in my wife's company, and I am seriously convinced that its point was to alleviate the guilt of the management for keeping everyone late hours at work.

Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, tr. Jeremiah Curtin

First of all, I didn't want to start this book at all. It looked boring.

My first impression reminded me of War and Peace. It begins with a discussion that all of a sudden, with one sentence, launches an epic story. But as the first few chapters unfolded, I saw that the epicness was not quite as big as Tolstoy's.

And then, the appearance of pious Christian characters professing their faith bade even more boringness.

But later on, I realised there was a great deal of audacity in setting a historical novel in the midst of a history that is covered by the Bible. Unlike a "life of Jesus" book, or movie, Quo Vadis is an imagination of what the characters surrounding Jesus were doing, and especially what they did after he died. So it must stick to facts that are covered by the Bible, but it must fill in the parts that are not covered. I think that's an admirable risk for a writer. I suppose an historical novelist always takes this risk--the fact that he or she must meet "checkpoints" that are verifiable in textbooks--but with all the cultural weight that the Bible carries, basing a history on it is just that little bit harder.

Finally, I appreciated that, although Christianity is unoriginally presented as triumphant in the end, the book allows very blunt debate between Christians and atheists. The principal atheist who converts to Christianity for example, backslides several times, even forgetting himself and killing a bunch of random people just to save a favourite. Doubts about the priopriety and potential of Christianity are carried through until the very end.

And finally, the story turns out very rich, the details original, and the read attractive.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Third time.

While I read it, I was hyped as hell. Now I'm depressed like a betaphenethylamine comedown. And I think it's because of Molly. I think she was in love with Case, but couldn't admit it. I've got quotes to prove it.

So it's funny: the first two times I read it, I was spatially disoriented; I didn't know what was going on. Honestly--some passages I read this time recalled images in my memory from the previous reading, and the old images were completely wrong. I had this one picture of Case watching the ninja from the top of a narrow tunnel, maybe over a TV screen, when really they were both standing beside a pool. I think it's fascinating how Gibson whips you around in space; how if you're not careful you can have no idea where the characters are standing.

But I don't want to analyse; I want to transmit. It's a hyped book, ruthless, sensitive, like Molly. And I like Molly, and she's gone, and that's tragic.

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

After being forced through Handmaid's Tale in highschool, I vowed: "No more Atwood."

But this was good. The greatest improvement over Handmaid is the lack of preaching. It's funny (as in humour), a fast read, conscious of the present, imaginative of the future.

The best though, was its ambiguity. Ie., what happened? Who loved whom? What happens after it ends? Who did what, exactly? Structurally, I have the impression that this book leaves multiple possibilities open at numerous points of the narrative. I feel like I could pick a spot in the middle and read a whole different book depending on how I interpreted the text.

In literature courses, we actively search for these points, and put great effort into uncovering ambiguity and non-intuitive possibilities, but the unique feature of Oryx and Crake is that these possibilities are unavoidable.

And yet... we never feel let down that the author is hiding something. No, rather, she seems to intentionally "paint herself into corners" where she is obviously no longer able to explain what is going on, and therefore we must do so.

So where Handmaid was patronising, this rough vision is pleasantly Socratic.

Pélagie-la-Charette, Antonine Maillet

This is my second reading, this time in French to see what the big deal was. They do use a lot of funny expressions and grammar like "J'allons au noroît" ("Nous allons au nord-ouest.").

It made me want to cry again, so epic it gets at some points. Twice, I think, there's things that are very touching, because you realise they're true and they're enormous.

It also made me think how my education confounded the Acadians with the Quebecois; how all I was told came from maybe a single page of a textbook.

Oh, and it also struck me structurally: especially when the author's own ancestor appears in one of the characters' tales. I can't stop thinking of the people as characters, but on a parallel plane they were real people. I still can't get my head around it: usually books either talk about historical figures, or about fictional characters, and the situation is clear. Here, no; they're both.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

I suppose I would sound smarter if I hadn't read Pico Ayer's afterword before writing down my thoughts, but what he says is spot on: this book is timeless.

I was sitting there trying to figure out what the story was, and I realised that the story is simply that of a bad government, or even more generally: destiny. The people whom the bad forces harm as they go along don't really suffer any discernible narrative progress. Other than learning how to live with calamity.

That, of course, makes it sound much more depressing than it really is; its fine balance comes from how much happiness the book is able to bring you amidst a sorrow that seems insurmountable.

It's just brilliant. The writing feels as natural as if the author was just making light, regular breaths, and they were floating down and lying on the page as sentences. And yet, this effortless, instinctive activity results in a remarkably structured and profound text. But then, hey, breathing is profound.

One flaw, I felt, was the Anna-Karenina-ending. That single instant wasn't as richly motivated for me as the rest of the events in the novel. It serves to highlight, though, that all the events, all the decisions and reactions of the characters, are explored through a crystalline myriad--tragic, comic, everything--of facets. It really does make you feel like you are living these people's lives.

Harry Potter et l'ordre du phénix, J.K. Rowling, tr. Jean-François Ménard.

This is the first Harry Potter book that did not give me the "Tetris-effect". Although the story is still fairly captivating, something is missing, something which made me unable to get rid of any of the first four books from my mind. I do not know what this missing element is; my going hypothesis is that as the kids have aged, I no longer feel any protective parental instinct towards them?

Based on that theory, the attraction of the previous books was that they engaged my protective parental instincts. I wonder if anyone else has felt this.

Again, a decent read, though fairly disappointing action scenes, where one feels that the resolutions of certain tensions are cheap. I think I can now wait patiently until the series is finished before I continue to the next one.

Watermark, MA Creative Writing Bath Spa University College 2004, Pridy, R., ed.

This is a collection of short stories and excerpts from the Bath Spa MA in creative writing, which my buddy Dan did.

There is some really good stuff in here. Some of it is just brilliant. Some of it is crap. My attention was drawn to one of the critics' comments printed on the cover: "there is no house style, no School of Newton Park", referring to the fact that everyone writes in their individual style. This is an interesting thing to look for in a collection from a creative writing programme: I generally agree with the guy. There is a story that's insanely funny; another one ominously troubling, and a few other interesting pieces in between.

Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry, Isabel Rivers

Although this is a textbook and, as such, not necessarily the most attractive casual reading, once into it I found that it gave me the most incredible ideas. For creative writing, I mean. I'm talking about ideas that are hardly possible to bring about. They all had to do with writing on four- or five-fold exegeticable structures, or exploring the relationship between classical and modern religion.

This is an interesting book because of its surveying quality of thought in both classical and medieval times. As such, it opens up vast complexes of ideas.

Harry Potter et La Coupe de Feu, J.K. Rowling, tr. Jean-François Ménard

As addictive as ever. The "darker" edge of this one made me more uneasy when I finished it. But my main reaction is how goddam invasive these books are. It's not even impossible to put down; it's impossible not to keep thinking about it even after you have put it down. I don't know what it is... it's not like it's even the best story I've ever heard; it's pretty mediocre that way. What could it be that gets Harry so inside my head, dammit! (Note the lack of question mark.)

An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears

Historically-set murder mystery. Mystical ending. A rare structure: four manuscripts tell the same story, in sequence, from four different angles. Only the last writer has access to all the other manuscripts. And thus the exciting and unexpected truth is hidden from us until the very end.

The trouble is that it takes a great deal of pain to read through the first three manuscripts. It's as if the author's heart wasn't really in them, but he knew he had to write them to fulfill form. A gruelling read; somewhat rewarding at the end. Some of the historical details (English renaissance) are interesting.

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

Nice Work, David Lodge

A ripping good tale. Great story, adulterous sex, titillating comedy, and with some fun philosophical questions to boot.

Microserfs, Douglas Copland

This was a fad and important.

The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay

Good yarn.

The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton

Jurassic Park, Michael Chrichton

Legion, William Peter Blaty

The Exorcist, William Peter Blaty

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

I'm not sure if I liked this. I think it seemed quaint and forced, simplistic, childish.

The ideas in it make me curious, make me think I should maybe read it again. But the impressions I got from the first time are discouraging.

Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut

I did a project comparing this to The Diviners, and one thing I remember emphasising was how the timeline in Hocus Pocus straddles both the near past and the near future. It starts some 20 years before the book was written, and ends some 20 years after. I thought that was a mark of the author's confidence.

I think it was quite good, though I don't remember what it was about, and its memory makes me want to read more Vonneguts.

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, Anne McCaffrey

I think this was the second time I read this, but not because I especially liked it. I remember the whole Pern series as being pretty good, though slightly vacant.

The Diviners, Margaret Laurence

I remember doing my homework about this book and finding an article that listed this book's first sentence as among the top first sentences of all time. It starts: "The river flowed both ways." And I think it continues with the same force.

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone

As far as I remember, this must have been pretty good. Since reading it I have always felt an emotional attachment for Michaelangelo.

Fifth Business, Robertson Davies

Thick and chocolatey.

Friday, Robert A. Heinlein

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

I remember thinking that the author must have calculated the thickness of the final chapter in order not to give away the book's ending.

Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson

I don't remember this much, although I remember eagerly awaiting it. Something about art theft, I think. Pretty good.

The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

This is probably the only historical science fiction novel I have read (as of 2005), and I still find it an extremely novel idea. Stunning, really. Wish I had thought of it.

Count Zero, William Gibson

I don't remember this. Is it the one with the bridge? I probably liked it a lot.

Neuromance, Gibson

Second time.

I found it hard. Good, but hard. Still didn't get what happened exactly.

Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott

Dune, Frank Herbert

This was good, as I recall. Very alien, but very familiar science fiction.

The Mark of Conte, Sonia Levitin

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend

Yucky.

Dracula, Bram Stoker

The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul, Douglas Adams

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

Definitely not as inspired as The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I remember a murder investigation in which the crime scene featured an impossible murder; I believe a man's head was found spinning on a record player in a room to which all access between the murder and its discovery had been impossible. This reminds me of Legion, by William Blaty.

The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

I was proud of myself after finishing this. I was at a Catholic school, and we had Bibles, and I remember comparing the hefty sizes of both books and telling people "I've read a book bigger than the Bible."

(They didn't care.)

What can I say about a book I read 15 years ago and of which a hugely popular movie was recently seen by every person in the world? I can't trust my own memory. I think I liked it quite a bit. I remember building sandcastles representing the various cities in the book. I liked the whole logical geography of the whole thing.

I also remember that my dad thought the book was way too big to handle comfortably, so he cut it into its three component books with a kitchen knife, and announced that I should draw some nice new covers for the parts. Whatever... it fell into tatters.

The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien

I liked this. Maybe it was a bit slow at times, but generally pretty good. I liked the comic book version that my brother got later.

Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes

I think this was alright. I don't know if I would read it again, though. I might give it to my kid for "culture".

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Douglas Adams

This series, which started brilliantly and kept it up for a while, had largely changed tone by this point. There were several nevertheless interesting ruminations and absurdities left, like bistromath, plus sex to plug the cracks.

Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Hilarious and hard to put down. As of 2006, I have not read anything else like this.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle

Time Machine 2: Search for Dinosaurs, David Bischoff

a Choose you own adventure book

Incomplete entry: I do not remember which ones I read.

Secret Of Phantom Lake, William Arden

The Secret Of Skeleton Island, Robert Arthur

The Secret Of Shark Reef, William Arden

The Mystery Of The Purple Pirate, William Arden

The Secret Of Terror Castle, Robert Arthur

The Mystery Of The Talking Skull, Robert Arthur

The Mystery Of The Green Ghost, Robert Arthur

The Mystery Of The Vanishing Treasure, Robert Arthur

The Mystery Of The Whispering Mummy, Robert Arthur

The Stuttering Parrot, Robert Arthur

Just the title sounds so evocative and thrilling.

No seriously--they solved some mystery by figuring out why that parrot stuttered, right? Didn't they find it at the scene of the crime, and then search for its stuttering owner? That's so awesome.

Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne

Who doesn't love this?