The Whole Earth Catalogue - I finally found a copy! There it was on the shelf in the Petit Rien charity shop here in Brussels. The ultimate guide to "living off the grid", self sufficiency for the LSD generation. Everything you need for life is in this book, where to buy potters wheels, guides for repairing your VW micro bus, how to build a Buckmaster-Fuller geodesic dome, woodwork, metalwork, EVERYTHING! This copy is a little dog eared and the newsprint quality pages are yellowed with age. When I sat down for the first proper read through I found a rather interesting bookmark (as you often find in 2nd hand books, shopping lists, train tickets etc). In this case it was a letter dated 16th July 1975 from J. G. Stevens Chief Staff officer of a US Navy destroyer on patrol in the mediterranean. The letter concerned an Ensign S. C. Collins (458-76-8399) who was requesting permission to sell his 1971 Volkswagen Kombi van, very topical! Who knows how it got all the way to Brussels but it adds an edge of excitement to the discovery of this classic book.

Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson. Everything I've come to love about Gibson is here in this book. Bobby Zero is back in the sprawl, the rust belt of rubbish that encloses the eastern seaboard of the United States. Stim Sim, Deck Jockeys, the ubiquitous Maas Biolabs and the omni-present Tessia Ashpool are all there. Great stuff.

Funeral in Berlin - Len Deighton. It's back to what makes him what he is for Harry Palmer. Grimey streets, insessant paperwork and unreliable collegues make this a fine return to the world of the original anti James Bond.

Nightwatch - Terry Pratchett. You won't believe this but Ian and I had discussed the next Terry Pratchett book after reading The Thief of Time and came to the conclusion that it had to involve The Watch and The Sweeper! Which is exactly what this book is all about!

The Life of Graham Greene (Part 1 1904 - 1939) - Norman Sherry.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Phillip K. Dick. This must one of the few cases where the movie is better actually than the book. I've heard somewhere that all sci-fi is just a reflection of the time it is written in and in this case it's very true. The pre-feminist wife of the protaganist can't make up her mind whether ironing shirts or watching stim sim is the best thing to do. Dicks well worn, Phillip Marlowe needs little excuse to leave the house and get back to work (Dicks ham fisted efforts at film noir make me adore Chandler even more). I recently heard that Dick went a little (more!) off the rails towards the end of his life. In the hoopla that is surrounding the release of the Hollywood version of Solaris I read that its Polish author Stanislaw Lem was denounced by Dick as a communist agent. Scary stuff especially as the uber-liberal Speilberg seems to have pinned his reputation on Dicks work for all his current Sci-fi output. Speilberg lost a lot of my (albeit totally meaningless) respect by altering E.T. (again with the full stops! what's next J.P.4?), changing the guns to walkie talkies.

Horse Under Water - Len Deighton. Harry Palmer on holiday in Portugal. Apprently Len Deighton spent a lot of time in a holiday home in the same region. The effect shows, some sections read like a tourist brochure! The part where Palmer is on a diving course in Portsmouth is classic stuff.

The Billion Dollar Brain - Len Deighton. Harry Palmer vears sharpley into Bond territory with this the second installment of his adventures. A private army provides the foil to Harrys sardonic wit. Unfortunatly this private army is lead by an insane General worthy of Auric Goldfinger and Ernst Blofeld. Gone are the wonderfully drab and mundane office life touches of the first Palmer book. Now we're competeting with the francise idealology in its original form. Palmer is streets ahead of any Bond, with Ross at the War Office on his back he just doesn't care! The "saving my own neck" factor is a far more powerfull motivator of character than any "queen and country" spy-jinks of the Bond world.

Traitors Purse - Margery Allignham. Albert Campion foils a wartime plot to de-value the pound with counter-feit currrency. The opening memory loss plot device must be old as the hills but surely this must be its first use. As a teenager my local library held four of Allighams books in really nice hardback edition. I haven't seen them in this form since and I came very close to lifting them at the time!

The IPCRESS File DVD. Not stricly a book I know but as I love the novel so much I thought I should put a word in for the Carlton DVD and that word is "Terrible". I have never seen a worse presentation of multi-media data in my life. This effort by Carlton is the bare minimum to get the disk out the door. If ever anyone is guilty of abusing an inherited (via Thames TV and the collapse of Lew Grades ITC empire I assume) back catalogue then this is it. Its obvious that the movie has been transferred directly from the VHS edition (or at least from a non-master tape copy), the film is shown in a very badly panned and scanned format (care in the community in action) with VHS/tape artifacts (tracking and synchronisation errors) also transferred. The main menu is really very poor, again its obvious that the bare minimum of effort has put into this venture, which is a shame as the software tools to do these kinds of things are so easy to use. No language or chapter options are offered. The whole thing makes my flesh creep. It's a good job that the movie itself is so taunt and thrilling, the shortcomings of the presentation are lost (through my rose-tinted glasses) after a few moments of watching. The state-side amazon.com review talks of real wide-screen DVD edition. I guess the cousins really are over-sexed, over-paid and over-there. My advice - "Loose this disk" and order it from the states.

Complicity - Iain Banks. Be it sci-fi or his straight stuff every Banks novel is a breath of fresh air.

With the The Tailor of Panama I have come full circle. Le Carres hommage to Greenes Our Man in Havana sticks very closely to the same formula but with a modern twist. It is no longer political pride at stake but money and influence. The pace is more akin to a taught movie thriller, more heavy-handed than Greenes gentle mocking of flexible cold war alligences.

I recently got thrown in the deep end of an ADSL project at work and had to learn something about ATM in a hurry. This book is dated 1996 and as the title suggests covers the ATM equipment on the market at the time. As a Lucent employee its quite funny to read that "Equipment manufacturer X has recently bought equipment manufactuerer Y" when two years after the book was written they were both bought by Lucent! I was hoping that the explanations of the theory would be a bit more substantial than they are as I found them to be rather flimsy with better tutorials available on the web.

Steve Jobs is the Howard Hughs of our age (Forget Bill Gates! I couldn't imagine him designing a bra for Rita Hayworth). Capturing the truth about his private life and in-camera business dealings was always going to be tough. Having read John Scully's Odessey I had high hopes for something a bit less "It was all me" from this book. Deutschman pulls no punches and doesn't fail to describe the ups and the downs of Job's fall from grace at Apple, the NEXT debacle and his subsequent return to glory. Any book that mentions George Lucas, ILM and Apple on the same page is alright with me.

Boy was I late for the party! For a long-time Chandler fan and a dyed in the wool ("bring me some new cliches") computer hacker (in the non-media sense of the word) like me this book is everything I live for rolled into one. With his descriptions of a virtual world inside the net Gibson came up with all of the concepts that we now take for granted. Getting over his Clockwork Orange dialogue is a bit tricky but once the trodes are on and your're jacked in to his deck it's a non-stop trip. Chandler said of The Big Sleep that even he didn't know who dunnit, with the future-speak it took a couple if page re-reads to keep track of this plot.

I must have watched the movie Field of Dreams at least twice and still not really understood what was happening either time. I picked up the book, the Edward Hopper-esque cover caught my eye (unfortunately not the one shown here), last week and since starting to read on Monday haven't been able to put it down. This book is wonderful, "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintainance without getting bogged down in the heavy-duty technical philosphy" is my one line review. I'm only halfway through (JD Salinger has just seen the light) but already I know that this book (like Zataomm) is a lifer.

Don't believe what they tell you! Pratchetts cannot be read out of order! Well maybe most of them can but the "Witches" and the "Watch" books are much better if you read them in order. Finding out that Cheery Littlebottom had once been an beer quaffing, gold loving, asexual dwarf was a big revelation for me. See what the rest of the world thinks at Amazon. IMHO this is the best of the post-Guards! Guards! adventures of Detritus and "der boys".

Having been raised on Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark it's a big shock to discover that serious sci-fi can sexy and is a very welcome shock at that. Emma recommended Consider Phleabas to me a few years ago while I was living on her sofa. This one is a re-read as the first time I read this was during the white-heat of discovering Iain Banks when I was reading his books as fast as I could buy/borrow them. To be honest I read all of his current sci-fi ouput and then read The Wasp Factory and got no further with the non-"M." fiction. This is probably due to the BBC dramatisation of The Crow Road which, whilst it starred that bird from Space Precinct put me off the rest of his earth-based stuff. This is all against the advice of Del who is a big fan. Hear what the great un-washed have to say.

review

What can I add to what's already been said about this book. I'm a sucker for cool book covers and this one caught my eye in a second hand book shop. I'd heard of the movie with Uma Thurman and after reading the book I'm intrigued how they managed to deal with all of the subjects that this book covers. I'm especially looking forward to finding out how the film makers coped with the almost poetic scenes of lesbian love without making it look like cheap porn. Who played Bonanza Jellybean? I'm in love!

Its a rather shallow method of selecting a book I know but another cover that I couldn't resist was Generation X. This opened the door to the world of Douglas Coupland. I wish I could write like this! He just seems to be binding casual observations on the world around him with a simple story (all stories are simple with hind sight "I could have written that!") but his style is so effortless and cuts right to the core. Part Carrie (the pre-telekenisis, Farah-Fawcett, girlie locker-room bits), part romantic tragedy, part sci-fi. I really love this book. Who wouldn't want to be on the special effects crew of the X-Files?

Even though I am a huge fan of Raymond Chandler I would have to agree with the comments from the review at amazon.com. You really can see the join between the two authors work. Don't get me wrong, Chandlers work is perfect as ever but its impossible to really gauge where he was going with only the first four chapters completed by him. Whilst I have not read any of Parkers previous works I have read all of Chandlers Marlowe books. The differences between the two styles are obvious. Chandler always gives his work an edge which opened my eyes to what really was going on in the forties but Parker goes way over the top and colours Chandlers world with a modern view of crime, sex and violence. Of course all this was going on in the forties but Chandlers way of describing the events is much more comfortingly innocent when compared to Parkers brash, heavy handed post-"JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, everything that's happened to the states since the forties" style.

Our Man in Havana is my Catcher in the Rye. You know Mel Gibsons character in Conspiracy Theory who has to buy the book each time he sees it? (Well you could add The Big Sleep, The IPCRESS File and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance to that list!). Reading Brighton Rock is sort of a litrarery rite of passage in the Lewis household so it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading this and then only mere pico seconds before I became a fan of Graham Greenes work for life. Our Man in Havana should be standard issue to all people who consider themselves British (whatever that means) when going to live in another country. If only for the way it makes you think about your life at "home" and where that home really is. During the reading of this book I, quite by accident discovered rum and coke and The Beuna Vista Social Club. Both are essential ingredients if you wish to try and capture some of the mood of the island whilst reading (I've never been to Cuba but I've seen Alec Guinness in the movie and that's better than being there). I would recommend The Comedians and The Quiet American as you next Greene move. Checkmate!