Even more occasionally, he’ll go and do something incredibly generous that makes me temporarily forget his awful, terrible, black-sheep status. Like this:

At a recent comic-con (I believe that’s what they’re called in the geek vernacular) he got me a copy of Hellraisers by Robert Sellers and Jake. Hellraisers is a sort of graphic biography of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Peter O’Toole. Since these four are among the most splendid of bastards to ever have graced this foetid planet, this gift was enough to fill me with unbridled less-grumpiness.

However, the icing on the cake was that he’d got the thing signed by the writer (Robert Sellers) and had the artist (Jake) do a little doodle of Peter O’Toole for me (O’Toole is the most splendid of those most splendid bastards, in my opinion).

There it is… Look.

Click to embiggen the wonderful sketch of O’Toole smoking jauntily.

All those times I’ve collected the brother from police stations and dubious, back-street bars with naked poultry beckoning at passers-by from the windows have been worth it.

While I was checking out Kindle hardware, Amazon kindly recommended a Kindle-format book that I’ve been planning to buy. It would cost me €7.71 to have the relevant zeroes and ones beamed to my Kindle (if I had one).

To compare, I popped to The Book Depository (where I buy a sizeable chunk of my books) to find I could get the actual, physical, hold-it-in-your-mitts, dead-tree version of the very same book shipped to my door for €6.37. And when I’m done with that, I can loan it to a friend or bring it to a second-hand book shop or use it to start fires in government buildings.

It seems unlikely I’ll be getting a Kindle this Christmas. I don’t feel I’m being unrealistic with this—I understand that there are people all along a book’s production chain that need to buy baked-beans and fingerless-gloves and stuff but it’s hard to shake the assumption that providing a virtual copy of a book should be, at least, a little cheaper than printing one and having a postman deliver it to another country. I tried pricing a few other books with very similar results.

“Pah!” I snort.

Get your head out of your arse, Amazon.

Or am I missing something?

UPDATE:

@timmaughan pointed out that I am missing something. Namely that it’s the publishers setting these costs and forcing them on Amazon. This seems quite believable but it seems odd that the largest vendor of both physical books and ebooks in the world (ok, I’ve just assumed that fact but I’d put some money on it being the case) can’t bring a bit more clout to negotiations. As we digest this new information, let me close the update with:

Get your heads out of your arses, Amazon and the publishing industry. I’m a freakin’ book-snob yet I’m thinking of buying a Kindle. I’d have scoffed, scoffingly, if you’d told me that a couple of years ago. There’s no way, however, that I’m putting my book-snootiness aside just to pay more money for something that has no physical presence outside of some transistor-states. Whoever is at fault for this stupidity doesn’t matter. The end result is the same to consumers like me—we’re not buying a Kindle.

The story is told from Jack’s point of view and is written, for the most part, in a five-year old’s voice and with a five-year old’s understanding of events. We learn about Jack and his mother’s daily routine; how they fill their days in this confined space. We have glimpses of the man keeping them captive and we find out something of Jack’s mother’s past and how she came to be trapped in Room.

It’s certainly an emotional read. It grabs you pretty hard and pulls at you, making you want to keep reading. I suppose you’d call it a page-turner (if you were a twat).

Jack’s relationship with his mother and with the objects in Room—even with Room itself—is beautifully drawn. The scene-setting at the beginning nicely conveys Jack’s unusual institutionalisation. He’s never known anything else. He’s not even sure if outside is real.

The child’s voice narration does a good job of getting you into Jack’s tiny world. I felt like it ‘slipped’ from time to time and there were a few occasions where I had a hard time reconciling what Jack understood and what he didn’t. I sometimes felt there were things he didn’t comprehend that he should have and vice-versa. Every now and then I thought “he knows that, why doesn’t he know this?” I’m nit-picking a little here to be honest and a story like Jack’s has to be granted a certain amount of leeway for suspension of disbelief. I mention it only because it pulled me out of the story a couple of times.

That said, Donoghue was more than capable of pulling me back in. The tension she wound and wound as Jack and his Ma worked on plans for escape was brilliantly communicated. That twat who said ‘page-turner’ earlier would probably say ‘edge of the seat’.

Room has accolades bursting from it. Man Booker shortlist, TV Book Club and, although I’ve peeled off the sticker informing me of the fact, the Orange Prize shortlist too. All that certainly carries a hefty clout. And it’s deserved. Room is powerful and moving without straying into sickly or depressing (which, given its subject matter it could have done). It’s also gripping enough that I’m wondering what I’m doing writing this when I still have some left to read.

Pop it on your list.

UPDATE: I should really finish a book before doing one of these posts. About two-thirds of the way through I felt Room lost focus a bit. No spoilers but the back end of the book doesn’t have the intensity of the beginning. I thought the narrator’s 5-year old voice/understanding slipped quite a bit more as things went on too. And, it may be an odd observation, but, as things moved towards their end, it seemed like pretty much every adult was a dim-witted, selfish, arsehole.

Or it might be just me.

A game of two halves, then. One great, one a bit poor by comparison.

So, mostly spoiler-free version:

Inspector Tyador Borlú is a senior homicide detective in Beszel, an eastern-European city-state. Beszel is pretty run-down and runs on the remnants of post-Soviet bureaucracy. Getting anything done here isn’t easy but Borlú’s good at his job. When investigating the murder of a young woman, however, he finds more and more barriers placed in his way. Someone’s doing their best to keep him from the truth.

On a basic level, The City and The City is a good, old-fashioned police-procedural-type of story. Miéville, however, adds a layer—that arena, I mentioned earlier—that brings that genre somewhere else. It’s pretty intriguing (especially if you haven’t read a review that lays it all out on a plate and shoves it into your gob on a massive spoon).

The blurb I was looking up, by the way is one stating that ‘comparisons to Kafka and Orwell are thrown around too readily these days…’ before going on to liken Miéville to Kafka and Orwell. I thought this a pretty lazy comparison and it annoyed me enough to try find the review. This annoyance is directed at the reviewer, by the way and is in no way intended to be a slight on The City and The City, which I enjoyed immensely and have no problem recommending. It’s original, intelligent and gripping.

And, if I know you’ve begun reading it, I’ll email you spoilers unless you send biscuits.

For now, though, here’s what I’ve just started. Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.

I’ve never read Rushdie before. Obviously, I’ll eventually get around to the obligatory Satanic Verses but I figured this might be a less clichéd introduction to Rushdie’s work.

Sprawlingly intricate seems to be the term that works best here. It’s a dense family history, across four generations of the da Gama/Zogoiby family, told by Moraes Zogoiby – the Moor of the title. The family histories are woven into India’s wider history and, if some of the stories I’ve read are to be believed, this was enough to annoy those with their own particular views on aspects of the subcontinent’s past. True or otherwise, it wasn’t enough to lead to a new round of death threats against Rushdie and hasn’t interfered with his abilities to take phone calls from U2 (Bono be praised).

So far, The Moor’s Last Sigh is deep and elaborate and beautifully written. I think I’ll enjoy it.

First up Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth. I love Dawkins. I love his passion. And Dawkins is, quite clearly, passionate about his subject matter. That subject matter here: evolution – something about which the prof knows more than a little. Anyone who has read any of Dawkins’ other books will be familiar with his style and won’t be disappointed. He explains everything clearly and makes his science-bits (most of it) easy to read and very entertaining. Getting back to my earlier point, I believe he manages this because of that passion. It’s so obvious that he dearly loves what he’s explaining and also – I think – loves passing on his understanding in the hope that we’ll love it too.

In the wake of The God Delusion, there is an undercurrent of poking at the creationists throughout. I’d hazard a guess that the concept for this book may have occurred during Dawkins’ repetitive debates with creationists during The God Delusion’s book tour.

Whatever, this book is a wonderful, beautiful look at what really is The Greatest Show On Earth. Get it. Read it.

Ah, Douglas Adams, you great and brilliant geek. Reading this was a bit weird for me. As a young man, bemoaning the fact that the girls were just interested in handsome and cool blokes, I read the Hitchhiker’s books. I loved every cleverly-twisted little word of them. I had always intended to move on to the Dirk Gently books but never really got around to it. Oddly however, while reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, huge swathes of it seemed incredibly familiar to me. I have no conscious recollection of ever owning or borrowing the book so how do I explain this odd déjà vu? It’s entirely possible, I suppose, that I read snatches of it in a bookshop while killing time. In a friend’s house, perhaps. Who knows? I don’t. Weird.

Oh, by the way, the Dirk Gently stories (and this contains the Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul) are fantastic. Adams makes language his bitch and has it contort itself into unusual shapes for our amusement. It’s not Hitchhiker’s but it’s certainly worth a read.

Yes, like everyone else, I had heard all of the talk of posthumous Pulitzers and of mothers pestering publishers to get A Confederacy Of Dunces published long after the death, by suicide, of its author John Kennedy Toole. I had this book neatly filed in the ‘must get around to reading sometime’ list in my head but never got around to reading it. A couple of weeks ago however, a friend of mine (Aidan – I name him as I’m pretty sure he’s looking for a shout-out) mentioned it and offered to lend it to me. True to his word, he posted it through my letterbox the next day (I was out – he’s not that odd).

Toole weaves a number of characters around the flatulent life of, anti-hero, Ignatius J. Reilly and his unwilling quests for work. Ignatius is over-educated and overweening. His pompous denial of most of his reality, however, makes for a very funny read. Ignatius rails verbosely at (or behind the backs of) everyone he encounters and it was these rants that kept me happy until the characters’ threads met in a nice knot at the end.

Eloquent, funny and slightly tragic, A Confederacy Of Dunces is well worth moving up your ‘must get around to reading’ list. Tell them Aidan sent you.

I haven’t done one of these Tea-And-Book posts for a while.  This is chiefly because my brilliantly fractured skull (and I’m certain it was fractured brilliantly, despite that I can’t remember the incident) gave me a headache that lasted about a month and I didn’t feel much like focussing on text.  Rest assured, however, that I have consumed just as many cups of tea as normal.

Anyway, Banville.

I’ve been a Banville fan for quite a few years now.  The logophile (word-geek) in me loves the thesaural manner in which he spills intriguing words onto the page.  I love the fact that I always have to dig into a dictionary on a couple of occasions when I read one of his books.

The prose-geek in me, however, practically wets himself at the promise of a new Banville because it’s not possible for the man to write a single sentence that isn’t so polished it gleams, blindingly, from the page.  Lyrical, evocative, poetic, beautiful; to quote the vernacular of the Youth, Banville the man (ahem).

The Infinities is Banville’s first novel under his own name since he won the Man Booker with The Sea (he’s written as Benjamin Black in the interim – I have these on my shelf and really must get around to them).  Set in a big, old country house somewhere in the middle of Ireland over the course of a single midsummer’s day, The Infinities follows the members of the Godley family as their father lies, comatose from a stroke and dying, in bed.  Banville chucks in a number of themes that he’s touched on in previous books including a massive helping of Greek mythology.  You see, the book is narrated by one of the old Gods, Hermes to be precise.  Even big daddy, Zeus himself, features as do some minor deities. The gods watch the family through the day, plotting and intervening here and there (Zeus in his own inimitable fashion).

The Infinities contains something that I don’t remember reading from Banville before – a dash of what’s essentially speculative fiction.  Maybe I’ve become a Banville purist or something but it seemed a little incongruous to me; and like an easy path to showing the breadth of impact the dying Godley patriarch’s intellect has had on that world.  It’s probably also possible to accuse Banville of over-egging the pudding slightly on The Infinites. It’s a little plump around the waist and not quite so pared and perfect as The Sea or The Book Of Evidence was.

Still though, it is a beautiful read.  Even a bad Banville (which this most certainly isn’t) is preferable to most of the books on Amazon.  For the odd, little thing that pulled me from the story, there were chapters and chapters of wonderful, rich, flowing prose to pull me back and carry me along, happy as a metaphor mixer in shit.

I will sing Banville’s praises all day, to be honest.  I love his writing.  If you’re not familiar with him, don’t just sit there, pop off and get something he’s written (pretty much anything).  I challenge you not to like it.

Are you still here?

The scone: Fruit.  The jam: Strawberry.

The book: Risk: The Science and Politics Of Fear by Dan Gardner.

I spotted Dan Gardner on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe a few weeks ago.  He said sensible things and then his book was mentioned.  Impressionable type that I am, I rushed to the internet to order up a copy.

Risk’s raison d’être is that, as a species, Homo sapiens has much, much less to worry about now than at any stage in its past but most of us go around anxious and stressed about stuff that has a minuscule chance of occurring.

Our brains couldn’t keep pace with our species’ development and, although we’re flying about in jets and curing disease, our brains are still somewhere around the early, hunter-gatherer stages of our evolution.  However, instead of a useful ‘there’s a lion in that bush’ brainwave, now that we have very few lions to dodge, we’re getting ‘there’s a paedophile in that bush’ brainwave.

I’m oversimplifying massively of course but the jist is the same.  Although the clever ‘head’ part of our brains can work out the statistics of there actually being a paedophile in the bush, more often that not, the ‘gut’ part of our brains goes on what it ‘knows’ – and it reads the Daily Mail. Risk looks at how and why this behaviour happens and – maybe more interestingly – looks at how that behaviour can be, and is, exploited.

Risk is well written and entertaining throughout.  At times it strays towards feeling a tiny-bit academic but it really is only a little and it’s worth it for the wealth of information you’re getting.  I really recommend everyone read it.  I’d go so far as to say it’s required reading.

And, if you don’t read it, a paedophile will move into your bushes.  Go and make it so, gullible ones.

It seems I didn’t.

I tried to take a break.  I started two other books and gave up a dozen pages in.  They were too light.  My brain had grown accustomed to the distressing world of Peace’s Yorkshire and was unable to turn itself to something less somber and grim.

That was slightly worrying.

As it turns out, 1980 is slightly (very slightly) less bleak than either of the previous books in the series.  Less bleak than 1977 – I think – because its protagonist is not so tainted as either Bob Fraser or Jack Whitehead (77′s ‘heroes’); his point of view a little less grimy and sordid. Less bleak than 1974, possibly, because even the grisliness of the Ripper murders holds less emotional resonance than the tortures and murders of the children in the earlier book.

Don’t think it’s a walk in the park however.

Peace brings more of the prose we’re used to; expressive, personal, and beautifully burrowing. We’re with our new protagonist, Peter Hunter but he’s slightly more removed from what’s come before. For all the pain and lies and secrets that are in Hunter’s head, we’re just glad that it’s not so awful in there as in previous books.

Peace makes some progress towards winding up this tetralogy (quadrilogy isn’t a real word) in 1980 and I’m looking forward to finally getting to 1983.

This time, however, there will be something between this and the next Peace book.

At least it is in David Peace’s 1977. Bleak, gloomy and darker than closing your eyes at the bottom of an ocean where even those weird, ugly fish are scared to go.

Awful, terrible, beautiful darkness.  Peace just won’t leave you alone. His words gnaw and eat at you and his story remains in your, now fetid, brain for a long, long time.

I read 1974 a few months ago and needed a bit of time before moving on. I’ll need more time before moving to 1980. These are not easy-reads but they are remarkable reads.

Much has been made of Peace’s ‘stream of consciousness’ prose and it is beautifully lyrical and engaging.  The story focuses on the Yorkshire Ripper murders and is told from the first-person perspective of two different characters (two characters from 1974).  This throws you for a few seconds as you process the first character switch but it’s easy to accommodate.  Oddly – and adding to the disorientation – while both characters narrate their 1st-person story in alternating chapters, one does so in the present-tense and one in the past-tense.

And the violence…  While there was plenty of violence in my last read, No Country For Old Men, it was more distant; slightly more stylised. Peace’s violence is in your face (and your hair and under your fingernails).  It’s visceral and savage and affects you more deeply. Like I say, it’s difficult to forget.

I’m two thirds through and I’m now going to sneak off somewhere quiet and finish it.  If I don’t post again, it’s because I’m huddled in a foetal position, weeping quietly and despairing.

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed my new Penguin Classics mug.  I recently treated myself to two of them. Keep ‘em peeled to see the other make an appearance soon.

*I’m certain I’m not the first to have made this, rather weak, joke.  Apologies.