James Cridland
I didn’t know much about Ben Elton, other than the gobby man on Channel 4, and apparently a writer of The Young Ones (a show which is best enjoyed in the memory rather than watching it again). He comes across as earnest and serious, some massive chips on his shoulder, but then has reason to. One chapter subheading is “Why does everyone hate me?”, but I am not convinced he ever works it out. I didn’t warm to him on reading, but learn a lot about him, and that is much of the point of an autobiography I suppose.
This is a whodunnit book written for intellectual idiots. Every plot point is repeated carefully so you're not going to miss anything; every part of the slightly torturous plot is carefully explained in cutaway “he remembered when she said...” devices. It's an unsophisticated book, without any real character development, and every vaguely difficult plot point spelled out in a tediously obvious way. And it'll sell very well because it's Dan Brown - just like high fructose snacks sell very well because they're super sweet and made to be easy to eat.
I did like this book, and I learnt a lot about Iceland (where I have been, I think, four times now - all for very short periods). It's a very good and well-researched book with a lot of interesting stories, until it surprisingly lands you in a long and weird crush-piece for Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. Acres and acres of words about how utterly splendid she was, divine, beautiful, saintly, miraculous (if nothing about her actual achievements). A very odd end.
I bailed after getting to about 35%. John Bolton is a fool, Trump is a bigger fool, and I realised this book told me nothing I don't already know - that Trump is a vain, shallow, stupid man, and that Bolton knew this but got a job with him anyway.
This book is written in a turgid fashion, with Bolton keen to point out how clever he is (quoting in Latin, then explaining to us stupid people what the Latin meant), and how right he was (apparently he made no mistakes at all during his time in this administration). You get the feeling that Bolton would squeeze the excitement out of the moon landings if he could put a bit of Latin into a paragraph. I felt like I was wading through a poor essay from a thick person trying to prove himself clever.
We learn nothing from this book. We've read all this stuff before. It's plain as day to anyone. Yet half of the US still wants to vote for this fool.
Bolton comes out of this worse than Trump, though. He's helped this man achieve some ridiculous policies, so the left won't like him. But he's now published this, so the right won't like him either now. Not sure who wins, other than a nice retirement check.
This was a good book, though a little unnecessarily snarky at other travel writers. He's good at bring characters to life, and you get to meet a bunch of them - most, though certainly not all, fellow Americans on the journey: Thornberry especially.
It's a little knowingly contrived, and perhaps that's the disappointment about this book - he's travelling to write a book, not travelling for the fun of it. That said, it's a good and fun read.
This is fine, though you get the feeling it's rather hurriedly written (unsurprisingly, given the amount of writing Palin was doing at the time). It's a slightly light book about North Korea, and you tend to learn quite little from it, which is a shame, but he's good at taking some of the characters that he met and giving them a bit of life.
The book is surprisingly light on the method, but very heavy on the “yes, man, wow” of keeping doing the method (and, would you have thought it, buying the special notebooks, though they're most certainly not required).
So, I've got some way through the book, and realise that it's essentially the same as my rather more rudimentary attempt of keeping a task list in a paper notebook and copying it over every morning, which has the effect of self-pruning the task list, since it's relatively clear if I've copied something over five days in a row, it's really not going to be done.
I don't see much benefit in the “logging my thoughts” aspect of it, though I could see that as a busy manager it might have been useful. So it's not a bad book, but just not really very brilliant.
So, I think this was a book that I probably wouldn't have read were it not for the author being Michael Palin. It's an interesting read about a ship I'd never heard of before; it's relatively pacey for what it is, and gets over a lot of the ship's history. Clearly well researched, it's a good book.
It is not funny. There are very, very few jokes in it.
“Classic, wry, gleeful Bryson”
Well, no. It's classic bookish Bryson, where he researches something that he reckons people might be interested in, but it's not particularly “wry” or humorous.
Reading this book is a little like eating a box of chocolates: the facts, crammed throughout every chapter, are interesting and fascinating on their own, but once you've read a few chapters it's all a bit sickly, and you need to put the book down for a bit.
The basic point: “it's all very complicated and we don't know much” is hammered home every few pages. And it is. And we don't. But even so.
(I bailed, 29% in)
This book starts with the authors saying they won't pick a side, and are impartial, and are just reporting as journalists.
Sadly, that's not entirely true; with, at one point, Donald Trump called “America's cable TV watcher-in-chief”. That's fine, but that's not entirely impartial.
The book doesn't really cover anything you don't know, but does it in rather more detail than the press coverage. I'm not sure I've learnt much. But, honestly, what is there to really learn from this anyway?
