Books books books (updated)

As some may know I generally can’t sleep on planes so I always travel with a few books with me to read on the flight. I also need books for trains and buses and of course books for return flight.

My suitcase is now massively heavy, as in over 30 kgs, weighed down with all the great books I have purchased or borrowed over here. They are:

Wilt in Nowhere by Tom Sharpe – his latest work – as funny as ever at 77 years of age.

Clinton by Martin Walker – a really good read because it deals fairly with the scandals and the triumphs. Not an attack book or a hagiography. Fascinated by the account of when he was looking to stand for President in 1988 and Betsey Wright forced him to sit down and go through the list of women with whom he was rumoured to have had affairs, and tell her the truth so they could assess whether the women would keep silence. That would have been some meeting!

Also borrowed off Nikki, Clinton’s autobiography – My Life. Interesting, not great.

The book I have enjoyed the most is Pitt the Younger by William Hague. It’s an outstanding biography and Hague has received well deserved praise for the book. For the first time I understand how a 23 year old can become Prime Minister, and how he ruled for around 20 years, yet died broke. I will get William to sign it when I see him next!

I try to avoid hardbacks when travelling but when I saw in Scotland the latest Raymond E Feist novel – Flight of the Night Hawks, I swooped on it. He is my favourite fantasy author. Helps that he also is a regular participant on a Feist Fans e-mail list – posting several times a day – so you get to quiz him on the most obscure details sometimes.

A serious 200 page Margaret Thatcher book of quotations (We should back the workers, not the shirkers).

Also a Tony Blair joke book and a Bill Clinton joke book – got them at the Tory Party Conference 🙂

Useful Idiots – How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War And Still Blame America First: a great skewering of the American left showing what disasters they were.

A Mary Higgins Clark novel I hadn’t read – On the Street where you live. Okay, not great.

Several Dragonlance and Star Wars books. For geeks only!

Michael Crighton’s novel – State of Fear. This was a huge disappointment. He uses the novel to attack the credibility of the extreme environmental movement. Now I have no problems with that – they need to be attacked. But he overdid it by turning the novel into a lecture on the myths of global warming etc. For people like me who are already sceptics, it was way way overdone. Every second conversation of the characters was one person stating a well known ‘fact’ and then the hero demolishing it. Would have been okay once or twice, but in the end it destroyed the flow of the novel. This tried to be both a novel and a lecture and failed at both.

The Plot against America by Philip Roth. A great book detailing the life of a Jewish family in the United States if Charles Lindbergh had become a Republican President in 1940 and made peace with Hitler. I love alternate histories.

Paranoia by Joseph Finder. An average but fun corporate espionage novel.

Ecomyth by Lance Kennedy – an excellent NZ book on the hysteria and myths of the international green movement.

Avenger by Frederick Forsyth – only got it as it was 4 pounds. Not his best, not his worst.

Crystal Gorge by David & Leigh Eddings. Eddings gets a bit formulaic but still easy to read. The third part of his latest series.

Finally David Morrell’s collection of horror short stories called Black Evening. Perfect for travel.

Now I’m off to Waterstone’s Piccadilly – the largest book store in Europe – to but some more!

UPDATE:

At Heathrow now with five more books. Groan. Oh yes and I forgot to list I also have Lord Ashcroft’s book about his battles against New Labour and the media. He kindly autographed it when I saw him, threatening to sign it with love and kisses 🙂

Anyway five new books are:

Captain’s Blood by William Shatner. I didn’t know he wrote Star Trek novels himself. This one has characters from the original, from New Generation and Voyager!

The latest Colin Forbes – Blood Storm. I know I shouldn’t as they now all have almost an identical plot formula but easy going for a flight.

The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme – a 1939 books which studied the period from 60 BC to 14 AD. My favourite period.

A three books in one volume by Chris Bunch who got me hooked with his Seer King series. This is the Shadow Warrior series.

And finally “In the name of Rome” which is a study of 16 Roman Generals from Scipio Africanus to Belisarius.

Never again am I going to try travelling with 30 books. My back is killing me. In future I may freight some of them home ahead of me.