Books

The first book I read of my own free will was some crap out of my school library about slug like aliens growing in a barn and one boys quest to find out the truth. Some crap like that; I couldn’t say for sure.

Crap as it was though I still thought it was great. The detail a book goes into can never compare story wise to even the best the cinema has to offer and if I love anything it’s detail. I obsess over it. Detail in fact is one of the main reasons that the stories I write are never complete; I can’t let the details go. Detail is paramount to fiction and fiction is really what I love. Give me a biography and it can take me weeks to get through it – no matter how interesting. I’m the worst with biographies, though books like The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell(everyone should read The Tipping Point) for example can take me longer too nothing sends me to sleep like a biography. It’s like a subconscious rating system – I read biographies in weeks, consume knowledge in days, and devour fiction in hours.

And not just any fiction; American fiction. I hate stories set in Britain - they are so grey and dismal and downtrodden compared to the bright shining heights of American works. That being said I have enjoyed Ben Elton and I am about to delve into Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning.

I just finished a book called Promise Me by Harlan Coben. Coben is a great mystery writer – some would say the best currently around- and Promise Me was his first book in years to feature one of my favourite characters, Myron Bolitar – It took just over a day to read.

I first came across Myron Bolitar after reading Coben’s bestseller Tell No One – a great example of Coben’s non Bolitar work in which an everyman is thrown by some means or another into a seedy world of violence, lies, and most often a menacing hitman of some sort. I loved Tell No One and this prompted me to buy Deal Breaker; Coben’s first book to feature The former basketball star turned sports agent, Myron Bolitar. It took me weeks to finally pick it up. Weeks. Why? Well comeon – Myron Bolitar? What the hell sort of name is that? And he’s a sports agent – I hate sports – who solves crime? Really? Comeon! However, read it I did, the reviews were good and I had, after all, paid money for it. I read it in hours. I loved Myron Bolitar. Love in fact.

Myron is sort of like Batman if Batman were a wise cracking crime solving sports agent. Coben’s novels are filled with great charters with colourful backgrounds and bad guys with almost Batman villain esque facets to their character (ghost like appearance, steel hard fingers, a fetish for biting etc). This was the first PI book I read (although technically not a PI, Bolitar is as good as there.) and since them I can’t put them down. I love delving into the hard boiled and morally ambiguous worlds of characters like Patrick Kenzie, Harry Bosch or Atticus Kodiak.

PI/mystery books are great but are pretty much the Die Hards or Lethal Weapons of literature. All style and no real substance. Every so often I find I need to read a book of substance, serious literature with charters that feel real and make you think. Richard Russo is a great author – his books are about life or lives within small town America and can capture me so completely that I feel genuine loss after finishing one of his novels because I know I’ll never meet the charters within again. These books are harder to get into but infinitely more rewarding in the end.

If your wondering why I’m writing about this or why I thought anyone would really care what my thoughts on books were the answers are: one - I stole the idea from Irish writer John Connelly’s Blog. And two – I never really care if anyone’s interested in the stuff I write or not I just like to write it.

I watched: - The Constant Gardener and parts of The Shield: Season Six

I read: - Promise Me by Harlan Coben and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Cabon

I listened to: - The Arctic Monkeys – all albums.