A Good Read
15 April

I've been taking the bus into work this month.

Not entirely co-incidentally, my novel reading quotient has shot up. Funnily enough, this year, I've been re-reading a lot of stuff that I've read before. I've paced my way though Dan Kavanagh (pseudonym for Julian Barnes)'s Duffy novels which were great fun and suitably nasty in places. Also they now have great sociological value as a picture of the nastiness of the 80s. I'm also engaged on working my way through Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels. He was supposed to have died at the end of the last one that I read. Whilst in London last weekend, I bought a new one - so he must have survived.

I've also been going through the Harry Potter novels in preparation for this June. I find there's more in them the second time around. And certainly the detail is quite telling as a the three main characters actually grow up as the books progress.

The best of the lot, however, has to be To Kill a Mockingbird which actually made me cry on the bus. If I look back over the novels which I have rated over the past seven years...

• The Man who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J K Rowling
• The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin
• Canning Circus by Christopher Pressler
• Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham

they all have one thing in common - a love and acceptance of the humanity in us all and a willingness to look beyond the presented behaviour into that of god in everyone. I'd be happy to add Harper Lee's book to that list but we'll see how it goes by the end of the year. For the time being, I'm giving it four stars.

I'm also handing out another four for Edward de Bono's Simplicity . I think every manager in the country should be forced to read this book in order to make them think about how overly complex they make projects.

I doubt that I am going to get much more reading done in the near future

I blame it all on Colin from Lowestoft who came to stay over the weekend. We had a fine time of it including most of a bottle of Southern Comfort on the Friday night, a passable meal at Charlie Parkers on the Saturday (I'm going to have to scout for an alternative eaterie) and a trip to Speke Retail Park which resulted in Ross and I buying the DVD player that we'd been talking about for the past two years.

Actually, it wasn't just the Philips DVD. That came in a special bundle along with the Philips 28" wide screen TV, the Philips VCR and the stand to house it all. Well, we were going to join the 21st Century at some point. We just needed a little nudge from Colin. It was quite a rare occurrence. Normally when the two of us go shopping, it is he who spends a lot whilst I am frugal. Nice to turn the tables.

We chose to inaugurate the new system by visiting the video store - it also does DVDs. Finding something that all three hadn't seen and were happy to see wasn't easy and the path of least resistance fell on XXX. It was very poor but at least it showed how well crafted James Bond movies can be. Vin Diesel can't act. He can't do light comedy to save his soul. His tits were bigger than his female co-star's. The plot was laughable in the extreme. The special effects and stunts were less than impressive. I'd be over-rating it if I gave it a one star rating for poor.