QI: Advanced Banter

QI: Advanced Banter by Stephen Fry I absolutely love this book. I have hundreds of quotation books, but they almost all lack the editorial style of Messrs Lloyd and Mitchinson. The big difference is that quotation books are normally only really reference books, this one flows so that you find yourself absorbed and taken along by it.

Other reviewers suggest it's nothing to do with the TV show QI. I don't agree. John Lloyd and John Mitchinson dreamed up and produce the QI TV show, and you can tell the humour and approach is from the same place. The great thing about the TV show is nothing is off limits. If it is interesting and it is funny, it is in. From Greek philosophy to the profane and odd, anything goes. The same applies to this excellent book, and that, along with the Johns' comedy and editorial talent is why this is different from the others.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga This is a hilarious,acerbic, unsentimental read about modern-day India, of villages and globalised big cities (Delhi, Bangalore), of venality and corruption.
I like the way the narrator, plays his part as downtrodden servant and driver so wryly and knowingly, although the device that the whole book is an open letter to the Chinese president does not really ring true.

This kind of humour and irony is difficult to keep up for book length but the author manages it superbly well, faltering only in a few places. The main problem with unrelenting irony is you feel no sympathy for the characters. Indeed, apart from the narrator there are only caricatures, and some of these verge on cliché through overuse by the end of the book.

Perhaps the best joke of all is that this book made the Booker Prize long list - as if to say this is far more than a good laugh. But this is emphatically NOT a literary novel. No single character stands out, most are two-dimensional. White Tiger has a feel of bringing us up to date on modern, globalised India, but I feel it skims the surface and does not really get us to the nub of people's hopes and fears about these changes. There are already many non-fiction books that tell us about the call centres, the shopping malls in Gurgaon and the IT outsourcing industry.

There is a message at the end, about the servant mentality, but it does not amount to a theme running through the book. Vikas Swarup's Q&A which came out a couple of years ago did a better job of combining humour with characterisation - his servant-boy perspective was more convincing than White Tiger and gave it better claim to being literary, although it had no such pretensions.

This book reads more as a humourous, satirical extended essay or magazine feature. This is no reason not to enjoy it. For Indian literary fiction there are others, such as Amitav Ghosh (also on the Booker list) a far superior writer but let's face it, not half as funny. White Tiger, it seems to me, is a cuckoo in the Booker nest.

The Gift by Cecelia Ahern

The Gift by Cecelia Ahern I love Cecelia Ahern and I am always so excited when another one of her books is released. She is so young but writes so wisely. I watched the video of her interview on Amazon and she seems like a really nice person. I thought that the book itself was a really great read. I read it in 2 days (around work!) and loved it. I finally finished it in the bath last night and the water went cold because I wanted to finish my book!
The story is a story within a story. The first story is about a kid who throws a frozen turkey through his Dad's living room window (it is Christmas time) and the second story is a story told by a policeman to the kid with the frozen turkey. It sounds confusing but it really isn't.
Lou is a busy working man. He never has time for anything and always needs to be in 2 places at the same time. Enter Gabe. Gabe is a homeless guy that Lou gives a job to. Gabe is so efficient and he seems to be everywhere in Lou's life. Gabe offers Lou some tablets for a headache that essentially means that he can be in 2 places at the same time. His dream come true!
The story follows Lou through Christmas time as he learns a few valuable lessons. I think they are lessons that many people could do with learning. The story was totally unbelievable but the message wasn't.
Another great read by Cecelia and the story will stay with you for a while after you stop reading.....

The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson Niall Ferguson again here brings us a history that is informative, entertaining and sobering. Being published in the midst of a global economic meltdown, for a book such as this, is a mixed blessing, as a step too far on the bearish side may make the author look like a doommonger, whilst being even slightly bullish might look blinkered. Ferguson, though, seems to manage to pull it off, though that equally is a spot evaluation. However, though it's clear where his loyalties lie in the pro/anti capitalism debate, the balance of the narrative tends nevertheless towards the various shocks delivered to the system rather than towards the prosperity delivered, albeit still strictly speaking to a relative minority of humanity, by markets and their lubricant, money.

As it turned out, some of the ground covered was familiar territory to me, bringing together strands of other books I've read recently, including Findlay and O'Rourke's Power And Plenty, Bentley's A Book Of Numbers, Schama's The American Future and even Lonely Planet Andalucia.

But some of it was new. He gives the origins of ghetto (a geto was a casting, and the original ghetto was in Venice's foundry district); explains that a consol gets its name from "consolidated fund"; and confirms that "dollar" comes from the German "thaler", on which the Spanish based the piece of eight, the world's first truly global currency.

Ferguson is also adept at telling stories: his account of the First Opium War, for example, is probably the clearest I've come across, and in the chapter on housing there is an excellent explanation of how the development of securitisation by Salomons ultimately led to the sub-prime meltdown.

He's not always right. In a description of segregation in Detroit and the 1967 riots he describes Aretha Franklin as a Motown star, which she almost, but never quite, was. And the final chapter begins with speculation that the rest of the world has decoupled from the United States economically. Unfortunately time has not been kind to this notion, with only Brazil, it appears, unaffected so far (December 2008), oil down by over $100 a barrel from its mid-08 peak, and even China's growth looking very shaky. But if there are any signs that "His pages are hot with proof-stage tyremarks", as one newspaper review alleged, then Ferguson is not alone in his revisionism: after all, even the German finance minister got it wrong. And in mitigation, this is the man who ended a previous television series (Colossus) warning that the United States was "heading for a credit crunch".

This is not, to be sure, a technical book. Readers seeking more detail of some of the principles described should go to the likes of Brealey and Myers's Principles of Corporate Finance. However, Ferguson more than succeeds in achieving his objective of providing a foundation of financial awareness for the general reader, providing plenty of food for thought. Amongst the morsels on offer: in better days for Argentina, the other Harrods was in Buenos Aires; the birth of stock markets was in 17th Century Netherlands, a country now often reduced to two letters in "Benelux"; and he ultimately really hits the button marked Panic by reminding us of the consequences of al-Qaeda's effecting a nuclear strike, of a further Katrina-like event, or of inundation courtesy of global warming.

So, great book, and so much for the past, but what of the future? Ferguson describes himself as a "liberal fundamentalist", and certainly descriptions of him as "rightwing" look overdone. Nevertheless, there seems to be a faith implicit that capitalism can cure itself, counter to the standard Marxist analysis of a bankrupt and inevitably doomed system. So where, as Larry Elliott has asked, is the intellectually endorsed social democratic alternative? It is implicit, ironically, in the response of the US government, but the measures being taken by that and several other governments has the appearance of a huge geoeconomic experiment unsupported by any clear theory other than it is the opposite of what was done in the 1930s. What is needed is a Keynes for the noughties. I'm looking forward to reading Krugman's new work to see if that is where the gap is filled.

101 One-pot Dishes: Tried-and-tested Recipes

101 One-pot Dishes: Tried-and-tested Recipes by B.B.C. "Good Food Magazine" Well I'm not sure if you are like me...single, busy, a pet to walk, work to do and a hundred other tasks to occupy so little available time?! But apparently I'm just the person that this book has been written for! I believe these BBC good cooking guide books have been around for a while. Though for some reason I havent happend upon them until now. Im the kind of person that 'thinks' he likes to cook great meals. I have bought loads of cookery books, Delia , Jamie Wotsits and the rest of the motley crew. But when you open those up and look at the ingredients list and some of the fancy techniques dictated...no way hose'! This little book is different. Sensible meals, ingredients that you can actually buy in the supermarket and basic cooking techniques that even I can handle! Very easy to use...to the point instructions and some lovely pics to show you exactly how your masterpiece will really look when you have finished the cooking...ermmmm well possibly! No, seriously, these books are really good and I may now get the whole series. A couple of quid a go..you cant go wrong.! Good luck!