Reading stuff? On paper? People still do that?

Oh yes, people still do that.

I read a lot of books, and this page is an attempt to share that fact with you. Enjoy... and please understand that I'm just expressing my personal tastes here. You're quite welcome to disagree!

Chris

I don't have that much spare time any more these days, and I'm sure you're in the same situation. So where do I find time to do all this reading?

Simple: In the bath. I can get a good half an hour's reading in, relax, and get clean all at the same time! OK, there's the occasional hazard of ending up with a rather crinkly book (my copy of Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation will never fully recover, I'm afraid) but it's a great way of recovering after a hard day's work, apart from anything else!

Where do I get books from? Well, I buy an awful lot of mine second hand, either at charity shops or in specialist booksellers. Having said that, I'm also a great fan of Amazon. I dread to think how much money I've spent with them over the years. I've even ordered one or two of their books recommendations, and have been pleasantly surprised to find that I did actually quite enjoy the books that they said I'd like... We also run a book club at work. Each member gets to pick a book, we all read it, and then discuss it, see what we think about the way it's written, and so on. It's good fun, and I've found a couple of great books that I wouldn't otherwise have read.

I'm convinced that reading so many books (and the fact that I started reading when I was very young) has been one of the main shaping factors in my life. Yes, I probably should have spent more time going out and socialising with friends when I was a kid, but I can't imagine living in a house that doesn't have large quantities of books - preferably on a wide range of subjects. And if I walk into a house and see books like Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable on the bookshelf I know I've found somewhere interesting...

I don't read that much generic fiction - not to put too fine a point on it, if I'm reading stuff that's made up, I tend to go the whole hog and read science fiction. I've read so much SF that I've dealt with it as a separate subject below, so more on that in a minute.

What is it about a novel that I enjoy? For me, the memorable works are those that completely immerse me in the experience. I've bought lots of those brick-sized blockbusters at airport bookshops, and if I'm flying to the US, I've usually finished them by the time we've landed. But I've probably been half-watching the in-flight movie as well, and if you asked me what the plot was a couple of weeks later, I wouldn't always be able to tell you. Still, I've read Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris, will pick H. P. Lovecraft over Stephen King, Aldous Huxley over George Orwell, Conan Doyle over H. G. Wells, and I prefer Craig Thomas to Tom Clancy, but as Craig Thomas used to be my English teacher at school in Stafford, I'm probably biased.

A brief diversion, at this point: The Old Grey Whistle Test's David Hepworth tells a story about Don van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. The Captain, down on his luck many years ago, was reduced to selling vacuum cleaners door to door in California. One day, so the story goes, he knocked on a door and was amazed to find himself standing face to face with none other than the aformentioned Aldous Huxley. Too ashamed to go through with his sales patter when faced with such a literary legend, the great Captain fixed Huxley firmly in the eye, indicated his merchandise, and proclaimed: "Sir, this... sucks!"

If you don't know who any of those people are, shame on you.

Where were we? Oh yes. Mere blockbuster status isn't enough to convince me that a work of fiction is necessarily art. There has to be more than "just" a good story for me to really enjoy a novel. For instance, I've got all the Harry Potter books, and while J. K. Rowling spins a good yarn, the way it's presented doesn't catch my imagination alight in the same way that Terry Pratchett does. In the same way, I don't like things to be too predictable. If I can figure out which way a plot will turn, I get disappointed. So, I like books in which the writer surprises me, or out-thinks me.

On the other hand, I've found myself reading far more cultured works of late. For instance, I've just finished reading not one but two translations of Beowulf - one by Seamus Heaney, and one by E. Talbot Donaldson. And I thoroughly enjoyed them, too. If you've never read the tale of the great hero Beowulf and his fight against the monster Grendel, I bet you've at least heard the names before. I really do recommend them. Next on my culture list is Plato's The Last Days of Socrates, which I've just started, after which I really should get round to reading Friedrich Nietzsche's The Will To Power again. Scary thought, isn't it? I'm doing this voluntarily. Maybe I should get out more...

Chris's Favourite Ten Works of Fiction at the moment (in no particular order):

• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkein
• The Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle
• Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman
• Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor
• Flying Saucers Have Landed by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski
• Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick

I am a huge, huge fan of science fiction. I have come to acknowledge my geekdom, and fully realise that when it comes to SF I could easily be mistaken for a major nerd.

Blame it all on the artist Chris Foss, if you like. Back in the 1970's he painted a series of amazing airbrush covers for the Panther Books reissue of Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith's great Lensman series of novels. "Aha," I thought, "This looks like it might be interesting..." In case you haven't read them, let's just say that they are 1930's space opera at its very best. Spaceships leap across entire galaxies in a single bound, fire ravening space rays of awesome destructive power, and are crewed by two-fisted heroes of unstoppable machismo. When you're barely in your teens, this is irresistable stuff, and I was hooked instantly.

I've been reading SF ever since. After "Doc" Smith I went on to the standards - Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and then Frank Herbert - and branched out from there. A friend of mine in Stafford gave me a copy of Larry Niven's Ringworld which was not only high-powered, hard SF (in other words it tried very hard to obey most, if not all, of the known laws of physics - and usually has a passable stab at figuring out the engineering behind the paraphernalia) but also had cool aliens, and what must have been pretty much the first hints of, er...well, more adult behaviour I'd ever read in a book. I loved it. Still do. Reading it again recently I was struck by how much more I noticed about character interactions and suchlike. I'm the sort of person who will read a book again - as I get older and accumulate more experiences, I find that this profoundly affects what I get out of a book. Try reading an old favourite from your childhood again - preferably something you haven't gone back to in 20 years or so - and see whether your perception of the story stays the same. Bet you it doesn't.

When we moved to London, I used to go to book signings at Forbidden Planet. This was back in the days when they only had the single shop in Denmark Street. I still have signed copies of work by Frank Herbert, A. E. Van Vogt, Michael Moorcock, Douglas Adams, and James Herbert, amongst others. SF bookshops like Forbidden Planet were the motherlode for me. I couldn't enter the place without buying at least one new paperback. Slave to marketing that I was, whether or not I selected an untried author depended strongly on the cover art. Apart from Chris Foss, those were the halcyon days of (amongst others) Jim Burns, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Michael Whelan, Tim White, and Rowena Morrill (and wasn't everyone surprised recently to find out that Saddam Hussein was a collector of Morrill's paintings!) As a result, I bought more than one howlingly bad hack novel, but I also discovered more and more top-flight work. When I started my first full time job, a lot of my income went on books. Pretty soon my shelves were groaning under the weight of books by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Disch, Harry Harrison, and (joy of joys) Philip K. Dick. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

In the 90's, the Americans (and Canadians) more or less took over the field, with folks like Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson producing great mainstream SF works. Bow down and pay tribute, too, to the great William Gibson. If you haven't read Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, or Count Zero, then you've missed one of the turning points in western literature in the last half century, I believe. And his later novels are even better.

These days, British SF is undergoing a bit of a renaissance, with Peter Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds in particular producing some stunning work. And, of course, there's Iain M Banks. You have to read his novels if you have any interest in SF at all. In my next life, I want to work for The Culture.

If my ramblings here have whetted your appetite and you want a proper history of science fiction rather than all this drivel, may I point you in the direction of Brian Aldiss's excellent work Trillion Year Spree?

Chris's Favourite Ten SF Novels at the moment (in no particular order):

• Ringworld by Larry Niven
• Excession by Iain M Banks
• All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson
• Ubik by Philip K. Dick
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• First Lensman by E. E. "Doc" Smith
• The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
• Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
• Eon by Greg Bear
• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

If you'd asked me thirty years ago what proportion of non-fiction books I'd be buying as a grown-up, I'd probably have suggested a figure less than five per cent. In fact, probably one in five books I buy these days is non-fiction. Good lord, I even buy text books! With all the SF I get through, perhaps it's a way of keeping my feet on the ground.

One of my heroes was the physicist Richard P. Feynman. I still have a 3-volume set of his Lectures on Physics from my days at university. His autobiographical essays, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman and What do you care what other people think? give a tantalisingly brief insight into a huge and somewhat eccentric intellect. I also have Ralph Leighton's biography of Feynman. Heck, I even have a CD of folk songs from Tuva. This was the Professor who worked at Los Alamos during the war and who, famously, demonstrated the frozen O-ring problem at the Challenger inquiry press conference.

Thinking about it, a lot of my non-fiction reading is science related. I'm reading books by Richard Dawkins and Francis Fukuyama at the moment. I've even seen arguments conducted through books: try reading Godel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and then read The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose to see what I mean.

On the other hand, I also collect books about the paranormal, flying saucers, lake monsters, bigfoot and so on. I'm fascinated by Colin Wilson's work, and have copies of every book of his I've been able to track down. I've been a subscriber to the Fortean Times for years, and have copies of Charles Fort's books. Like Fort, I don't necessarily believe any of the books I read; in fact, as I get older and more cynical I am also becoming more and more skeptical, but I do find the way people react to these things very interesting. Having lived in America and spent many years surfing the net, I have come to the conclusion that a sizeable proportion of the world's population cannot distinguish fiction from reality. Given the sort of programmes shown on American television these days, I suspect that this won't come as much of a surprise, but I've watched someone adamantly describing "documentary footage" from a world war two experiment they claimed to have witnessed, and realised that they were actually describing scenes from a dodgy 1980's science fiction B-movie called "the Philadelphia Experiment!"

Chris's Favourite Ten Non-Fiction Books at the moment (in no particular order):

• Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
• Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
• Chaos by James Gleick
• The Social Life Of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman
• All The Troubles In The World by P. J. O'Rourke
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
• Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
• Bones of the Master by George Crane
• The Occult by Colin Wilson

If you haven't read any of these, then I'd suggest that you're missing out on some very entertaining stuff!

The following is a list of most of the books I've read over the past couple of years. It's not totally comprehensive, as it omits quite a few text books, encyclopaedias, and the Guinness Book of Records; neither does it include the magazines I read regularly like the Fortean Times or New Scientist.

All the same, it should give you an idea of what I read...

• Judas Unchained - Peter F. Hamilton
• The Stories of English - David Crystal
• The Sense of Being Stared At - Rupert Sheldrake
• Howard Hughes: The Secret Life - Charles Higham
• Best American Movie Writing 2001 - John Landis (Ed.)
• Blockbuster - Tom Shone
• John Peel: A Life In Music - Michael Heatley
• Looking For La Bomba - Richard Neill
• Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self - Claire Tomalin
• Iain Banks - Raw Spirit
• Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
• The Adventure of English - Melvyn Bragg
• The Men Who Stare At Goats - Jon Ronson
• How to be a Bad Birdwatcher - Simon Barnes
• What a Carve Up! - Jonathan Coe
• Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
• Pandora's Star - Peter F. Hamilton
• Lost for Words - John Humphreys
• Between You and I - James Cochrane
• A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett
• The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce
• The Little Friend - Donna Tartt
• The Shipping News - Annie Proulx
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
• The Adventure of English - Melvyn Bragg
• The Info Mesa - Ed Regis
• Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss
• The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
• Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
• The Papers of A.J. Wentworth, BA - H F Ellis
• Dude, Where's My Country - Michael Moore
• Ilium - Dan Simmons
• His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
• Yellow Dog - Martin Amis
• The New Confessions - William Boyd
• The Matrix and Philosophy - William Irwin (Ed.)
• The Pythons Autobiography - The Monty Python cast
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
• Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology - Gregory J. E. Rawlins
• Bots: The Origin of New Species - Andrew Leonard
• Beowulf - Seamus Heaney (Trans)
• Beowulf - E Talbot Donaldson (Trans)
• The Iron Sun: Crossing the Universe with Black Holes - Adrian Berry
• The Sky People - Brinsley Le Poer Trench
• Media Control - Noam Chomsky
• Parliament of Whores - P J O'Rourke
• Stupid White Men - Michael Moore
• Questionnaire Design, Interviewing, and Attitude Measurement - A. N. Oppenheim
• Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
• White Line Fever - Lemmy
• Project Orion - George Dyson
• Our Posthuman Future - Francis Fukuyama
• The Coen Brothers - Ronald Bergan
• Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman
• Ain't It Cool - Harry Knowles
• Gifts of Unknown Things - Lyall Watson
• O Lucky Man - Michael J. Fox