A fascinating biologists account of the ten great inventions of Evolution. A little smarter than I am, but I learned a lot more about evolutionary biology and filled in a few glaring gaps in my biology knowledge. He explains things I know nothing about very well, even with my poor science background. O level Physics with Chemistry. (45%. A bare pass)

A nicely written thriller about a man confusingly picked up and put into the hands of the Feds for an unwanted change of identity. What does he know, what did he do, what did he remember? The State as tyrant. Good yarn nicely told.

Hilarious. About The Premier League and with real people in it. Made me shout with laughter. Someone said the critics didn’t like this. I told them I don’t read critics I read books. To be this funny may seem easy but it is desperately difficult. I was at first surprised and then delighted. Not sure if you have to be a Football (Soccer) fan to enjoy it or not, but as a fan of both it and him I was really happy.

A book of short stories with an air of underlying anxiety about them. Manhattan malaise. Either everyone is unhappy with someone they are with or anxious about their previous lover, and they have frequently just undergone some kind of nervous collapse. I liked them though.

I found a signed first edition of one of his I haven’t read. It’s an odd bird. A romantic spy story set in Berlin. It’s like he’s still learning his trade and trying on this genre. It’s not really comfortable to him, so really to me the book is of interest in a novelist exploring himself.

A wonderful, original, hilarious, and brilliant book. I really enjoyed it. I think you’ll like it very much indeed… And she is married to the wonderful Thomas Perry, whose books I have been binging on. A must read.

I got lucky and found a Jane Whitefield Novel I hadn’t read! Actually I think it’s my favourite. Someone has set up pretending to be Jane and hiding people, or in fact milking them, having set them up. Really gripping.

I found another at an airport. This one about people pretending to be Jane Whitefield without bothering to keep them alive. They too pursue Jane as she tries to hide an innocent plastic surgeon. Gripping as ever. The Jane Whitefield books are: Vanishing Act Dance for the Dead Shadow Woman The Face Changers Blood Money Runner Poison Flower A String of Beads

I found a signed first edition at The Iliad Bookshop (www.iliadbooks.com) and though I have read it I began to read it again because it starts so grippingly and continues so. Love it.

Another I hadn’t read. Again from Iliad, which has a massive collection of great books. This one is about The Butchers Boy, hiding in the UK, he is recognized, with violent results. Most enjoyable.

Tom kindly sent me this as I could find no trace of it on my reading file. But just at the end I realized I had read it, and the thrilling chase and climax in the mountains was very familiar, but for some reason I had forgotten to note it down.

These are the books I chose to send to friends this year: The Zone of Interest  by Martin Amis The Children Act  by Ian McEwan Stalingrad  by Antony Beevor Rubicon  by Tom Holland Don't Point That Thing At Me  by Kyril Bonfiglioli Lost for Words  by Edward St. Aubyn Who's that Lady?  by Carey Harrison The One From The Other  by Philip Kerr So, Anyway  by John Cleese The Unquiet Mind  by Dr. Kay Jamison

Santa was kind to me and brought me a new Jane Whitefield novel. I couldn’t put it down and devoured it hungrily like a Christmas dinner. Now I’m saddened that it’s over and I have to wait for a new one….

In Hatchards I found a very nice first edition 1996 of one of hers I hadn’t read. Not for the first time she writes of the movie business, in this instance about a film director recovering from a fall from a crane. Lovely writing.

I’m not normally a fan of faux Chandler. I think people over write. They mistake his style, which is essential simple with startling metaphors, for bad Hollywood dialogue but I found this 1998 oddity in Odyssey and was tempted to pick it up because the first four chapters are by Chandler himself. To my surprise I stayed for the whole book. Robert B. Parker writes very well, and continues an interesting start which begins with Marlowe married to Linda, plots it elegantly and writes with style and simplicity so that it is as readable and enjoyable as Chandler. He is himself a detective story writer and his experience in the form shows.

These are so good for traveling with. Devoured this one on BA. One of the best mysteries so far.

Another elegantly plotted and deceptively simply written short novel who dun it in the new Penguin translation. Good to the last bite.

I picked up this nice 1976 first edition at Hatchards. A lovely, witty, elegant, cleverly crafted tale of sin and sinners around the town of Nemi in Italy. Always a joy to read.

The shocking story of how Rupert Murdoch, his editors and his five newspapers deliberately corrupted the police and public officials, perverted the course of justice and only after years of deliberate lying in courts were they forced to “pay.” Not much at that. The foul News Of The World was shut down, but the Sun  popped up on Sunday. They blackmailed, bullied and corrupted public life, debasing debate in their own financial interests, using their papers to expose innocent people who in any way crossed or questioned them. The book makes you want to vomit. It is not quite so well written as Dial M for Murdoch which covered much of the same territory, as he is anxious to tell all of the tale. But still shocking.

Fabulous the way these Penguin Classic reissues pop up to jog your elbow and clear your palette when engrossed in other books. Classic who dun it as always with the unflappable Maigret and his disdain of all authority, so interesting in a policeman. His quick sketches of characters are excellent. And what is happening between them.

Well I really enjoyed most of it, which is fairly extraordinary since I don’t like “unreality” books. But he writes so well I tolerated people changing into other people as long as I could. Then with a great sigh I let slip the mighty tome. He won’t put me off though. I shall await more.

A very funny, and highly original autobiographical story of Jane Bussman, interviewer to the stars in Hollywood, leaving for Uganda in pursuit of a heart throb aid spokesman. She manages to become involved with Joseph Koni and his abducted captives, and in her savage anger she brilliantly exposes the Aid money racket which keeps the whole business of abducting young girls going, everyone needs the money, since they steal it from the beginning, and so they are not motivated to do what the money is supposed to be encouraging them to do:  stop him. Indeed one hand washes another, and they all profit from the trade. This has been going on for years and years and shows no end of ceasing. Her deceptively innocent pose reveals someone deeply disturbed by what she sees, and her apparent naivety takes her into scary territory where most journalists would not go.  A hilarious, laugh out loud book, on the most improbable subject.

I had to interview him about this book, so I was fascinated to see what he had done with this volume of autobiography, intriguingly, and surely unnecessarily, sub-titled The Making of a Python. The first surprise is that he only gets as far as Python, and then not very far into it, so that while we get Cambridge Circus, the Frost Report and At Last the 1948 Show there is very little of Fawlty and only the odd reference to Wanda so this is clearly only the beginning of what might become a trilogy if he can ever face it. The irritation that sneaks in about having to do it and publicize it, makes me doubt he’ll want to try. Irritation is a key word for John. The result is that the book is very long on the young days, with a lot of the unpleasant mother, and Prep school and Clifton College, and short on the fascinating self-questioning person who became the funniest man in Britain. The surprise for me is that when he gets accepted into Cambridge University he goes back and teaches for two years at his old Prep School which he describes as halcyon days. Here he was at his most happy, which I find extraordinary. There has always been a teacher inside John, and a yearning to teach, and at one point his parents set him up for a job at Marks and Spencer’s, and he even hankers for a moment about becoming a banker. Shades of Mr. Puty.  At Cambridge he drifts accidentally into the Footlights before revealing that amazing performing talent that was so evident in 1963, when I first met him. He talks generously of Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, but John stood out head and shoulders above that crowd, and not just physically. He was always the funniest man on the stage. The book is well written and there are tender and affectionate portraits of his father, a favourite teacher, called Mr Bartlett, Graham Chapman of whom he writes lovingly and with great tolerance; greater tolerance than he expressed at the time; and he adores Connie Booth, revealing the kind heart that beats under the somewhat crusty exterior. He is a self-confessed wuss, and shy of women, until finally taken in hand by a forthright New Zealand lass on tour.

Reading Eleanor Catton’s precocious first novel revealing her extraordinary talent as a writer still did not quite prepare one for the amazing achievement of deservedly winning the Booker next time out with The Luminaries. Set in a high school, where a teacher has been interfering with a pupil, it concerns the first year classman of an acting school, raising questions about reality, acting, and concealment of truth, through the central figure of a saxophone teacher and the pupil’s sister. Complicated and not altogether satisfactory in conclusion, it raises more than it settles, but is a terrific read anyway. Her talent is immediately evident.