Reed Bookshelf

London, in a roundabout way

As well as writing the Barbican poster in the From Here to Here exhibition at 2005's London Design Festival, I wrote one of the stories in this accompanying book. Again based on Barbican, the story isn't quite as happy-go-lucky as the poster, but I'm pretty pleased with it. Being published alongside Simon Armitage is quite nice, too. If you'd like to read my story, or any of the 30 others in the book, click the book to order it via Amazon.

I chapter, X stories

The 26 Letters exhibition at the British Library was part of 2004's London Design Festival. It featured 26 posters, each built around a letter of the alphabet, and it proved a terrific success. I was lucky enough to be invited to create the poster for X (which you can see in my portfolio), alongside designer Thomas Manss of Thomas Manss & Company.

I also wrote the article that accompanies the poster in the exhibition book (above), which includes images and words from all the contributors. (Contributing designers included Alan Fletcher, Michael Johnson, Angus Hyland, Alan Kitching and Derek Birdsall, while the writers included Dan Germain of Innocent Drinks, John Simmons, Howard Fletcher and Will Awdry.) Just click the book to order a copy via Amazon.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

Perhaps the most thrilling thing Richard Dawkins says in his furious polemic on religion shouldn't really be thrilling at all - it should be almost axiomatic. Religious ideas, he says, should be as open to challenge as, say, Marxist ideas, or Big Bang Theory. As obvious as this point might seem to many, it's one rarely made or championed. And it's about time that changed.

The God Delusion is by no means a perfect book. (You might say only religions claim to have those.) It's sometimes self-indulgent, sometimes simplistic, and Dawkins is too tempted to suggest alternative philosophies that feel a bit thin or naive. But it's passionate, literate, provocative stuff.

One of the most common, and most mistaken, criticisms of Dawkins is that he's as dogmatically immovable as the fundamentalists he despises. But Dawkins deals with this in the book. As a scientist, he would be delighted to be proved wrong. Being proved wrong (rather than just denied) means taking another step forward in our knowledge.

This goes to the heart of the case against religion. Whatever its internal wranglings over the detail, every religion shackles itself to a basic story it can never abandon. It's stuck. Science, on the other hand, is free. It's an ongoing story, constantly being revised, enlarged, renewed, deepened. (Dawkins' final chapter is a wonderful introduction to that story.)

For this atheistic son of the manse (me, not Dawkins), religion has always been a preoccupation. And I've always shared Dawkins' distaste for the indocrination of children. But there has long been a popular sense that religion is beyond argument or intellect. From there, it's a small leap to the idea that we shouldn't think, we should just believe - manna from heaven for fanatics. At heart, all Richard Dawkins wants is for us to think, rationally and maturely, for ourselves. It's a message that's not only timely, but long overdue.

Buy The God Delusion on Amazon.co.uk

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

This is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It's about how we make very quick, split-second decisions about people and situations, but often don't trust them. Gladwell shows how powerful the unconscious is in making these decisions, and why they're very often extremely accurate.

But he also shows how they can be skewed by environmental, social and cultural influences, and how we can be aware of the prejudices that may influence us.

It's packed with incredible stories, from how one man beat the entire US military in a wargame, by refusing to behave predictably, to the psychologists who spent seven years mapping 10,000 combinations of facial muscle combinations to show how our expressions express (and even create) our feelings more than we may like to believe.

Blink is both an eye-opener and a jaw-dropper, and I can't recommend it enough.

Click the cover to buy Blink through Amazon.

Burglars Can't Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block

If I'm looking for sheer, sophisticated entertainment, and Wodehouse isn't to hand (and sometimes even when he is), I reach for the Burglar books. Lawrence Block, who must be one of the most prolific writers in any genre, has turned out ten of these sparkling mysteries so far. And long may he continue.

The hero of the books is one Bernie Rhodenbarr, a Manhattan bookstore owner who also happens to be a burglar. Technically, that should probably make him an anti-hero, but he's a straightforward hero every time.

Bernie inhabits the New York we all love to imagine: a laid-back, loose-limbed sort of a city, peopled with laconic, wise-cracking characters always ready with a snappy quip or a sudden revolver. And the Burglar's the epitome of this personality: effortlessly witty and bright as a button, without being the smartarse nobody likes.

Burglars Can't Be Choosers is the first in the series - which can be enjoyed in sequence or in whatever order they arrive with you. It's not that important to read them in order, says Block on his website, adding the Bernie-esque aside that "I wrote them in order, but I didn't have any choice."

The books almost always follow the same basic formula: there's a murder, and Bernie's in the frame for it. (Often because he was sneaking into the victim's home around the same time as the Grim Reaper.) Unless he can solve the crime himself, he's going to be taking an unexpected and protracted vacation from the bookselling business.

But this 'formula' is far from monotonous. Indeed, settling down with the new Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery is like settling down for a drink with an old friend. Their very familiarity is what makes them so much fun, but they've always got some new and entertaining tale to tell.

Bernie's aided and abetted by his long-term compadre Carolyn Kaiser, a dog-groomer by trade. Whole passages of the Burglar books are taken up with dialogue between these two, much of it inconsequential – and all of it a delight to read. (Of course, Block also exploits the distractingly trivial quality of these chats to disguise plot points that bob to the surface later on.)

The fact that there will never be any romance between these two (they both like girls) means we're never looking for that possibility as readers, and can enjoy their banter and partnership as easily as they do themselves.

There's more. A lot more. But I'll let you discover the rest. And I hope you enjoy doing so as much as I have. (Click the cover image to start your Burglar collection at Amazon.)

Maus, by Art Spiegelman

I finished this extraordinary book on the train the other day. I don't recommend you do the same. Try to read the final pages somewhere private. Then you won't have to fight back the tears.

Tears over a comic book? A comic book about mice being terrorised by cats? Absolutely.

Maus is Art Spiegelman's retelling of his parents' experiences in the war, and in the camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz. And somehow the simple idea of turning the Jews into mice and the Nazis into cats makes the Holocaust more, not less, real.

The historical tale is also interwoven with the story of its own telling, as Spiegelman records his father's memories onto tape - dealing with the old man's neuroses, gripes and infuriating habits along the way. It's unflinchingly honest, and deeply moving.

I can't recommend this book enough. It's both epic and intimate. Hilarious and heartbreaking. Although the telling seems effortless, the whole thing is a masterpiece of construction. And once you've read it, you can't imagine this story being told any other way than in this inspired comic book form.

Click the image to buy Maus from Amazon.

My answer to "What's your favourite book?"

The "favourite book" question is an impossible one, of course. But this is the one I always end up giving as my answer. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, by Michael Ondaatje. It's a perfect little book, knitting a life of William "Billy the Kid" Bonney from history, mythology and Ondaatje's own imagining.

Now best known for The English Patient (also easily in my top five, and a vastly better book than a movie), Ondaatje is a staggering writer. Like the very best, he makes English sound new again. But he tends to do it with very simple words. It's poetic, but not flowery; lyrical without being pretentious. It's their placing - in relation to each other and sometimes even visually on the page - that makes Ondaatje's familiar words startlingly fresh and deeply resonant.

Ondaatje is equally renowned as a novelist and as a poet, and in this book the two disciplines dissolve into each other, forming something quite unique. A collection of poems weaving a story, or a novel written in poetic language? Who cares? This is how writing should be: grounded in character and story, economical, precise, fluent; at once earthy and unearthly...

No, it's no good: I can't do it justice. Read it. It's very short, but most writers fail to achieve this sort of beauty, scope, humanity and ferocity in books twice or three times the size.

An extraordinarily funny book

Of course you know this, but the late Grahame Chapman was one of the Monty Python team, and is widely regarded as its most eccentric of all. This is his autobiography, more or less, and it's still one of the funniest books I've ever read. It's as anarchic as he clearly was himself, it's often startlingly angry, and just as often (as just as startlingly) extremely touching.

As well as being phenomenally funny and a gifted actor (just remember "Brian"), Chapman was gay and an alcoholic. Both of which led inevitably to various forms of friction. (Some of them quite fun.) He doesn't hold back on any of it, and you get the feeling he wasn't the easiest man to live with. But you also get the overwhelming sense of an incredibly intelligent, caring, hysterically funny, and really very sensible human being. A book that brings on tears for all sorts of reasons.

The English Patient. Put the DVD down, and buy the book

"She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house."

Now maybe it's just me, but reading that opening paragraph meant one thing: I was reading the whole book. It's not exactly "There was a terrific explosion and Hurst was thrown to the floor of the aircraft as it fell into a screaming descent", but it's got everything I want. It's the sketch for a picture I want to see more of. It's straight into storytelling, without preamble. It's an introduction to a writer who sees wind as "a buckle of noise in the air", and drops that hard, metallic word in amongst languid, gentle language to emphasise the point. And that first sentence: simple, rhythmic, lucid.

Gives me shivers.

If it does anything for you, read this epic, stunning book. And if at all possible, don't watch the movie first. The visuals in the book are just as good, and there's a lot more story besides.

The Name of this Band is Talking Heads - on CD at last

Rejoice. For at last we have a CD reissue of Talking Heads' epic live album. Plus, it comes with enough extra tracks to fill a whole other CD. And it is, of course, trancendentally wondrous.

The only downside is that fans like me who never got to see the Heads know from this album (even more than the better-known Stop Making Sense) just how much we missed.

Many years ago, in a pub called The Legless Ladder in Battersea, I met a Dutch girl who confessed to running away from school in the Netherlands to get to a Talking Heads gig. And who can blame her? (I'll never forget her - she was clearly a woman of great musical taste. And she had a live, bright green lizard on her shoulder. Looking back, one wonders why I didn't propose on the spot.)

If you've been waiting as long as I have for this CD, or if you've never experienced musical heaven before, click the picture to buy it from Amazon. (It's even a bargain - under seven quid for a historic two-disc album. Can you argue with that?)