Another break from normal service…
There’s only one contender for book of the year.
‘I Hate The Internet’ had the sarkiest writing.
‘High-Rise’ the best explanation of what actually happened in the incomprehensible film.
‘Annihilation’ the best homage to Robert Bloch’s Cthulu short story ‘A Notebook Found In A Deserted House’.
‘You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You are Raoul Moat]’ and ‘In Plain Sight’ the darkest books (almost) written by Raoul Moat and Jimmy Savile.
‘Before The Fall’ was the best page turner I read this year.
But there was only one winner.
And it’s complete tosh.
But brilliant complete tosh – Jack Reacher in ‘Tripwire’, which in any shape or form is not a great book. But, this year, it’s the only book that attempted an audacious plot twist worthy of 20 years of waiting to find out how Hodor in Game of Thrones got his name…
SPOILER ALERT
… because it had Jack Reacher working on a building yard and developing chest muscles so big, so huge, so freakishly large, that you have no idea why Lee Child keeps referring to them until, 500 pages later, just as it looks like Jack will lose, he uses his chest to stop a shotgun blast and the pellets didn’t kill him because they couldn’t penetrate his big, huge, freakishly large chest.
Now that’s what you call great writing*!
(*It’s not, but bloody ‘ell, you’ve got to admire the commitment to write a 500 pages book built on the single idea that a man can pump iron so much bullets bounce off his chest. Go, Jack, go!)
Twin brothers swimming, cycling and running in Scotland 