Biographies, non-fiction and Kindle
LENGTH.

Fiction doesn't really keep my interest. Whilst I like Douglas Adams' stuff, I've not really been able to keep my interest on anything else along the same lines.

I'm a big fan of the "Do something daft for no reason" types of books by Dave Gorman, Danny Wallace and Tony Hawks etc, but what I'm really into at the moment is going through the biographies section on Kindle at the moment and looking for books with decent reviews that cost about a quid and buying those. I've found some really good ones from 'regular' people on there. The style of some of them may be a bit more "DIY" than you'd get on a bestseller, but to me that makes them more interesting.

A lot of them seem to take on a sort of diary / blog format, but there's some interesting stuff about peoples' professions in there. I'm currently part way through "Zen and the diary of a B&B owner" (77p). A good one I found is "confessions of a GP" which I bought for 99p. "Hell of a salesman" (86p) was good, even if you didn't really sympathise with the author, but "Delete this at your peril: The Bob Servant emails" for 99p was an absolute, utter bargain and one of the funniest things I've ever read anywhere, ever.

Sure, I've downloaded a few shite and average ones as well, but when they average at about a pound each, it's not much of a gamble.

As for ones to avoid:

Anything by Will Self. Just seems like pure linguistic wankery. Admittedly I've only (attempted to) read 2 of his books, but I just sat there reading it, thinking "He's just saying LOOK HOW CLEVER AND ERUDITE I AM constantly."

Stephen Fry's "Moab is my washpot" was disappointing. I normally like Stephen Fry when he's on teh tellehbox but I just didn't get in to this at all.

But the most appallingly bad book I've ever had the misfortune to read was Sammy Hagar's autobiography "Red: My uncensored life in Rock". Jesus sodding Christ, what a deluded, self centred, selfish, spoilt, vacuous, waffling cretin this man is. Yes, I did finish the book, but all the way through I was thinking "What a complete and utter dick". I don't know if that was what he was trying to achieve (so if it was, well done him), but, despite all the details about his 'humble beginnings', he just seemed have a talent to blabber on about pointless minutiae one minute and then go on to self-congratulatory bollocks the next. I know the purpose of an autobiography is for the author to talk about themselves, but this really was something else.
( Mike Fishcake teamfishcake.co.uk - better than your mum's face, Fri 6 Jan 2012, 14:03, 1 reply)

Fry is usually worth a read, at least
The Liar was genius, though.
( Squilliam but . . . . *I'm* the one with all the talent!, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 4:10, closed)