Read Ten Years in the Tub for Free Online

community festival. Leadville is a biography of the A40, one of London’sdreariest arterial roads, and the desperately unpromising nature of the material somehow persuades me that the book has to be great. And I’d like to point out that The Poet and the Murderer is the second cheap paperback about a literary hoax that I’ve bought since I started writing this column. I cannot really explain why I keep buying books about literary hoaxes that I never seriously intend to read. It’s a quirk of character that had remained hitherto unrevealed to me.
    I picked up the Styron in a remainder shop while I was reading the Yates biography—Yates spent years adapting it for a film that was never made. Genome and Six Days of War I bought on a visit to the London Review of Books ’ slightly scary new shop near the British Museum. I’m not entirely sure why I chose those two in particular, beyond the usual attempts at reinvention that periodically seize one in a bookstore. (When I’m arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I’m going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. “This is really who I am,” I’ll tell him. “I’m actually much more of a Genome guy than an Arsene Wenger guy. And if you let me in, I’m going to prove it, honest.”) I got the CDs at the LRB shop, too. They’re actually pretty amazing: the recordings are taken from the British Library Sound Archive, and all the writers featured were born in the nineteenth century—Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Yeats, Kipling, Wodehouse, Tolkien, and, astonishingly, Browning and Tennyson, although to be honest you can’t really hear Browning, who was recorded at a dinner party in 1889, trying and failing to remember the words of “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” Weirdly, everyone sounds the same, very posh and slightly mad.
    I read about a third of Bush at War , and I may well return to it at some stage, but the mood that compelled me to begin it passed quickly, and in any case it wasn’t quite what I wanted: Woodward’s tone is way too matey and sympathetic for me. I did, however, learn that George W. Bush was woken up by the Secret Service at 11:08 p.m. on 9/11. Woken up! He didn’t work late that night? And he wasn’t too buzzy to get off to sleep? See, if that had been me, I would have been up until about six, drinking and smoking and watching TV, and I would have been useless the next day. It can’t be right, can it, that world leaders emerge not through their ability to solve global problems, but to nod off at the drop of a hat? Most decent people can’t sleep easily at night, and that, apparently, isprecisely why the world is in such a mess.

November 2003 / January 2004
    BOOKS BOUGHT :
    Â Â Â Â Â     Moneyball —Michael Lewis
    Â Â Â Â Â     Saul and Patsy —Charles Baxter
    Â Â Â Â Â     Winner of the National Book Award —Jincy Willett
    Â Â Â Â Â     Jenny and the Jaws of Life —Jincy Willett
    Â Â Â Â Â     The Sirens of Titan —Kurt Vonnegut
    Â Â Â Â Â     True Notebooks —Mark Salzman
    BOOKS READ :
    Â Â Â Â Â     No Name —Wilkie Collins
    Â Â Â Â Â     Moneyball —Michael Lewis
    Â Â Â Â Â     George and Sam: Autism in the Family —Charlotte Moore
    Â Â Â Â Â     The Sirens of Titan —Kurt Vonnegut
    F irst, an apology. Last month, I may inadvertently have given the impression that No Name by Wilkie Collins was a lost Victorian classic (the misunderstanding may have arisen because of my loose use of the phrase “lost Victorian classic”), and that everyone should rush out and buy it. I had read over two hundred pages when I gave you my considered verdict; in fact, the last four hundred and