Reading - May 2026

Alex by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor (1987 - 2024)

I first came across Alex in The Independent, probably in the late 80s or early 90s. It was always a very sharp satire on City life and I've bought a few books from the early 2000s. Finding out that it was still being published as late as 2024 was a bit of a surprise - nearly forty years is some going! Luckily the cartoons - yes, all 9,021 of them - are on the Alex site and although it took me a while to go through them, I enjoyed it.

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (2025)

A very 2020s take on a 1950s relationship.

Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks (1998)

Gently amusing re-read that is a bit dated now perhaps.

The Sure Thing by Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts (second draft, 1983)

The Sure Thing is an little gem of a film that doesn't get much recognition. Having just watched the film and then the "Making of", I was curious to read the script. This second draft is fascinating because, although it contains most of the same scenes as the eventual film, most of the dialog is completely different; the characterisation is inconsistent, it's not clear why either of the main characters would like each other and in general it's a noticeably worse film. From things mentioned casually in the featurette, I suspect that Rob Reiner, then right at the beginning of his directing career, basically rewrote the script, or at least heavily guided the authors. It often seems unfair to talk of a "Rob Reiner film" but given the similarities in tone between this and When Harry Met Sally a few years later (which was written by Nora Ephron but developed in collaboration with Reiner) it seems fair to give him a reasonable amount of credit here.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (1933)

Having just watched the TV dramatisation from 2010 (with David Suchet), I wanted to read the book again to remind myself of the plot and see how close the adaptation came. Well, it's pretty close: the book has less action, which is fitting for a locked-room mystery, and although the solution is now well known, it isn't any less impressive from a story telling point of view.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis (2010)

Having just re-watched the film (twice!), I wanted to re-read the book. It's ten years since I first did, and the story it tells is still just as shocking. I don't fully understand the financial products involved (although I'm slightly mollified that the same is true for all but a handful of people in the world), but it doesn't stop this being a fascinating read. That said, while we hear from the people who figured out that the whole sub-prime market was a house of cards waiting to fall, we don't hear from anyone who built it. Were they just kidding themselves or did they understand what was going on but just didn't care? I suspect, and Lewis hints, that they won't or are legally bound not to discuss it, but it would be good to know. Lewis weaves a compelling tale and concludes, as any rational person surely must, that the issue, while complex, is not unsolvable. But there has to be a political will to solve it, and that's the thing that was - and is - really lacking. Why is that absent? Now there's a question.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis (1989)

One of the themes that strike me from both this and The Big Short is the way that the money markets (is that the right term?) too often end up being the tail that wags the dog of actual industry. The sub-prime crisis was caused by the banks' demands for more and more mortgages that could be packaged up into bonds, and similarly here we learn that junk bonds were so profitable that investment banks, having run out of them, artificially created more by engineering corporate takeovers that would then end up being financed by more junk bonds. I'm sure I'm over-simplifying things, but there's an imbalance here surely. Anyway, Michael Lewis is as entertaining as always while maintaining a sane view into the madness of the 80s (a madness that is mild compared to what later occurred, of course).

Going Home by Stacy Finz (2014)

Our online library finally has the last two books in this series and so, as a reminder, I re-read this first one. No surprises of course, but still a sweet and wholesome romance.

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (2015)

The last in the trilogy of Michael Lewis books I got a week ago and the first I hadn't read before, Flash Boys (he does give good title) is just as interesting, this time about the next way that the financial markets conspired to make money at the expense of ordinary people - high frequency trading (HFT). Again, though, in taking the perspective of the people who uncovered the shenanigans (those who then founded the stock exchange IEX), we're left with the impression of shadowy demons behind the scenes who created the mess in the first place, but who we never hear from. Someone - lots of people - figured out how HFT could work and made billions from it. I can understand why many of them wouldn't be keen to talk publicly but surely enough would to make the genesis of the story tellable. As it is, this is like coming in to the story when it's about to end; we find out what happened but not really who or how. Lewis makes it excellently readable though, as always.