T_S_A_R

there is no one set or defined morality. everyone has to find the moral code that is right for them. the last book i read was cat and mouse by gunter grass. it's a man telling the story of his childhood friend 'the great mahlke' and their exploits as school boys in danzig/gdansk during ww2. it's not near the level of the tim drum which is grass's masterpiece but it's still pretty damn good. the book is almost two stories running parralel, one being the antics of the teenage boys and the other dealing with how people who are percieved to be different can be alienated from society. it's a nice understated story which is well written and equally funny and sad, i'll definitely be getting the third part of the trilogy the next i time pillage amazon. i'm reading lolita now. paedo-tastic.

that's like getting move from clyde to man utd, an incredible jump in class. i've had a look through that dragon tattoo book a few times but i only have to read a couple of paragraphs to know it's not for me. the wind up bird chronicle is amazing, it's probably my favourite murakami novel. i won't spoil it by going into details though. the translation of his most recent work 1Q84 is out in october which is quite exciting

when murray was 2 and djokovic was 4. djokovic had a quite a lean period when he was struggling with fitness and some dubious injuries as well having some terrible troubles with his eyesight where he seemed to be going blind every time he was struggling in a match. he's left all the that behind and has been electric this season. i believe it is possible for murray to click in the same way.

i do follow tennis all year round and i've seen him beat the top 3 often enough to think it is perfectly feasible for him to win a grand slam. it wasn't that long ago that he had clearly surpassed djokovic and looked what has happened since. nothing is set in stone.

if murray plays as well as he did in the rome semi he has a right good chance. i'm back at work today after being on holiday for a wee while, disastrous timing. the bird's final should be pretty good tomorrow, both semis were decent for a change.

i haven't heard of that book before. has irving lived in india? he's not the first (or the 100th) person i'd think of when it comes to the subcontinent. white tiger by avinda adiga very deservedly won the booker a few years ago and is very insightful about how the lower castes fit into modern india. i've also got a fine balance by rohoin mistry waiting to be read which is supposed to be very good. i'm not actually a fan of brautigan. the opposite in fact, watermelon sugar was a major test to finish. i was considering throwing it out a train window at one point it was annoying me so much. i've been on a bit of a war splurge recently... general of the army of the dead by ismail kadare: an italian general and a priest travel around albania trying to recover the bodies of italian soldiers killed during the italian occupation. the general has a bit of an ahab complex which only gets worse as his gruesome tasks wear him down but the more interesting thing about the novel was learning a bit about alabians and their history which i know next to nothing about. kadare paints a picture of a people out of time, hidden away from the rest of europe by their mountains, who are tied to their ancient cultures, violence and vendettas. i'm definitely going to read more of him. soldiers of salamis by javier ceraces: it's a book about the spanish civil war in 3 parts. the first part is a journalist in barcelona in the 90s deciding to write a novel about a falangist writer escaping a republican firing squad at the end of the war and how he stumbles on the information. the second part is the novel itself which is a fairly straight telling of the history of the falangists and the civil war the incident of the firing squad and escape. the third part is the most interesting, it takes place after the book has been published but the author feels it is unresolved. out of nowhere the chilean author roberto bolano appears and steers him towards a man who has a remarkable story which may truly complete the novel. i'm a big fan of bolano so it was a nice suprise to 'see' him in the novel, before he appears the author is trying to tell a 'factual story' but the inclusion of bolano and the events that follow it seem to indicate that an author must put something of himself into a novel and be free to add a few things to the story. the people's act of love by james meek: another novel about a few topics i didn't know anything about, the czech legion fighting their way home from WW1 by travelling east through siberia and a weird siberian religious sect. the czechs at the beginning of the russian revolution were the only organised fighting group in the country and ended up controlling the full trans siberian railway until trotsky got organised and raise the red army to fight them. the book is basically about a mysterious stranger coming out of the woods into a town controlled by a crazy czech officer and full of mental russian cultists with a warning about a cannibal who is chasing him. as ever all is not as it seems and things rapidly deteriorate. it reminded me of andrei makine but not quite as good and more relying on plot twists which aren't really my thing. it has lots of terrific moments but the full thing doesn't quite come together. the white guard by mikhail bulgakov: the story of the turbin family loosely based on bulgakov's own family during the battle for kiev during the russian civil war. it's a much more traditional novel than the master and margarita and not on the same level of greatness but it does a good job of tieing you to the family and their home while creating the sense of an entire city in chaos. it will probably always be in the shadow of M&M but it definitely stands on it's own as a classic of russian literature. it was turned into a play which stalin apparently loved and saw numerous times which is probably the reason bulgakov managed to almost finish his great work and die of natural causes rather than ending up purged and in the gulag.

i'm sure i've read a few books that begin mid sentence. american pyscho definitely ends mid sentence. i just thought it was some weird form experiment. even reading it the wrong way round it still wasn't as weird as borroughs, brautigan, stewart home or kathy acker. it just seemed like a different way of doing martin amis's backwards narrative trick. i really enjoyed that. she lays it on a bit heavy with rushdie-esque language but it's a good story that unfolds in an interesting way. i'm quite interested in india and caste though. i refuse to watch the film of the road as it won't come near the book. i totally agree that seeing the film first would ruin the book, i was shitting myself with every turn of the page reading the novel. confessions is a century ahead of it's time, maybe more. in my opinion it's up there with lanark as the greatest ever scottish novel and should be more widely read. hunter s. thompson's book hell's angels is the only thing i have read on them. barger is one of the few people who come across as being almost ok, the rest of them seem like total arseholes.

british music festivals are shite. i'm just back from primavera in barcelona though which is definitely not shite. great bands,a friendly crowd who are there for the music first of all, and city location so you can hire an apartment and have great dining options and interesting stuff do during the day before the bands start at 7. see also benicassim and sonar in spain, soundwave and garden in croatia, exit in serbia and melt in germany.

i think this could have been a classic grand tour if contador wasn't in it. the stages coming up could make for magic racing but i don't think we'll see anything different than we did today with big groups escaping and contador marking someone then attacking on the final climb. i'm getting quite excited about the prospect of lance getting the jail. i'm guessing that the press are going to have to wait until the investigation concludes before they can really start digging into this but whoever does lift the lid of it will have a hell of a story on their hands. i imagine there will be some very nervous people at the uci, aso, us cycling and especially nike. 70 million livestrong bands sold on fraudulent grounds i don't think even being buddies with g.w bush will get him off this one. hincappie giving evidence against lance is actually unbelievable. hincappie was his right hand man who rode himself into the ground for him year after year and was still helping him when they were on different teams. floyd landis is clearly a bit of a nutter and tyler hamilton lost any credibility he had after the 2004 games and being at phonak but big george is a loyal henchmen and if he has decided he can't lie to the grand jury then it's safe to assume that the garmin mob - vaughters, zabriskie and vandevelde - will be doing the same. lance is fucked now, the only question seems to be who he will take down with him. i can see levi being stupid enough to perjure himself and horner's late career resurgence marks out exactly where he stands but it's nike's reaction that interests me the most. us postal's nazi-esque evil effiency always used to do my head in. the perfect straight line of their team trial squad was the cycling equivalent of goose stepping. it's very odd to think that they have turned on their leader.

i think the majority of them are probably transfusing their own stored blood during races and micro dosing epo (and hgh for the sprinters) however i think the peloton is a lot cleaner than it has been which is reflected in the decreasing time gaps and later attacks. while i wouldn't be suprised if andy schleck was doping i think he left everything out on the road in last year's tour while contador still had a lot in the tank suggesting contador's program is on a totally different level to the rest of them. what contador over the weekend was like armstrong in his prime or ricardo ricco at his most blatant. he beat the full peloton on saturday on a small hll then left nibali and the rest of the favourites for dead on the first major climb. that shouldn't be possible.

i thought contador was taking the piss a bit over the weekend. at least in the last couple of tours he kidded on it was close when he could probably have destroyed andy on ventoux in 2009 and on the tourmalet in 2010. let's face it the guy is doped to the gills and he only got caught due to a stupid mistake with contaminated blood. i've got a feeling he thinks he's going to lose his case and is just going to go out and dominate the giro and the tour before he gets his ban.

has anyone else seen the leaked uci doping suspect list? every rider was ranked 0-10 with 0 being clean. there are some quite interesting ratings but it was no suprise denis menchov got a 9, his performances are extremely suspect. from super clean sky geraint thomas had a 6 rating and bradley wiggins a 5. if it turns out the british olympic track cycling gold rush was achieved by doping i may well die of laughter.

i can't agree with that. for me the stages that define grand tours are the ones with top climbers going over multiple difficult climbs. that's when you see the real selections. the giro has been extremely entertaining over the past couple of years but hasn't had anything to match the saxo-astana-radioshack drama of the tour. stage 17 from 2009 when hushovd went on a solo escape then the schlecks and contador controverisally broke away on the final climb while lance and wiggins toiled. 2010 tour stage 8 when armstrong lost it and astana stepped it up leaving only the elite climbers at the end. andy schleck and samu sanchez got away from contador at the end. i don't think you need dirt tracks or impossible inclines to make a good race just a challenging parocours. i can' t think of a recent giro stage which matches either of those two for drama.

holy shit. there is a rabo rider down who looked to be getting cpr but he seems to be moving. edit - shlager the guy who was in trouble is apparently ok but will have to abandon. the stage was won by rabo's peter weening. quite an entertaining stage but the deabte about whether the giro is becoming too gimmicky will continue.

the eurosport commentator is currently loving the fact that bikes are wobbling about on the dust tracks and riders are using their legs and feet to get round corners and laughing that a police bike slid out. surely considering what happened with weylandt it's a bit tasteless. nibali is going for it on the descent here though. he might get some time.

i was gutted to get a text about this at work today. we're so used to seeing riders descend at crazy speeds that you tend to forget how dangerous pro cycling really is. the spanish rabo guy that fell off the cliff two years ago had a lucky escape, weylandt wasn't as fortunate. i read earlier that his girlfriend is five months pregnant. i really hope she didn't see the pictures today.

i love billy parham.

'all the pretty horses', along with 'no country for old men', is considered to be his crowd pleaser. i love the full border trilogy and am a huge mccarthy fan. what is it about it you are having a hard time with? a great book and a great writer. i stumbled upon a collection of essays about slaughterhouse five compiled harold bloom on google books. there was quite an interesting one about the influence of the vietnam war on slaughterhouse five and gravity's rainbow. some of it was over reaching but most of it was good stuff. recently i've read warlock a western by oakley hall written in the 50s. it's far more complex than your average western and every character in it is shown as a real person rather than the heroic and villianous archetypes you expect in this kind of narrative, it's actually a lot clser to deadwood than the westerns of his time. the impression i got from it is that the conflict in the west wasn't between good guys and bad guys but between people who wanted to live by their own rules and those who wanted to civilize the region and profit from it. the book is about how the town - warlock - attempts to introduce law and order into their anarchic society and how it effects the community and law men themselves. everyone in the novel speaks in a strange victorian/western hybrid voice which is bit unrealistic but adds a sense of drama to every conversation. all in all its a really good novel which probably should be better known. i then read invisible cities by italo calvino. it's an odd wee book which consists of marc polo describing imaginary cities to the kublai khan and them occasionaly debating existence. each description is quite thought provoking and contains an idea about life, death, time, memory and identity and gives you something to think about. it's probably a bit overdone and pretentious but because it's so short i didn't mind.

recently i have read the master and margarita by mikhail bulgakov. i think it's probably the 4th or 5th time i've read it but it's also the first time in about 5 years andi found it as funny and as interesting as ever. there are three main narrative strands one following the fortunes of the title characters as they cut a deal with the devil, another relating the chaos caused by the devil and his lunatic band in stalinist moscow and a third which relates an alternative and more realistic version of the easter story centred mainly around pontius pilate. i could quite happily enthuse about every aspect of this book but i think my favourite thing is the narrative voice, he is completely charming and lyrical and you feel as if you're listening to someone tell you a fantastic story. after that i picked up to have and have not by ernest hemingway. it's another book i read years ago but i didn't remember it as well as the bulgakov. it's classic hemingway, very easy to read with large helpings of racism and violence. it's set in the florida keys during the great depression and focuses on a local man who makes his living taking tourists out fishing but as the crash hits is forced into more and more shady dealings to make money. it reads as much as a social history as a novel as it documents the poverty and hunger of the local people contrasted to the conceited excesses of the rich tourists. although it's a very enjoyable book due to the heavy handed politicism it's not up there with my favourite hemingway works. it does make you want to get out doing some serious sport fishing though. i went on a bit of an amazon splurge after that and bought 16 books which will keep me going til the autumn i'd imagine. currently reading warlock which is a cowboy/western novel, pretty good so far.

jeezo this tour is getting longer by the day. they went away at the end of october and were home by the end of march. they had nine days off before the quarter, it's hardly the tour de france is it? pakistan are playing pretty well just now and they haven't played a home series in years. also there was no excuses cast up by australia in 2009 when they went on tour in the middle of april and didn't get home until the middle of november.

i'm very keen to. as i've said i've read 'the crying of lot 49' and i'll probably read 'v' later this year. but i'm glad to get a break from it now and return to the world of paragraphs, sentence structure and something resembling a linear narrative. 'gravity's rainbow' was a fair old commitment, i couldn't read it on the bus/train, i couldn't read it with a hangover or after a heavy weekend, i couldn't read it late at night and whenever i picked it up i inevitably ended up having to reread the last bits i had already read to get back into the flow and i was constantly flicking back the way to find characters that had reappeared after a couple of hundred pages. i've read some reviews of 'against the day' and it seems quite similar in scope to 'gravitys rainbow' but bigger so i think i'll save that for next year unless i end up in hospital, plaster or the jail.

not at all. most editions have quite detailed annotations which explain the russian references you probably wouldn't get otherwise which is handy but it's very funny and quite straightforward. as long as you know the tiniest amount about the politcal purges and culture of fear and informants in the 1930s in moscow you'll be fine.

i finally finished gravity's rainbow by thomas pynchon. it's a 900 page monster with incredibly dense and complex prose featuring aprox. 400 characters. it's a bit of a slog in some places but most of the time it's very, very funny and extremely readable. this is my second pynchon novel and like 'the crying of lot 49' it's brimming with references and allusions and it encourages a bit of research into the wide range of subjects addressed. at times it's overwhelming and i'm sure that a lot of it went completely over my head but it's a novel which you find yourself very easily immersed in and captivated by the scope and achievement of. if there is a plot it's pretty hard to describe. it's set in europe in 1944 and 1945 as the war concludes, mainly in london and the south east during the v2 rockets attacks and in germany during the period when germany didn't legally exist anymore. it's pretty similar to 'moby dick' in that it does feel like several different books in different styles all merged into one although it's far more abstract than anything melville tried in his epic. instead of a white whale this novel is centred around a mythical v2 rocket called the schwarzgerat and the search for information on this rocket leads a very odd cast of characters in to some extremely strange situations. everyone in the novel is either a complete deviant or comprised in some way and there are lot of very peculiar goings on with every character seemingly being somehow plotted against in a game they have very little idea they are playing. reading pynchon has an extra dimension that most novels don't have due to the fact he doesn't do any interviews and to the best of my knowledge has never spoken about his work. parts of the book make me think it must be partly inspired by lsd and he was in the right place at the right time to have been part of that in the 1960s but i guess there will never be any serious critical biography of him due to his desire for privacy. i do enjoy reading interviews and profiles of novelists but i think with pynchon due to the hyper paranoiac vibe that his writing creates and the general weirdness of it all his silence on it is fitting. as much as i think it's a work of genius i'll be glad to be rereading some more straight forward old favourites next. i'm going to reread the 'master and margarita' to see how much rushdie ripped off from it in 'satanic verses' then batter into some hemingway and kerouac as i've abandoned them for far too long. gravity's rainbow is also a musical and features a lot of songs throughout. this is my favourite, the origin of a characters genitals come into question and the chorus intone... 'Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own – Just a big playful boy of a bone . . . With a stout purple head Sticking up from the bead, Where the girlies all played Telephone Te-le-phone But They came through the hole in the night, And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight--- Out of sight… Now he sighs all alone, With a heartbroken moan, For the Pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn!

the windies have suffered an epic arse collapse. 100-8 after 37 overs the now. surely even pakistan can't mess this up. the west indies looked good at the start of the competition as well but since they've made the knockout stage they haven't seemed to give a f**k. against england they started of batting like a 20/20 match then pulled back into it then the tail enders just threw their wickets away. against india they lost from 146-2 chasing 230 odd. this collapse is just a continuation of those ones. they have some good players coming through but lack leadership and direction, there's no way a captain like smith or ponting would have overseen three batting performances like this.

lightweight.