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Rather unsurprisingly I haven’t been reading an awful lot lately. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Peter Carey’s My Life As A Fake slipped by in those few weeks that, like a fake Christmas Eve, left me going to sleep all excited and waking up all disappointed, until one day it was 4 in the morning and then suddenly I was in hospital. I’ve started reading again now (Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint) though and new reviews will be forthcoming.

To do the two books mentioned above justice would be pretty hard, but Oryx and Crake (as I remember it) was a real page turner - Margaret Atwood at her sci-fi finest. As usual the premise is one of absolute quality and the story telling superb. A judge of a good book is the ending (it’s rare for a book to be great in my opinion if the ending isn’t perfect) and this one doesn’t disappoint. At all.

My Life As A Fake didn’t have quite the same impact. It was a cracking story, but I don’t think I was giving it my entire attention. Perhaps someone else could read it and let me know what I missed as I turned the pages without really concentrating!