The Kowloon Diaries

Mitchell, David - Black Swan Green

The last book I read was about a childhood that had nothing in common with mine, this one is practically identical. Jason, the 13-year-old narrator of Black Swan Green lives in an English village in 1982. He watches the Rockford Files, eats Angel Delight, and listens to his older sister's copy of Fleetwood Mac. (I used to listen to the copy owned by the older brother of a friend - we had to sneak into his bedroom when he was out and put it back in precisely the same place so he wouldn't notice.) He's lower middle class – not rough enough to have credibility with the working classes, not posh enough to have respect from the middle classes. Maybe I'm getting old, but reliving adolescence from the perspective of middle age felt very strange to me. That world existed once and it doesn't any more, so what happened to it? It just disappeared, like the Falklands war and the gypsies and Angel Delight.

Definitely, a great book and his best so far. It's like a prequel to Number9Dream where you find out what David did before he went to Japan. That's something else that resonates with me – my life is clearly in two parts, before Hong Kong and after. The longer I stay here, the more the place before seems foreign.

The lost art of reading

An article from the LA Times in which the author is moaning about not being able to read with the distractions of technology. It gets more interesting when he talks about reading as an act of engagement with the world and other people. Reading is so often described as an escape, but it’s the opposite. He writes: ‘Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.’

Lethem, Jonathan - Fortress of Solitude

I've been away, sort of. I've spent three weeks in Brooklyn, without leaving home. I've been engrossed in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which is about a white boy, Dylan Ebdus, growing up in a black ghetto in the years before Brooklyn became gentrified.

Apart from being white and once being a kid, Dylan's life has nothing in common with mine. I don't deal with gangs of bullying black kids on my way to school every day. My mother didn't abandon me, and my father isn't a reclusive artist. My best friend's dad isn't hasbeen singer turned cokehead. I've never taken hard drugs. I've never broken into a prison, or out of one, or even been in one. There's no point of contact between him and me that I can see, but I've been living his life for three weeks and loving every minute of it.

This total absorption in another world is what makes books better than cinema. Special effects can't hold a candle to a really well written, really long book. It's the ultimate virtual experience. You can live someone else's whole life, not a couple of hours, and you live it from inside their head. And because a book like this can't be read at one sitting, it takes on a life in your head in between readings. True, you need a writer as excellent as Lethem to pull it off. Not many books are as detailed as this one. But when a book is good it wipes the floor with any movie I've ever seen.

So, I've finished the book now and I'll miss Brooklyn. Technically I have been there. A week before 9/11, years before our kids were born, I accompanied S to New York on a business trip. We had dinner and saw a show with one of his customers, who then took us on a tour of Manhattan, which culminated in a drive across the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn't stop, just turned around and came back again.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Part travelogue, part personal memoir and part writing manual from the Japanese master. I was fascinated to see how Murakami connects sport and writing, which is something I've been thinking about recently too. I think, in fact, the point is that if you take on any activity seriously – whether it's sport, or art, or running a business - then you will require determination, guts and, above all, strenuous effort, and that's basically his point. Writing is hard labour, he says. It's a slightly depressing and slightly comforting conclusion.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

I attempted to read this because of all the hype, and then I gave up and because it was so stupid, cliched and predictable that I couldn't stand it. I don't like to not finish a book, but in this case I made an exception because life is simply too short to waste on utter nonsense. However, since then it has been on my mind and I have found myself at odd moments wondering what happens to the characters. Yes I know I said it was stupid and predictable, and yet … I'm drawn to it. This is really annoying. Now I'll have to go back and finish it.

What is Your Dangerous Idea? Edited by John Brockman

I've been dipping in and out of this collection of essays written by Today's Leading Thinkers who are, apparently, people like Daniel C Dennett, Susan Blackmore and Stephen Pinker. It's not bad, but I've heard most of these arguments before. The authors agonise over stuff like the non-existence of the soul, human inequality, eugenics, free will, consciousness, and the general pointlessnes of the universe. Actually it was quite depressing. Today's Leading Thinkers seem to do a lot of worrying and don't have a lot of answers.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

A delicious morsel of a book from Murakami. The action takes place over a single night in Tokyo. The story moves from an all night restaurant to a love hotel, to a mysterious girl sleeping and being watched by strange man. It's the kind of story that seems random until you get to the end and you see that everything was leading up to the perfect conclusion.

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Roberston

A great Scottish book about a minister who doesn't believe in god, and then gets kidnapped by the devil. Very funny and full of truth, and the setting in the northeast of Scotland (at one point he runs the Elgin marathon) made me feel quite homesick.

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

Nine short stories which loosely feature comic book superheroes in one way or another. I love the concept, and Lethem's execution exceeded all my expectations. In some stories the characters are pretending to be heroes, in others they are actually comic book characters come to life. It's quirky, offbeat and often absurd. Lethem seems to be following wherever his pen takes him, and the results are touching and and brilliant fun at the same time

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

It's not often you find a book that is really, truly funny and a serious literary novel at the same time. It says everything that needs to be said about the state of the world today: fools leading fools with foolish ideas. I completely fell in love with mad, bad Ignatius J Reilly.