This week I’ve read two books that stuck in my mind. I picked up The Suspicions of Mr Whicher after seeing it discussed on Late Review. It was as engrossing as the panel suggested – keeping me fully occupied on a flight to and from the lovely Polish city of Krakow. The subject is a Victorian murder mystery that fascinated and inspired Wilkie Collins (leading to ‘The Moonstone’) and Charles Dickens, meticulously told by Kate Summerscale. Today Which resident of the locked house killed the toddler? is a mystery that can be solved with a little googling, but Summerscale takes the story further and comes up with chilling suggestions. I’ve been a big fan of the 33 1/3 series of short books about rock albums…

for the link to this video that she posted a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just caught (the blog’s updated even less frequently than the one you’re reading). This ought to be shown before every movie at my local Cineworld. That said, it must be an old video, as it doesn’t mention the special circle of hell reserved for people who send or receive text messages during movies, as if to say ‘I can’t be bothered to follow this, so I’m going to distract you, too’. Oh and do read Forkspit, soon, I believe, to be a book. But be warned, as with the video, explicit content yada yada yada

For thirty years, my favourite novelist has been the Irish writer, Brian Moore, who died in 1999. I love the way he never wrote the same kind of novel twice, his brilliance with writing female characters, his mastery of suspense and, most of all, his unshowy yet graceful, clean, tight prose style, which I would encourage any aspiring writer to learn from, as I did. Authors tend to drop into popular and critical decline in the years after their death, so I’ve been interested to see what happened to his reputation this century. Recently, a blog dedicated to discussing his novels appeared (they’re currently up to the out of print ‘Emperor of Ice Cream’, his most autobiographical novel) and another book blog, Asylum, has been…

I saw Leonard Cohen twice in the 70’s, once on my own in Liverpool and four years later with my then girlfriend in Birmingham. Both times, hearing about the tour, I posted off a cheque after the tickets went on sale. A few days later, great stalls tickets arrived. That was how it worked last century. Unless an act was absolutely huge, like Led Zeppelin, you could always get tickets. The only time I missed out was when i sent off for a Joni Mitchell ticket at a theatre in London, for a gig that was, anyway, subsequently cancelled. Never did see Joni. I’m going to see Melanie for the first time, next month. She was huge in the 70’s, probably bigger than Leonard Cohen…

When I wrote about iPod farming four weeks ago, I meant to tidy up a letter a day on my iTunes, a schedule which would have got me through my entire library by the time term starts again next week. But I didn’t reckon with a three day trip to Derbyshire or the length of certain letters. So, a confession, so far I’ve only go to M. Or, to be precise, ‘Ma’. Yesterday I cleared a few of Madonna’s lesser tracks. At the moment I’m in the middle of deleting one of several Manu Chao albums that I downloaded as research before going to see him last year (he was disappointing and exhausting. Mike and I left independently but at the same time, about 70…