From the paper mines

How's your Christmas going? I've not left the house in days, other than to fetch firewood and feed the animals (that probably sounds more Lark Rise to Candleford than it should - neither of these tasks requires more than two or three minutes outside). I'm boycotting the outside world until it snows. Yet again, the proper weather swirls around, leaving a large empty circle with me in the middle. Rather like life.

I have read three books in the last couple of days though - each very different from the last. First up was Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (that's a link to a free copy). It's a wonderful mix of sensation and whodunnit (or rather who did what and how) from the 1860s. There's lots to talk about in literary criticism terms, but it's also a cracking good read. A man abandons his wife to make his fortune in Australia so that he can reclaim her with honour. His friend's rich uncle marries a beautiful young lady with no past. There are deaths, fires, storms and pre-Raphaelites. Very, very satisfying.

Foster's And She Laughed No More is a fan's eye view of Stoke City's long-deserved promotion to the Premiership, achieved through a gritty determination never to allow excitement mar the purity of Route One football. That's what we like in Stoke: we're suspicious of the flamboyant, the arrogant and the easy. Graft's what you need, 'ard graft.

Finally, I read Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. It's a departure from his comic-literary pastiche novels, and I'm not sure about it. It's a dystopian future novel (big tick from me) set in a Britain in which degrees of colour-blindness form the basis of an apartheid system, a state with a dark secret (though actually it's one anyone who's read a political thriller or sf novel before will guess pretty much immediately). The novel is a mix of thought-experiment and rather good thriller. Fforde's improved on characterisation, and the usual puns and references are present, though less frenetically than usual. It is a successful novel - I read all 450 pages in an afternoon - but it needed a severe edit. Still, well worth reading.