I have always read a wide variety of books, from an early age. I am no longer at what anyone would call an early age.
These days the main themes of these books are (in no particular order) crime thrillers, science fiction, biographies, fantasy, cryptography, and travel.
Examples of the authors I enjoy (this time in alphabetical order) are Arthur C Clarke, Ben Elton, Blake Crouch, Bruce Schneier, Derren Brown, Douglas Adams, Gerald Kilby, Isaac Asimov, Jeremy Clarkson, John Cramer, Mark Lawrence, Michael Crichton, Michael Palin, Neal Stephenson, Paul Davies, Peter James, Stephen Fry, Terry Pratchett and William Gibson.
I'm not saying I really like everything every one of those people have written - some have produced stuff I like, and stuff I don't get on so well with; some have produced very little, but what there is, I think is great.
I haven't yet found anything by Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett which I don't like (and sadly I don't think I'm going to find anything new published by either); John Cramer has only published two books that I know of (one is good, the other is excellent); Isaac Asimov published so much that I don't think I shall ever read all of it (and it's all been good so far except what he wrote with his wife Janet); and Neal Stephenson and William Gibson both fall into the "some is really good, some isn't" category for my taste. Peter James used to be in my "definite" category, until I started reading more of his earlier works, written before he settled on the Roy Grace character. He now falls into the "most is good, but not all" category.
I pretty consistently dislike books which dart about from one timeline to another.
Unless you are writing a book about time travel, in which case it's not only reasonable, but pretty much expected, please avoid it.
If you have to, write a preface or foreword about things which occur well in advance of the main story, and if you really feel you have to, write a preface or foreword about things which occur some time after the main story, but other than that, please write from the start to the end in as reasonably continuous a way as possible. It's just the way life works.
I understand that you might want to jump from one set of characters to another between chapters, and their actions might to some extent overlap, but that's fine - you can't write about everybody simultaneously. What's not good, though, is jumping about between things that happened 20 years ago, and the present day, and then back again, to the same or different groups of people, continuously, throughout the book.
If you know of readers who say "Please don't write a linear story! Keep it changing between then and now, and maybe some other time too, just to keep things interesting", then by all means pander to their needs, but please put a warning on the cover that this is a non-linear story.
To summarise: Life happens one thing after another. There may (in fact, almost certainly will) be other things happening at the same time which you don't know about, and you only find out about later, but as far as you (the character in the story) are concerned, that finding out happens later, so if you (the author) are writing about people doing realistic things, please keep that in mind.
I'm really impressed with Amazon.co.uk's eBook pricing policy. I have no idea what the policy actually is, but the result is that every day there are plenty of good eBooks available for £1 each or less, and it's often possible to find them priced at around £5 - £10 on one day and 99p the following day, and then sometime later (maybe the day after, maybe a week later), they return to the original £5 - £10.
Because of this (and the fact that some books, such as collected works of historical authors like H G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell) are often completely free of charge, I've bought 224 eBooks from Amazon in the two years since early 2020, at a total cost of £128. Even Tesco (where I've been buying my paperbacks for the past ~25 years) can't match that. Plenty of my purchases have been books published completely recently (up to within the past month), so you can get very good deals on very new books, if you look for them.
Unless you feel that "I want this book now", you can get really good deals on good books with just a little bit of patience.
You'll find most of the link references to the books below are for Amazon.co.uk, largely for this reason.
The only problem I've been encountering with Amazon since around mid-2023 is they're increasingly using a DRM encryption system which my copy of Kindle for PC can't handle (and upgrading it doesn't work on my computer), so there are more and more books being published which I can no longer read.
On the other hand at least Amazon has a really simple returns and refund policy for eBooks, which works well.
Amazon invites people to write reviews of their books - you don't have to have bought the book through Amazon, but the reviews show whether or not the reviewer did.
However, Amazon is not keen on negative reviews (presumably because they put potential future purchasers off buying something from Amazon), and if you write too many reviews of the books you don't like, you may end up seeing a message:
| We apologise but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. |
|---|
You can still read my reviews below, of course :)
When you buy a book in a shop, you own that copy of that book, and you can do what you want with it - read it, burn it, keep it on a shelf, bury it, give it to someone else, sell it - whatever you like.
When you buy a Kindle eBook on Amazon, you might also think that you own that copy of that book, but you don't. You can read it on your Kindle device, or using Kindle for PC. But Amazon can delete that book (or all your books) from your Kindle device or from Kindle for PC. You can't burn or bury an eBook, but (if you follow Amazon's rules) you can't give it to someone else or sell it either, but your copy of that eBook will only work on your Kindle device/s or your installation/s of Kindle for PC.
If you don't follow Amazon's rules, and take the attitude that since you bought the eBook, you can then do what you want with it, you can convert it from Amazon's digitally restricted AZW format to the open ePub format, and read it on all sorts of devices and applications; you can also give it away to someone else (of course, you have to delete it from your devices when you do this, otherwise there are now two books when before there was only one, which is clearly not right).
Anyone who's been using Kindle for PC up until the end of June 2026, and has not converted their books to some format such as ePub has now found out that Kindle for PC doesn't work any more - the library is empty - Amazon has cleared out your bookshelves. I regard this as a splendid example of why end users should not trust cloud service providers - the service providers has complete and total control over whether you have access to what would normally be regarded as your property.
If Amazon decides to disable your access to the books you bought from them, and you didn't make sure you somehow had local copies (which Kindle for PC does not provide - once it stops working, you can no longer even see which books you bought, let alone read them), then you've simply lost them, and Amazon doesn't give a damn. They've taken your books away and you can't get them back.
You can still read the books if you buy a Kindle device, or use their Kindle for Web interface, but neither of those give you actual copies of the books - they give you the ability to view them. It's the difference between playing with your dog and being able to give to a new owner when you need to, and viewing a stuffed dog in a glass cabinet - it looks the same, and you can see it whenever you want, but only if you go to where it's kept, and you can't interact with it.
These books are great; just read them. I don't need to say more than that.
These books are also good, but I wanted to say a bit more about them. Your should read these as well.
These books are okay, so long as you can put up with some oddities. Read them once you've run out of the ones above.
Read these at your own risk.
Don't bother reading these. Just thank me for doing it for you and saving you the bother. Somehow I got to the end of them, but I wish I hadn't.
Don't even consider reading these. They range from bad to terrible, and include unpleasant.
I'm amazed these are still even being published. They're worth neither the paper nor the electrons.
These are some books I've read but didn't review at the time.
I've bought plenty of books on Amazon but haven't yet got around to reading all of them. They should all gradually move to one of the lists above in due course, but then again the list here will also get bigger as I buy more books…
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