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 policy for eBooks, which works well.
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.
This section is so that I can make notes on whatever I'm currently reading, before I know which of the above categories it's going to fall into.
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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