Last orders

This is a brief post about the joy of a good book.

A few months ago, I bought Andy MacIntyre's 'Last Orders', which concerns a heavy-drinking member of the music industry's successful attempt to give up drinking for a year. It starts off well enough but after around halfway, it just descends into a rather mundane diary.

I always like to carry a book with me but this one just wasn't getting read. Well, maybe three or four pages at a time. Normally, I have more than one book on the go but this one tome seemed to suppress my reading. In the end, last weekend, I determined to finish it, which I did, pushing my way through the last fifty pages.

On Monday morning, I had to head to London so I picked up Tony Visconti's autobiography, which my friend John recently gave to me. I read it in a day. GOD but it was wonderful to get lost in a book again, to see that there were two minutes until the tube train would arrive and get the book out for a quick read. It was a complete return to that type of reading where it feels like the book is telling you a story, like it's an effortless experience.

And then on Tuesday I picked up this book, coincidentally also called 'Last Orders'. The film is one of my favourites, starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Tom Courtnay and Ray Winstone. I mentioned this on Twitter a while ago and someone said how good the book was. And it is! It's so good that I've already recommended it to someone even though I haven't finished it.

But I nearly have. I am officially back in love with reading :-)