Holiday reading

Just returned from a week's holiday at the Likya Residence and Spa in Kalkan (thoroughly recommended if you're looking to get away from it all - see Flickr set) and thought it was high time I ended my three-month blogging hiatus with a gentle re-entry post. So, with a nod to Roo Reynolds, who's 'recent reading' post format I've cribbed, here are the books which kept me occupied on the sun lounger:

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - probably not a book that I would have picked off the shelf in a bookstore (the cover gives some of the wrong signals - the likely subject of a future blog post), but a loan from my brother, whose literary recommendations I trust - a trust rewarded with a thoroughly engrossing novel exploring the universality of love and loss through a rich tapestry of interwoven narrative strands and the birth of an irresistible hero in the shape of private investigator Jackson Brodie. I already have the next in the series (One Good Turn) lined up on the shelf.

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody - an eminently readable, if ultimately inconsequential, memoir from the writer of 2007 indie hit, Juno, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, serving up enough memorable characters and anecdotes to justify the 200+ pages.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - probably still best-known as co-editor of Boing Boing (but better known to me as Mr Alice Taylor), Cory conjures a hugely engaging narrator and protagonist in Marcus Yallow, a 17-year old tech-head, battling to outsmart the Department of Homeland Security as it clamps down on civil liberties in the wake of a major terrorist attack. The book was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license and can be downloaded from Cory's site. Go do it.