Books I have been reading recently

While I spend most of my time of trading-related data bashing, I have still been able to do a little bit of other reading over the past month or so.

First up, Joe Ambrose's Gimme Danger: The Story of Iggy Pop. The early account of the Stooges and the Bowie years in the 1970s were the best sections of this, but then the story is at its best then as well. He was surprisingly positive about many of Iggy's rather poor 1980s albums (Party may be one of the worst albums ever made by any one), even Avenue B, which sold only 30,000 copies but which I rather like. The book finishes with the early Stooges reunion prior to Ron Asheton's recent death and so doesn't cover the James Williamson Stooges that we saw In Carcassonne. Ambrose is also not above making the odd snide comment about Iggy, which seems well deserved.

More seriously, I have ploughed through Anthony Beevor's Berlin - his account of the Red Army's attack on the city at the end of WWII. I read his book on Stalingrad a few years back and have been slowly re-watching the tv series The World at War, so this has fitted in with a general theme of the last couple of months. I didn't know much about this aspect of the war until now

Les serious is Pamela Des Barres' Let's spend the night together and Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life, neither of which are great works but have provided a certain light-heartedness after a long day of work, when I haven't fancied anything else. Groupies have not figured much in my career, it must be said.

Then onto Grace Lee Whitney's The Longest Trek: my tour of the Galaxy. What is there not to like about this? She was the first girl I ever had a real crush on and Yeoman Rand remains one of the great Star Trek characters.

One of the sexiest tv characters ever in my view!

And my current reading? Beevor's Stalingrad.