John Vannai - Read in 2011

John - 28, English, yorkshireman living in Bath. I confess that I suffer occasionally from milk-guilt (I have a house-mate who shops more efficiently than I), I also invented the hyphen. Just made that last part up but I assure you it’s true.

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.

Wait, no; my absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees — which you might think is mean of me. Of course you’d be right, but not to worry, I was lying: it’s not my favourite piece of information after all.

My absolute, supreme favourite piece of information is this: there is a large kink in the Trans-Siberian Railway because when the tsar decreed that the Trans-Siberian Railway should be built, he drew on a map with a ruler where the decreed tracks should run. The ruler had a nick in it.

Read in 2011

John Fowles.

· The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Daphne Du Maurier.

· The Flight of the Falcon

Ian McEwan.

· Atonement

Herman Hesse.

· The Steppenwolf

Julian Barnes.

· Flaubert’s Parrot

Kurt Vonnegut.

· Slaughterhouse 5

· Mother Night

· Timequake

Lin Cook & Others.

· Peter Cook Remembered

Kingsley Amis.

· Lucky Jim

John Steinbeck.

· Of Mice and Men

Robert McCrum.

· Wodehouse a Life

John Fowles.

· The Magus

J. K. Rowling.

· Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

· Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Charles Bukowski.

· Post Office

Martin Amis.

· London Fields

Jane Austen.

· Emma

Kurt Vonnegut.

· Hocus-Pocus

· A Man Without a Country

Ray Bradbury.

· Fahrenheit 451

John Fowles.

· The Collector

· The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Flann O’Brian.

· The Third Policemen

Vladimir Nabokov.

· Lolita

Martin Amis.

· Money