I'm looking for some new stuff to read in my spare time. Can anyone recommend any good books they've read recently. My taste is pretty broad, but I like novels that play around with genre, well written short stories, and a bit of popular science.
I'm going to recommend Timothy Mo's "Renegade or Halo" (the actual title has a superscript 2 after halo) as one of the best books I've read recently. Story-wise it's a story about a mixed race Filipino guy who gets involved in gang violence and has to get out of the country. He basically moves around the world, but I'm not really doing it justice. Here's the Amazon.co.uk summary:
"Renegade or Halo2 is narrated by Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, a black Filipino who size and skin colour owe more to his anonymous American GI father than his Filipina bar-girl mother. Lifted from the barrios of Mactan by an unlikely pair of Jesuits, Rey begins the most extraordinary of picaresque journeys across the globe, which takes him from the Philippines to Hong Kong, Thailand, the wonderfully evoked fictional Gulf state of Bohaiden, London and Cuba. Along the way Rey moves in and out of the high and low of Mo's vividly imagined world, from the frighteningly macho fraternities of Manila high society, to the stateless and the dispossessed who haunt the backstreets of the Gulf states and the fringes of London's metropolis. A true renegade, Rey never fully embraces any of the communities through which he moves, shrugging off the fear and racism he encounters with his own unique response, summed up by the first words in the book: "Love your enemies. Far better than your friends, the dolts define you."
Anybody read anything good recently? Doesn't have to be perfect, just worth a look.
