I have a bad habit of continually ordering books and just stacking them unread in various precarious piles around my bedroom. With Christmas and my birthday now behind me this has now increased this stock of undiscovered worlds and interesting facts waiting to discover. To that end I am trying to do a around a hours reading a night, otherwise I just spend it watching TV or pissing around on the internet.

My plan is to have on the go one fiction and one non-fiction book at any one time. I have started to collate my mini library on the internet site Shelfari. See my profile here.

In the non-fiction corner we have the weighty tome that is David Marquand's political history, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy. I am only a quarter of the way into it so far, but it is an enjoyable and elegant book, in which Marquand identifies four broad ideologies that have influenced the development of British democracy since 1918.

On the fiction side of things I am reading a book I got for my birthday called The Island At The End of the World. I have only read the first few chapters so far, but it is an intriguing start; a man living with his three children on an island after a Great Flood, apparently instigated by God has washed the Earth clean of sinners. He is keen to keep his children from 'knowing the truth', but the book opens with him spotting signs on the horizon of someone else approaching in a boat, a prospect that has him gripped with fear.