Arnaldur Indridarson, Silence of the Grave

Woo, Great Britain are up to 19 Gold Medals in this wonderful Olympics. I can now say I've raced with a gold medallist after Mo Farah's victory, as he's taken part in the last two London 10Ks I've raced in. He may have been storming past at the 8K mark while I was puffing along at the 2K, but it was still the same race. . . We've just put the house back on the market and have half a dozen viewings lined up - hopefully we'll have more luck selling this time. I've been able to flog all my Cable & Wireless shares due to the Vodafone takeover, so we have a wee bit of cash too, let's hope we're able to get a nice home to raise the kids in.

Silence of the Grave was really enjoyable, with the usual Scandi-noir elements of a dark secret from the past . The police did absolutely nothing though, it was a series of revelations to get to the truth. Quite different, but it's given me an appetite for more. It all now depends which particular books by authors with nordic names  I can get hold of in Woking Library or the Oxfam Bookshop. . .

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery and WG Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape

Umberto Eco is awfully clever, I think I missed most of the allusions and the significance in the book, about how the conspiracy theories that abounded in the 19th Century about Jews and Freemasons and the like were all the work of one man, a master forger, sewing confusion and acting as a double agent. Reminiscent of the dodgy WMD Dossier, and a worrying reminder of how easy it is to fool people into believing some horrific things. Read Hoskins again, but it really needs to be read with an OS map in hand. It would have been fantastic to sit with him and have him point out the many features that are obvious to him, but that the rest of us miss about bends in roads and field shapes. We did take F&L along to watch the cycling, it was an epic trek across Hoebridge Golf Course and the ridge above the water-meadows between Pyrford and Send Marsh, but we made it, and watched the peloton whizz past. The bunting is up, the only house on respectable York Road to bother; unlike the jubilee when all the posh houses had their flags out.

Andrew Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs

Mostly read on the train back down from Derby on the first sunny weekend of the summer, which up until now has broken records for rain. I've become slightly obsessed with the slugs and snails that are eating our flowers. Helen's been trying to get rid of the ones in the front room for years, but doesn't want to put poison down. I've been sneaking out with a maglite after dark each night and rooting around for the little shits. I started by squashing them on the drive, but there were so many it was starting to resemble a really nasty oyster omelette, so now I collect them in a bucked and hurl them into the wilds at the back of the garden.

Olympic fever has kicked in, it's all incredibly exciting at the moment with the first events on Saturday. I'm considering making bunting. It's more likely I'll be buying some cheap plastic stuff from Sainsbury's  half an hour before the Opening Ceremony. The Road race goes through Pyrford on Saturday, and we're considering taking F&L along to watch. They won't realise the significance, but it's nice to be part of such a wonderful event. It means trudging across the water meadows around the river Wey though, so I'm going to need to go out and scout the route; after all the rain a coracle might be the best form of transport.

Camilla Lackberg, The Hidden Child

More Scandinavian detective fiction featuring the far right and the legacy of the Second World War. It's not the first in the series, so many of the characters are already established, but it's set in a St Mary Mead/Ystad small town where everyone's related and has secrets. . . My second hand and charity bookshop browsing at the moment is limited to Detective Fiction; as many Nesbos, Nesers, Lackbergs and unspellable Icelandic authors as I can find.

Helen and I celebrated our 10th anniversary a few days ago. It still takes Libby a long time to settle and she's still breastfeeding, so we couldn't go out and had to make do with a takeaway from the Keralan restaurant in West Byfleet. So I got to be all obnoxious and pretentious about the correct way to eat Idly and Sambar. Libby is a terror at the moment, such good fun but she's worked out how to climb, and whenever she gets somewhere relatively high - a chair or the top of the slide for instance - she rocks madly back and forth to try and cause an avalanche. She also loves to pick up anything and hit Freddie with it, particularly in the bath where he cannot escape. She laughs manically while doing it too. It's so sweet to see her wandering along with her battleaxe or a plastic golf club swinging wildly in Fred's direction. Poor fella. Fred shows such restraint though. It would be so easy to retaliate, but he never does. He is so heavy now I can hardly lift him, and he can run so fast. I'm hoping that once my knee is working again we'll be able to go out running in the park together.

On the subject of knees, Ledley King announced his retirement today, which surprised no-one. He's only 31, but can’t train and has played so few matches over recent years. What a player, I remember his debut against Liverpool when he showed such potential. Still the holder of the quickest goal in the premiership too! He'd go into any Spurs Greatest XI; I wonder if any Spurs fan will ever be ready to put Sol Campbell in alongside him?

Robert Harvey, Liberators: Latin America's Savage Wars of Freedom 1810-30: Latin America's Struggle for Independence, 1810 - 1850

My understanding and appreciation suffered from a complete ignorance of South American geography, and now decent maps were provided. It was difficult to imagine the feats of Bolivar without understanding the terrain. The story of the Revolutionary Wars is told through concentrating on 7 liberators, all of whom appear to have shagged and duelled their way round Europe and South America, breaking off from liberating Venezuela to seduce the Spanish Viceroy's daughter and win a horse race before returning to the fray. Read like a Sabatini novel at times. Those bits I liked. I'm just about to finish Camilla Lackberg's 'The Hidden Child', so there should be a further update soon. I was tempted to skive off work for half an hour this morning to finish it, but I'm a conscientious sort and instead am writing this.  . .

In the meantime, every woman I know that doesn't normally read books is reading the awful, awful, Fifty Shades of Grey, a mildly pornographic wish-fulfillment fantasy for a woman who wants to be submissive and controlled. It started as fan fiction. I pledged to read it in return for a colleague reading 'The Awakening', a decent feminist novel exploring sexuality. Fifty Shades really is terrible though, the lack of decent editing as it was initially published online shows through. In the first few pages such dull cliches as 'pedal to the metal', 'the elevator reached terminal velocity' and 'I'm a monkey's uncle' are used, and one character has been described as 'tenacious' three times despite showing no evidence of this characteristic. It reads like Jean Teasdale from The Onion has written fan fiction on the characters from Sweet Valley High and Herr Flick of the Gestapo starring in an episode of Howard's Way. I don't know if I can continue.

Henning Mankell, The Pyramid

A Wallander prequel and yet more Scandinavian noir. After reading Forshaw, I've a wishlist on Amazon full of dark brooding authors with unpronounceable names and a mystifying support for Tottenham Hotspur (that may be just

Jo Nesbø though, for all I know Arnaldur Indridason or Camilla Lackberg could be Charlton Athletic diehards).  Ken Branagh's Wallander has just started again, and I'm badgering Helen to go to Scania for our next holiday. Fred has a settling in day at school today and H is going to see if we can skip the first week in September when he goes in for just 2 hours a day. Then we can get a cheaper holiday. How disgraceful of us. We're only just back from 2 weeks in Cornwall in the wettest June of all time, but I didn’t get enough sandcastle time and need more.

I've had to stop running for the past few weeks as my knees are absolutely shot. I think it's because of carrying heavy, heavy children for prolonged periods of time on holiday. I had to skip the London 10K yesterday because of it. I really hope this isn't permanent damage as I'd hate to have to give up running. I may have to go and see the doctor. . . 

George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848

Also Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies (soooooooooo good) and Barry Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction

It's been a while, must do better. Writing now was spurred on by Robert Webb on R4 reading from his excruciatingly embarrassing teenage diary. Although now my life is tracked on the Facebook timeline, maybe this is surplus to requirements. We're in a strange lull in patriotism at the moment between the highs of the jubilee and Euro 2012 and the start of the Olympics next month. Apparently the torch will be passing through Bracknell next week. It appears most Londoners are dreading it and the traffic chaos they're gleefully predicting will ensure. Already lanes have been marked with 5 rings to show they're only for use by athletes, officials and rich people. Helen's been told to work from Farnborough for the duration.

We've just got back from Cornwall where I read Rudé, Roth and the gloriously misguided Righteous Mind, about why the Left will always be less likely to appeal to working-class voters than the Right. Haidt seems to believe that because that's true of some, it's true of all; when any glance at election results will show it's a third of the working class at a maximum, and there's nothing inevitable about it. The first part of the book is brilliant at describing why so many vote against their own interests, but them makes a massive mistake in assuming from this that conservative popularity is inevitable. Ah well.