Sum by David Eagleman- a good, philosophical hangover read.

Last night I went to The Taiwan Beer Bar for Jeremy's birthday. Cheap beer. Then a couple more bars and celebrated Mickala's birthday. Happy birthday again to you both if you ever read this. The night ended with flaming absinthe and a vague memory of someone climbing a lapdancing pole and trying to touch the roof. It wasn't me.

Sum is the kind of book you can read easily in an afternoon. It's also the kind of book you won't put down, at least if, like me, you don't have much else to do.

Sum is forty short stories. Each one is easy on the absinthe addled mind, being concise, thoughtful, and thought provoking. Each story is a possible kind of afterlife, but rather than serious possibilities, I think Eagleman is largely commenting on our lives on Eartyh. In Circle of Friends, the afterlife includes only the people the  character, dead bloke, whoever, remembers from his life. He becomes bored but no one has sympathy because these are the people he has chosen. In Prism, heaven includes a you for every age of your life, one, two, twenty-three, etc. The seperate you's don't get along very well because they have so little in common. Each story comments somehow on how we behave, how we think, or who we might be.

Reheated Cabbage by Irvine Welsh

When you've been wandering about a bookshop trying to get into average middle eastern chick lit (The Girls of Riyadh) or over well-reviewed cross cultural cuisine drama (In the Kitchen by Monica Ali), there's nothing like a bit of Irvine Welsh to cheer you up.

Whatever critics might say about Welsh, you're always guaranteed sex, drugs and violence. And if you can follow the Scottish dialect well enough, plenty of intelligence and humour.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of short stories that have mostly been published before. In A Fault on the Line, a man gets frustrated with his wife after she has a train accident and makes him miss the football. In Catholic Guilt (You Know You Love It) , a homophobic thug dies and is forced to have gay sex until he admits to St. Peter that he's started to enjoy it. These stories might lack subtlety, but they're weird, dark and brilliantly entertaining.

There is one new novella in the collection. I Am Miami is set in Irvine Welsh's new home but brings up some characters from other books, in particular tail-chasing Terry Lawson, now nearing forty.

The other main character's are Ewart, Lawson's DJ friend, and their ex- schoolteacher, Mr. Black, who is now a bitter, fundamentalist Christian. All the above characters are Scottish; Mr. Black has followed his younger family to America,  Ewart and Lawso are visiting Miami because Ewart is DJ-ing.

Mr. Black is soon in a nightclub, he goes there to find Ewart and Lawson, to desperately see if his younger days of teaching yielded any good , Christian results. He finds them there, high on E, soon to score some cocaine and with two very pretty, but 'sinfully dressed' girls.

The group get on well, in a drug addled kind of way, and after accidentally imbibing a strange tea, Mr. Black reaches a kind of redemption.

The Zookeeper's Wife- A War Story by Diane Ackerman

The Nazi's had some fucking stupid, and some fucking strange, ideas. Their interest in Eastern religions is well known, but not that often understood. It seems to come down partly to an obsession with race, bloodlines and purity, a common theme in Nazi thought.

Hitler assigned top Nazis with the job of finding the source of the Ayran race. They believed it originated in Tibet, and even went on research missions to Tibet itself.

But Nazi ideas on race and eugenics sometimes went beyond even humans. Nazi ideas on animals are among the themes in the true tale of The Zookeeper's Wife. Before war breaks out in Warsaw, Jan and Antonina ran a zoo in the Polish capital. The beginning of the book  describes this as a happy time, and concentrates on expressing Antonina's natural empathy with animals, and the individuality of the animals themselves.

Under German occupation, Jan and Antonina come back into contact with Lutz Heck, a Berlin zoo owner and a top Nazi. He promises to protect their Zoo, but most of the animals are taken away to Germany. In all likelihood, 'inferior' animals were killed, whilst 'superior' animals were bred and preserved. The Nazis had absurd fantasies of re-creating 'pure' extinct animals like the auroch (something like a buffalo) and the tarpan (a kind of wild horse). The Nazis applied their ideas to people and animals alike, and so treated animals just like people, or, more accurately, treated people just like animals.

In The Zookeeper's Wife, Heck's promise turns out to be fairly worthless, not only does he turn up drunk with friends and start shooting animals randomly, but the Zoo, like so much in Warsaw, is used throughout the war for whatever purpose will benefit the Germans. Firstly, it is a pig farm, and after that a fox farm, used to provide meat and fur to German soldiers.

But Ackerman concentrates on the true story of Jan and Antonina, who, though Christian, concentrate on saving and protecting Jews throughout the war. They hide Jews in their Zoo, smuggle them  out of the Ghetto where Jews were kept, and take part in other Underground activities such as poisoning the pork they were supplying to the German military.

Ackerman is a fine , descriptive writer. A story centered so much on animals could risk being too sentimental and cute, but with the frank descriptions of everyday brutality that doesn't happen.

The most interesting thing about the book, for me, was the insight into Nazi thought. Ethnic cleansing is not a new idea and is still happening today. It is absurd, though. Yes, there is something in our tribal natures that makes us sometimes want to believe that one group is better than another. You only have to look at the world cup or women wearing expensive hats to a wedding to see that.

The Nazis , in their way, thought they were making the human race move forward. But the human race can't go anywhere as long as we follow our predictable patterns of tribalism and fighting over fuck-all. Only when we look at our behaviour, see that we're not fighting over religion or ideology, but , in most cases, over power and resources, can we actually evolve and stop history repeating itself. Until that happens, we'll go on fighting, just like animals.

My Father's Notebook- A Novel of Iran by Kader Abdolah

It's not easy to write about Iran. It's probably easier if you're from Iran, but I imagine it's still difficult. Maybe before 9/11 , some of us would have associated Persia with spices, hookahs, and legends of magic carpets. The war and the media haven't destroyed those connotations, but these days when I think of a flying carpet, I wonder where it's going and if it's carrying WMD.

Abdolah does a good job of dismantling these preconceptions; he makes us forget about them. The story begins with themes familiar to us all, family, status, and the search for happiness for those we love.

Ishmael , the main character, tells the story of his father and how he came into the world. Aga Akbar, his dad, is a deaf mute, born of a rich father to his servant mother. Akbar grows up in a small village, makes a trade as a carpet mender, and with the help of a benevolent, opium addicted, poet uncle, finds a wife.

Ishmael grows up with the normal pangs of childhood and adolescence. He sees unhappiness in his parents' marriage,  gets beaten up, and meets a helpful but unfortunate dentist.

The writing is clear but never over-descriptive. While evocative, it gives a sense of place that could be anywhere. When history and politics entered the novel, I'd almost forgotten I was reading about Iran.

But the politics is powerful, too. Ishmael gets involved in a far left party when he goes to University in Tehran. After that, his life and his families' lives are no longer safe. The novel takes us through a military dictatorship to the religious leadership in place today. The writing, though, focuses on people trying to get by, first in a simple village, then under one shit government after another.