Some quite difficult reading

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

I avoided the recent television adaptation and went for the book.  An extraordinary book about a man you feel you can never quite get the measure of.  A book about the intensity of  forbidden sex, but ultimate failure to make an emotional connection that can bind the Stephen to the person he loves so passionately.  The passages that will stay most vividly in my memory and where it seems Stephen is most alive are those describing the horror of life and the waste of lives in the trenches of World War I.

Pity The Nation by Robert Fisk

Published in 1990 about the war in Lebanon in the 1980s.  I have had this book for years and should have read it back then.  A big, distressing book.  The saddest thing of all - nothing changes.