I always have at least one book on the go which I keep in the downstairs loo. This is perhaps not the most flattering place for a book to be kept, and if it were one of my books, I must admit I’d prefer it to be kept in the bedroom or the study or somewhere more salubrious. But certain books are perfect for the loo: PEPYS’S DIARIES, for instance, and various works of history.

This month’s loo book has been so good that I’ve already almost finished it. And given that it’s 800 pages long, that suggests I spend WAY too much time in the loo. However, the truth is it was so good, I started taking it out to read in the garden, at the kitchen table etc. The book in question is 33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE by DORIAN LYNSKEY, a history of the protest song from Billie Holiday to Rage Against the Machine. Not only is this one of those ideas so obviously good that you can’t believe it’s never been done before, but it’s really nicely executed. Lynskey, who’s a music critic at the Guardian, is very good at capturing eras in a few words and at uncovering the often less-than-glorious reality behind songs that are now considered iconic. He’s also quite witty, and has interviewed many of the featured artists. The most fascinating chapter for me was the one about pop music’s reaction to 9/11 - because I’d just stopped being a music journalist then, and deliberately didn’t follow what was happening for a few years, so almost all of it was fresh and unknown to me. I’m still not entirely convinced that anything by Radiohead can really be considered a ‘protest song’, but it’s an interesting debate nonetheless.

One of the two novels I read this month was also very long - and formidably dense. In fact, PAOLO BACIGALUPI’s THE WINDUP GIRL was so intimidatingly, off-puttingly dry and repetitive in its opening pages that I almost gave up on it. I didn’t, because it had won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, so I figured it had to get better - and I was right. It’s a science fiction novel set far in the future in Thailand. This is a world where our current ‘Expansion’ has peaked and been followed by a long, harsh ‘Contraction’. The sun beats down (as Bacigalupi tells us about five times in the first ten pages) like a hammer, and Bangkok is protected from the rising sea that surrounds it by flood walls and pumps. It’s a world where genetic engineering has led to terrible food plagues, and where genetic engineering is now the only thing that can save humanity from its self-inflicted sufferings.

If this all sounds quite heavy and worthy, well… it is, a bit. Certainly for the first 250 pages or so, I was able to admire the book’s credible creation of this future world without really enjoying the story all that much. But once you’ve got used to all the foreign terms and scientific ideas, once you’ve got to know the array of central characters, and once the hugely complex plot has lumbered into motion, it does drive you on with real narrative power. The Windup Girl has been compared to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which seems highly misleading to me, as Neuromancer has that appealingly trashy, noirish aspect to it - it’s like comparing a fried breakfast with some ultra-healthy wholegrain cereal. But, although I wouldn’t say I loved this book, it’s definitely worth reading.

I didn’t quite love THE GIRL IN A SWING by RICHARD ADAMS either, but I did find it compelling and disturbing and provocatively, interestingly flawed - and often I prefer flawed books to flawless books, primarily because the reason they’re flawed is that what they’re attempting is so much more daring and ambitious. That’s the case here. Adams, whose most famous book is Watership Down, writes about a very dull, dry, almost asexual Englishman, Alan Desland, who falls so brutally, totally and profoundly in love that he is engulfed in a nightmare of guilt and madness.

It is, I suppose, a work of psychological horror, but it’s so beautifully written that you can’t really regard it as anything other than literary fiction. As I said, it’s flawed - and most of those flaws, for me, are incarnated in Karin, the German woman with whom our hero becomes obsessed and quickly marries. I can only assume she’s based on a real person, because I don’t think any novelist, attempting to personify someone irresistibly seductive, would have come up with such a blatantly false and annoying character. I kept wanting to scream at Alan to dump her because she was so obviously bad news. But he wouldn’t have listened, of course, because people never do when they’re in love.

The last chapter in particular is written with a magnifcent, haunting power, but I found it hard to get past my distaste for Karin, whose character and actions (and I can’t really get into the latter without creating spoilers) do not seem to me to be the stuff of tragedy. So, not a perfect book - but perfection is overrated anyway.