Just like camels store food in their hump for times of drought, I’m currently reading much less than usual, so I’m finding myself needing to resort to back-provisions of read books. It’s not that I’m off reading, but the side effect of returning to university after a 20-year absence – which means most of my reading time is taken up by course material.

Going back to university after such a long hiatus is quite, ahem, interesting. Much has stayed the same: canteen coffee, photocopy parlours, posters for parties and poorly-attended protest events.

Many other things have changed, of course. Before I attended my first lecture, I asked a friend who works there, whether kids these days still take down notes with pen and paper or whether it’s all tablets and laptops. Whatever happened to the beloved transcriptions system from my days, where you only had to attend on average one lecture every five or six weeks?

“It all depends,” she told me, “whether you want to be in with the young crowd – then it’s strictly digital – or whether you want to be the obviously mature student using papyrus.”

For every book we want to read, we feel compelled to check out online reviews, ratings, feedback on Facebook and Goodreads stars

I opted for what I optimistically hoped was a retro cool look. Apparently the cool effect is lost on everyone but me, but anyway.

Also, laptops. What’s with people cheerfully carrying on lengthy online chats during a lecture, posting online, checking the www.timesofmalta.com site and, in one case, apparently Facebook-stalking a potential (or ex?) girlfriend? Or perhaps I need to stop showing my age and just go with the flow.

So yes, the hump-reserve of books. A few months ago I’d made a lucky find in a bookshop. These days I find we’ve become so reliant on peer reviews and recommendations that our capacity to assess and make up our minds independently has been severely blunted.

For every film we intend to watch, every book we want to read, we feel compelled to check out online reviews, ratings, feedback on Facebook and Goodreads stars. Life is too short to watch or read dull stuff, we tell ourselves.

Be that as it may, I occasionally pine for the thrill of that random find. And I Saw a Man, by Owen Sheers, was one such. Sucker for a good cover that I am, I impulse-purchased it purely on the strength of the cover and blurb. A part of me was bracing itself for a let down.

But no, it was a really great find. It’s been a sort of sleeper hit as it hasn’t, as far as I know, hit the bestseller lists nor the book-chattering classes.

A man walks into his neighbour’s house in a leafy London suburb, on a quiet Saturday morning and the life of all concerned changes. That’s the premise but, as is often the case, it’s the writing that sets it apart.

It is also one of a newish cohort of books dealing with the aftermath of drone strikes. Not the irritating garden-invading drones that flourished as gifts this Christmas, but the deadly missile-carrying, target-remotely-destroying variety.

Just as we had the post-9/11 novels and the jihadi novels, drone-casualties is gaining ground as a literary theme.

I Saw a Man explores the effects of drone destruction. Not so much the carnage in itself – it is very much not a war book – but the emotional and psychological consequences of a strike on the victims. Especially, and this is what makes it particularly interesting, on the remote operator of the drone who, from hundreds of miles away, has terminated lives and wreaked havoc.

Speaking of flying: twice in a row I’ve found myself reading a novel about a plane crash while flying. Happenstance, unless it’s some weird ritual by my subconscious, trying to ward off the unthinkable.

I have already written about The Three. This time around I read After the Crash in its English translation from Michel Bussi’s French original.

Both have been rather disappointing reads. For some reason, After the Crash got quite glowing reviews in some sections of the press. Either I’ve really missed something (or everything) about it or French authors remain untouchable and reviewers don’t dare diss anything of theirs.

It piles on cliché after cliché, ridiculous plot twists with holes you could fly a plane through and an annoying, pontificating narrator.

To be fair, it does keep you reading, so I suppose it does succeed in that. There are some characterisations that intrigue and the promise of a dramatic final denouement does have a sort of pull to it.

And yes, there is a passable final twist, but by that stage you’re so past caring – and anyway the author has stretched it for so long and soliloquayed all possible solutions to the case for so many interminable pages – that it’s a let-down when it does finally turn up.

Again, speaking of much-hyped books, I’m currently reading Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, which is an ideal complement to Camus’s L’Etranger. Here, of course the hype is not entirely unjustified, and if anything suffers mostly by the inevitable comparisons to its hallowed pater.

It is also hugely topical – something I suspect had a lot to do with much of the praise heaped on it – because it takes up the murder in L’Etranger from the Arab victim’s point of view.

Camus’s unnamed Arab is here given a name, a backstory and a brother narrator. It lacks the concise beauty of the original and panders to contemporary intellectual tastes, but is probably worth a read if you’re a fan of L’Etranger.

Now, of course, a fresh batch of highly-anticipated 2016 titles is round the corner. By all accounts, it looks set to be an interesting year for book lovers. The to-be-read pile beckons.

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