Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall-from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

Book 45 about Bobby Fischer I read more quickly than the last two biographies, but that's because it was shorter rather than better.

In fact it was quite a disappointing book because you get the feeling the author didn't know Bobby Fischer at all well. Nearly all the periods of his life which are covered to any degree are those for which Fischer was in the public eye. There are long periods when Fischer disappeared from the public daze and these are sketched over in the main in Endgame. The truth I suppose is that there is nobody who could produce such a book as Fischer was such a loner, so we have to make do with this which is mainly a biography about Fischer's chess games with the odd bit of personal stuff.

I have to say some books inspire you especially when they are about the lives of the greats but Bobby Fischer was a massive underachiever and he could have been a far greater individual than he was, in my view. The reason he wasn't "greater" is down to him. He was obviously suffering from mental illness and was paranoid about being persecuted to such a degree that it took over his life and stopped him playing chess. Although he was undoubtedly a genius lesser people have achieved more in life then he did. I award Endgame as a book 5 out of 10; I award Fischer as a person 2 out of 10, and 0 out of 10 for anything he did after the age of 30.

Next up for book 46 is a memoir about Incarceration.

Jaycee Dugard was taken aged 11 and kept away from her family in a similar case to Natascha Kampusch in Austria, whose book I have also read. I'd put this book in the True Crime section rather than Biography, but maybe when I've read it I'll see why it's been put in this category.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

It took me a few days less than three weeks to read the Book 44, the Steve Jobs biography, which continues my slow progress through this section of the library. Biographies are typically quite long books and most of them are not page turners that you can rattle through in a few days.

That doesn't mean to say I don't enjoy them though. I have got something from all the biographies I have read so far: Wainright, Marx and Jobs. Although I work in a similar industry to that of Jobs, he's the most different type of person to me than either of the other two, and therefore in many ways the most difficult to relate to. I am not and never would have been a high powered businessman, so in many ways I identify more with Marx and Wainwright's years of solitary industry than I do with Jobs's construction of a business empire.

Obviously though reading of the evolution of the several Apple devices which changed the world was personally interesting to me. I have never owned anything made by Apple, but I have used extensively some of the second wave of products that copy their ideas - Windows and Android largely. Jobs is a few years older than me but I can still understand the extent of what he achieved in the 1970s when he and Wozniak built the first apple machine in his dad's garage.

Interesting as this book is it's not really a full biography of Steve Jobs at all. It's much more a business biography. I know he spent most of his waking day at work but he still had a life outside the office and this is not the main focus of the book. It's very much a catalogue of the products and services which Steve Jobs developed rather than an account of his personal life. To some extent that's because it's a first biography which Jobs himself asked for, although refused to read. It would be interesting to read a more complete and independent biography that doesn't hold anything back.

I never met or even saw Jobs but I don't think I would have liked him as a boss, he's definitely not my type of employer. If I had to choose between him and Bill Gates as my boss (oh to have had that choice!) I would plump for Microsoft every day of the week. That's not to say though I am not in awe of what Jobs achieved - without even writing a line of code himself!

Next up for Book 45 is another biography, this one of Bobby Fisher the chess player.

As a (weak) Dorking Chess Club player myself I enjoy the game, and Fisher was one of the great characters in its history. He also lived in an interesting time during the Cold War when chess was a very competitive area between the two super powers. Reading about Fisher is going back to the "loners" like Marx and Wainright, rather than Alpha Males like Jobs.

Endgame is "only" 450 pages so it should be polished off in no time :>)

Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution Mary Gabriel

It took me three weeks to read the Karl and Jenny Marx biography, which means at this rate I'll still be working my way round the library in five year's time!

Holiday slowed me down a bit, but it's a very long book I embarked upon, 550 pages of small print in a physically large book, It's probably 800+ pages in a normal typeface. Plus the subject matter is not easy with a very long list of characters entwined in the story across a large part of Europe. Because Love and Capital is not just the biography of Marx and his wife, it's a biography of his whole clan, and there's over 100 pages after they both have died before the story finally comes to an end.

It's an enjoyable and meticulously researched book and you can tell that the author is as interested in Marx's daughters as she is in the man itself. All the family had so many tough experiences to go through it's hard to imagine over 100 years later how hard it was to live in the 19th century even for a middle class family like the Marx's. Marx lost four children and his first fourth grand children, which must have been very hard to take. He was almost permanently skint until the last few years of his life and his kids mainly continued the tradition of being flat broke!

What I really got from the book is what an underachiever Marx was. He may have changed the world but really he wrote so little completed material and you just wonder what more he could have accomplished given the resources and a more regimented life. He was incredibly lucky to have Engels there to finance him for most of his life and complete all his works after he had died.

When you compare Marx with Wainright who I read about two books back there a lot of similarities in that both of them didn't become well known until well into middle age. The difference was Wainright was much more focused and produced a massive oeuvre in the years left to him. Wainright paid the price of having almost no meaningful relationships whereas Marx founded a whole movement and had many contacts and friends. Swings and roundabouts!

Marx spent his life dedicated to the struggle of the proletariat but never worked himself for anyone in a "normal" job, not unlike most of our recent prime ministers. Marxism has ultimately been a failure wherever it has been tried out, but you could equally argue that capitalism has been a disaster as we stand on the precipice of the environmental meltdown of the world's burgeoning population. Marx though fought for the rights of the ordinary "man", and today's world is unrecognisable in Europe to what it was in his day. Employment laws, education, votes for everyone, and human rights have progressed enormously from the world of the latter half of the nineteenth century. A lot of that must go down to the movement he inspired.

For all his liberalism though Marx was still a Victorian and his views seem distinctly un liberal to today's mind set. He still treated his daughters like he owned them, refusing them permission to marry is one case.

All in all Love and Capital is a good book and I award it 8 out of 10. I miss the Marx's, they were my companions for three weeks of my life and even went on holiday with me!

Next up is an even longer book! Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson is a book about one of the great figures of my lifetime.

I have read books about Bill Gates, the Google founders and the recent book I read in this project about Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Steve Jobs though is someone I have not read about before. Working in the same or similar industry to Jobs but about 15 years younger than him I have a great deal of common years with him, unlike Marx whose whole era was completely alien to me. Even though I have never bought anything made by Apple I'll be interested to read the story of his great inventions because I've spent much of my life using competitor products like Windows that were shaped by his own inventions.

I am still busy reading the Karl/Jerry Marx biography. However while I have been reading the book I have been busy doing the South Down's Way by bike with my friend Tim.

Lost At Sea by Jon Ronson

I feel like I should have heard of Jon Ronson before but I confess he's a new name to me. He's an investigative journalist mainly for the Guardian (a paper I buy sometimes) I think and he's written a few books. Lost At Sea is a collection of articles which have appeared in his name around 3-4 years ago.

There's no discernable order to the articles which is one of the alluring points of the book. The articles can literally be about anything, but nearly always are about unusual people and/or unusual situations. Some of the articles are excellent, a few are less good but there's not a bad article in the whole book. I award Lost At Sea 9 out of 10.

The title story is about a fairly normal person, who disappeared on a cruise voyage and the cruise-line have been very unhelpful at getting to the truth. Most of the articles though are about people who live bizarre lives like the real life super heroes on America, there are a couple of game show contestants who go to extreme lengths to get on shows and win them, and even a trip to Alaska to find the town where  it is always Christmas. Ronson in every case goes and talks to the people involved and sees for himself what the story is.

Ronson is a great writer and very funny on occasions - he's also very good at getting to the point without being boring. I'll definitely have to read some more of his stuff. Unfortunately my own rules forbid me to take anything else by him out should it crop on another bookcase! When I've finished this challenge he'll be high on my list to return to that's for sure.

Next up is book 43, which is the first full scale biography of a major historical figure, Karl Marx. I must admit to having a soft spot for the Nineteenth Century and have read a few biographies from this period especially of British people in the heyday of our nation.  Marx was German but he lived in London for a large part of his life and largely made his name here to the best of my recollection.

I'll be interested to read about Marx - and his wife who is also the subject of this book. I'm not especially interested in his politics, more about his life and that of his wife. Good biographies allow you to live the lives of others vicariously and you can learn things from them which you can apply to your own life. Two books ago I read another biography, about Alfred Wainright, and it helped to put parts of my own life into perspective. Alfred Wainright was a minor figure though in the grand scheme of things - Marx is one of the giants of the Nineteenth century and one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

It's a 700 page book so I may take a couple of weeks to read this one!

Wainwright: The Biography by Hunter Davies

I'd heard of Book 41's subject Alfred Wainwright of course, but have never read a word he's written or seen him on TV - to the best of my recollection. I suppose you wouldn't normally read a biography of someone you had such a tenuous knowledge of, but such is the nature of my library challenge that I am often plunged into the covers of books I would not normally open.

That said, I was glad I read Wainwright, who sounds like an enigmatic character. A man, who appeared gruff and taciturn on the surface, but underneath was a romantic. For a man who spent hours alone on the hills he had an amazing number of women friends, yet barely spoke to his wife, who he treated like a housekeeper!

Wainwright is the biographer's dream because he wasn't much of a speaker, yet was a prolific author of letters as well as over 50 books which he didn't start writing until well in his forties! He practically wrote everything down which happened to him. There must have been an enormous amount of material to read in order to write this book, which maintains interest throughout and is rarely boring.

I am an obsessive so I could identify with Wainwright who embarked on such a ludicrous challenge that few would have expected him to complete it - only an complete obsessive could do so! Writing his guide books entirely by hand was bizarre even in the 1950s, something that probably hadn't been done since the Middle Ages.

Yet to the people around him he paid little regard. His wives and son had to fit in around Wainright's life and he had very few friends who he spoke to. Nobody was allowed to walk with him, except on rare occasions, but if they did they weren't allowed to speak - even his second wife!

Although Wainwright is not a massive figure of the Twentieth Century, even in the UK, he's still an enjoyable character to read about and Hunter Davies is a very good author. I award Wainwright 8 out of 10.

Next up is book 42, which is another work from the biography section.

I think this book is not a true biography, more a kind of book about things Jon Rowson has come across during his time as a Guardian journalist. Let's find out.

I am still busy reading the Wainright book but at the weekend, vaguely inspired by AW I decided to walk to London!