I have to confess I haven’t written my reading blog for ages, though I have been reading. Of course.       I have been bingeing Patricia Highsmith.  She is quite wonderful.  I think what she gets is the ability of people to appear one way and yet underneath be totally monsters.  And vice versa.  She knows perfectly well how women can manipulate men.  And how weak men can be. These are fascinating areas and quite new in novel writing.

Strangers on A Train (1950)  Patricia Highsmith

This is her first novel. Amazingly.  Bought by Hitchcock and filmed.  It is complex.  And bears re-reading.

The Tremor of Forgery (1969)  Patricia Highsmith

“Highsmith’s finest novel” says Graham Greene.  Set in Tunisia, an American writer, is drawn into something murderous. I love it, since I lived in Tunisia a short while. Also it’s brilliant.

Those Who Walk Away  (1967)   Patricia Highsmith

I love this one.  A grieving husband is assaulted by his father in law.  From Rome to Venice where Ray is both the hunter and the hunted.  Alarming, and disturbingly good. I love the way she completely changes the settings of her stories.  Mexico, Tunisia, Italy…

The Blunderer (1954)              Patricia Highsmith

The faithful husband wishes his wife dead.  She dies.   Things change.  Another brilliant book.

Small g    (1995)      Patricia Highsmith

Her final novel.  Subtitled A Summer Idyll.  It opens in Zurich in a bar with a brutal murder.  I so love how much she changes the set and settings of her novels.  Here we’re in Switzerland, there we’re in Tunisia and Italy and …

A Game for The Living (1958) Patricia Highsmith

Set in Mexico City.   Two friends both sleep with Leila. When she is raped and murdered both twist in “a limbo of tension and doubt.”  Living with the possibility that one of them is a killer.

Deep Water (1957)         Patricia Highsmith.

Now a movie.  A very tolerant husband, who loves snails, turns a blind eye on his wife’s adultery, which leaves him vulnerable.  In the book this works terrifically.  In the film not at all.  Possibly due to the fact that no one could quite believe Ben wouldn’t shag her….   Highsmith is brilliant, and I think foremost in her field,  in conveying the stresses and strains inside a marriage. Cinema is good at the exterior.  The novel is better at the interior.  I stumbled across the book and loved it.  I searched for the movie and didn’t.

All The Secrets of the World             Steve Almond

Families and scorpions.  Fascinating.

The Driver’s Seat  1970           Muriel Spark

One of my favourite stories from one of my favourite authors.  Kinda brilliant.

The Palace Papers         Tina Brown

She is excellent as usual on the Royals.  The only problem (shh) is that they are boring.  Dull.  And uninteresting.  Royalty is cruelty to humans.  Diana was a fascinating character to write about and her rebellion was a genuine threat to the Weird Family but this lot aren’t very interesting.  Andrew is a failed human being.  Meghan, well Tina doesn’t like her.  And actually, who gives a flying fuck about any of the poor trapped victims? Apart from the Tabloids.  For whom Royalty is like Hunting.

The Flick    Anne Baker

Nice play.

The Silence of The Girls          Pat Barker

Troy through the eyes of the women.  What am I saying?  It’s all women.  They do everything, from feeding and washing and healing the men who fight , to being the unwitting cause of the whole war (thanks Eris) when Paris picks Helen.  I adored this book.  I think she is a wonderful writer.  For the first time the Trojan War made sense to me.  I really loved it and the sequel.

The Women of Troy                Pat Barker

Aftermath of the ten years war.  Troy has fallen but the Greeks still cannot leave for home as the wind blows continually towards them.

All The Secrets of the World             Steve Almond

Families and scorpions.  Fascinating.

The Driver’s Seat  1970           Muriel Spark

One of my favourite stories from one of my favourite authors.  Kinda brilliant.

Run Towards the Danger                 Sarah Polley

A wonderful book from a wonderful person I knew first as an eight year old child actor on Munchausen.  As she grew up she was bothered by increasingly dark memories of filming in Italy and Spain.  She wrote to me and I was able to tell her that she was quite right to be so traumatised.  Her life was in danger on many occasions.  Once, recounted here unforgettably, Gilliam himself was responsible.  This is not a pretty story, but it is essential for her to understand what went on.  I am thrilled to be still in touch with her. She was a brave, and an amazing child and she has grown into an extraordinary mother, director, and writer.  A National Treasure, Canada.

The Palace Papers         Tina Brown

She is excellent as usual on the Royals.  The only problem (shh) is that they are boring.  Dull.  And uninteresting.  Royalty is cruelty to humans.  Diana was a fascinating character to write about and her rebellion was a genuine threat to the Weird Family but this lot aren’t very interesting.  Andrew is a failed human being.  Meghan, well Tina doesn’t like her.  And actually, who gives a flying fuck about any of the poor trapped victims? Apart from the Tabloids.  For whom Royalty is like Hunting.

And of course a slew of Maigrets.

Maigret and Monsieur Charles

Maigret and The Saturday Caller

Maigret enjoys himself

Maigret and the Wine Merchant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2021

 

January thru March

Sun King             David Ignatius

An elegantly written, modern take on Gatsby.  A hedge fund billionaire attempts to buy his way into Washington and woo his dream girl. Excellent read.  Made me re-read Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby           F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Starts off with less drive than I remembered, but once Gatsby picks Nick Carraway up to head for New York on the train, stopping in the dust yards by the unforgettable eye glasses of Dr. Ecklenburg, to meet “his girl” in a garage with a poor mutt of a mechanic husband, the pace of the novel proceeds swiftly towards its tragic ending.  They leave the garagiste for a drunken afternoon in New York.  Only an alcoholic could so capture the vague leaps of time and events while they are drunk.  Before the inevitable conclusion, which we still somehow don’t see coming.

The Gentlemen’s Hour            Don Winslow

The Gentlemen’s Hour is the surf time for the elderly retired crowd who surf in PB after the Dawn Patrol has gone to work.  When one of their colleagues is murdered by three young brutes in a parking lot Boone Daniels, enamoured of a Brit investigator, helps her, working for the other side to convict him.  Setting up tensions, losing friends, and influencing people to try and kill him…

Slough House                Mick Herron

The 7^th in this highly readable and hilarious must read series: Slow Horses.  With the wonderful Jackson Lamb.  And the other sad failures.  This must shortly be a TV series surely.

Trio            William Boyd

Read in a day.  I like it when he writes about the movie business because he knows about it.  He never disappoints.

Luster         Raven Leilani

The best novel I have read in a long time.  She is simply stunning.  A must read.

Maigret’s Childhood Friend    Georges Simenon

An old friend seeks favours.  Inappropriately. Maigret can’t stand him, and he is clearly guilty. I like the insights into his childhood, and the class consciousness against his father.

Vesper Flights               Helen Macdonald

Naturalist essays by the brilliant author of H is for Hawk.  Fascinating.

The Road to Mars          Eric Idle

Someone suggested I read myself to cheer up, so I did.  On Kindle.  I haven’t read it in 20 years and thought it would be a lot worse.  As it is I quite enjoyed it.

Reaper Man         Terry Pratchett.

So funny. Such a pity we never met.

No Room at The Morgue  Jean-Patrick Manchette

A French thriller writer I was unfamiliar with.  He’s good.  There are lots more.

Whiplash River              Lou Berney

Excellent thriller. Caribbean romps.  He is good.

The Slave Ship              Marcus Rediker

Terrifying. Essential reading.  A history of the most inhuman enterprise. For more than three centuries millions of Africans were kidnapped from Africa and transported across the world to the Southern States and the Caribbean to provide forced labour for intensive industries such as sugar, tobacco and cotton.  A disgraceful, disgusting, dehumanising industry that is almost unimaginable to think about.   The terror of the Middle Passage is overwhelming, chained inside a hot crowded slave ship for eighteen hours or more a day.  These poor people.  The shame of this needs to be addressed.  The oddest fact is that the anti-slavery hymn Amazing Grace, is written by John Newton, who was a Captain in the vile trade, before he finally repented and wrote the hymn.

The Creative Spark        Augustin Fuentes

How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional.

No One is Talking About This           Patricia Lockwood

Me either.

Memorial    Alice Oswald

A Version of Homer’s Iliad.  She translates the atmosphere and the litany of the dead. Not the plot. Brilliant.

The Men Who Would Be King          Nicole Laporte

A trip through DreamWorks and the three ambitious people behind it, Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen.  They formed a Studio at the worst possible moment. Formed with good intentions. Money would have helped. It focuses in on the strangely weird Katzenberg, who ends up with all the money and all the power.  And none of the talent.

Here We Are.       Graham Swift

Magic, Theatre and Memory.

The Fran Lebowitz Reader      Fran Lebowitz

I bought this after very much enjoying her extremely funny conversations with Marty Scorsese.

Sadly this is an older book when she was not quite as hysterical as she is now. I look forward to a more up to date one.

Savages               Don Winslow

I managed to read this before seeing the movie version.  It’s very enjoyable.  The film seemed more violent.  But I found the book more enjoyable though I liked the flick too.

 

         Summer Reading

 

Philip Roth.                            Blake Bailey.

The Biography.  I wonder if the biography of a novelist is ever as interesting as his books.  I doubt it.

This one certainly isn’t and now I find the book itself is actually more interesting because it has been cancelled and withdrawn by the Publisher.  We seem to be heading into dangerous waters.

Bowie’s Bookshelf                  John O’Connell

A lovely, elegant book, succinct, interesting, and beautifully written, it clearly shows the intellectual that David Bowie was.   Sympa, hip and erudite at the same time O’Connell cleverly avoids the pitfalls of pretention and has written a tremendous tribute to an extraordinary man and gifted artist and also a good reading (and listening) guide to anyone interested.

Maigret and the Wine Merchant        Georges Simenon

One of the most elegantly written Maigret’s I remember.  His books are never so much as who but understanding why. This one the murdered man has done everything to ensure the list of people wanting him dead is huge, as he is a roué and an adulterer.  He is shot, leaving a fashionable but very discreet brothel.  But who?  Maigret suffers from a cold and sneezes his way across half of Paris before retiring to bed and of course solving the puzzle.  A lovely book.

The Bomber Mafia                  Malcolm Gladstone

Precision bombing. For and against.  The politics and problems of firebombing in WW2.

The Premonition                     Michael Lewis

This is a must read to understand the pandemic and the response to it.  Quite oddly it starts with George Bush and the unlikely fact that he had read a book that fired him up to realise that no one in the entire Government was in charge of any pandemic response.  He insisted on starting such an organisation right away.  And did.  So kudos to him, though no amount of planning could forestall the damage a Trump can do. The book tells of the real heroes, mostly mavericks and outsiders, who persisted, often at the cost of their jobs, to prepare America for some kind of a response while the Trump Government utterly failed the people.  A gripping and fascinating story.

Lurkers                                  Sandi Tan

I loved this book.  Hilarious.

In the Garden of the Beasts     Erik Larson

The foolish naivete of the American family who came to the American Embassy in Berlin in 1933, when everyone was busy trying to pretend that the Hitler regime was no big deal. Tourists and others beaten by the Nazi thugs made it hard to look away but daughter Martha manages to, for quite some time, before inevitably the true nature of the organization reveals itself. The book is a picture of American ignorant innocence against vilely motivated right wing gangsters, which provides echoes of what we have all just witnessed in the White House.  Never forget, Hitler said the next place for Nazism would be America.

The Book of Eels                    Patrick Svensson

Contains more than you ever thought you would want to know about eels, almost all of which is totally fascinating, including the amazing fact that they all originate in the Sargasso Sea.  I’d skip the fishing bits.

The Autograph Man               Zadie Smith

I hadn’t read this one, so it’s catch up time, because I adore this writer. I enjoyed this, what, her second novel? very much.

King of the World          Philip Mansel

The Life of Louis XIV.  A lengthy but readable life of a man we have seen a lot of recently.  An extraordinary life as he constructed a glittering cage for the nobility to entrap them in a Court where they must compete for favour and affection.  I was intrigued to read about his early Pilgrimage to Provence (and indeed Cotignac) in 1660 to give thanks to God for himself.

Fall            John Preston

The Mystery of Robert Maxwell.

Not much of a mystery since he was a crook and con man from the moment he left the army after WW2 as a decorated young officer with an enviable reputation for bravery. Giant balls and no morals, it’s the story of Murdoch and Trump.  The mystery to me is how he managed to get his hands on the millions of dollars from his own employees pension fund.  It wasn’t just him who went belly up.

Tales of the South Pacific        James Michener

I like dipping into these tales which contain the seeds and the characters for the Rogers and Hammerstein movie South Pacific, though the raping of American nurses by American soldiers is not selected as a theme for Broadway.

Languages of Truth       Salman Rushdie

I raced through this book of Essays (2003 – 2020) with increasing delight, mixed with anxiety at his own story of his long battle with Covid.  But the book is a refreshing brain shower that sets off all kinds of resonances and a need to search, look up, re-read and basically have a good think.  I have to declare that he asked me for permission to quote I’m Not Yet Dead from Spamalot but I had forgotten about that till I got there.  Likewise I was very moved by his elegy to our mutual friend Carrie Fisher.  The first thing I did after reading this was to re-read…

Slaughterhouse Five      Kurt Vonnegut

The first half of which I found absolutely delightful, and the second half less so.  Vonnegut is so funny and smart and great and always tries to keep the reader with him.

Widespread Panic          James Ellroy

Can I declare I don’t quite love him?   It’s the prose.  It gets in the way for me.  He’s like the school of Tom Wolfe where you are so busy looking at the writing BAM you get snapped out of the world of the novel.

Double Blind.                Edward St. Aubyn (signed)

I’m going to give it another go.  I was wildly excited by the Patrick Melrose novels, and gushed to him at a Memorial.  I kept losing my way in this one.  I have learned to put books by serious authors aside and come back to them. So I will.

The Krull House            Georges Simenon.

Not Maigret.

The Kings of Cool          Don Winslow

In the prequel to Savages, this does exactly what I find Ellroy’s prose doesn’t, it excitingly paints the scene. Minimalism in the prose maximises the impact of the action.  I really enjoyed this as indeed I do all his books.

City On Fire                  Don Winslow

He very kindly sent me an early copy of this elegant new first part of a trilogy of novels based on the Aeneid, though you probably wouldn’t have guessed if you hadn’t been told since it is set in Providence, Rhode Island. Brilliant and compelling. He is absolutely at the top of his game.  This is a must read. And for me a Must Read Again.  (Comes out in September). Can’t wait for the next.

Post August 16^th

Frostquake           Juliet Nicolson

I well remember the winter of 1963.  So bloody cold.  Snow till May.

Inside Comedy               David Steinberg

Me too.

Henderson the Rain King        Saul Bellow

He writes so divinely.

 

The Mystery of Charles Dickens        A. N. Wilson.

Beautifully written, elegantly told, I loved this book.  It’s amazing to me that I did a whole University Exam on Dickens and most of the facts discussed here were completely unknown.  His love affair with the actress, with children, and his cruel treatment of his wife.  Of course it was 1965….

I can’t believe I haven’t read this man.  He is a delight.

The Secret Life of the Savoy             Olivia Williams

And the D’Oyly Carte family.

I loved this book too.  Far better written than expected. I knew a lot of the early story about how D’Oyly Carte built a theatre and Hotel at the Savoy from the money he made for Gilbert and Sullivan.  The Theater was the first to have electricity. An extraordinary sea change in theatrical history.    She tells the story elegantly with plenty of teasing details.  Olivier and Marilyn on the cover, and you long to know what she was telling him in the Savoy bar.

Beautiful World, Where are you.  Sally Rooney

All unhappy love affair stories are the same… I really enjoyed the opening of this and then felt it tanked.  I liked the stuff on the importance of the novel, but felt the story wasn’t up to it. I really enjoyed all the bits about the late Bronze Age collapse. Relevant to today with the possibility it was caused by a pandemic.  This was all new to me (novel) but I found the non-novel better than the novel.  She should do some essays.  (Like Zadie Smith.) I look forward to her next.

Smoke                          Joe Ide

An I. Q. novel. I have been following him since his debut.  He tries to ring the changes on this one, but like all successful formats it becomes a bit of a trap.  I think he should try something completely different, though he will be known for these books.

The Chiffon Trenches    Andre Talley

I find fashion not very interesting it seems.   I met this pleasant man at the Bowie wedding in Florence.  He was humiliated by Iman seizing his camera and unrolling the film.  He went to his room he was so embarrassed.  They were being paid a million by Hello Magazine for the exclusive..

A Slow fire burning       Paula Hawkins

A thriller.  It thrills.

The End of Everything (Astrophysically speaking). Katie Mack

A fantastic book, which I had to read very slowly, a chapter at a time.  It is mind blowing.  The five or six likeliest ends to the Universe are here simply laid out.  I first was amazed by her on The Infinite Monkey Cage.  The end of the Universe is fascinating and I hope I’ll be here to enjoy it.  The most amazing thing is that in the future all the galaxies will have moved so far apart that we will have no sight or knowledge of the entire universe that came before.  We will have reverted to the Medieval view of the Universe, that there is just us…

She has the funniest footnotes.  I suggested she might win a Nobel Prize for her footnotes.

Smoke and Mirrors        Neil Gaiman

I don’t read a lot of fantasy so I have not read him as widely as I should.  I really enjoyed this book though.  My favorite was The Goldfish Pool and other stories, which was hilarious.  And accurate. I will read more.  He is a wonderful writer.

Changing my mind        Zadie Smith

Occasional Essays.  Always interesting. Of course I love everything she writes.  She seemed to be defining a form of Quantum criticism in her essay on Barthes and Nabokov.   Learning to re-read almost as important as learning to read.  A good book is one you can re-read, a great book is one you must.   “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it.  A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”   Dip and enjoy.  Gold everywhere.

Based on a True Story.   Norm Macdonal

I wasn’t aware of his work.  I downloaded this to Kindle after he died.  It’s a funny autobiography, but thanks to his first love for drugs and alcohol, slightly less coherent than it might be.  Indeed he has a fictional co-conspirator with him and can’t wait to be away from the serious bits of his life story, indeed at times he seems to be channelling  Hunter Thompson.  Clearly an outrageous chap, he left lots of comedians distraught by news of his death.  I met him briefly one year at Marty Short’s Christmas Party.

Peril.          Bob Woodward and Bob Costa

The importance of Democracy is to vote unsuitable characters out and so I read the terrifying Trump chapters, and skipped the less interesting Biden scenes. America dodged a bullet but only just and the bullet (still mad) keeps on coming, because a con man is like a shark and must keep on going forward so somehow some people don’t notice that he is lying through his teeth and everything he says is worthless.  Sadly this shark is killing thousands of Americans.  Poor suckers.

My Mother Was Nuts              Penny Marshall

I didn’t know Penny had written a book.  Nice scenes of the early days and Laverne and Shirley.  She visits us one year with Art on a Motorbike.  I liked the crew of characters she grew up with and played with and partied with.  I know lots of them.  I found when her book got onto making movies I was less interested.  Movie making is as dull to read about as it is to do.  But she was always a treat and of course I married her on Laverne and Shirley..

Rebellion             Peter Ackroyd

The History of England from James 1 to The Glorious Revolution.  Beautifully written history by a writer who is a master of the anecdote.   Very fine, popular history, that began with the Tudors, which I skipped and I can’t wait to continue.

April in Spain                John Banville

Just a bit too gentle and laid back for my taste.  He is an amazing writer whom I have enjoyed widely.

Cloud Cuckoo Land       Anthony Doerr

Another brilliant book from the most brilliant writer.

 

The Lincoln Highway    Amor Towles

Sadly I have never really got into him. I find him more of a parodist.  He writes well but..

The Man who Died Twice        Richard Osman

Literally a Who Dunit, this is a really funny book, the sequel to a highly popular first book The Thursday Murder Club Mystery which I will order immediately.   Hugely popular in the UK he deserves to be widely read and appreciated everywhere.

The Promise                  Damon Galgut

Booker prize winner and deservedly so. Really a family saga, which also contains the modern history of South Africa, from the deplorable apartheid world of Dr. Verwoerd to the current day. It is also a mento mori, a philosophical study of the human constantly condition faced with human mortality.

Effortlessly linked are the stories of Amor, and what happens to her two siblings Astrid and Anton.  Really an amazing book.

Silverview            John Le Carré

A posthumous novel completed by his son.

Camino Winds               John Grisham

Ok.

The Deer Park               Norman Mailer

Re-reading this book always gives me the utmost delight.   It is one of my favourite novels.  It has the ring of reality. It is written with effortless energy.  The characters are instantly recognisable, even when they are movie stars.  It’s about Palm Springs and the Movie People but it is really about Love.   And Sex.   I had not realised until now that his Publisher rejected it, and Mailer refused to make cuts.  In 1955 Viking stepped in. I have a British first edition from Arthur Wingate 1957. I don’t know anything finer by this author.  I am hard put to explain why I find it so appealing.  I think it is because he brilliantly pictures two different male/female relationships, but each couple with the same tensions.  The whole ambivalence of love and lust, and fear of, and gratitude for, such bonding.  He understands this beyond his years (the war) and is able to illustrate perfectly, the unique human ability of the sexes to misunderstand each other and yet still be reconciled through sex.  Both share the magic.  It is a wonderful commonality.

The swats at the film industry are funny, as they always are at that industry.   I had never spotted any Fitzgerald in Mailer hitherto and yet here it is in Sam Spades, but with a strength, clarity and modernity of language which I think is new, both from and caused by the wartime experiences of these writers.  Remember Holden Caulfield travelled across the battlefields of Europe in the knapsack of J. D. Salinger. From D-Day to Dachau.  They were young men, but with such awful, traumatising experiences of war.  No wonder their novels seemed fresh and arresting.  They had lived with death.

The Left Handed Twin            Thomas Perry

In cracking form this is one of the most thrilling of his recent novels. It’s a Jane Whitefield novel, and the pursuit of her along the Appalachian trail is one of the most intense things he has ever written.

The Silence of the Girls           Pat Barker

One of the most brilliant and best written books I have ever read.  I really loved this account of Troy through the eyes of the women.  A terrific idea and wonderfully executed. She writes like an angel.  I thought she brought to life the daily incessant dull, terrifying grind of warfare brilliantly, and how virtually invisible the women are.  Between Queens and slaves.

The Women of Troy.      Pat Barker

And I loved the sequel too.

The Thursday Murder Club     Richard Osman

Reluctantly retired oldies solve crimes.  Funny and sweet.

Revolution.           Peter Ackroyd

The next book in a very fine history of England from the Battle of the Boyne to the Battle of Waterloo.

He writes very well and his stories are fine and well chosen.

Mike Nichols A Life       Mark Harris

A very fine portrait of a wonderful man.  I must have met Mark at Mike’s apartment. He is married to Tony Kushner the brilliant writer.  The book is both sympathetic and insightful, and highly readable.

Dolphin Junction           Mick Herron.

The latest thriller from the very best contemporary British thriller writer.  He is a must read.

On Provence                 Henry James

He is a mustn’t read.

 

 

Unposted

 

 

 

 

 

 

   2020

Command Option 1 / 2 / 3

 

My favourite Book of the Year

 

It seems obvious that lockdown has encouraged a thriller binge, reading for fun and escape, so it should be no surprise that my favourite book of the year is:

Broken       Don Winslow

Fabulous.  Five or six novella length stories.  Quite brilliantly written. Don Winslow has filled up the hole in my life left by the death of Elmore Leonard. It is the sheer joie de vivre of his prose, his fuckit let’s tell this story style, that makes him so readable.

December

The Dawn Patrol           Don Winslow

A whole community arises before our eyes, of surfers, of cops, of cops who surf and surfers who cop, in Pacific Beach down by San Diego. Here we meet Boone Daniels, the ex-cop PI surfer and his crew including Sunny, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God and Johnny Banzai, members of The Dawn Patrol who surf before work, to be replaced by The Gentleman’s Hour, older men who talk as much as surf.  It’s an intricate California social world, set around La Jolla and the beaches, of a new world of modern housing estates, intruding on an old world of surfers. Breath-taking narrative and a delight to go along with.

The Winter of Frankie Machine        Don Winslow

The surfing guys again.  Many people want to get rid of Frankie Machine.  If they can find him.

The Creative Spark.    Augustin Fuentes

No not Muriel… Totally fascinating.

The Death and Life of Bobby Z.        Don Winslow

A fascinating and absorbing breath-taking ride.

The Colossus of Maroussi       Henry Miller

Travel writing.  Miller in Greece. Lovely tales.  Interesting he was great friends with Lawrence Durrell.

Eddie’s Boy          Thomas Perry

Such a delight.  Thomas Perry comes through for Christmas again.  The Butcher’s Boy is back again.  He cannot hide.  So he must run, first to Australia, then to America, to try and destroy who is trying to kill him.

Maigret and the Loner            Georges Simenon

So often with Simenon it’s the weather he starts, with, the early summer in Paris, the fog on the coast, the heavy barges ploughing along a rainy Seine.  This one starts with a heat wave in Paris.  Maigret investigates the murder of a tramp in Les Halles, the Covent Garden of the capital, which leads to the unsolved case of a naked girl, with two lovers,  strangled in a nearby apartment.  Was one culpable?  All these years later the  truth begins to unravel.

Broken       Don Winslow

Fabulous.  Five or six novella length stories.  Quite brilliantly written.

November

The Silence Don DeLillo

Fine writing, slender book.

V2  Robert Harris

Both sides of the Vengeance Weapon unleashed on London in the last few months of WW2.

More terrifying than the V1, but it seems the tremendous cost of this final weapon to turn the war around was too much.  It’s terror was real.  It’s creator Werner Von Braun would defect to America at the end and take the US to the moon.

The Long and Faraway Gone.     Lou Berney

A tragic shooting in a Mall Movie House.  Time passes.  Wounds are not healed.

Sapiens                Yuval Noah Harari

Re read.  Fascinating news about our species.

Girl, Woman, Other                Bernadine Evaristo

This surprisingly won the Booker Prize of 2019.  Sadly it didn’t win me.

Isle of Joy            Don Winslow

As in “We’ll turn Manhattan into an..”  A love letter to New York. 1996 early Don Winslow.  Beautifully written.

The Third Man.   Graham Greene

I read a first edition from 1950 to remind me what Greene is good at: storytelling, and prose.  In his Introduction he disparages this story, as it changed when it became a film, but it’s still very good.  Martin Amis said he didn’t like him and for the same reason I used to quote:  God.  You simply don’t want Him banging around in your books.  Fortunately there are many fine Greene novels where He doesn’t appear.  And they are much better than just good.

Inside Story                   Martin Amis

A very interesting book, which is a memoir written by a novelist as fiction.  I always used to think of him as one of the new young writers but I realise that he is now over 70.  This, appropriately is a Memento Mori, a book about death, and in particular about four, deceased, extraordinary men who played a huge part in his life:  Christopher Hitchens his great friend, and a remarkable friendship it was too, his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, and his closest friend the poet Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow, an adopted father really, whom Amis considers the finest American novelist.  Along the way we get very useful insights into the theory and practise of writing, and some lovely autobiographical scenes, frequently with The Hitch which are always thoughtful and touching.  He memorialises the wonderful Hitchens and the bravery of his last years, when he was suffering so badly from the smoking that killed him and so many others.

October

Snow          John Banville

And he does write brilliantly about snow, which pervades this whole yarn: a detective mystery tale about a dead Priest in a Protestant family Mansion, two hours from Dublin.  A Prot policeman from the Garda  has to deal with a Cluedo-like cast of characters.  Quotes on the back compare him to Nabokov which is ridiculous.  Here he is closer to Simenon.  We know he loves Chandler as he wrote a whole book in his style and his affection for the thriller is obvious here in a very smart, interesting, Irish revenge story.

Say Nothing                           Patrick Radden Keefe

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

A brilliant history of The Troubles.  Essential reading.  Quite brilliantly told. I loved every second of it, and lived through quite a lot of it in London.  I think I even met the Price Sister at some trendy lefty thing in London.  Fascinating. In any other year this contemporary history of Northern Island would be my book of the Year.

The Chain                     Adrian McKinty

A brilliant thriller, recommended by Don Winslow.  A terrific narrative hook this highly readable page turner is currently Thriller Writer winning awards.

Fifty Fifty                     Steve Cavanagh

Another thriller with a clever narrative hook.  Two sisters on trial for murder accuse each other.  Who do you believe?

Maigret and The Loner           Georges Simenon

A vagrant dead in Montmartre in Les Halles.

The King in Yellow                 Raymond Chandler.

Such a brilliant opening, it suggests to me he took a short story and expanded it into this novel which is never quite as good as it’s beginning.

Squeeze Me: A Novel              Carl Hiaasen

Pythons in Florida.  Funny and deadly.  The perfect beach book but oh where is the perfect beach?

September

Thunderstruck               Eric Larson

Two intertwined stories, the flight and arrest of Dr. Crippen and his lover Ethel Neve who were arrested on an ocean liner after an international hunt.  Their capture as they fled to Canada was entirely due to transatlantic messages relayed for the first time through Marconi’s new transmitter.  The other half of the book is the story of Marconi himself, his remarkable invention, his travails trying to make it work and his eventual success, marriage, etc. etc. The problem is that the story of the pursuit of the runaway couple, he wanted for the murder of his wife,  she disguised as a boy, the chase all the way to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and their final arrest by the Scotland Yard Detective Dew, who arrives before them on a faster boat, is played out with the whole world watching, while they remained ignorant of the international excitement.  This story is far more thrilling than Marconi’s squabbles with competitors and  his many attempts to connect ships to shore, which cannot match the tale of a quiet cold-blooded psychopathic wife-murderer, a Doctor who chops up his spouse, disposes of her bones somewhere locally (probably the Canal) and then buries the skin and viscera under the cement in his basement coal cellar, all within 24 hours, without arousing any attention.  I had not known that Crippen and his wife Cora were both American. Ethel Neve not.  This book would be twice as good with half the material.

The Lion     Thomas Perry

An English professor is offered a bizarre chance to get his hands on a believed extinct Chaucer poem.

A short story length book and excellent as usual.

Maigret and The Informer       Georges Simenon

Always reliable.  The perfect pocket book.  The perfect palate cleanser.

Fifth Avenue 5 A.M.  Sam Wasson

Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman.

Slightly pretentious sub-title but good fun.  An enjoyable romp through the casting and filming of the movie.  Including the song, the song, the song….  Moon River.  When they did this as a musical in London (with Anna Friel) they unaccountably left out this amazing song which was as daft as leaving out What’s it all about? from the remake of Alfie.

The Beatles from A to Zed.      Peter Asher

By a much-loved old pal, this is a very fine alphabetical stroll through the Beatle song canon. Stemming from his Radio show of the same name, it is deceptively simple and easy to read, but crammed with great perceptions and personal memories, it is an invaluable look at the serious business of song writing.  Peter worked at Apple, while his sister Jane was dating Paul McCartney and he was often either present in the house while Lennon and McCartney were writing some of their classic Beatle songs, or else when in the studio recording them. Highly enjoyable and informative, his insights and memories make this a unique look at the greatest British composers of the Sixties.

Barbarian Days    William Finnegan

A Surfing Life

A bit more than I ever needed to know about surfing.  It won a Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so for it is very finely written but I had had enough of surfing after a while, only to stumble into the world of Don Winslow!

 

August

Trust Exercise               Susan Choi

I thought this book had a magnificent opening.  The first chapters were clever and brilliant.  A fictional memoir of young actors at a Performing High School in a southern City on the East coast.  I was bowled over and so enjoying it.  Then she pulled an interesting move.  She advanced the story ten years, when one of the characters in the memoir interestingly doorsteps the memoir writer at Skylight Books.  The confrontation is between the “real,” what Karen the “character” girl thinks happened, and the fictional memoir by Sarah the memoir writer.  So far so good.  But it quickly gets confusing.   Where are we going?  Revenge?  Hatred?  Resentment?   It’s unclear.  Then a third character enters, Kevin, who also begin narrating.  I’m sorry.  Three narrators is a play.  She is undoubtedly brilliant and I shall try other books but I miss the first one she was writing here.

 

Intimations                   Zadie Smith

It seems slight, it seems light, but it is heavy and essential reading, with serious questions to ask ourselves about 2020.  She is quietly despairing of racism in this country and concludes “that my physical and moral cowardice have never been tested, until now.”   Delicious and deceptively simple these philosophical essays have great resonance, and set a benchmark asking the question where we should begin considering how much we owe to ourselves as self-centred evolving individuals and how much we owe to being part of a society in a pandemic at a time of great civic unrest.  The essays are scattered with little observational character gems that she drops effortlessly into her wonderful prose:  “Ben…makes baldness look like an achievement..”   A book to carry around, re-read and reconsider.

I’m thinking the Wordsworth allusion is to make us think of Mortality.  Which is really her subject.

November Road             Lou Berney

Recommended by Don Winslow.  This book really crushes it. Everything you ever wanted in a great fuck-off read.  In New Orleans in 1963 a low life is assigned to remove a vehicle from a Houston garage and dump it in the Ship Channel.  A Cadillac that has come from Dallas.  With a used Mannlicher rifle in the trunk!  Kennedy’s assassination is on TV everywhere.  Oswald is shot by Jack Ruby.   The guy realises he is wanted by everyone from the FBI down and must try and escape from all those who want him dead.  Very sweetly he hooks up with a battered wife and kids on the road to eventual, but subtle, redemption.

Gutshot Straight.           Lou Berney

I decided I need to read more of this guy and so I downloaded his first novel.  Written during the Writer’s Strike of the first decade of the millennium, the influence of writing for the screen can be seen in the characteristic short scenes which are whole chapters and the general smart pace of the piece, which is essential for a thriller.  Cut to Cut to… But he has a great talent.  And I’m starting his penultimate one…

July

Utopia Avenue      David Mitchell

The latest by a favourite writer, I loved this novel for most of the time.  Sometimes I think he is channelling me, he refers to so many places and events I recall.  Black Swan Green is set in Worcestershire where I was wicket keeper for Redditch third XI’s.  Then there’s Butlins, Skegness,  The Marquee Club, watching the psychedelic early Pink Floyd play at UFO in the Tottenham Court Road, I remember dancing for hours to those lava lamp oil projections, to Granny Takes a Trip, Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s, yes I was there,  but he is at least a decade younger.  This story tells of life back stage in cheap gigs on the road with an evolving British Pop group (Utopia Avenue)  in the Sixties.  Real people, like Bowie, Marc Bolan, Sanny Dennis etc pop[ in for the odd cameo. Three creative talents, all writers brought together into a group by Levon, Canadian entrepreneur friend of (real person) Joe Boyd. Elf, Jasper and Dean.  I was never quite convinced by Dean, the lead singer.  I couldn’t see him.  Elf is interesting, but Jasper (de Zoet) develops an inner poltergeist, which takes his life off at a tangent.   So while it was fun and terrific, and it was great to visit the Troubadour again and watch them making it, I don’t think he quite nailed it.  I’m not quite sure why, but I’m going to read the ending again and see what I think.

The Border          Don Winslow

The third and possibly the most powerful of an extraordinarily fine Cartel trilogy, the tale spans over 45 years of the powerful warring drug cartels, the men who lead them, the agents who fight them, the women they seduce and the cold continuous bitter-cruel killing that only escalates the more money the endless War on Drugs pumps in to the whole corrupt mix. This longest, endless and most unwinnable war undertaken by America, continues to corrupt civilization and destroy democracy while delivering daily death to US junkies, and misery to thousands of Mexicans.  It is clearly only slightly fictional and has so much relevance for and disgust with the current political kakistocracy in the US.  He has been writing this story for thirty years.  It is a huge achievement and a great read.  I kept asking myself, as  a contemporary novel what is this like? It has the social reach of Dickens, the anger and the despair, the view of the helpless poor trapped by the hypocrisy of the greedy,  but in its savage view of the depths of human behaviour and betrayal it is more like Dostoyevsky, or even Webster.  Throwing kids off a bridge being the most notable of the many outrages he evidences.  For this reads, not like fiction, but like truth. Dickens uses comedy to sustain.  Mr. Winslow only occasionally. His books are deadly serious. Not afraid to lay the blame, his finger points to the highest in the land, the US President’s son-in-law is involved raising money from the cartels for his campaign.  It’s all there. The New York property draining away their financial security and the complicity of foreign banks to come to the rescue of a campaign that is happy to accept help from gangsters and Russian mob leaders. We read with belief, yes this is how it is, and despair, yes this is what will happen.  Corruption prospers at a trough.  Turn the tap and watch the piggy’s feed. We need to end the War on Drugs, legalize them and treat them as the social health problem that they are.  Amazing work.  Bravo.

June

The Novellas of John O’Hara

I was reading these in a nice Modern Library Edition (1995)  They are just great to dip into.  I dipped deep.  Great bedside book.

Push through…             Carey Harrison

The last in a quartet of remarkable novels that is his life’s work and a singular achievement.  I love the way he can handle large scenes with multiple characters, because he is also a very fine playwright, and can manage this very difficult skill.  He may be an old friend but he can really write.. bu since he has been my friend since 1963 I will quote someone else: “…This novelist of such amazing dexterity, humanity, inventive skill. He reminds me of Durrell, of Burgess – yet with a sense of tenderness often missing in those showmen. I’ve since read as much as I can of this writer, unfailingly inventive – as I read his work, I often feel (as with Powys often, and Lawrence sometimes) that I’m reading a detective story that turns out to be about me.”  1968 he began what was to become a quartet of novels:  The Heart Beneath, beginning publication with Richard’s Feet (1990) Cley (1992), and Egon (1993), and completed in 2016 by How to Push Through, a project which the author regards as his primary life’s work.

The Newton Letter         John Banville

I reread a flawless novella from 1982 from John Banville.

The Comedians             Graham Greene

One of my favourite books. I love re-reading it. Greene explores the roles we all play in our lives. Even beginning with a joke, the three men who meet on a boat into Haiti are called Smith, Brown and Jones.  He is Brown, the lost soul, who loses his mother, loses his hotel, his mistress, but not his wife, ends up ironically as a Funeral Director.   He misses what others see in Jones, whom he foolishly thinks is a rival.

May

Until the End of Time    Brian Greene

I read this in a hurry as I was about to join him on BBC’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, but now I find myself going back and dipping into some of the fascinating things he reveals about the Universe.   It’s more interesting than science fiction.  In fact the whole Universe is far weirder than the bearded conjurer theory.   I want to read more.

I downloaded two Don Winslow books on to Kindle because they are so heavy! Alas I began to read the wrong one.  I meant to read The Border, the third part of his trilogy but I inadvertently started….

The Force            Don Winslow

…so I continued.  It was very prescient, a book about Police Corruption and the Manhattan Police.  Fascinating.  A brilliant portrait of a corrupt cop and what happens on the streets of NY.

Now perhaps I can finish his brilliant Trilogy.

Laugh Lines         Alan Zweibel

My life helping funny people be funnier.      Hilarious.  I loved this book.  He is a wonderful man.   I’m so glad I have known him since SNL in 1976.  I also am very proud of him.  He sent me a dollar of course…. For interviewing him on a forthcoming Zoom.

Strangers on a Train      Patricia Highsmith

Was this her first?  Hitchcock made the movie.  This was not my favourite read of hers. I was disappointed and bailed.

Catch and Kill      Ronan Farrow

I started this brilliant book in hardback when it first came out, but finished it recently on Kindle.  It is an amazing achievement and worthy of all the awards he picked up.  He takes down the appalling sexual bully and rapist Weinstein, as well as NBC and their misguided attempts to shield Matt Lauer from the retribution he totally deserved.  Along the way he has to face many attempts to stop him, including the attentions of Black Cube, which is, reassuringly a post Mossad group for hire, if you have, you know, raped anyone recently.  They can help.

Talking to Strangers               Malcolm Gladwell

I finally finished this intriguing book.  He is always readable.  Like a feast for the mind.

Maigret and the Old People.     Georges Simenon

Wonderful as usual.

So you don’t get lost in the neighbourhood.   Patrick Modiano

A bit French for me.

American Dirt               Jeanine Cummins

Starts fantastically well but I felt it ran out of steam towards the end.  I prefer Don Winslow in the horrendous world of the Mexican cartels, but she is certainly impressive, and he recommends this, if indeed it is not quite The Grapes of Wrath.   The Rapes of Wrath?

 

 

 

April

Hi Five                Joe Ide

An IQ novel

Well into his stride now, his books are effortlessly readable.  I’m not quite sure I get much of a picture of IQ his protagonist, I still don’t quite have an image of him in my mind,  but I really enjoy reading his author.   This one concerns someone who is accused of murder who is a Multi, and that in itself leads to complications.  Highly original.  Good stuff.

No Bones             Anna Burns

The great thing about age is you can happily re-read a book you just read recently with only a dim awareness of what happens.  This was her first novel and I liked it very much. Her writing is wonderful, in Belfast rhythms with slang and issues, a young girl, her family and friends at the beginning of the Troubles. I did indeed read it in January 2018 and said then “ She manages to be both bleak and satirical at the same time, as well as the finest prose writer.”  I agree with me.

Lady in Waiting             Anne Glenconner

My Extraordinary Life in the shadow of the Crown

A highly readable memoir of the Upper Classes and the poor woman who was married to the loony Peer Colin Tennant, the King of Mustique.  She becomes Lady in Waiting to the less than fabulous Princess Margaret.  This is a fascinating glimpse of the children of the Bright Young Things. Her description of the Coronation, where she was one of the six ladies in waiting carrying the train of the Queen at that extraordinary event, is worth the price of admission alone.  Kindle.

Maigret in Vichy

A memorable one.  Maigret is a fish out of water, taking the waters in Vichy, when a little old lady he and the Mrs have been holiday watching is suddenly found dead. Of course the local police ask for Maigret’s help and of course he can’t resist.

Apropos of Nothing        Woody Allen

Interesting autobiography of America’s most famous comedian and director of our time.  Interesting that he says he is not an intellectual, and indeed he never went to college. It was fun to read about his movies.  But we were all waiting for how he writes about HER… and he does.

Read on Kindle.

March

The Splendid and the Vile        Erik Larson

A terrific read.  About Winston Churchill in the dark days of 1940, replacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister with the country in imminent danger of German invasion.  It’s about his crew, Beaverbrook and Tree and so on, his loyal family, his determination to bring America in, via Roosevelt during two years of one hundred and fifty German bombers overhead.  The cruelty of the Blitz, and the nightly raids which killed thousands of Brits is particularly relevant in the age of CV.  There are indeed worse things.

Framed                Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Why Michael Skakel spent over a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

Robert F. Kennedy sent me this, because, unbelievably, the murder of Martha Moxley took place during the first ever broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS in 1975 and several of the protagonists were racing home to watch it.  More importantly, I was convinced by this book that a major injustice took place, prodded by Dominik Dunne and Mark Fuhrman the OJ Cop, when Michael Skakel was suddenly accused of and shockingly convicted of the murder three decades later, despite never having been a suspect and having a cast iron alibi.  I think he is out now.  I hope so.

Vegas                  John Gregory Dunne

A Memoir of a Dark Season

I have been searching for years for this book and I finally found it at the Pasadena Book Fair. It was certainly worth the search.  A very fine semi-autobiographical novel of a writer and his nervous breakdown in Vegas. Sharp, funny and sometimes cruel.  I loved it.

February

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        Victor Hugo

I’d forgotten just what a damn good writer Hugo was.  The French Dickens.  This abridged version was really good.  Completely captivated me.  Musical anyone?

Frankissstein                Jeanette Winterson

Lake Geneva 1816 and Mary Shelley is writing her classic on a wet weekend in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley and meanwhile in Brexit Britain a man is making robotic sex toys

The Man in the Red Coat        Julian Barnes

Much as I love him he didn’t grab me with this odd tale of a bunch of Frogs in Angleterre in the summer of 1885. The Belle Epoch in London and of course very gay Paree.

January

A Very Stable Genius              Philip Rucker & Carol Leonnig

A fine book on the Orange Monster.  But after a while I no longer wanted to continue reading about how crazy this terrible tyrant is and I put it away.  He is making everyone nuts.  Poor America. Will it ever recover?  The Trump Presidential Library is going to consist of nothing but books exposing what an insane malignant narcissist can do to democracy, when tutored by Putin and Roy Cohn.

The Catch            Mick Herron

He seems to be very good at these short novellas, perhaps inspired by Simenon.  This is great.

Maigret and Monsieur Charles         Georges Simenon.

Another brilliant one.  The great thing about the novella is it’s hard to run out of steam, as so many novels do.  Even great ones.

Serotonin             Michel Houellebecq

The same bleak view from a loser.  Compelling writing and total honesty.

Pal Joey               John O’Hara

Wonderful short letters from a Chicago nightclub singer to a better.   Became the basis for the Rogers and Hart musical.

Rogue Lawyer               John Grisham

Fine character.  A rogue lawyer.  Really interesting and very well told. I had picked up a large priont format but it was already very easy to read.

Maigret Hesitates           Georges Simenon

…but not for long.  Slight resemblance to another story of his, where he learns in advance a crime is to be committed. This one really surprises him and he hesitates to call the outcome.

More Than Likely          Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais

Fabulous memoirs from the two great writers (and Director). I loved every second of it.

Likely Lads, Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

 

 

 

 

 

    2019

Command Option 1 / 2 / 3

 

Christmas Gifts.

December

Agent Running in the Field     John Le Carré

Interestingly he seems to be writing a corrective to Nick Herron’s Slough House series…also it seems to be about the agent runner being seduced.   One might say penetrated.  But hard to tell so far.

The Two Faces of January      Patricia Highsmith

So often her novels concern two characters (usually men) circling each other, the one trying to murder the other. The would-be victim usually triumphs, often by killing his assassin, but in this particular long and complicated dance of death set in Greece, a young American aids and abets a rather nastier American in covering up a murder because he looks like his father, the intended victim saves his would be murderer from the Police.

Those Who Walk Away            Patricia Highsmith

A study in no revenge.  Set largely in Venice, a man will not kill or expose his father in law, after his very young wife has committed suicide in Majorca.

It’s Only Life                          Ash Carter and Sam Kashner

Mike Nichols in quotes from his 150 closest friends.  Witty, brilliant and I wrote notes all over it.

Talking to Strangers               Malcolm Gladwell

Misunderstandings and how to understand them and what they tell us about how we work.  Or don’t.

Another fine book from the finest current essayist.

Grand Union                          Zadie Smith.

What can I say?  I adore her.  Favourites:  Downtown is wonderful and  Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets is wonderfully funny.

Maigret’s Patience                  Georges Simenon

A recurring character is bumped off.

The Madman of Bergerac        Georges Simenon

A very good one.  Maigret jumps on a train and is almost bumped off.  Who is the madman??

How fortunate am I to have two novelists married to each other, sending me their work.

November

Winter                          Ali Smith.

Some discussion about how good we think this quartet is.   I didn’t finish this one.

Pity The Reader             Kurt Vonnegut & Suzanne McConnell

On writing with style, from a master, nicely interpreted and linked. Finely chosen and edited.  Excellent advice for writers.

Dark Places                   Gillian Flynn

An early novel about the sole survivor of a massacred family, as she grows up and deals with just what happened that night when her brother may have murdered her entire family.

A Small Town               Thomas Perry

What joy to have a writer friend who sends you his latest thriller every year?   He always has a great premise.   Here a Prison Break devastates a nearby local town, and sets in motion a female cop with a million dollars bounty to destroy the twelve who plotted, murdered the officers, escaped, invaded the local town with murder rape and mayhem.  And he returns to his Jane Whitefield books theme with a powerful female, tracking, hunting and in this case eliminating some really nasty people.

Everything happens       Jo Perry

Even better is to have a writer friend married to another writer.  I loved both books.  Stepping away from her excellent Dead Dog series, this is a fine novel where everything happens at the end.  It’s very short and I could have taken a lot more.

Queen Lucia. Part 1.  Make Way for Lucia.  E.F. Benson

Re-reading these wonderful books.  Lucia and Georgie are surely two of the greatest comic inventions in literature.  The book is exquisite, hilarious, and a delight.  A Curry cook appears as a Guru to fool Miss Map and her rival acolytes. Exquisitely bitchy novels about life in home counties rural England.

Camino Island      John Grisham

I’m not a big Grisham fan.  To me he writes like a lawyer.  I abandoned this. I wrote earlier (1995) about him the rather cruel line that he is “The MacDonald’s of writing.”

October

The Library Book Susan Orlean

I’m afraid I put it back on the shelves.  I might give it another go, a) because I was on pain killers and b) I think it should be better than it is and I don’t want to misjudge it.   For me it’s always about the writing.  Are they good at writing a sentence?  Compare any page of this to Salman Rushdie’s latest novel and you’ll see the difference.  Salman’s prose sparkles.  It feels effortless, which of course indicates a great deal of effort went into it. I know that’s not fair because Salman is a genius. I think it’s the shape that she’s chosen and I might dip into and see why it doesn’t grab me when I like everything about the story.

Maigret’s Anger   Georges Simenon

Maigret is perplexed by the murder of a nightclub owner, which threatens his reputation.

The Captain and the Glory      Dave Eggers

The rather wonderful Dave Eggers sent me a copy of his latest book.  He dispatched the text to me in the summer and I giggled happily through the entire, though rather short, fable, about an ignorant, vain, hopelessly inadequate, newly appointed Captain of a ship. I can’t imagine who he had in mind.  I found it hilarious, and I sent him a quote, not just because he wonderfully interviewed me about my Sortabiography in San Francisco last year, but because I thought he successfully lampooned the Idiot in Chief where many I think have failed.   They allow their hatred into their writing.  Here he just gently, mildly mocks and it is so much more deadly.  He had me laughing out loud.  Not an easy thing to achieve. I hope it does well. The Trump Presidential Library will be a room filled with books about what a useless, treasonable, shite he is.  A new book drops every day.  Dave’s is different. It’s funny.  I think Trump is funny, though dangerously so.

Quichotte             Salman Rushdie

An exquisite read.  Salman at the top of his game.   His writing is delightful.  His take on Quixote is brilliant.  I shall re-read it soon.

Offshore              Penelope Fitzgerald

The Booker Prize winner from 1979.  A perfect short novel.  Entirely built up with close character observations of all the outsiders who live on the boats at Chelsea Reach.  Delightful, less is so more.  I was happy to read it again, and would again.

Joe Country         Mick Herron

A Slough House novel.  The 8^th in this series about the losers at Slow House.   Great characters.  I think I’ve read every word he wrote.

The Beginning of Spring         Penelope Fitzgerald.

A Moscow novel set in 1913.  Interesting but not perfect.

July thru September

My Purple Scented Novel        Ian McEwan

Short, little novella.   About revenge.   Of the literary kind.  A tiny book which packs a punch.

Hapgood              Tom Stoppard

A play about Nils Bohr and Quantum Theory.  first produced in 1988. It is mainly about espionage, focusing on a British female spymaster (Hapgood) and her juggling of career and motherhood.

Jean de Florette    Manon Les Sources.      Marcel Pagnon.

Lovely French novels about the search for spring water in the south of France.

Read in French.

Written on the Body                Jeanette Winterson

A very fine writer.  I love her work.

City of Light, City of Poison     Holly Tucker

Abandoned.  Rather been down this Louisiana track recently.

The Cartel            Don Winslow.

Part Two of the epic trilogy.  Totally gripping.

White Teeth          Zadie Smith

I love her.  This was the first.  Happy to catch up.

Ravelstein            Saul Bellow

Ravelstein is Saul Bellow’s final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it received widespread critical acclaim.  It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written in the form of a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, a renowned professor, and Nikki, his lover. Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies. After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce. Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write the memoir.

The Smiley Trilogy.

Great re-reading.

 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.             John Le Carré

The Honourable Schoolboy.            John Le Carré

Smiley’s People.                                John Le Carré

The Unsteady Captain             Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers sent me this book.   “Mr. Idle —Hope the summer’s been good to you and yours. No obligation to read this, but given your interest in politics and humor I thought I’d send this. After trying many thousands of ways to address this horrible time, I wrote a sort-of satire. Maybe it’s some kind of distant cousin to Hello Sailor. Do not bother with it unless you are very bored or somewhat medicated.

In other news, I hope you are well.”

I replied:  “It’s fucking hysterical. I was concerned at the beginning because a writer I admire failed to make a funny Trump book work.  There was too much hatred. I think what you got exactly right and why it works so well is the tone.  The form of the narrative.  It doesn’t seem to comment while delivering hundreds of brilliant back handers.  It’s a kind of naive narrative “Oh and then this happened” as if it were all perfectly normal.  For instance when we find out they haven’t yet left port.  Both the metaphor and the story play perfectly together. You manage to conceal every gag, which means for example, when you deliver the daughter gag, we hadn’t actually seen it coming.  The first essential with comedy. I laughed out loud so frequently I was amazed because I’m not that easy to make laugh out loud.

Hotel World.         Ali Smith

Hotel World is divided into five sections. The first section, “Past” tells the story of Sara Wilby  The second part, “Present Historic”, is about a homeless girl (Else) begging for money outside the Hotel. The “Future Conditional”, the third section of the novel, Lise, a receptionist. The fourth part is “Perfect” with its far from perfect character Penny. The fifth section of the novel titled “Future in the Past,” is entirely Clare’s memories on the life and death of her sister Sara. “Present” is the title of the last part of the novel.

The Constant Gardener           John Le Carré

is a 2001 novel by British author John le Carré. The novel tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. Believing there is something behind the murder, he seeks to uncover the truth and finds an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucracy and pharmaceutical money. The plot was based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria. The book was later adapted into a feature film in 2005.

Ripley Underground               Patricia Highsmith

Instantly addictive.  Binge novel reading.  I downloaded the next on Kindle.  I needed it now. She writes about the killing in the same low key uncommitted way she does about everything.   Brilliant.   Only now and again she lets Ripley’s underlying hysteria and madness bubble through, like a barely controlled manic episode.  In this he has a French wife and lives just beyond Orly.  She repeats her themes of killing and impersonating here, with a twist, when Tom disguises himself as a dead painter, whose work they have been forging, with the legend he is in Mexico. An American collector suspect his is a forgery.  Actually they are all forgeries.   The painter makes an assault on Tom.   There is a whole second story about the German fence.

June

The Talented Mr. Ripley          Patricia Highsmith

A classic.  A young man of almost no morals, virtually borderline, escapes his low key tax fraud scam, by being sent to Italy to rescue Dickie Greenleaf, the son of a millionaire boat designer.  The switch from picturesque into sinister is done so effortlessly you realise you are in the hands of the very talented Ms. Highsmith.

Normal People     Sally Rooney

I found this also to be genius.  A beautiful book, of an unspoken lifelong romance.  She’s only 28 for heaven sake, but what a gift.   Just delightful.  Romantic and yet very modern.

Autumn               Ali Smith

A quite brilliant opening to a promised quartet of novels, my how this lady can write.  Buy more, soon.

Maigret and the Reluctant Witness    Georges Simenon

A strange, uptight wealthy family close ranks when the scion is suddenly murdered.

Cley                     Carey Harrison

The second in a quite brilliant quartet of books by this masterful novelist, author and dramatist.

Siege:  Trump under fire.        Michael Wollf

As gripping and as good as his Under Fire which exposed the chaos in the Trump Shite House.  This shows the crumbling of the man’s mind.  Everyone who meets him and works for him thinks he’s a moron.  A really must-read look inside the President’s mind.  Once again Bannon contributes largely to the understanding of what is going on.,

There There         Tommy Orange

Finely written from a new writer.   The Native American experience in Oakland and beyond.   Good characters.   Short stories melded into a novel.

The Whistler        John Grisham

A corrupt Judge in Florida aids an Indian Gambling Casino Crime Mob.  Efficient.  Readable.

Live a Little          Howard Jacobson

Falling in love at the end of your life.

Maigret and the Ghost    Georges Simenon

Strangely interesting people live opposite the scene of a crime.  Wealthy, corrupt and maybe guilty of something.

May.

The Moving Target        Ross MacDonald

1949 noir detective thriller reprinted recently.  A good example of the genre and quite readable if not the best.

A Separate Peace           John Knowles

I tried twice to read this novel and though both times I got more than two thirds through I never finished it, so I’d have to say it’s two thirds good.

The Woman in the Window     A. J. Finn

A wonderful thriller.  Beautifully constructed and written, like a cinema noir.  Impossible to put down.

Maigret Defends Himself         Georges Simenon

Impeccable.   For once Maigret finds out what it is like to be investigated.   I love the way he occasionally plays with form and the expectations of his readers.

Maigret’s Patience         Georges Simenon

Almost a sequel in that it features two characters from the previous book, the gangster whom Maigret suspects of being involved in the ongoing jewellery heists, and his love the ex-hooker.

The Kindly Ones            Anthony Powell

Book Six in this very long sequence of novels A Dance to The Music of Time, and this time I really sat this one out…

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs   Steve Brusatte

I found there was a little more of the author and his pals and a little less of the dinosaurs than I needed so I abandoned ship.

Maigret’s Doubts           Georges Simenon

One of his best.  Again another one where he plays with form and expectation.  In this one Maigret begins to investigate before there is any crime.

The Battle of Arnhem     Anthony Beevor

One of Monty’s most inglorious moments and a lesson in the arrogance of power.   Strange how the English seem to treasure their defeats the most.    This amazingly detailed retelling of the disastrous plan to drop paratroopers to destroy the bridges (as portrayed in the movie A Bridge Too Far) is a lesson in the jealousy of commanders.   Monty wanted to be the first to attack Germany.  He manipulated Eisenhower and the Americans, keeping them in the dark.  The big losers were not just the poor old paratroops but the Dutch who were seen by the Germans to support this Allied liberation and were punished as they withdrew.

Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.   Rick Reilly

Everything you ever needed to know about the deranged liar in the White House: he’s a man who cheats all the time at golf.   All the time. Hilarious.   Revealing.  Nicely written by someone who cares deeply about the Sport and who has played with him.  The best description of how to understand the weird person who has taken over the country.   Hilarious and then when you think of it, very scary.  But a must read. Please somebody call a Doctor, he shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

 

The most fun I have is browsing book shops.  Sometimes I pick well and sometimes not. This particular weekend I came back from Vromans with four books:

Machines Like Me         Ian McEwan

..which I knew within two pages I wouldn’t complete.  I’m not mad on sci fi but the opening scene seemed to be one I’ve seen in at least two movies:  plugging the humanoid android in.  I like him very much as a writer and the only ones of his books I don’t like are always hugely popular so this should be huge for him.

White          Brett Easton Ellis

…which I knew nothing about.   I didn’t even know it wasn’t a novel, but I instantly adored it.  A wonderful book of memoirs and thoughts and essays and above all honesty.  Great writing.  Very readable and enjoyable.  Taking to task political correction, and despite his unfortunate love for the Trump monster which goes back to his character’s obsession with him in the novel American Psycho he has interesting observations on whether the violence in that book is real or imagined.   So of course I had to read..

American Psycho  Brett Easton Ellis

I found this novel very original and startling.  Every character is described as if in a photo shoot from GQ with minute magazine-style details on what they are wearing, which is highly original and gives the book great stylishness.  Of course the violence is sickening, but I much preferred this to Crime and Punishment.  And it makes sense they all adore Trump.  This is the Reagan eighties of Wall Street and champagne, cocaine and money-making.   In a sense you can read it as a satire, though I think he is deadly serious.  Some things are very funny, like no one quite knowing anyone’s name, the coke-fuelled conversations with everyone talking and nobody listening, the narcissistic world of Personal Vanity Fair, Les Mis posters and references everywhere and Shopping Guides, define a world where New Yorkers are defined by their wealth, their personal income and what they wear.  Published in 1991 it seems to be very relevant again.

Maigret’s Patience         Georges Simenon

One of the finest of his novellas.   Impeccable.

April

The Greengage Summer                   Rumer Godden

I had heard of her but never read her.  I found this 1958 original edition in my shelves, along with a contemporary Quantas menu (!) and found it to be utterly delightful.  It could be called Five go-a-feral in France but actually it is far more serious, though set in a child’s world, when a family go on holiday in Les Oillets on the Marne.  Losing their mother to a Hospital in illness they must cope with a grown up and quite different French world from their English middle class home, where far more is going on than they can understand.   Beautifully narrated by the second oldest girl (13) it is exquisitely written and pretty much covers everything.  Delicious as the greengages.   And still in print.

The Old Drift                Namwali Serpell

A young new Zambian writer spans the history between Livingstone’s falls and modern day Zambia and pretty much everything in between:  Independence, Kaunda, Communism, Revolution.   Very finely written and excellent story-telling, she teaches at Berkeley.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits  Ayelet Waldman

A brilliant, beautiful book that I devoured at one sitting. About the difficulties of being a step mother.  Each single character plays a part in the totally unexpected outcome.   Marvellously crafted and magnificently written.

Doing Justice       Preet Bharara

Unexpectedly well written and delightfully informative I would never have expected to so have enjoyed this book and learned so much from it.  It was a gift I loved.

Richard’s Feet      Carey Harrison

To come across a masterpiece is rare enough, but one written by an old friend is truly a delight.  He wrote this in 1990 and I have remained quite ignorant of it until now.  As I wrote to him: “I find your prose so readable.   Strong, virile, sensitive, descriptive, subjective, passive-historical and at times so fucking funny.”  It is a fabulous novel.  Marvellously it is a Quartet and I have the other three still to savour.

Metropolis            Philip Kerr

It made me so sad to receive this his last book in the mail.  But it’s a Bernie Gunther and set in the Weimar republic, just as the Nazis are becoming what they so unpleasantly became, and so of course I loved it, pausing occasionally to mourn the loss of this wonderful author and kind man whom I was lucky enough to meet briefly.

Provence 1970      Luke Barr

Another great read which I couldn’t put down.   In 1970 M. F. K. Fisher met Julia Child and James Beard in Provence, almost by chance.   This lovely book, so well written by her nephew, tells the tale of how these great American tastemakers, got on, or didn’t, how they cooked for one another, what they thought of it, and how their experiences in France revolutionised American taste.  Quite by chance, and unnoticed in the book, a young Englishman arrived in Provence only a year later…

A Time of Gifts     Patrick Leigh Fermor

Just before World War Two a young man sets out on foot from England bound for Constantinople. Writing the most exquisite prose in his diaries he tells the tale of all the weird and wonderful things he sees and feels en route, in a world just about to collapse and disappear for ever in World War Two.  Impossible not to want to re-read.  This was my second go.

Elvis in Vegas      Richard Zoglin

A thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating tale of the many stages of Vegas, and how its constant state of change has continued to the present day.   Also just how big an influence Elvis was.

The Tailor of Panama.            John Le Carré

Re-reading this novel several things became clear:  first how similar the idea of Harry Pendel recruiting phony sources in his mind to turn in to Osnard his unwanted handler, is to Scobie recruiting fake spies in Our Man in Havana  and then how similar JLC and Graham Greene’s fathers were.  Both men, semi-criminal dubious fantasists, who would pluck them out of school and even steal them from school  (Single and Single)  and then I remembered Dickens shameless cozener of a dad and wondered if this wasn’t the very making of a novelist.  In the former two, spying adds another level of deceit to the original sense of betrayal.

March

Hamlet                William Shakespeare

Still the greatest play, and then I had to go back to reading…

Will in the World           Stephen Greenblatt

….the essential book on Shakespeare.   It’s nice to bounce between the plays and the book.

Caddyshack                   Chris Nashawaty

The making of a movie I have yet to see.. but an interesting early history of Doug Kenney and the National Lampoon and meeting Matty Simmons, several of whom I knew, for instance Michael O’ Donahue. I missed Lemmings  though Python had to ask them to stop doing our Custard Pie sketch which Tony Hendra had given them.  I remember going to see The National Lampoon Show at the Palladium New York in the Spring of 1975, with Terry Gilliam, and there I saw and met for the first time John Belushi (a little awed by meeting two Pythons), Bill Murray and the adorable Gilda Radner.  It was a very funny show and we hung out for a while.  This is before SNL began.  Happy Days.

Before The Fall             Noah Hawley

Another very fine novel by the showrunner of Fargo.  A gripping modern novel, which reminded me a little of Tom Wolfe.  No, not his silly kerpang prose but his clear look at modern business types. The tragedy of City Man.  His view of society and money which I suppose has been a major subject of the novel since E. M. Forster.  Here in an intensely page-turning read, a plane crash triggers the complex reactions of the modern New York world from the corrupt Fox-like News to its appalling, tasteless, terrible heroes, the mercifully now defunct O’Reilly.  Both finely satirical and deeply moving and very enjoyable.

The Power of the Dog             Don Winslow

Totally gripping and compelling first part of an extraordinary trilogy about the US and the drugs and arms trafficking world.  Set in the Nineties, the characters interweave through complex story layers, both in New York, California and South America,  and there is a lot about the Reagan Contra World.  Page turning, thrillingly written, I have the other two standing by!  I loved his California Fire and Ice, and have since let him fall from my radar, but he’s back and glowing brightly.

Stoner                  John Williams

A simply brilliant novel from 1965.  Flawless prose.  Every single word is precise and eloquent.  Hardly a sentence too many and yet generations pass before our eyes.  The book really asks the question : what is it to be successful in life?   What constitutes a good life?  And the answer is simple and clear:  living honestly, working hard and trying to love.  To enjoy the love of your metier:  in this case teaching. To enjoy the love of another human being:  in this case it’s not his wife, and to be loyal to the right things – not pro patria but pro humanitas, in this case loyalty to and love for a University. Wholly unexpected and totally enjoyable.  I think I picked the tip up from Michael Chabon.  Pass it on.

Maigret in Court            Georges Simenon.

Thoughts from Maigret, Simenon’s alter ego, which I think reveal what he tries to do as a novelist. “Even today, he knew that he was only giving a lifeless, simplified picture.  Everything he had just said was true, but he hadn’t conveyed the full weight of things, their density, their texture, their smell.”

Killing Commendatore   Haruki Murukami

I got some way into this then abandoned.   It happens to me with a lot of his books.  It’s when he moves from Reality into Fantasy.   I lose interest.

Bad Blood            John Carreyrou

Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-up.   Totally gripping tale of Theranos and its intriguing, utterly self-confident, strangely weird founder Elizabeth Holmes.   An excellent and revealing read and a reminder how newspapers can still save us from the Liars and the Lies they tell…

A Time of Gifts              Patrick Leigh Fermor

The finest English prose you’ll ever encounter.  This 19 year old misfit walked out of Britain in 1933 with the aim of reaching Constantinople.  This is his diary of his amazing adventures and his for all time description of Europe before it closed for Fascism.

No Bones             Anna Burns

The debut of this year’s Booker winner.  She manages to be both bleak and satirical at the same time, as well as the finest prose writer.

Dead is Beautiful           Jo Perry

The third and probably the best in this unique series about a dead man and his dog.  I love her writing and I love the extraordinarily original setting of a detective ghost story.  Amazingly clever and deeply satisfying.

 

February

No Chip on my Shoulder                  Eric Maschwitz

(1957.)  I have been looking for this book for some time, ever since I learned about Eric Maschwitz in Robert Hewison’s book about The Footlights.  A former member, he wrote the lyrics for two great songs: “These foolish things” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.   He married the hilarious Hermione Gingold, joined the BBC, wrote musicals, then went out to Hollywood, playing tennis with Cary Grant, before returning to England for WW2, and ending up as Head of the BBC.  We eventually found the book in the LA Public Library but disappointingly it contained hardly any details about the story that intrigued me, that he used the Footlights as cover for an operation against the Nazis.  He draws a veil over this alas.  Pity.

Wild and Crazy Guys              Nick de Semlyen

An interesting book about the SNL alumni who went out to Hollywood and changed if not the face then the nose of Hollywood.  Since I knew most of these guys and was often around some of their movies (e.g. Blues Brothers in Chicago) it was fascinating for me.   Belushi, Aykroyd, Chevy, Murray, Eddie Murphy, and the SCTV alums, John Candy, Marty Short, Rick Moranis – they made a lot of movies and a lot of money.

Bookends             Michael Chabon

At the beginning of the book he identifies a set of “people who do not read introductions” amongst whom I would have included myself, but I happily basked in him writing about the books contained here, and I immediately subscribed to almost all of them, most of which were entirely unknown to me.  Of course he seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, and his prose glitters with gems, amongst which I loved “the past is another planet” and “It reveals the fundamental truth of the universe: that the fundamental truth of the universe will remain forever concealed.”

Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse. Georges Simenon

I discovered towards the end I had read it before.  Oops.  That’s why I keep this diary, but I can’t for the life of me find any reference to it, so I guess I forgot to record it.

Wrecked              Joe Ide

An IQ novel.    The third by this fascinating local writer and he’s really getting into his stride. I found the opening few chapters to be utterly fabulous and unexpectedly hilarious.  Impossible to keep up such expectations, but still a very good yarn indeed.

Somebody’s Darling       Larry McMurtry

I am constantly impressed by his writing.  By the time he came to write this in 1978 he had already written Terms of Endearment, the Last Picture Show and Horseman Pass by..  I thought this an absolutely brilliant Hollywood novel, but then he went and switched horses in the last third, changing the narrator unexpectedly from the man to the women and without any warning which I felt absolutely took the wind out of the book and confused and annoyed me.  Nevertheless he can really write.

 

January

The Spy and The Traitor         Ben Macintyre

I felt this was an article at book length.  I wanted the skinny and abandoned the fatty.

Maigret and the Tramp           Georges Simenon

A very nice one.  Maigret is sentimental about a tramp under a bridge, assaulted, but by whom?   Who assaults tramps? he asks, in less violent times.   Reminding us that the streets were not always filled with the homeless sleeping rough.

A History of France                John Julius Norwich

A splendid and informative and not too long canter through French history.  Very enjoyable.  I’m very sad he himself just entered history, and since his father was Duff Cooper he joins his Dad in the pages about the Twentieth Century and France.  Very readable.

Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.  Anthony Powell

Being the fifth episode of the rather magnificent epic series of twelve novels A Dance to the Music of Time first published in the fifties and sixties. I’m slowly working my way through for the second time. Hope I finish before I’m finished.

Maigret’s Secret            Georges Simenon

I’m so grateful to Penguin for their monthly publishing of new translations of this extraordinary writer.

They are novella length and are just perfect for palate cleansing between longer works, and any plane journey, or just popping in your pocket while you wait for something.  As usual, weather sets the scene.  Here Paris in the rain.  I like the way he often changes the setting.  Here Maigret recalls an old case in discussion with his friend Dr. Pardon, so you get two levels, the actual story of a murder, and Maigret reflecting on it.

The Burglar                           Thomas Perry

My all-time favorite with a new novel is cause for rejoicing in our household.  How does he do it?   An annual treat.  He has written so many great books and here comes another one…

Little Constructions       Anna Burns

An earlier work by the Booker Prize winner, she is so goddamn funny and so dark.   Plus she writes like a goddess.

The Fifth Risk               Michael Lewis

Pretty compulsive reading, and should be compulsory really to understand the mess that one ignorant, vain, narcissistic, criminal can impose on America within days of starting taking office.  Wonderfully clear and brilliant journalism of the problems of our times.  The big take away is just how much the Government do for us which is purloined and used for profit by Reptards.

 

 

 

2018

Command Option 1 / 2 / 3

 

Christmas Books.

These were my Christmas gift selections….

 

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth   William Boyd
Swing Time                                     Zadie Smith
Chicago                                          David Mamet
IQ                                                  Joe Ide
The Adventures of Augie March    Saul Bellow
The Drop                                        Mick Herron
Slow Horses                                   Mick Herron

December

 

This has been the year I discovered Mick Herron.

There are two series of thrillers. The Slough House series, which is more modern Le Carré territory  and The Oxford series. I read both series in order.  They are completely addictive.  Perfect for the road. I began with Slough House and I recommend that to start.  Welcome to the world of Jackson Lamb.

I ended up with The Oxford Series, which is also terrific and consists of:

Down Cemetery Road              Mick Herron

The Last Voice You Hear        Mick Herron

Why We Die                           Mick Herron

Reconstruction                       Mick Herron

Wonderful.  Just brilliant.  Tense, taught and totally unexpected.  Everything you’d ever want in a thriller.   Set in Oxford, at a Nursery school, which ends up involving the Police and MI5.   A master of suspense at the top of his game.  I thought this was magnificent.

Smoke and Whispers               Mick Herron

An Oxford novel.  But this time Zoe Boehm is dead.  Drowned in the River Thames.  Or is she?   A masterly piece of character detective fiction.   He keeps you gripped to the page.   Absolutely addictive.  Read one, read the lot.

Nobody Walks                        Mick Herron

A stand-alone book.  But brilliant.  Totally absorbing.  I seem to have read everything.  Such a joy to discover a new writer (to yourself) and to binge.  I’m sad because I seem to have done the lot in such a short space of time.  I hope I missed something.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions    Stephen Hawking

My new Bible.  Beautifully and very simply written, from lectures and talks, this is a mind blowing, very simple summation of what we believe to be true in the Universe.   It makes belief in a God created Universe somewhat simplistic.  Many of the things described defy belief.  I now give it to people.  Don’t panic, there’s not an equation in sight.  With an introduction by Eddie Redmayne and a very beautiful postscript by his daughter about his funeral which is both touching and amazing.

Maigret Enjoys Himself      Georges Simenon

As always the perfect appetizer, or palate cleanser for longer reads.  Maigret is on holiday but stays in Paris and can’t resist watching how his colleague Janvier goes about solving a crime.  It’s his perspective on the reader who follows cases in the newspapers.  One of those where he plays with form, this time allowing Maigret to follow the crime as a civilian.  But with a bit better clue.

Moonglow                              Michael Chabon

I ran out of books and picked up this and the Doer in Sydney.   The hallmark of a great book is you can read it again.  This was even better for the second time.   I find this a lot with this amazing author.   Basically about his (fictional really as he admits in the intro) maternal grandfather.  It skirts a lot of territory, memorable chapters being about Werner von Braun and his attempted capture by the Americans at the end of the war, and his real involvement with the foul camp that kept the V2 running until almost the last month.  The camp that killed more than the victims of the flying bomb which would soon become the Saturn rocket that would take America to the moon.  He ends his days in an old peoples home in Florida searching for a Python.  Funny, witty, exquisitely written, I was hooked once again from the start.

This is what happened.            Nick Herron.

Spy thriller.  Or is it.  Spoiler alerts.  Latest thriller.  Always surprising, always entertaining.

About Grace.                          Anthony Doer.

Running out of books in Sydney I picked up two I was fairly sure I’d read, and re-read half of this before economising on my packing, knowing I have it at home.  Very fine writing about a boy who dreams the short future.  Bad things will happen.  No one will believe you.

Murder, Satanism and Infanticide at the Court of the Sun King. Anne Somerset

Reading on I Pad after enjoying the Netflix series Versailles.   It makes you want to discover whether it is all true.  This one confirms the poisoning and is very interesting about the sexual activity.  But of course it is France.   Nicely written and a good perspective on the most extraordinary of monarchs and his amazing creation of Versailles.  The gap between the glittering court and the poverty of the over taxed peasantry would of course soon be closed by the Revolution.

The Sun King                         Nancy Mitford.

I picked up my old copy of this excellent history, and dipped into it.

November

Milkman                                Anna Burns

A very powerful, original, incredibly well-written and highly deserved winner of this year’s Mann Booker Prize.   An interior monologue about a young girl in Northern Ireland during the troubles.  Her skill in capturing the voice and the attitudes of a community under siege and locked into its prejudices, as the political ice slowly starts to melt and things begin to change is extraordinary.  I found it gripping, fascinating, fresh and honest.

The Age of Louis XIV             Will & Ariel Durant

We had been watching Versailles on Netflix and I was intrigued to know just how much was actual history.  I knew many scenes were completely made up obviously, so I turned to the masters, Volume VIII of their incredible Story of Civilization, a complete set of which was presented to me by my wonderful Spamalot Producer Bill Haber. Beautifully written this is the finest historical record ever and an amazing achievement.  Louis’ Age was of course 66, and he dies sadly, amidst the financial collapse of the gilded honeytrap he created to destroy the nobility.  The Revolution would complete the work in only a few more years.

The River in the Sky                Clive James

A long epitaph poem by Clive musing about his own life and forthcoming death.   Torn between self-love and self-pity many parts of this are enjoyable, and many a complete giveaway of a desperate need for fame.  Occasionally funny, occasionally moving, occasionally pretentious beyond belief, this is, what you feel, he would have liked someone to write about him.  My feeling is that he was desperately jealous of everything said by the good and worthy about Christopher Hitchens at his funeral.  He wanted all that said about him.  The tragedy is they won’t.  A good hearted fellow, a serial adulterer, against all the odds he managed to stay with the beyond long-suffering Prue for all his life. Like his life, I enjoyed lots of it.

Love is Blind                          William Boyd

After being blown away by his short stories his latest novel somewhat disappointed me.  It’s a romance.  In the cinema sense.   Fascinating, and occasionally very moving, I never quite believed in this 19^th Century tale of the love of an Edinburgh piano tuner for an enigmatic Russian beauty. Mainly, I failed to believe in her.  And I often felt manipulated, in so far as things happened, because the plot needed them to happen.  That’s what I mean by cinema writing.  It might make a very fine movie.  I was never bored, I was engaged, until perhaps the last quarter, where I felt him thrashing around to find an end, and when he did it was pure movie writing.  Novels are bloody hard work, and I often wish novelists would write the end first, because even the best of them tend to run out of steam.  I think William Boyd is up there with the best of them, but this is not his best novel.

The Gifts of Reading               Robert Macfarlane

Somewhere along my book tour, possibly Manchester, some fan slipped this tiny Penguin book into my hand.  Like an idiot I signed it and tried to hand it back.  Mercifully I took it away with me.  It’s tiny, delightful and extraordinary and one I shall continue to re-read and I thank the anonymous donor.

“Broadsword calling Danny Boy”     Geoff Dyer

An extraordinary book, musing on the movie Where Eagles Dare.   Almost a scene by scene description of what happens in a movie I haven’t seen, with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, it is hilarious, very witty, occasionally wonderful rude, and captures something quite original, managing to talk about telling a tale on the screen and how unreal that world usually is.  I picked up a beautiful signed special edition published by and at Hatchards.  One for the stocking.

October

 

I spent this month largely on the road.  So, I packed some preferences for travel, Maigret of course and some Mick Herron, the new essential travel companion for binge reading, but then, a superb discovery, that William Boyd has become my all-time favourite short story writer. 

Spook Street                  Mick Herron

This, the fifth in his Slough House series, was easily my favourite, intensely plotted and very well written, kept me happily entertained during a long trip across America and many changing scenes and airports and hotels.  What a joy he is.   And so much as yet unread, waiting for me in the wings.   It’s such a pleasure to stumble on a new writer you’re going to treasure.  I began the month with him and ended it too.

The Drop                      Mick Herron

I found this at the end of the month in Waterstones and it was here almost before I was.  Very impressive to shop on a Saturday in London and start reading on a Tuesday in California. Short and sweet and almost a tease, as I want to know more, but I like his short Maigret length novellas, like a good appetizers it whets without satiating the palate.  Oo you pretentious git, says the inner editor.

Maigret Travels             Georges Simenon

Maigret out of his depth, a fish out of water, amongst the rich in a luxury Parisian hotel, with an attempted suicide by a countess and the sudden death of a billionaire.  He is particularly good describing  his inadequate feelings in the strange backstage world of the hotel, while plodding on regardless with his investigation into what does not feel right to him.

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth                       William Boyd

I stumbled across this book of short stories in Hatchards and was totally blown away.   I have never read a collection of stories like it.  He was always good, but now seems to have evolved into the finest short story writer I have ever read.  It was never my favourite form, but I devoured these, immediately bought the previous collection and then thoroughly enjoyed reading some of the earlier ones I remembered, such as On The Yankee Station, and Nathalie X now republished in a more recent collection as:

The Dream Lover           William Boyd

I re-read these.   This is what I wrote before.   “These funny, surprising and moving stories are a resounding confirmation of Boyd’s powers as one of our most original and compelling storytellers.”

Fascination                   William Boyd.

I enjoyed this, the second recent collection, even more than the republished older ones.   They seem to come out of nowhere with so much detail and precision, I found them over-whelmingly great. Powerful, germane, and almost out of nowhere.   Impressive and extremely enjoyable.

 September

 

My reading has become very desultory and random.  I pick up and put down books.   I can’t settle in to anything.  I can’t tell if this is just a phase, as I prepare to head out on the task of selling my own.   The last serious book I read was Herzog and even that I discarded.  Is this Reader’s Block?  I became obsessed with that gag in the last novel I wrote; at least I hope it was the last novel I’ll write.  You deserve at least that.  It wasn’t even printed, a download.   It wasn’t half bad.   About three quarters.  I took some consolation from the fact that it was printed in German, but a friendly fan from Munich wrote and assured me that the translation was so bad it was almost unreadable.  I trust her because she reads amazingly well in English.  I’ve fallen back on Kindle quite a bit too.   Let’s see what precisely:

Calypso                         David Sedaris

I finally came to enjoy him, and quite by chance.  I was watching the wonderful old two-part documentary on Mark Twain by Ken Burns when I realised the voice I should hear in my head when reading Sedaris should be Southern.  I have no idea whether that is how he speaks, but since many of the tales in this collection are set in and around the beach and house he buys on Emerald Isle and  I looked it up on a map, Raleigh, Smithfield, definitely the south, it fell into place for me and I would read with the warm treacly elegant voice used by many of the Burns readers.  And enjoyed the tale of family, and loss, and good times.

Sue Grafton                  C is for corpse

I abandoned her alphabetical detective stories at this one. Not finishing.  Not even sorry.  Maybe a rainy day read.  But she is no Maigret.  Pity

Fear                             Bob Woodward

My final Kindle try was Woodward’s book, delivered shortly after midnight on publication day, but I can’t become interested in Trump.  He is such a simple monster.  Narcissistic and uninteresting.  With all the sycophants surrounding him doing the dance around his desk only Bannon struck me as interesting, the rest avoiding the Jared’s and the soi-disant First Daughter came across as jumped up stool pigeons, and I began to lament the weakness at the heart of the American system: the elected Emperorship, with way too much power for one man and the fact that he could pull anyone unelected into his kitchen cabinet and have them do anything under promise of Presidential pardon, surely the most corrupting exception in any form of government.

 

I tried a few real books too:

I’m a Joke and so are you                 Robin Ince

A Comedian’s Take on What Makes us Human.   I very much enjoyed this book that Robin Ince kindly sent me.

A Strange Eventful History      Michael Holroyd

Which I found to be an occasionally eventful history of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, and no more remarkable than the lives of many actors, the main interest being who and when they popped in to bed with others, since it is almost impossible to get a sense of the acting styles of Sarah Bernhardt et al pre U Tube.  Frankly, I got fed up with the whole lot of them.

How to talk about books you haven’t read.  Pierre Bayard

A fascinating series of essays and although apparently tongue in cheek, this Parisian professor tackles some interesting thoughts about what we think we know about reading.   Amusing hors d’oeuvres, but not the full smorgasbord.

The List               Mick Herron

A short novella length little beguiling read, is part of the Slough House series.  He just gets better and better.

Fortune Smiles                                                  Adam Johnson

“Superbly written short stories I could easily re-read again.”  That’s what I wrote when I first read this book on the road in February in Australia in 2016,   but I was going through an Adam Johnson phase and picking this up again in Vromans I found it wasn’t true.  I couldn’t easily re-read them.

 

So now what?   Pick up a Dickens, mash into a Maigret, or attack the Bellow I have been storing up?

Plus I have to decide what to take with me on my book tour…. I decided to tackle a book on Berlin.  See Napoleon’s guide to reading:  “When in doubt invade Berlin.”

Berlin                  Rory Maclean

Well I loved this. A kind of personal cultural history of Berlin, with two of my favourite essays: one describing the extraordinary day that Kennedy visited Berlin, which by an exquisite coincidence found me also in Berlin on that very day, where I saw his cavalcade go by.  The other is a lovely piece on David Bowie and “Heroes”, describing his time in the city and his work methods.  The whole book was lovely and finely written and I really loved it.

 

And I kept on reading:

Collected Poems            Philip Larkin

Which is simply wonderful.

 

August

Continuing my troll and stroll through Powell.  (And that rhymes.)

It’s like a very posh soap, but exquisitely written.  Is Proust French soap?

The Acceptance World   (3)     Anthony Powell

The first three books are described as Spring.  Jenkins moves into the world and falls in love, this time reciprocated, in an affair with Jean.  Uncle Giles is obscure as ever in a Bayswater Hotel.  Some acquaintances have fallen away, some have been married, divorced and become drunks (Stringham.)  Widmerpool has left his powerful job and joins the acceptance world, in the City.  Something to do with guaranteeing options.

At Lady Molly’s.   (4)              Anthony Powell

We enter now Summer.  Time has passed.  The affair with Jean is over.  Jenkins, as usual glides through society, bumping into people, Widmerpool of course, who is now getting married.  I finally finished reading this in September, when I was low on good reads, because it is so exquisitely written and you just want to know what happens to Widmerpool.  At the end Jenkins is engaged, but not particularly happily.

Catalina Eddy                        Daniel Pyne 

A Novel in Three Decades.    Very fine trilogy of LA crime novels set as advertised in different decades.   Very well written and constructed. I like his books very much. I had this on Kindle for travel.  This was particularly readable and a fascinating slice of different times in LA.

Deep Water                            Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith’s great originality is making us root for the villains.  She understands that evil is only a slight shift of emphasis from the norm.  Thus she can have it both ways, we observe the criminal and then watch the net closing in on the unsuspecting criminal.  I love all the Ripleys.   This is very good too and has some interesting stuff from Gillian Flynn.

A is for Alibi                           Sue Grafton

My wife was ploughing through these and they are very finely written Californian crime novels, with a very cute female Private Eye.  I enjoyed it so much on Kindle I started the second

B is for Burglar                      Sue Grafton

Same author, same detective.  I was a bit disappointed it repeated the shape of the first book at the end, but I imagine she will have changed this by the next, which I have already downloaded.

The Vegetarian                       Han Kang

Two thirds of a great book for me.  Extraordinary fine writing and construction, but I felt it disintegrated into sentimentality just at the end. Since when I have read a little about the controversy of the translator – they both won the Booker.   Perhaps that explains the tailing off.   Who knows?

The Actual                             Saul Bellow

A novella, from 1997.  About a Chicago businessman and his intense and long love for a married woman.

Maigret and the Lazy Burglar           Georges Simenon

Like a fine cocktail, the short exquisite world of Maigret refreshes and cleanses the palate.  Here he investigates the suspicious and inconvenient (to his superiors) death of a small-time burglar.

Intimacy                       Hanif Kureishi

An unhappy man makes plans to run away from his partner and their child.  Honest and revealing.

Herzog                          Saul Bellow.

Magnificent.  But I stopped again at the same point.  Is it the construction?   It’s like Ulysses events and memories.  I find the apparent directionless of it a little wearying.   I’ll pick up and read on later.  Honest.

 

July

Swing Time                            Zadie Smith

Having totally fallen in love with her reading her recent book of essays I’m now catching up on some of her work I haven’t yet read.   I seriously enjoyed this, her fifth novel, which is a highly readable book. It gave me some sense of the Willesden world my son grew up in.  It has such an authentic air to it I wonder if she really did work for an Australian singer.  But this is to underestimate the great imaginative skills of good writers.  They convince you that what they are writing is actually the truth.  Let us not forget the sage advice of John Le Carré “Never trust a novelist when he tells you the truth.”   This is the story of two friends, with different family backgrounds, but from the same estate in Willesden.  The unforgettable Tracey sets off to become a dancer, while the unnamed narrator, revealed as sadly too flat footed for ballet, drifts, into college and then into a job with Aimee a successful world famous international pop singer, who befriends her, lifts her up into a smart whirlpool world of New York, Australia, London and finally West Africa where her darker skin tones make her useful to do the grunt work in a hugely publicised charity work, opening a girls school.  This satire is deadly.   The lack of interest in the details of what it entails to run a girl’s school in a Muslim dictatorship, exposes Aimee as a self-obsessed shallow narcissist, and the inevitable break up with her leads to ?? (the unnamed protagonist) finding herself.   Tracey, whose father she steadfastly believes is away dancing with Michael Jackson, but is actually frequently in prison, recurs and is glimpsed in the final scene in a heart-breaking but highly revealing moment.  She is a happy mother.

Ravelstein                              Saul Bellow

A dying man is given the task of writing about a dying man, his remarkable mentor and friend.  I guess this 2000 is late Bellow.  I liked it very much.  I loved the Parisian scenes particularly.      

Maigret and the Dead Girl       Georges Simenon

Wonderful.  The mystery of a poor young girl coming to Paris and what happened to her.

Slough House Series               Mick Herron

Slow Horses                  1                Mick Herron

Dead Lions          2                Mick Herron

Mick Herron has been oddly compared to Graham Greene by some reviewer, which is inappropriate, he is far more like a modern Le Carré.  Slough House and its unforgettable head Jackson Lamb are destined to become the new image of The Circus.   A cluster of fuck-ups, screw ups and people who may no longer be fired for politically correct reasons, are relegated to Slough House where they are destined never to return, to push paper around until they finally give up and quit.  However, the underdogs have their day.  Highly readable and given to me as a pot boiler read by a friend, they are more than that; they are an articulate, and hilarious study of modern British society and its place in the world.

A Question of Upbringing (1)                                       Anthony Powell

Spring.  The first of the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. I bought the second in Hatchards and then the whole dozen.   However, I found that it was too much cream for tea at one sitting.   His prose is magnificent, but as my friend Jeremy says the writing is great but nothing much happens.  Obviously, the wonderful creation of Widmerpool is a delight but that whole world is gone now.    This book is largely the schooldays with the unforgettable first appearance of Widmerpool.

A Buyer’s Market          (2)                       Anthony Powell

Time has passed.  Nicholas Jenkins is older.   Girls are coming out.   Boys are getting in.   Not Jenkins, whom seems to glide through this privileged world, bumping into odd characters like Gypsy Jones, falling in love with French women, imagining himself in love with English women, people’s sisters, without actually doing anything.

 

June

Born Trump                           Emily Fox

I ordered this on a whim from Kindle. The Trumps of course are not interesting in and of themselves, they are rather like second rate characters from a TV soap, but this writer did nothing to make one want to read about them, and I ditched it early.  She comes from Vanity Fair which has of late also become strangely dull.  Come back Graydon Carter, all is forgiven.   We needed your relentless hatred of the orange monster.

Maigret Sets a Trap                Georges Simenon

I was wondering why I wasn’t so knocked out by this when the denouement blew me away.  He is seriously good.  Once again weather provides the setting.  This time Paris in the dead days of August.  Hot and oppressive, waiting for a thunderstorm to clear the air.   This is about a serial killer, and he comes into the story after five murders!   Who else would ever do that?  Such confidence he has.

Call for the Dead                   John Le Carré

Confined to bed for twenty four hours I lashed into Le Carré, beginning with this his first novel, which is at least half a detective story and introduces the delightful character of George Smiley, who collaborates with Mendel to solve the mystery of the sudden suicide of Fennan.  Also appearing for the first time is the sinister Munch.  And also for the first time the name Le Carré.  “When people press me, I say, I saw the name on a shop front from the top of a London bus.  I didn’t.  I just don’t know.  But never trust a novelist when he tells you the truth.”   I enjoyed it so much I resolved to re-read the Smiley novels in order.

A Murder of Quality               John Le Carré

After twenty four hours I was done with the first two and was forced to download the next.  This one is set at Carne public school and features the struggle between town and gown when vile things break out in this ancient public school.  For a short time Le Carré even taught at Eton, and of the masters he says “I loathed them, and I loathed their grotesque allegiances most of all.  To this day, I can find no forgiveness for their terrible abuse of the charges entrusted to them.”

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  John Le Carré

I was forced to download this since I thought I had reread it recently, but turns out I hadn’t.  Of course I’d seen the excellent movie again.  I’m glad I did, because I really liked it after all these years.  Intriguing to get back into that world of Checkpoint Charlie, and the Munt puzzle which he brilliantly revisits in his latest A Legacy of Spies, which I re-read with delight a month ago for no better reason than it looked fun in paperback at Vromans.   And it was.

The Looking Glass War           John Le Carré

This did pose a dilemma as I have read it recently, but I determined to continue in my quest and again I was rewarded.   He was of course panned for this, immediately after his grand success with the previous novel.  It reminded me that the only thing I learned from studying literature at Cambridge is that it is almost always pointless reading any criticism.  Most of it is penis envy, and though the envy may be big, the penis is tiny.   JLC meant this book as a corrective to the romantic view of the Circus he portrayed in his big surprising hit novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  This is a more accurate portrayal of the petty world of British intrigue and the seedy and sordid world of spying.  Perhaps that view did not accord with the times.  Anyway, it is well worth the trip.  So that’s the fourth of the Smiley novels and the larger, more famous works lie ahead.

However I have decided to put re-reading them all on hold, there are just too many good new things to read on my shelf this summer.   Perhaps on my book tour…

The Essex Serpent                  Sarah Perry

I had trouble sticking with this one.   It reminded me of the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but I kept being confused by the period setting, and the intrusion of things like the London Underground, cameras and so on into the world of the 1890’s.   I’m not sure I care enough to stick with it, but it’s the sort of thing I could pick up later and enjoy.   That’s me not it.

Seize the Day                          Saul Bellow

And despite all my ravings about Saul Bellow I kept finding myself putting this down.   Why?

Is it me, or can you smell gas?

Vengeance is Mine, All Others pay cash     Eka Kurniawan

I was quite enjoying this Indonesian novel.  Mainly a story of a dick, I may return to it.

The Moving Finger                 Agatha Christie

Sometimes one overlooks the obvious.   There is an excellent reason Agatha is the best read author in the world, she is actually very readable.  This short novel, which eventually even includes Miss Marple at the end, helping with the denouement, is narrated by a brother in a dry, ironic style. He and his sister retreat for peace and quiet, and physical recovery into the simple peace and quiet of the English countryside where, of course, they find anything but and become involved in a murder mystery,  a who-dunit about a poison pen letter writer.  Utterly pleasurable.

Maigret’s Failure                   Georges Simenon

The secret of Simenon is women.   He knows them.   Thoroughly.  He studies them.   He understands them.  He sees their sorrows.  He understands their heart aches.  Their betrayals.  Their sadness at growing old.  Their power over men.   Their hanging on to old illusions when their men have passed their sell-by date.  And of course in Madame Maigret he has created the ideal companion.  One who never complains or demands his time.  Who cooks at the drop of a hat, who even tries not to breathe when she has toothache so as not to disturb him.   Of course she is the least real of all his women.  It’s the sadness, and the drinking and the violence against women he perceives, because he was a lover of women.   Thousands.  A daily seduction was as essential to him as writing.  And he is not a good looking guy.  But women trust him and perk up when they see him like they do for Maigret, the ideal observer, who just smokes his pipe and says little until the whole crime falls into place.   Sometimes even in a dream.    This is a faultless Maigret which includes excellent examples of all this.

Tyrant                                   Stephen Greenblatt

The most brilliant take-down of the tyrant in the white house without a single mention of his name.   Stephen examines tyrants in Shakespeare history plays and what makes them tyrannous and how they grow into tyranny.  Richard 111, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus.  Madness and megalomania leads them all down a path that seems so familiar from today’s headlines.   A fascinating and brilliant read.  And you can be sure one illiterate traitor won’t be able to read it…

How the Wheel becomes it.      Anthony Powell

A brilliant novel, exquisitely written.  A short return to the scene in 1983 after the long and classic series of novels A Dance to the Music of Time.  I felt it was so wonderfully written and constructed with his characters scenes constantly illuminated by the hilarious comments of the off-stage narrator.  I thought it might make a play and I wanted to read it again.  I found a first edition somewhere on my travels.  It made me buy the first of his twelve volume epic classic: A Dance to the Music of Time, and eventually the whole set.   See July.

Churchill                               Paul Johnson

An essential gallop through the exciting and brave life of one of the most remarkable men in history.  And one of the greatest exponents of English prose.  Nicely told by Paul Johnson.  He was utterly fearless and seemed to actually enjoy being shot at… Things I picked up:  Hitler loved whistling, Churchill hated it.    He was fencing champion at Harrow school.

May

Uncommon Type                    Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks has no business being this uncommonly good at the short story.  Is there nothing he cannot do?

Warlight                                Michael Ondaatje

A book of very accomplished parts.  Fine writing, good characters, why does it not all then come together in triumph?  I think he has chosen a very difficult way to tell the story. It’s hard to tell a love story backwards and then only learn about it and the meaning and depth of it from the older eyes of the offspring.  It involves the world of secrecy.  Might have been better chronologically.

Loser takes all                        Graham Greene

Fifties pot-boiler, set around Monte Carlo and some lessons about wealth.  A little too over evident on second reading.

Robin                                    David Itzkoff

I missed him.  I didn’t find him in this book.  It read like his life was sad.  It was far from sad. It made me want to try and write something about him, a little longer than the chapter I wrote about him in my Sortabiography, to discover for myself what I mean instinctively about his absence from these pages.  It’s not the Final Chapter of my book but it was the last chapter I wrote because I kept postponing it, knowing I must because I owed it to him, to recall him, in all his heart warming funny, sweet affectionate ways, but I was avoiding it for the longest time, dreading facing the reality of his loss. So maybe I will have a go or maybe that Chapter does it.   This is a perfectly fine canter through his life, but the essence is not there for me.

Crime and Punishment                     Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Loved her, hated him.

 

April

Is the cruellest month bringing the news of the sudden death of a favour writer just when I was joyfully settling in with his latest book.   Philip Kerr passed away at the very young age of 62. I met him at a party and we talked away happily though I was entirely ignorant it was him, one of my favourite writers.  Fortunately for me another favourite writer Howard Jacobson told him what a fan I was of his Bernie Gunter novels.  When I learned of his death I reached out to Howard and he kindly sent me this:

 

I passed on your email to Jane Thynne, Philip’s widow.  She has just written back –
‘Thank you for sending it. I know he was extremely chuffed that Eric Idle liked his books. Actually, beyond chuffed.’
So there’s the title for your critical study of his novels – Beyond Chuffed.

 

I also wrote to Tom Hanks who I’m know was also a big fan of his, and he responded:

I was crazy shocked.  I had a dinner with him at his home in Wimbledon a few years ago – and have read every single one of the Bernie Gunther stories.

 

It is heart breaking we no longer have him, but at least we have his books.

Greeks Bearing Gifts                        Philip Kerr

My heart went out of the reading.   When death walks unbidden into a book it’s hard to simply continue.

I shall return to this some other time.  Bernie starts work in a morgue, gets a job with an Insurance Company and investigates a fraud in Greece…

Maigret and the Headless Corpse      Georges Simenon

I turned for relief to my old standby favourite the latest translation of the life-saving series of newly translated Maigret’s in paperback Penguin, which I hope never end.

Chicago                        David Mamet

Truly a master of dialogue, this makes his book brilliant.  Totally readable.  The characters are immediately alive.  Set in the twenties in the windy city, around the mob and newspaper men, this is a big, broad wonderful book. You can’t put it down.

Maigret is Afraid                    Georges Simenon

Often Maigret’s short novellas are simple tragedies, frequently in a large family linked together by silence.  Often the family are set are against the local town, either above them socially, or beneath them through poverty, drink and disgrace.  Maigret’s arrival, here to visit an old friend on his way home, finds him greeted as well with fame, and the cautious respect due to the famous Parisian detective.  He watches from the outside while others,  less competent, pursue wrong leads, rival theories, and petty jealousies.  He wanders around the bars, drinking, listening and watching.  Simenon, like Maigret, is a fantastic observer of the ordinary lives of others, their jealousies, their sexual weaknesses, their alcoholism, their drugs.  What makes his stories so particularly satisfying are the characters, especially the females, whom he draws accurately, precisely, and without sentiment.  Their clothes, their laundry, their homes.  That, the countryside and the weather, and the love of Paris in the springtime.  In fact weather is vital in his writing: take two examples from this perfect short novel.  This:

 

The weather was so contrary and fierce that the rain wasn’t mere rain or the wind freezing wind – this was a conspiracy of the elements….There was no point trying to protect himself.  Water wasn’t just pelting down from the sky but was also dripping from the guttering, in fat, cold drops, streaming down the doors of the houses and racing along the gutters with the gurgling of a torrent; you had water all over your face and neck, in your shoes and even in the pockets of your clothes…

 

And then this:

 

            By around 5 p.m., the sky had become apocalyptically dark and it had been necessary for all the town’s streetlamps to be lit.  There had been two brief, dramatic rolls of thunder, and finally the heavens had opened, sending down not rain but hail.  All the people in the street vanished, as if blown away by the wind, and white hailstones bounced off the cobbles like ping pong balls.

 

            Maigret, who at that moment had been in the Café de la Poste, had jumped to his feet like everyone else, and they all stood at the window watching the street the way people watch a fireworks display.

 

This is masterful work.

The Only Story                       Julian Barnes

I have to confess that while the new Julian Barnes is beautifully written, and while I picked up a signed edition at Vromans, I became strangely uninterested in the affair of the nineteen year old teenager for the tennis club siren in the home counties.  I couldn’t quite decide why I cared so little.  The fifties are elegantly described.  The dull lives of the parents are precisely placed.  We understand the local middle class disapproval, and the weird withdrawal of her older husband.   I think in the end it’s in the bedroom the story falters.  This is a sexual novel, and while it may be “true” to say, as the narrator does, I don’t remember how it started, the love story is all and in the end it didn’t come alive for me.  It was too polite.  I suppose in the end she doesn’t come to life.  I’m going to read on because he is Julian Barnes, and I have also been known to be wrong!

 

The Nothing                  Hanif Kureishi

I like this short novella.  He is a terrific writer as we know.  Zadie Smith describes his importance to her in her wonderful book of essays (q.v.)  Here an old filmmaker, stuck in a wheelchair, plots an elaborate revenge on his betraying love.  It’s a Hitchcock plot, and probably deliberately, because there are film references throughout.   His skill keeps both the pacing and the twists of the plot coming at you.  Short, sharp, sweet.

The Captain and the Enemy.   Graham Greene

I always get to the same point in this book.  About half way through.  I have about three first editions, I think for the reason I keep thinking I haven’t read it.   I either have to stop buying first editions or start half way through…   This is the story of a funny/wicked Uncle who pulls a neglected boy out of a dull boarding school, and then like his father, also disappears.

 

March

Feel Free                                        Zadie Smith

I came across this new book of Essays by this terrific novelist and fell in love.  Not with just the book, with the author.   It’s alright, it happens at my age, and she is a Cambridge alum and lived in Willesden, and now lives in New York, writing fabulous essays.   I bought all her books again to read in the summer.  I loved this one,.

Zero K                                            Don DeLillo

I had a strong feeling I had read this before, but if I did I failed to note it.  Perhaps in France.  I also had the strong feeling I abandoned it at the same point.  I only like some of his work.

I’ll be gone in the Dark                    Michelle McNamara

Of course I bought this because of Patten.  I was at her memorial and remember being impressed by the number of police who had turned up.  The book is truly well written and fascinating, but I have a weakness.  I confess to a horror of horror.  I decided when I had to shut the curtains, and couldn’t sleep that while I loved the book it was simply too terrifying for me to read.  I cannot watch horror movies:  the last I saw was Psycho!, so I’m sorry, I’m a supporter, a sympathiser, but a dweeb.   What was brilliant is the recent arrest of the serial killer and she helped to keep the case alive, and even describes what will happen to him one day with the knock on the door and the arrest.  How wonderful that it did. A bitter sweet triumph for Patten, who shepherded the publication of his late wife’s work.

As Time Goes By                             Derek Taylor

Talking to Ringo the other day, now Sir Ringo hooray, he told me once again the story of how Derek Taylor entered the lives of the Beatles, kicking in the door of their dressing room backstage at a concert.  So impressed with such hutzpah were the Fabs that Derek, a Manchester reporter, immediately got the job of Beatles Press Officer.  I was privileged to have him as a friend for many years, and even as an Executive on The Rutles, where Michael Palin played him (Eric Manchester) interviewed by George.  We exchanged lengthy and giggly correspondence until his untimely death.  His books are being re-released and Apple sent me this one, which I loved before and love now.   More are promised.

When The Light Goes                      Larry McMurtry

He is some kind of wonderful.   Always readable, always entertaining. Always honest.

The Birth of Britain.                Winston S. Churchill

I bought all four volumes of this classic of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in a nice first edition set at The Pasadena Book Fair.   I might quibble and say that in Volume One they speak mainly Anglo-Saxon and French, but his prose is so enjoyable that I settled in for an enjoyable trip through my peeps by the finest exponent of the English language.

The Adventures of Augie March       Saul Bellow

I finished this fabulous novel.   Perhaps one of the greatest novels I have ever read.  Simply the best.

Of course I prepare to binge…and have bought everything else.   Read this.

February

The Rub of Time                              Martin Amis

Various essays.    Wonderful on Nabokov, and Hitchens and Travolta.  Made me buy and read the Saul Bellow at once.

The Adventures of Augie March       Saul Bellow

An almost perfect novel.   I don’t know how he does this.  I can understand how Dickens writes, how Jane Austen achieves her effects, but this pours out like poetry.  Quite extraordinary.   I see now how Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens became such fans of his work.  I’m about halfway through, and dreading it coming to a close.   I think one of the finest books I have ever read.

The Angel Esmeralda                       Don DeLillo

Nine stories.   Exquisite.

Playback                                         Raymond Chandler

Almost perfect.  A continuous pursuit of the mysterious lady who arrives on the train in LA.

The Monk of Mokha                                 Dave Eggers

A tale of coffee in the Yemen.

Maigret Goes to School                    Georges Simenon

A school teacher from La Rochelle seeks help in a murder.

Great Contemporaries                      Winston Churchill

Published in 1938 Churchill is the best prose writer of the twentieth century.  Fascinating people here.

Righteous                                        Joe Ide

An IQ Novel.   Having been bowled over by his debut I had to immediately send off for this his second novel.   Obviously he spent ten years on the first, and this can’t quite follow it, but he is the real thing.

Maigret’s Mistake                            Georges Simenon

A charismatic brain surgeon and the death of a mysterious young woman.

 

                                                      Evegenia Citkowitz

I was so looking forward to this and I have to confess I was disappointed.   I adore her short stories, she writes wonderfully well but I felt she was not quite in control of this her first novel.  I was frequently confused, I wasn’t sure what the main story was and it seemed to jump all over the place.

January

IQ                                                           Joe Ide

A brilliant new writer.   Please enjoy this almost perfect First Novel.  I found it at Vromans in Pasadena.  A local LA thriller with a brilliant protagonist and perfect foil.  Such mature writing and such accomplished story telling is very rare.  It’s delightful.

A Man’s Head                                          Georges Simenon

Another brilliant read for the plane.

The Old Man                                                     Thomas Perry

Thank heaven I threw this into my packing at the last minute.   I read it last year but it had me gripped again.  That is the great advantage of age.  You can immediately re-read books!  It’s really fine and wonderful.  He writes so well and is so consistent.  Thrilling.

Munich                                                    Robert Harris

This is the second time I bought this book and took it away with me and the second time I abandoned it after a few chapters.  Are there two Robert Harris’s?  Some of his books I just adore and others I just cannot get into.   As Al Read said “Is it me, or can you smell gas?”    Must be me.

Striking Back                                           Aaron J. Klein

I brought two books away with me about Munich, this one about the horrendous 1972 Olympic Massacre “and Israel’s Deadly Response.”   I love books about the Mossad.  This foul attack led to reprisals and I should bloody hope so.   What stunned me was that the Germans did not immediately halt the Olympic Games when the hostages were taken.   I could not believe that.  Also they made a terrible mess of the security arrangements for the athletes even after concerns were broached, and the rescue attempt, well the keystone cops could have done better.  Sadly the Israelis totally misunderstood just how incompetent the Bavarian authorities were and how in their system West Germany was not allowed to intrude.   So a deadly farce was played out on television with deadly results and the resulting Bavarian incompetence completely hushed up.  The resulting revenge was slow but deadly.

Power House                                                     Aaron J. Klein

The story of CAA, the little Californian Talent Agent that could.  I enjoyed ten per cent of it.   Kidding.   It’s a fascinating story, if not always fascinating, of how five agents broke away from William Morris to create their own Agency, poaching clients and luring others, mainly by working their butts off.  Of course success leads to its own problems.   All Power corrupts is not just a tendency.   It is a rule.  Here we see what happens when Ovitz becomes the biggest and most powerful man in Hollywood.  I loved reading about the adorable and wonderful and hilarious Bill Haber, who would go on to such great things as producing Spamalot!  Also Stan Meyer is a wonderful chap.

The Man Who Invented Christmas                        Les Standiford

The story of Dickens writing, editing and creating (in effect Self-Publishing) A Christmas Carol, his short but brilliant novella, which sold out immediately before Christmas 1843, saving his bacon and his turkey.  The recent film itself was fairly clumsy but then worked magnificently, almost like the book of a musical, because it is so wonderfully sentimental and moral and based on a genius book.  And it had Christopher Plummer as Scrooge.

The Old Man Dies                                    Georges Simenon

A non Maigret about the death of a Parisian restaurant owner and the three sons.  The usual chaos and greed and infighting in the family that death seems to foster.   Beautifully written.  But no crime…

Fire and Fury                                                   Michael Wollf

Inside the Trump White House.  Such chaos, such court rivalries, such incompetence, laziness, arrogance and greed has not been seen since the Borgias.  A Kakocracy, a Kleptocracy, a Nepocracy… Michael Wollf sat on a chair in the West Wing and recorded it all.  You couldn’t have made it up.  Seems that Bannon made his move based on this book coming out. His own run for power.  A miscalculated play.  One thing this bald money laundering mobster knows is how to fight back.  “Where is my Roy Cohn?” he shouted recently like a Shakespearian villain.  (Enter from Hell a Ghost in chains.)

Great stories of infighting between the Javanka’s as he calls them, Bannon and Rince Previus.  But this is truly a Shite House, where they are all live in fear of the next Tweet, the next firing, even lining up to escape.  Where will it all end?   Will America ever become Great again?   Fingers crossed.  Read on.

The Man Who Owns The News                           Michael Wollf.

I so enjoyed the style of Michael Wollf I went back and downloaded a previous book on Rupert Murdoch.  Again he is fair.  No one could say this was a hatchet job, however the growth of the Ailes/Murdoch/ Fox News World is intensely depressing.  His newspaper world and attempts to own the Wall Street Journal, do paint him as a man vitally involved and in love with newspapers.  Also the growth of his love for power.  Which as we know corrupts and which led in his case to a monstrous control over politics.   He is not altogether dislikeable, but his dynasty is held together by his will alone.  It will crumble.

It’s Even Worse Than You Think                        David Cay Johnston

What the Trump Administration is doing to America.      Took the download.   Not as focused or as timely as Wolff’s book but in many ways interesting, slash, depressing.  Hashtag Follow The Money.  If this money lending mobster gets away with this America will be over.

 

 

 

    2017

Command Option 1 / 3

 

A few friends are on my Christmas gift list, where I send them ten of the books I have most enjoyed reading in the year, wrapped in brown paper, string and ceiling wax, from Mr. B’s Bookshop in Bath.

 

This year these were my ten (??) gift books.

 

A Legacy of Spies                  John Le Carré

The Golden House                  Salman Rushdie

Dead is Good                          Jo Perry

An Officer and a Spy              Robert Harris

The Comedians                       Graham Greene
Prussian Blue                          Philip Kerr

How To Build a Universe       Professor Brian Cox and Robin Ince
The Hand                                Georges Simenon.

 

The Bomb Maker by Thomas Perry would have made it but of course it’s only just now in the shops.

 

Happy New Year and have a great read.

December

The Second World War                             Antony Beevor

I spent most of the month reading this great narrative of World War Two.      Then I found….

Blitzed                                                              Norman Ohler

A most wonderful read and a really informative book especially right after reading Anthony Beevor’s World War Two where I was constantly asking myself how could anybody do this.   Here is the answer.   They become a junkie.  Crystal meth, amphetamine, coke, morphine, half the Supreme Command was on something, and Hitler was on everything.   At the end his doctor/dealer could hardly find a vein.  The German army, navy and pilots were fed amphetamine to stay awake.  Blitzkrieg?   How did the army move so fast and without stopping?   Easy: Pervitin, a form of speed manufactured in enormous quantities by Merck to keep the armies rolling and the factories churning.  Why did the army stop and not continue their charge to obliterate the English at Dunkirk?  Hitler gave a stoner command!   How did he condemn an entire Army to die at Stalingrad?   Crystal meth.   Locked away in his bunkers he felt invincible.   Possessed of super powers.  This is an important book to read and solves some of the many puzzles about the war.   You can even begin to feel slightly sorry for the Germans, especially at the end when kids were given speed to help them face the Red Army. Ironically, much of the stuff was grown at Dachau.   Oh the unspeakable ironies of History.  This is also downright fucking hilarious.   The picture of the Fuhrer at the end in his bunker, strung out, suffering from withdrawal symptoms, drooling, shaking with reality finally breaking in is just wonderful.  We should check the Doctors of our leaders.

Just saying…

Maigret’s Revolver                                             Georges Simenon

Another very fine tale from the Master of Maigret.   He is a constant bright spot in the months reading.

Regards                                                   John Gregory Dunne

I very much enjoyed these excellent essays. He is particularly good on the film industry and the horrors of being a screenwriter.  In fact I enjoyed him so much I turned to:

 

Monster                                                   John Gregory Dunne

which I enjoyed all of.   I also bought three of his novels at Iliad but then realized I had already read:

Red White and Blue.                                          John Gregory Dunne

And I wasn’t knocked out by the other two.    Too Irish too Catholic too much dialogue.

Nothing Lost                                            John Gregory Dunne

True Confession.                                      John Gregory Dunne

The thriller element is potentially very good but nothing much happens while they talk and talk.  And Apostolic intrigue is not interesting, not even when Trollope did it.

Tell Tale                                                  Jeffery Archer

Every year the surprisingly nice Jeffery sends me his latest, and last year he said sadly that I never read them.   It’s not true.   This year I had seen and bought this book of short stories before I even opened my mail.   I enjoyed them very much.  He is a real writer, not just an enormous world-wide best-selling author!    That’ll teach me to be a book snob.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve           Stephen Greenblatt

My old friend Stephen warned me that I wouldn’t like this book, but I read and enjoyed a lot more than he would expect.

How to Build a Universe                            Professor Brian Cox & Robin Ince

Despite a very churlish intro from me this is a wonderful book.  They have made it as simple as possible to understand as much as possible about the Universe and I really recommend it to everyone.

 

November

The Years of Victory                                                   Arthur Bryant

I read about half of this precursor to The Age of Elegance, the sequel of which is Years of Victory, both of which I was able to download, Iliad having for once come up empty.  It’s wonderful up to the sad Death of Nelson, which saves Britain at the same time as Napoleon’s military genius at Austerlitz against the hapless Austrians condemns the Continent to ten more years of his dictatorship.  But of course the coarse Corsican can’t resist hurling himself on those Russians and their endless Empire, which causes the eventual death of his.  Excellent history if like me that is your bag.

The Last Kind Words Saloon                              Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is some kind of genius.  I always enjoyed reading him.  You look at his list of titles and he has an incredible run from Evening Star, through Texasville, through Lonesome Dove, The Desert Rose, Cadillac Jack on to Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show.  An amazing writer of effortless stories, his people spring to life from the page, his characters fighting in and out of bed…  This one is almost mythical in the way he handles Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, so that the O.K.Corrall comes up at you almost unexpectedly so used to their company have you become.  Yes, definitely some kind of genius.

Mr. Hire’s Engagement                                      Georges Simenon

An exquisite early detective tale, without Maigret but in the same milieu.  An innocent man is hounded to his death by police and public.  The amazing part of the story is the relationship between Mr Hire and the killer’s girlfriend.  The ambivalence, the use of sex to entrap him, Simenon is brilliant, honest and original.

The Vanity Fair Diaries                                     Tina Brown

Tina Brown is wonderful and I was sorry I missed her talk with Bruce Wagner in LA.  This is not as great a book as The Diana Chronicles because while it fascinatingly charts the amazing rise and rise of Vanity Fair under her editorship, once that has been achieved we are left with a series of social events with New Yorkers, some fascinating, some brilliant, some merely rich.  I found I began to skim the latter category.  She is fascinated with the man who will provide the end game on Reagan Presidencies, but to be fair, in the mid-eighties, who could have foreseen that Donald Trump would be in the White House, even for dinner?  As the Reagans passed from the scene the pursuit of money seemed to replace the pursuit of happiness.   Perhaps that all went up the nose in Studio 54 in the Seventies.  Her achievement in resuscitating an almost dead magazine title and making it hip and smart and funny and readable is clearly and determinedly and modestly described in her extraordinary well-written diary. So I enjoyed the book but it is what it is, and unless you are fascinated by just how the wealthy designed their next party you should be prepared to skip.   Certainly worth it.

Ma’am Darling    99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret              Craig Brown

The glimpses go from early intrigue, through contempt for her, through to eventual pity.  A sad life in many ways and surely her greatest accolade was that she ended up as The Pantomime Princess Margaret appearing at all our live Monty Python shows in the Royal Box.  We actually once stayed at her house on Mustique with David Bowie and Iggy Pop when the chartered Yacht didn’t show up for a week.  She wasn’t there of course.  Very beautiful Oliver Messel bungalow in the most exquisite setting.

Our Kind of Traitor                                                    John Le Carré

I was enjoying re-reading this about two innocents recruited on holiday in Antigua to deal with a proposed Russian Mafiosi defector.  I felt the same this time, that it sags after the Paris tennis scenes, indeed once the two leave the centre of the action.  Nevertheless some great stuff.

The Golden House                                                                  Salman Rushdie

Possibly the most peculiar experience I have ever had reading.  I was quietly enjoying Salman’s latest when I entered the novel!     Most disconcerting and slightly scary.  I was so shocked it took me a while to go back to the book.  The anonymity that you are guaranteed as a reader was ripped away and I realise how much we are dependent on that.  We sit in the dark and respond but don’t interfere and that is the implicit contract between writer and reader.  When that is gone it is rather like being discovered on the toilet.   A most unique and interesting lesson.  When I wrote to him Salman hoped it was a happy surprise.  I think I’m still a bit shocked…

My lawyer wanted to charge him for appearing in his book, which I thought was pretty funny.

The Rub of Time                                                                    Martin Amis

More fascinating articles from the most fascinating writer.  Dip at will and you will find gold.

Damage                                                              Josephine Hart

Not quite as good as Sin and earlier, but still pretty shocking.  She heads straight for taboo subjects.

 

October

Sin                                                                   Josephine Hart

I really loved this.  Wickedly entertaining, highly readable.  Funny and tragic and excellent.  I’ve bought all her books at Iliad….   Barnes and Noble had nothing.

The Kingdom of Speech                                     Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe’s take down of Noam Chomsky’s apparently utterly worthless theories about the beginnings of language in homo sapiens.   Funny and elegantly done.   For a while Chomsky’s politically correct thesis was untouchable, now it appears no one knows anything at all about the beginnings of language.  I did just read a piece on line about Bonobos and Chimpanzees, which suggests that gesture is the beginning of language and this seems a very promising place to begin the search for this defining distinction between man and animals, though always remembering that the apes are animals, that birds talk and that trees communicate.

The Looking Glass War                                      John Le Carré

An almost satirical look at the fuck ups still fighting the previous war, and the constant war amongst bureaucrats.  Three innocents caught up in this tale, only one survives.  Smiley appears trying to help a hopeless cause.  First published in 1965.   Very fine.

Dunbar                                                             Edward St. Aubyn

The third novel from the Hogarth Press from major writers adapting Shakespeare.  I’m not convinced it’s a good idea.   This is successful until almost the end and the character of Dunbar is a finely drawn Lear jet businessman incarcerated in a mental home  by his evil daughters.  The trouble is there is no room for manoeuvre in the plots.   You know what is to happen.  And a novel is not a play.  He is the finest of our young writers and he got me till almost the end.   But then more questions were raised than answered and they were interesting questions because he had created interesting versions of the evil sisters, but the play was over so the novel had to be.  I found this same limitation in the excellent Jeanette Winterson’s Winter’s Tale and now that I understand the premise I understand why Howard Jacobson’s Shylock also fell away.  I’m not sure first rate writers should be assigned to second rate publishing ideas.  I bet that a good TV writer might do a better job.   Just saying.  All three of these authors seem to have been constrained by the premise.   Now I see John Banville is finishing Henry James’ books.  Please authors write your own stuff, no matter what the advance….

Call for the Dead                                               John Le Carré

This is his first novel?   It is certainly his first Smiley novel.  It is more of a detective story with a spy setting, which is how he finds his feet I think.   I liked it very much.  The mystery call is the plot on which everything turns.   Finely worked out, elegantly told, it’s the beginning of the tale of Smiley, his failed marriage to Lady Ann and her early exploits before she returns to him.  Shows Smiley’s struggle with the bureaucracy of the spying world and how he works well with characters like Mendel.  Grand stuff.

The Age of Elegance                                                   Arthur Bryant

Continuing to re-read this eloquent history of the Napoleonic period from the British perspective.  I began half way through at Waterloo.  He writes so thoughtfully and then of the period after the war where the Industrial miracle changed the face of England and English society.  As always thought provoking and gripping.   Will resume next time I’m in that place.  Meanwhile will search Iliad for more of his work as he seems to have gone out of fashion and nothing is in print.

The Secret Pilgrim                                                      John Le Carré

A wonderful book. A series of tales really as Smiley is invited back by Ned to talk to the graduating class at Sarrat.  During his speech which forms the framework of the book he reminisces about some episodes and leads Ned into remembering or questioning certain good or dubious things that happened over his lifetime in the Service.  It’s a valedictorum for both of them, since they are both shortly to retire.   It’s about the sadness of leaving the Service and passing it on to a questionable world which has lost the black and white certainties of the Cold War, and which leaves behind the questions what have we become, who are the real victors, and what do we stand for now?  Questions which have only become even harder to answer since this book was written during Glasnost and it seemed at the time like The Russia House were friends.  It’s an exquisite read.

The House of Rumour                                        Jake Arnott

I found this sadly discarded on my shelves in France and picked it up again.  I had done it a severe injustice.   It’s not a perfect book but it is highly readable.   I picked up again and found that what I thought was a book about L Ron Hubbard and Crowley and some slightly naive folks in Pasadena was a far more complex book about the puzzling flight of Rudolph Hess to Scotland.  Was he lured or was he pushed?   Since the deputy leader of Nazi Germany flew solo to Scotland to the Duke of Hamilton’s Estate only six weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Russia which would take place crazily on the same day as Napoleon invaded and inevitably with the same result, Stalin certainly believed the British knew about it and didn’t warn him.  He had had several warnings and ignored them anyway and retired to bed for three weeks when Hitler turned on him.   Hess wished to prevent Germany fighting a war on two fronts and wanted to reach out to Churchill for an armistice.  Whether he did that on his own initiative or was in a situation of plausible deniability is uncertain, what is certain is he never reached Churchill or Hamilton and spent the rest of his life imprisoned and either faking memory loss or being mad. He was the last to die in Spandau and according to this by suicide.  Interwoven with this are three or four stories and some real people including Ian Fleming.   I very much enjoyed it and was so glad I picked it up again.  Reminding me of the entirely new adage that there’s nothing wrong with the book it’s the bloody readers…  (c) E.Idle 18^th October 17 2017.)

Elephant                                                           Raymond Carver

More wonderful tales from the world of Carver.  Can’t go wrong if it’s a short story last thing at night you’re needing.

Maigret Takes a Room                                       Georges Simenon

Even though I’m pretty sure I read this before I was just as gripped by the story of Maigret, in the absence of Madame, taking a room in a boarding house with an over confident Proprietor to try and figure out who shot, but fortunately didn’t kill Janvier in a quiet street where they were watching for someone else.

Assembling California                                        John McPhee

Again re-reading John McPhee’s entirely wonderful tale of the unlikely geological assemblage of California.

Forest Dark                                                                             Nicole Krauss

Praise from Philip Roth is about as good as it gets, I couldn’t wait to read it and it was excellent as promised.  I followed up on Kindle with

The History of Love                                                    Nicole Krauss

But didn’t find it so compelling.  An earlier work of course.  Get the first.  She’s good.

 

September

 

A Legacy of Spies                                              John Le Carré

I bought this his latest in NY and loved it of course.  This time Peter Guillam is hauled out of retirement and confronted with some issues over Alec Leamas, the anti-hero of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.  That was perfect timing for me as I had just watched the movie again, set against the bleak wall of Checkpoint Charlie with Richard Burton’s dead-on performance of a burned out spy, unfortunately let down by his love for the idealistic communist Claire Bloom. This long ago episode involving who was really betraying whom has left some questions.   Smiley helps him solve who was on who’s side after the ambivalence of almost fifty years.  I could read it again now.

The Bomb Maker                                               Thomas Perry

I saved up for my travels and sneakily took away with me this latest thriller from Thomas Perry and I found myself a little concerned about reading it at night, it is that gripping.   I don’t think it’s published until January and the only problem with the author slipping you an early copy is you have to wait even longer for the next one.    This is about a frightening bomb maker who takes on, and murders, the LA bomb squad.  It’s hard to think where we are going these days, but every street and every incident seems for real.

As if it wasn’t bad enough his wife has also written another perfect book

Dead is Good                                                              Jo Perry

This is the third in her hopefully continuing series of a dead man and a dead dog.  I enjoyed this one even more.  Hard to solve or prevent crime when you are dead and that’s the brilliant originality of these books. Charles Stone, helped by the dog Rose tries to prevent someone murdering his late wife in LA.  Starts with a bang and goes on surprising.  Highly enjoyable and unique and there must be something in the water in the Perry household.   Oh and I was surprised to see myself quoted in one of the epithets that begin the chapters.

Maigret and The Tall Woman                             Georges Simenon

A woman he arrested years before, who teased him then by appearing naked returns to his life to help him solve a crime.

Born Standing Up                                              Steve Martin

Simple, elegant and eloquent.  Steve tells the tale of how he became a comedian.   And then stopped.  Fun to re-read this classic.

The Hidden Life of Trees                                             Peter Wohlleben

I’m still dipping into this and finding new and surprising delights.   It’s not a book you can read straight through.  It has such mind boggling facts that it is worth keeping by the bedside to dip into.

Maigret and the Killer                                        Georges Simenon

Another goodie.   From 1969, though the translation in this Book Club edition was 1971.   He is quite easy to find in second hand book shops, since he sold so well.   Worth it.

August

 

Absolute Friends                                               John Le Carré

I had such a nice time re-reading A Delicate Truth  that I plucked this one off the shelf to re-read.  Interestingly, and thanks to my book diary, I found I stopped reading at exactly the same point, about half way through, when I realised that the missing person he is describing, and whom he seeks, is actually an asshole.   Fortunately for me his new novel arrived from Amazon, and I bought a nice edition of Call for the Dead.   I have a feeling that it is the interim novels, after the Smiley world and before he gets into his later stride about the world of arms dealing, that the books aren’t quite so forceful, but I have to read further to pursue this theory.

A Gentleman in Moscow                                    Amor Towles

I’m sorry I think this is fraudulent.    I became uncomfortable reading Rules of Civility and after a while this book gave me the same discomfort.  It’s not that he can’t write, he can, and well, it’s that this is pastiche.  The characters come from another place, and, indeed, book.  It’s parody without comedy.  Or context.  So I’m sorry, and I know there are many people who read and enjoy him without noticing that this character is from War and Peace and this one is from Eloise at The Plaza, but it makes me feel practised on. 

Maigret Bides His Time                                      Georges Simenon

His books are like a steel trap.  People seem to be wandering around, many disconnected characters, and then suddenly the pace increases, connections are made, often violence explodes, and there it all is.  Everything is connected.   This one, a first edition from March 1965, is a perfect example of this method.

The Devil finds Work                                         James Baldwin

These Idle hands love it.   I love everything he writes.  I once came face to face with him in St. Paul de Vence.  That unforgettable face.   Those eyes.  What a genius.

What The Dog Saw                                                     Malcolm Gladwell

Another impeccable book from this master, what? essayist I guess.  His particular genius is not only to write about what fascinates him, and he is clearly a fascinating man, but connecting disparate subjects and considering what they might have in common.   In this collection of essays from the New Yorker he writes about legendary Pitchmen, ketchup, sportspeople who choke, early and late bloomers, Cesar Millan, the paradoxes of plagiarism, homelessness, criminal profiling, etc etc The range of his interests are seemingly endless and he is always fascinating, and illuminating about everything that catches his attention.

A Delicate Truth                                                John Le Carré

Le Carré is perfect for jet lag, and I don’t mean that in a rude way that it helps you sleep, but the exact opposite: that you are happy to be awake all night because reading is such a pleasure. I enjoyed this one more on this my second read, and even more than The Night Manager.  It is cleverly constructed and tight and told from two different viewpoints.  You can see his new target becoming not the old Cold War warriors but the modern cynical arms dealers, without any side but their own.  Greed is the great modern sin, and combined with business efficiency he again targets the merchants of death.   Excellent.  I have downloaded a ton onto my Kindle for future travels.

What Makes Sammy Run?                                          Budd Schulberg

There’s a reason this novel has sold continuously since it was first published in 1941: it’s very good.  He also has identified a then new type of American, Sammy Glick, the boy from the Ghetto who has learned to survive on his own wits and his own hutzpah.  Unfortunately that which lifts you up may also bring you down, which is what makes this book such a satisfactorily moral tale,  told through the eyes of Al Mannheim, who is, like everyone else in the book, used by Sammy Glick, but somehow retains an interest in him, through an interest in the question that makes the title of the book a recurring theme, what makes Sammy run?  In the end, by returning to his roots he has the best view of the true answer.

Maigret’s Christmas                                                   Georges Simenon

A collection of nine stories from the forties and fifties, only one of which Maigret in Retirement I had read before, and then was just as confounded by the outcome.   All are great.   Seven Little Crosses in a Notebook, Maigret and the Surly Inspector, The Evidence of the Altar Boy, The Most Obstinate Customer in the World, Death of a Nobody, Sale by Auction, The Man in the Street, as well as the title track.

Conversations with Friends                                         Sally Rooney

Highly recommended from some magazine, I found this to be not so important as suggested and not so unputdownable, so I put it down.

 

Pounding away on my laptop I fell disgracefully behind, not on my reading dear reader, but on my writing about reading, so these are recreated memories of the pleasures I endured this summer.  One of the reasons for keeping this writing diary is so I remember not to forget what I enjoyed, and yet here I am, packing to leave, with a stack of books on my shelf I can only dimly remember.  Apologies to self.  I can only hope my writing was worth it. 

The Dog’s Last Walk                                                  Howard Jacobson

This kept me company throughout the summer,  selections of his fine writing from what I now I only just learn has become the defunct Independent.  I really must try and keep up, but if the Brits won’t let me vote despite paying taxes and force me to Brexit despite allowing me a choice in the matter, then I shall continue to ignore their often sick and insane newspapers.   Many a fine day was ended with a keenly turned polemic, many an afternoon siesta preceded by a finely tuned satire, from the Mancunian master and I am grateful for the company of his wonderful mind, sharing as I do a Cambridge education, a love of ping pong and some early years in Manchester.  I promise never again to use the words “a good read.”   Though this is!

Pussy                                                                         Howard Jacobson

I was also reading and enjoying his new novel before I became sickened by reading or listening to anything at all about the fat, dystopian, lunatic in the White House, and forswore to pay him what he most desperately craves, any more attention, even at the expense of abandoning the satirists who mock him. Perhaps when he is gone and if the world survives his inevitable demise my sense of humour about the monster will return.

 

I enjoyed catching up with two very fine books by the master of the Bernie Gunther novels, Philip Kerr,  who seems to be able to turn his hand to anything.

Dark Matter                                                               Philip Kerr

A most unlikely thriller starring Isaac Newton as a kind of Sherlock Maigret ensconced in the Tower of London with a satisfactorily proficient swordsman sidekick called Christopher Ellis. Sir Isaac has become Warden of the Royal Mint responsible for hunting down counterfeiters during a national emergency.   Faced with having to solve problems of codes and withstand physical attacks from assassins this is a highly suspenseful original tale. I have no idea how much of this is based on any historical truth but it makes a very satisfactory historical thriller.

A Philosophical Investigation                                      Philip Kerr

This is his version of a modern detective story, set in a slightly more dystopian version of London in 2013, where serial murderers are sought by DNA detection and put into a “punitive coma.”   A case weary, female detective “Jake” Jacowitz, matches wits with an intellectual serial killer. This is a brilliant story, told from both perspectives, and I enjoyed it very much.

The Plot against America                                            Philip Roth

So culled from contemporary headlines does this seem that it is almost impossible to believe it was published in 2004.  It is what might have happened to America had the Republicans chosen Lindberg instead of returning Roosevelt for a third term in 1940.  A Nazi appeaser in collaboration with his country’s enemies in the White House, couldn’t happen I hear you say…  Told from the perspective of a Jewish boy growing up in Newark this step by step story of how fascism came to America is both prescient and terrifying.   It should have been a warning, and yet, here we are, with the country rising up to vote in a monster.  A must read.

The Day I Died                                                           Lori Rader-Day

A very fine thriller about a handwriting expert pulled in by a sceptical detective to try and locate a boy and his mother who have gone missing.   Having only recently moved into the area she has her own story of running away and hiding.  Finely done and gripping throughout this is great fun.

An Officer and a Spy                                                   Robert Harris

Another fine book from this author, this one set at the time of the Dreyfus scandal where a French army officer witnesses Alfred Dreyfus being publicly humiliated and exiled for life on Devil’s Island.   Georges Picquart, promoted to run the Intelligence Unit that tracked him down discovers that secrets are still being handed over to the Germans and is drawn into a struggle that threatens his life.  Very brilliant and effortlessly written, I loved it.

The Slaves of Solitude                                                 Patrick Hamilton

A fine novel, described by some as his finest, though I have read no others, set in a Henley boarding house during World War Two about the mind numbing dullness of the English when in society together.  Underneath the polite nothings of conversation are seething hatreds and cruel tortures.  Miss Roach, through whose eyes we see everything, is horribly tormented by the cruel and pathetic non entity Mr. Thwaites, a sadistic prat who is both pompous and useless and the major comic thrust of the novel, with his clichéd language and his rush to judge and destroy. He wastes no time tormenting Miss Roach whose essential niceness is sorely tested by his irritating attacks.  Into this cold-bed of turmoil come two outsiders, an alcoholic American Lieutenant, and a blonde haired German refugee Vicki whom Miss Roach has been attempting to aid.  The one flirts wildly with her, while the other wastes no time scoring off her, so she is puzzled and confused and unhappy.

There is a kind of genre of Boarding House novels which reflect a certain time in English society when people not related were forced to lodge and dine together.   It seems to me that this has come to an end, although Kingsley Amis’ The Old Devils is a relic of it.   This is a very fine example of the genre and the kind of patient suffering the British had to endure during the long length of World War Two.

 

So Long, See You Tomorrow                                       William Maxwell.

Slightly concerned not to notice at first I read this in January.   This is what I wrote then.  “The most magnificent short novel.   Glorious.  Beautiful written.  Like the essence of a novel.”   I suppose the good news of age is one can keep re-reading the same book!

June

Rules of Civility                                                                   Amor Towles

Hailed by many as a brilliant, wonderful, magnificent first novel, and it is that, a first novel, I found a little voice in my head wondering whether it was truly authentic.   Two things bothered me:  the period (1938) and the leading character who is the narrative voice in the story.  I never really believed in her.  I felt that she was too good to be true, and that who she ended up with, was entirely random.  I wasn’t convinced by the period either.  I thought that many of the characters had been drawn from literature and not from life.  Even the whole idea of the poor outsider female making good in the glittering world of New York seemed familiar (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Sophie’s Choice, Sally Bowles etc.) and although very well written and constantly entertaining it reminded me of a certain kind of black and white Woody Allen film romanticising NY:   a movie of a story rather than the story of a movie.  Everything happened because it needed to on a Hollywood level.  And so despite heavy recommendations from people I respect I offer these unnecessarily carping thoughts of an excellent read and will hold my opinion until I read his next.

The Night Manager                                                             John Le Carré

Having watched the TV version twice I loved it so much, it was fascinating to finally read the novel, which somehow I had missed.  Also fascinating to see the differences in the excellent TV script, not merely setting the whole Roper episodes in Marbella, instead of the West Indies, which I get, but this was far more about the dark interior of Pine, and his instant love for Jed, because of his guilt over the  murder of Freddie Hamid’s mistress.   What stole the TV show was the brilliant Tom Holland as Corcoran, and the added satisfaction of his demise, not at all in the book, plus the wonderful performance of Hugh Lawrie as Roper, “the most awful man in the world.”  This is like the same story but from a different Gospel. His writing is very good indeed and it’s well worth the read even if you have loved the small screen version.

Maigret at Picratt’s                                                              Georges Simenon

One of the least interesting Maigret’s I have ever read, probably because the victim whom we like, gets killed in the opening chapters and we never meet the killer till he is arrested.

Rock Solid                                                                          Anna Grayson

A Natural History Museum Publication and one of the most fascinating and useful books I have ever read.   Short, simple, lavishly illustrated.   All you’ll ever need to know about the geological history of the British Isles.  Which is totally and utterly fascinating.  How young we are!

May

Into the Water                                                                     Paula Hawkins

This book is at first confusing.  I found it hard to keep up with the multiple changes of character and viewpoint.  In fact I thought about bailing but I’m glad I didn’t; I persisted and I was rewarded.  She keeps it together and delivers.   In a way she’s a modern Agatha Christie, except she is a far better writer and her characters have real life.  What I mean is that it is the whodunit aspect which keeps you going.   She is a very sophisticated story teller.  We  know that from The Girl on the Train.  But this story will be clearer in the inevitable movie.   I sound carping but I very much enjoyed the second half of the novel, once I’d managed to sort out who was who (and there are about ten narrators) then I became intrigued by the tale and surprised by what I thought was the ending.   Actually it wasn’t.  Like a cocktail she adds a final twist.  I’m not sure whether I believed the final revelation.  It was more bewildering than satisfying.  It didn’t seem to need it.  That’s what happens when you hold your cards close to your chest.  You can’t see the winning hand properly.

South and West                                                                   Joan Didion

If ever you needed to think Joan Didion was over rated this book will do it.  Almost a parody, it’s a virtual catalogue of inconsequential things and unimportant observations about uninteresting places. This is from her notebooks, where it should have stayed, far from the greed of publishers.

Three Minutes to Doomsday                               Joe Navarro

The good news is Joe Navarro suspects he is an asshole.  The bad news is, he is.   This over-written, over-long, hyper ventilated tale is filled with the sound of one hand clapping himself on the back.  Not only is this detection of a spy from the late 80’s not the most significant act of espionage in the last one hundred years, it’s not even the most interesting.  I guess when you are an ex-FBI guy you have to do something with your time.  He should take up golf.

The Killing of Osama Bin Laden                         Seymour M. Hersh

Important corrections to history.  The killing of Bin Laden took place in no way we were told.  And the latest sarin gas attack was not necessarily Assad’s.  The truth is the first casualty of war.  Only now do we learn of the fearful loss of civilian life in Trump’s first adventures in warfare.  Once again the vital importance of journalism and honest reporting is made clear.  How to balance that against the need for State secrecy in the battle against terrorism is the issue.

The Hidden Life of Trees                                    Peter Wohlleben

What they feel, How they Communicate.     Discoveries from a Secret World.

“A Spruce in Sweden is more than 9,500 years old. 115 times the human lifetime.”  One of many amazing facts about trees which I shamefully knew nothing about. Written essentially, by a German Lumberjack, this book will amaze anyone.  Who knew?  I kept saying.

4.50 From Paddington                                       Agatha Christie

First edition 1957 picked up from Hatchards, this is a Miss Marple story. The amusingly named Mrs McGillicuddy witnesses a murder on a train passing hers in the same direction. Ignored by authorities and with no dead body turning up Miss Marple encourages the exceptionally efficient and most unlikely and unlikely named Miss Eylesbarrow to pursue the case into the heart of the even more unlikely named Crackenthorpe family.  Perfectly enjoyable train fare, it is still a long way from Simenon.  The characters are never entirely real and the pleasure lies in the whodunit puzzle which it is impossible to pick or predict because she has set it up that way.

The Comedians                                                 Graham Greene

A magnificent 1965 novel (I found a nice 1981 Viking reissue on my bookshelf) this is classic Greene.   His black comedy is superbly appropriate here in the heart of Haiti under the mad dictator Papa Doc Duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes.  The country is sliding into chaos and random murder.  Three characters meet on a boat headed to Port au Prince:  comedically they are Smith, Jones and Brown.  Brown, the narrator, owns The Trianon a once popular hotel which he has been in NY trying hopelessly to sell.   The Smiths are two militant vegetarians from the heart of America intent on encouraging world peace through lack of meaty acidity.  Jones, or Major Jones, as he likes to be called, is the kind of mysterious Alec Guinness innocent around whom the plot revolves.  Brilliantly worked out and with Greene’s typical take on an adulterous romance, it is a glittering gem of a book.  One to savour and revisit.  We are all comedians, says Greene, at least in the French sense of playing out our roles, even if we are not all funny.

Difficulties with Girls                                         Kingsley Amis

First edition 1988.   “About a man who falls in love with his wife” says the FT.  A philandering publisher Patrick Standish moves into a new block of restored flats with his wife Jenny and they interact with others, the fighting gay couple, the grasping wife of a British loser etc. all of whom are superbly delineated in character and speech.  An excellent novel and a great read.

The Fatal Tree                                                  Jake Arnott

Jake Arnott is a brilliant novelist who needs a good editor.  He seems to be going backwards.  Here a perfectly fine setting for a novel of 18^th Century bawdry is spoiled by endless canting and obscure phrases from its contemporary underground world of crooks and whores and highwaymen and lawyers.  You just get tired of the language and can’t lose yourself in the story.  Moll Flanders in Palare.

Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne                Robert Hofler

Wonderful, gossipy, very readable, biography of the extraordinary life Dominick Dunne carved out of hip, hype, and horror to become the most celebrated of court room journalists.  It would have been worth the easy ride if I had learned only that Nancy Reagan was famous for fellatio!  The first lady of Frenching…

 

Published.

April

The Twat from Oz.

The nauseating, self-centred memoirs, of a talentless name-dropping star fucker.

The Rich Man                                                   Georges Simenon

Another of the great series of psychological novels. I found a1971 First English (US) Edition at Iliad.  Simenon is so wonderful about sex.  He is completely non-judgemental.  He describes it as it is.  Something humans do.  That can lead to crime, or just something to do after a decent bottle of white wine.  This may be because he is French (well Belge) and also because that is what he did with a good deal of his time.  He not only wrote more novels than anyone, he had more sex than anyone.  Probably that’s why his books are so short.   Short they may be, but they are deceptively complex.  He has a deep understanding of the human condition, and writes about it superbly.  Here we are with Victor Lecoin, who makes up for his sexless marriage, by having sex with locals and prostitutes, with his wife’s understanding.  He completely falls for and becomes entirely obsessed with a rather plain 16 year old maid called Alice and tries desperately but without success to keep his hands off her.. and Simenon still manages to land a surprising end.

No Man’s Land       (and A Stranger’s Hand)       Graham Greene

A couple of rediscovered Graham Greene novellas.   Both worth a read.  The former, a short spy novel set in Yugoslavia, and the latter set in Venice with a small, lonely ten year old English boy, waiting to meet his father.   The latter was turned into a film, but he only wrote this first opening piece.  It’s still amazing.  There is a foreword by David Lodge.   I like Greene’s film treatment stories, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man etc. and Lodge perceptively points out that “Graham Greene belonged to the first generation of British writers who grew up with the movies, and his work, like that of his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood, was deeply influenced by the new medium.  What Greene learnt from cinema was how to hold his readers in the coils of a suspenseful plot while exploring moral and metaphysical themes, and how to evoke character and milieu with the verbal equivalent of cinematic close-ups and pans.”

Another Great Day at Sea                                   Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer spends time on a US Carrier in the Gulf.  I got the big photographic version of this book but never read it.  This I love, because he is such a great observer, and honest writer.  He makes no attempt to hide his own crankiness and manages to get himself a single stateroom, and eventually decent food,  almost unheard of on this huge floating, deafening island.   But he meets people and paints them wonderfully.  I enjoyed every sentence.

This Gun For Hire                                             Graham Greene

“Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job.”    A fascinating spy novel about a hare-lipped, double-crossed assassin and his attempts to revenge himself on the people who employed him to shoot a good man in order to create a European war for profit.  Originally published in 1936 in England under the title This Gun for Sale. I’ve been attracted to re-reading some of the lesser known novels in my collection of his books.  He is that good.

Prussian Blue                                                    Philip Kerr

One of the great delights was finding this new Philip Kerr Bernie Gunther novel in Hatchards.  Alas not signed, but I devoured it on my return, dreading reaching the end. It’s set in Hitler’s winter white house of Berchtesgaden.  He didn’t trust Berliners.  Only Bavarians.  It’s so fascinating to read about the  corrupt Nazi world of his henchmen and cohorts, all busy building Villas next to the leader, and the mass of tunnels they’re constructing under the mountains, even before he has gone to war.  Wonderfully ironic that he should be finally forced to suicide in Berlin, instead of in his billion dollar custom-built, air conditioned Bavarian bunkers.  Here Bernie is brought in by Martin  Bormann to solve a murder on the terrace of Hitler’s newly constructed tea-house before the leader gets there to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.  Nazis are only a minority election away…   This is as good as any of them and incredibly readable.  I could start it right away again.  Can’t wait for the Tom Hanks TV series.

Striptease                                                          Georges Simenon.                               I found this Review Copy of the First American edition at the Iliad.  Published September 20^th 1989.  I love these non Maigret novels.  This one is set in a strip club in Nice.  He is so brilliant with his characters.  His style seems so simple, yet he paints scenes so clearly.  I could read it again now.

The Patient                                                       Georges Simenon

Another one of the non Maigret’s. I picked up this 1963 first edition at Hatchards.  It’s about a successful businessman and newspaper editor who suffers a debilitating attack of hemiplegia. His loss of interest in life and the medical attempts to bring him back to “life” is clearly about Simenon’s own experience.  A great example of being able to tell the truth about life more accurately in fiction.

Sylvia                                                               Leonard Michaels.

I left this highly autobiographical first novel, about first love in New York, behind in London.  And also this next book:

The Crofter and the Laird                                   John McPhee

About the author taking his family to spend some months on the lonely windswept Scottish island of Colonsay.   I hope they forgave him… Cruel and unnecessary paternity it seems to me.  The island is now owned by an English solicitor from Brighton.  It is interesting to learn that before the foul Highland clearances (an early form of ethnic cleansing by the English on the defeated Scots after Culloden) this island was home to thousands of crofters.  Perhaps luckily for them they all moved to Canada.

Snowdrops                                                        A. D. Miller

This is a very good book.  Occasionally I felt he was on the verge of making it a great book.   I think it won’t be long.  He can write.    “Snowdrops” are bodies left in the snow and found in the spring in Moscow when the ice melts.  He brings the metaphor home nicely. “That’s what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed.  The lesson wasn’t about Russia.  It never is, I don’t think, when a relationship ends.  It isn’t your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.    I was the man on the other side of the door.  My snowdrop was me.”

Set in Moscow about corruption and relationships.

Maigret Takes a Room                                       Georges Simenon

Patience is one of Maigret’s greatest virtues.  He waits.  He watches.  Then they crack.   Here he moves into a well-kept boarding house, where all is not what it seems.

General Macarthur                                            William Manchester

A long and fascinating biography by a long and fascinating biographer.   I knew nothing about the General.  Now I know too much.  Actually that’s not really true.  Manchester is such a fascinating writer that what interests him interests us.  Or in this case, me.   On My I Pad as it is a long and rather heavy book.  I’m still only up to half way through WW2 before the retaking of the Philippines and it assures me I have 9 hours to go, so I think it will be travelling with me.  Manchester sees both his flaws and his genius and is fair to both.

Spring Fever                                                     P .G. Wodehouse

A book I hadn’t quite finished before I had to leave for Europe.  I haven’t yet picked it up again.  He is really funny.  I have an entire collection of his novels by the Overlook Press and have shamefully neglected them.   They sit in my bedroom ruefully mocking me, but one day, when I can’t leave my bedroom I shall be grateful for them.  Stock piling for that rainy day.

 

The Ides of March.   Thru End of March.

UK.  London.  Cambridge.  Copenhagen.

I read two books back to back which seemed coincidentally connected in theme – The Hand by Georges Simenon and The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

The Hand                                                                   Georges Simenon

This is a very fine book indeed, and reveals just what a good novelist Simenon is, especially here where Maigret is not only not involved, but it is set in a snow storm in Connecticut, far from Paris and the French.  Simply and clearly written with four characters, it’s about how little we really know of each other.  The unhappy local lawyer Donald Dodd discovers in the accidental death of his best friend Ray in a blizzard, that he didn’t like him at all, and he may even have murdered him.  He comes to realise he really cannot stand his long time wife Isabel who seems to just look at and through him.  His life is torn apart by his passion for Ray’s wife Mona, a physical affair, at the end of which he is faced with emptiness and misunderstanding.   It is “a devastating psychological novel…which…delves into the lies we tell ourselves and the darkness within us.”  Published in 1968 in French, part of a series of books known as Les Romans Durs, and as John Banville notes “they are tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place….utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining.”   This is by far the best of them I have read so far.

The Ministry of Fear                                                   Graham Greene

An Entertainment.    Published in 1943.

Greene’s very well-written thriller is set in 1941 in the Blitz, where the central character, Arthur Rowe, suffers from self-loathing because, as we learn, he has killed his wife, but solely to free her from pain.  For this he has been found not guilty and confined for a while to a mental hospital.  He emerges into a confusing world of random violence from the skies, the nightly bombing raids from Germany, and accidental interaction with some banal characters at a Fete who puzzle and confuse him when he wins a cake in a raffle.

It seems to me the novel owes a lot to John Buchan (The 39 Steps) It is largely all action with mysterious foreign spies engaged in a conspiracy with an overseas power.  Greene’s tale is empowered by love, the love of a sympathetic sister, and is resolved through it.   Rowe is empowered and escapes his past.  Again, like the Simenon,  there is the issue of self-loathing, or lack of self-knowledge and a yearning desire for self-destruction.

Maigret and The Man on The Beach                            Georges Simenon

Maigret as a close observer of human behaviour is engrossed by a single detail of a man, found stabbed to death in an alley. He wears goose shit green shoes.  But why, when he is so dull otherwise?

Hidden Killers                                                            Lynda La Plante

An airport buy, and a perfect travel book,   WPC Jane Tennison is a genuinely original Detective character creation, and of course it helps that we cannot read about her without picturing the brilliant and extraordinary Helen Mirren, but nevertheless Madame La Plante is a very good creator of story and the thriller genre.  She knows about plot and her stories are gripping.   I enjoyed it and it took me happily to Denmark and back.

The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By                    Georges Simenon

Not exactly a Maigret, but Inspector Lucas is involved peripherally.  It’s a portrait of madness.  A comfortable middle aged Dutch clerk goes off the rails when he discovers his employer is a cheat and a fraudster.   He does a runner, leaving wife, hearth and family, to the puzzlement of the world.  To him he has discovered sanity.   A man on the run from himself, and the constraints of life.   A Roman Dur.

 

 

Published.

January/ February/ middle March.

Berlin Noir                                                                 Philip Kerr
Stuck in bed with a broken ankle I turned to Philip Kerr and re-read with great pleasure the first three great Bernie Gunther novels:    March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem.  The first set in pre-war Berlin, the second towards the end of WW2 and the third in Vienna, during the filming of The Third Man.   He is really good, and re-reading is a total joy.

A Hero of France                                                       Alan Furst

People recommend Alan Furst in the same category as Philip Kerr, but he doesn’t hold up to the amazingly researched and extraordinary daring of PK.   The Bernie Gunther novels are in the first person which allows him to make hilarious derogatory remarks about the Nazis, and to my mind he is funnier and sharper than Chandler, to whom he is often compared.

Maigret at the Coroner’s                                             Georges Simenon

And then of course there is Simenon, who is like eating fine patisserie between long gourmet dinners.

This one sees Maigret is in the USA attending a Coroner’s investigation of what might be a murder.  His puzzlement over American methods is great.  He cannot help but become involved.

My Friend Maigret                                                     Georges Simenon

An officer from Scotland Yard is studying Maigret’s methods when a call sends them off to an island off the Cote D’Azur.

I have been doing research and gave myself a quick course in Biology.    Amongst the books I perused:

Life Ascending.                                  Nick Lane

What is Life?                                      Addy Pross

Life on a Young Planet                       Andrew H. Knoll

Ever Since Darwin                              Stephen Jay Gould

A New History of Life                        Peter Ward & Joe Kirschvink

The Greatest Show on Earth               Richard Dawkins   (which rather flatteringly contains the entire text of a parody lyric I wrote for Python called “All Things Dull and Ugly..”)

The Princess Diarist                                                    Carrie Fisher

While she may have been uncertain herself, one thing Carrie Fisher certainly was is a fine writer.  From the evidence of her earliest writing on Star Wars here it’s clear she can express herself in words.   Revealingly she says she likes to write because it slows down her thoughts so she can finish one.  Not only is it heart rending that she has gone so young, it is sad because we miss out on the writing she might yet have done.

And yet….                                                                  Christopher Hitchens

Wonderful essays on everyone and everything.

Believe Me                                                                 Eddie Izzard

Brief memoirs.   His publisher seeking a quote.   I sent:  “Eddie Izzard is my favourite stand up chameleon.”  I’m puzzled by his lack of reference or thanks to Python and me, picking him up at Aspen in 1998, and then us buying out his entire first night in LA.  It was the same in the documentary his girl-friend made.   My part was written out.   It was all Robin Williams (who did it after we did.) Then Tania remembered.   This same lady borrowed our lovely cleaning lady Delilah, and treated her rottenly.   So badly she refused to go back.   Aha that explains it!   Cuntishness rears its ugly head again.

So Long, See You Tomorrow                                       William Maxwell.

The most magnificent short novel.   Glorious.  Beautiful written.  Like the essence of a novel.

Maigret and The Old Lady                                           Georges Simenon.

He can take a character and create a whole novel out of it. This is about a sweet little old lady who comes to Paris to ask Maigret to come to the Le Havre coast to solve the murder of her servant.

Sapiens                                                                      Yuval Noah Harari

A mighty book in all senses.   About us, and who we are and how we came to be so.

The Undoing Project                                                   Michael Lewis

 

Late December

Memory Wall                                                             Anthony Doerr

Sending out for emergency supplies on Amazon, this is a beauty book of short stories by a wonderful writer who I discovered this year.   I love it.

Tangled Vines                                                            Frances Dinkelspiel

A true story about an arsonist amongst the Napa vineyards, the emergence, growth, survival and rebirth of California wines.  Interesting.  He destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of vintage wines.

Conclave                                                                    Robert Harris

A surprisingly good read.  Surprising, not because he isn’t good, he is, but I didn’t think he’d grip me with a yarn about a Papal election.   But he did.  I loved it.

Human Universe                                                        Professor Brian Cox

I had a good read of this.  It’s covered in highlights and I need it again as I’m taking up Act Two of the Universe.

Oliver Twist                                                                Charles Dickens

This time on Kindle.    I liked it.  Then I thought the Fagin portrait was really anti-semitic, then I switched to

 

David Copperfield      

When I realised if I was going to re-read Dickens I’d want Bleak House or Dorrit.

The Last Tycoon                                                F. Scott Fitzgerald

Watching a bad movie adaptation by Amazon led me to the original.   Was it really about the effect of the Nazi’s on the Studios in Hollywood?  Of course not.  But after the elegant opening of the book I was struck by how unfinished it was.  And how far from being a masterpiece it is.  I used to like it a lot.  This time I didn’t.  Two previous readings.

Previous:    September 2010    The Last Tycoon F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Read on the plane flying from London to LA.   Interesting because of the notes and the insights into how much work he put into constructing his novels and characters.  His writing seems to come effortlessly to him but here we see that there is indeed a great deal of effort in it and he is harshly self-critical.  He writes “Only Fair” opposite one paragraph.  These notes in many ways are more valuable than the unfinished novel because they show the artist in mid brush stroke.  The only thing I don’t find convincing on re-reading is the narrator – the female character Cecilia.   Does he ever try and inhabit another female narrator?  She doesn’t really come alive for me.  I still love the Pat Hobby stories for the shabby view of Hollywood, but here you see that Fitzgerald was seen and appreciated for what he is, when he first went to Hollywood.  Stahr really knows him and admires him.

Christmas Carol                                                Charles Dickens

Timely re-reading of this touching story of redemption.  Find the child.   Even Scrooge comes from some unhappy childhood.  His emotional connection with his past as we see how he got to be him, prepares him for his great moment of reconnection with mankind.  Has led me into Oliver Twist.

The Writer’s Cut                                                                  Eric Idle

Hadn’t read it in a long time and it made me chuckle.  On my I Phone.  Trying to decide whether to do a reading of it.  Happy to find it funny.

Moonglow                                                                           Michael Chabon

I loved it.  Read it in Cedars.  We shared a little email exchange about the effects of meds on reading.  Oddly afterwards I think he was right.  Don’t trust your reactions on meds.  When I returned to it I couldn’t get into it again so much and I’m, not sure whether the meds had changed my reaction or whether they had caused me to enjoy it more.    Published November 2016.  Found a signed edition.

Heroes of the Frontier                                                          Dave Eggers

On Kindle.  Married woman flees with her kids to Alaska.  Perhaps a film that became a book?  I see I’m only half way through, which is good, because I can go back to it.

The Schooldays of Jesus                                              J. M .Coetzee

A puzzling book which I really enjoyed.  I’m still not sure what it has to do with Jesus, and it ended abruptly.  A man finds a lost boy on a ship to South America and takes him to a new life.  But he is really the lost boy, and cannot find his feelings or emotions, either with the boy or the boy’s mother.  They place him in a weird Music and Dance Academy where he soars, only to be involved in a brutal murder of his adorable teacher by his adored friend the janitor Dmitri.  The novel explores, but doesn’t finally resolve the need for forgiveness.

Pure Imagination                                                       Leslie Bricusse

Pure delight from the long and wonderful Musical Career of Leslie Bricusse.  President of Footlights, he paved the way to Broadway writing so many brilliant songs, often with Anthony Newley.   If I Ruled the world.  What Kind of Fool Am I?  Gonna Build a Mountain.   You Only Live Twice….I could go on but Sammy Davis Jr. recorded 60 of his songs…   An inspiration and delightful company.

 

Posted

Christmas Book List

Here’s what I have selected to send to selected friends.  I get them packaged with brown paper and ceiling wax and sent from Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights | in Bath.

https://www.facebook.com › Places › Bath, United Kingdom › Book Store

Ending Up                                                                                             Kingsley Amis

Dynasty                                                                                                 Tom Holland.

Maigret Gets Angry                                                                                 Georges Simenon

Madame Maigret’s Friend                                                                       Georges Simenon

The Pigeon Tunnel                                                                                 John Le Carré

Nutshell.                                                                                                    Ian McEwan

The Hotel on Place Vendome                                                                    Tilar J. Mazzeo

All the Light We Cannot See                                                                     Anthony Doerr

The Orphan Masters Son.                                                                          Adam Johnson

Dead is Best                                                                                           Jo Perry

December

All That Man Is.                                                         David Szalay

A fine novel, really nine interlinked short stories, about the frustrations of man.  From all ages of men, with their disappointments, hopes, dreams and lives exposed as nothing in the stream of time.  The book is carefully and cleverly worked, and features many European scenes, which somehow all link with a rather bleak view of man, and men, cars, transport and modern life.   I read most of it before I left but read it all again on my return.   He really is very good.

The Rival Queens                                                       Nancy Goldstone

The Queens are Catherine de Medici and her daughter Marguerite de Valois (married to Henri 4).

Amid the madness and the religious and sibling rivalries of a French court, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August 1572, after Marguerite’s forced wedding, here laid very clearly at the door of Catherine, ran the streets of Paris red with Huguenot Blood, and would lead to years of chaos and warfare.   Well told narrative of a period I find fascinating.

October and November

(Reading on the road)

Red Gold                                                                             Alan Furst

The third of these highly readable novels set in Paris during the Occupation, all with the same protagonist Jean Casson, a film producer, scrabbling to survive under the Nazis. I have enjoyed reading all three, and there are several more, which is good news.  Excellent travel reading.

Ending Up                                                                          Kingsley Amis

Wonderful.   Cranky old people sharing a house.  Remarkable.   Simple and funny and true.

When Hitler took cocaine and Lenin lost his brain                  Giles Milton

Short bits, true stories, odd bites.  Quite readable and occasionally quite remarkable.

The World at Night.                                                                Alan Furst

Casson the film producer is blackmailed into working for the Gestapo in occupied Paris.   But he escapes to find his love the actress Citrine.

Mission to Paris.                                                                     Alan Furst

The beginning of the Occupation of Paris, and fun and games amongst the poor Parisians left to deal with the German Army and the Gestapo.   An ex-Austrian American film star shooting in Paris is manipulated by Gestapo agents.  With Casson, a film producer, his ex-wife and current loves.

Three Ten to Yuma.                                                               Elmore Leonard

Short stories.  Western.  Sparse and wonderful.   Mostly dialogue and action.  Highly readable.

Mister Hire’s Engagement.                                                       George Simenon

A non-Maigret brilliant book about a little man suspected of a crime.    A small masterpiece.

The Old Man                                                                       Thomas Perry

Thomas very kindly sent me his latest proof as I am such a fan.   This one seems a little different from his previous work.  More complicated and a bit into the territory of Le Carré. Very readable as usual and highly enjoyable.   And I’m sorry to say you can’t get to read it for another month or two.  But get it.

In the cafe of Lost Youth.                                            Patrick Modiano                                                                         A four different viewpoint short story about odd customers of a small 50’s Parisian cafe. In 2014 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Prime Suspect 3.   Silent Victims.                                  Lynda La Plante.                                                    Third and final Jane Tennison story.  They represent a remarkable trilogy.  Excellently written.  Tense, taut and a quiet masterpiece of the genre.

Dynasty                                                                      Tom Holland.

A magnificent history of the Caesars.  Very timely reminder of the dangers of supreme power.  Thoroughly readable and wonderfully told.   From Julius to Nero.

Maigret’s Holiday.                                                       Georges Simenon            Madame Maigret poisoned on holiday mussels.  Inside a Nun run hospital.   A young woman dies.  Nun slips him a note.  Who dunnit?  Bored Maigret moves in.

The Misty Harbour.                                                     Georges Simenon               Fairly sure I read this before.  But it still gripped me.  His sense of locale, the details of sea and tide and fog are superb, with Maigret groping around in the dark as usual.

Prime Suspect   2:  A Face in the Crowd                       Lynda La Plante

This is Lynda La Plante at her very best.  From 1993.  With Jane Tennison, by now inseparable from Helen Mirren, this is what she does best;.  revealing the sexism and the racism in the police and the general hatred of the easily misled public for them, manipulated by both Press and Politicians.   Short, sharp sentences, mainly action and dialogue, she tells the tale with great skill.   Highly readable.

Wrongful Death                                                         Lynda La Plante

Nice airplane reading.  She is good, although this one is fairly ambitious and contains enough material for two thrillers, especially as her female detective goes off half way through on an FBI course to the States, where another case is solved.  I did enjoy it though.

Hunting Eichmann                                                     Neal Bascomb

It seems weird to me that when I was born there were still two years of Nazi Concentration Camp horrors to go.  It is particularly enjoyable to read of the purple-faced fury of Hitler in the final few days of the war as the Russians entered Berlin.  Each of the Nazis had an escape plan except him!  This other Adolf deviant managed to evade capture for many years after the war and escaped with the help of the Catholic Church and the Red Cross to Argentina.  Unfortunately for him not all Germans had forgotten the Nazis, although at least one was now in a high position of power in West Germany.  Realising that Germany had lost its drive to capture Nazis Herr Brandt leaned on the at-first-doubtful Israelis to say he did indeed know the whereabouts of the by now sad little arrogant fucker called Eichmann.  The book tells of the verifying of the identity and the capture of the man who went to the gallows unrepentant and unconvinced he had done anything wrong.  Just obeying orders.   I love these books.

The Truth About Lorin Jones                                      Alison Lurie

I really like Alison Lurie and this is a particularly fine book from 1988.   She is quite critical of her lesbian friend, who is revealed as utterly selfish.             A fine read.

September

Finally the first Maigret I really didn’t finish…

Maigret’s Memoirs                                                     Georges Simenon

Devilish clever and post-modernist and all.   This is the real Parisian detective Maigret writing his memoirs about how he came to meet the Belgian writer Georges Sim, who became Georges Simenon, stealing his character and his name, his shape, his methods, simplifying his cases, and making him available to the public and even available to be played by actors who in no way resemble him.   His resentment of this is very clever, very smart, and funny conceptually, but it doesn’t grab like a real Maigret novel.  I’m not sure we want to be reminded of the fictional nature of the heroes of our novels.   It’s confusing and runs against some vein, as if some character in a play was constantly to remind you he was in a play.

Two cracking Maigret novels.  One from the plane and one immediately afterwards.

Maigret Gets Angry                                                     Georges Simenon

A retired Maigret is drawn into a strange world by an eccentric old lady.  Told at great pace and with great drive, it is amazing how much plot he gets out of pure dialogue and character.  Unexpected and thrilling.

Madame Maigret’s Friend                                           Georges Simenon

Again an unusual Maigret where Madame Maigret is drawn improbably into a puzzling situation.

The Pigeon Tunnel                                                     John Le Carré

The most marvellous memoirs.  Described as “Stories from my life” they reveal a surprising side to David Cornwell.  Not just the wonderful people he has met, and the encounters he has had, but many sharp observations about life, secrecy, parental disappointment and what turns us into us.  I was fascinated to see the novelist constantly at work, examining character for fictional uses, and almost always playing life back into fiction and vice versa, it’s as if he is more comfortable with fiction than reality.

White Sands.      Experiences from the Outside World.      Geoff Dyer

Dyer gets dryer and dryer.  His wit and his incredible clear eye looking closely at things, plus the ease with which he slots himself into his own narrative, essay world, makes him unique and very enjoyable.

The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.                        Barbara B. Diefendorf

A Brief History with Documents.  A short readable account of the atrocities which occurred in Paris early on the morning of August 24^th 1572 when after a Royal marriage the Catholics massacred the visiting Protestant Huguenots by the thousands in the streets of Paris.   Shockingly relevant history of the endless animosities and atrocities committed in the name of religions.   Was it in fact Marie de Medici who planned it, and persuaded her son Charles IX to go along with it, after she had opened fire on Admiral Coligny?.   Still the sexiest historical movie ever made.  La Reine Margot.

Nutshell.                            A novel.                                    Ian McEwan

Read in a day. A wonderfully accomplished original novel.   Told from inside the womb where his mother is plotting to betray and murder his father.  Nice Hamlet echoes but the omniscience and anxiety for the world he accords this helpless inmate and witness to dreadful things is what makes it so witty and original and fascinating.   I loved it.

Maigret in New York.                                                       Georges Simenon

An odd one this.  A  retired Maigret definitely a fish out of water accompanies a young man to see his father in New York who then immediately disappears.  Who is the young man?   Why does he disappear?   What is the crime.  Maigret wanders around New York, and finally draws the strings together of thirty year old events.    Strange.    How much he depends on his Parisian  milieu and how little he understands of New York.

Bright Precious Days                                                  Jay McInerney

I got about half way through this and got bored with the New York characters and their world and lovers.  I think if you’re going to do adultery you have to be at least Tolstoy.   I gave it another go when I got back and it still left me cold.   I’m sad as I had him down to become great.  He may yet I suppose.

August

The Midwich Cuckoos                                                 John Wyndham

This is a wonderful book.  Elegant, eloquent and prescient.  Published in 1957 it is more than science fiction, it raises issues that trouble us today.  I had not expected it to be so well written, with many wonderful references.  He terrified us as children with The Day of The Triffids on the radio.  I’m happy to find him still just as entertaining.

The Sympathizer                                                         Viet Thanh Nguyen

The fictional confessions of a Vietnamese spy, evacuated to America in the fall of Saigon and then returned to his former side, who are of course far  worse.  Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Beautifully written and gripping novel.

The Flemish Shop                                                      Georges Simenon

A 1941 wartime paperback edition which says it’s from “Maigret to the Rescue.”  I wish I could have a new Maigret every week.

 A Kim Jong-Il Production                                          Paul Fischer

A fascinating and extraordinary tale about how the North Korean film obsessed madman Kim Jung-Il kidnapped not only the leading film actress from South Korea but also her Top Film Director Husband, held them locked up for years then brought them together and made them make films!   A hard to credit real true story and a great look at the monomaniacal locked-in State where fear rules all.

True Grit                                                                   Charles Portis

A wonderful Western tale from 1968, given me by Jeremy Clarke.  I devoured it.

 Do you ever get to that point when you find yourself reading four books at once and not committed to any of them, but keep switching in a random fashion between them.   Then you go Fuck It I’m going to stop this and look for something I’m really committed to.   Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s me or if it’s the books.  Here are some I’m leaving by the wayside in a quest for something gripping.

The World of Christopher Marlowe.                                David Riggs

I’ve been reading this one for years.  In parts fascinating, but it mixes somewhat dry academic literary criticism with tales of the far more exciting life of Marlowe, so it’s somewhat annoying, unless you are studying for a degree.

Man Belong Mrs Queen                                              Matthew Baylis

The hilarious story of the South Pacific islanders (Vanuatu) who worshipped the Duke of Edinburgh.

Funny, and odd, but could have been shorter I think.

A Hell of a Woman.                                                      Jim Thompson.

I was enjoying this too.   But he switched styles and became all modernist and I got fed up.

Uncommon Carriers                                                    John McPhee

I really liked the essay on the most beautiful truck in the world, and even the French Navigation School, but got a bit tired on the barges of the Illinois river.   I shall dip again as I think he is amazing.

July

The Hotel on Place Vendome                                       Tilar J. Mazzeo

A lovely read about the history and customers of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, from its founding in 1898 during the Dreyfuss Affair, through the German Occupation and beyond.  A whole history of interesting characters wander in and out of its doors, behaving badly and bitchily, including Marcel Proust, Hemmingway, Goring, Goebbels, Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, the awful Windsors, the collaborational Coco Chanel, Cocteau, Sartre, Scott Fitzgerald.  Highly entertaining and most unusual social history.  Great read.

The Metaphysical Ukulele                                           Sean Carswell

A concept book of short stories based on “what if there was a ukulele in it?”  Pastiches of the imaginary writings of famous people.  In the end it’s too much pastiche and I turned to a pastis.

The Blue Room                                                          Georges Simenon

For once not a Maigret, but an excellent tale of love and lust and female determination. Fascinating.

Everybody Behaves Badly                                            Lesley M.M. Blume

Especially Hemmingway.  The story behind The Sun Also Rises and the self-making of a legend.

I have come to like Hemmingway less and less.  Both as a writer and as a mythomaniac.   Sorry, but give me Fitzgerald any day.    Very enjoyable book about the real characters portrayed and betrayed in the novel.

Death of a Diva                                                          Derek Farrell

Quite fun.

About Grace                                                               Anthony Doerr

In search of a daughter.  A man with foresight for disaster.  This is a long novel, too long in my humble, but I stuck with it because he writes so well and it is interesting to see a writer becoming a master.

Signed, Picpus                                                            Georges Simenon

So happy to always have a Maigret to grab.

Hollywood Nocturnes                                                  James Elroy

Short stories by the rather rough Elroy.  Odd echoes of Chandler with modern brutalism and old fashioned racism.

More June

Inside a Pearl.                                                            Edmund White

More memoirs of an American in Paris from the beautiful prose of this very fine writer.  It’s a very enjoyable and immensely readable recollection of the many artists and intellectuals he met in his 16 years living and writing in Paris.  Most of the really interesting people seem to be gay, and even when he is gossipy and revealing about their sex lives, some of which are very bizarre indeed, it is always without malice and with great human sympathy.  There is a great deal of sadness in the many lovers and friends who died of AIDS but he remains cheerfully optimistic even when, as he says, he becomes old and fat.

 

I bought his latest novel….

Our Young Man.                                                               Edmund White

…But a bit gay for me.  Can we say that these days?  But I do intend reading more of him, though I think he is a remarkable memoirist. Is that even a word?   Get The Flaneur and Inside a Pearl.

Felicie.                                                             Georges Simenon.

Quickie.  All character driven by the wonderful suspicious and very difficult housekeeper of the murdered man.

Talleyrand.                                                         Duff Cooper.

Magnificent 1932 biography of this fascinating diplomat who outplayed and survived Napoleon, who called him a shit in silk Stockings.  He saw through Napoleon, spotted the dangers of him, stuck with Louis XVIII and negotiated a strong position for France at the Congress of Vienna. Elegantly written by Duff Cooper, quondam English ambassador to France married to Lady Diana Cooper, one of the great beauties of the age.  He writes well and almost as good as his pal Winston Churchill.

Dead is Best                                                               Jo Perry

The highly entertaining sequel to Dead is Best.  I read on Kindle but now in paperback.  Lovely concept of a dead man and his dead dog.  In this case trying to save his step daughter, which is a rather touching concept.  I liked both books very much

Before The Fall                                                          Noah Hawley

Paged turning thriller given to me by Conan no less.  Enjoyable read with many dramatic twists.  Excellent beach read.

Sweetbitter                                                                 Stephanie Danler

22 year old lady moves to NYC and gets a job at a top restaurant where she becomes involved emotionally, intellectually and sexually with the crew of a top restaurant.  A coming of age novel, a New York novel, and a behind the scenes at a restaurant novel, very nicely written by a very talented young lady.

Death Comes to Pemberley                                          P.D.James

Continuing Pride and Prejudice as a thriller.  Nicely done, but in the end, er…not Jane Austen.

Imperial Bedrooms                                                     Bret Easton Ellis

Very gripping novel till about two thirds through and then it fell apart.    Short, good writing by a good novelist.  A re-read. I enjoyed it more this time.

The Hothouse by the East River                                   Muriel Spark

Not her best but still by her, and she is great.  First time for me.

Territorial Rights                                                        Muriel Spark.

Set in Venice.  Both these two first editions from Iliad.  First read in 2001.

 

Published from here on website.

L.A. Noir                                                                   John Buntin

An intertwined biography of the gangster Micky Parker and Police Chief William Parker, whose lives and careers went side by side in the seamy side of Los Angeles.  Corruption, and big city crime, terminating in The Watts Riots of 64.   An interesting tale which could have been better told.

April May

Napoleon.   A Life                                                       Andrew Roberts

A magnificent read.  A wonderful 800 page biography of Napoleon, elegantly written, with excellent analysis of the battles and the campaigns, terminating in the Longwood House on St. Helena from stomach cancer.  Often self-deluding, and frequently aggrandising, this is a fair minded account of the life of a great military man, and civil leader, who nevertheless spilt more French blood than anyone before or since, and lost almost 2 million dead in his sixty battles.   France has still not recovered from his effects on the population.  A perfect book for the beach….

All the Light We Cannot See                                        Anthony Doerr

Recommended by a friend and absolutely fabulous.  A brilliant telling of what happened in and to St. Malo and its inhabitants, and its occupiers, at the end of World War Two.  A beautifully woven tale. A masterpiece.  A must read.  .

Inspector Cadaver                                                       Georges Simenon

The latest in this wonderful series from Penguin.   In his short novella world the drama always comes from characters.   Their pride, their greed, their fears.  Nothing much happens except internally as Maigret tries to understand what really happened by the reactions of those around.  Here once again he is involved in small town politics, where the rich and powerful close ranks at all costs.  As usual he out waits them.

The Mystery of Olga Chekhova                                    Anthony Beevor

Sadly the mystery seems to be why anyone would bother to write a book about her…

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men                              David Foster Wallace.

Not brief enough for me.   I liked the film though.

Dead Wake                                                                 Erik Larson

The shocking attack on and sinking of the Lusitania, which virtually propelled the US into WW2, very carefully and very well told.

The Nest                                                           Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Ya know, it’s a best seller.  I get it.  It’s going along.  Nothing much wrong with it.  Then I was no longer interested.

The Grown Up                                                            Gillian Flynn

An excellent short story, with perhaps one of the very best ever opening lines:  “I didn’t stop giving hand jobs because I wasn’t good at it. I stopped giving hand jobs because I was the best at it.”

I Met Someone                                                           Bruce Wagner

On form Bruce.  Happy to  have another book from him.

The Driver’s Seat                                                        Muriel Spark

I love her writing.   Here she experiments with form and has the  victim ensure her death is achieved.  An odd tale, imaginatively told.

 

On the Road Reading.    February and March

The Orphan Masters Son.                                              Adam Johnson

An absolutely first class brilliant book.   A work of fiction and imagination that seems entirely real. Set in the bizarre and foul world of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, he relentlessly exposes what it is like to live under the insane dictatorship of this poisoned state, and the contradictions in self behaviour and self correcting thought it requires to even survive.  A brilliant and thoroughly original and unique book.   Masterful.

Shylock is my name.                      Howard Johnson

A disappointing novel of clever ideas but unfortunately dull characters.  I very quickly became bored, and distracted and after many attempts abandoned it in Adelaide.   It’s hard to explain why except the Jewish obsession really doesn’t work for me.  Very sorry.

The Crying of Lot 49.                                            Thomas Pynchon

I thought I had read this, but reading the first page in a Brisbane bookshop really grabbed me.  Now 50 pages in I’m beginning to feel he’s lost the thread and that the extremely funny prose that seduced me is losing its pull.   Will give it a bit more of a go.  Which I did and finished by the last night, but wtf?   Conspiracy theory as a novel.   So many good things, so unsatisfactorily woven together, and so much that is frankly puzzling.

The Whites                                                             Richard Price

Often novels end weakly.  The author seems to run out of steam.  The only category of novels in which this is absolutely unacceptable is the Thriller, or Detective novel.  The climax, the end, is the whole point.  This one I found took me a page or two to understand and then built and built and went off like a rocket.  I loved it.

What we talk about when we talk about love                  Raymond Carver

Vintage Carver.  Literally and publishing.  This Vintage book 2009.  The original from 1981.   So simply written, so brilliantly expressed.  Often the same sad tale of alcohol and the falling away of love.  These are wonderful short stories.  He is amongst the greatest of the genre.   Found them in Brisbane and devoured them.

Parasites Like Us                                                        Adam Johnson

His first novel.   The end of the world caused by anthropology.  Fabulous, funny and brilliant.  An anthropological discovery near an expanding Casino, causes fascination, theory and ultimately chaos to the whole world except the discoverers in ways you neither predict nor could foresee.  He really is the real thing.

The Noise of Time                                             Julian Barnes

An ironic life of Shostakovich or how to live under tyranny, oddly the same subject that Adam Johnson tackles so brilliantly in The Orphan Master’s Son, though here done as a narrative biography of the real composer.  Perhaps because it is based on truth and isn’t fiction it fails to come to life.   It isn’t biography either but a strange hybrid.  It’s hard to know who is telling this tale.  It is pseudo biography but it stirs no emotions except pity.   You feel sympathy towards this highly gifted composer being forced to compromise for Stalin, but I think by adopting this method of telling his story it feels more like a lecture and I miss the dialogue and character at which Julian Barnes is so amazingly good.  A puzzler.

The Gap of the Time                                          Jeanette Winterson

The Winter’s Tale.    A modern rendition of the Shakespeare play.   The first half is absolutely brilliant.  Gripping, thrilling and the people come bursting off the pages.   The second half falls apart totally.  As I suspect so does the play but it’s been a while since I saw or read it.   Even when we get to our longed for end, when the lost Perdita is reconciled with Leo (Leontes) and her mum comes back from the dead (as a statue in the play, as a recluse here), she cuts it short and flips into an essay on Shakespeare and his heroines.  Because of course she, the author, is an abandoned daughter, a Perdita, and lost to her own mother, and to her that is of course more interesting than the reconciliation with a fictional mother, which never in her life happened.   And of course she hated her foster mother and wrote two absolutely brilliant books about this monster of a woman.   If it had only stopped at page 123 I would be raving about this.  But sadly it doesn’t.   Pity.  What with Howard Jacobson having a go at Shylock this is quite the age of novelising Shakespeare.

Fortune Smiles                                                  Adam Johnson

Superbly written short stories I could easily re-read again.   Read on Kindle on flights and in Hotel rooms on the road.  He is just fabulous.   One of the stories actually concerns two North Korean defectors, which was interesting.  He seems to know so much about the Koreas.  The stories are: Nirvana, Hurricanes Anonymous, Interesting Facts, George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine, Dark Meadow and Fortune Smiles.

Where My Heart Used to Beat                                    Sebastian Faulks

A sort of sentimental novel, a memory of war and love and visits to an old man on an island.   Robert Hendricks never quite seems to enjoy love affairs with any of the women offered up to us.   Instead spending his life quietly denying his thirty years regret of not being with the Italian woman Luisa he met and had an affair with during the war.   Anzio is described well from the British perspective and he is supposed to have written a book about new ways of looking at the mad, but all in all it feels like that rather sentimental type of movie, where the nurses wear starched white and no one quite gets to do anything.  He is of course reconciled with Luisa once she is tragically stricken with cancer.   An odd thing.  Many good things but…I think I have also read by him Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion D’Or.

Prime Suspect                                                   Lynda La Plante

So well and succinctly written, even if we hadn’t become accustomed to Helen Mirren playing the role.  The first case of Detective Jane Tennison, and she is up against the full prejudice of the Police force.  This adds a piquancy to what is already a great tale.

Girl in The Dark.                                                        Marion Pauw

Amazing how good all these contemporary female thriller writers are.  This is the English language debut of a Dutch writer.  Masterly (mistressly?) construction, gripping and unexpected.

False Nine                                                        Philip Kerr

A disappointment for me in the end.  The story of Manson, a black Scottish football player and manager and solver of crimes in and around the game.   The gags are good, but he fails to convince me that this guy is real.  Even if he does get to shag all the beautiful women in the book, who throw themselves at him, this is more Bond than reality.  I liked January Transfer but I’m not sure if I’ll bother with the one in between.   About a missing French footballer returning to Guadelope before joining Barca from PSV.   He writes well always, but one recurring character too many?

The Mystery of Michael Black                            Adam Johnson

Thank heaven I found something finally by him I wasn’t crazy about.   This is about a writer who writes what is about to happen.   A little too cute and fantasy for me.

Maigret and his Dead Man.                                Georges Simenon

Impeccable and reliable as ever.   On I-Pad

The History of the Conquest of Mexico                William H. Prescott

For the second time.   Magnificently written telling of the fall of Montezuma and the Aztec Empire in the face of the implacable Cortez. 150 men and 16 cavaliers, four cannon… Outrageous manipulation of will, diplomacy and determination.  I am still avidly reading this beautifully written book first published in 1842.  Of course he cannot from his time period entirely show that the Aztec Gods were just as weird as the Spaniards, but he can at least suggest it, and his prose is to die for.   And what a story.   Shameful, reprehensible, but world changing and it happened.   On I-Pad

Emporium                                                           Adam Johnson

Recent volume of short stories.   He is just so great.  I am still reading this.  Savouring them, and saving them, like the best chocolates in the box.  You’ve been good, now you can have another. On I-Pad

Clandestine                                                            James Elroy.

Interesting.  Gripping.  And at times downright weird.   A huge work, with great ambitions most of which it achieves.    On I-Pad

The Other Side of Silence                                                     Philip Kerr

And thank h. Philip Kerr came through and redeemed himself at the last whistle with another Bernie Gunther novel.  I loved it, and it is amazing how cleverly he works real people into his stories, which accounts for their quirky reality.  Here Somerset Maugham plays a big role, really?, yes and also Anthony Blunt.  Good fun.

 

Off on Tour…

 

January/ February

Monsieur Monde Vanishes                                          George Simenon

An interesting Maigret.  He starts with a mystery he immediately explains, and follows the runner, a middle aged business man weary of his dull life who escapes to the South of France.

War and Peace                                                           Leo Tolstoy

In the fine translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I am about half way through my third reading of this amazing book, and let’s face it, probably my last…. In a copy sent to me by Mike Nichols.  As I am off on tour I shall continue reading the same translation on my I pad.  Certainly easier on the wrist.  Of course inspired by watching the exceptionally good BBC TV series.  This is one of my favourite novels.

The Myth of American Exceptionalism                                  Godfrey Hodgson

Both an explanation of the theory of American exceptionalism through history, and how it arose, and a warning that it has now become dangerously politicised, which led in the second Bush administration to a serious of disastrous foreign policy decisions, from which America still suffers.   To be honest I wasn’t really aware of AE, or for that matter Manifest Destiny, so I’m catching up.  Good book to start.  He is very gentle with America, which makes his case far more effective.

“My thesis is not that American exceptionalist thought is intrinsically corrupting or that it was destructive in the past, but that what has been essentially a liberating set of beliefs has been corrupted over the past thirty years or so by hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system.”  A thought provoking and interesting book.

April 1865                                                                  Jay Winik

The Month that Saved America

A wonderful book, beautifully written, with great thought, about the enormous changes wrought in this month to America.  From the fall of Richmond, to the noble and dignified surrender of Lee to the courteous wisdom of U.S. Grant at Appomattox, and the other brave decisions of the Southern Commanders to relinquish arms, rather than committing the nation to endless guerrilla warfare.  The assassination of Lincoln only six days after the actor Booth shot him in the theatre might have revived the whole bloody mess, but mercifully it didn’t.  A very fine book with unforgettable scenes right to the end when the extraordinary General Lee joins a black communicant kneeling at the altar rail before a shocked community in a Richmond Church.  So many great moments.  A really thoughtful, succinct, yet wide-ranging tale of a nation almost rending itself in half, but coming together at the last moment.  A classic.

 

I caught the flu and in my delirium I dipped into many books.  Some of them I did not finish.   The fault, if there be any, is mine. I may or may not take them up again for I must leave on a long journey soon and they cannot come with me.   So for the fallen, a salute:

Herzog                                                                       Saul Bellow

I know many people, the wonderful Christopher Hitchins for one, who adore this book.   I got about half way through.  He is very good, but he doesn’t do what some other writers do for me, which is make themselves indispensable in my life.   I will return…

The Narrow Road to The Deep North                             Richard Flanagan.

I was enjoying this Booker Prize Winner of 2014, an Australian tale of sons, and fathers suffering on the Burma Railroad.   And oh how they suffered, and oh how few came back, to the shame of the honour of the Japanese nation.  The book contains important lessons about individualism against Fascism.  The modern world has embraced the individual.    That is the way forward.  In many ways World War Two is a moral triumph of the individuals of a nation against the mass forces of insanity, led by single insane leaders.  About half way through.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: An Essay    David Foster Wallace. (Digital Original)

A fun essay about his week on a Caribbean Cruise Liner for a glossy Magazine inspired me to read:

Infinite Jest                                                                David Foster Wallace.

I shall not finish this before I leave on my journey, 150 of 1,000 paperback pages.  A richly textured, extremely dense novel, I think his second, set in a tennis training camp for young men (such as the one he attended) but here in Phoenix, Arizona, it is intriguingly leading off in many other directions, most of which seem more promising and one hopes he will get on with it.   Prolix, lengthy, and certainly editable, there are a further 75 pages of small print notes at the back.  I think part of being a great novelist is choosing what to leave out.  He couldn’t resist about 100 notes at the end of his essay.  Is all this necessary one wonders?   Yet there is no denying the scope of his genius and the power of his writing, amongst the cornucopia of drug references, which indicate the speed in which and probably on which, he wrote.    Fascinating.

The Year of Lear.  Shakespeare in 1606                            James Shapiro

Excellent historical background to the lengthy and highly rewarding time Shakespeare was writing for James 1^st and not Elizabeth 1^st.    Something we easily forget.   Amongst the fears and threats of home terrorism of Catesby and Guy Fawkes and others in Warwickshire, very close to Shakespeare’s Stratford.  I find his history better than his literary criticism.  But certainly it is filling an essential gap in my knowledge of the greatest writer ever.  I am not entirely sure what point he is making.

 

 

2015

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

 

Slade House                                                                               David Mitchell

Submission                                                                                Michel Houellebecq

The Flemish House                                                                     Georges Simenon

The Lady in the Lake                                                                   Raymond Chandler

Heat Wave                                                                                 Penelope Lively

Low Life        The Spectator Columns                                             Jeremy Clarke

Gideon’s Spies                                                                            Gordon Thomas

The Lady from Zagreb                                                                 Philip Kerr

Dead is Better                                                                             Jo Perry

 

December

Dust That Falls from Dreams                             Louis de Bernieres

Sometimes reading a book one can feel ambivalent, unsure whether you’re totally enjoying it.  I enjoy this writer and have enjoyed many of his books.  He writes nicely and interestingly although anyone who starts a novel with a young man heading for the trenches, well no doubt how that’s going to turn out.   With this book I was still ambivalent for almost two thirds, but I felt I needed a break as the year ended.  Not sure why.

Killing a King                                                             Dan Ephron

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin And the Remaking of Israel.  Really the end of the Clinton peace process… and possibly the last chance for peace in the middle east as he manages to get the great hero Rabin to shake hands with the terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, thus unwittingly condemning Rabin to death by the Israeli far right settler movement.  So sad for all concerned.  Nicely told.

The Girl on The Train                                                 Paula Hawkins

A wonderful very well written murder mystery.  A great read and a great thriller.  Alternative viewpoints from the various characters keep the suspense till the end.  Perfectly accomplished and a great achievement.  I loved it.

The Lemur                                                                 Benjamin Black

An excellent book by John Banville under his pseudonym.  I don’t know how I managed to miss this one.  Short, taut and almost perfect.

Purity                                                                        Jonathan Franzen

I was enjoying it, which surprised me, but he writes nicely and then it just seems to go on and on, and I realised that I believed neither in Pip, the female lead, or the asshole Andreas Wolf, the murderous East German spiritual leader of young women in Bolivia.  Really?   I tried and tried and then went, oh fuck it.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.                                  Joshua Ferris

A very funny book that would have made my Xmas selections if I had read it sooner.  Very amusingly called “the Catch 22 of dentistry” by Stephen King no less, his style and his subject reminds me of Joseph Heller, and indeed Philip Roth, which is high praise indeed.  Very enjoyable and original.

 

November

Sweet Caress                                                              William Boyd

Sometimes you can be reading a novel which starts well and just feel the air go out of it.  I like William Boyd’s writing very much and have enjoyed almost all his books, though not his last one, the Bond job, and this at first excited me and raised my expectations because he strayed into W. G. Sebald territory by including pictures, but somehow it collapsed.   I ceased to believe in it.  Mainly I think because I didn’t feel he wrote a convincing woman.   I felt he has used this shape before in a novel I really liked,  (Any Human Heart) but that here he was dealing unconvincingly in slightly clichéd areas.  I am sorry for this and to have to say this as I think he is a very fine novelist.

 

Made me want to read Sebald himself and I had a recent collection of essays which I tried, though I only really read the one on Rousseau.  It’s the prose that keeps you reading.  Deceptively simple yet sonorous.

A Place in the Country.                                               W. G. Sebald

Essays.      And this led me to read..

Vertigo                                                                      W. G. Sebald

A puzzling book, about memory and a good beginning about Stendhal with Napoleon, Kafka in Italy, Casanova in Venice and he himself going back to South Germany.   I wrote in 2006 when I first read it “Sometimes great, sometimes banal.  He seems unable to distinguish between the particular and the prosaic.  Highs and dulls.”   This was a first edition I picked up in Hatchards.

O Pioneers!                                                                Willa Cather

I very much enjoyed this beautiful short novel of the Swedish settlers in Hanover, Nebraska.  Love and loss and lyrical writing.  Great.  Written in 1913.

Slade House                                                                David Mitchell

A brilliant ghost story, a form I never would have imagined enjoying so much, but he has made it so modern and above all so believable that you are seduced into it and cannot put it down.  I read it from cover to cover between JFK and LAX and was utterly pleased and thrilled.   I have very much enjoyed his previous books and he is an astonishingly good writer.   This I think will be a best seller for him.  It’s chillingly good.

Submission                                                       Michel Houellebecq

A very funny novel.  Satirical and withering.  And deadly topical.   I read it just before the Paris attacks.  He demolishes modern France a step at a time, through the eyes of his louche academic who studies Huysmans and teaches at the Sorbonne.   Step by step he goes from the contemporary to the inevitable.  It is both a warning and a great gag about the triumph of Muslim fundamentalism.   I liked it a lot.

Lanzarote                                                          Michel Houellebecq

Short, funny, sexy and hilarious, he can make drama out of four characters and an empty island.

 

October.  On the Road.

Forty Thieves                                                                      Thomas Perry

Oh joy, oh rapture, to be off on the road with a new Thomas Perry, which won’t be published until January.    A perfect start to travel reading.

Civil War                                                          Peter Ackroyd

Volume 111 of the History of England.   Very well told history of the English Civil War from the arrival of the Scottish King James V1 to become James 1^st, through his wilful son Charles 1^st who was executed,  and his two sons Charles II and James II who was forced to flee the throne on 1688 in the Bloodless Revolution, allowing his daughter Mary to take the throne.  A fascinating struggle for Parliamentary rights against the capricious arrogance of a monarchy.  Parliament’s victory was a very important moment in the history of the rights of the individual.

The Last Six Million Seconds                              John Burdett

A cracking good yarn as they say.   I think this is his second novel and he is working his way towards his Thai detective series.  This is set in Hong Kong on the eve of liberty from the British and has a Hong Kong Policeman who is only half Chinese.    Really excellent read on my I pad.

The Maltese Falcon                                           Dashiell Hammet

I think Hammet is not as good as Chandler but still I like this, his best book.  Spade is a weird man.  “When your partner gets killed you’re supposed to do something about it” but what he does do is avoid the widow, with whom he is clearly having an affair, and sexually pursue the client, and then turn her in.   He is described as a blond Satan and with his yellow hair, his slightly cruel, in fact beastly behaviour to his secretary, he is both more real and less attractive than Humphrey Bogart.

The yarn is still superbly set up for the John Huston movie, with all the characters leaping off the pages on to the screen.

Watch me                                                          Anjelica Houston

The second volume of director John’s daughter picks up her tale in the seventies in London, with some familiar faces to me.   Jack Nicholson filming The Shining, Shelley Du Val and Nona and Martin Somers.   Familiar times.  I was kinda hoping she would describe her visit to filming The Life of Brian in Tunisia, but she didn’t so I guess I’ll have to.      There is the arrest of Polanski which she was very close to.   A wonderful woman, and a great life.

Pulse                                                                 Julian Barnes

Fine short stories, some linked which I picked up on the road and enjoyed even though I had the feeling I had read them before,  which I had in July 2011, and here’s what I wrote then:

The new collection of vaguely linked short stories is a return to form for him, and an example of what he does best, conveying character through dialogue.   These short stories are almost play-like in their lack of descriptive prose, but his characters talk, bicker and despair and come to life immediately.   Happy to see he’s back.

The History of The Conquest of Mexico.               William H. Prescott

Continued to read on I Pad.

Liberty Bar                                                        Georges Simenon

The first set in the South of France where Maigret commutes by bus between Cannes and Nice while sorting out what’s up.

The Flemish House                                             Georges Simenon
The thing I notice is his weather is superb, his atmosphere, the rain, the cold, the boots, the bars, the differences between the French and the Flemish. The border places, the boat places, the canals, the locks, and in this case the Meuse which is in full flood and preventing the barge traffic.   Maigret is often soaked and cold, and always reaching for a warming drink or missing his wife’s cooking.   The images are in the details.   I loved this one.

A Passage to India                                     E. M. Forster

Brilliantly alive with the misunderstandings of the British, Fielding, Miss Quested, drawn together by the strange and unlikely affection of Mrs Moore for Dr. Aziz,  a Muslim who lives through misunderstanding, false arrest, false accusation and unexpected release and triumph, to explore his hatred and misunderstanding and finally his love for India and the inevitability of its release from the British Raj.  Written in 1924, it still had only 24 years left, and correctly predicts another European war will do for it.

First US edition, third printing August 1924.  Rather oddly Pages 161 – 176 are bound in upside down…

 

September

The Dying Animal                                             Philip Roth

Dr. David Kepesh.  A monologue on love and sex, and child abandonment, teaching and above all his longing for the breasts of Consuela the Cuban, whom he loves, whom he abandons and with whom he reconnects and photographs just before she has a mastectomy.   In all a strange book.   And for a short book, rather long.   I haven’t read The Breast, perhaps it is a start of that.

A Personal History of Thirst                               John Burdett

I enjoy his novels very much so I sent for this, his first.  It starts off like a rocket, and he writes really well but I thought it lost its way after a while, and I’m glad he found a more interesting world to write about.

The Thin Man.                                                  Dashiell Hammet

Talking of a history of thirst Nick and Nora Charles never stop.    I’m afraid I had to.  I found the banter and the plot a lot more banal this time around.  Too many cocktails.   This level of public drunkeness.  It’s almost entirely about the next cocktail.   Though interestingly written during Prohibition, so perhaps a love song to liquor is aloud. The Nora character seems to have been based on his lover Lillian Hellmann.

The Blue Guitar                                                John Banville

I was enjoying this and admiring how well he writes, until I suddenly lost all interest and saw why he got the sort of panning I had read which had up until then puzzled me.   I’ll give it another go, because he is the real thing.

 Heat Wave                                                       Penelope Lively

A wonderful novel, set in a long hot English summer (yes they do happen) where Pauline watches her daughter undergoing the same betrayal by her husband that she had experienced.   The structure is simple and elegant, but the emotions are wonderfully handled, as she watches the adultery in helpless dismay.  I like Penelope Lively a lot and here she produces a sudden and unexpected and highly satisfactory end to a very fine book.

The Counterlife                                                 Philip Roth

Brother of the famous novelist, discovering his triple by-pass has left him impotent at 39 either dies under the knife, or survives and flees to Israel to join a commune, run by a radical right wing Kibbutzim.  Meanwhile the writer of the book either dies from the same surgery or marries an Englishwoman and tries to live in Chiswick.   The book keeps shifting, shape and narrative, and while it is fiendishly clever, it also becomes slightly annoying.    Every person in it has a good reason to destroy some of Zuckermans writing, and they are all angry with him in some form for writing about them, although he denies it is them, and in some parts invents whole scale unlikely action scenes, where a passenger tries to hijack an El Al plane from Israel.   So it is a discussion of the novelist and his role in life.  A large part of it is a long and highly argumentative discussion about what it means to be a Jew in Israel, as opposed to an American Jew.   For the non-Jew this is simply hard to understand, so I turned again to remind me, to a book about major anti-semitism ….

The Grand Inquisitors Manual                                    Jonathan Kirsch

A History of Terror in the name of God

And an all too stark reminder of just how foul and consistently horrendously the Jewish people have been treated through the centuries.   It’s nauseating, and unrelenting and shameful.

The Cellars of the Majestic                                 Georges Simenon

Is there anything more satisfying than a murder mystery at a hotel?   Yes a murder mystery with Maigret in the basement serving quarters of a smart Parisian hotel.  The Penguin Classics continue.

A Spy Among Friends                                        Ben Macintyre

The story of Philby, here told through the eyes of the great betrayal of friendship,  first with Nicholas Eliot and also James Angleton.  Elliot is so in denial he even fights hard to get Philby, deeply suspected by MI5, reinstated by MI6.  What is fun is to see the torture that Philby went through, thanks to his betrayal of friends, wives and country, becoming virtually an alcoholic zombie by the end.   And this book suggests quite plausibly that Philby did not run, but was carefully pushed into fleeing to Moscow, since it spared the Secret Service the embarrassment of a public trial, and a potential hanging, and the Security world could not afford another scandal after Blake, Buster Crabbe etc.  Nicely told, intriguing world of the Cambridge Spies and the upper class twits who seemed to think a decent school was all that was required.

 

August

Fierce Attachments                                                     Vivian Gornick

A reprint by Daunt Books of a fine novel published in 1987.   Reminded me of Jeanette Winterson in the intense and crippling relationship with the mother, here told in a series of flashbacks from the current state of bickering, mutual but clinging dislike in which they walk the streets of Manhattan to the eight year old girl, growing up under the mesmeric spell of a willful, possibly borderline, Jewish mamma, in a crowded tenement in the Bronx, filled with extraordinary neighbors, people and lives.  Walking on egg shells and learning by hard knocks, never to quite trust herself, she reveals the  neighborly world of the tenements.  Nettie, the beautiful slut, etc.  I think it not as good as the Winterson because the story is unresolved, the unhealthy relationship with the mother remains unbroken.

The Judge’s House                                                                             Georges Simenon

Another great one from the series of Maigret reprints.  His usage of the grey, marshy coastline of the mussel fields is brilliant.  Maigret has been exiled to Lucon and is grateful when a busybody neighbor seeks him out to bring him into an obscure little town with a murder and a mystery.

The Grave of Alice B. Toklas                                       Otto Friedrich.

I love the writing of Otto Friedrich.  I particularly love The End of the World: A History¸ which is the most fascinating book on the recurring mad moments of history; City of Nets, about Hollywood in the 1940’s and particularly good on the émigrés; Before The Deluge, about Berlin before the world ended.. etc.  This collection, first published in 1989, is a series of interesting essays, all of which inform, entertain and instruct.  He writes easily and modestly about the many worlds he has crossed, Paris in the fifties, where he writes fascinatingly that it was Alice B. Toklas who defined the tastes of Gertrude Stein and not the other way round as we had always supposed.  The book ends with a loving reminiscence of  James Baldwin in Paris while he was a still struggling writer, struggling to eat, struggling to stay well.  What comes through about Baldwin is his amazing confidence in his own creative talent, and his knowledge that he is head and shoulders above the other scribblers and scriveners around him.  There are pieces on Wagner’s Parsifal, and the last year of Mozart’s life, the last Empress of Rome, and Fact Checking on News Magazines, for which he worked when he returned from Paris and Berlin.

Sweet Thursday                                                          John Steinbeck

A 1954 First edition in good order.  Probably from Iliad.   This is a sequel to Cannery Row which took off like a rocket and then became strangely sentimental.  As if he was writing for a market.  Always a fatal thing to do.   The audience must always be you.   It’s easy to fool the others. (Rutland Writers Hints, Part 146.)

The Stories of Muriel Spark                                         Muriel Spark

A nice first edition I picked up at Hatchards.  I enjoyed the South African stories particularly.  It seems to me she was a very modern writer, always challenging form and shape and conventions and it gives her a most refreshing style which says “yes, life is like this. People talk and behave like this.”

The Bangkok Asset                                                     John Burdett

I really do enjoy these Thai detective books.   John Burdett writes a great yarn.   His Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Thai Police is a wonderful creation.  They are a great series of books.  This one is about transhumans.   Apparently based on some real CIA program.  Checking back I seem to have read all of the series so far with great enjoyment.  Always a nice moment when a book you want to read comes out.

 

Summer Reading June July

 

H is for Hawk                                                    Helen Macdonald

The most delightful and original book I have read in years.   A beautiful book, a very fine book and a new classic.  In a perfect edition from Grove Press.  It’s the sort of book you want to sit down and instantly re-read.   Natural history, which is about both nature and history.  A valedictory for her father.  To cope with her grief she adopts a goshawk and patiently and with great courage learns to teach it the ancient arts of hawking.  She herself is an odd bird, but she writes heavenly prose.  I loved this book.

 

The Two Penny Bar                                                    Georges Simenon

Continuing the fabulous new Penguin edition binge into the work of this modern master.  It seems like effortless writing.  They are just so great I can’t wait for more.

Trouble is My Business                                               Raymond Chandler.

Very short.  Obviously written for the Pulp Mags, which he writes about.  It’s not his best.  But it’s still Chandler.   From his intro:  “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”    “Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all.  In the end he knows all the tricks, and has nothing to say.”

Plus three short stories:   Finger Man, Goldfish and Bad Wind.   About Philip Marlowe.

I just realized that Chandler was at school in Dulwich not far from where Christopher Marlowe was murdered.  (There’s a thesis for you.)

Casino                                                                       Nick Pileggi

The Rise and Fall of the Mob in Las Vegas.            Wonderfully readable.  Led to a Scorcese film.  Given to me by Jeremy Clarke, who couldn’t believe I have met Nick and enjoyed his company.

Low Life        The Spectator Columns                           Jeremy Clarke

The delightful Jeremy came to dinner, leaving me a signed copy of his latest collection, and I sat happily in front of the Test Match reading it and giggling.

The Crying of Lot 49                                                   Thomas Pynchon

I get the feeling I tried this before.   It starts off so well and bogs down.  I haven’t abandoned it, just been flirting with other books.  Actually now I have abandoned it.  I don’t like it.

The Misty Harbour                                                     Georges Simenon

One of my favourites.  I think he writes best of the foggy coastlines of Northern France and the small villages, where people have private agendas and nobody talks.

Family Album                                                            Penelope Lively

A portrait of a family.   Well a portrait of a house really.  An interesting book, a large and complex family are portrayed through reminiscences and multiple viewpoints in time and character.  It makes the story slow, but because she writes so well it works.  We get their viewpoints on everyone else.

The Shadow Puppet                                                    Georges Simenon

Low life mystery in the Place des Vosges.

Oranges are not  the only fruit                                     Jeanette Winterson

A lovely novel I had somehow managed to miss.   She is a brilliant writer.  I loved her book about her nightmare mother last year Why Be Happy When You Can be Normal, which made me howl out loud with laughter, to the surprise of my wife.   How can you find such a monster mother funny, she asked?  This was her debut novel and won a lot of prizes for very good reasons.

Moon Tiger.                                                                Penelope Lively.
A most wonderful, eloquent, elegant, beautiful, exquisitely written book, which I see quite rightly won the Booker Prize in 1987.
A delightful discovery, a happen chance in Harrods, hiding in the shelves of their classics.
It is immediately gripping.  Her prose so finely constructed, so that you do not notice the effort that is here.   And the tale unrolls with breath-taking control.   How could I not know about this?
Sometimes it feels like a blessing and a benediction to discover such beauty, and yet there must be hundreds of such undiscovered delights, hiding on shelves all round the world.  Literature at its finest, about who we are and how we are and how we got to be here.  I was gratefully and intensely joyful for the few unputdownable hours I spent in the company of her gracious wonderful mind.
Past Times remembered.   The base of both literature and history.

Hotel Savoy.                                                                Joseph Roth
A rather beautiful short novel translated from the German.   Roth is new to me but I loved this story of a soldiers homecoming from captivity to stay in the old Savoy Hotel, along with a crowd of unusual characters.  The uncertainty, and threatened violence of a post war city is reflected in his beautiful prose.  A nice discovery.

Cecile is dead.                                                             George Simenon
They keep coming, and they keep pleasing.  These delightful inspector Maigret books issued by Penguin Classics in new translations are essential for your travels.   This one about a woman who keeps coming to see Maigret and he is bored by her constant visits, with bad results…

Suspended Sentences.                                                  Patrick Modiano
One of those French novels where very little happens at great length, but we are spared no detail.    Actually three short novellas.   I managed about one and a half!
Picked up at Daunts on a whim.

Maigret                                                                      George Simenon.
Though now retired Maigret is drawn back into the familiar world of the Police Judicaire by the folly of his nephew who is accused of a murder.  Hovering like a famous ghost at the edge of the investigation, treated with respect and occasionally not, he builds his patient case.

Missoula.                                                                    Jon Krakauer
This is not a book you enjoy.  And indeed the emotions and passions and violent language of the public towards principals in this tale of two rapes make you despair of the brave new internet world, where ignorance and savagery and hurtful language is the new fee speech.
As a Brit all I can say is that this outbreak of extraordinary entitled and violent behaviour towards women has several elements that are peculiarly American.  First are the drinking laws which ensure that illegal drinking is the norm, and binge drinking, and private drinking games consume a large amount of College social life.  Second is the extraordinary savagery of a game which makes heroes of violent young men. Third is that fame itself and the special privileges that come with it in a closed society, due to the extremely profitable exploitation of their sport, permit young men, of less than high intelligence, and far less than impeccable or sensitive behaviour, to act as if they are above the law.    This is now such a common perception that it is epidemic.
The liberation of young women into a supposedly equal college society where gangs of boys conspire to seduce them actually leaves them vulnerable.    If there is any encouraging news it is that colleges now seem to be taking this rape epidemic seriously, and Obama called it out.  It makes you feel ashamed to be a man.

Seize the Day.                                                              Saul Bellow
A nicely written sad tale of the worst day of a no longer young and foolish man, who keeps failing and faces an unsympathetic father and separated wife.   Good yarn.

Gone Girl.                                                                   Gillian Lynn
Interesting to read the novel after seeing the movie, because of course you know the big secret, which it takes more than half the book to get to.  The big secret of Amy.  So reading it is interesting because you know she is lying in her version of events, which you would not normally know when reading the book for the first time.  As in the movie we feel ambivalent towards them. We don’t know what will happen.  The brilliance of the book is in this… it is so skilfully plotted.    It’s filled with a million insights of how it is to be caught up in celebrity culture.  Everyone now behaves like the TV and needs to grab the story and twist it for their advantage…

May

I Blame Dennis Hopper                                               Ileana Douglas

More movie Memoirs this time from the siren Ileana.

The Hot House by the East River                                 Muriel Spark

Found this first edition from 1973 set in sweltering New York, the principal characters, though hilarious, are not quite what they seem to be.  She is so playfully, both in her writing and her use of form.

Wilde in America                                                        David M. Friedman

He argues that Wilde invented the cult of celebrity, by agreeing to allow D’Oyly Carte to tour him round America, so that everyone could see what Patience was mocking.  Persuasive argument, since Wilde had only a small volume of self-published poems to his name, but instantly became widely well known, lecturing to the denizens of the States, to greater and lesser acclaim.

Deception                                                                   Philip Roth

That rare bird, a Roth I hadn’t read.   And even rarer, didn’t love.   All in dialogue.  Scenes from an affair.

The Hollow Crown                                                     Dan Jones

The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of The Tudors

I picked up and read the second half of this – well from about Edward IV to the end.   The more familiar arrival of the Tudors.  Hundreds of years of civil war here, sometimes there seem to be about three rebellions a year.  The entire island seems to be filled with plate armour and arrows and terrible bloody, muddy, hacking to bits.   They’re all about 23 too.   So it’s late teenage violence on a huge scale.  More like gang warfare.   Richard 3^rd was definitely a serial killer.   May have killed two Kings too.   Henry VI it is widely assumed.   Quite possibly his brother as well.

Life Ascending                                                           Nick Lane

The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

I’m still reading this.  It’s not a book you can rush, since it encompasses The Origin of Life, DNA, Photosynthesis, The Complex Cell, Sex, Movement, Sight, Hot Blood, Consciousness and Death.

I expect to be reading it still next year.  The Unbeliever’s Bible.  How things really came to be.  I read it on my phone and I pad.  Often, occasionally, and always with great interest.

Gideon’s Spies                                                            Gordon Thomas

The Secret History of the Mossad.

The totally fascinating, utterly gripping, long but never dull, history of the Mossad. With all the greatest hits, and a few of their misses.  An intriguing tale of ten heads of this most secret service, and the way they coped with the many, many crises which continue, and the threats, which seem to worsen, and the potential for Middle East disaster with nuclear proliferation.  Then there’s the incredible tale of Robert Maxwell….   This book is essential reading, and it’s updated now and in a nice big fat paperback form.  I could not put it down.

The Passion                                                      Jeanette Winterson

Boy she can write.  Beautiful sentences.  A delightful, short novelette about young people picked up in the wake of Napoleon, (near Boulogne when we meet them), following him to Moscow, where his appeal is exposed as the sham it always was.  In several voices, two mainly, a young lad called Henri and a Venetian “comfort lady,”  whom he loves madly, though her feelings are more sisterly. They escape to Venice, but she loves a Lady and, well, Henri ends up fairly happily.  It’s the kind of book that I could easily read again.

 

 

April

The Lady from Zagreb                                       Philip Kerr

A Bernie Gunther Novel

Of course I couldn’t wait and I bought the book and downloaded it so I could finish it on the plane, which I did.  About Dalia, a smouldering siren of the German cinema, her Yugoslavian background, including a monster father, her married time in Switzerland, all of which Bernie unravels.   He sees her in the old cinema at La Ciotat, and then recalls 1942 when he was employed by Goebbels to get her into a picture, and his bed.  Bernie smokes and screws his way through constantly challenging dangers, which makes him our favourite detective….

The Big Seven                                                   Jim Harrison

I like Jim Harrison but this book seems to just go on and on.   It’s almost totally stream of consciousness and with him that means fishing, and sex, and alcohol.  Pretty much with anyone.  There is an interesting plot buried in it, with the most obnoxious family in the world, a family of brutes and killers, who are being slowly poisoned by one of their own, but even this gets away from him and it goes on and on with him boozing, and looking for women to fuck.

The Last Word                                                   Hanif Kureishi

An excellent novel.   An old trope, the young lion writing the biography of the grumpy old master, but handled very nicely here, and with a world of understanding of the female.   With a famous Indian novelist it of course could be interpreted as Salman, but actually he manages to create in Mamoon a convincing and genuinely moving grumpy old bastard figure.  I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, and delighted.  I must read more of him.

A Burnt-Out Case                                              Graham Greene

Found a nice 1961 First Edition at Iliad.  I remember not liking this novel when I first read it, too Catholic I thought snobbishly, but I was wrong.  It is a beautiful book which I very much enjoyed this time.   The burnt out case refers to both the lepers and the architect (aka the novelist) trying desperately to hide himself in Africa.  He arrives in depression, believing in nothing, contemptuous of everything, fleeing a disastrous affair, which is so Greene.   Of course as he is famous the world won’t let him be.   And because he tries to avoid it they pursue him more.  It ends in the wonderful seedy world of misunderstood and misconstrued emotion, not entirely dissimilar to the world-weary end of Gatsby, where things inevitably go wrong.

The American Lover                                          Rose Tremain

Short stories.   But not quite up to it.

Dark Places                                                       Gillian Flynn

Lovely when you find a new writer you love.   Bingeing on her of course.   She does indeed inhabit some dark places.   But she always throws light into these murky corners. And as with most of detective fiction and the thriller:  She is on the side of the innocent.

Disgrace                                                           J. M. Coetzee

I picked this up and began to read, and then I couldn’t put it down.  I read it with delight, because I was feeling lately his writing for me was going off the boil.  The subject: a Professor who cannot resist his students is now almost a modern cliché, but I suppose from the amount of writers who have dealt with it, it’s a recurring temptation.  Here’s what I wrote in 1999. Brilliant writing and deservedly the Booker winner – which I read before the announcement and thought it my book of the year.  The disgrace of the father and the rape of the daughter, woven together in a totally compelling way.

March

The Hollow Crown                                            Dan Jones

Since I just finished The Plantagenets I went straight into his sequel about the War of The Roses, which as he explains, is far more than the simple York v Lancaster struggle it is often presented as.  He is a good narrative historian.  It’s interesting to see how important Kingship was in those days to keep an unruly country with powerful and ambitious Lords in check.  When the unfortunate (bi-polar?) Henry V1 came to the throne everything fell apart.  Nicer for the French of course.  Had a signed copy I picked up in Hatchards. (UK)

The Death of Caesar                                          Barry Strauss

Pretty good simple history of Caesar and the principal assassins.

Sharp Objects                                                    Gillian Flynn

Welcome back Cutter.    Sorry.  Silly mood.  I really enjoyed this dark, disquieting first person narrated thriller about a Chicago female reporter sent home to the South, and her awful mother, to investigate a couple of teen murders.  Very well written.  I am going to read more of her, she really delivers.

Fatherland                                                        Robert Harris

I enjoy his books and I had somehow missed this one, which is about a Berlin detective, but with the twist that Hitler is still alive and the Nazis won the war.  An excellent read.

The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin                            Georges Simenon

The latest in the Penguin paperback new translation and series of re-releases of these excellent short detective stories featuring the indefatigable Maigret.  Perfect for a plane ride.

Kafka on the Shore                                            Haruki Murakami

I really like some of his books, but others I find too long, and in this one once we got to talking dogs I’m afraid I lost interest.  Far and away the most enjoyable I have read so far is the trilogy IQ84.

February

Farewell My Lovely                                                    Raymond Chandler.

Love him.  Love it.  He is one of the best American writers, not just of detective fiction, but of prose. I have read them all before but enjoying them even more a second time.

Re-read with great enjoyment.  Chandler is one of my favourite writers.

The Lady in the Lake                                                  Raymond Chandler

A brilliant book.  Quite stunning in fact.

A Theft                                                                      Hanif Kureishi

My Con Man.  A very short but true story about the writer plagued by a charming con man.

The Longest Afternoon                                               Brendan Simms

An account of the 400 men who pretty much decided the Battle of Waterloo, by defending the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte during the battle of Waterloo, fatally delaying Napoleon’s advance and ensuring time for the Prussians to arrive, to save the day and all Europe from the relentless dictator.

Silver Screen Fiend                                                     Patton Oswalt

A very finely written memoir by this very funny man, of his total addiction to movies, and the growth of a brilliant comedian.  I was fortunate to see him interviewed by his brother at The Writers Guild, and then again interviewed and doing Stand Up at Largo.

A Man’s Head                                                            Georges Simenon

Another in the brilliant new series of Penguin Maigret novels.   They are very short and simply written, but deceptively great.

Nora Webster                                                             Colm Toibin

Finely written Irish novel.

Angels Gate                                                                P.G. Sturges

A Shortcut Man novel.   I really enjoyed this, as I did a previous one of his.  It’s a Crime Novel and an excellent one.

The Plantagenets                                                        Dan Jones

Since the New Year I have been working through Dan Jones’ long story of The Kings Who Made England  or who nearly unmade France as they might better be known.  Violent,  arrogant, aggressive, assertive, muddle headed and very often wrong, they seem to have only two flavours:  mad and violent, or mad and sneaky.  Two deposed:  Ed 2 and Dick 2, both as it turns out far shittier, tyrannical, and less sympathetic than Shakespeare and Marlowe present.  Hard not to sympathise with the French, the Welsh and the Scots, and all who suffered under them, not the least being the poor English caught between taxation, endless wars and the plague.  Nicely written narrative history.

Jeremy Thorpe                                                           Michael Bloch

In hindsight it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about Thorpe.  Once removed from the scene he was never missed.   A man whose confident sense of his own superiority led him to get away with (attempted) murder.  I skimmed.  This was the man in the silly hat who hit the beaches to the Monty Python theme tune.  Always a charming clown and of course stalked by the singularly unattractive looney Norman Scott with whom he had an affair in the days when that sort of thing, though widespread, was illegal.  Between the Kings and the Upper Classes it’s a relief the Sixties happened.

Life Ascending                                                           Nick Lane

A fascinating biologists account of the ten great inventions of Evolution.  A little smarter than I am, but I learned a lot more about evolutionary biology and filled in a few glaring gaps in my biology knowledge.  He explains things I know nothing about very well, even with my poor science background.  O level Physics with Chemistry. (45%.  A bare pass)

Fifty Mice                                                                  Daniel Pyne

A nicely written thriller about a man confusingly picked up and put into the hands of the Feds for an unwanted change of identity.  What does he know, what did he do, what did he remember?  The State as tyrant.  Good yarn nicely told.

January                                                  

January Window                                                        Philip Kerr

Hilarious.  About The Premier League and with real people in it.    Made me shout with laughter.

Someone said the critics didn’t like this.  I told them I don’t read critics I read books.   To be this funny may seem easy but it is desperately difficult.  I was at first surprised and then delighted.  Not sure if you have to be a Football (Soccer) fan to enjoy it or not, but as a fan of both it and him I was really happy.

The Emerald Light in The Air                                      Donald Antrim

A book of short stories with an air of underlying anxiety about them.  Manhattan malaise.  Either everyone is unhappy with someone they are with or anxious about their previous lover, and they have frequently just undergone some kind of nervous collapse.  I liked them though.

The Innocent                                                              Ian McEwan

I found a signed first edition of one of his I haven’t read.  It’s an odd bird.   A romantic spy story set in Berlin.  It’s like he’s still learning his trade and trying on this genre.  It’s not really comfortable to him, so really to me the book is of interest in a novelist exploring himself.

Dead is Better                                                             Jo Perry

A wonderful, original, hilarious, and brilliant book.  I really enjoyed it.  I think you’ll like it very much indeed…   And she is married to the wonderful Thomas Perry, whose books I have been binging on.  A must read.

 

The Face Changers                                                     Thomas Perry

I got lucky and found a Jane Whitefield Novel I hadn’t read!   Actually I think it’s my favourite.   Someone has set up pretending to be Jane and hiding people, or in fact milking them, having set them up.  Really gripping.

The Face Changers                                                     Thomas Perry

I found another at an airport.  This one about people pretending to be Jane Whitefield without bothering to keep them alive.  They too pursue Jane as she tries to hide an innocent plastic surgeon.  Gripping as ever.

 

The Jane Whitefield books are:

 

Vanishing Act

Dance for the Dead

Shadow Woman

The Face Changers

Blood Money

Runner

Poison Flower

A String of Beads

Strip                                                                          Thomas Perry

I found a signed first edition at The Iliad Bookshop (www.iliadbooks.com) and though I have read it I began to read it again because it starts so grippingly and continues so.  Love it.

Sleeping Dogs                                                            Thomas Perry

Another I hadn’t read.  Again from Iliad, which has a massive collection of great books.  This one is about The Butchers Boy, hiding in the UK, he is recognized, with violent results.  Most enjoyable.

Shadow Woman                                                         Thomas Perry

Tom kindly sent me this as I could find no trace of it on my reading file.  But just at the end I realized I had read it, and the thrilling chase and climax in the mountains was very familiar, but for some reason I had forgotten to note it down.

 

 

 

 

2014

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

 

These are the books I chose to send to friends this year.

Christmas Book List

The Zone of Interest                                                               Martin Amis

The Children Act                                                                    Ian McEwan

Stalingrad                                                                                Antony Beevor

Rubicon                                                                                  Tom Holland

Don’t Point That Thing At Me                                               Kyril Bonfiglioli

Lost for Words                                                                        Edward St. Aubyn

Who’s that Lady?                                                                   Carey Harrison

The One From The Other                                                       Philip Kerr

So, Anyway                                                                            John Cleese

The Unquiet Mind                                                                  Dr. Kay Jamison

 

December

A String of Beads                                               Thomas Perry

Santa was kind to me and brought me a new Jane Whitefield novel.   I couldn’t put it down and devoured it hungrily like a Christmas dinner.  Now I’m saddened that it’s over and I have to wait for a new one….

Reality & Dreams                                              Muriel Spark

In Hatchards I found a very nice first edition 1996 of one of hers I hadn’t read.   Not for the first time she writes of the movie business, in this instance about a film director recovering from a fall from a crane.  Lovely writing.

Poodle Springs                       Raymond Chandler & Robert B. Parker

I’m not normally a fan of faux Chandler.   I think people over write.  They mistake his style, which is essential simple with startling metaphors, for bad Hollywood dialogue but I found this 1998 oddity in Odyssey and was tempted to pick it up because the first four chapters are by Chandler himself.   To my surprise I stayed for the whole book.   Robert B. Parker writes very well, and continues an interesting start which begins with Marlowe married to Linda, plots it elegantly and writes with style and simplicity so that it is as readable and enjoyable as Chandler.    He is himself a detective story writer and his experience in the form shows.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair                                      Georges Simenon

These are so good for travelling with.  Devoured this one on BA.   One of the best mysteries so far.

Night at The Crossroads                                     Georges Simenon.

The Grand Banks Café                                       Georges Simenon

Another elegantly plotted and deceptively simply written short novel who dun it in the new Penguin translation.  Good to the last bite.

November

The Takeover                                                    Muriel Spark

I picked up this nice 1976 first edition at Hatchards.   A lovely, witty, elegant, cleverly crafted tale of sin and sinners around the town of Nemi in Italy.   Always a joy to read.

Hack Attack                                                      Nick Davies

The shocking story of how Rupert Murdoch, his editors and his five newspapers deliberately corrupted the police and public officials, perverted the course of justice and only after years of deliberate lying in courts were they forced to “pay.”   Not much at that.  The foul News Of The World was shut down, but the Sun  popped up on Sunday.   They blackmailed, bullied and corrupted public life, debasing debate in their own financial interests, using their papers to expose innocent people who in any way crossed or questioned them.   The book makes you want to vomit.   It is not quite so well written as Dial M for Murdoch which covered much of the same territory, as he is anxious to tell all of the tale.  But still shocking.

The Yellow Dog                                                 George Simenon

Fabulous the way these Penguin Classic reissues pop up to jog your elbow and clear your palette when engrossed in other books.   Classic who dun it as always with the unflappable Maigret and his disdain of all authority, so interesting in a policeman.   His quick sketches of characters are excellent.  And what is happening between them.

The Bone Clocks                                               David Mitchell

Well I really enjoyed most of it, which is fairly extraordinary since I don’t like “unreality” books.  But he writes so well I tolerated people changing into other people as long as I could.  Then with a great sigh I let slip the mighty tome.  He won’t put me off though.  I shall await more.

A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless, Unspeakable Evil   Jane Bussman

A very funny, and highly original autobiographical story of Jane Bussman, interviewer to the stars in Hollywood, leaving for Uganda in pursuit of a heart throb aid spokesman.   She manages to become involved with Joseph Koni and his abducted captives, and in her savage anger she brilliantly exposes the Aid money racket which keeps the whole business of abducting young girls going, everyone needs the money, since they steal it from the beginning, and so they are not motivated to do what the money is supposed to be encouraging them to do:  stop him.  Indeed one hand washes another, and they all profit from the trade.  This has been going on for years and years and shows no end of ceasing.  Her deceptively innocent pose reveals someone deeply disturbed by what she sees, and her apparent naivety takes her into scary territory where most journalists would not go.  A hilarious, laugh out loud book, on the most improbable subject.

October

So, Anyway                                                       John Cleese

I had to interview him about this book, so I was fascinated to see what he had done with this volume of autobiography, intriguingly, and surely unnecessarily, sub titled The Making of a Python.  The first surprise is that he only gets as far as Python, and then not very far into it, so that while we get Cambridge Circus, the Frost Report and At Last the 1948 Show there is very little of Fawlty and only the odd reference to Wanda so this is clearly only the beginning of what might become a trilogy if he can ever face it.  The irritation that sneaks in about having to do it and publicise it, makes me doubt he’ll want to try.  Irritation is a key word for John.  The result is that the book is very long on the young days, with a lot of the unpleasant mother, and Prep school and Clifton College, and short on the fascinating self-questioning person who became the funniest man in Britain.  The surprise for me is that when he gets accepted into Cambridge University he goes back and teaches for two years at his old Prep School which he describes as halcyon days.   Here he was at his most happy, which I find extraordinary.  There has always been a teacher inside John, and a yearning to teach, and at one point his parents set him up for a job at Marks and Spencer’s, and he even hankers for a moment about becoming a banker.  Shades of Mr. Puty.  At Cambridge he drifts accidentally into the Footlights before revealing that amazing performing talent that was so evident in 1963, when I first met him.  He talks generously of Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, but John stood out head and shoulders above that crowd, and not just physically.  He was always the funniest man on the stage. The book is well written and there are tender and affectionate portraits of his father, a favourite teacher, called Mr Bartlett, Graham Chapman of whom he writes lovingly and with great tolerance;   greater tolerance than he expressed at the time; and he adores Connie Booth, revealing the kind heart that beats under the somewhat crusty exterior.  He is a self-confessed wuss, and shy of women, until finally taken in hand by a forthright New Zealand lass on tour.

The Rehearsal                                                   Eleanor Catton

Reading Eleanor Catton’s precocious first novel revealing her extraordinary talent as a writer still did not quite prepare one for the amazing achievement of deservedly winning the Booker next time out with The Luminaries.   Set in a high school, where a teacher has been interfering with a pupil, it concerns the first year classman of an acting school, raising questions about reality, acting, and concealment of truth, through the central figure of a saxophone teacher and the pupil’s sister.  Complicated and not altogether satisfactory in conclusion, it raises more than it settles, but is a terrific read anyway.  Her talent is immediately evident.

The Tudors                                                       Peter Ackroyd

Excellent voyage through somewhat familiar landscape.  He is very good on Henry V111, less so on Elizabeth, but he views the Tudor world through the ever changing veil of religion, one man’s saint is another man’s cinder.  Highly readable.  Always interesting.

 

September thru mid-October.

On the road.  London, Pompeii, Henley, San Francisco, Seattle.

 

This was a great month for new novels.   I hit Hatchards in London delightedly finding a new Martin Amis, a new Ian McEwan, a new David Mitchell and the real Howard Jacobson signing his new book. He kindly invited me to his launch party where he introduced me to Philip Kerr, but I didn’t catch this man’s full name until later, grr.   However, I liked him without even knowing I loved him.

 

Two of these new novels are about the Holocaust but they couldn’t be more different.

The Zone of Interest                                          Martin Amis

I really enjoyed this book.  He sidles you into the sudden startling realisation that the people talking, narrating, the talking heads who take us through the novel, are all in Auschwitz and to them it is a life, a job, and a career.   Their various narratives show us the different ways humans deal with hell,  from denial to alcoholism.  Almost all of them have an eventual realisation that something is terribly wrong here and they might have to pay for it.   This is an extraordinary work that imagines the day to day banality of the reality of casually disposing of the carcasses  of human beings and the problems which that presents, smell, mess, leakage…. without ever recognising their humanity.  A total denial of the real horror of what is going on.   Amis creates a love story between a junior officer and the wife of the Commandant, a very dangerous liaison, that never quite takes place, but which provides the central theme of the book.   He is the most honest of writers, and credits Primo Levi, and many others in his bibliography, but I find he has the most amazing ability to understand the truth about the human monster, and a pitiless glare exposing that moral monster.  In this he is subtler than Dickens, who makes monsters comic for us to laugh at and dismiss when they get their come uppance, but you feel Martin Amis goes all the way to try and understand what makes a man into a monster, see for example his amazing book on Stalin, Korba the dread   His constant exposing of hypocrisy must be why he arouses such resentment in the British press, which is the home of hypocrisy.   But he is an unrelenting satirist and the finest novelist.

J                                                                      Howard Jacobson

A dystopian novel set in the future about the recent past.  A big break for him, and this is not one of my favourite genres, because I find the world complicated enough to understand without having to invent another fictional world with its own set of rules.  Given that apologia this kept me going because, simply, I love the way he writes.   In this one he eschews his masterful comic talents for something far more serious.   This is set in a post Holocaust world where everyone is encouraged by the state to be in denial about what might or might not have taken place.  The J word of course is the subject.  Certain humans do speak up and out, while others observe and report, so there is both paranoia and suspicion.  In the midst of this he produces a love story between two misfits, struggling to survive in the violent, angry, and hostile world that has replaced the supposed event with silence.

I had the great pleasure of meeting him briefly and I shipped a signed copy home but picked up a nice travel paperback version at the airport because I couldn’t wait to read it.    Also I just realised he looks like Shakespeare.  If Shakespeare had been born in Manchester.  Nominated for the Booker.

The Merchant of Venice                            William Shakespeare

And quite by chance I was reading this play which does to me now, seem anti-Semitic.   I guess the question is are the characters anti-Semitic, obviously yes, but is the play itself anti-Semitic.   I’ll get back to you.   I’m a bit tired of the silly casket business.  Which reads even more like a tired idea for a game show.   Why would you leave your daughter so at the mercy of a guessing game.

 

The Children Act                                               Ian McEwan

A short but powerful book.  I love the immediate reality of his characters and the way he writes about them.  He brings a freshness to the kind of people he writes about, in this case a female married English judge whose husband announces he is leaving her.  She must meet and decide on whether the court should forcibly give blood to a young 17 year old Jehovah’s Witness who will otherwise die.   Complex moral problems and her own feelings intermingle as the young man begins to stalk her.   I really enjoyed it.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher             Hilary Mantel

This is a far better title than book.   In fact it’s just an eye catching title of a not particularly brilliant short story, which tries but fails to deliver on a promising concept.  This is a publishers pot boiler.  There are two schools of thought about Hilary Mantel and I’m afraid I fall into the other camp of what is the fuss all about?   I couldn’t finish the Cromwell book, and was reasonably disappointed by the stage adaptation I saw recently.   I felt that Peter Akroyd’s book on The Tudors knocked her fictionalisation into the proverbial cocked hat.

The Wonders of the Universe                              Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen

While travelling I have found this an intensely interesting book to read on my Samsung.  The amazing and astounding information it contains is better suited to bite sized reads.  You can only digest the immensity and staggering size and wonder of the Universe a bit at a time.  I find myself highlighting section after section, and saying “I didn’t know that” a lot out loud in airports.  It’s a book I will never stop reading.   What is also amazing, and hilarious, is that it is in parts already out of date!   So I can tease Brian in the same way he got me…. Though it is astounding the pace of increase in our knowledge of the Universe, which can only be in response to the great threat to our own survival.   It is up to the intelligent to defeat the forces of ignorance which are everywhere….  Survival of the what now?

 

France

The Unquiet Mind                                             Dr. Kay Jamison

Probably the finest book written by and about bi-polar disorder, from someone who both suffered from

and studied it, often, ironically, at the same time.  She was a psychology student, while undergoing the

encroachment of the manic state.  The fact that Jamison was a professor of psychiatry at the Johns

Hopkins University School of Medicine and a co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar illness,

knew the disease as both clinician and patient, her outing of her affliction involved considerable

professional risk.   Her honesty and her writing skill reveal just how horrendous suffering from this

disease is.   Written sympathetically, she tells her whole life story and struggles with this horror and

reveals what it is like to suffer from manic depression.  But her tale is optimistic on the grounds that she

fought and survived, thanks to intelligence, love of a brother and medication.

I also read:

Night Falls Fast:  Understanding Suicide            Dr. Kay Jamison

To try and understand how a friend could be in such a position.     There have been some bleak times this summer, but at least this book shows there is almost nothing we could have done.  Depression is a killer.

Epitaph for a Spy                                               Eric Ambler

A very satisfactory classic who dun it.  Somewhere between Agatha Christie and Graham Greene.  Lovely book of a man suddenly involved in a police case in the south of France.

The Vesuvius Club                                             Mark Gattis

I very much enjoyed these wickedly sinister tales from the acid pen of the brilliant Mark Gattis, who brought us Sherlock (and plays his brother) and The League of Gentlemen.   What a clever chap he is.

Stalingrad                                                         Antony Beevor

Not just one of the best history books, but one of the best books I have ever read.  A brilliant narrative history of the hubris and arrogance of Hitler’s Panzer drive into Russia, and the fearsome consequences and the terrible price paid by both the Russians and the Germans in one of the greatest military disasters of all time.   Perhaps worse than Napoleon’s equally hubristic attack on Moscow.   It also shows the frightening indifference of Stalin to Soviet losses; a man equally as monstrous as Hitler.  It changed the course of the war while I was still in the womb.   From this point on the war was lost as even the Wehrmacht knew.   Of course the insane megalomaniac continued to cause the deaths of millions of more humans.  He would fight until the last German.   And he wanted that to be him.  Beautifully written it reads like a novel, but is sadly all true.  Lest we forget.

Demobbed                                                         Alan Allport

A friend gave me this interesting book about the problems of service men coming home after World War Two.  He knows my sad tale.   I wish my father had been demobbed…..  Nicely told and with many insights into the problems of absent fathers and husbands, returning after four or five years to complete strangers of wives and children.

 

August

Rubicon                                                            Tom Holland

A wonderful narrative history of the fall of the Roman Republic under the autocratic rule of Emperors and tyrants.    A compelling and brilliantly written book which never once mentions America but the thought of which is never a second away.   I really enjoyed it and couldn’t put it down.  Highly recommended.

A Crime in Holland                                           Georges Simenon

Maigret journeys to a small town in Holland, at the request of an arrested lecturer, to solve the mystery of a murder in a small town which cannot admit of scandal.   A classical and elegant tale, beautifully told.

The Mahé Circle                                       Georges Simenon

Not a Maigret but one of his roman durs, tough, bleak, very fine short novels.   Dr. Mahé on holiday on the island of Porquerolles falls prey to the delusion he can escape from his banal existence as a married doctor.

The Great Mordecai Moustache                          Kyril Bonfiglioli

The Fourth Charlie Mortdecai Novel.      Completed by Craig Brown.

Charlie, proudly growing a moustache, is thrown out of the house for it by his wife.   He finds himself in Oxford trying to solve the death of a female don who drove into an omnibus.

Mildred Pierce                                                   James M. Cain

I always get to the same point in this novel and I always stop, just as she prepares to open the Pie Shop.   I think it’s because Mildred herself has no interior life.  Steinbeck it ain’t.   So while one is prepared to be moderately entertained for a while after the while I go I don’t care anymore.

Operation Shylock                                             Philip Roth

Very entertaining but by the end there are so many twists and turns as to whether he is or he isn’t Philip Roth or whether the story is true or it ain’t that one gives a quiet sigh for being brought up a dull doubting Christian and didn’t  have to go through all the tortured self-questioning guilt of a Jewish upbringing.   Nevertheless there is no part of Judaism left unexplored in this quite remarkable novel.

July

Holiday reading began in earnest with a re-read of an Elmore Leonard

Split Images                                                                        Elmore Leonard

The millionaire who likes killing for fun.  A tragi-comic tale in the end.

After reading Muriel Spark my eye was caught by the Penguin reprint of an old favourite of mine The Charlie Mordecai novels of Kyril Bonfiglioli.

This is what I wrote when I first encountered what was then a trilogy by the already deceased author in 2000.

“Oh yes the best and the finest, the funniest and the most fabulous discovery.   Ronald Firbank meets Raymond Chandler.   Divine writing, hilarious description, gripping action.  Everything and more.  If there are three better books this year I will eat my wife….”

Apart from the ungainly metaphor these books are even funnier on a second rereading:

Don’t Point That Thing At Me                                     Kyril Bonfiglioli

The First Charlie Mortdecai Novel

It’s the simple polished elegant style of the writer that grabs you right away plus the naughty antics he gets up to with Jock, his bruiser side kick.   Charlie Mortdecai, degenerate aristocrat and amoral art dealer is at once a great comic creation and a hilarious character.   Just relax and bathe in the fun.

After You With The Pistol                                            Kyril Bonfiglioli

The Second Charlie Mortdecai Novel

The adventures continue in America.

Something Nasty in the Woodshed                                Kyril Bonfiglioli

The Third Charlie Mortdecai Novel.

And in Jersey with a gruesome series of rapes.

Pom Poms Up!                                                           Carol Cleveland

Yes that is the title, complete with the exclamation mark, an “as told to” book of the story of the girl from Monty Python.    She gave me an autographed copy, and of course I had contributed an interview about her with the author.   Sweet Carol.   She doesn’t get me at all, which is hardly her fault, but I do treasure waltzing with her and playing Mr. Bunn at O2.   She is an utterly professional comedienne and totally reliable on stage, and never unprepared.   She reveals glimpses of her naughty life, but is far too decent to tell tales out of school….

A Death in the Family                                        Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle:  1.

This one came highly recommended but I forget by whom.   Sadly I found this memoir of Norwegian adolescence over long and rather easy to put down.   Sorry.

The Metaphysics of Ping Pong                   Guido Mina di Sospiro

An enthralling guide to the mystery, mastery and practice of Ping Pong, which of course led to some fine games with my son.

Your Fathers, where are they? And the Prophets, do they live forever? Dave Eggers

Another challenging title from the wonderful Dave Eggers.  This one is actually a play.    Written entirely in dialogue, it is the conversations of a psychotic loser who kidnaps people he wants to talk to.  Fascinating and funny and black.  I wonder if he did write it as a play but it certainly works as a novel, stripped bare of all description, so that character and action are both revealed through dialogue.

Louis XIV                                                         Vincent Cronin

By way of something completely different I really enjoyed this 1964 life of the Sun King.  More sympathetically written than many other biographies of this long reigning monarch who totally changed, and modernised France.   His faults he recognised, and in his long life he seems always to have behaved with decency, courtesy and at the end humility.  A nice portrait of an important man.

June

Early on in June I set off for the big adventure.   It didn’t leave me much time to read at first.

I travelled with the brilliant

Lost for Words                                                            Edward St. Aubyn

for whom I am lost in admiration.   This is a very funny satire on the Booker Prize, and committees and the vanity of authors.   Seriously funny.   Well worth another read.

 

I found calm and elegance in the sentences and quite exquisite writing in

A Time To Keep Silence                                              Patrick Leigh Fermor

A 1957 classic collection of his visit to several monasteries.   An elegant and moving defence of the monastic life, its shocking austerity and its strength in surviving and building over the centuries.

 

This has been a month of rediscovering Muriel Spark.  I always did adore her.  I think she is so funny and yet oddly modern.  I love her take on characters .    This binge began when I found a nice 1984 first edition on Hatchards new old first edition shelves.  A really good idea that one Hatchards.

The Only Problem                                                      Muriel Spark

This is about a man writing a monograph on The Book of Job and the complicated family interplay when his ex-wife joins a band of terrorists, leading to the unwelcome intervention of the French Police.   Out of such unlikely material she makes a thoroughly entertaining and knowledgeable comedy.

 

This whetted my appetite and I found in Piccadilly a nice illustrated limited 1971 first edition of

Not To Disturb                                                           Muriel Spark

A squib of a book which reads like a film script.     A kind of comic mystery where the entire serving staff of a prosperous mansioned Swiss upper class family conspire to do them in.   Each member of the staff is carefully sketched in and it does indeed read like a fast moving movie.   Perhaps it was a film script at one time, but anyway it is very funny and lovingly skirts around the gruesome murders at the heart of the story.  It’s her black humour I think I find so attractive, done with such a light touch.    She’s like a murderous Maggie Smith, for whom of course, she wrote the brilliant movie of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The Finishing School                                                  Muriel Spark

I then found an unread paperback of a more recent 2004 novel. A surprisingly inventive tale of a not particularly happily married couple running a moving school in Switzerland, (they have to keep moving),  where in Rowlands creative writing class he is challenged by the arrival of a precocious young man who is already writing a novel which, to his chagrin, is soon picked up for publishing.   So this is a story of jealousy and creative envy and things might turn out very nasty indeed, but for a brilliant twist at the end which quite takes you by surprise.   Mordant masterly comic writing.    I love her.

April May early June

Bark                                                                          Lorrie Moore

Excellent short stories.

Encounter                                                                  Milan Kundera

Essays on writers and memoirs

Who’s that Lady?                                                        Carey Harrison

“This is a magnificent book.  A great achievement.  Wise, witty, erudite, informative, learned and honest

Carey Harrison has written a masterpiece.   I can’t wait to read it again.”     A superb novel from an old friend.  I loved it.  Please buy it and enjoy yourselves.

 

I have been re-reading Raymond Chandler.   Here is the order in which I read them.  I found that I had downloaded two onto my I Pad and they turned out to be a welcome treasure trove on a Mexican Holiday.   I began with:

The Long Goodbye                                                      Raymond Chandler

This is simply a magnificent book.   A classic.  I had forgotten how good it is.  It surmounts the genre and can be set proudly alongside any major American novels of the 20^th Century.  He is a master of the art of short, simple, writing.   I devoured it and,  as with all great books, felt saddened as the end approached.  One of the best American novels of the last century.

The Big Sleep                                                    Raymond Chandler

I then read this, his first novel, which comes in fully laden, fully charged, with Philip Marlowe precisely delineated in this tale of the mad seductive sisters of the sad rich old man in the Orchidarium and  Marlowe’s compulsive habit of turning down money.  This is almost the signature Chandler character keynote:  the refusal to be swayed by money.   And it is important in all his books so that they are about a class struggle, between the monied classes who can afford to ignore and pay off the law and the poor schmuck whom they try and manipulate but who in the end makes the difficult choices and takes the beatings and is refused to be bribed off.  The Big Sleep is death of course.   Born in Chicago, educated at Dulwich College England,  what are the odds Chandler would become the archetypal noir fictional writer of California, learning his trade from Hammet’s Maltese Falcon.  This his first novel is an extraordinary beginning.

Playback                                                           Raymond Chandler

I found a nice 1958 first edition, second printing at Iliad.   It’s a fine edition.  I love the typeface which is uncredited and the design of the book.  The thing that makes Chandler so seductive is he uses very few words to paint his scenes.  Like Hemingway but less deliberately.    Few adjectives.  The simple word over the flash.   And the wit. It’s like the wit of the Metaphysical poets in that it calls attention to itself.  You are meant to notice the carefully chosen simile.   The metaphor is metaphysical.  In Playback  (his last) it’s still there, with the taut prose and the love for the missing lady.  The flirtatious behaviour with the client.  I’m not even sure what the title means.   He is paid to pursue a lady.  But it isn’t as good as others.

The Black-Eyed Blonde                                      Benjamin Black

Oddly in the midst of my Chandler binge came this new Philip Marlowe detective novel under the name of Benjamin Black, which is the pen name used by John Banville for writing some rather good thrillers in the detective form.  Now he turns to Chandler.  It’s a difficult choice.  There is no doubt Banville/Black can write anything he wants, but I do wish he wouldn’t.  It’s not that he doesn’t make a reasonably good stab at writing Chandler, but he doesn’t totally get the brevity or the wit of the writing, and he flounders a little with what Chandler does effortlessly, capturing the geography and micro-climate of Forties Los Angeles.  There are, of course, glaring inconsistencies, the British pub with the picture of the young Queen is from a way later LA, and there would only have been a young Queen anyway then, but these things are fine.   It’s just not Chandler.  It’s clever pastiche, which is dangerously close to parody.   He’s a clever bugger though.

The Little Sister                                                 Raymond Chandler

To cheer myself up I bought a First Edition of this book from Mystery Pier Bookshop, which is a fabulous place just behind Book Soup on Sunset that sells only First Editions.  This 1949 First Edition with original slip cover was a delight to read and I love the way he writes sexy, seductive, but psychotic women.  Here there are three major female characters in the tale of little shy innocent Miss Nobody in from the mid-West searching for her dear missing innocent brother who has become mixed up in blackmailing a mobster.   No surprise he turns up dead.

The Brasher Doubloon                                       Raymond Chandler

This is a first edition in this form which is a republishing of The High Window under the film title with which they released it.  It’s dated August 17 1947 from The World Publishing Company who seem to specialise in publishing books of movies.  It has yellowing paper but still a nice original cover with pictures of Gorge Montgomery and Nancy Guild.     I have to say the novel itself I found disappointing.  Maybe one shouldn’t binge too much….

Chandlertown                                                   Edward Thorpe

The Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe.    Chandler’s sense of place is very fine.  This is a handy guide to some of the places featured in some of the novels.

The Thin Man                                                   Dashiell Hammett

Chandler’s inspiration.   A short re-read.   Nick and Nora Charles are a delightful couple, but boy do they drink.   Hardly a page goes by without another cocktail.   It’s an ok yarn and I liked the period NY milieu but I think Chandler’s prose is way better.   I shall read further because I always liked Hammett.

The Carter of La Providence                              Georges Simenon

I liked this one better than…

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien                      Georges Simenon

Continuing the general thriller genre read.  Not mad about this one.   But the virtue of Simenon is his brevity.

Tenth of December                                            George Saunders

Where I’m Calling From                                    Raymond Carver

Ran out of reading and picked this up at The Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle.  Always dependable and interesting short stories.  He is my favourite after Cheever.

The Winter Horses                                             Philip Kerr

His latest and he is a good writer but please we want Bernie Gunther and those top Nazis….

East of Eden                                                     John Steinbeck

I bought a lovely signed limited first edition in London and have been saving it up.   I love it.  He is such a great writer I can’t believe I never read these books before.   Musings on evil and in particular the struggle of Cain and Abel.    With surely the most wicked female character in all of literature.  What a joy to discover a classic at my age.

March

The Complete Sherlock Holmes                          Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Having watched the third series of Sherlock for the second time in a month I was tempted to tackle the original books and found much to enjoy on I pad.   They are always there for me.

The World of Apples                                          John Cheever

A wonderful later collection of short stories in a lovely first edition from 1973.  As if it were possible for his stories to get better these do.  I particularly loved The Geometry of Love and the eponymous The World of Apples.

Brown Dog                                                       Jim Harrison

I poured into this new Jim Harrison and I really enjoyed it.  I find the sheer energy of his sentences and the rough reality of his characters makes me want to continue reading him, so he’s hard to put down.  This one I felt I might have read before somewhere??  Finding the dead Indian in the cold waters of the lake seemed familiar to me, but he develops the story on one hand in a farcical manner, with Brown Dog’s attempts to shag and drink everything, and on the other Brown Dog seriously trying to protect the Indian Burial Site from the depravations of an academic lady whom he is boffing.   Much booze and misunderstandings follow and he almost makes jail, but he is so cheerfully an outsider of society and he has such a keen eye on the media and the total misunderstandings of the Press and Police that I find him really enjoyable.

Dance for the Dead                                            Thomas Perry

I was still in a holiday reading mode so I plucked from the shelf an old Thomas Perry that I was pretty certain I had read before but which I had picked up in a nice hard copy at Iliad.   He didn’t let me down on re-reading this Jane Whitefield Novel.   Good to have reliable authors.

Holiday Reading February

I snatched a quick Mexican Beach break at the end of February, partly burned out from six months on the Python show and partly to avoid all the Oscar bollocks that invades this town.   I felt confident in my choice of books but in the event I was grateful for my I Pad to which I had to turn for some solid fall-back reading choices when others let me down…

The Goldfinch                                                   Donna Tart

I felt confident taking this since so many people seem to have enjoyed it and it is a best seller everywhere but I’m afraid that after the first and highly dramatic opening scene I found her writing so prolix and her sense of drama so long winded that I lost all interest and ditched it fairly soon after I arrived.

The Wind-Up Bird                                             Haruki Murakami

I turned instead to the author I had  recently discovered and enjoyed but I found him annoyingly slow too. I kept waiting for a story to break out.   He’s so busy preparing dinner and listening to classical music that it takes ages for something to happen, far too long for a holiday read, so I ditched him too.

The One From The Other                                   Philip Kerr

Fortunately Bernie Gunther is always busy.   Something is always happening.   Rich women, famous Nazis, Eichman even, and he loses a second wife to influenza.  Some detectives have no luck.  Or is it really influenza?    The great thing about Kerr is even the smallest threads are tied up.  Nothing is entirely irrelevant.  And he is a very funny writer.   I devoured it and was saddened by the thought that I have now read every single one of the Bernie Gunther books.   More please!

After Dark                                                        Haruki Murakami

Fortunately I had brought a shorter back up Murakami and this one was both briefer and more enjoyable.

Restoration, Charles II and his kingdoms            Tim Harris

I always like to take a history book and this one I felt sure would grip me but sadly no.  Writers of His Story should remember that half of it is Story.  Academically history can be a series of essays about aspects of the period, but only if you’re studying it.  Not if you are reading it for character, for drama and for the foibles of mankind, especially the rich and powerful, behaving in unseemly ways and suffering the consequences.  Here we need wit, syphilis, mistresses, retribution, Catholicism and Revolution but it’s as dull as a Dissenters Dinner.

The Collected Stories of John Cheever                          John Cheever

I ploughed gratefully into these on I Pad, despite the fact I have read them before in hardback.   His creation of the sad world of the commuter and the small businessman and family man and the suburban drinking at the club rings so real.   Shady Hill is aptly named and those that survive and thrive there and those that implode and fail there are magnificently rendered.   Most people lead lives of quiet desperation, and between Rome and Shady Hill he chronicles the life of keeping up appearances, the daily drudgery of the struggle for existence. He is rightly the master of the short story.

The Long Goodbye                                                      Raymond Chandler

Mercifully I had downloaded some Chandler a long time ago for just such an emergency.  The prospect of running out of reading abroad.   I had almost forgotten how great he is, and this is simply a magnificent book.   A classic.  I had forgotten too how good he

1. He is a master of the art of short, simple, writing. I devoured it and,  as with all great books, felt saddened as the end approached.

January and February

Othello                                                             William Shakespeare

One must always re-read Shakespeare and the more I do the more reasonable Iago’s mad and vicious playing of his master seems.   He is spurned for the job he wants, he is jealous of Cassio.  There is no mystery.  He just takes to extremes what we all occasionally feel.  That is why in many ways this is a double tragedy.  I was reading it at The Ahmanson when I went to see Christopher Plummer’s wonderful one man show and the lovely girl greeting at the Restaurant said she kept a copy of Othello constantly by her bedside.   Are you tragic?  I asked.  Not at all, she chuckled.  I gave her an extra big tip for her grace, her beauty, but largely for her book choice.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty                           James Thurber

I had to download this to find out why the movie Mitty didn’t work and of course it’s evident, it’s about a dreamer.   The tale doesn’t work if he actually does do brave adventures.   It’s only then about a shy adventurer.  Not at all Mitty.  No irony.  No fun.

A Ghost at the Door                                           Michael Dobbs

Described as the electrifying new Harry Jones thriller I’m afraid I only found his writing so-so, exactly what I felt when I read the books that led to the original magnificent BBC TV series House of Cards.  It’s a certain Bond kind of thriller writing which is closer to wish fulfilment than real life.  Escapist fiction is probably it.   Jeffery Archer does it.  And this chap too is apparently a Lord and worked in the House of Commons for Thatcher and Major.  Affable enough, but in the end not good enough I’m afraid.

Andrew’s Brain                                                 E. L. Doctorow

You know, somewhere along the line Doctorow lost it.   Oh he can write alright, but too often now I find it too easy to put his book down.   I liked the last one (Homer) but this one I found I couldn’t read.

The Last Lion                                           William Manchester & Paul Reid

Finally finished the last third of this last volume of the great Manchester biography, on my I Pad because the book is so heavy.   Very exciting read with the finish of World War Two, after six bleak years for an exhausted country, the amazement of D-Day, the final horrendous civilian bombing of London by the V2’s, the first real rocket weapons, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge and the invasion of Germany itself, which thanks to the millions Stalin was prepared to sacrifice, was a lot easier than it might have been.   Stalin running rings around a dying Roosevelt, and a helpless Churchill, preparing to bring down the Iron Curtain over Europe.  This was the world I was born into.  It should be required reading.   Then of course the Lion won’t leave the stage, and the servicemen vote him out of office.  He still returns, and I can remember that election on the radio!  A massive man, and a massive biography.  The world owes him a lot.

How it all Began                                                Penelope Lively

I haven’t read much of her but I enjoyed this witty book which illustrates chaos theory, how one random event, a mugging on a London street, can lead to disruption and chaos in the lives of so many others who are variously interconnected.  A marriage falls apart from a randomly discovered affair, a famous pompous historian attempts to become a TV celeb and a middle aged immigrant discovers love through learning the language.  Wise and funny and thoroughly enjoyable.

The Catcher in The Rye.                                     J.D. Salinger

PBS did a brilliant TV biography of this reclusive writer, which showed his heart-breaking year of first combat (D Day!) through the long fight up to liberate Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, the slog into Germany, finally ending with the surreal nightmare of liberating Auschwitz, a horrendous year which would be enough to make anyone a recluse.   He carried with him bits of this novel, working on it when he had time.   We shall see whether the interesting decision to turn his back on the world after the enormous success of his first novel, really pays off, as perhaps ten more of his books are due to be published at regular intervals throughout the next few years.  I re-read the Glass stories recently and found them to be quite over rated.  I’m afraid I started to re-read this “classic” and dropped it quite quickly.  Perhaps Gore Vidal was right?    And why did it became for a short time the murderers handbook.   Questions for others I’m afraid.

 

And now a treat for all of us.  Penguin are publishing entirely new translations of the Inspector Maigret books of Georges Simenon, at regular intervals, one a month.  I already can’t wait for the next having already devoured:

Pietr the Latvian                                                George Simenon

The first Maigret book.  He seems to have sprung to life fully formed.  “…his frame was proletarian.  He was a big, bony man.  Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers.  He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there.  His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues.”   Here he chases down the mysterious many presences of Pietr the Latvian, a man composed of a confusing melange of characters and associates.

The Late Monsieur Gallet                                   George Simenon

A beautiful book of a mysterious death in the Loire.  Maigret is sent to investigate.  His detective is as relentless and as instantly likeable as any great detective.  More appealing than Poirot, more real than Sherlock.  Perhaps I like him because I have been so enjoying Bernie Gunther from Philip Kerr.  The more cynical and realistic side of real policing, rather than the Home Counties crimes of Agatha Christie.

A Philosophical Investigation                             Philip Kerr

Having spoken so flatteringly about Philip Kerr I had to put aside this book about murdering a serial killer because it gave me bad dreams.   I think that is a good enough warning.  I cannot watch Dexter.  A female detective from a favourite author, but I’m sorry, I have to look after my own mental health.

Prayer                                                              Philip Kerr

And this one too I didn’t really enjoy so much as I was expecting.    I found it confusing, and I’m still not quite sure what happens at the end.  Perhaps it’s the involvement of the God element, and killing through prayer, which leads us almost into Dennis Wheatley territory.  It’s set in the Houston FBI.  And of course a chap is entitled not to be hobbled by the extraordinary success of the Bernie Gunther novels, but I can’t wait to read another!

Jonathan Swift                                                  Leo Damrosch

A rather long biography of Jonathan Swift, an old favourite of mine.   As usual, I got fairly nauseated by all the baby talk of the Stella letters, but there is so much else in the book.  Perhaps the obverse of satire is sticky sentimentality, for a lot of them seem to have it.   And how odd that his great children’s work is a detailed piece of satire on the then Government, which simply falls away for he is such a great story teller.  Then of course I just had to read:

Gulliver’s Travels                                              Jonathan Swift

In a finely illustrated Windermere Series, which claims to be published in 1912, but which the good people at the Iliad Bookstore suggested might have been later, and the publishers were still pushing the early print run.   Either way a fine edition of a fine read.  How strange it was all personal satire from his frustrating years at the pinnacle of power in London under Hervey and Co.  Although I’m ashamed to say I still can’t tell a Whig from a Tory….

Flappers and Philosophers                                 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Short stories from the Twenties.   He’s bang in form, magnificent writing, just shortly after his huge hit This Side of Paradise.    He seems to write through scenes, delicately dropping phrases which somehow activate and bring to life a scene, so that his writing is as poetic as Shakespeare who has the same ability in verse drama.  Also these stories seem to exhibit a world weariness and an almost sardonic view of relationships, especially amongst the suburban world of the commuter and New York, a definitely satirical view of how they despise the South and southerners.   I associate the bitter sweet world of marital problems, and failed aspirations  (Head and Shoulders, The Ice Palace) rather more with Cheever, who of course must find it in these stories.  A delight.   And of course the hall mark of all great books:  you dread it ending.

 

 

 

 

2013

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

 

Here are the ten books I gave for Christmas:

Whatever it is I don’t like it      Howard Jacobson

Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal?       Jeanette Winterson

The Patrick Melrose Novels:  Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope & Mother’s Milk  by Edward St. Aubyn

Berlin Noir March Violets.  The Pale Criminal.   A German Requiem.      Philip Kerr

10:   What W. H. Auden can do for you                         Alexander McCall Smith

 

And here are the runners up….

 

A Delicate Truth                                                                     John Le Carré

 

When the Light Goes                                                              Larry McMurtry

Cannery Row                                                                          John Steinbeck

Casanova’s Return to Venice                                                 Arthur Schnitzler

Prague Fatale                                                                          Philip Kerr

City Primeval                                                                          Elmore Leonard

Madame De                                                                            Louise de Vilmorin

Levels of Life                                                                         Julian Barnes

The Luminaries                                                                       Eleanor Catton

 

 

December

I really only read only two novels this month but both were enormous.

I also started a biography of Swift, and continued reading Clive.  And I peeked into my pal Bruce Wagner’s The Empty Chair, but I need to warn him about ranting!

 

Failed to finish

Traveling Sprinkler                                            Nicholson Baker

And

Seven Deadlies                                                  Gigi Levangie.

 

But these I did enjoy unreservedly…

The Grapes of Wrath                                         John Steinbeck.

Found a very nice 1^st edition from 1939 to read this book for the very first time.  Shame on me I know.  But what a beautiful book.  A magnificent novel.  Written with a fine anger in lovely poetic prose.   He is a true successor to Dickens.  Social commentary on the devastating effects of the Dust Bowl and modern farming methods on poor sharecroppers, who are forced to become migrants and face the unwelcoming Californians.  Amazing writing, amazing feeling.

IQ84                                                                 Haruki Murakami

Recommended by my daughters room-mate, this is another huge novel.  Mercifully for we travellers I found an edition in Seattle which divides it into three paperbacks, and I commenced the first part on the road in Chicago.  I thought it was arresting, and very minimal and very well done.  It’s about a female assassin and a would-be novelist who is asked by an editor to conspire to re-write a young girl prodigy’s new and slightly strange story.  With this slender basis Murakami is good enough to keep you engrossed for the length of three whole paperbacks, twisting the tale into a fine thriller.   Seems odd I haven’t read any of him before.  Must look around.

November

The Luminaries                                                 Eleanor Catton

Booker Prize winner, rather fabulous and certainly deserved.   It’s really a Victorian novel set in the New Zealand gold rush of 1866.   We gradually learn just what went on from twelve witnesses to several incidents.   Fascinating, and tender and informative and beautifully written, it seems impossible to believe that this is only her second novel.   I read it throughout my stay in the UK.

Hitler’s Peace                                                    Philip Kerr

Almost a what-if novel.   The Yalta Conference revisited with a most surprising attendee.  Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, all the big boys, with an attempted plot to assassinate Stalin.  How he does all this beats me, but I find him effortless and a joy to read, even though Bernie Gunther is not in this one.

Pride and Prejudice.                                          Jane Austen

The joy of re-reading.  It gets better and better.  Oh how we love Mr. Collins.  I like to travel with the little Collectors Library Edition, very thin paper and very light.   Perfect for a plane.

Levels of Life                                                     Julian Barnes

Musings on life, musings on love and loss.  Touching and wise.   Also fun stuff about Sarah Bernhardt and ballooning…

October

David and Goliath                                             Malcolm Gladwell

Another from the interesting New Yorker writer.   Interesting insights and observations.   I’ve used the word interesting twice which alerts me I am trying to cover up the fact I found some parts a little dull….

The Circle                                                         Dave Eggers

Well this is 1984.  Actually more like 2084.   For those of us who feel I-People are akin to a cult here is the novel of our anxieties.   What does it mean when we share everything on line, on camera, on email and twitter?  Is this a sinister or a useful human social development?   Do we get closer to others, or further away from our real selves?   Mae is the Winston Smith of the book, who gets a job at the Silicone Valley online giant The Centre.  Her moments of rebellion, solo kayaking, and furtive sex with a mysterious watcher, are used as examples against her.  Carefully advised by her counsellors, she learns her lesson, outing herself in a series of Orwellian contradictions.  History too is rewritten, as camera and digital data is re-interpreted.  So yes it’s a great idea, but I got the feeling that for once the film might be even better.  Perhaps it’s the character of Mae who rarely becomes more than a cypher or perhaps we get it too soon, we quickly understand the irony of freedom becoming repressive,  and hate the intrusive nature of this Maoist world, where self-criticism is used to keep the individual in line, so that the book seems overlong as it slowly works out its paradoxes: how working at The Centre transforms a bright intelligent young woman into a workaholic vessel, how it affects her relationship with her parents and former lover, how her world view is polluted by the shining guidelines of the Company, where everything is free, and nothing has any value.   Where cameras follow you for every waking hour and you must be careful what you think, and you must communicate all day or feel the sting of social criticism.  Big Brother is watching you.  Dystopia Ltd.

Clive                                                                          Robert Harvey

The Life and Death of a British Emperor.

I’m slowly working my way through this.  I was always fascinated by the Fall of Clive.  This history is a little slow but I haven’t abandoned it, since I want to see how it turns out.

Hollywood Crows                                                        Joseph Wambaugh

I finished this which I had started in June and was struck by how well he finishes his books, not something all novelists can do, but something vitally important in the detective thriller.  His terrain of the Hollywood cops and the Hollywood moon that sets the denizens of Hollywood buzzing is exactly his own.   He has carved out this territory and nobody does it better.

A Man Without Breath                                                Philip Kerr

My addiction grows.  I’m trying to ration myself to one Philip Kerr book a month but I don’t know whether I can.  Found a nice autographed copy at Vromans, the excellent bookstore in Pasadena.  Between Berlin and Smolensk, Bernie is the same back chatting non Nazi cop.  Here he is invited by Joey the Crip to exhume and examine the bodies of the thousands of Polish officers killed by the Red Army, on Stalin’s orders at Katyn.   The irony of the Nazis investigating a Communist War Crime is not lost on him or his protagonist.  Great stuff.

What W. H. Auden can do for you                       Alexander McCall Smith

A sweet little book which will whet your appetite for the real thing.   A major fan of Auden’s shares his feelings and his favourite poems and his best thoughts.

I Curse the River of Time                                            Per Petterson

Last year a nice Norwegian journalist who was interviewing me gave me some Norwegian books so that I might know a little more about Norwegian writers.  I could hardly know less, so it was a most kind gift.  I enjoyed this beautiful story about a son and his mother and his life and her death.  The quotation is from a poem by Mao.   This is a line from the book.  “It was like it always is with time, that it can slip through your fingers when you are not looking.”

The Love-charm of Bombs                                           Lara Feigel

Sometimes when you read a book, you think I got the gist, and put it aside.  This is one of those, from the slightly ungainly title, to the sex lives of the less than famous, (with the exception of Graham Greene) this illustrates the truism that in war it’s more than the gloves that come off.   What it does paint is the extraordinary image of London in the blitz, where every night more and more of the city went up in flames.  The fact that the inhabitants reached for each other in those long terrifying nights could be attributed to DNA or just the fact that terror, loss and death makes you want to fuck.

September

Madame De                                                                Louise de Vilmorin

A beautiful, very French,  novella about marriage and a pair of ear rings.  Written in a slightly antique style as befits the subject, by the exotic Louise, a novelist, poet, journalist and “grand horizontale” and translated by her quondam lover Duff Cooper, the quondam British Ambassador to France.  Forgive the repetition, it’s quondam thing after another.

 

Solo                                                                           William Boyd.
A James Bond novel.
I never thought Fleming was any good.  I only read him recently and was surprised to find him almost as bad as I suspected, but I do rate William Boyd, so it’s a pity to find him slogging through a Bond novel.   It seems his heart isn’t in it.  Anyway I left it behind in Paris, for somebody else….

Shangri-La                                                                James Hilton
Nice change at the Shangri-La Hotel in Paris to find this thirties yarn by James Hilton instead of some religious bullshit book.   It’s very much a Ripping Yan, with the stiff upper lip narrative by Conrad the laconic hero of this improbable adventure, but he keeps the excitement coming in the Buchan style.
Characters are sketches, caricatures, but hey, it’s an innocent enough read.

If The Dead Rise Not                                                  Philip Kerr

He is an ace thriller writer. This one moves between Berlin in 1934 and ends up in Havana in 1954 before the crime is revealed.  And you never see it coming.   Bernie Gunther is the perfect hero, flawed, smoking, drinking, womanising, hilarious.  I defy you not to have a good time with him.

On The Edge                                                              Edward St.  Aubyn

The trouble with discovering a new author whom you adore, is if you binge on their writing you eventually come across something that you don’t like.   This for me was it.   The send up of the Esalen, New Age , touchy feely folk is funny for a while, but then reading about them is just as irritating as meeting them.  So I chucked it I’m afraid.

Caesar’s Vast Ghost                                                    Lawrence Durrell

Aspects of Provence.

I re-read it, mainly because I enjoy the story of Marius saving Rome, by refusing to battle the vast Teutonic barbarian horde as it heads south to threaten Rome, before he accustoms his army to seeing them as just an enemy and destroys them completely in Pourrieres…  A military genius even Caesar thought was the cat’s pyjamas.

A Clue To The Exit                                                     Edward St. Aubyn

The first half I thought was one of the best books I have ever read.   Need to re-read it actually.  It didn’t quite maintain the vigour and strength of its opening, but still brilliant.  A prolonged consideration of the nature of consciousness from a physical, philosophical and scientific perspective.  The Oxford dilemma:  Stuck on a train in Didcot.  Witty, thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent.  Superb stuff.

Unknown Man No.89                                                  Elmore Leonard

Found a first UK edition in London.  An early Leonard.  And highly readable as usual.

August

Christopher Marlowe                                                  David Riggs

Scholarly but slightly dull.  So much is unnecessary.  I abandoned at half time, which is the wrong time to abandon Marlowe.  I shall perhaps take it up again later and skim, because the subject is interesting if the author is not.

City Primeval                                                                               Elmore Leonard

Read in a day.  Impossible to put down.  The first I have read since he died, but of course he isn’t any more dead to me than he ever was.   He’s alive the minute you pick up his amazing pages.  And I will go on reading him until I pop off.   I would guess it’s about 80% dialogue, but he seems able to establish real believable characters whom you think you know, and are certain to visualize, almost instantaneously.   How does he do that?  Of course the basis of his books seem to be Westerns, there are good men and there are bad men, and here he actually ends with a shoot-out.   It’s also subtitled High Noon in Detroit.

 

In the matter of Alvin B. Guy, Judge of Recorder’s Court, City of Detroit: The investigation of the Judicial Tenure Commission found the respondent guilty of misconduct in office and conduct clearly prejudicial to the administration of justice. The allegations set forth in the formal complaint were that Judge Guy:  Was discourteous and abusive to counsel, litigants, witnesses, court personnel, spectators and news reporters.
2) Used threats of imprisonment or promises of probation to induce pleas of guilty.
3) Abused the power of contempt.
4) Used his office to benefit friends and acquaintances.
5) Bragged of his sexual prowess openly.
6) Was continually guilty of judicial misconduct that was not only prejudicial to the administration of justice but destroyed respect for the office he holds.

Ride down Woodward Avenue into the Motor City, toward a deadly show-down between dedicated homicide detective Raymond Cruz and a psychopathic murderer, “Oklahoma Wildman” Clement Mansell, who picked the wrong town to kill someone, even if it was only a crooked judge. Murder in Motown!  Mansell picked the wrong place to go on a rampage. Homicide Detective Raymond Cruz doesn’t care who it is; nobody kills in his town.

Road Dogs                                                                 Elmore Leonard

At some point in the summer I re-read this, which brings back three of his favourite characters—Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from La Brava, and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap—for “ a twisting, explosive, always surprising masterwork of crime fiction.”  Foley was the Clooney one.

Zoo Time                                                                    Howard Jacobson

Well not for the first time I change my  mind.  I loved this book on second reading.  He is so completely funny.  The opening few chapters are hysterical.   The Northern novelist self-mockery, the observation of the state of published fiction, of the dearth of readers, all superbly realised.  I had the feeling I would enjoy it more the second time and should give it another go and I did.  Perhaps too, in paperback it seems less portentous, more mocking of the serious novel, than being that.  It is that, serious, too, and ends with fine irony, his wife whose literary pretensions he has scoffed at throughout, turns out to be the successful one, but even then he succeeds, succeeds in writing “popular” fiction under a pseudonym, while the mother in law whom he fancies goes off with his publisher.   I did it a disservice.  I was wrong.  As we say up North “Is it me, or can you smell gas?”

Catch 22                                                                    Joseph Heller

I was discussing with a friend how some novels which we read avidly in our teens and early twenties no longer stand up to re-reading, or we no longer regard them with such affection.  Is it them, or is it us?

Examples:  Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandrian Quartet, Ulysses, and now I have been re-reading Catch 22 and it didn’t do it for me.  Nothing wrong, I simply had had the gags and didn’t want to revisit the territory.   Whereas Dickens gets better by the re-read, apart say from The Old Curiosity Shop and the nauseating Little Nell and the wildly unfunny Pickwick Papers.   The exception for me with Lawrence Durrell is his excellent book Provence.  

Berlin Noir

March Violets.  The Pale Criminal.   A German Requiem.      Philip Kerr

The First Three Bernie Gunther novels.

This has been my year for discovering the Edinburgh born Philip Kerr, and this summer I have binged on his books.  Fortunately there are tons of them.  His Bernie Gunther detective novels are about as good as it gets, plus they are set fascinatingly in Berlin during the Nazi period, so that we get a sense of how such an evil invades and takes over by small steps, while many were against it, but it is difficult to face the encroaching daily choices, and the risk of being murdered for speaking out.  The joy of Bernie, is that he invariably speaks out, often in the face of the real Himmler, or Heydrich.   Meanwhile he writes great detective fiction, shags the most delicious women, drinks and smokes and through him we see the rise and fall of Nazism and the appalling end Berlin undergoes.  Invasion by the Russians?   No, crucifixion please.

At Last                                                                       Edward St. Aubyn

My other recently discovered author is Edward St. Aubyn and I binged with great delight on The Patrick Melrose Novels.   This, the final one, I had started previously, but didn’t get as it is set at the funeral of the mother of the protagonist and you really have to read them in order to understand who is what, and what they did to who.  In particular here he examines Eleanor the mother, and her complicity in the awful relationship with his father which permitted this poor child to be so sadistically and brutally bullied and sexually abused.  A delightfully written and sympathetic conclusion to a life examined.

Casanova’s Return to Venice                                       Arthur Schnitzler

A lovely book in a lovely pocket paperback edition by Pushkin Press.  Here, the sadly elderly Casanova is lingering around Mantua, waiting for permission to return to Venice, where he will accept the ignominious job of government spy.  His powers waning, but not his interest in seduction, he has to face the decline of his fame, a challenge from a younger self, and encounters with both young and old females who want him virtually as a trophy, because of his reputation.   At a friend’s house he behaves despicably to gain his way with a young woman who does not want him, bribing his rival, only to have to face a naked duel and his own feelings about his decline.  So, then a book about mortality and morality, written by the excellent Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, whom I have always enjoyed.

The Reign of Beau Brummel                              Willard Connely

A nice 1940 edition, picked up in a second-hand bookshop in Chichester.  A finely written story of the life of the Beau, who seems not only madly self-centred and utterly entitled, but vain, and not a little gay.   He seems to be a bitchy queen half his life, and while he has many female admirers, with whom he gossips and corresponds,  he doesn’t seem to sleep with them.  Hello?   Yes he is funny and foolishly brave insulting the Prince Regent when he is cut by him on Piccadilly, (“Alveney, who is your fat friend?”) but his entire life is dressing up, and three hours toilette and he changed his lingerie three times a day, so if that isn’t the height of narcissism what is?  His gambling addiction and his penchant for borrowing money from his aristocratic friends makes it virtually inevitable he has to run away to Calais, where he lives in great style, but constantly on the edge of poverty by continually writing to and borrowing from old acquaintances.  His sense of entitlement never leaves him, as he becomes Consul in Caen for a moment before talking himself out of a job.   Perhaps this is the gamblers vice, to lose everything.   He declines into squalor, sued by a former friend and thrown into prison, freed by friends, only to end up in a madhouse as reality overtakes his vanity.   I thought it might make a nice play and then the Beau would of course have to be played by Simon Russell Beale.    Excellent biography.

Outrageous Fortune                                          Anthony Russell

A friend sent this advanced copy for a comment, the biography of a boy growing up in Leeds Castle, but I’m afraid I found it uninteresting.

Low Life                                                           Jeremy Clarke

One middle-aged man in search of The Point.

A friend sent me this, and then brought him to dinner.  Very funny pieces by the low life correspondent of the Spectator.  In his own words:  “He remains an undiscovered talent.”  Modest, witty, and hilarious.

June and July

Gunsights                                                         Elmore Leonard

Finished the month with a Leonard.  I had never read one of his Westerns before and of course he never disappoints.   Is it Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is the point of fiction?  Anyway it leaps off the page and is excellent summer reading.

Cannery Row                                                    John Steinbeck

I can’t believe I have never read this beautiful poem of a book before:  elegant, short, exquisitely written interweaving tales of the inhabitants of a small Northern Californian fishing town.  It’s the refreshing non-judgemental attitude of Steinbeck to his characters that makes it so enjoyable.  That and his prose.  How’s this for an opening?  “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories, and flophouses.  It’s inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.”

First Published in 1945 I read a beautiful Penguin Steinbeck Centennial Edition paperback, set in Bembo.  I shall read it again.

Pronto                                                              Elmore Leonard

Well yes I’d read it before ( in July 1998) but who doesn’t love this first tale of US Marshall Raylan Givens, tracking the corrupt bookie who flees to Italy to avoid being hit by a fat, lazy Florida mob boss.   Leonard says that Raylan is his favourite character and no wonder, he really is the old Western sheriff, with his country hat and his cowboy boots and his unshakeable pursuit of villainy.  I love Justified and it’s Raylan than makes it work and it was a treat all the way to read this again.  This book ends where the TV series begins, with his fast draw down on the Zip at a restaurant table.

 

The Patrick Melrose Novels:  Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope & Mother’s Milk               by Edward St. Aubyn

I was shocked at how good these four novels are.   First of all he writes better prose than Bruce Chatwin and the tales he tells are full of dark truth.  You know these things took place.  I was actually shocked by the child molesting which occurs early in the first novel in the sequence Never Mind and the books explore the attempt by the protagonist Patrick Melrose to put his life back together after his appalling father bullies and assaults him in the early sixties in Provence.  But they are also brilliantly witty and hilarious. In Bad News the tale jumps starkly forward to the now grown boy’s junkie years in New York, to return in Some Hope to an hilarious account of an upper class birthday party with an outstandingly funny pillorying of Princess Margaret which had me laughing out loud with joy.  He captures the whole braying world of a really nasty class of English people which is at once a joy to read and a necessary corrective from the soft soap opera of the dear aristocrats portrayed so untruthfully and nauseatingly in Downton Abbey.   Funny, and bitter, and satirical, it is at once better and grittier than Evelyn Waugh, and that from me. (?)   I read all four in one lovely Picador Paperback original which restores one’s faith in Publishers.   I can’t wait to get home and finish At Last, the final book in the series, which I was enjoying, but got distracted from when I picked it up from Mr. B’s last year.   I understand now why.  It is important to read them in order.

 

Between The Assassinations                               Aravind Adiga

From the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger I really enjoyed these tales set in Kittur, India.  However, I did find that the track of the stories were similar, people seeking to rise above their station and falling from their aspirations, as they banged against the class and caste systems of this Indian city.  Once this pattern emerged, I found them harder to enjoy, as each protagonist suffers the same fall, and so they are all about loss and disappointment, which is perhaps an Indian attitude.   Or maybe it’s Oxford?

When the Light Goes                                         Larry McMurtry

A novel about sex in old age.   And a good one.   He picks up the tale of  a character who first appeared in The Last Picture Show and who he has revisited often.   Duane Moore comes home to find a young attractive executive working in his office.  He fancies his shrink, and she, deep in grief, abandons the profession to give him some much needed tips on sexual pleasure.   The beneficiary is obvious, but satisfying.   Highly enjoyable.   Like sex in old age….

Queen of Scots     The true tale of Mary Stuart             John Guy

So, just to prove it is possible to read many books at once I read this fine biography, by a Cambridge Historian, of the tragic Queen who fell into the hands of the all-powerful Elizabeth.   Her end is well known, but her beginnings in the Court of France under Catherine de Medici, married to Henri II of France, her education by his mistress Diane de Poitiers and her Uncles, the occasionally all-powerful Guises is a fascinating tale.  Mary is married to the weakling King of France Francis II, who doesn’t last long, after which she returns to Scotland for the first time as an adult and has to deal with the obnoxious Knox, the mistrustful and inscrutable Protestant enemy Cecil and his vacillating virgin Queen as well as the jealousies and intrigues of the Scottish nobles and the powerful surges of Protestant and Catholic hatred.  One can feel nothing but pity for her as she  has husbands and friends murdered around her, falls for the horrible Bothwell, is kicked off the throne and imprisoned in England for nineteen years by the insanely jealous Elizabeth, before leading Cecil’s secret service to the proofs of her desperate plots to escape, her inevitable trial for treason and the tragic farce of her execution.  The stagecraft which she employs, to set herself up as a Catholic Martyr, is her final scene of Tudor Reality TV.   The Kardashians have nothing on her.  This is the best book I have ever read on her.

Sabbath’s Theater                                                       Philip Roth

It starts out so energetically, with such force, so well written like a meteor, with the tale of Sabbath’s passion for his Croat mistress and the consequences of their sexuality, and then suddenly and unexpectedly collapses into a long almost incessant moan of complaint by the sixty year old puppeteer, who causes his wife Roseanne to collapse into alcoholism, his other actress wife Nikki to disappear, and a young student to expose him (accidentally) as a serial molester of students.  Meanwhile he blusters on and on, justifying his geriatric sex antics that one grows quite tired of his endless justifying of his own desires, and his harking back over his happy days with the whores of South America.  He is such a brilliant writer and this book is filled with his effortless bringing to life of scenes, but in the end I tired of it and decided to put it to one side.

Ulysses                                                             James Joyce.

A nice copy, an unabridged re-publication of the original Shakespeare and Company edition published in Paris by Sylvia beach in 1922 tempted me once again to give this a go.  About a quarter way through I was tempted by something else and set it aside for a while.  It’s not in my top 100… It’s amongst the world’s top unread books.

Madame Bovary                                                Gustave Flaubert

Continuing my summer bi-lingual reading I am still slowly working through this in French.  I have the translation to hand.  Emma is with Rostand.    It’s as good as I can get in French reading and improves both my language skills and my appreciation of Flaubert’s cinema-like rendition of scenes and emotion.

The Last Lion.   Winston Spencer Churchill         William Manchester& Paul Reid

Defender of the Realm   1940 – 1965

I am also still working through this classic monster book on World War Two.  It is intriguing to read what is going on in that tiny brave beleaguered island as they face the appalling sacrifices of six years of total war, held together by the wilful bravery of one of the finest drinkers the planet has ever known.  I appear first as a tiny molecule around the North African campaign and then am born just at the time that the tide of war has finally turned.  There will still be almost another three years of world carnage, culminating in the birth of nuclear warfare, the rise of America, and the exhausted decline of Great Britain as a world power, having pawned her all (to America) to barely survive.  Major stuff.

A Quiet Flame                                                   Philip Kerr

This lovely Philip Kerr novel has a sympathetic German protagonist who was a cop in Berlin during the Nazi era.  He has survived the war, and this one is set in post war Peronist Argentina, with Eva herself appearing, It reveals startling “facts” about how Argentina constructed its own death camps for poor Jewish immigrants.   The country (and story) is filled with real life escaped German Nazis, such as Mengele and Boorman and ex-Policeman Bernie Gunther is hired to pursue an escaped serial killer amongst the Nazi émigrés, a Berlin crime previously encountered in an earlier novel.   A fascinating and unusual tale and my favourite of his so far.  He is really good and I have enjoyed passing along recommendations to happy people.

May

The Loved One                                                  Evelyn Waugh

Described as an Anglo-American tragedy, Waugh’s satirical novella is set in Hollywood, and is about an Englishman who has fallen out of the movies and now works at a pet cemetery.  After the literal fall, by suicide of his house mate he becomes acquainted with the world of Whispering Glades, and studies the funeral business for humans, falling in love with the unfortunate Aimee, who is torn between Mr Joyboy, who makes up dead faces into smiles for her, and Dennis who gives her classic poems from the English poets which he pretends are his.   Genuinely funny and revealing of a lost world of the English abroad in the Studio System of Hollywood.   Nice UK 1948 First edition.

The Farmer’s Daughter                                     Jim Harrison

Two really excellent novellas and a third about lycanthropy which I found less compelling.  In the first an abandoned daughter learns to come to terms with her murderous revenge instincts towards a cruel rapist and her acceptance of the possibility of love and in the second Brown Dog a native American hiding in Toronto with his adopted daughter, escapes back to America with a rock and roll show.  Both of these are tremendously well written, and powerful and great fun.

Kingsblood Royal                                                Sinclair Lewis

1947 First Edition picked up at Earthling.  Started with two of the  most hilarious chapters and then settled down into a story of snobbery, about the man pursuing the family myth that they might be descended from Kings, only to find in reality they are descended from a full negro.  This is a good gag, but the time in which it is written is more revealing about America’s long crawl out of its racist journey, than how you might tackle such a story today.  Mercifully the full horror of the context has evolved a little.

Caroline                                                           Cornelius Medvei

I must have picked this curio up at Mr B’s in Bath.  It’s the story of a family on holiday and dad’s involvement with an enchanting donkey called Caroline.  He’ll do anything for a nice piece of ass.  No, sorry.  It’s not like that at all.

The Farmer’s Hotel                                           John O’Hara

An unexpectedly delightful little novel that I picked up as a First Edition at Earthling in Walla Walla.  He really is a delightful writer.  This 1951 novel about a snowstorm at the opening of a small hotel in Pennsylvania is charming and surprising by turn.  The characters swiftly and deftly sketched, and the drama unfolds with great humour.  He really is a wonderful discovery.   I intend to hunt him down in old bookshops.

Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal?       Jeanette Winterson

This is a wonderful book, from its hilarious title to its touching and movingly honest ending.  It is a terrific tale, the magnificently hilarious story of Jeannette Winterson herself growing up in Accrington, adopted into the home of the freakily wonderful mad comic personage of Mrs Winterson, a creature so fabulously funny that, if you didn’t have to live with her, you might assume she was made up, by someone like Dickens.  The now-successful author observes this comic monster in hindsight with precision, and even forgiveness,  and makes of her an all-time unforgettable character.  Not since George Melly have I so enjoyed the honest tale of a Northern upbringing.  Strongly recommended for all readers. I picked it up in Seattle airport and could hardly put it down.

A Delicate Truth                                                John Le Carré

A delightful book.  One of the best of his most recent works.  The tale is dark and engaging, and the secret services and political world have become once again the dark places of corruption and intrigue which he first explored in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.  Quite a complex tale and one I regretted interrupting several times as I travelled, and one I intend re-reading at a sitting, as its yarn demands.

Swag                                                                Elmore Leonard

I might indeed have read this before as it was previously published under another title, but I cannot find any trace of it.    About two hoodlums and low rent guys in Detroit who aspire to be more successful.  Ten rules for getting away with armed robbery.  A very enjoyable read.

Dead Babies                                                      Martin Amis

Perhaps the hardest thing to do in the world is write a comic novel.  This absolutely rocks it in a tale of the drug induced, sexually indulgent world of young people in the Seventies.   Laugh out loud story-telling, this goes off like a rocket, and even ends darkly, and not sentimentally, which is the downfall of most comic novels.   I found a nice 1975 first edition to read and I loved it.  Darker and funnier than even his Dad.

 

The Great Gatsby                                               F. Scott Fitzgerald

I re-read this in case I see the movie.  A beautiful First edition from 1925, with a facsimile slip cover.

There is something wonderful about re-reading a favourite book in its original edition. It’s as fine and lovely and epic and poetic as ever.  Like a Greek tragedy with its inevitable bloody end.  No one is at Gatsby’s funeral.  All the people who came to his parties despised him.  He causes the death of Tom Buchanan’s mistress and the alienation of his wife, and pays for it, when Buchanan betrays him to the grief stricken Wilson.   The book is about wealth, the rich are different.  Daisy (who actually causes the accident that kills) disappears back into her wealth.  Buchanan feels justified.  Gatsby himself is extinguished in his great house looking out towards the green light on Daisy’s dock at East Egg, in the end a metaphor for the gap that these Westerners cannot bridge in their new lives in the East.  Carroway hates the Buchanan set more than the pretentions of Gatsby, and is at the end, with him alone in his death.

Ghost Man                                                        Roger Hobbs

A rather fine and highly readable thriller by a young man from Portland.   Cleverly intertwining the story of two heists, he has absorbed the many who have preceded him in this form to create a very fine debut.  It’s destined to be a best seller and a movie.   I have an autographed copy from Book Soup.   Very good yarn for a holiday read.

God Knows                                                       Joseph Heller

I found a nice signed limited first edition of this autobiography of King David and was enjoying it, as was he, until I suddenly lost interest, because no plot had yet kicked in.  Odd isn’t it, that that’s the hook that lands the fish. If you don’t tell us a story you’re just talking, and no matter how clever or how witty you are it just won’t do.  So I laid it aside.  I had intended to re-read Catch 22 before finding these two at Iliad.  I see it’s down in my list of books pre-1992 before the list began and they were all shipped from London.

March thru April

The Mansions of Limbo                                     Dominick Dunne

Dominick was a very agreeable guy and in his writing he is agreeable company, but in the end his obsession with the very wealthy is cloying.  Reading this book from the early 90’s with the benefit of hindsight, the rich with their snobbish ways are almost all dead, and only the murderers remain alive.  He is better at the terrifying Kashoggi than pandering to Princess Thurm und Taxis.   Rich old men, young beautiful women, nothing changes…

Portrait of an artist as an old man                       Joseph Heller

His final novel.  I found a nice 1^st edition from 1999 at Iliad.  I love Heller.  This book is about an elderly iconic comic novelist struggling to write a final classic novel.   He rejects several false starts before settling on writing a final comic novel about an iconic novelist trying to write his final comic novel.  It’s great fun.  And very revealing of the optimistic bravery of Heller at the end of his life, and the insane urge to continue writing, despite the knowledge that almost all great novelists commit suicide or end in despair.   Black humor to the end.

The Switch                                                        Elmore Leonard

A nice reprint edition from Book Soup.   The biter bit is often the subtitle of his plots.  Loved it of course.

Prague Fatale                                                   Philip Kerr

Nice lady at Book Soup recommended this.  Actually most of his books, but I chose this one for a plane journey.  He writes well.   An odd area for crime novels, set in 1941 Berlin under Hitler, a non-Nazi detective pursues a case.  Interesting and excellent travel read.   One of the things I love most about reading is the occasional felicitous synchronicity, for example here while reading the assassination of Heydrich in Prague in fiction, it also cropped up in historical reality in the Churchill biography. (cf)

The Last Lion.   Winston Spencer Churchill         William Manchester& Paul Reid

Defender of the Realm   1940 – 1965

Thrilled to discover that the classic biography by William Manchester has been finished by another hand.  This is the third and final volume.  It’s utterly compelling.  The first is the best, the second you can skip as he is out of power and mainly stays home frustrated, but this ought to be taught in schools.   No one remembers WW2 anymore, which is a pity as it was the most disruptive, disgusting world event in history, and millions were killed and enslaved and Britain survived only by the will of Churchill, and by pawning the British Empire to America for second hand boats… until finally the Japanese struck and made up Roosevelt’s mind for him.

I also downloaded this onto my mini-pad as it is a wrist-breaking monster of a book.  I recommend that way of reading this admirable book.

N.W.                                                        Zadie Smith

I couldn’t get into this.  My fault probably.  New barbaric Britain is so depressing.   Autographed though so I must have picked it up in Hatchards.

Split Images                                                      Elmore Leonard

Found a nice 1981 first edition, with an autographed envelope from the author.  Great read.  Thrilling and exciting.  About the rich murderer who does it for kicks.  I’m not giving anything away, that’s up front.

Reader’s Block                                         David Markson

Improbably, utterly and against all expectation I totally loved this book.  At first sight I disliked it, discarded it but constantly came back to it until I could not put it down.  It is a book like no other.  No character, no plot, no description.   It is more like a commonplace book.  It consists of hundreds of quotations, and references and facts about writers, painters and artists. It is hypnotic like poetry, and fascinating like philosophy.  As he himself describes it:– Nonlinear.  Discontinuous.  Collage-like.  An assemblage.

David Markson, Postmodern Experimental Novelist, Is Dead at 82 You +1’d this publicly. Undo

Jun 7, 2010 – Mr. Markson’s wry, elliptical novels were almost always surprisingly engaging and underappreciated

 

Glitter Dome                                            Joseph Wambaugh

Darker than some of his books.  The crime when finally revealed is nauseating,  but this tale somehow failed to connect for me.  He tends to build up situation and narrative through various protagonists, almost always cops, but here I kept forgetting what was going on.   His lack of skill or my lack of concentration.  Still many memorable things.  The incomparably sad life of the policeman.  I like his books though and will continue exploring him.

Anna Karenina                                                  Leo Tolstoy

Still pursuing this.   I decided I only really like the Anna scenes, and find that the Levin scenes are a bit of a waste of time…..

Light In August                                                 William Faulkner

I loved this exquisite novel with it’s complicated way of telling a story, skipping from one character to another so we finally piece together what is happening from several different viewpoints.  First the pregnant Lena, then Byron Brown, and then the early days of Joe then Burden for a while until he murders his landlady lover and is hunted down.   The crazy old Grandfather and his wife determined to thwart him.  All in the most beautiful prose.  A beautiful Modern Library Edition from 1952.  I think this is one of the most impressive books I have ever read.

When the Women Come Out to Dance                 Elmore Leonard

Re-ordered this in Paperback but had the feeling I’d read it already.  Indeed in 2002.  And even more recently Fire In The Hole (this January) the short story that starts the series Justified.  Interestingly I’m working on an old novel from 2002 where I wrote this:

You know the feeling?  You’re half way through an Elmore Leonard and you think wait, I know exactly what’s going to happen now, I must have read this already.    No disrespect to Elmore, whom I adore, but sometimes publishers change the titles: The Big Heist previously published as Detroit Snatch.   It can be very confusing.  

February

The Shipwrecked                             Graham Greene

First published in 1935 as England Made Me.  A seedy tale of a no good brother and his too-loving sister attempting to help him with Krogh the millionaire in Stockholm.  Ends in a seedy death.  Nice moments of writing.  I apparently read it in 2006 under the other title, but left no notes.  Only for the Greene fan probably.

For The Love of Vinyl                      Storm Thorgerson & Aubrey Powell.

Co-written by my co-Director of What About Dick, his co-story of his co-work in the great album art of Hipgnosis.  Lavishly illustrated classic album covers (Pink Floyd and co) with tales from the front line.  Aubrey is witty and honest and wise.  A lovely book.   Contains my favourite summation:

There are five stages to a project

1. Excitement and Euphoria
2. Disenchantment
3. The Search for the Guilty
4. Punishment of the Innocent
5. Distinction for the Uninvolved.

That says it all.

Nice Weather                                  Frederick Seidel

Book of poems gifted by Dylan Moran– most of which I enjoyed.

Goodbye Columbus                          Philip Roth

I gave it a re-read.  To me it’s only a pointer towards what he can achieve.  The writing is superb, but I got a little tired of it.

Telegraph Avenue                            Michael Chabon

I confess I had a bit of trouble with this one.  I love him and his writing but to me the writing became very dense and some parts I had to read two or three times to see what was going on.  This seems to defy a couple of the basic Elmore Leonard rules:  “Try and leave out the parts that readers skip” and the most important “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

10 Rules of Writing                          Elmore Leonard

I picked up a lovely illustrated edition of this at Iliad.  Some of the advice here should be illuminated and hung on the wall of all writers rooms.  Many offenders, including a Graham Greene I picked up but put down because it broke one of his rules: “Never open a book with weather.”

Fifty-two Pickup                              Elmore Leonard

Found a nice UK first edition of this, (1974) with a signed envelope from him, in a secret new treasure trove bookstore I won’t be sharing with you.   Couldn’t resist re-reading this.  The tale of the manufacturer who resists blackmail and revenges himself on the perpetrators.  Classic tale.

Success                                           Martin Amis

I picked up a signed first edition at the Santa Monica Book Fair.  Not cheaply, but happily, for this is a wonderful novel.  I had a lot to say about it, but forgot to write it down..   Ah, memory.  Anyway I highly recommend it.

Oddly and sadly I picked it up again and was sucked into it by its bravura opening, before the familiar feeling of maybe I just read this, came over me.  (May 2013)

The Moon Is Down                          John Steinbeck

I am now officially in love with Steinbeck.  I can’t believe I never read him before.  But I am thrilled I didn’t because I have a lot to look forward to.   This delightful 1942 first edition I picked up is an elegant tale about invasion, war, and what happens to people who wage it.  He is so simple and so precise, so sparse and yet paints characters so well.

 

January

Of Mice and Men                                               John Steinbeck

An exquisite novella.  I can’t believe I haven’t read it before.  A tale of two itinerant workers with an unlikely friendship.   Geoff the more normal hobo, travels with a tall, powerful but mentally underdeveloped friend from his village.  The story is simply what happens when they apply for a new job, where the boss’ son is a heel and married to a light lady. Two crucial scenes parallel the plot, the euthanasia of the old man’s dog, and the eventual more potent euthanasia.  Stark but exquisitely told.   I found a nice old copy from a lending library, with yellowing pages, and almost as old as me, from June 1943, which added to the pleasure of reading this classic.

You Only Live Twice                                          Ian Fleming

I found a 1964 First Edition for 12 bucks and even I know that’s a foolish price for a Fleming, most of which go for at least five figures, so thought I’d give Fleming another chance.  My point of comparison was Conan Doyle, a popular master of  best-selling fiction, but Fleming is far inferior.   He doesn’t write well at all.  He seems almost tired of his task at times.  He labours at scene description, but the plot shifts enough I suppose, and there are plenty of breasts and buttocks, although the sex scenes are indicated rather more by dots and chapter ends than copulatory descriptions.  In fact it’s perfect cinematographic writing.  Just enough to suggest what will be eventually made explicit by the camera.   And not written well enough to tax Producer’s intelligence.  He is at his best at fast paced action, which is essentially Bond.

Anna Karenina                                         Leo Tolstoy

I have kept on with my pleasant self-imposed tax of reading Anna Karenina.  After the excitement of the horse race and Vronsky’s fall, and the proud acceptance of her love and her fate when Anna informs her husband of their love,  the central section of the book is about the less interesting love of Levin for the now suffering Kitty, which as the Intro helpfully explains, is more about Tolstoy himself.   But with the eponymous heroine missing the book is less gripping, and we wait impatiently for the return of the now off-stage adulterous pair.

Hollywood Station                                    Joseph Wambaugh

Another highly entertaining novel of the folks at the Hollywood Precinct.  Highly readable, hugely enjoyable, very easy to read, Wambaugh is very funny.   His Russian cop Viktor is a hoot of modern Malapropisms.  But his novels are also true and touching. Found this in a second hand store and went back to pick up some more by him, and a few Elmore Leonard First Editions.

 

 

Working The Room                                   Jeff Dyer

Essays on writers and writers and Jeff Dyer.  Always interesting.

The Life of  Brian /  Jesus                         Julian Doyle

Python memories of filming by Julian Doyle the seventh, eighth and ninth Python.

The Boyfriend                                          Thomas Perry

Highly readable and suspenseful as usual.  You can’t put him down.  I don’t want to give away the plot, as this book isn’t published until March and I am lucky enough to get a pre-publication copy, but it features Jack Till hunting a dysfunctional young hit man with an unusual method of hiding his tracks….

Fire in The Hole                                       Elmore Leonard

Collection of excellent short stories by the master.  He seems to be as intense and as in depth about characters in the short format as the longer.

 

And I never even got to the middle of Middle March and it’s only middle February….

 

 

2012

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

December

Christmas Gift List

Ancient Light                          John Banville

The Angry Buddhist               Seth Greenland

Truth in Advertising               John Kenney

Lionel Asbo                            Martin Amis

Waiting for Sunrise                William Boyd

A Hologram for the King       Dave Eggers

Bullet Park                              John Cheever

Raylon                                    Elmore Leonard

 

Plus one CD

 

Long Wave                            Jeff Lynne

Shining City                                                      Seth Greenland

Thought I’d try another since I so enjoyed the other one I read.  I gave that as one of my Favourite Books of the Year for Christmas presents: and I know you’ll want to know so my list is above.

The Bookshop                                                   Penelope Fitzgerald.

Delicately and exquisitely written this book is disappointing in its conclusion.  We are set up to expect the routing of hypocrisy.  The inexhaustible horror that is Mrs Gamart is surely going to get her come-uppance.  We have read our Dickens.  Virtue is rewarded, hypocrisy exposed and the wicked punished.  Bravery brings its own reward, kindness must triumph, goodness will survive.  But no such thing.  The genteel horror of Middle Class life is allowed to succeed and poor Mrs Green slinks off to London having lost her bookshop and her house.  Such a pity.  Nothing makes us feel better than a book that punishes the wicked for their greed and grabbing.  For shame.  That’s what Fiction means.

Anna Karenin               by Leo Tolstoy,  translated by Louise &Aylmer Maude

A beautiful Kindle edition with pictures and a fine biography of Tolstoy.  I found this, the correct Nabokov approved translation, and set off happily into the world of mother Russia.

Lectures on Russian Literature                           Vladimir Nabokov

Tolstoy:   Anna Karenin.   Superb lecture by Nabokov on this, almost his favourite, novel, which he compares and contrasts with Madame Bovary, as both are about adultery and suicidal wives.  Inspired by the brilliant Stoppard script of the wonderful Joe Wright film, I am intending to read the book again soon.  I see I have downloaded it to my i-Pad but I see also that it is in the Constance Garnett translation of which VN so disapproves.  So I must search for another.

Middlemarch                                                     George Eliot

Before I went to London I had been reading Middlemarch, and almost took it with me, but it seemed a little pretentious for British Airways. I would have had no hesitation on Virgin where it would look like a normal outré act, but I felt constrained to be seen reading it on BA, because there are occasionally real readers on BA, who, like me, never switch on the video choices. So I took the Amis Biography instead.  Now I pick it up again, and I haven’t read it since University Days in Cambridge.  I read more.  The prose is refreshing.  Two young ladies, whom I respect as serious readers, both cited this as their all-time favourite novel, which is a weighty matter, but I wonder from the subject so far, whether this isn’t a Female Read.   I think there are such things as gender preference novels.   We don’t all come with the same bag of tricks.  And after all whole sections of Bookshops are now segregated off into Gay Novels and Black Novels. I hate all that intellectual apartheid.  There are only Good Books and Bad Books.  Anyway I think I’ll persist in reading it alongside things like the new Bruce Wagner because the gap between intellectual worlds is so vast, and it’s good to remind ourselves that nothing is everything.

The Daylight Gate                            Jeanette Winterson

Set in the touchy-burny era of James 1^st, shortly after the Gunpowder plot, when Lancashire was the witches capital of England, at least according to the weird superstitious Scottish twat known as James 6.^th   Nicely written, mercifully brief novel.  Hatred of women masquerading as real science, determining who are “witches” envy and corruption. We Will Rack You!

Death Star                                                        Bruce Wagner

Very hard to come back to the current US from Conan Doyle and pick up this polemical, cruel, almost Rabelasian blast at contemporary celebrity life.  I like Bruce Wagner very much but this was too much for me.  Having read three quarters of the novel within 24 hours I had to put it down and seek a change.  Reality, porn and the interior life of Michael Douglas, I mean, are we to take any of this seriously?  I suppose yes if you are American, but I turned for relief to Scott Fitzgerald…  I’ll come back to it.  But is that America really?

All The Sad Young Men                                     Scott Fitzgerald

Nice 1926 First Edition of short stories, some familiar “The Rich Boy” for its careful observation of the wealthy man boy who fails to be successful in his own life, the very funny Rags and The Prnce of Wles,  which is almost lyrical in its writing, I mean really lyrics, and seems almost like a musical, or a comic movie.

The Hound of The Baskervilles & The Valley of Fear   Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I love the little Collectors Library editions for travel, and this one really packs a punch.  It’s many years since I read Conan Doyle and I enjoyed both of these major novels.  The Gift of Fear is uniquely constructed, seemingly arising out of the solution (by Holmes) of a murder in the first part, and spinning backwards in time to the coal fields of Pennsylvania.  I know of no writer who delivers surprise so well.  He is almost a dramatist in this.

The Gate of Angels                                   Penelope Fitzgerald

Julian Barnes re-ignited my interest in her.  Hatchards was out of the ones he loved the most but I very much enjoyed this romantic tale set in a Cambridge College in 1912. His recommended ones are:  The Beginning of Spring, and The Blue Flower.  Thanks to my reading list I see I have read rather a lot of her novels, some of which I loved and some of which I didn’t.  I’ll have to give them another go.

Through The Window                               Julian Barnes

Seventeen Essays and One Short story.  About writers and writing, the French, translating, (particularly Madame Bovary), Orwell, Houellebecq,  and a whole slew of subjects he is never less than interesting about.  He made me race straight out and buy Penelope Fitzgerald.

 

“Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus.  Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps.  Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way … they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does , except with a greater purpose and hidden structure.”

 

 

November

Martin Amis The Biography                      Richard Bradford

I took this as a travel book to London, and of course got interrupted and side tracked and jet lagged and random.   I was enjoying it and will pick it up later.

A Short Autobiography                             F. Scott Fitzgerald

A compilation of short autobiographical pieces

The Spy Who Loved Me                             Ian Fleming

My first ever James Bond.  A weird tale this one, quite nicely written in the first person by a young Canadian girl, who is in a cabin motel in the woods, and almost half the book is taken up with her young life story from girlhood in Quebec to London and the two men what done her wrong, one an English twit, and one a German co-worker.  What’s odd is that the story doesn’t kick in till he has gone into all this, and then two thugs turn up and she is in peril and then, almost as if by magic, James Bond turns up.  What are the odds?   Some girls have all the luck.  But Fleming handles the subsequent battle well. I guess that’s his strength.

Don’t Stop The Carnival                           Herman Wouk

Paperman, a Jew from Broadway (so described) arrives on an idyllic Caribbean island with the intention of buying a run-down resort.   It’s the fifties. He meets a married femme fatale, learns to dance to the steel band and is accompanied by a frightful huge man called Atlas.

Sweet Tooth                                             Ian McEwan

A clever and very quick read about a Cambridge blonde literally seduced into the secret world of MI5, and her amours which lead to her involving herself with a writer whom she is to arrange to sponsor secretly, and his revenge once that secret is leaked by an envious co-worker.    Finely done yarn with a very smart ending one doesn’t see coming.

A Theft                                                    Saul Bellow

A New York intrigue, not quite intriguing enough.  Nothing wrong, just not particularly engaging.  A NY socialite and her constant amour but never married friend who gives her a ring which she first loses, then recovers and then finds it stolen by a nanny.

A Possible Life                                         Sebastian Faulks

Very disappointing.  Badly written.  It began to read like the outline of a book.  I abandoned ship.

Mortality                                                  Christopher Hitchens

This is a painful book.  Painful because we know how it is going to end.  Mortality isn’t going to have a happy third act.  Painful because it is painful to read of the pain that accompanies the end.  Particularly with the Big C, and the patience with which people put up with bombarding radiation into their bodies.  And most painful because we can have no more Hitchens.  Even the sad eyes and lugubrious expression of the balding victim on the cover is painful.  And yet he doesn’t let us down.  He looks unrelentingly at his own condition and tells us what it is like, and what it looks like and what it feels like.  Some things are just too painful.

The Enchanter                                         Vladimir Nabokov

The early short novel written in Russian in Paris which was the first glimmering of Lolita.  Even in translation (by his son) he is unable to write badly.  Here the predator is discovered by his would-be child mistress masturbating and races out to commit suicide.  The eventual novel is far more daring.

Back To Blood                                          Tom Wolfe

He is very bad.  SPLAT.  From the naff photograph SNAP of him in his silly dated clothes to his inability PAFF to write anything without sounding like a fifteen year old WOW on acid I hated every inch of this. TOSS.

October

Joseph Anton                                           Salman Rushdie

I enjoyed Salman’s memoirs of The Fatwa.  Ten years of self-imprisonment guarded by Special Branch and abused by British newspapers.   It’s a fine and revealing memoir.  I think it would be twice as good if it were half as long, but this was the whole experience he went through.  I even went to his wedding with Padma Lakshmi. I don’t think any of us expected it to last.

The Snowman                                          Jo Nesbo

A friendly Norwegian journalist brought me this to read.   I’m not a great fan of the serial killer genre although I did enjoy the Larsen Trilogy, mainly because of the wonderful eccentricity of the eponymous tattooed lady.  This one I was enjoying when the most gruesome and creepy murder of an innocent female turned my stomach and I bailed.  I can’t even get into Dexter.  I find violence against the female insupportable as entertainment.

Bandits                                                      Elmore Leonard

Found a first edition in Earthling.  A weird one, about an ex Nun and an attempt to heist Contra money off a murderous Nicaraguan Colonel.   Something of a fairy story set in New Orleans.  Not his best, but he is never ever dull.  And yes I just checked and found it in my reading diary from May to June in 1999.

Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land                     Tom Stoppard

Two early plays by the Number One.

A Doll’s House                                                  Henrik Ibsen

A “new” version by Christopher Hampton, well actually from Broadway in 1972.  And yes of course I was just in Norway.  They showed me round the National Theatre.  Thought it was about time I checked in with old Henrik.  His plays of ideas seem more fun that Shaw.  Need to check the last line in the old translation.  About the little wife, kept in a virtual prison by her condescending husband, and how Nora grew up and learned to love herself.

The Whispering Muse                                        Sjon

An odd fish.  An Icelandic novel.   The narrator, a self-important nobody, of excruciating behaviour, lectures on the Importance of Cod to the development of the superiority of the Scandinavian.  They go on some sort  of voyage where the First Mate retells the legend of the golden fleece.   Small gestures, tiny ironies, occasionally indelicacies, this will delight one in a hundred, but that one will be utterly delighted.

Enter Laughing                                        by Joseph Stein

The play adapted from Carl Reiner’s novel.   Later it became a movie, and I think a funny one as I recall.

 

September

Zoo Time                                                 Howard Jacobson

Again I’m disappointed, and yet I love him.  His book starts with ridiculing female reactions to his books but within a few chapters you are feeling sympathetic to their views.  Must he go on and on about the death of the novel when he himself is killing it?  There are many hard truths about the failure of the novel and the futility of the Northern writer moving to London and then writing about the decline of the novel.  But he keeps saying he has nothing to say but says it anyway.  Irony?  Of course.  Wearying?  Eventually. If you keep destroying our faith in what you are doing we may be tempted to take you at your word.  He is one of our funniest writers.  His essays are sublime.  Is this all that is left after you have been Prized, praised and rewarded.  Come on Howard.  Bet you’re a Man City supporter.

The Beautiful and The Damned                 F. Scott Fitzgerald

A damned beautiful novel.   About him and Zelda, the falling in love, the drifting apart, the drinks, the lack of purpose.  Very fine.   His writing seems to look even better with distance.   Here he has written the falling out of love, which is so hard to write.   Now my second favourite Fitzgerald.   The detail of his prose is fascinating and wonderful.

Vengeance                                               John Banville as Benjamin Black

John Banville isn’t only a good novelist, he is two good novelists.  Here is another highly readable (the fifth) in his Quirke Dublin series.  A mystery.   And a mystery how he finds the time to write these books as well as his more enduring ones.

At Home                                                  Bill Bryson

Described as a short history of Private Life, in fact it is a bit longer than that.   A full length history of his own Rectory home in Norfolk, it delves into the history of so much that we take for granted.   Dining, sleeping, eating, crapping: each function of humanity has had its evolution from our animal state.  So a fascinating view of our homes, interspersed with excellent tales of the man who built the Crystal Palace,  Jefferson’s lifelong attempt to build Montecito and many other fascinating stories.

Charles Dickens                                       Simon Callow

I was enjoying this but was forced to abandon my copy in London by the constraints of travel baggage. He loves his Dickens and his actors approach to this great author means he sees and feels the human being behind the novelist.  One feels that Callow himself has suffered and empathises with this most humane and dramatical of novelists.

The Lady in the Tower                              Alison Weir

A wonderful book.  I sometimes wish though that she would be edited because she writes history (story) so well, but occasionally bogs down into historical detail.  Particularly research questions, maybe this, maybe that.  Of course that’s history but we want narrative.  A bit of blue pencil work would help a lot, but she is a serious historian of course and would hate that.   By concentrating on the fall of Anne Boleyn we see the nightmare side to the Tudors, the savagery and the falling from grace, in this coup d’état engineered by the unlikeable Thomas Cromwell.

The Lower River                                       Paul Theroux

Started really well, but once this ex-African Peace Corps hand returns to the idyllic land where he had such a seminal experience growing and helping the villagers, it grew into some kind of Evelyn Waugh story where the white man is trapped by resourceful natives, and I found it less interesting.  I liked his observation that Africa like the rest of us, has grown cynical and exploitive.   More re-writing please.

The Masque of Africa                      V. S. Naipaul

I also swiftly tired of this.  Again it’s a summer orphan, staying on the shelves for another year, crying out forlornly, finish me.

While Mortals Sleep                         Kurt Vonnegut

Another summer orphan.   Described as Unpublished Short Stories, sometimes there’s a good reason not to publish things. Of course once you’re dead nothing can prevent Greedy Bastard Publishers laying hold of your left overs.   Not that bad, but also not compelling, which is a rare thing to say about the wonderful Vonnegut.

Sydney                                            Jan Morris

Civilised company for a modern and historical ramble through the streets and waterways of this great city.   The problem is that this is written in the 90’s and Sydney (like London) is evolving so very quickly that things have changed quite a bit since then.  Worth a dip.

 

Summer Reading

June thru August

The Borgias                           Christopher Hibbert

Light reading but interesting history of the Sixteenth Century Sopranos.  Clears out a few facts from fictions about this Spanish family who took the Vatican and then half Italy, helped and witnessed (a bit) by Machiavelli.  I became convinced that Lucrezia was much maligned, that the celebrated incest with her father was indeed just black propaganda from their enemies the Sforzas, that Cesare was mentally ill and a thug, (he murders his sister’s husband) that Pope Alexander VI (father Borgia), was quite interesting, that the Vatican was better when they shagged girls, that with Alexander and Julius quite a lot of really great art was commissioned (Michelangelo for example) and that the whole Medieval Catholic con job that made them so wealthy (the sale of forgiveness for your sins) was so easy to see through it’s amazing the Reformation didn’t start sooner.

Heartburn                              Nora Effron

From the late lamented, superbly talented, hilarious Nora Effron, this remains a brilliant book.  First published in 1983, it was an immediate smash because it is hilarious.  I defy anyone to read the first chapter and not laugh.  But it lasts, because like all great comedy it is based in the tragic.   The protagonist is a professional cook, (the book was ground-breaking for including real recipes) a New Yorker who is betrayed in Washington by her famous husband writer, no prizes for identifying Nora’s second husband Carl Bernstein.   She is seven months pregnant with her second child, when she discovers he is having an affair with an Embassy wife, and the book is simply her attempts to come to grips with this betrayal by her stud Jewish prince, fleeing back to New York, her Group, and her relatives, all of whom are nuts.  The book is both a lament and a wonderful revenge.   She turns tears into laughter,  healthy, painful and very difficult.   She does this effortlessly.   So lightly written, and so deftly done, this is the revenge novel of all time, and was turned into a movie by Mike Nichols.   The book has sold continuously and has even got better because in 2004 Nora wrote a short and wonderful preface, nailing her ex, and particularly the Jays, for how they had behaved in the wake of the book’s success, hilariously, as if they had been betrayed.   This is the sugar plum on the cake.   Distance has increased the comedy and pomposity of the self- justifying betrayers, and the colluding husband (Anthony Jay) who feel aggrieved that she betrayed them.  Great stuff.   A kind of Jewish Vanity Fair meets Jane Austen that has you cheering in your seat for all betrayed women.   She is very, very good on men.  And never unjustly.  A superb lady, great company and very gifted, I was lucky to have spent even a little time with her, often in Vegas where she was, unexpectedly, a devoted and excellent craps player.   This book has lasted, and will last.  If you haven’t tried it, do.

Ancient Light                         John Banville.

Surely the Mann Booker winner right here, but I have said that sort of thing before only to gasp later with surprise, not even nominated.    This is a very brilliant book, brilliant in luminescent language, brilliant in conception, brilliant as the stars, whose ancient light creates us, and finally contains us. Sparkling with metaphor, coruscating with words, only a great poet could have written such a work, a memento mori, to the living, to the dead, to the lost worlds of love.   It is literally about light and death.   A vast prose poem, written in measured sentences that seem almost in meter, about the memory of first love, about loss, about grief, and about life itself, this strange ineluctable progress of being towards non being,  about what we are when we are not and how only memory keeps us alive in the minds of others, and how inconstant memory itself is, until we too slough off our selves and pass into the shade, into the darkness of non being.  A great non Catholic novel, the complete antidote to the seedy love stories of Graham Greene,  here there is no God, no Daddy to comfort us and wipe us down and forgive us our trespasses, there is only the differing views of others, the tiny points of light perceived only by the individual, that distinguishes our viewpoint from another’s.  The tale told by an actor (to be or not) who himself cannot grasp the nature of himself, and whose occluded view of reality has obscured even his own life from his own memory.  The fifteen year old and his shameful love affair with his best friend’s mother, the anguish of a father for a dead child, about grief and loss, about recreating life on film and above all about metaphor, so many great and fresh perceptions (lion yellow, filming is like a nativity scene) every line is laden with ore, demands to be re-read and savoured.  Oh yes thank you.

The House of Rumour                               Jake Arnott

A most disappointing novel from a fine writer who seems to have lost his way here, with a series of interlocking stories involving improbable figures such as L. Ron Hubbard and Rudolph Hess and managing to spark almost no interest from them.   It has joined my pile of orphan books, to await another time, and another look.  I’m sorry because I think he is a really good author.

L’Etranger                                                Albert Camus

Started to read this in French, (Pretentious?  Moi?) backstage at the Olympics as a very good way to avoid worrying about the upcoming show.   It worked too.  His prose is so simple and basic that it is a really easy read.  And a very fine novel.

Comedy Rules                                          Jonathan Lynn

I very much enjoyed this book of my contemporary and old pal Johnny’s reminiscences and observations on comedy because he does try and stick to the truth, which isn’t always pretty.

He reveals how Rita upset Alan Bennet, and she certainly upset me, perhaps she makes a point of upsetting comedians her husband works with.  Hard to tell.   She was pretty cow like to me on my opening night, but Johnny tells tales of Cambridge and Footlights and a brilliant career directing and on television.   I wish he had spent a little more time on his successes, Nuns on The Run and My Cousin Vinny, and rather less on the flops like Clue and Bilko, but perhaps it is in the nature of things that one wants to justify the things that didn’t work.   Anyway a thoroughly entertaining book by a thoughtful and a clever man I have known since 1962.

The Truth                                                Michael Palin

I’m not sure Michael would recognise the truth if it bit him on the bum, but he very kindly sent me his latest book, which I tried very hard to read and couldn’t, so I gave it to Richard and he couldn’t either.  I wrote and told him it would be a tremendous best seller, which was right because when I got to England it was Number Five in the Fiction Top Ten, but the subject is so dull and he writes such bland prose, it’s impossible to know what he had in mind.  The title is ironic too as Michael’s books seem to hide from the truth, well certainly his carefully edited diaries, which seem more like polishing his image than revealing the rather more interesting human being that hides underneath the nice man on the telly.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake                           Anna Quindlen

This is very pale stuff, collected journalism really, the sort of thing agents suggest to publishers.     Not for me.

The Lessons of History                                       Will & Ariel Durant

Fine short essays from the masters of history.  Particularly good short essays reflecting various subjects and aspects of history.  The two I most enjoyed were Government and History, and War and History.  Excellent stuff.

Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes                 Billy Collins

I have been dipping, but it’s a short swim.   Sometimes poems that are easy to read are easy to write too.   I miss any kind of depth or insight, the sudden intake of breath you get when reading, for example Larkin, or Emily Dickinson, when a great truth is suddenly made apparent, which is one of the great delights of poetry.

Bring up the Bodies                                           Hilary Mantel

I began to read the new Wolf Hall on the I-Pad a holiday cruise, but it really didn’t grab me, rather like the old one.  I’ll give it another go, but I rarely am seduced by historical fiction,  perhaps because I find real history so fascinating, for example I’m currently reading Alison Weir’s “The Lady in The Tower” which covers the same period, and the same man (Thomas Cromwell) but which is so much more fun.

The Angry Buddhist                                           Seth Greenland

I loved it and thought it a terrific read,  a particularly great holiday read, or Vacation, as you Yanks call them, probably because you take so few….  From the brilliant opening line of the Prologue, the whole novel unfurls superbly…“Everyone knows that when a certain kind of single American female on a Mexican holiday drinks too much tequila she will get a tattoo.”    A single woman and her married lover, a brief affair, sets up the future conflict which turns nicely deadly.  Chapter One opens just as brilliantly.   “In the desert the sun is an anarchist.  Molecules madly dance beneath the relentless glare.   Unity gives way to chaos.   And every day, people lose their minds.”       This man can write.  We are in Palm Springs, California.    But I won’t spoil it.   Read it and enjoy.

July

Truth In Advertising                                          John Kenney

This is a very funny book.  Made me laugh out loud.  Genuinely, uproariously funny expose of the pretensions and bollocks of the advertising world, which kept me happily engaged.  But underneath the hilarious and wonderful comedy he also wants to write a serious book, about a dead bullying father, and while forgiveness of a cruel parent, and honouring his unpleasant father’s wishes to be buried at sea in Pearl Harbor provides him with a plot, we rather shamefully

just want more of the drop dead funny stuff about all the mad people who work in advertising and their side-splitting attempts to film a Snugglies diaper commercial in  LA.  It it seems to me particularly difficult to meld the two forms, or you have to be a far more serious writer.

It’s as if Waugh tried to combine The Loved One with Brideshead,  the comedy kills the sentimental.   Most of the plot beats we do see coming, and his protagonist seems to be the only one in the book who hasn’t noticed his love for Phoebe, so while we forgive him for not bringing the book home quicker, it cannot compare to a real novel. I have to reveal that he sent me the book for a comment, which I was happy to give.  So one hundred per cent funny, and a big hit, but not a great book

Guns, Germs and Steel                                       Jared Diamond

I found the argument compelling, but repetitive.   An important book, and at its finest at the beginning where he argues the case for the reasons for the survival of Western culture, at the expense of other highly evolved human societies who could not cope with the first encounter with the heavily armed Europeans.

 

Inside Scientology                                              Janet Reitman

The Story of America’s most Secretive Religion.Downloaded.     This is a less than interesting tale.  If anything an illustration of how easily mankind is misled, or the prevailing appeal of fascism. If a minor con man and bullshit artist like L. Ron Hubbard can get anyway with starting a religion so evidently stupid as scientology one wonders what hope there is for mankind.  But then of course all religions require the willing consent of the deceived.   I personally believe in the separation of Church and planet…That these con men should be entitled to tax relief is shameful. The paranoid who are everywhere, are at the mercy of manipulatory idiots like this.  It’s a Miscavidge of Justice.  A Cruise missal.

The Tiger’s Wife                                                Tea Obreht

I was gob smacked by this.   The extraordinarily confident prose, such maturity of thought and expression in one so young completely took me  by surprise.    I know precisely where it left me though.   The simple tale took a sudden left turn into a narrative by someone else, with the story of the unkillable man, and I felt the whole air go out of the book.  I persisted, but so did she, so though I intend to return and see what happens after that seismic shift, I have been in no hurry to do so.

Incognito                                                          David Eagleman

Great opening chapters state his theme, the growth of consciousness of the real, and our perception of the Universe and how we are growing smaller and smaller as our knowledge expands beyond the stars and the galaxies to the very nature of the Universe itself.   Nice to be reading under the whirling summer Milky Way with the lyrics of the Galaxy Song on my mind, and my lovely task to provide new lyrics for Professor Brian Cox, a sequel to the original song, including the immense dimensions of the whole unlikely exploding thing in which we find ourselves.  In 1981, when I began to write that song, the astronomical distances and speeds mentioned in the lyrics were all considered scientifically accurate, now, of course, we have had thirty years of expanding scientific research and observation and I have had to alter the words to correspond with our new estimate of the extreme distances in the Galaxy and our ever expanding Universe, not to mention the possibility of a multi-verse, not a day goes by without us getting smaller and smaller.  So far from the medieval picture of us as at the centre of the heavens, with everything revolving around our fixed planet, we now find ourselves thrust ever farther from the enormity of the Universe, and now we know we are only at the extreme edge of a thing so immense that it is almost impossible to conceive. Here are some new “facts” that I pulled out of David Eagelman’s book about the brain:  There are 500 million Galaxy groups, 10 billion large Galaxies, 100 billion dwarf Galaxies, 2,000 billion billion suns.  The visible Universe is 15 billion light years across and may itself be just a small speck in the total Universe…

Think of that on your way to the mall, and, of course, I bet you anything in thirty years you will have to update all these figures… although I alas will have to leave that task to you.

 

Lionel Asbo                                                       Martin Amis

Imagine the worst person in the world.   Martin Amis has written him.  A nightmare character with no redeeming features.  A man so vile you have to read his exploits behind your hands, as you avert your eyes from the worst violence in movies. Then Amis plays the gag.   He gives him all the money in the world.  While inside prison he wins the lottery and becomes intensely rich.  This is indubitably funny.   He gives Asbo a budding young intellectual nephew for a companion and surrogate son, stirs and it becomes an explosive brew.  Not pleasant, but decidedly funny. Not so much Lucky Jim as Lucky Bastard.  He has portrayed the worst sociopath since Stalin. This man is a Borderline and has no feelings for anyone at all.  Of course in the end he is betrayed by his utter lack of feeling, “who let the dog’s in?” In his unspeakable cruelty to Marlon, his envious attempt to hurt the innocents who have found love and form a family reminded me of Dickens long before I realised Martin Amis was well ahead of me with his Carkery Lane and Speers Central.  But why do the British press hate him so?  Well partly because he subtitles this “State of England” and also perhaps because this portrait of an exploiter with no feelings is actually an intimate view of the Press itself, snarling with impotent rage.  I am glad he has successfully escaped the country.  It seems the only sensible way to avoid the Rottweiler’s of Wapping.  They savage his work apparently, though it’s hard for me to believe that.  They even savage his dentistry.   They eat their young.  Must it become a land fit only for the mediocre?

Courtiers                                                           Lucy Worsley.
Most books end badly. I don’t mean their events, I mean their writing. It requires a great deal of stamina to finish a book, and many authors fall off towards the end.  I found this as true of  Mansfield Park as this book.  (Perhaps this thought comes from Aspects of the Novel by E.M Forster?)
I think pervasive use of editors by Americans writers helps prevent it more than their English equivalents.  This is a mostly very interesting book about the first two Georges, their courts, their wives and their mistresses, with some delightful tales, and quite a bit of tattle.

The Wapshot Scandal                                        John Cheever

I’m sure I wrote something about my experience of reading this book in early summer, about my excitement, my anticipation, and my disappointment that this was not as good as other Cheevers,  nor approaching the maturity of Bullet Park, and about my continually returning to pick up the tale, but if I did I cannot find the words, and must have recourse to Dave Eggers charming introduction.   Of course Eggers would love Cheever, as I believe does Michael Chabon, but then who does not, who could not?  (Probably a lot of clod hopping best sellers)   So you must excuse me, that I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this tale, a sequel in the sense of recurring characters, and that I have lost my notes where I’m sure I made many sensible and cogent observations, only to leave you with this pale wreath of memory.

Dial M for Murdoch                                 Tom Watson and Martin Hickman

I’ve also lost my notes on this brilliant book about the scoundrel Rupert Murdoch’s empire and his cynical and self-important manipulation of the British Press, Police and Politicians.     The book is an eye opener, revealing just how sinister and deeply corrupting the whole phone tapping thing became.  The News of the World with their God given right to hound and bully people, was always a nasty rag: in the Fifties exposing sex amongst the middle classes and the endless naughty vicars who in those more innocent days had sex only with young women. Of course they hounded gays, but they were asking for it weren’t they? Often they hounded people to death.  Early on they discovered just how cheap it is to bribe policemen, Detective ranks particularly, and in the Sixties they happily collaborated with the Metropolitan Police busting pop stars for possessing grass and helping to plant drug evidence to ensure conviction for The Stones and some Beatles.  With the coming of Murdoch the scene changed. Suddenly he had five newspapers and they could change Governments. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” in the famous phrase of Baron Acton¸ but I prefer the finer quote from Stanley Baldwin attacking Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere (themselves the leading press barons of his day) in a phrase suggested by his cousin Rudyard Kipling: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.”

During the Seventies there were legendary tales of fearless News of the World reporters sexually entrapping celebs and politicians in pubs and clubs and hotel rooms. I once watched two young ladies making out in the Gents at a London club, attempting to seduce a famous footballer friend of mine, who shall remain blameless, as he rolled his eyes and mentioned the name of the Publicist (Max Clifford) who was paying these girls to entrap anyone who wandered in for a quiet piss. How English is all this? Hypocritical. Devious. Yes, very English. The pursuit of unhappiness seems to be the watchword of the British Press, who are even more depressing than the English weather.  Read this book and be very very concerned that the man who owns Fox News did this.

Arguably                                                           Christopher Hitchens

Essays.  With a pang I noticed that he was still alive and writing this, this time last year.  Of course the great thing about writers is that they stay alive as long as there are readers….

I was intrigued by his essay on Lolita, in a review of Reading Lolita in Tehran,  in which he rates it even higher than I do, and discusses it finely, and compatibly with my own views…

The Lonely Hearts Club                                     Raul Nunez

Do you have those books that you always pick up and start to read and then go, hang on I already read that.  That’s why I keep a reading list.  But some, like this one, I remember that I bailed about the same time as I just did again.  Nothing particularly wrong.  Just ungrabbed I guess.  Think it might have been a Mister B’s which I picked up last year, and then picked up again this year!  Well if I did I obviously didn’t enter it, sometimes I don’t if I don’t get very far.   Sorry B keepers.

The Imperial German Dinner Service.                            David Hughes.

In Henley at Jonkers, a very lovely Antiquarian bookshop in the High Street, just opposite the grave of Dusty Springfield, I picked up an old paperback edition of this David Hughes book.  I knew him a little in Provence in the old days with my novelist friend Earl Thompson and I enjoyed his novels ( The Pork Butcher.)  He was married to Mai Zetterling for nineteen years, and I may also have met him through Gerald Durrell with whom we socialized a little in the early seventies.  In fact he wrote a memoir of Gerry which I have ordered through Alibris.  He was our host when Python filmed one of the later Flying Circus series in Jersey, where he had a spectacular zoo and where we adopted a spectacled bear. I found the book itself engaging, and then less so.

Reading Jane Austen in Venice.

Mansfield Park                                                  Jane Austen

Well actually I began reading this in California, because I was heading for Bath, and there is something wonderfully appropriate about reading Jane Austen in Bath, but I finished it in Venice, which is strangely inappropriate, Venetian society being almost the polar opposite of Jane Austen’s Bath.  Literature is attempting to reveal what it is like to be human at a certain period of time, and this novel certainly does that. It is a comedy of manners.  In Jane Austen novels it is vitally important in society how people behave (correctly) and feel (appropriately) and act (not at all).  These manners are imposed by society and real people often behave differently, hence the famous irony which is the gap between what is spoken and what is felt.  Perception and reality.   Fanny Price, though poor, has correct instincts, she thinks and feels correctly, sees people for who and what they are, without standing up to them until pushed.  She is the classic “fish out of water” adopted by, though not part of society and in the world around her people are estranged from their emotions.  Indeed giving in to emotion is seen as very dangerous.  When they begin to put on a play this gap is exposed, hence the brilliance of the scenes of the rehearsals at Mansfield Park, which is a thoroughly appropriate metaphor as they are permitted to act in a different, and less appropriate way.  That is why the play is seen as dangerous, and “acting” inimical and dangerous to society.  These scenes are the emotional heart of the book and provides the dramatic climax to the first half of the book with the return of the father from the West Indies, and his angry dismissal of the play.  Seems to me that all that follows, when Fanny moves to Portsmouth, (Cinderella returns to her hovel) the heart goes out of the book, and, as Nabokov notes, the novel finally becomes epistolary where everything is revealed at second hand.  Since we have been waiting for something dramatic to happen for several excruciating chapters it is deeply frustrating and surprising that a book ostensibly about acting, and acting inappropriately, should have so much drama happen entirely off stage.   In particular the revelation that Mr Crawford is a shit and Maria vain and foolish, is achieved by having the pair simply, and conveniently, and adulterously run away together off stage.    This violently dramatic conclusion which we learn about only through letters, leads to the inevitable denouement where Edmund realises he is meant for Fanny Price (duh). Since of all Jane Austen’s heroines Fanny Price is the closest to the author’s heart and mind as to be virtually an idealised self-portrait, one may speculate that Austen herself is the victim of unrequited love, which may account for the false feeling one gets about the enforced happy conclusion which was missing in her own life.   But with the great scenes of the play, this is still a half way great novel.

 

 

Waiting For Sunrise                                                   William Boyd

This theme of play acting and real behaviour is co-incidentally present in another excellent book I have just been reading: this new one from William Boyd.  The theme of the book is the river of sex, which flows as strongly in London as in Vienna.  The protagonist Lysander is not only an actor, he is also the son of a famous actor, with a Viennese mother.  He is fleeing a fiancée, the aptly named Blanche, as he is suffering from an unusual sexual problem, Anorgasmia, the inability to achieve orgasm,  and he goes to Vienna in 1913 to take the talking cure from a disciple of Freud’s, an Englishman like himself. Fortunately for him he is swiftly seduced by Hettie Bull, the English common law wife of a Bullish Austrian sculptor called Hoff, whom he meets at his shrinks and who insists he pose in the nude for her.  When he submits and visits her a blatant seduction swiftly proves his condition is no longer a problem.  His therapist suggests his own kind of cure, which is a re-programming therapy, reconfiguring in the mind a convincing version of what never happened,  which in a way is what acting is all about.   And, for that matter, novel writing.   So we are somewhere between Stanislavski and Freud, with references to the new realism in sexual writing (Miss Julie) which Lysander is acting, as well as Angelo in Much Ado, the most sexual of Shakespeare’s plays.  His mistress also appears naked on stage in scandalised Vienna in Andromeda and Perseus.  Other problems swiftly follow from the affair with his pretty mistress, which I am not going to spoil for you, for this is a fine book and you will like it.  I find William Boyd writes the best sex scenes of any living novelist, and dead, for that matter.   He seems to get it exactly right, just the correct amount of quirkiness that drives our sex motors, without ever straying into mawkishness or pornography. The book itself turns into a pretty fair thriller, where Lysander becomes a kind of post-modern Richard Hannay, with shady encounters with espionage figures almost from the pages of John Le Carré .

 

Howard’s End is on the Landing.                                 Susan Hill.

If you like reading and you love books, and you must because otherwise why would you be here, then you will love this one.  Almost exactly my contemporary, though she went to Kings London, where I might have gone for I was offered a place, she like me, encountered D. H. Forster and experienced the same thrill and total disbelief that he could be possibly alive. Like me she enjoyed meeting the insanely beautiful and slightly arrogant Bruce Chatwin, and like me her childhood love for reading has informed and enriched her life. This book is a trip through her own library, a delightful, and utterly memorable readers memoir, and she says many thoughtful, true, and eminently quotable things about the writers she met, and their books. For instance this on Dickens,

(the whole paragraph is quotable) “..his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has ever been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like.  He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breath-taking in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an Old Master, in vivid colour and richness on huge canvasses.”

A quick flip through these pages makes you want to read and re-read almost everything she mentions.  Enjoy it.

She made me slightly ashamed I had discarded Heart of the Matter recently, but then I felt better when she confessed she couldn’t stand Jane Austen. It reminds you that reading is not an exact science and that the Heisenberg principle applies, the position of the observer alters everything. (I apologise to scientists if I have this wrong. I have a very uncertain grasp of the uncertainty theory and sometimes confuse Pavlov’s dogs with Schrödinger’s cat, but then you see, I am only a comedian and not a scientific vet.)

 

I picked this up in Toppings, which is another excellent bookshop in Bath, how exceedingly fortunate they are to have Mr B’s and Toppings and countless little second hand shops, including a great one down by the railway station whose name I have shamefully forgotten.  When I tell people I come to Bath to buy books they look at me strangely, but it’s true.  I ship them home in tons.  Bath is the sort of place that makes me miss England, but the weather is wet enough to fill a battleship of bath-tubs, and that soggy deflated feeling of incessant rain in June, is what makes me glad I left.

The Enemy                                                        Christopher Hitchens

A short monograph on Bin Laden.  A brief and brilliant polemic exposing the pathetic pretensions of this vain and foolish enemy of the people, responsible for so many deaths.  A short discourse on evil.  And as usual Hitchens is not afraid to call a spade a spade.   A Kindle Single, read Online on I Pad, indeed not much longer than an article.  Here is the conclusion.  “The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war.  In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation.  In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one……But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for.   As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.”

 

May

A Hologram For The King                                 Dave Eggers

The extremely fine Dave Eggers sends me his latest novel.  It is absolutely brilliant.  It is so seemingly simple – an ageing failing consultant is sent to Saudi Arabia to negotiate a contract for a US high tech company, only to find in King Abdullah Economic City a baking hot empty space in an empty lot.  During the endless frustrations of waiting to meet the King or at least his emissary, he remembers his failed business life, contemplates the state of society (qv), discovers a hidden world of booze and pills amongst the ex-pat community, undertakes surgery and falls for his doctor, and attempts to write to a letter to his daughter justifying her mother, his divorced wife, whom he hates.  It is Kafka, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman and, well, Dave Eggers.  His writing is so clear, and effortless and his story telling so artful that we feel as much at a loss as Alan in this strange world.  Yusef an amusing driver, who is fearful of assassination from a rich man who thinks he is having an affair with his wife, is also highly entertaining and gives him a fine Sancho Panza foil.

This is how he sums up the effect of a long neglected bill from Banana Republic and its effect on his credit rating: “The age of machines holding dominion over man had come.  This was the downfall of a nation and the triumph of systems designed to thwart all human contact, human reason, personal discretion and decision making.”

Wise and witty and funny and intensely readable.  Order it now.

Madame Bovary                                                Gustave Flaubert

I am fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime by finally reading this book in French. It’s a very good way to appreciate the language of a novel.  And Flaubert is a total master of language.   Reading is for me, just that.  I want to read great sentences.  It is as satisfactory as music.   I am quite impressed with my comprehension of his 19^th century French, which is extremely fine, and far better than my fluent Franglais.  What I do is read a bit of the translation first in English, and then plough into the French;  on the I-Pad, so you can flick between the two.  It’s a very good way to do it, and as I speak the French out loud people assume I am insane, which is fine by me.   Or on an I Phone, which is not.  It does improve my French comprehension and my French pronunciation and since I am headed for a spell in France this is a very good thing. (pacé Sellers and Yeatman.)

 

Incidentally those who seek to read properly should be acquainted with two brilliant books by Nabokov: indispensable guides to the art of reading.  And writing.  Try reading one of the novels he discusses and then reading him.  He illuminates what you have just enjoyed, adding to your pleasure and making you want to read the book again.  Re-reading is one of the great joys of great books.   Nabokov says you should read a novel once through, just to understand what is going on, and then several times, as you would scan a painting, and the hidden meanings and echoes and shades then reveal themselves to your mind.

Lectures on Literature                                        Vladimir Nabokov

Covers Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hide, Swann’s Way, The Metamorphosis and Ulysses.

Lectures on Russian Literature                             Vladimir Nabokov

Covers Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorki, Tolstoy and Turgenev.

Rome                                                                Robert Hughes

I finished the Robert Hughes tome on Rome, which is really a history of Rome through the history of art.  Since I know very little of either (after the Romans) it is a jolly good thing, and highly entertaining.  It’s a paean to the soul of Rome, which Hughes, the polymath, now believes after centuries has finally deserted it.  He argues that the brutality of Mussolini has been inherited by the totally superficial world of his natural successor Berlusconi.  It is also an occasional memoir of an art lover who first visited Rome in 1960 and bemoans the changes that have occurred.

Lolita                                                                Vladimir Nabokov

1955. First American Edition, with a facsimile dust jacket.

Depressed by seeing a screening of the awful 1962 Kubrick film, which was as bad as I remembered, and which I had to leave early because Peter Sellers was turning it into an audition piece for Dr. Strangelove, I decided to clear my brain by re-reading the brilliance of Nabokov’s prose poem to post paedophilia. (The love object is not pre-pubescent.)  And what a brilliant novel it is.   By adding two years to the age of the nymphet to make it “acceptable” for Americans and by attempting to turn it into a “comedy” they screwed the essential point, that it is a tragedy; that Humbert Humbert is as unable to avoid his fate as any Frankenstein monster.  He is a monster, that is the point, but by recognising his own hopeless lust, and by defining for us its psychological roots in a pre-teenage love affair, the protagonist is able to reveal his weird condition, its very real effects on the hunter and his prey, and their weird collaborative dance.  It is a confession, written by the monster who accepts his guilt, as much as he can no longer control it.  This to the moment when she seduces him and he discovers she is not quite the innocent he believed.  Thereafter the whole central journey of the book, where he entraps the poor girl, enslaves her to his will, and robs her of her childhood, the possibility of friends and any semblance of normality, let alone parental affection, is a long pathetic attempt to defend his crimes.  He is a butterfly collector, killing what he adores. It is a murderer’s view of his victim. All justification.  Even corrupting Lolita further by rewarding her financially for his gratification, he still robs her of her earned rewards.  At no point in his sexual delirium do we learn anything at all about her sexual feelings or responses.  It is entirely through his own lust laden eyes.  This is not an enchanting story.  He even considers fathering a child, and even a grandchild, on her for his further delectation.  This is Peter Pan with a vengeance.  This is the diary of a madman, and Nabokov makes that quite clear.

 

Of the film, one might say the whole misguided thing was saved only by a fine performance from Shelley Winters as the poor victim/wife/mother Charlotte,  or one might observe that Kubrick similarly screws up Arthur Schnitzler’s fine 1926 novella Traumnovelle about anti-Semitism in Austria, by setting his movie adaptation Eyes Wide Closed in a non-existent world of upstate New York, and making it both pointless and unbelievable.

 

      And here I might as well come out and state what I believe:  Movies are not Art.  Movies are entertainment.  Art is made by individuals.   Movies are made by moguls, monsters and mobs.  Think how impossible it would be to do a remake of Hamlet, or a remake of Bleak House.   You can remake the film of course, many times, but that’s my point:  nobody would seriously attempt to rewrite Jane Austen.  Films are of their time, they date as quickly as their stars fade from the scene, and as new technology evolves.  Words remain the same.  Just that we interpret them through our extraordinary brains.   Nothing against the movies, but they are a passive form, like television, whereas real art requires the individual response, the observer is as important as in Quantum theory.  As long as I don’t have to be in ‘em I’m happy enough to watch movies, but Art??  Take your Cahiers du Cinema and shove it up your arse.  As my late character Sid Gottleib said in an unproduced documentary I wrote in the eighties:  Cinema is half Sin and half Enema.

 

The trouble with reading a great book, in this case Lolita,  is that reading anything after it puts tremendous pressure on that author.  And so to….

The Heart of the Matter                                               Graham Greene

…Which is a problem.  This first edition 1948, picked up at Mystery Pier Bookshop, simply cannot follow Lolita.  The whole thing reeks of the insensical smell of Catholicism, which is fine if that particular superstition is your bag, but for the more enlightened of us what must we do?   Hamlet was a Catholic, in fact so were most of the Kings in his plays, but Shakespeare doesn’t go rubbing our nose in it.  OK he was living under a Protestant monarch, but you get my drift.  Cheever was a Catholic and he screws almost everything but does he… (ok enough of this, if the Pope wants to get dressed up in The Wicked Witch slippers from the Wizard of Oz and exit an aeroplane dressed as a bride that’s up to her, him, sorry. I mean bad enough having to start your life in the Nazi youth. No wonder Catholicism appeals to him…NOW LOOK stop this anti-Catholic rant,  this is supposed to be a book thing.  Just remember you are an equal opportunity mocker of superstition.  Time and place.  Graham Greene.  Rapidly sliding off my must-read list.  Almost impossible to get Alec Guinness out of your mind too.  I’ll give it another bash but I found it a little dull…. Picked it up again, still found it a little dull with even more Catholicism so I dumped it. Sorry. One Act of Contrition, One Hail Mary and a blowjob.

Pnin                                                                          Vladimir Nabokov

I picked this up in Washington at Earthling along with another nice Cheever first edition.  I must say I can’t imagine how I haven’t poured into Nabokov before.  I just adore him.  There is something magical in his writing, something poetical, he seems to be able to make you imagine the scene, living, breathing, and in full colour with sound.   It’s quite extraordinary, but then what the brain does with this odd jumbling of letters is very strange and wonderful.  Our literacy marks us from the animals.  Our brains are extraordinary.   And then there are Republicans….  Sorry.  I guess they read too.   I’m in a waspish mood.  The anticipation of travel fills me with delight.   Sad to leave the dogs, but the open high road beckons, hey ho…. Get on with it.  Nabokov is very funny, his irony always sharp.  Pnin is a figure of fun for others but he never loses his dignity.  It is of course a mild self portrait of a parody Nabokov, from the physical description of the aging Professor to his job teaching Russian literature to people who are uninterested.  The reason Pnin is disqualified from teaching in the French Department is that unfortunately he speaks French and, worse, he can read it.  He gently mocks American academia, and, equally well, Russian mispronunciation of English and the manners of the Russian émigrés who have fled to America.  A seriously fine novel.

Fire Season                                                                Philip Connors

A finely written book about fire watching,  and the new thinking about fire prevention in America’s wildernesses.  Perhaps a little long but intriguing and in praise of solitude.

Various Voices                                                           Harold Pinter

Actor poet, ranter.  I grow to like the poems more and more, thanks to Julian Sands’ fine renditions of them publicly, and his memories of working with the fearsome beast of the pause.  A fine, sensitive man, and a grand playwright with a great sense of menace.  He reminds me of John Donne.   Why?   I think the mute presence of Death, the ruffian on the staircase, as I think Joe Orton describes it.

The Tipping Point                                                       Malcolm Gladwell

I came late to this book and admire some of his later work more.  This I found a teeny touch tedious, though I love his description of types of people, such as Mavens and Connectors, which are very true and very well observed, I think for the first time.  He has such an eye for humanity, and he makes stories out of the most unlikely sources.  A fine writer and human being.

Secret Lives of Great Authors                                      Robert Schnakenberg

Almost impossible to believe this name isn’t made up.  Anyway the book is composed of quick bites..  or schnacks.  Any book that relies on tons of illustrations and different coloured text is clearly not taking itself entirely seriously.  It’s a Sun newspaper approach to great authors.  Amusing enough, with a strong preference for the scurrilous and naughty.  Which would almost describe my friend Jim, who gave it to me as a birthday present.

Marty Feldman                                                           Robert Ross

The Biography of a Comedy Legend

A fine biography of a lovely man.  I knew him well Horatio.  He was on my first honeymoon, in the South of France, during the first week of Python filming in July 1969. Lyn and I would spent Christmas as houseguests with him and Lauretta at his lovely Victorian home in Hampstead overlooking the Heath.  He enjoyed his rise to fame, and sudden English popularity, but when the American TV series came along (Marty Feldman’s Comedy Machine) all we potential writers fled from it, except Gilliam who was accustomed to Yanks after all.   None of us wanted to turn up at Elstree and write in a factory five days a week, that’s just not the British way.

The book is good, with the occasional inevitable inaccuracies:  for example I did not accompany Marty’s body home to Hollywood in December as it plainly states, for the simple fact I had left the movie long before he died, actually in October, and I was in Australia by that time. (1982.)  Bill Oddie is quoted rather unpleasantly.  I don’t remember him being much of a Marty friend, but he speculates about people’s deaths that he knows nothing about.  Tim Brooke-Taylor, of course, was very close to him, and is typically generous.  Several commentators reveal anger and envy about America and personally I have always used his life as an example of what to avoid in Hollywood: mainly the film business…but then my reasons for coming here were to raise a child, and I told my wife to shoot me if ever I became involved in Hollywood.  She kindly consented to do that.  The child was a big hit.

I will never forget Marty coming home to England to film Yellowbeard, in early September 1982.  He came into our house in Carlton Hill and Tania and I were shocked to see how thin and ill he looked.  He said he was happy to be back in the UK making something silly with old friends again.   He was delightful as ever during the filming in Rye, though chain smoking.  I didn’t see that much of him in Mexico, as I was only there for three weeks and had a contract they had to shoot all my scenes, so I could leave quickly, so I left before Peter Cook fell off the waggon and Marty fell off the planet, but there were rumours of cocaine abuse, and clearly the heart attack was massive, though probably survivable in LA.   I was always told the story of the ambulance being stuck in Mexico City traffic, which is amongst the worst in the world, so that makes some sense.  He was a brilliant writer, a great script editor, an hilarious actor, an extraordinarily loving friend, the finest companion and the most brilliant company.  I think he enjoyed his fame and success.  But fate and fame conspired as they do for us all.   It made me sad to read but happy to remember him.

The Letters of John Cheever                               Edited by Benjamin Cheever

Harvey Jason the extremely nice proprietor of Mystery Pier Books kindly gave me this.   What a nice fellow he is.  Here we get a little glimpse into the ambivalent life of the John Cheever, which one perceives from his books.   For instance his bi-sexuality.   Incidentally this is the 100^th anniversary of his birth, and I noticed my other fav Michael Chabon was helping celebrate it in New York.  As my old friend Barry Cryer said “sometimes life is very well written.”

 

I was also happy to pick up a first edition of Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter (1948) from Harvey.  Rather battered and old but then so am I and the book is still younger than me!   This Mystery Pier Books is behind Book Soup on Sunset and well worth a visit… www.mysterypierbooks.com

Spring Break (end of April)

Harbor Nocturne                                                Joseph Wambaugh

I really enjoyed Hollywood Moon recently but this one reads like a sequel, many of the same characters, which is fine and the story line is ok, but it needs a rewrite and probably the market demands didn’t give him time.  He is a very good story teller but not a great writer.

The Hilliker Curse                                             James Ellroy

My Pursuit of Women.    Memoirs of a horny chap.   I’m not a huge Ellroy fan.  I don’t think he writes quite well enough.  These are early sexual memoirs, and if you like that sort of thing then you’ll like this.  He seems an agreeable chap, and of course a literary star, but not, for me, a literary lion.

The Wapshot Chronicle                                       John Cheever

I was so looking forward to reading this book.  I have been on such a Cheever jag that I suppose I could only be disappointed.  It was his first full length novel, after having been a brilliant short story writer and it took him a long time, and indeed he won awards but for me it is too tricksy.  I believe he had to write this to get where he was going, but there are whole chapters in diary note form, and, well I put it down twice and still picked it up before finally passing on it.  But compare it to the superb Bullet Park and you see where he is going and what this one is lacking.

Bullet Park                                                       John Cheever

Sure to remain an all-time favourite of mine.  He is fully into his stride, and what makes him a great writer is the underlying humour which is never very far away.   Somewhat like Evelyn Waugh in this respect.  His comedy is naturalist and real and human, not farce; again like the mature Waugh.

A Model World                                                  Michael Chabon

Picked up a nice first edition paperback of these short stories. Which sped me happily to Mexico.

April

The Beginner’s Goodbye                                    Anne Tyler

A very beautiful book.  A meditation on death, well bereavement, and a reminder of the importance of life, every second, every moment with lovers and children.  A very finely written tale of a partially crippled man whose far from perfect wife is suddenly killed in their own house by a falling tree and the widowers attempts to come back to life.  His wife appears to him from time to time but not in a creepy way, as bit by bit he learns to put aside his grief and open himself to a possible future.   This roman a clef is told very simply and effectively with many wise observations from other characters, who tread gingerly around the whole question of grief.  A good book puts you into a mood, a contemplative mood, where you experience the sufferings and joys of being human.  And this is a very good book.  She is indeed a very fine writer.

An American Dream                                          Norman Mailer.

I think Mailer has too much ego to be a great novelist.  He has all the skills but lacks the “negative capability” which allows any character room other than Mailer himself.   He is always at your elbow, sweating and drinking, and boasting of his sexual prowess and his ability to stab women literally in the front and back.  This 1962/63 novel was written and published in monthly chapters in Esquire, so at least there is some excuse for the lack of editing, and the flying by the seat of the pants writing, but the anger is never very far below the surface, and the cocksure quality of the man who kills his wife, and goes on to fuck two other ladies and screw with the rest of the world, this arrogance never reaches its natural conclusion, which is what it is crying out for.  The wages of sin is death, though not here, just a long series of discussions about the devil and god.  It is more fun than I make it sound, but it still is flawed work.

The Paris Review   200

Interviews with Terry Southern, whom I knew a little in New York, and Bret Easton Ellis, the more thoughtful of the two, plus a nice piece by Geoff Dyer on the photographs of Prabuddha Dasgupta.

Zona                                                                 Geoff Dyer

He is such an odd fish.  In the midst of an  entirely boring exposition of what appears to be an entirely boring film by Tartovsky his footnotes get out of hand, even intruding into his main text, so that we get fascinating glimpses of Geoff Dyer, who is of course the real subject of this book.  His odd fishiness is partly due to his upbringing, trips to America and some quite interesting experiences with hallucinogenics.    His work swings wildly from utterly fascinating to utterly puzzling (like Jeff in Venice.)  He seems to me sometimes best as an essayist, but I would also give him great credit for inventing form.  He seems brilliant at this.  And he is also very good at diagnosing the meaning behind images, see above..

The Colour of Memory                                       Geoff Dyer

Or Jeff in Brixton.   I attempted this novel, which is not bad at all, set in South London, but the whole depressing world of bad drugs, bad teeth, bad sex and bad weather reminded me of what a depressing scene London can be.  Of course Dyer is from Oxford which accounts for the slightly smug aspect of his writing. Inverted snobbery seems the Oxford vice, even if they aren’t all inverts. But The Missing of The Somme is a most brilliant book.  And Steve Martin believes that Out of Sheer Rage is one of the best novels ever.  By the way the difference between Oxford and Cambridge is that Cambridge people are good at business and comfortable with being successful whereas Oxfordians have to apologise for success and pretend not to be supremely self-interested.

 

And this is what I wrote about Geoff  Dyer in 2001 when I read this one.

Paris Trance                                                              Geoff Dyer

Another interesting novel from the very readable Geoff Dyer.  This one mimics Women in Love, two males in love with two girls in Paris, one male fails the test and goes off to live in London.  One scene of sodomy from Lady Chatterley and several quotes from Hemmingway, but still many fine scenes of first love and first time in a Paris of exiles.

Parisians                                                                    Graham Robb

Billed as an adventure history of Paris,  I picked up and finished reading this entertaining love story of Paris by a Francophile.  Many good yarns, particularly about De Gaulle and the many failed assassination attempts on him, none more extraordinary than the hundred to three hundred people apparently wounded in a hail of bullets aimed at De Gaulle inside Notre Dame Cathedral while he remained standing erect at the altar.  Having learned that the failed assassination attempt on Francois Mitterand was actually organised by Mitterand himself there is more than a little suggestion that De Gaulle was somehow implicit in this failed attempt.  The odd thing is that no one seems to know, and there is no record of the people who were arrested at the time.  Perhaps they disappeared. There was some necessity to remove several of the most dangerous of those in Paris left behind by the Nazis at the Liberation, particularly the Milice (the military Police who collaborated so enthusiastically with the SS.)  A little too, on the recently deposed mini-man Sarkozy.

March

Oh What A Paradise It Seems                                      John Cheever

A very fine clean copy First Edition I picked up at Iliad.  An almost exquisite short story/novella about a group of people who are all brought into relationships through a toxic pond.   Once again the older protagonist Sears seems equally at home in bed with his girlfriend and the janitor. Cheever makes almost no moral judgements about his characters and their habits, which is why his world seems so honest.

Falconer                                                                    John Cheever

An extraordinary novel about a man incarcerated in a maximum security prison, how he got there (a fratricide, though it turns out not actually) how he copes with the loss of wife and freedom, how he finds love with a man who escapes by assisting at a Mass when a Cardinal comes in by helicopter.  He simply leaves with him.   And how eventually he manages to escape the prison to find freedom.

My Booky Wook                                                Russell Brand

Doing a little research on Russell, who has kindly consented to be in my Dick.  As Steve Martin told him, when we all dined together at Steve’s, he is a remarkable fellow and his book reads very honestly and well.   A huge hit too of course.   I have it on I Pad and bookshelf.

Raylan                                                              Elmore Leonard

It’s rare for me to read a novel twice within two months but I did this, because I have become addicted to Justified, the brilliant TV series, which I somehow missed first time round, and even missed the fact that it is based on an Elmore Leonard short story, and that he is an Executive Producer. When I noticed that what seems to be Tim Olyphant is on the cover of the book I had to read it again, now with the images of the people from the series in my mind.  Leonard often mentions how his characters resemble real actors as a shortcut to describing people in his novels.  Anyway I loved it even more.

The Honorary Consul                                        Graham Greene

I picked this first edition (1973) up at a book sale, and a first edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  At the checkout I was amazed to find they charged by the book, three bucks for each hardback.

The novel itself seems no better to me than when I found it disappointing in the Seventies.   Somewhat like Our Man In Havana, the lead character Fortnum is a drunken honorary consul kidnapped mistakenly for the American Ambassador.  Farce leads to tragedy with the usual marital betrayals, in this case the half-English Doctor narrating is betraying the Hon Con (with his ex-hooker wife). Dr. Plarr spends hours talking about God to the defrocked Priest who leads the revolutionary cell.   It’s all somehow vaguely silly, and indeed the twist of the end seems false to me, and without tension.   It’s the fault of all the damn Catholic discussions.  Can’t you just tell a story?   Must God come in too.  He always ruins everything….

Killshot                                                               Elmore Leonard

I also picked up this First Edition Elmore Leonard which I re-read with great delight.  This may well be his best book, certainly he is at the peak of his powers in this 1989 novel.

February

A Room with a View                                           E. M. Forster

I didn’t really mean to re-read this, but I picked it up and was instantly hooked.  Perhaps the most fun of all his books.  And certainly working on What About Dick?  I can see just how much it influenced me, particularly Helena and Beebe.  It is a lovely novel and a lovely film, and I think real as opposed to the Downton Abbey soap shite.

Heroes of History                                              Will Durant

On I Pad.   Impossible to pick him up without learning something or wanting to quote him on something.   This final book is written in his nineties!

The Essential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde                   Leonard Wolf

I had been meaning to re-read Stevenson’s fine novel and picked this up at Earthlight Books.  I was fascinated by Stevenson’s own story, told very succinctly here but the actual novel is printed in Italics which I cannot read!   I am unable to read any book that has long passages in italics, particularly books that start with them.  I don’t like books that change font, or shape, or turn into screenplays, or cell phone conversations, or even god forbid, texting.   I’m not quite sure why I have this prejudice except perhaps I think it is tricksy and showy-offy and unnecessary.  It shows us the framework, when I wish to forget the scaffolding and enjoy the building.  I shall re read Dr. J and Mr. K, but first I must re-read Nabokov’s quite brilliant lecture on it, where he physically draws the house, and actually makes you see the scaffolding of the novel, which until then has been entirely concealed.  So his essay is a revelation of  the book, as indeed are all his lectures on books.  If you think you are a good reader, read Nabokov’s lectures on literature and think again.

Dante in Love                                                             A. N. Wilson

So sure was I that I would enjoy it I managed to buy it twice.  The fact is though, I got bored.  He is dry and brittle in his writing.  I liked the history, but it was the whole theological world of Purgatory that I found, well, nuts.    So I threw it.   I have a ridiculous prejudice against almost all religious writing, with the possible exception of the Bible, which is only tolerable in the St. James version, thanks to the historical accident of its being translated during Shakespeare’s time, which was, perhaps, the richest period of the English language.   Only Churchill has as rich a sense of prose writing.   Although of course the Bible is poetry.   And metaphor.   Like all religion.

The Caretaker & The Dumb Waiter                              Harold Pinter

I re-read this happily while waiting to attend a college rehearsal of The Birthday Party.   I found it downstairs in a Book Fair which was selling paperbacks for a dollar and hard backs for three bucks, so that when I took them three first editions to pay for, they charged me nine dollars.  I felt like a small kid who has just won the lottery and is being paid in sugar.  One of the books was a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Brigadier and The Golf Widow.                              John Cheever

The illustrious Mike Nichols turned me on to Cheever with a fine present of the Collected stories a Christmas or two ago.  I never used to like short stories but this changed my mind.  I love them, and especially his.  Carver is good but Cheever is better.  I also like linked stories in the Julian Barnes manner.   This first edition I found in Washington and gave to Sophie Winkelman, a very brilliant and intelligent and extremely funny gal (ex-Cambridge Footlights natch) who has become a devoted fan of Cheever.   I can’t imagine how I missed him until now, but what fun it is to discover a new writer as one gets older and know there is a whole stack of books to discover ahead of you.

Pieces                                                                        Norman Mailer

I had an old gag in the UK:  “Norman Mailer will be resumed as soon as possible.”  This book of short pieces reminds me why.  Mailer is a son of a bitch who went crazy with fame and alcohol, but who at heart is a great writer.  I was inspired to buy this because of the several bitchy chapters on a disastrous appearance he made with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show.   He is enough of a good writer to show us that even when defending himself he reveals he was in fact an asshole…  I love many of his early books, and also quite a lot of the journalism (Fire on The Moon and the boxing one) but when he began to refer to himself as Mailer in the third person, and ran for Mayor and thought he could fight everyone, he became a dick.   Well we’re all dicks from time to time, and he has left many treasures.

Contents May Have Shifted                                         Pam Houston

I very much enjoyed Cowboys are my Weakness, but I swiftly tired of this one.

Gilead                                                               Marilynne Robinson

Pulitzer Prize winner.  A fine novel recommended by Anne (Mrs M)  The memoir of an old pastor, son of an old rather bastardly pastor, written to his young child.  Very fine writing.    I noted this to send to my kids:

 

I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.   You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind.  If only I had the words to tell you.

 

…only to discover that my daughter had not only read the book but had written a twelve page paper on it.    A fine thing education.

One On One                                                      Craig Brown

I have been reading this on and off since picking it up in London.  Hard to categorise but fascinating in short bursts, like Modrić.  (Pointless soccer comparison:  don’t go there.)  As the blurb says life is made up of humans meeting one another.  101 such encounters here in a circular form, Marilyn Monroe with Frank Lloyd Wright, Tolstoy with Tchaikovsky.   All true, and most fascinating.

January

Raylan                                                              Elmore Leonard

Of course I picked this up immediately and consumed it at once, but was able to re read it again within two months (see later) due to the unexpected circumstances of falling in love with the TV series Justified which turns out to be all about Raylan and the cast of cock-eyed characters who surround him in the coal fields of Kentucky.

Charles Dickens                                                Claire Tomalin

I have started the new year with the second of my packages from Mr. B’s Bookshop, a nice big fat Dickens bio. It’s delicious.  The wonderful thing about Dickens is that the life is a perfect companion to the books.  He, more than any other writer, has told us in his novels about his inner life and his deepest and most painful experiences growing up.   We can deduce from Shakespeare that he was feeling such and such at a certain stage in his life (especially armed with Stephen Greenblatt’s great book) but all is transparently clear with Dickens, the hurts and grief and shames of childhood are clearly exposed.  This book takes us further into the side of Dickens he was keen to hide, which, of course, is therefore most interesting, his affair with the actress and his rather poor behavior towards his wife.   Of course there is no reason why anyone should be a paragon just because they are intensely famous and much loved, but Dickens had more to lose than most.  Writing is a solitary and bad tempered experience, so it is easy to forgive him some sexual joy in his later life, and of course blaming the innocent for our own moral mistakes is what we do well.  How irritating to have a wife whose kindness and innocence is no excuse for his middle aged lust.  Funny that Dickens the supreme moralist (which he is) should succumb to such a desperate condition as to be cruel and mean and harsh to the mother of his children, but how wonderful that we can learn more and more about the complexity of people instead of less and less with time.  Ms. Tomalin is a fantastic biographer and has delved deeply and fairly sympathetically into a part of Dickens which he would rather have concealed, but which in the end, is as revealing as his novels of our ability to become monsters.

At Last                                                                       Edward St. Aubyn

I can’t remember why I put this down as I remember being quite impressed to start with.  It’s set at a funeral and funny, in a wicked way.   But I didn’t persist. Travelling I think.  Now I know why, it’s the fifth in a series of books which I have adored reading in order, so I shall return the minute I get home.

I must have picked it up from Mr. B’s in Bath last fall.  He is the real thing.

Lunatics                                                           Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel

I had a terrible existential problem with this:  I couldn’t decide whether to read the signed edition or the unsigned, which I had bought earlier.  I wasn’t sure which would be funnier.  I went to see them both at Skirball on their book tour: an evening of pure hilarity.  Eventually I went with the unsigned edition so I could save the signed in mint condition, or sell on ebay….  They wrote this tale together separately, sending chapters to each other as a challenge.   A fine idea and a very funny book.  A kind of improv novel.  I think the signed edition is funnier.

The Big Laugh                                                           John O’Hara

I have enjoyed discovering O’Hara, and read Butterfield 8 recently, which is much better than the Elizabeth Taylor movie (natch)   It’s about an actor who uses his charm and sex appeal to get ahead in Showbiz.  He has no moral compass and gets to conquer the world, becoming a move star, which is the appropriate place for charming actors with no moral compass, as O’Hara knows.  Here is the ending:

 Even in the jet age, it takes time to get from place to place, and Hubert Ward’s year is segmented by travel and the brief stopovers in California, Texas, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and France.  He has long since learned the names of the permanent servants in their various establishments maintained by Mary Jo, and half a dozen times a year he accepts their welcomes and farewells as genuinely cordial, which in some cases they are.  He is Hubert Ward the movie star, and no son of a bitch can take that away from him. 

            Ha ha ha ha ha.

Shockaholic                                                               Carrie Fisher.

It’s short, wise and very funny. Like its author.

Rome                                                                         Robert Hughes

Encyclopaedic history and art history by this cultural monster.  Highly entertaining and informative.  My own view of Rome is permanently clouded by the six months of hell on Gilliam’s Munchausen and I still felt depressed about it when I revisited Rome last year.  I would rather go back to boarding school than wake up and find myself still on that movie.  Rome is a brilliant and extraordinary city and it was amazing to live in The Ruspoli Palace and commute to Cinecitta past the Coliseum and along the Appian Way…but still it was a Dante-esque hell.

Vulture Peak                                                              John Burdett

The latest in his excellent stories about Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Thai police, which I unashamedly love.  This one is the second book in a few weeks to concern itself with the fate of illicit trafficking in human organs, (see Raylan) this time by a pair of sexy Chinese identical twins.  Sonchai pops over to Dubai and Hong Kong in the course of unravelling this as usual very gripping tale.

Shortcut Man                                                             P.G. Sturges

Tales of Dick Henry, the Short cut man.   An ex LA cop whose job is to throw people out of their apartments for non-payment of rent.  Hollywood yarns, I picked up on a whim, signed by the author, at Book Soup which seems to be becoming better and better as a bookshop.   More books and less high class porn.

 

              2011

December

Frank Sinatra Has A Cold                Gay Talese.

The first of my Christmas books from Mr B’s in Bath (they come beautifully individually wrapped in brown paper, string and wax.)  Exquisitely written articles from a master of prose.  I had consumed it almost before lunch.  Thanks Santa.

 

Do check out Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights

14/15 John Street, Bath, BA1 2JL, UK

01225 33 11 55

www.mrbsemporium.com

The Quotable Hitchens  From Alcohol to Zionism

I read this from cover to cover, finishing it just as he passed away.  Fascinating and always quotable on every subject you can think of.

He will be remembered.  And quoted.

Hollywood Moon                                               Joseph Wambaugh

Is there anything better than being holed up in bed with a good detective story.   Apart I suppose from being holed up in bed with a great detective. This is a wonderful book.  I was made very happy by the serio-comic stories of the Hollywood Division.  The accurate rendering of the madness that is policing in Hollywood and the amazing cops who do it.   Extraordinary and funny, and just like us.

The Map and The Territory                                Michel Houellebecq

“The last act of the desperate writer is to introduce himself into his own novel…”   That’s what I wrote about a Theroux book, and my heart sank as an interesting start turned post-modern with the arrival of the author in the story.  But Houellebeck goes a step further.  He has himself murdered in his own novel!  Talk about anticipating the critics.  Actually he won the Prix Goncourt with this one, and I have enjoyed his previous books, and I really like his writing style, but I found this increasingly irritating.  I couldn’t wait to find out who dun it, so I dumped it.   But I picked it up again and read on again.  Partly because he is a very good writer, and partly because I remembered with some embarrassment that I had actually put my own self in The Road to Mars.   Such hypocrisy.   Anyway I gave it a second chance and was glad to do so because although I question whether he needed to be the victim in his own murder mystery, nevertheless he actually solves the murder rather well and we then go on into the future to learn of the death of the protagonist, the incredibly successful wealthy artist, who actively helps solve the murder.  So it is not a perfect book, but has many great things in it and he does write so darn well, even in translation.

 

And talking about the great pretentious European novel, how about this one?

The Prague Cemetery              Umberto Eco

A very large book.  I found one chapter absolutely exquisite, deliciously written and I slipped off my shoes for a good read, only to find it stumbling on and on, without shape or plot or direction.  I am rather uncomfortable with all the anti-Semitism which I know is meant ironically, well I hope so anyway, and is attempting some kind of history of this sickness, and I like the illustrations, which make the book seem old, but the biography of this person who may or may not be the person who thinks he is or isn’t becomes so confusing that eventually you don’t care.  Nice big book, makes a great door stop.

Hello Chelsea It’s Me Vodka

On a quick trip to London I read my wife’s guru Chelsea Handler on my I-Fad.  She is very funny and witty and totally adorable.

Parisians                               Graham Robb

An Adventure History of Paris

I took this as a very good plane read.  Robb is not the most gifted of wordsmith’s (I find myself continually re-reading sentences)

but he is a good historian and has a smart eye for the story in history.   Here, many tales of Parisian life (and death).  Who knew for instance that Emile Zola was murdered?   An excellent book for all Francophiles, and  a great book for picking up and putting down on travels.  I also enjoyed his The Discovery of France.

 

Private Eye           The First Fifty Years

An A – Z by Adam MacQueen.

They weren’t very nice people, but they were certainly funny.  They made our lives worthwhile as we left school in the early sixties.  Worth a dip.

 

 

 

              2011

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

January

 

This year’s reading was considerably slowed by my attempting to work hard on what is currently called Death and Shakespeare or Say No More.  I have never lagged so far behind on my reading diary.   So most of this has been reconstructed in hindsight  (actually blush April).   I wish I could say it was all worth it….

Life                              Keith Richards

Not quite as we know it, but certainly life.   In a petrie dish.   Three years ago I had dinner with James Fox to tell him “anything I could remember” about Keith, because, he said, he could remember nothing.   At the front of this book Keith says “I haven’t forgotten any of it.”   Not the first of the untruths, but the book has been so well written by James that it is highly readable.  Keith is at his best talking about song writing, about which he has a lot to say and all of it true.  In fact he is a closet intellectual, and I believe took all those drugs so he could tolerate the barely tolerable fact of having a brain on a rock and roll tour.   He is erudite and well read.   They used none of my stories, all of which were about Keith being out of his mind, (no surprise there) and the book is very good until the end when he turns on Mick in a classically ungrateful act of ungenerous fratricide.   I remember times in New York when Keith was in recovery upstate and he spent hours going up to visit him and taking him books.  Of course nothing is more annoying than ones partners, but to leave shameful things in your book of life about people who have dragged you round the road redounds against him.  Pity.  He is a nice man.

Appointment in Samara          John O’Hara

Nice Modern Library edition picked up in Walla Walla.  Classic writing, classic book.  He is very influenced by Fitzgerald, whose influence one can easily detect in this, but the country club snobs and the way Julian English drinks his way to insulting friend and foe to his demise is very much him.

Air Guitar                              Dave Hicks

Went to see him interview Steve Martin at a Writer’s Block event in LACMA where he was very charming and had a lot to say but almost too much to say as the subject was Steve Martin and we were there to hear him promoting his fine novel about the art world An Object of Beauty.  I find these essays promise much but deliver little.  He is always about to make some devastating point but never quite gets round to it.   He is an agreeable chap and conversationalist and it was interesting to meet him afterwards and hear of the multi-disciplinary work he is doing on campus in New Mexico (?) but any Art Critic from the University of Las Vegas is clearly not simply interested in just art.  Sex and drugs and rock and roll are his real loves.   I don’t think you can be a critic of that quite yet unless you work for Rolling Stone or The Rolling Stones.

The Looking Glass War           John Le Carré

Early.  1965 First Edition.  Small tales of amateur spying and the setting up of the secret service in the UK, at its most porous.   This will lead to the great Tinker Tailor world…

Djibouti                        Elmore Leonard

This one set amongst pirates in Djibouti, but of course I have forgotten everything.

Hero                             Michael Korda

1. E. Lawrence. Yes a hero. A military strategist, a remarkable stoic, an extraordinary historically important person, an unusual warrior and a weirdo…    Very enjoyable biography and a useful look at the beginning of oil politics in the 20^th Century.

Tales of The South Pacific                James Michener

Short stories of the characters and the war in the South Pacific, it’s boredom and its occasional violence (US troops raping nurses?)  This would become South Pacific the musical, but the stories are good and well told and its interesting to see how the adaptation took place.  Nice first edition I picked up in Walla Walla.

City Boy                                          Edmund White

Gay memoirs of New York in the very gay period.  He writes well and finely.

Nemesis                        Philip Roth.

Its been a Roth year.  His latest tells the tale of a healthy protagonist, working at an inner city school during a terrible year of Polio, which kills the young baseball kids.  Encouraged by his girl friend to join her at an upstate summer camp teaching kids and counsellors to dive, he becomes the unwitting bringer of polio to this idyllic backwater and then succumbs to it himself.  But what marks the book is his grasping at failure.  In the final chapter we learn from one of the polio victims who finds him in late middle age that to punish himself he renounced his fiancée who wished to live with him as a cripple.  Self-hatred then becomes the motive.  Something Job like in this, and something also of a Conrad move in the narrative.

 Zuckerman Unbound             Philip Roth

Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman has gained great fame from writing Carnovsky, but this has brought shame on his parents and shabby stalkers on the streets.   The ambivalent side effects of literary fame, to a literary lion.

The Ghost Writer                    Philip Roth

So good I read it twice.  And I could re-read it again right now.  Just read the opening sentences and you are right in.    Zuckerman starting his literary career, and falling afoul of his father.   He is letting down the Jews.    And he encounters Anne Frank, who has survived (maybe).

A story about the importance of telling the truth in writing, ignoring all the pressures of parents, society, religions etc.  Zuckerman listens in on the great author and his young mistress and is shocked, disturbed and elated.  “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life.”   This after his father has submitted an unpublished story of his to a Judge who writes an hilariously funny letter to its author.  Roth is as daring and as honest as any writer.  He is also revealing of the imperious and dictatorial insistence of the writer…

Where Men Win Glory            Jon Krakauer

And where Bush’s win shame.    A simply brilliant book, about the great Pat Tillman and his amazing family, who stand up to the bullying Bush propaganda machine, which replaces a tragic and unnecessary killing of a brave true American from friendly fire, with a bullshit tale of a football hero killed by the Taliban.    He also goes into the Jessica Lynch bullshit story.  This ought to be compulsory reading at schools, to warn people of the depths to which Government will swiftly sink when selling a war to the American people.   Best book of the year for me.

The King’s War    (1641 – 1647)       C. V. Wedgwood.

Further reading of this arrogant man’s folly.   An old edition from school…

The Finkler Question                       Howard Jacobson

Of course the first one of his I couldn’t finish wins the Booker.   Is it me?    Of course.   But I didn’t like this one at all.    I’ll try again some time.   Maybe.

The Alice Behind Wonderland          Simon Winchester

A most annoying book in which the author in great detail discusses the portraits of Charles Dodgson without reproducing them.  In fact but for the book jacket we wouldn’t have a clue what he is talking about.    But surely a book like this can only be a book of photographs with text.  It is sublimely pointless and nonsensical and deeply irritating to discuss pictures in great detail which we cannot see!  

Inside WikiLeaks           Daniel Domscheit-Berg

In case one felt Assange wasn’t paranoid enough here is someone exposing Wikileaks.  Daniel Dumbshit hasn’t much of interest to say though he reveals what went on etc.

And Furthermore                   Judi Dench

Because I adore her I adored it.  But to be fair, it’s just too correct to be entertaining.  She has to be nice about everyone in everything she was ever in, and so doesn’t really become about a person.  She is much sharper and funnier in real life.  Lucky for me to know that.

Mexico Holiday Reading.  27^th March thru 3^rd April

Sunset Park                   Paul Auster

A brilliant book.  He just damn well keeps getting better and better.  The brilliant way these different character stories interrelate is extraordinary.  I could read this whole thing again.   I may have to.  Thanks to memory loss I may never have to buy new books again.  Though one of the few things that get better with age is re-reading books you know and love.

King Lear                     William Shakespeare

Yes I know it’s a bit pretentious reading this on the beach but it is extraordinarily gripping and each time you learn something new.  Fuck Shakespeare.  He is just too damn good.

The House of Meetings                    Martin Amis.

Er.  Not sure what this is about.   Might continue.

 

A best seller I junked brought by Tania.

April

Hitchens vs Blair

Bitch v Hair.  Well almost nothing Tony Blair says is of interest, it’s all self interest.  He plugs away at his new Faith based Charity, but of course we all know he became a Catholic after leaving office so at least someone would forgive him.   I doubt I shall forgive him even that.  Hitchens is breathtakingly brilliant and the prospect of his imminent demise has neither shaken his disbelief nor sentimentalised his thinking.

 

Unfamiliar Fishes                            Sarah Vowell

I find her very easy to put down.  This one is about Hawaii.  Oh God, apparently the Americans are colonists!    How unsurprising this sounds to non American ears.   But yes they made a real pigs arse of Hawaii.   But fortunately it keeps the Mexican beaches a bit clearer of the ugly American tourist, which makes Hawaii so uninteresting.   As I found before, Vowell’s writing alternates between the prim and the dull, with smug and snide references to the British who did much better at preserving the Sandwich Isles than the Americans who turned it into a holiday hole of whoredom and boredom.  Between the shocking Missionaries and the horrible whalers they created a schizophrenic mishmash of a society serving the great Yankee God Business.  Anything rather than call it by its real name of Colonialism.  The great American non-Empire of Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, and Puerto Rico.   No surprise that Melville the author of the practically unreadable Moby Dick should have arrived here on a whaler.

The House of Meetings                    Martin Amis

Finally I read this book all the way through with delight.  It is a love story of a rapist.  He tells his tale, raping his way across what would become East Germany, and he will end up raping the love of his life (Zoya) his dead brother’s ex-wife whom he adores and follows and fantasises about, before he makes his Nabokovian exit to America.   And she will make her exit leaping on to the frozen Moscow river from the parapets of the famous stone bridge.   A victim of the revolution, he returns a war hero to a life of arrest and the endless meaningless brutality of the camps, where his younger brother Lev appears but who internally “resists” – giving up poetry but never collaborating with the brutal world in which he too is a captive.   But Lev holds on against the tyranny whereas our hero surfs through it, surviving, but compromising, and killing where necessary, so he too becomes both brutal and unfeeling before the slow death of the protagonists.

Two things mark Amis – his relentless fury at the monstrous depraved madness of Stalin – and his knowledge of the sadness of sex, it’s inability to quell the disappointed itch of love, the desire to utterly possess the love object.   And what kind of freedom is that?   Zoya describes her love life with Lev as freedom, they find freedom in each others arms, while X has only possession and betrayal and plans for future possession.    A Russian kind of love.  A Stalinist love song.   The rape of Russia by the Georgian ogre, a man who mass murdered by quota.  Must be considered as a kind of novel companion to Koba The Dread.   And of course brilliant.

The secret he learns from the House of Meetings is that he has repressed love feelings for his brother.

The Invisible Dragon                       Dave Hickey

More art essays about the beautiful.  Including Mapplethorpe butt snaps from the sixties….

All the Time in the world                           E.L. Doctorow

I don’t like this writer at all anymore.  He used to be good, and had the possibility to be better, but now I cannot read his sentences and his stories bore me.  (Failed to live up to:  cf D.H. Thomas)

Exit Ghost                                       Philip Roth

Nathan Zuckerman returns to NYC after an eight year absence, to possibly swap homes and indulge in an affair.

Super Chicken Nugget Boy               Josh Lewis

Signed by the author.  As you might expect, since he gave it to me over dinner with Jeff Davis.

Bossypants                                      Tina Fey

The celebrity book du jour.   Steve Martin read out some very funny passages when he interviewed her at the Nokia Centre, where she was selling books by the ton.  Perhaps that is the best way to approach a book like this – have it read aloud in the car, preferably by Steve…

Reporting                                        David Remnick

Collection of long form articles.   I bought in Walla Walla (Earthling Books) because of a nice essay on Philip Roth – who has me hooked.  Enjoyed an article on Blair running for re-election and Gore not.   Many fine things to dip into.

The Old Man and The Sea                Ernest Hemmingway

He isn’t my favourite cup of tea.  I find his famous short sentences annoying.  Almost as annoying as Gertrude Stein, who is almost totally annoying.

This is a nice Book of the Month Club first edition from 1952 I found in Walla2 for fifty bucks, so certainly a good buy, but I see I had abandoned it by page 32.   It is a fishing tale.  Hunting, fishing, war… certainly a pattern there for a soon to be suicide.

Venice                                            Peter Aykroyd

Essays on, rather than a history of.   They become in the end just too generalised.  It is the particular in history that is of interest, not the thesis.  I kept hoping to find meat and chewing only on vegetables.

The Princes in the Tower                                    Alison Weir

I had to read it again.  It seems to me that Richard 111 was a serial killer.  He seems to have done a couple of jobs for his brother the King, before replacing him on the throne, murdering his way towards his own crown with ruthless efficiency.  He is utterly Machiavellian and his rise and fall are amongst the most dramatic in history.  The odd thing is why the Shakespeare play should be so funny…?

 

Summer Reading

 

Leaving home for Amsterdam, Trieste, Venice, Rome and then six weeks in Provence.

Rather desultory reading summer.  Nothing quite grabbed me.

The best book I read was

White Noise                                     Don Delillo

An amazingly fine novel.   The book is about death and the fear of death.  How we learn of it.  How we feel about it.  In a brilliantly described family of an Academic at a small University town the Professor of Hitler studies, a course he invented, is overtaken by an “event” (in satire worthy of Heller) a noxious toxic cloud. Simulac constantly prepare for everything but the real thing, a perfect parody of how we face death.  His perception of wives, fathers, children and friends is stunningly accurate.  Above all he has a deep abiding sense of humour, which means he can sidle sideways into the awesome business of writing about death. Set pieces of great prose:  the burning of the town mental asylum, the nebulous mass of the cloud itself.  An awesome novel of great value.  How we hide frm the things that most worry us, while still perceiving them.

 

I had thought this would be my summer for reading all of Roth.

The Prague Orgy                             Philip Roth

A short squib of a book which I enjoyed re reading.

I married a Communist                    Philip Roth

I found this tale of two brothers rather annoying.  Ira, the pontificating Communist, married to the anti-Semitic Jewess Hollywood starlet.

But I kept putting it down.  Freedom of speech is the theme, and certainly it was a hard won freedom in the time of the Enquiries, but it was somehow too much for me, though I finished it.

 

I didn’t finish

American Pastoral                           Philip Roth

 

I could hardly start

The Garden of Eden               Ernest Hemmingway

I dipped into

The Pat Hobby Stories                      F. Scott Fitzgerald

Which I did not enjoy as much as before, or as I had anticipated.

 

And I never finished

The Women                            T. C. Boyle

Which I was quite enjoying.  But again I left it in France for the unguarded moment, to complete.

Girls Like Us                                   Sheila Weller

I read mainly the Joni bits, as I am not so interested in Carol  King or Carly Simon, though it was fun reading about some of the mutual times in NYC, where Tania and I appear, but she under the wrong name!  For a while we spent some time together when she was married to James.

 

And I did enjoy many of the short stories in

Never Breathe a Word                      Caroline Blackwood

Collected stories by Evgenia’s mother, though I prefer her own stories.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes

Didn’t grab me at all.  This netsuke book, but I guess it prepared me a little for Tokyo.  I don’t say I won’t finish it sometime in France.

 

Some books I read on the I Pad, including the one about the French, which was okay but spread a bit thin.

La Seduction                 Elaine Sciolino

How the French Play The Game of Life

Which I read on my I Fad.  Her book which basically suggests that French men are different, got a huge lift from coming out the instant DSK was arrested in NY under suspicion of raping a hotel chambermaid.  Since he features in her book as a serial abuser it was somewhat unfortunate for him and very fortunate for her, for essentially this is a very short argument run very long.

The great thing about the I Fad is its ability to fulfil instant demand.  I also ordered

Ideas Man                     Paul Allen

An unfortunate photograph and an unfortunate memoir.  When you are one of the luckiest men on the planet it is better to seem grateful than bitch about someone who helped you get there (see the Iago side of the Richards Jagger relationship.) Here Paul manages to complain a lot about Gates, which I am sure is irresistible, but bad policy.  Tania reckons he is an Asperger’s for sure, no eye contact etc, but they did a remarkable thing and the near death certainly brought him to life, even if not exactly life as we know it Jim.  He kindly sent me an autographed copy and I will take a little more time to read it.   He is a kindly man in his weird way.

 

Also on I Pad:            

A Little Princess.                    Frances Hodgson Burnett

Being the whole story of Sara Crewe now told for the first time.

Which I read because Gorfaine/ Schwarz  wanted to turn it into a musical.  It’s fine, but the movie was very well done.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate                Stewart Lee

Tales from the joke face.  Stand up memoirs very well done.

Kafka’s Dick                          Alan Bennet

A sudden remembrance made me check this out in case of clash, but no problem really and I didn’t finish this play, though I remember seeing it at the Royal Court.

Caesar and Cleopatra     Bernard Shaw

I wondered if this might make a musical, but it seems to have lost its charm.

Three Cups of Deceit      Jon Krakauer

A long essay and a fabulous expose of the exaggerated charity of the somewhat hypocritical smug writer Greg Mortensen’s lying claims in Afghanistan.

Twentynine Palms         Daniel Pyne

Katie’s father’s rather enjoyable thriller novel which I also downloaded, and I am reading a PDF download of his latest novel as he has of course asked me for a quote

A Hole in the Ground owned by a Liar        Daniel Pyne.

Katie’s Dads latest which I have downloaded in PDF and was enjoying.  He writes to me and asks for a quote….  See later

The Missing of the Somme               Geoff Dyer

Very fine, but the trouble with the I Fad is that I read and pick it up all over the place and so it is impossible to keep to the nice consistent pattern of reading lists.  See later.

 

Also on the I Fad I read

The Merry Wives of Windsor            William Shakespeare

Because I did the Hank’s charity read with Marty Short and Ken Branagh and Tracey Ullman and  so on…

 

So back to the real book world.

The Age of Wonder                          Richard Holmes

Pulled me out of my reading ennui with the fabulous tale of Joseph Banks on the first Cooke cruise to Tahiti.  A wonderful story, which continued into his relationship with Herschel and his sister, the most devoted cosmologists, but I ran out of steam with Humphrey Davy, though could easily pick it up again next time I am in Cotignac.  Well fortunately I had two copies so finished it in LA.  The crazy mad nitrous oxide parties of Davy and his friends… My God, Leary’s all.

 

There were some tiny Penguin books I found at Venice airport, which were variously fun:  Updike’s and Amis [peres and Nabokovian gems, all about the length of a short flight, so excellent for travel.

Dear Illusion:                          Kingsley Amis

Terra Incognita:                      Vladimir Nabokov

The Machine Stops:    E. M. Forster

Rich in Russia:                        John Updike

 

Usually when I leave for a while there are lots of unfinished orphans, odds and sods incomplete, things I have picked up, partially discarded, set aside for better times with the intention of finishing and sometimes with the intention of abandoning, so they may quietly die while I am gone.  My habit of reading two or three books at a time can also lead to a trail of books settling into the sand, often through no fault of their authors.

Here is a partial list of the ‘found abandoned’, some of which I may pick up and continue with, in my own weird way.

Where I’m Calling From                                    Raymond Carver

Selected stories.   Short, dark, penetrating.  He gets to character very quickly, through details and observation of small but revealing characteristics.  I like them a lot and shall continue dipping.

Reporting                                                 David Renwick

This looks to be something I picked up in Walla2 probably attracted by his essay on Philip Roth.  They look nice, and I was clearly dipping as there is no bookmark but a jacket flap turned back around an essay on Nabokov.  I think I’ll leave it out for double dipping.

Encounters with the Archdruid                           John McPhee

Narratives about a conservationist and three of his natural enemies.   So says the sub text.   I’m not sure what the three natural enemies are apart from time, and the falling off of memory.   I like McPhee but he is on occasion prolix.   Oh that’s right, they are stumbling around the High Sierras, and I was geek enough to track their trail on an I Pad Map App.  Conversations as they go, about primal land, and rights to open it for the people, and preserving it and so on.   And yes I might continue.

Apparitions and Late Fictions                    Thomas Lynch

Here’s one I have no memory of, except I remember the hand free watch face which is a striking image of frozen no time.  I see I am about two thirds through, somewhere through Apparition and I’ll give it a go and see.  (I didn’t.(

The War Against Cliché                            Martin Amis

Essays and Reviews 1971 – 2000

I have been enjoying my resurgent interest in Amis since last summer’s eye opening read of Koba the Geek, his demolition of the man monster Stalin.   Here I see I have again bookmarked an essay on Philip Roth, so I’ll pick up from there.  Hm, seems like there’ll be quite a delay before I start the new package of books I sent in from Mill Valley.

 

La Retour de France.    14^th July 2011

 

Okay that’s housekeeping.   Since my return I have read and enjoyed two paperback best sellers:

The Big Short                                  Michael Lewis

Inside the Doomsday Machine.

Michael Lewis leads one gently through the crash, and the evil bastards, and the ignorant gits, who profited from and sold the poor into worthless loans, which would lead, almost inevitably, into the crash of Wall Street.  He writes of the brave f

ew who saw what was to them inevitable and who betted against it.   What a system?   Would they could have denounced it and had people arrested, but you mustn’t try and tame the Bear.  It is sacrosanct to America that Wall Street must remain out of control. Since Reagan took the restraints off, paid for by the restrained, there have been at least three ugly meltdowns,  Savings and Loans, Enron, and the Collapse of the Bond market.  Finely told and I finally understood what the Bond market thing was.

 

The second best seller I picked up was

Outliers                                          Malcolm Gladwell

The story of success.

He makes a very good point about the 10,000 hours theory, and there seems to be plenty of evidence.  His thesis: in a nutshell, nobody got good by accident, nobody got good without some help from fate, Gate’s access to a computer paid for by wealthy neighbours, Beatles in Hamburg.   The story of one man making it from impossible odds is simply untrue.  He makes the case that there are good times in which to be born and there are bad.  You are better off being born on January 1^st if you are to be a pro ice hockey player, than any other time, and if you are born after August forget it, you have no chance, because your peers have already six months of development ahead of you.  (Being born Post World War Two seems to be a good time.  At least to be British. We didn’t have to avoid the army or Vietnam.)  He writes well and intelligently about all sorts of seemingly unrelated things like the accident patterns on Korean Air, and he says quite simply that the things we try and deny for political correctness say – like where we are from – are absolutely what define us and pre condition us to respond, by fighting if we are from that sort of Scottish descent, or in other ways if from different societies.  And this societal pre patterning persists long afterwards.  So Yay to him for opening that door once more.  And a big thank you for comedians everywhere.  Stereotyping is often accurate. Gladwell’s genius is he goes and asks why it should be so, and evidences good examples of how it comes to be.   I loved his simple explanation of why Asians are good at Math – their numbering system makes it simple, whereas our convoluted, partially language based, counting systems, leads the brain into endless confusion.  If you can grasp math as a friend then it does not become a self-fulfilling torment.   A most interesting book.  I dipped into his Tipping Point and I shall read him further.

Pulse                                     Julian Barnes

The new collection of vaguely linked short stories is a return to form for him, and an example of what he does best, conveying character through dialogue.   These short stories are almost play-like in their lack of descriptive prose, but his characters talk, bicker and despair and come to life immediately.   Happy to see he’s back.

School Rules and Dutch Girls                    William Boyd.                                    Two screenplays for TV.

I was reading about William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and this is the same sort of story – the incredible inhumanity of boys in a group.   Something I know a little about, and how it soon becomes bullying and then out right fascism.   He discusses this on a nice long intro about his own schooling at a public school in Scotland.   He is about seven years behind me and the difference seems to be that we were still allowed to flog junior boys.  Still the same senseless cruelty.  Not dissimilar from the extreme in the Bunker, which I am also reading about.   Here the bullied figure comes back for revenge, and the upper class twit is saved by the middle class boy who has partially betrayed him.  The full working out of the British class system.  One wonders how this evolved, out of society or creating a society.  Surely the former.  A school must have mirrored if not society then the sort of society they wanted to create.  This is Doctor Arnold at Rugby.  Boyd’s best thought is that growing up in public school allows no growth of the private person, and there is an inability to get in touch with this private self.  That and responding to the opposite sex.

Tolkein’s Gown                      Rick Gekoski

A marvellous book.  I had actually read it when I met him at a Book Fair in LA but he presented me with a copy and autographed it for me so it is entirely appropriate.  The book is about books and their owners and collecting and first editions and very eloquently written.

Our Tempestuous Day             Carolly Erickson

A fine and very well written brief history of the Regency Period.  She writes very well, and is particularly good at set pieces.  The Peterloo Massacre is very well done for example.  Much about the Regent, his wife Caroline, and people such as Byron and Caroline Lamb.  I think she is really good.

The Sense of an Ending          Julian Barnes

A fine short novel.   Very good.  Booker winner surely.

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece      Jane Hamilton

I couldn’t decide whether it was merely interesting at times or truly awful.  About a wife who organises her husband into an affair with a celebrity whom she adores.    An odd creature.

Silk Parachute                        John McPhee

The best of these unrelated articles is Season on the Chalk, about the huge belts of chalk that form the Downs and then Beachy Head and then go under the channel, emerging in the champagne district of France.  Filled with interesting facts about chalk and why it isn’t limestone, facts I have already forgotten….

The Fall of Berlin 1945           Anthony Beevor

A magnificent history of the nemesis that awaited the civilians of Berlin, Prussia and Eastern Germany with the arrival of the Red Army.  Four million rapes, twelve year olds on bikes trying to stop tanks, the full irony of the cowardly end of the grotesque Nazi leadership.

Trip Round the World.   Departed August 28^th.

Japan, Tokyo, Bath, Cotignac, Sweden, London, Cotignac, London, New York.

Paris After the Liberation                 Anthony Beevor & Artemis Cooper

I continued my reading of the excellent Beevor, with this study of the return of de Gaulle to Paris, and the stories of Hemmingway etc. Unfinished and left in France for travel.

All My Friends Are Superheroes       Andrew Kaufman

Sadly crap.   And Canadian crap at that.

 

Bought in Bath 31^st thru 2^nd September  and taken to Provence, 2^nd thru 13^th September

Sense and Sensibility                        Jane Austen

In Bath I picked up a lovely little collectors library edition and very much enjoyed it.  It’s ages since I read this novel and I really loved it.  She is so funny.  Like Dickens she is very good at hypocrisy.  Lack of self-knowledge, characters say one thing and act another, revealing themselves, for instance the “poverty” of their half-brother who is persuaded by his wife to give Mrs Dashwood (the surviving wife) and her three daughters, absolutely nothing.  This is more than irony this is savage irony (Swift – saevo indignation) which Dickens perfects.  She has a clear eye to the folly and pretensions of society – living unhappily in Bath between 1801 and 1806, when they escape to Clifton.   First four novels published anonymously. She does not do the Dickens thing by addressing the reader directly to involve himself in the suffering of society – there is no pulpit, but she is always there at your elbow, often with killer understatements.  It is satire often, comedy with sentiment.  The story revolves around the final awakening of sense in the younger sister Marianne as opposed to sensibility.  Elinor sees all and suffers all from her tragedy of unrequited love but Marianne does not die.  Almost.  Through suffering to wisdom.   Like all her books it is about money, lack of it, expectations of inheriting it, finding suitable men to marry with or without it.  There is almost no male mentioned who does not have a price attached.  This one feels is very close to the society of Bath which she was able to observe so closely.  I loved it.

I then turned to, a copy of which I picked up in Bath.

The Swerve                            Stephen Greenblatt

Stevens book is most interesting, about the discovery by the medieval book searcher Poggio di Baldisarri of an ancient copy of Lucretius Poem On The Nature of Things which Steven argues is a classical statement of the real views of Epictetus, and the influence of these views on modern science, and ultimately, through Thomas Jefferson, on the Pleasure Principle, the pursuit of happiness.  I get to discuss this book with him in October at Writers Block.

The Deer Park                        Norman Mailer

Perhaps my favourite Mailer.  He writes so marvellously.  In many ways in this book he writes a little like Scott Fitzgerald.   And of course it concerns Hollywood, but viewed from the distance of Palm Springs, here called Desert D’Or, with wholly recognisable figures, such as Orson Welles and Marilyn Monroe with whom the ex-flyer hero has a huge affair.  Largely about love and sex and the connection, if any, between them.   Lots of other excellent characters, of pimps, and queens and hangers on, to the word of the Studios as mediated by the Committee for Un American activities.

This is a most honest book because he tackles and captures the vagaries and many hesitations and conflicts men feel about sex and physical love.  The Deer Park is a pleasure ground of the sexually available (Is this Roman or French?)  Which here is used as a metaphor for Hollywood.

Nothing is clear cut, nothing is self-evident, ambivalence is everywhere. It shows relationships working and not working.  The completely different feelings about the lover, hatred, contempt, arousal and indifference. Our ambivalence about ourselves and our desires.  Set amongst the corruption of the Studio World, the commercialisation of an apparent art form and the temptation to a young writer (obviously here Mailer writes of himself) to shag the beautiful and take the money.   It explores the hypocrisy, and how people become users of each other.  All for HT, the exploitive Studio Head who is powerfully connected to the Subversive Committee and their goons.

And in the ambivalent figure of Welles, we see the self-loathing of the creative director, plus his heartlessness torn between his lust for the beautiful and his frustration with the stupid.  Then the snobbery of the ageing roué amongst a world of constantly available fresh meat.  This is still true of contemporary Hollywood society and sadly hinders men committing to relationships there.

And now the Dan Pyne which I read on a PDF on my I Pad.

 

A Hole in the Ground owned by a liar                           Dan Pyne

 

I enjoyed this tale of a man who buys a gold mine.  The title is the definition often attributed to Mark Twain, of a Gold Mine.   It’s actually a story of two pairs of brothers, the hero who has great affection for his brother, although he betrays him with women, who are attacked by two rather less real Asian brothers in the mining business, who attack them, and blow them up and burn down their house and do everything in their power to take their mine.  In many ways it is of course a movie and like a movie it must and does have a satisfactory resolution.   My problem was how to write something useful for Dan, knowing how publishers work.   I came up with two quotes:    Like Jane Austen, without the violence.   Which Dan liked and a slightly longer one… which I need to look up.

 

The Break                              Pietro Grossi

Not overimpressed by a book heavily recommended by Mr. B’s in Bath but I’ll leave it here in France and try again, and have a go at his first book:

The Fist                                 Pietro Grossi

A very light book to travel with.   And autographed I see.  It’s actually three short stories, the first one of which, about a skinny boy boxer, who builds and defends his reputation against The Goat, a thicker set boy, whoch builds up to a classic fight, but is about much more, growing up, maturing, becoming a man.   I shall save the other two here in Provence.

 

Nice to Stockholm 13^th September and then London 16^th  September thru 22^nd

Where I picked up three books on Madonna, sorry Wallis Simpson.

Wallis Simpson seems to be the sort of person who the less you know the better.

Wallis Simpson                       Rose Tremain.

A very touching short story about the dying Duchess under the care/imprisonment of the appalling Frenchwoman Maitre Blum. Her life and memory slips away, and it is beautifully imagined and written, and far and away the most sympathetic she will ever appear.

 

Back in Provence again.   September 22^nd thru 30^th (maybe)

Third time this year and lo, how wonderful, the nightingales are also back.  I have a tremendous virus, that laid Tania low as we left Stockholm for London. But sitting in the sunshine, tripping out on the virus and the many drugs one takes I realise I could be content to die here.  Partly of course motivated by a wonderful book by Martin Amis..

 

Experience                             Martin Amis

A wonderful, tender poetical book about literature and writing and being the son of a father who was a very special comic writer.  His love and support for him and tender recounting of his various lives with him, and his helping him die, is reflected in his own life, of various upheavals, and the sadness and leaving children behind in failed marriages, so that while he repeats the same patterns as his father, he never seems to fall into the comic alcoholism of Kingsley.   In fact we learn very little of his own wives and marriages – a deliberate choice, so that there is no bitterness in the book, only kindness and wisdom and regret.  Even the Fourth Estate, who blast him for leaving his agent, and for having his appalling dental problems fixed in New York, only come in for a sad side swipe here and there, and he is remarkably gentle over his long-time pal Barnes dumping him.  (of course he is married to Pat Kavanagh, the agent he lets go.)

Actually he saves all his well-founded contempt for the fourth estate to an appendix and a blistering attack on Eric Jacobs, who was to have been KA’s literary biographer, but who noxiously and poisonously and typically could not resist writing things cruel and untrue about the funeral from which he was banned in the Sunday Times.

The final theme of the book, the dreadful murder of his niece Lucy Partington,  by the foul serial killer Frederick West, a recurring and dreadful theme, as she was missing for several years before the truth, and then mercifully not all of it, finally emerged, reaches its culmination in the permission of his Aunt to write about poor Lucy, only after she has seen his youngest daughter and seen her own daughter in her.  The recurring healing power of children…

(The cowardly brutal evil West commits suicide in Winson Green Prison, suicide being an occasional theme in this book, as also wickedness itself, which culminates in a visit to Auschwitz. )

This is a loving and remarkable book, from a brilliant man, and a loving father.

 

I also read further on my I Pad

The Missing of the Somme               Geoff Dyer

Which I find fascinating as he is writing about the perception of the Great War, in its poetry and novels and monuments, as much as his own fascination with the utter horror of trench warfare.  I was drawn back  to it by having seen the magnificent production of Warhorse which we saw in London.  It’s a very fine book, and his observations are telling and interesting, particularly his theme of Remembrance and Remembering, and his description of the outpouring of public monument building in the twelve short years before the World was at it again.

 

Behind Closed Doors              Hugo Vickers

The tragic, untold story of the Duchess of Windsor, which seems neither tragic nor untold.  Behind Closed Bores would be more accurate as he writes at enormous length and whenever possible about himself and his very minor role in the funeral of Edward and George.  I shall probably dip a bit again some other year in Provence as I never found anything very interesting and there must be something interesting in here.   It seems pathetically royalist.    Wallis Simpson, the less you know of her the more fascinating she is.

 

I also began to read this, after our brief overnight visit to Dodington Park, built by Codrington, commencing in the 1780’s.

The Sugar Barons                  Matthew Parker

This is a tale of the West Indies and how immense profits came into the hands of those entrepreneurs and slave owning families, when Sugar was the Oil of the 18^th Century, the cause of wars and fortunes.  I shall probably leave it here in France to return to another year (non D.V)

Actually I took it with me on my travels, but eventually abandoned it.  Not because it wasn’t interesting, but because it wasn’t gripping.  And it should be.  Also there is a kind of general acceptance of slavery without the complete horror of the state and practise.   This may be a severe criticism of what is an interesting book, but I’m trying to explain why I suddenly lost interest.  The tales of the islands – particularly the sides taken by Cavaliers and Roundheads during Cromwellian times are funny.  A continuation of a very British quarrel in the West Indies.   The sheer death and destruction and plunder and greed and piracy (buccaneering!) is breath taking.  The  constant invasion of other islands.  The bringing of hell to Paradise, the massacres of civilians, the death and destruction of huge invading forces, victims of disease and lack of water, planning and supply, all a far cry from the cricket playing Paradises of sandy beaches and sunsets….

The Auschwitz Violin              Maria Angels Anglada

As fine a written a short novella as you could ever wish to read.  A kind of magical tale of an Auschwitz victim, prisoner, saved through his unlikely skill of being an expert violin maker.  That odd conjunction of pure evil with the sublime.   Just great.

 

And finally in New York  October 2^nd thru 8^th

 

Byron in Love                                    Edna O’Brien

A Short Daring Life.

A wonderful mad cap dash through the incredible and hilarious and at times farcical life of this not very nice man.   I really enjoyed it.  He was a kind of Regency rock star and as Caroline Lamb said “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.”  Buy it and read in amazement.

 

Tiny Terror                                         William Todd Schultz                                                      Why Truman Capote (almost) wrote Answered Prayers

A psychobiography of Truman Capote.  This is a form of biography I was unaware of and I must say I like it.  It makes a lot of sense, taking primal scenes from the life of the author and seeing how these themes work out in the pattern of their lives.   Here his theme is whatever made Capote so crazy as to turn round and bite all those rich and famous upper crust people in New York by exposing them in the incomplete fragments of Answered Prayers.  His fancy Society friends dropped him overnight, and never spoke to him again, yet he must have anticipated this.  Apparently not.  There is much sense and sensibility about his relationship with Perry Smith, the gayer of the two murderers of In Cold Blood,  a book which cost him years of effort and pain and work, at the end of which he had to attend the executions of his two protagonists, (at their request) which he bravely and painfully did.  Watching two men who had become friends (and questionably lovers) be hanged in front of your eyes, well you can

see why the alcoholic drug laden path lay ahead, poor man.  He was an incomparable talent.  I happen to love Breakfast at Tiffany’s and I have a great deal of guilty pleasure in Answered Prayers  and I very much liked this short psychobiography in a series into which I shall dip further.

 

The Rogue                                          Joe McGinniss                                                        Searching for the Real Sarah Palin      

A total pleasure.  Everything you had ever suspected about the housewife superstar. Read and enjoy folks.  I’d describe it as a guilty pleasure but since I have no religion I have no guilt.  If only someone had done this job on the fledgling Bush think of the harm that could have been spared.  No Iraq war, no Bush recession, no shrill voices demanding smaller government while bankrupting the country…  Sarah Palin believes in God.  It would be unkind to wonder whether God believes in Sarah Palin.   People who believe they are chosen by God are worrying.  It is one of the signs of madness.  Joe McGinniss should be thanked for risking his life by living next door to this vindictive couple and their dysfunctional family.   They could have been the Dysfunctional First Family.  Not any more I trust.  I laughed and cringed out loud.  Enjoy!

 

……………………………………………………….

The above Published on the web site

 

 

Mid October, November.

 

The Fear Index                                          Robert Harris.

Sadly this book fails to catch fire. It’s supposed to be a thriller, a digital world thriller about a schizophrenic billionaire in Switzerland who has invented an algorithm which predicts and eventually controls the stock market bringing about a crash. But this H. G. Wells world of out of control machines controlling the financial future of the Wall Street never quite rings true, it all reads like a film. the point about the novel is it is still the best form of story-telling that gets inside the minds of the characters. Yes fine actors can imply what a character is thinking, and with music and close ups that is certainly possible, but nothing is quite so good at telling us what a person thinks, and incidentally what the author thinks of what that person thinks, than the novel. So that when the characters are cardboard thin, and the emphasis is mainly on what happens next, then the experience of reading is thin, as here. In a real action novel, a detective or thriller for example , the best thing to do is to strip away all adjectives and keep only minimal scene description, and concentrate on short sentences that describe physical activity (see Thomas Perry who is very good at this). Harris is fatally wounded by his attempt to write a good book at the same time. Also he falls into a trap of his own cleverness, with technology, so we who do not share his cleverness, kinda skip the tech bits.
I think The Ghost is a very good book (In the US The Ghost Writer) and not half a bad movie either, because it was about something, the appalling smugness and self centered behavior of Tony Blair, a man who seems but little to know himself let alone the appalling consequences of his actions, so that he is a tragic figure, a man who could have been Pitt, who turns into the pits.
Harris’ other books I found difficult to read. I did get through Pompeii, but I abandoned Lustrum. Of course he is a best seller, and this will be a big hit, so it doesn’t matter to him, but it matters to me, as some writers can pull off popularity and greatness and that is surely the goal. So sadly I think you can skip this.

Whatever it is I don’t like it    Howard Jacobson

Yay.  I loved this.  I felt very guilty about not loving his Booker winning novel, but this made me very happy indeed.   Not only is he very very funny, he is also wise, and gently provocative, milking sacred cows, exposing clichés and shabby and “correct” thinking.  There’s a lifetime of wisdom in these occasional pieces.  I can only recommend you buy three copies and give two to a friend.  (A tried this for Christmas and Amazon is shockingly out of print.)  And yes I will try his last novel again…

 

Boomerang                  Michael Lewis

He seems to be the clear sensible voice explaining the void that was Wall Street.  Now he explains the meaning of the imminent third world debt, Greece, Ireland, Spain.   A house of cards ready to collapse.   His clear and concise prose helps one through the unbelievable murky miasma of what began as a US Ponzi scheme, and which seems to have ruined the world, through teaching Wall Street Greed.   Though in the Greeks case a well-deserved exception may be made.  A people so corrupt and so entitled, well, not much of a chance they’ll change, so they’ll default…

The Cat’s Table             Michael Ondaatje

A boy, called Michael, at the age of eight, leaves Sri Lanka, Ceylon, to voyage to a new life at an English boarding school.

Pure                             Andrew Miller

Interesting, rather finely written, historical novel, of a young man in 1785 given the task of digging up and destroying an ancient cemetery (les Innocents), finding himself, his love, his friends, almost death.  It’s an almost Booker.

No One Left To Lie To            Christopher Hitchins

The Values of the Worst Family

The incomparable Hitchens takes on the impossible Clintons.   Far more here than an objection to their style, or his endless womanizing.  Seen here Clinton appears more of a serial female abuser that one had cared to think.   Including a pair of possible rapes.  Fine-tuned hatred, like a blow torch.   Wouldn’t care to find Hitchins on your ass.  Is it the whole story?   It’s whole enough.

Blink                                     Malcolm Gladwell

Another of his most interesting pop psychology books, this one about the power of instant decision making, and the need to trust that first impression, whether it be judging an art fake (which comes complete with provenance) or choosing cellists (preferably blindfold, or they are always men!)    De Becker respectfully referenced.

A Sport and a Pastime             James Salter

Short stories.

A Death in Summer                Benjamin Black

John Banville writing as Benjamin Black.   A new Quirke Dublin Mystery.  But not a very good one.   I think Black’s work is affecting Banville’s.   Certainly not as good as the previous Quirke’s.  This time Dublin is having a heat wave…. But the usual murky suspects to a suicide of a wealthy businessman or is it murder?  The victim’s odd French wife has an affair with Quirke.  Never really believable.

Poison Flower                        Thomas Perry

Now this is how you write a mystery.   Not a word too many, never a dull moment.  Not stooping to conquer.  Not a pretence that you could write a Prize Winner,  this is simply fabulous.   I read the first half all the way to Chicago and the second all the way back.   Couldn’t put it down.  Utterly engrossing.   It’s a Jane Whitefield novel.   She is the Seneca Indian who helps people escape into new lives.   This one even ratchets the temperature up higher.  If this is your first, do yourself a favour and read your way to here.   All of his books are wonderful.   This is an advance copy and is not published until next March.  I cannot wait for the next.

Poems                           Philip Larkin

Collected by Martin Amis.

And incomparable.

I Want It Now               Kingsley Amis

Fabulous 1968 First Edition Amis, at his finest.  Here a TV host pursues the weird daughter of the wealthy, winning her on his own merits.  In many ways more readable even than Lucky Jim.

Sons and Lovers            D. H. Lawrence.

Picked up a 1922 Modern Edition Library in very bad shape and was immediately seduced by the prose.  Yes it is a touch too Oedipal but his descriptions of young love, and the anguish it brings to the young is incomparable,  I liked him all over again.  Paul Morel.  Reminded me of discovering him and this book at 16.

Reflections on a Marine Venus         Lawrence Durrell

Dipped into this pond.  A memoir of his two years on Rhodes.

Built of Books               Thomas Wright

Is there any sadder sight than the mob waiting outside Oscar Wilde’s house the morning after he was sentenced, to bargain for, to buy at auction, and in some instances purloin his priceless precious library.  Wilde could apparently consume a whole book in half an hour and answer detailed questions on it.   That he was well read is a given, but that he was also an intellectual genius is something I had somehow failed to pick up on.  Educated in Ireland by his poet mother, he had the finest classical education, took an effortless first at Oxford, and was probably the finest read English writer since Coleridge.  This is a nice idea of a biography, the subject seen through his reading.  Of course you couldn’t do George Bush this way…

George W. Bush  and The Redemptive Dream     Dan P. McAdams

A Psychological Portrait

A psychobiography. And perhaps the only sensible way to approach the infant Bush.  This way one can read about him without being consumed by hatred.  How he became President is such a puzzle, let alone how he could appeal so much to so many, despite fulfilling Gore Vidal’s accurate prediction that he would become the worst President in history.  Mind you that’s quite a tough category, there are so many entries in the race.  I had hoped the Bush recession would remind America not to put an incompetent in charge of the business again, but well, the Tea Party beggar description.  Even Evelyn Waugh could not have invented them. They seem invented by Dickens at his most anti-American.  (He did get over that by the way, though Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes will give you some idea of the fear and loathing stage he went through.)

So back to the Bush wars. If you did a portrait of Bush warts and all you’d only have the warts, so at least this psychologically sympathetic book attempts to understand rather than condemn.  (A unique idea I know.)

The early death of his sister when he was seven (with no parental warning) seems to have been the key element, rather than the Oedipal struggle with his father, whom he loves and idolizes.  W comes out as both more pleasant and less naïve than in other portraits, but still, even if we can forget his wars, what he did to the world economy is going to take some surviving.

House of Holes              Nicholson Baker

A book of raunch.

I honestly don’t know what to make of this.  I think the best way to think of it is comic pornography.  The sound of one hand reading.

Butterfield 8                           John O’Hara

I found this book at O’Hare, (not O’Hara) and had not realised that this novel either was by O’Hara nor that it was a best seller in 1935.   Of course for me it will always be linked with the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and the climactic events that followed my discovery at a Wolverhampton Cinema….  But this book is much better than I had expected.   Almost a Capote like heroine, perhaps he got his idea for Holly Golightly from this book.  Here Gloria is a well raised middle class good time girl adrift in the amoral world of New York Speakeasies in 1930. It’s a kind of sad tale too, as she is pursued by her married lover and accidentally falls off the top of a steam boat to her mangled death.   The wages of sin and all that.  It is noticeable that by the time of Capote it is no longer necessary for a naughty girl to die, but she certainly has to disappear.   The tone of the book reminded me of the books by that other fine New York novelist whom Gore Vidal so much enjoyed:  Dawn Powell.

What The Dog Saw                 Malcolm Gladwell

More interesting essays by this most interesting essayist from the New Yorker.  Part One is described as Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius and Part Two as Theories, Predictions and Diagnoses.   He is so interesting.  Once his interest has been piqued he will not let go but follows the story.  In his fascination with what he describes lies the secret of why he is such fun to read.  He is the almost perfect holiday or travel book, topics can be taken up, browsed and discussed.  This one was published in 2009.

December

The Map and The Territory              Michel Houellebecq

“The last act of the desperate writer is to introduce himself into his own novel…”   That’s what I wrote about a Theroux book, and my heart sank as an interesting start turned post-modern with the arrival of the author in the story.  But H goes a step further.  He has himself murdered in his own novel.  Talk about anticipating the critics.  Actually he won the Prix Goncourt with this one, and I have enjoyed his previous books, and I really like his writing style, but I found this increasingly irritating.  I couldn’t wait to find out who dun it, so I dumped it.   But I picked it up again and read on again  The fact is he is a very good writer.   Did he need to be the victim in his own murder mystery?  He actually solves the murder rather well and we then go on into the future to learn of the death of the protagonist, the incredibly successful artist, who helps solve the problem somewhat.  Still a bit of a mess, but he does write so darn well, even in translation.

 

And talking about the great pretentious European novel, how about this one?

The Prague Cemetery              Umberto Eco

A very large book.  I found one chapter absolutely exquisite, deliciously written and I slipped off my shoes for a good read, only to find it stumbling on and on, without shape or plot or direction.  I am rather uncomfortable with all the anti-Semitism which I know is meant ironically, well I hope so anyway, and is attempting some kind of history of this sickness, and I like the illustrations, which make the book seem old, but the biography of this person who may or may not be the person who thinks he is or isn’t becomes so confusing that eventually you don’t care.  Nice big book, makes a great door stop.

Hello Chelsea It’s Me Vodka

On a quick trip to London I read my wife’s guru Chelsea Handler on my I-Fad.  She is very funny and witty and totally adorable.

Parisians                               Graham Robb

An Adventure History of Paris

I took this as a very good plane read.  Robb is not the most gifted of wordsmith’s (I find myself continually re-reading sentences)

but he is a good historian and has a smart eye for the story in history.   Here, many tales of Parisian life (and death).  Who knew for instance that Emile Zola was murdered?   An excellent book for all Francophiles, and  a great book for picking up and putting down on travels.  I also enjoyed his The Discovery of France.

 

………………Published on the web to here.

 

The A to Z of  Hitchens

Read from cover to cover the Quotable Hitchens.  A to Z.  Fascinating and always quotable on every subject you can think of.  He will be remembered.

Hollywood Moon                                         Joseph Wambaugh

Is there anything better than being holed up in bed with a good detective story.   Yes being holed up in bed with a great detective story.  This is a wonderful book.  I was made very happy by the serio-comic stories of the Hollywood Division.  The accurate rendering of the madness that is policing in Hollywood and the extraordinary cops who do it.   Extraordinary and funny, and just like us.

 

           2010

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

 

January thru March

Arcadia                         Tom Stoppard

Best play ever.  I love it

Too Much Money          Dominick Dunne

His last posthumous novel and is as usual a closely reworked version of something that actually happened (in this case the Monte Carlo Saffire fire death) set now in Biarritz.   As with parody often the elusive truth is easier achieved through fiction.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much       Allison Hoover Bartlett

About a book thief who like all thieves is in denial about theft.  Not written well enough to be really good or interesting and she abandons the tale and pursuit of his career in order to publish.   You see this book at all Book Fairs in order to deter the man himself.

Descartes Secret Notebook.               Amir D. Aczel

Everything I needed to know about Descartes:  I drink therefore I am.  Started last summer and picked up and finished.

St. George and the Dragon               John Masefield

Bought at Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena.  A couple of lectures in New York about the British and the horrors of the recently ended 14-18 war.

Shampoo Planet                     Douglas Coupland

Like all comedy novels – starts well but dries up a bit.

The Letter From Death           David J Moats

Research.  Nicely written interesting perspective of Death from the viewpoint of Death The character.

Picture This                  Joseph Heller

An odd fish – hybrid of biography, art history and novel about the famous painting “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” by Rembrandt.

1^st Edition.

Point Omega                 Don DeLillo

Not quite getting him still….

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold           Evelyn Waugh

Picked up First Edition, but still I don’t much care for this tale of the madness of a paranoid elderly writer on a sea voyage who hears voices.

Franny and Zooey         J.D. Salinger

Picked up a battered Library first edition in Walla Walla for ten bucks!

The college girl Franny and her truly awful lunch date as she is sweating, passing out and possibly pregnant.   Direct Scott Fitzgerald descent but then he acknowledges it on Page 3 of Zooey, quoting from Gatsby “which was my Tom Sawyer when I was twelve”…”that everybody suspects himself of having at least one of the Cardinal virtues.”   Zooey is narrated by Buddy Glass and is much less good than I remembered.

The Godfather of Kathmandu           John Burdett

Despite the violence I love his books.  He is a very good tale teller and his wonderful Thai Buddhist detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is terrific.

Marathon Man              William Goldman

Picked up a first edition.  Pretty good but the film may be better…

England’s Mistress        Kate Williams

The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton.   A wonderful biography of poor Emma, the supermodel who became a money making star for Romney – following early whoring, working her way up to Mistress of a nasty MP who gave her to his Uncle the wonderful Hamilton, whom she persuaded to marry and then seduced Nelson and the navy to come to her rescue in Naples, and lived contentedly in a threesome until his untimely death at Trafalgar left her to the mercy of the ungrateful Brits.   Her attitudes must have been real sexy.  Sadly dies in poverty ignored by an ungrateful Nation.

The Gulag Archipelago           Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn

Lest we forget what we do to each other.  Animalis capax Rationis (Swift)

Ronnie                 Ronnie Wood

The cute one – writes quite nicely of his life on the road.

Wolf Hall             Hilary Mantel

The Booker Winner and none the worse for that.  Not a great book but not a bad one.

69 A.D.                Gwyn Morgan

The Year of Four Emperors.   History but not brilliantly written.

Plays One:  Veterans, Across From The Garden of Allah  Charles Wood

I have always loved this first play ever since I saw it with Bob Hoskins Gielgud and John Mills at the Royal Court.

Cheating at Canasta                William Trevor

The Doctor’s Wife                  Brian Moore

Picked up a first edition.  Not my favourite of his.

When China Ruled The Seas            Louise Levathes

The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405 – 1433

Empire is what we do.  This might just have started the Renaissance.

Lord Jim                       Joseph Conrad

Wonderful opening.   Wonderful subject – the gap between self delusion, illusion, what we hold to be us, flawed character.  His finest writing.  But the book peters out – as so many books do.   The problem is his story of Jim is told second hand – so he has to contrive later encounters with other witnesses to finish the tale – which to be honest – I never did…

On Death and Dying               Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.

The five steps….

 

 

Easter Vacation –    Saint Bart’s and New York

March 29^th thru April 12th

New Grub Street                     George Gissing

Anne insisted I try this.  On the Sony Reader.

An Object of Beauty                Steve Martin

Read the m/s of his new illustrated novel about the art world.  You learn a lot about paintings and about the people who curate and auction them.  Lacy is a kind of Holly Golightly whose story is told by, for once, a non gay friend who adores her from a distance and who is seduced into helping her break the law to make a fortune.   Steve slightly cheated on this vital plot point, confusing both me and Tania, so we called him on it and he was going to alter it.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest              Stieg Larsson

The third in the Millennium trilogy.   He turned in all three parts and then died so some editing is actually missing, but he is such a great deliverer of suspenseful plot – I think almost like Le Carré in the Smiley books.  Even at the end he has another twist and an end.

Strip Tease                             Carl Hiaasen

Always starts well but can’t maintain it for me.  His characters are usually quite nasty.   Not as good as Elmore Leonard.

Waterloo.  A Near Run Thing.  1968          David Howarth

A beautifully written brilliant account of the eve and the day and the destruction of Waterloo.  43,000 dead and dying on the battlefield at the end of the day….The horror, the bravery, the fortune, Napoleon out of it with haemorrhoids and cystitis.  Not a good day to be sick…..

Howarth uses eyewitnesses from around the battlefield with shifting viewpoints so you feel the gruesome horror of the long drawn out day of bravery and death, whose outcome (thanks to Blucher) changed the world.

I am fairly sure I read this before but before I began the book list.

Typhoon                                Conrad

On Sony Reader

Sex With Kings

On Sony Reader.  History as People Magazine.  OK for a plane.

How It Ended.                                                   Jay McInerney

This is what I wrote last year.  “Sometimes when picking up books again, or when continuing to re-read from where I left out they seem a lot better than they had at first appeared to me,  These short stories for example.”  Even more so as I picked up the paperback in New York.  “His themes are betrayal, adultery, the suspicion of love failing, the falling apart of couples, particularly after marriage, childbirth and pregnancy (abortion too: he is a Catholic after all.) He writes of these things honestly and with no squirming or ducking both the selfish search for sexual release and the female hardening of the hearteries.  In his work I like the older more mature voice.  (Putting Daisy Down) I think he can develop into a great writer, he has the skill, the time and the control.   Failing to connect, Manhattan man, the pressure of the city – especially post 911 – and the ennui of the commuters to Connecticut.”   I am even more impressed. He is a great stylist.

Closing Time                 Joseph Heller

Again desperate for something to read I picked this up again.  It has one of the most hilarious opening chapters of any book since Catch 22.  This is billed as the sequel.

This time I knew I had read this – my third time.  I wrote:

“Heller is really funny.   Yossarian in hospital determined to get the doctors to find out he is really sick though he has no symptoms is a hoot.     Heller keeps doing the negative option – the funny option in language (nonsense?) that we reject as absurd.   It is a rich vein for him

“Heller is very funny, the funniest of all his contemporary Jewish/American literary novel writers.   His contempt for Washington and all human institutions, his knowledge of the depth of corruption of industrial man, his appreciation of greed and self-interest as the major motive of mankind Heller has a Swiftian vision of bureaucracy.  Yossarian goes to hospital determined to prove he is sick, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Paradox is his field.  The Chaplain pees heavy water and is disappeared by the security forces.   His contempt for “that prick in the White House.   He is very Pythonic as he takes the absurd seriously.”

 

Sometimes it seems when reading novels this common pursuit can go flat, everything seems dull, stale and unprofitable.  Is it me, is it them.   I’m not sure.   It began with an awareness that Nostromo, so far from being a great book, was actually rather tedious.   I had been enjoying re-reading Lord Jim, and was anticipating pleasure – maybe it was using the Sony Reader – whose latest incarnation has left everything a dull grey, so different from the nice 1910 rough cloth-bound edition of Lord Jim I had been reading, but I was forced to discard this book on the plane to NY and search in vain amongst one or two of the other things I had loaded – a dull  (Oz) book about Catholicism and masturbation – surely the only good thing about Catholicism is masturbation, increasing its pleasure by increasing its guilt.   Who are these papal pederasts and where do they think they fit in – is it really just a homo-erotic anti-female cult?   Haven’t they heard about the Universe – a hundred billion galaxies and no sign of God or heaven yet?

 

On my return from St. Barth’s I searched desperately for reading material – only to be progressively disillusioned.  The new Ian McEwan…

Solar                   Ian McEwan

…turned out to be terrible.  I kept picking it up again – only to chuck it away.  It’s like a bad version of Kingsley Amis – though Amis would never have permitted himself to be so dull, and Michael Beard, the unfortunate scientist, is never as funny as Lucky Jim.  Perhaps he is trying to be funny?   Is this supposed to be humorous,   It drags on and on and on…

 

Paul Theroux’s latest continued the downhill trend in his writing, barely surfacing above geriatric pornography…

A Dead Hand                Paul Theroux

In fact it has claims to be one of the most awful novels ever written  (to be challenged by Mrs Dalloway.)   It all starts off so well – a blocked writer is invited to solve a mystery – oh goodie a thriller.   A step away from the embarrassing porn of his previous.  Only young men must write about sex.  For the middle aged it is a disaster.   The last act of the desperate writer is to introduce himself into his own novel and having failed to make a real character out of the desperately unconvincing Mrs Unger, an improbable American who lives in India, worshipping Kali, sacrificing goats, while practising Kundalini sex and giving Tantric massage to the poor fool of a narrator, who is suddenly brought face to face with Paul Theroux.  Oh puhleese… thereby completely killing off belief in the only character we have any faith in.  I found myself missing the convincing sexuality of John Burdett, who at least manages to write vigorously about sex, instead of this wishy- washy Hallmark card sentimentality…. And by the way we see the end coming miles and miles away.  So no points for Theroux, who has written far too much, and time for him to experience writers block without fucking writing about it….

Mrs Dalloway                Virginia Woolf

I turned for hope to a first edition which I had picked up in Walla Walla.  But alas the same desperate feeling of dullness stole over me that I have always experienced in trying to read this book.   Oh God.  I am afraid of Virginia Woolf and for very good reasons – she is dull, tedious and boring.

Play It as It Lays            Joan Didion

In desperation I went out and bought a paperback of this, only to experience instant disappointment as time has definitely dated this so called classic.

Contact!                       Jan Morris.

A Book of Encounters.

The latest Jan Morris I chucked almost immediately – being hardly more than excerpts from a diary or commonplace book – where is the great man/woman who chronicled so brilliantly the decline of Empire?

The Mother Tongue                Bill Bryson

English and how it got that way.

Bill Bryson held me for a while with his book on the English language.  But still no more than a cleverly rewritten Albert C. Baugh book on English.

The Spartacus War                 Barry Strauss

And even a lively attempt at Roman history descended into what I call the Mustapha school of historical writing (It musta been a great sight when..)  But I might give it another go as the subject is fascinating.

The Stories of John Cheever             John Cheever

I finished off the stories of Cheever, though they too went down hill with lots of Roman tales.  Still I enjoyed very much this book that Mike Nichols sent me.

 

Thankfully a new Benjamin Black has come along to replace the temptation to read the latest of his alter ego …and we are now already half way through (what?)

April thru May

The Men Who Would Be King          Nicole Laporte

The er.. epic tale of Dreamworks.  Jeffery Katzenburg recruits two smart friends to help him fight the bully Eisner.  Along the way we see what a thief Jeffery is – but also how his grim and determined work effort finally paid off – and despite more flops than a Chicago hooker he finally makes his millions and manages to take all the credit for Shrek.  And most of the money from his co-workers.

She is not the best writer in the world but it is competently written and readable.   As Freddie would say “Movies are made by assholes for idiots”…

Coriolanus                             William Shakespeare

Am I missing something?   This seems to be a very tedious and dull play.  In fact who put the anus in Coriolanus?

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet            David Mitchell

An extraordinarily fine book.   A great novel.  Picked up on a brief visit to UK.  He is our Chabon.   The best contemporary writer in action today.

I can’t believe he didn’t make the short list for the Booker.  Clearly the best novel in English since his last.

The Pregnant Widow              Martin Amis

I supposed he might be challenged a bit by Amis who seems to be getting better and better.   This is a very good novel indeed about the early days of Keith Nearing (his thinly disguised attack on himself ) in the 70’s in a castle in Italy on a summer vacation.  He flashes forward to modern times and it is a very effective device, a revelation of development and character and life as it is experienced.

Ether                   Evgenia Citkowitz

Seven stories and a novella by Julian Sand’s wife.  I was bowled over by her writing, her grasp of character and her ability to convey depth precisely and simply.   I have been reading a lot of short stories and it seems to me that she is as good if not better than Cheever, and I have bought tons of them to distribute amongst friends, which is a rare thing and always a sign I really like a book.  Get it.

Private Lives                 Noel Coward

It seems so artificial.  Contrived theatre.  Intellectual farce from the middle class.  Noel, a self re-invented working class boy, writing for “Noel” the darling of Broadway.   The interesting bits for me are the actual physical violence between the lovers, which seems real, drunk, and written from somewhere true and honest but Coward is always trying to create a glittering carapace of golden wit behind which he can perhaps hide – not unlike another working class laddie who admires some of his lyrics beyond belief.

Memento Mori              Muriel Spark

Spoken of as her greatest work – but not by me.  An old lady Dame Lettie is badgered by phone calls reminding her that she must die.   Indeed she must –she is brutally and unexpectedly and shockingly bludgeoned to death about two thirds of the way through the book.  These phone calls spread alarm and panic and disquiet amongst the beautifully drawn generation of elderly people who were once the smart set of London.  Now confined by the restraints of age they await the truth of the message of the phone calls “You are going to die.”  Unfortunately we never learn who is making the phone calls or why, so that the end is terribly unsatisfactory.

Game Change               John Heilemann  & Mark Halperin

Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin and The Race of a Lifetime.

Very readable, nicely written recent history, fascinating for its portrayal of the major characters in a vital election.  Hilary and the strange blood bond between the Clintons is fascinating.  Obama nothing short of a great hero, and the off-hand choice of the quite appalling beauty Queen Palin shows what a weak and arrogant leader McCain would have made.  America can breathe again….

Oprah                           A Biography                  Kitty Kelly

Yes.  Well what can you say?  Never dull.  I don’t have any quarrel with Oprah self re-inventing herself from the promiscuous pregnant young molested teenager.   Good for her.  Of course later on she becomes a bit of a monster, but she uses her power largely for good, and without her there is no Obama.  The way she conquers the white middle class wives of Chicago changes the whole racial attitude in America.  A fascinating tale of the rise and rise of an extraordinary female.  And who cares if she is gay or Steadman’s gay, or if anyone is gay… that is still a lingering prejudice (a cunning lingering prejudice?)

Elegy for April               Benjamin Black

Another grey thriller from Black:  the pseudonym of John Banville.  Not bad.

June

David Rizzio and Mary Queen of Scots                         David Tweedie

Murder at Holyrood.   A not particularly well written gallop through the facts of this amazing scene from history – sadly he is not really up to the job.

Imperial Bedrooms                                            Bret Easton Ellis

Ok Jay McInerney is the real thing.  Brett Easton Ellis isn’t.  He knows what it is but he can’t do it.   This is like a minimalist revisit of a minimal novel he wrote some time ago. Nothing wrong with it.  Except expectation.  That killer level where you have set your own bar and you have to jump it again.

Hitch 22                                                            Christopher Hitchens

A memoir.   Revealing more about the young rather fey self righteous lefty than the more interesting man who crossed over to America to discover more of himself and to lead a sensible life.   He loves the literary crack – and his pals are all interesting – Amis, pere et fils, Fenton etc,  He seems rather dangerous to me – has that weird Gore Vidal ability to insist on being the drunkest and most argumentative man in the room.

Cleopatra and Anthony                                      Diana Preston

Power, Love and Politics in the Ancient World.   Nice history well told.  I had not realised the amount of time that lapsed after the death of Caesar before the final showdown.  Anthony out manoeuvred by the shrewd Augustus.

 

Summer Reading

July 4^th thru September 12th

Tender is the Night.   F. Scott Fitzgerald

1960’s paperback edition of the 1933 novel which I found in the Library of Friar Park when my selected travel books proved disappointing.  My third go at this novel and this time I really enjoyed it.   It seems so honest and real.   About Doctor Diver the psychiatrist and his wife the schizophrenic Nicole.   It begins at Gausse’s Hotel in Juan Les Pins, where we are going shortly to celebrate Lily’s 20^th birthday.

Humboldt’s Gift            Saul Bellow

In his autobiography that weird chap Hitchens recommended this.   I was rather enjoying it but then got disrupted on my travels.  Sadly the Hitch seems to be dying.  So he was wrong about cigarettes at least.  Actually the weirdest thing is in the current edition of Vanity Fair he writes about how he persuaded a young woman to wear a mask of Martin Amis and then fucked her!   Oy vey.   That sort of thing you might want to keep quiet.   I suspected from his bio he was closety.  But if he goes he will be sorely missed.   Twice I tried to read this and twice I put it aside.   Second time I didn’t even get to the first point I abandoned.   Can’t quite see what Hitchens sees.   Is it the young successful and famous protégé of the more seriously good poet?   I found the prose in the end dull and it’s easy to chuck.

Hitch 22                        Christopher Hitchens  (duplicate)

I see I haven’t yet included this, though I think I simply haven’t updated on the lap top.

But there is something slightly pouty about the chap and the endless left wing bollocks.

It’s perfectly natural to be lefty when young – you are busy rejecting shit – and yet communism was always a step too far.  I could understand it somewhat in the Orwell generation who went off to fight Franco – but really after WW2 and the Stalin/Hitler pact to have any time at all for Uncle Joe is a terrible error of judgment.    Hitchens is more entertaining when he perversely becomes a Yank during the Bush wars – but even then who the hell could do that at such a time?   And he hung around with some of the really unpleasant people who ran Iraq.  He is drawn to tyrants of all kinds, pro and anti.   But his polemical books against religion are a revelation.  This is just slightly disappointing.

The Boss Dog                MFK Fisher

About a Provencal dog who haunts the cafés of Aix.  A children’s book of some charm.  But I only read the first.  I should give it to Pierre for his son.  (I did)

Operation Mincemeat              Ben Macintyre

The retelling of The Man Who Never Was.  I kept putting it down as he keeps delaying the story.   In the end it’s too discursive or he fails to write grippingly enough.   Disappointing.   Still might dip into the end parts.

Koba The Dread.                     Martin Amis

Laughter and the Twenty Million.

The Book of the summer (MORE)

This book is so good it should be taught in schools,   The nightmare psycho Stalin is of the type of madman who kills those closest to him.  Beware if you were Georgian or if ever you knew him.   Possibly murders his wife, certainly murders thirty million of his fellow citizens on a quota system (Oy how scary is that?)  to prove that his Agricultural policy is working, amongst other things, or simply terrorising the middle classes out of existence, the cry of the ill educated thug everywhere. (Hello Mr Mao, Hello Polly Pot.)

Sex & Stravinsky           Barbara Trapido

Very disappointing.   A fine opening in the 70’s when Josh the squatter meets Caroline the blonde Australian Goddess, but soon they are terrorised by her mother “the wicked witch” and it becomes the evil step mother story, for at the end Caroline discovers she is adopted and the ungrateful woman has plundered all her love and money.  Her revenge is amusing, dumping her in a Sainsbury’s rubbish skip, but nevertheless we are appalled by their 20 year passivity with this demanding sociopathic  monster and her own daughter’s exchange trip to France is literally yuck making.   At the end they all swap partners which is her version of  a happy ending….

London, the biography            Peter Ackroyd

Starts off brilliantly with a geological history of London, and then the Celts and then the Romans, but by early medieval it is getting pretty draggy and slipping into the Mustava type of history (it must ’ave been a fine sight).  Will see how it goes.

 

Summer reading  is both more and less demanding.   A good bad book will keep you happier longer than a bad good book.   I have been tossing the latter at a great rate of knots.  The holiday mood is whimsical, seeks constant diversion.  I have a constant mind to be somewhere else, or perhaps doing something else.   Should I be visiting Salernes market? (For what?)   Ought I to be playing guitar? (ok, why not?)

A few possibly fine books have become victims of this including:

Not to Disturb               Muriel Spark

A certain kind of Muriel Spark book fails to interest me.   Almost invariably they are about cults or semi religious bodies, usually involving sex, pregnancy and religion.  None of them interest me.   Iris Murdoch is the same.    Why do they do this?    I may well have tried to read this before and simply got to the same point and ejected.

Moab is My Washpot              Stephen Fry

The same response.  Perhaps I tried before.   Maybe it is the image of the satisfied schoolboy that shrieks out phoney.   It is I suppose inconceivable for me to consider some boys would be happy at school at seven.  They would probably have to have had a brother to protect them and  be gay.  Since this volume of memoirs is all about school, and public school at that, it fails to incite my interest, and joins the Moab is my tosspot pile…

In Hazard                              Richard Hughes

Not so this one which I preferred to Conrad!   I know – heresy!   It’s just he writes so well and also informatively about a ship stuck in a hurricane in the West Indies.   You could lift his description of the cause of hurricanes almost verbatim.   It is the best scientific prose description of a physical phenomenon I have ever read.

The Misogynist                       Piers Paul Read

The problem is not that it isn’t nice but that it is the same.   Things happen, new people are introduced but the story doesn’t spring forward     – we know precisely the same thing about Jomier – that he is old, that he is still bitter about his first wife betraying him thirty five years later!   Also when given the opportunity for a younger lover he would far rather live alone that share a Viagra life with her.   In the end his relentless self-disparagement convinces you that he is an uninteresting old whiner.  So for all the early acute perceptions of feminism and the DNA role of the male, and his delightful skewering of the American pro-Zionist right, you are less than interested in his tale.  It’s loser writing.

Lunar Park                   Bret Easton Ellis.

Got fed up in the same place.  When his dealer comes to his party.  Bright start.  Did not complete the re-read

David Mamet                          Theatre

Not as interesting as I had supposed but I did not get very far.

Northanger Abbey                  Jane Austen

A prototype novel.    With many common themes and characters but none as fully developed or as successful as they will become.  The lead character Catherine Morland is ridiculously naïve and entertains Gothic visions of her lover’s father murdering and locking up his wife – which borders on the insanely paranoid – though we are assured she is only parodying contemporary Gothic novels which were then all the rage.  Only the bitchy hypocritical wonderful self-justifying utterly selfish character of Isabella Thorpe, who seduces her brother, successfully comes to life.

The Anatomy Lesson               Philip Roth

A study in pain – the writer in neck pain and guilt at his Portnoy like success, can only shag women and take increasingly powerful drugs, which leads him to overreact against a critic of his work.   Not a complete success or as good as he gets.

Out of Africa                          Isak Dinesen

Nicely written but not a patch on that other great African memoir (Into the West, by Markham)

Dipped into and could dip again as I didn’t read very far.

LaBrava                       Elmore Leonard

Tempted to re read but then didn’t.

Shadow Woman                     Thomas Perry

The last one of his I hadn’t read yet and as engrossing and thrilling and page turning as ever.  A Jane Whitefield novel.   In this one she marries Carey – and sets off to hide a Vegas pit boss on the run – in danger of being eliminated by his security boss (Calvin Seaver) who hires two psychotic killers, Earl and Linda (she sexually winds him up to kill by getting close and attempting to seduce Jane’s new husband Carey).  Pursued into the Montana mountains by dogs and escaping only by the (Indian) good will of a Grizzlie, she shoots Earl, plants a sniper rifle on Seaver, traces their LA lair where she discovers the identity of Linda and races back just in time to prevent her eliminating her good and innocent doctor.    (omit the plot)

I am pretty sure I read and very much enjoyed this next Philip Roth about this time because I got into a correspondence with Nicholas Meyer about how much I had enjoyed it, without realising that he had adapted the screenplay, the final result of which he hated.  I reconstruct the notes I found in the back of my paperback copy in France.)

The Human Stain                   Philip Roth

Almost a perfect book, but like so many others he can’t finish it.  It goes on, turning into an essay on everything we have just enjoyed.  All because he needs to write a final scene on the ice with the murderer of his hero.  But it resolves nothing and feels almost like an afterthought.  I found this novel gripping and brilliantly written, its major surprising conceit sudden and unexpected – when the hero reveals that he is in fact black-  which we hadn’t seen coming.  But I stopped reading at exactly the point the story ends and went back only to discover why he continued.   I still don’t know.

(This is signed off Salgues, 10^th August 2010.)

 

Return to School via  Bristol, Bath, London, Copenhagen, Malmo, London, Edinburgh, London, LA…. September 2010

The Last Tycoon                     F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Read on the plane flying from London to LA.   Interesting because of the notes and the insights into how much work he put into constructing his novels and characters.  His writing seems to come effortlessly to him but here we see that there is indeed a great deal of effort in it and he is harshly self-critical.  He writes “Only Fair” opposite one paragraph.  These notes in many ways are more valuable than the unfinished novel because they show the artist in mid brush stroke.  The only thing I don’t find convincing on re-reading is the narrator – the female character Cecilia.   Does he ever try and inhabit another female narrator?  She doesn’t really come alive for me.  I still love the Pat Hobby stories for the shabby view of Hollywood, but here you see that Fitzgerald was seen and appreciated for what he is, when he first went to Hollywood.  Stahr really knows him and appreciates him.

“There are no second acts in American lives.”   Does he use this elsewhere?  What exactly did he mean? Certainly no second act for Monroe Stahr who goes down in flames.

“Action is character.”  I like this, certainly true of the movies, though I vaguely remember something similar from E. M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel?)

The Following Story               Cees Nooteboom

I think I liked it, but how quickly one forgets…. Dutch writer.

Invisible                                 Paul Auster

A brilliant and artfully constructed novel and certainly my favourite of his so far.   It is thrilling and gripping, but also beautifully written.  Highly recommended!

Our Kind of Traitor                         John Le Carré

And I really enjoyed this new John Le Carré – of two innocents abroad falling into the maws of an expansive Russian mob character, desperate to flee with his family to the UK, for whom they act as go betweens with MI6.  Tennis playing Brit lecturer and his lawyer girlfriend, at Roland Garros for Federer final and then Switzerland for the climax.   Will be good TV or movie.

A Royal Passion                     Katie Whitaker

A great book of history written by excellent young Cambridge scholar.  Highly readable story of the weirdo Charles 1^st and his extremely Catholic French wife Henrietta Maria, and how her religiosity, and his stupidly wavering arrogance led to the Civil War and ultimately his execution.  Though in many ways that was the finest thing he did.    His second son would also be thrown off the throne….(James 2^nd) in the Glorious Revolution, where he was dumped by his daughter for turning Catholic.

Finally followed by the dip shit proto Nazi Edward V111.

Portraits in Miniature                      Lytton Strachey

Essays by my favourite historian.

Found a 1931 first edition, signed by The Author.

He writes briefly and very well about people like Voltaire and Boswell, and Historians such as Hume and Gibbon.  Lovely stuff.  It’s because he is so gossipy and campy without being cutting or Queenly and yet his judgement is fair and accurate.   He sympathises with humanity.

The Informant               Thomas Perry

“I am covered with guilt and confusion that I never wrote to tell you how much I enjoyed your latest The Informant.  I had one of those flu’s at Christmas time that was considerably improved and made enjoyable by your book which I tore through as usual.  Thank you so much and please forgive the memory loss, which is actually a good thing, because I can now re-read books much sooner, having forgotten everything immediately…”

A pre-publication present from his daughter Alex, which I devoured in bed during the Christmas flu Season.

 

              2009

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

December

A Moveable Feast                   Ernest Hemingway

Quick re-read of a nice first US edition I picked up in Pasadena.  He’s not really very nice Hemingway is he?   Of course this book is invaluable for the amusing, bitchy and gossipy things he writes about Gertrude Stein (what was Alice B. doing to her upstairs that he couldn’t stay??  )  and about Scott Fitzgerald.  He is very clear that Zelda is bonkers and the problem.  Nice to see this old fashioned view clearly stated, rather than the PC troubled feminist genius who was behind it all really….  (See Mrs Shakespeare….)

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute       Grace Paley

And I picked up a second hand paperback of this to re-read.  I remembered it as something from the sixties and seventies I had enjoyed.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age  Bohumil Hrabal

Picked up from Mr B’s bookshop in Bath.  It’s all written in one sentence and like much experimental writing is finally too damn hard to read.  But I love this writer.

The Wanderers              Richard Price

When I was running out of things to read Michael Chabon suggested Richard Price.  He is very good.  I like the more recent ones since he worked on The Wire!

Strip           Thomas Perry

Thomas sent us his latest novel which comes out next May.   I didn’t get into it quite so much as I did and I’d like to figure out whether it was the flu or the novelist.   I think his writing is in a state of transition, and this is moving to a different kind of writing but I need to look back and see quite where I felt it became disconnected.

The Madoff Chronicles           Brian Ross

A quick coverage of the field.  Fascinating of course.  His fatalism is very interesting – once underway there was really no way for him to get out. He had to keep going until eventual shame and discovery.  So like Mr. Merdle in Our Mutual Friend (Dorrit?) though Madoff doesn’t have the balls to top himself.

September thru November  2009

Coleridge:   Darker Reflections                  Richard Holmes

Part two of a phenomenal poetic biography – and that is the key – his reading and interpretation and quotation from this unruly genius – makes him an unparalleled interpretive poet in his own right.  Fifteen years in the making – his Coleridge is more Coleridgean than Coleridge, and probably more attractive.

The Girl Who Played with Fire         Stieg Larsson

Absolutely addictive page turning staying awake to finish thriller.  Part two of a Trilogy.

God hates us all.                                                Hank Moody

The opening chapters made me laugh out loud.   Very funny version of the lets-get-fucked up and shag school of literature.  But like eating too many scones and clotted cream, in the end I became discontented and bailed.

The Humbling                                                   Philip Roth

Like a mood swing this goes through many changes as the elderly actor suffers memory loss, lack of confidence and a nervous breakdown, only to take up with a young part lesbian lover, who fulfils his every fantasy, including a threesome, after which she inevitably leaves him for the other female. The moral is perhaps: don’t get what you might wish for.

The Chronicles of Hernia                                   Barry Cryer

Laugh out loud title and many wonderful showbiz stories from a man who has had his nose pressed to the glass since he was a lad.   My only concern, apart from the relentless anecdotalising, was his sad plea for an OBE.   Come on lad you can aspire to better than that.  I was wondering if he remembered me – only to find I appeared in the opening sentence of his Prologue.   He and Dick Vosburgh were truly my comic mentors in my early TV writing days, and there is a marvellous Vosburgh story…

Havanas in Camelot                                           William Styron

Memoirs and memories, including a nice one about Terry Southern, whom I met a few times in New York with Mick.   Styron and Capote were contemporaries and watching the play of Breakfast at Tiffany’s I was struck by the similarity of the writer falls for eccentric female theme in that novella and Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and wondered if they both derived from Isherwood’s I am a Camera Berlin stories about Sally Bowles.    In Capote and Isherwood’s versions they are clearly camp longings for a diva – but Styron is not gay and shags his Sally.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s                                        Truman Capote

Of course I had to re-read the book immediately and it is still a flawless masterpiece – a genuine classic.  Far more dramatic and beautifully staged than the play in London, which bewilderingly discards all detail (of set) – which is one of Capote’s strong points – and isolates the actors in an Elvis Jailhouse Rock type set.   Anna Friel is brilliant, but the production is significant for incorporating a brilliant singing and guitar playing actress and then being unable to negotiate the rights for Moon River.   Which says it all.

The Lonely Hearts Club                                     Raul Nunez

I recall nothing and only got about half way.

City of Strangers                                                Ian Mackenzie

And sadly I can recall very little of this, though I apparently finished it.   My only excuse is that I have been travelling extensively and reading omnivorously.

Summertime                                                      J.M. Coetzee

Ok it’s fess up time and I have to confess I am getting tired of Coetzee.  He is prolix and tedious and almost nothing happens.  I bailed half way through with a slight sense of guilt which mellowed into anger that he was not entertaining me.

None of this ever really happened                        Peter Ferry

Recommended by Eggers on the cover and yes it is a nice illustration of the power of storytelling from one who teaches people the art of writing stories  (are you listening J.M. Coetzee.)  He both discusses and illustrates and plays with the theme of storytelling.

The Rich Boy                                                    F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemmingway got it wrong.   Fitzgerald had his finger on something really important: the reason the rich are different is that they are relieved from some of the burdens of feeling, which paralyses their ability to feel.  The hero of this story can never commit and suffers a kind of freezing in life experience from it.  Life simply passes him by.

The Mangan Inheritance                                    Brian Moore

Tried to read this before.   Failed again.

Perforated Hearts                                              Eric Bogosian

Very slight novel.   Nothing sticks.

Lush Life                                                          Richard Price

A fine novel indeed. Most of the book is great.   About two thirds of the way it began to remind me of Tom Wolfe, but then he pulled back from that brink and pulled off the book.

Angels in America                                             Tony Kushner

Re reading of a wonderful play.

Road to Recovery.  Looking Back at Britain.  1950’s.  Brian Moynahan

Good photographs and fine essays about these powerful times.  (research)

Our Times The Age of Elizabeth 11nd.                A.N. Wilson.

Same period, different perspective.     (research)

The Act of Love                                        Howard Jacobson

I didn’t finish.  About a self-willed adultery.   Never my favourite subject.  Here the husband wishes his wife to be unfaithful to him.  Pinter recommends it – they have the same problem clearly.

The Men Who Stare at Goats                     Jon Ronson

I finished this only after enjoying the movie.   Only to discover that this book is far more serious than the movie – and is really about the evil of Abu Grahib and what Psy-ops were really up to.   Often shocking….

Homer and Langley                                  E. L. Doctorow

Two weird brothers who live in a house on fifth.   And their closing down of their own world and rejection of this one.  Odd stuff.

Fame                                                       Tom Payne

From the Bronze Age to Britney – a discussion of the madness known as Fame.   Partly hilarious for discussing English fame cases – which are barely known to me.. e.g. Jade Goodey.

The Colour of Blood                                 Brian Moore

A re-read.

The Maples Stories                                   John Updike

A new collection of short stories.   Over time the Maples realise they are no longer in love and separate.   Clearly themes and characters he returned to over a long period of time.

Me Cheeta                                               James Lever

A great concept and a great opening.   The memoirs of Cheeta Tarzan’s ape.  Hilarious opening chapter about Rex Harrison.   I found the joke soon palled though.   Great gag though it is.   The film memoirs of the real Cheetah from the Tarzan movies…

The Princess of Cleves                              Madame de Lafayette

Translated by Nancy Mitford.    I dipped only.

Nocturnes                                                Kazuo Ishiguro

Five stories of Music and Nightfall.  I liked these inter-related stories about the breakdown of relationships, the failure of love over time.  Thematically linked though music. The guitarist who serenades the divorcing wife of the fading American crooner.  The guest uncomfortably caught between the grinding gears of his ex-college friend’s marriage.  (Come Rain or Shine)  The interloper – the awkward outsider – two couples, his sister and husband (Malvern) and the two “krauts” from Switzerland who quarrel.    Middle aged relationships and the helpless individual caught in the middle.  The narrator is uninvolved.  Puzzled and unable to respond except bizarrely or helplessly.  Even when seduced the narrator is paralysed – like the bandaged sax player next door to the Film Star.  It’s about missing opportunities – a constant theme in his canon.   The cellist and his non-playing female mentor..   They all fail to have sex, though sex is always the elephant in the room.

 

Bath and Return July through end of August 2009

Heliopolis                                                James Scudamore

Fine yarn, Booker entry.  Set in a Sao Pao shanty town.  Again it’s Copperfield, rags to riches, a little Pip too – rich benefactor.  The hero is bought by a rich family and is in love with his adoptive sister.  Can he ruin his opportunities or will he smartly succeed in advertising?  The plot is to find his own identity, his real father.  The revelation though brings nothing much.  Artfully written but doubtful winner.

The Black Prince                                      Iris Murdoch

Picked up this first edition in Bath.  An hilarious book.  A rather pretentious fussy little divorced writer – Bradley Pearson – the very name describes his tight little world – has finally decided to leave London to write his masterpiece, when the world intrudes on his doorstep – in the shape of ex-wives, best friends wives, brothers of ex-wives, suicidal sisters, in other words farce, but masterfully handled, and always with the discussion of art, the art of the novel, irony and its place in novel writing.   In this vein she is really first rate.

The trouble with Iris Murdoch is she is very good at action but then her characters talk and talk and talk and talk….. till we are sick to death of them, even more than they are sick to death of each other.   The dangers of prolixity…and the action virtually stops dead.

 

So she is an odd bird.   While commencing in farce she pushes on into deeper and rather more uncomfortable territory.  So prissy Bradley (58)– so snottily against his ex-wife Chris – falls in love with Julian (20).  We are uncertain whether she means us to laugh at his over-emotional joy/jealousy/panic as he writes so lengthily about his love.  The next thing he is throwing up in Covent Garden because he is with her (or because of Richard Strauss) and the next thing she loves him too.   She is really like a dramatist with stark changes of plot and character.  The characters twist and change with sudden moods exposed in eternally long soliloquy.   So yes an odd bird.   Was she as good as she might be?  Isn’t there something that is not deliberately funny about all this Henry Jamesian introspection.  Shall I continue?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo                           Steig Larsson

A pot boiler for the trip to Orca, and not a bad one, and the pot wasn’t bad either.  An undoubted page turner.  A high class murder mystery that reads like a real crime Monster of Florence type book.   A Swedish magazine writer is set up for a libel case, and is then seduced into solving a forty year old disappearance of a teenager from a particularly unpleasant wealthy industrial family.   Involving serial murders and sadistic abductions passed down in the family ( can this be true?) the eponymous girl with the tattoo is a very strange creation, both super computer sleuth, and borderline malfunction weirdo.  The sequel is heavily trailered at the end of the book, perhaps to prevent you noticing how unsatisfactorily and peremptorily it ended.   So in many ways more serial TV than serial murder.  But a great holiday read I picked up in Seattle airport when I mistakenly packed a paperback edition of Philip Roth’s Indignation only to realise I had read it recently.  Thank God for this reading diary.

How It Ended                                                    Jay McInerney

Sometimes when picking up books again, or when continuing to re-read from where I left out they seem a lot better than had at first appeared to me,  These short stories for example.   I have really enjoyed the later stories: e.g. his telling of Philomena.   His themes are betrayal, adultery, the suspicion of love failing, the falling apart of couples, particularly after marriage, childbirth and pregnancy (abortion too: he is a Catholic after all.) He writes of these things honestly and with no squirming or ducking both the selfish male search for sexual release and the female hardening of the hearteries.  In his work I like the older more mature voice.  (Putting Daisy Down) I think he can develop into a great writer, he has the skill, the time and the control.   Failing to connect, Manhattan man, the pressure of the city – especially post 911 – and the ennui of the commuters Connecticut.

 

France…  July 2009

Terrorist                                                           John Updike

Wrong man for the job.   The prolix Updike writing a thriller is a mistake.   Thrillers are all action.   Short description.  Short sentences.  Then this happens.   Then that happened.   Updike is all about language.  He completely loses the plot which is the most essential element of a thriller.  Here it creaks and is poorly delivered (especially the climax).  It gets drowned in his sentences. So that while the minor characters are all beautifully described and their worlds perfectly manifest, they are still just that – minor characters in a story that needs to unfold with some kind of tension.  Is Ahmet the too pure whose alienation drives him to a Muslim God going to become a suicide bomber.  Who is the terrorist in the title?   Is it ironic?  Will they succeed?   All the elements of the thriller are present but none of the essential drive.  His way of writing is layers of observation in gentle reality –  the overweight teachers, the saggy art aspirers, a corpulent old wife too bloated to leave the Lazy Boy.   These accurately observed details are wonderful Updike but since the genre is Thriller these details lessen the tension and they ultimately derail the novel.   I’m still unsure what happened at the end.

A Short History of Myth                                     Karen Armstrong

Too long for me….  Who is this woman who appears everywhere writing about God?   Apparently a former nun who lost her faith appeared on the BBC and then found it again writing 20 books on God.  Poor old God.

Closing Time                                                     Joseph Heller

I had the feeling I had read this and now I know why, I had. Only this time I’m really enjoying it.  Heller is really funny.   Yossarian in hospital determined to get the doctors to find out he is really sick though he has no symptoms is a hoot.     Heller keeps doing the negative option – the funny option in language (nonsense?) that we reject as absurd.   It is a rich vein for him

Here what I wrote in October 1994.  “Ominously  described as a sequel to Catch 22 it has desperation in every page.   There are flashes and of course the same names but much more in common with the dull endless unshaped rambling of Something Happened.     I closed early.”

Well this time I liked it a lot more and it’s true that I didn’t finish it this time, but next year I shall.   Heller is very funny, the funniest of all his contemporary Jewish/American literary novel writers.   His contempt for Washington and all human institutions, his knowledge of the depth of corruption of industrial man, his appreciation of greed and self-interest as the major motive of mankind Heller has a Swiftian vision of bureaucracy.  Yossarian goes to hospital determined to prove he is sick, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Paradox is his field.  The Chaplain pees heavy water and is disappeared by the security forces.   His contempt for “that prick in the White House.   He is very Pythonic as he takes the absurd seriously.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union                  Michael Chabon

Tania complained she couldn’t get into this and I encouraged her to try again next year.   Like me the first time she was put off by all the unfamiliar Jewish terms.   However I picked up the book again a year later and loved it.   Here I glanced at it and was immediately seduced into re-reading it and I loved it more than ever.   It is an almost perfect novel, where the writing and the language match and mirror the action in a breath-taking way that is apparent only in the great classics of Dickens, or say Gatsby.    It is a masterpiece masquerading as a detective story.

The Gulag Archipelago                              Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Wow.   Now I know why it is a classic.   Utterly gripping expose of the Soviet world since the revolution and under the monstrous Stalin, in the form of an autobiography of the author as victim of the system, so that amongst the essay type writing there is a developing story of what happened to Solzhenitsyn once he was arrested (during the war).  Plus the perfidy of the Brits in handing over hundreds of thousands of Russians, opponents of Stalinism, to it’s revenge.   A reminder that revolution always leads to authoritarianism  (France, Cromwell etc)  which leaves the country suffering a far worse fate than that it set out to over throw.

 The Professor of Desire                             Philip Roth

A history of childhood adolescence and early manhood.   An American Nickleby, but unlike Dickens the entire post-Lawrence era of writing incorporates directly and here specifically the interior sexual life of the author.   The randy, often Jewish, youth propelled into a world of desire and temptation.   Usually as here  there is some adjustment to and acceptance of the final winning of the female.  Oddly the theme here comes to be the anxiety that desire and not love will be that which will not survive.  An odd and quirky view – a nostalgia for your own rut – but if he were not odd and quirky he would not be the author of Portnoy.  Does his extreme sexual obsession make him a kind of Jewish Henry Miller?   (We see the same thing, handled skilfully, by William Boyd – especially the two young Swedish girls in France syndrome.   Where are these girls when you need them?)  But in this novel there is the tragedy of his girlfriend being betrayed and tormented by her own seduction by him and her friend.

Roth writes really well, but about two thirds of the way through with the contrived and sentimentally written return of his former wife, it becomes rather soap operatic.  Somehow untrue.   And contrived.    And though the character of the father lifts the book somehow the novel failed to nail the maturation of the young man thrust into the world theme – for he has yet to discard the adolescent obsession with perfect sensuality which also defines the grown up.

Interpreter of Maladies                              Jhumpa Lahiri

The most wonderful collection of short stories.   An absolute thrill to read.  Often concerned with the diasporic Indian experience, Indians in the US particularly.   I really was delighted by her writing and cannot recommend too highly

 The Apple                                                Michael Faber

A collection of short stories that does not appeal to me.  I don’t get Faber.  And what is his obsession with underage Victorian prostitutes.   I think it’s very posey….

 Don’t tell Alfred                                       Nancy Mitford

I recognised the tone immediately as Mrs Dale.   Odd because a few pages later one of the characters referred to her!  This is a fairly funny book.  Mitford isn’t quite Waugh – the prose is not up to it – but she is no slouch at comedy either.  Here a wry look at a plain Jane (Austen) type called Fanny, married to a quiet Oxford theology professor, who is suddenly and unexpectedly transformed into the British Ambassador to Paris, allowing her to be funny about both Oxford and the French.  She tries to create in Northey ( A young Scottish female assistant with whom every Frenchman becomes instantly besotted) a major comic character, but it doesn’t come off in quite the same way as Uncle Matthew.  Partly because her sexual life is somewhat ambivalent, so we don’t quite know if she is bonking all these French diplomats or just teasing them.   This ambivalence is fatal to our liking or not a rather self-indulgent character.

Descartes’ Secret Notebook                        Amir  D.  Aczel

Unfinished.  I’ll return.  And I did, but skipping.  Fuzzy writing about math.  I feel Descartes is more interesting than the writer.  The interesting thing is Descartes establishes the connection between math and philosophy which was to dominate and determine the course of philosophy.  He is presented as a timid man who is intimidated by the terrible trial of Galileo by the terrorists of the Inquisition, and who prevents the publication of his own book supporting the Copernican theory.  He has a mathematical proof for the existence of God, but by denying everything and suggesting everything is false he comes up with the I think therefore I am concept.

 

La  Place de la Concorde Suisse                 John McPhee

More than you ever really wanted to know about the Swiss and their ever ready army.  History, geography, philosophy – he defends the Swiss from Orson Welle’s abusive characterisation of their history compared to the Italians under the Borgias as leading to the cuckoo clock.   They fought very hard for their freedoms and are prepared to defend it against all comers.  And their uniting of separate nationalities, Swiss, French and German, though cantonically and ethnically divided, is an example to the world.

 

July 2009

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece                        Jane Hamilton

A brilliantly written opening chapter in superb prose leads one into high expectations which are soon dashed and lead to gnashing of teeth and book tossing.  I began to sense I wouldn’t love it when the female protagonist and narrator casually said her husband’s sex life was bothering her and blithely announced she was stopping engaging in it.   Then she intellectually falls for an improbable talk radio hostess and then decides to write a novel and then her  husband Charles Rider and she cannot resist showing us her knowingness about Brideshead – which she admires instead as we all know it is a very sentimental novel about love for alcoholic upper class English boys and oh well I tossed the damn thing in a shout of frustration.

April – June  2009

Henry VIII                             William Shakespeare

Henry VIII Part 1                   William Shakespeare

Henry VIII Part 2                   William Shakespeare

Henry VIII Part 3                   William Shakespeare

Richard III                            William Shakespeare

Richard II                              William Shakespeare

Henry IV Part 1                      William Shakespeare

Henry IV Part 1                      William Shakespeare

Henry V                                 William Shakespeare

 

This was White History month for this History Boy as he became first interested and then obsessed with Shakespeare’s History plays.    In the month of Michael Jackson’s death it’s good to remember that Dead White Guys are still interesting.    Triggered by Stephen Greenblatt’s remarkable and wonderful biography of Shakespeare I began to read Henry VIII because I never had and because in the new play John and I are working we were considering ending the First Act with a full Tudor song (No one as rude as The Tudors) sung by Anne Boleyn and Wolsey (A Long Farewell to all my former greatness) and I figured it was time I read the play.   It certainly seemed largely Shakespeare to me – who is now keen on deputing all second rate scenes (particularly comedy) to other collaborators.   Anyway I enjoyed H8 – sounds like a Tudor football score – Henry 8 Wives 6.  The Pelican paperbacks are fine and easy to read with readily accessible but not intrusive notes, so you can glance down if you are puzzled but mainly just read them.   I began with the Henry VI trilogy because I had not realised how big early hits they were for the Shakester (I know I hate that too) – and was surprised how fabulous they are as great reading.   Dramatic, fast moving, action packed and filled with great characters (Margaret!) they could easily be the Sopranos, Deadwood or some other kind of HBO series.   We are gripped and engrossed in the power struggles around the throne of the young Henry, watch alliances forming and betrayals happening (Godfather time) and the dramatic beginning of the War of the Roses which like any feuding powers are always the same – jealousies, rage, envies, lust for power and title.   I happily sailed into the more familiar Richard III (Dick The Third as Cheney should be known) and the wonderful villainous character which shows Shakespeare’s maturing interest in character and externalising the internal thoughts of the protagonist – here magnificently used for black comic effect.  What a simple device – to have the character speak directly to us about himself – and yet how richly it becomes vital to his dramas and enables The Shake to show what only the future novel is able to reveal – the subtleties and unconscious ironies of the way we think and behave.   Because of the multi tracked nature of our minds we can be saying one thing and thinking several others and still be misleading ourselves and how to deal with this is one of the interesting problems of writing and creation.   I’m unsure if Marlowe is the great evolver of this (as Coleridge is the great evolver of Wordsworth) but Elizabethan theatre is an extraordinary burgeoning and blossoming of this vastly mature and revealing new form and it enables Shakespeare to evolve from a simple plot motivated form to finally deep and penetrating studies of human consciousness (Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth)

 

So the usurpation of the throne by Richard the serial killer leads to the dangerous legitimacy of the Tudors and I shot back in time as did Shakespeare with the second Richard – a so called weak King attacked for his follies, corrupted by his tax needs to help himself to others inheritances and attacked and replaced by the modern politically astute Bolingbroke.  Shakespeare then switches into internalising the tragedy of the death of Kings and the mortality of man and it is in this play that he steps up and shows us what will become the mature study of the agonising ambivalence of life pointing the way to so much more to come.

 

It was with the second Henriad that I became surprisingly disenchanted with the Histories.   For a start the poetry slips away and is replaced by large dosages of prose – and turgid comic prose at that.  I would like to believe someone else wrote these comic scenes.   I found myself surprisingly uninterested in the massive comic figure of Falstaff, who seemed indulgent, unpleasant and unfunny.   I was even more surprised when I found that the O Level play Part 2 was even worse.   The whole farcical world – though clearly a hit – just didn’t interest me – I preferred the high drama of the many revolts – with Hotspur and the haverings of Northumberland, and by the time I hit Henry V, the prig of all time with its chauvinistic and unpleasant and unironic appeal to popular English sentiment (let’s kill all the prisoners – one of the great unchivalrous massacres of all time) this “hero” left me cold.    So there you are.

Will in The World          Stephen Greenblatt

The prime mover in all this Shakespeare mania, my old pal Stephen Jay Greenblatt as he used to be known in my day.   What a truly wonderful book, both an imaginative and sensitive biography but a constructive and an exciting reading of the plays – so we see when in the course of his life Shakespeare wrote what.   It made me immediately want to read Shakespeare which of course I did.   But I shall also re-read this book as it is full of so many wonderful insights into the life and times of this extraordinary human being.   The beginnings with Shakespeare spending some time in a Catholic household are conjectural, but it serves to place the plays in the context of the dangers of the Reformation where today’s belief is tomorrows burning and from the Archbishops staff to the scaffold is but a short step.  The extraordinarily violent world is emphasised with the death of Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great rival and teacher, and for a while one can see this rivalry with the younger Shakespeare endeavouring to compete with the glittering and sexually alluring star of the other company.  The other insight was that many of these plays were collaborative in the way that screen writing today’s is, though it is still perfectly obvious to me which is Shakespeare through the richness of the most amazing poetry in the language.

Coleridge             Early Visions 1772-1804    Richard Holmes

Another big influence on me book.   I had not realised quite how indebted Wordsworth was to the quick fire genius and penetrating thought of Coleridge.   Yes he was a young firebrand with idiotic schemes to found new hippy colonies on the banks of the Susquehanna but mercifully penury spared him the ability to do that.  His love of being high, hand in hand with his delight in stalking the hills by moonlight means that his poetry is often far more interesting and exciting than the more prosaic Wordsworth – indeed I read the Lyrical Ballads again recently and found them limpid – as I did before.   Interestingly cunningly manipulates Wordsworth off the credit list for Lyrical Ballads while still maintaining the best poem – the Ancient Mariner.   I believe in Part 2 the addiction becomes more profound and this rather attractive Coleridge is replaced by a less admirable man – but  here one feels all the sympathy for a loving man, trapped in a slightly loveless marriage, and constantly having to deny his sexuality.  What a great hippy he would have been – though probably he would have just turned into Tim Leary and had too much sex and not enough Philosophy.   In many ways Coleridge has always struck me as being like Jonathan Miller with the most tremendously engaging and wide ranging mind.   A Stephen Fry too.   Great book.  Great fun.

Lyrical Ballads              William Wordsworth

I mistyped Lyrical Balls but I think that was more accurate.  Surprisingly uninteresting poems the book survives for its polemical preface, most of which is taken straight from Coleridge.  I read it on Kindle. I do like Wordsworth – some of the sonnets are exquisite and I am very fond of The Prelude and the Intimations Ode.

When China Ruled the Seas              Louise Levathes

The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405 – 1433

Monstrous ships, monster fleets.  Who knew?   Not I.

The Goshawk                T. H .White

A lovely book on hawks and hawking, and the indomitable author who attempts to train one.  The finest prose.   Beautiful classic given me for Christmas by Lauren Hutton.  (Along with the McPhee Annals – so let us here no more about the intelligence of models….)

Shakespeare Wrote for Money                   Nick Hornby

More of the digested bits from the Believer.  Two years of monthly instalments which made me a Believer and which sadly he has now ceased leaving me a high and dry subscriber with very little interest in what they write about.

The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant           Pablo Tusset

Ok in a kind of muffin way.   Stud muffin.   An adventure story whose resolution happens to be a bit disappointing, the Illuminati or some kind of secret society maintaining secret HQ’s in Barcelona, but up to that moment it is mercifully Dan Brown free and highly entertaining, and certainly no worse than the idiotic conspiracy world we have to swallow in Dan Brown books.   What I am saying is he is more Fleming and entertaining than Flaubert and none the worse for that.

A Strange Eventful  History              Michael Holroyd

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families   and about as interesting as any book on actors could be.   One of the books Mike Nichols sent me for Christmas so I read along for a while And then sorta lost interest in them.   Nothing wrong with it.  Or me either.  Theatrical people don’t really interest me.

All The Tea in China              Kyril Bonfiglioli

I was excited to find this in San Fran as I knew this author has been dead a while.   I loved his Mordecai series and here he writes with fine wit an improbable adventure tale of the opium trade.   This must be some undiscovered early book.   He is still fun to read but how I yearn for a new one…

The Wanderers                       Richard Price

Muscular Brooklynism.  Aggressive teens with drugs and gangs.  Growing up in New York America.

The Missionary and The Libertine              Ian Buruma

Love and War in East and West.    Essays and histories of Asia, Hong Kong, 25 illuminating essays.  He is always fascinating.

Jeff in Venice.   Death in Varanasi

The most disappointing book of the year.   Oh dear.   Jeff Dyer’s attempt to become popular.  Or maybe make a movie.   About a sexy author who comes from England on a freebie for a journal and gets shagged by an American.   Oh God forbid.   He thinks he is the hottest thing in pants and here he looks like a twat.  More irony in the soul please.   It is ok to get shagged by pretty girls if you are an author but it doesn’t endear you to us…

Manhood for Amateurs

A new pal Michael Chabon gave me his new book, a series of essays on paternity and marriage.   Thoughtful and always honest, he reveals himself to be as intelligent and sweet and funny as, well, his books do.

March  2009

The Control of Nature             John McPhee

The control of the Mississippi Flood threat by the US Army Corps of Engineers (written long before Katrina) the heroic fight of a few Icelanders against and defeat of the lava flow, using hoses and water pumps, and the continual threat to Los Angeles of debris flows and the struggle to control them.   All pieces written for the New Yorker

Bech is Back                          John Updike

Good to remember what a wonderful writer Updike was, and this was fun to re-read the return of his alter ego, the writer Bech and his struggles with being single, married and divorced and feeling the obligation to publish.  This came out in 1982 and contains this prescient piece.

America at heart is black, he saw .  Snuggling into the jazz that  sings to our bones, we feel that the Negro lives deprived and naked among us, and that when the castle of credit cards collapses a black god will redeem us.

 

Bech:  a Book                         John Updike

Richly, wittily and poetically written these tales of the fictional alter ego of a blocked mid-life American writer as he travels to Russia and Rumania and London, as he leaves one sister for another on the beaches of Long Island, as he examines the meaninglessness of existence, and pointlessness of literary fame compared to the Universe, without ever surrendering his hold on either, makes this breath-taking little book, published in 1970, still a gem, and still glow incandescent in the flame of his bright prose, ensuring that he will be read long after this year of his death and has truly ascended into the Pantheon of the notable that he so wonderfully mocked with perhaps the greatest literary list of names since Fitzgerald.

How It Ended                Jay McInerney

Short stories.   Sex and coke and anxiety.  Rather more anxiety.  It’s in Cheever land, but cannot achieve what he does.

Road Dogs                    Elmore Leonard

The latest.  Jack Foley the Out of Sight (Clooney) bandit returns.

Twelfth Night                William Shakespeare

Here they Come             Yannick Murphy

Campo Santo                 W.G. Sebald

Re-reading the magnificent

Catching Life By The Throat    Edited Josephine Hart

Great poems, selected.(with CD)

Coffee with Dickens                         Paul Schlick

A pot boiler made up of quotes.

Everything Ravaged Everything Burned     Wells Tower

Excellent short stories.  Steamy and weird.

Angels and Ages            Adam Gopnik

A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life

Agnotology                             Edited by Robert Proctor

Essays.

Under the Skin                       Michael Faber

Rather nasty short stories.  He’s not for me

The Beautiful and the Damned         F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Re read a little.

February

Dance for the Dead                 Thomas Perry

This is a Jane Whitefield novel – she is the Seneca Indian who helps people disappear from nasty people.  I had got half way through when I realised I had already read it…

At Large                       Anne Fadiman

The essayist daughter of an essayist.  The best essays are on Coleridge and Lamb, whom she loves, and reveals as far more interesting than his rap.

Red Carpet Suicide                 Perez Hilton

At least this weasel’s book attempted to be amusing.   Read for research.  It’s a ten minute glance.   A jog through a jumped up blogger’s self-congratulatory world.

Six Degrees of Paris Hilton              Mark Ebner

Unreadable.  Possibly the worst book I have ever read.  Totally piss poor.  As befits the subject.

Wishful Drinking                    Carrie Fisher

Hilarious memoirs from Princess Leia, honed and refined from her stage act of the same name.   Genuinely laugh out loud funny.  What are the odds of reading two books consecutively where the heroine wakes up next to a dead man?   Here in fact, a shocking accidental OD and here…

Play It As It Lays                    Joan Didion

…..in fiction to a suicidal overdose.   Emergency Beach re-reading as also with

Nature Girl                            Carl Hiassen

Like a Jimmy Buffet song thus more of a snack than a meal.   But pleasant ocean side reading and a tribute to the high quality of discards from the former Villa Del Sol, Zihuantanejo.   Actually I think I probably left it originally!

Here They Come                     Yannick Murphy

I noted nothing.   I think I was liking it.   An elegantly produced McSweeney.

The Crimson Petal and the White      Michael Faber

Faux Dickens.  Faux writing.   About the usual teenage prostitute in Victorian times.  I don’t think this is the real thing.

The Chimes                            Charles Dickens

Described as a Goblin story – nothing of Dickens is not worth reading, and it’s direct approach of grabbing you by the coat tails and talking directly to the reader is nothing short of gripping if not perhaps originating here but I bailed when it came to the Fairies.   The Ghosts of Christmas past are far more acceptable because they mirror our appreciation of our former and our future selves, with the exciting possibility of change and redemption, which is the Victorian Christmas message.

January  2009

Annals of the Former World             John McPhee

Already my book of the year.  It is both Bible and Paradise Lost.  To read this book is to change for ever your thinking about the nature of the Earth and Time.  The most poetic book since Paradise Lost, the richness of its language, swathed in the highly poetic language of geology, so many words are encountered for the first time, that it is best simply to bathe in their unlooked up instinctive understanding. To appreciate the importance of the speed of evolution, between the constant stream of disasters, and the shortness of time we have in which to evolve and avert catastrophe.  The patient rise and fall of mountain systems, the constant subduction of continents, the continual spreading of the ocean floor.  All is motion.   Time is motion.  The earth crackles and moans as its tectonic plates rub and move against each other, magma rises, oceans grow, continents decline and fall, mountain systems rise to be instantly washed away by rivers , this is On The Road for the Planet.  McPhee a brilliant linguist is a companion of geologists, his understanding and constant interpretation of what they are telling him about the rise and folds of the geology of the earth as sampled along I 80, which spans America and unfurls it’s history like an incision in a cadaver.  So that the bearded men with hammers, who explore the copper history of Cypress, the anomalous island, where 200 year old slag heaps are environmentally protected as middens of industrial history, give us insight into the ancient industry of arms manufacture and the arms race of the Bronze Age.   And those words, the poetic language of geology, combined with tremendous erudition, that mark the man who loves words.  A monumental book.    A gift from my soul sister and Lily’s Fairy Godmother,  Lauren Hutton

Anglomania                  Ian Buruma

Fairly readable essays on fans of England  – such as Voltaire – with the occasional dissenter

The Nasty Bits                        Anthony Bourdain

The trouble with reading books about food is they either make you hungry or disgusted….

The Wordy Shipmates             Sarah Vowell

Rather dull history of the Puritans.

The Silver Swan                     Benjamin Black

Excellent Irish detective fiction by John Banville.  Well up to standard.

The Rover            Joseph Conrad

Swashbuckling historical romance set after the Revolution on the coast near Toulon.

The Portable Atheist

Selected readings for the Non believer selected by Christopher Hitchens, sent me by his co-editor Ben Schafer.   Fabulous stuff.

 

 

 

 

If there is anything more boring than being interviewed it is writing about being interviewed, oh wait blogging about being interviewed might be more boring.
              2008

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

December

The Master of Petersburg        J.M. Coetzee

Reads like a translation from another language.  I found the Father’s obsession with his dead son slightly sinister.

Homecoming                          Bernard Schlink

Is a translation

Something to Tell You             Hanif Kureishi

Some of these new young English novelists can’t end their novels. Like that girl… They get them started and running and then they just go on and on.  This starts strongly and just stops except he can’t stop it for 126 pages later, and even then he doesn’t know what to do with it.    Where are the English editors?   That at least keeps the Yanks more honest.

1423       Gavin Menzies.

The sequel to 1421.   No, honest.   Fascinating if not particularly well written theory that the Chinese started the Renaissance.   Quite convincing.   In particular the details of the Chinese fleets and their maps which seem to have got into the hands of both Magellan and Columbus.   Half way to a blog this book with constant references to his website.  Be nicer and more complete without this but I guess that’s the contemporary world.

The Lost Decade            F. Scott Fitzgerald

Another chance to read the Pat Hobby stories.   I liked them as much but this time his character seemed far more the scheming drunk and far less the sympathetic writer trapped in the harsh world of movies.  Perhaps a second layer of self-hatred that I had not noticed before.

The Dynasties of China           Bamber Gascoigne

A very elegant and eloquent quick glance through Chinese history – often through the viewpoint of art and artefact.

The China Lover           Ian Buruma

A most wonderful novel in three parts – with three separate narrators about the Japanese/Chinese film star before during and after WW2.  I found the first part great but the other two less so as the novel progressed.  His writing is wonderfully well informed and I have been reading more of his work.  I bought this for several people as Christmas presents and was quite impressed by it.

The Book of Dead Philosophers        Simon Critchley

Offered a chance to blurb this but declined.  The opening essay is great but the rest is a series of collected snapshots.

October / November

Child 44                        Tom Rob Smith

Cancer Ward                 Alexander Solzhenitsyn  (E)

The Autograph Man      Zadie Smith   (E)

At half the length this book would be twice as good.  Eventually she gets bogged down and it all slows up.

A Most Wanted Man      John Le Carré

Long and I’m sorry he doesn’t write well.

White Tiger                   Aravind Adiga

Magnificent worthy winner of the Booker.   Really great.

Indignation                            Philip Roth

Magnificent.  Beautifully written short novel about youth, fathers, girls, mothers and wars.   His prose is extraordinarily fine, his grip is phenomenal and he gets to the heart of the matter of growing up.

Man in the Dark                     Paul Auster

Parallel worlds Sci-fi.

Letters to a Young Contrarian           Christopher Hitchens

Excellent advice from an old contrarian.

Gentlemen of the Road                     Michael Chabon

Like a young person’s tale.

Prince of Pleasure                  Saul David

Fascinating tales of another Prince of Wales.  The self-indulgent fat fuck who became Regent and eventually George 1V.

Armageddon in Retrospect                Kurt Vonnegut

Writings about war.

Stark                            Edward Bunker

Like a fifties LA novel written in the sixties.  Less noir than gris.

Haroun                         Salman Rushdie

Clothing Optional          Alan Zweibel   (autographed with bill)

As I say in the blurb “Reading Alan Zweibel makes me laugh out loud.   And yet it is not a particularly funny name.”

Left in Dark Times                  Bernard-Henri Levy     (autographed)

What is the sound of one hand wanking.   The sound of a French intellectual defining his position on the left away from anyone else on the left.

America’s Hidden History                Kenneth C. Davis

And most of America’s history is hidden, since it has to be re-interpreted as myth.   (Or why should God bless America?)

The English Major                          Jim Harrison

When Men Become Gods                 Stephen Singular

Far too much about Warren Jeffs,  I get it so I junked it.

 

 

Retour – July thru September

The Monster of Florence                  Douglas Preston

Fascinating true life mystery of an American exile caught up in the sinister events of a serial killer who preys on young lovers in the Tuscan hills, the calamitous effects of a prejudiced investigator, who puts theory ahead of facts.  Well written, well researched, I couldn’t put this down.

Samuel Pepys        The Unequalled Self     Claire Tomalin

A magnificent biography of the great diarist – he kept his diary only for a few (crucial) years – the Plague and the Great Fire and visits to His Majesty Charles II.  He started off as an ardent Cromwellian – whom he always admired above any Kings – and managed to keep his job in the Naval Office at the Restoration –the finest flowering of British diplomacy.  Any other country would have descended into Civil War again – the Brits perhaps because they had just been through it, managed a transition that enabled the useless House of Stuart to resume its selfish living – but not for long since J2 Chucks selfish brother would manage to lose it all again.  When you think of those hapless Stuarts – one beheaded, one restored, one thrown out, you realise that Kingship was definitely not their strong suit. Catholicism shagging and pox.   What followed – the bloodless Dutch son in law, the helplessly fecund Anne and finally the House of Hanover  – 32^nd in line to the throne but for the Protestant exclusion clause.

 

The Wonder Boys                            Michael Chabon

I have been reading Michael Chabon backwards.   It’s interesting to see his development from the exquisite short story writing to handling larger themes and longer books.   This is a funny comic novel which became a funny film.   But he moves beyond this.

A Model World                                Michael Chabon

See above.   Short stories, but I prefer

Werewolves in their Youth                Michael Chabon.

I particularly like this collection of later short stories.   But with Chabon it is the unexpected brilliance of the prose which brings delight, the sudden insight.  I find he has an uncanny effect to create atmosphere and scene, so that almost before you read the line your mind has glimpsed the visual element of the moment he is describing.  This is nothing short of genius.

The Final Solution                                   Michael Shabon

Old Sherlock, finds a missing parrot,   Stunning.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh              Michael Chabon

His openings and his writing are so fabulous.  This is early work and shows slightly towards the end.  Gay love triangle for ambivalent son of gangster father who is enchanted by two characters who fail to enchant me in quite the same way – particularly Cleveland, whom we are invited to admire but who seems just a poseur fuck up.   Perhaps time would lend distance to the way he feels now about these characters.   Still brilliant writing.

The Wrecking Crew                Thomas Frank

I liked the long extract in Harpers but this full book is too depressing.  Who are these people?  How come Abramov is the only one in jail?  How come Norquist still has a job?   How come America doesn’t notice that these gangsters have taken over?   Good writing but terrifying conclusions.

The Overlook                Michael Connelly

An ok crime novel about an unlikely misdirection for a murder – a wife frames a terrorist plot to steal radiated goods from cancer hospitals? Driving past the location The Mulholland Overlook I realised that the Madonna house is far too far away and on the wrong side of the hill for any Madonna stalker to have witnessed anything of the supposed crime.   The book is like that – flakey.   Read on my Reader on a flight to Chicago.

Love, etc                       Julian Barnes

I wasn’t taken with this when I first read it and I’m not now.   The telegram form of novel with interlocking voices.   Almost like a script.   Too like a script in fact.   But a copy I bought at Book Fair because it was signed and I like him.  Seems to be about Martin Amis and wife stealing. I read it in 2000 and noted this:  “Academic rather than compelling narrative structure fails to ignite.”    Still holds true for me.

Kavalier & Clay             Michael Chabon

A novel I was convinced at the start I would certainly re-read, by the end I was not so sure.  But still a major achievement.   Almost a Russian novel.  About an escapee from the Nazis in New York who creates comic books with his pal, and the devastating loss of his brother torpedoed on a convoy which spins him out of control and into hiding until his own son helps him escape into the present.   Ecstatically fine writing, involving Houdini and a flawless historical recreation of  America in the forties and fifties.  Deservedly a winner of prizes.  Puts him instantly in the first rank of contemporary American novelists.  (And world.)

Runner                         Thomas Perry

The author kindly gave me an early copy of his latest Jane Whitefield novel which is not due for release until next January (09)   As I had just read a pair of his Jane Whitefield novels I was struck by the lack of energy and credibility at the start of this one – after a five year absence – perhaps due to a contractual obligation.  But he soon had me caught up into the story of pursuit and hiding that are the themes of this character’s stories.

The Enchantress of Florence            Salman Rushdie

While entertained for a while I failed to be enchanted.  The unfortunate aspect of this romantic form is that it is essential Sci-fi.  The world is made up.  Therefore anything can happen.  Largely things due to the dictates of the author.   And therefore who cares?   Not I, said the absenting Sparrow.

Maps and Legends                  Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon brilliantly defines a sub set of creative endeavour which includes Conan Doyle, and sixties British rock, and probably Monty Python which invites the subsequent participation of the audience.   This finds its apogee in the web.  It begins, he argues, with Sherlockian writings and the countless body of work that Holmes inspires, but in a sense all drama is this – in so far as Shakespeare requires constant interpretation or presentation by actors and directors.   Perhaps after all our imaginations which create worlds from the form of words placed on a page are the first stage of this.  Indeed all story telling involves the imagination of a participant, it is just perhaps that our communications having grown so massively include so many more millions that now the fan is not just a passive but an active participant.

It is a brilliant definition of modern “entertainment”, which he goes out of his way to name and encourage, pointing out that pleasure is the highest principle in all artistic endeavour.   (While observing that money is the encouragement of most writing.)   He destroys literary snobbery in one essay – well two – and establishes himself as not just the leading writer but the leading critic of this time.

Perhaps a little too much about comics to satisfy a non-comic reader.

American Eve       Paula Uruburu

Rather poorly written for an associate professor of English – with lots of gushing girly prose and no end of cliché “And to put the vanilla ice cream on the cherry pie” which should have had her fired from any decent English department, and bags of unnecessary editorialising where description would suffice, nevertheless if you speed through the early chapters and get to the gist the story is so enthralling and the characters so amazing that the book becomes spell binding despite its author.    That the unfortunate sixteen year old Evelyn Nesbit should be drugged and seduced by the 58 year old roué architect Stanford White in his Manhattan love nest complete with red velvet swing, while mother is conveniently sent back to Pittsburgh to visit relatives may be considered unfortunate, but to inspire and become involved with the lunatic millionaire sadist Harry K. Thaw, whose passion is partly inspired by his hatred of White, to confess all to him and then be raped by him in Paris, and then to still go on and marry him, leads to the appalling tragic denouement where Thaw shoots White to death in the open air Manhattan Gardens before a thousand people, incurring two famous trials which to his chagrin result in his being declared mad, leaving our Evelyn penniless and broken by her honest testimony which saves her husband’s life and her subsequent dumping by both her mother and millionaire step mother.  The beginnings of tabloidism and sensationalism in public trials and the expose of the lives of the rich and famous.

Intelligence in War                          John Keegan

Nelson’s intelligence in his pursuit of and destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, Stonewall Jackson’s use of local knowledge in his brilliant campaign in The Shenandoah Valley.

If you take warfare as the norm of relationships between societies then this shows the value of knowing more about the enemy that they do.

The Concrete Blonde              Michael Connelly

A very effective and enjoyable thriller.

Fatherland                    Robert Harris

A fine mystery science fiction where Hitler and the Nazis are still in power in the sixties in Germany and most of Russia.   A German detective aids an American journalist to expose the hidden history of the mysterious disappearance of the Jews which has been successfully covered up.

Holiday Reading  mid-June – mid July

On the plane I re-read on my Reader:

God is Not Great            Christopher Hitchens

Parts of.   A nice sequel to reading the rather prolix Dawkins.  Dawkins jabs his finger at you in the urgency of his persuasion, Hitchens sits back with a martini and laconically skewers the world of Deism.

Paradise Lost                 John Milton

Still as beautiful – and as baffling as religion.  There was a War in Heaven??  And the losers are chained in hell to torment mankind so that they can have Free Will.   This to overcome the argument that an omniscient God might prevent untold misery and if he can foretell everything that why cannot he forewarn.   An argument beautifully dissected by Dawkins   Still as science fiction narrative poetry it is ineffable.  Although ineff is ineff….

The Sonnets of Shakespeare.

Hadn’t read them in sequence in living memory – the first twenty five of them are addressed to some friendly aristo begging him to marry and reproduce his own beauty before it is too late.  Interesting.  I’ll continue and maybe then read a book about with speculation as to identities and reasons   They make excellent plane fodder.   His ability to make perfect and instant poetry  which read easily and understandably without recourse to high flown poetic language is what marks him out as the highest poet and a natural to continue this talent into the poetic drama.

Snuff                   Chuck Pahlaniuk

Actually I found this rather distasteful and sensationalist and abandoned it.

Who knows, next year I might find it a great work of art…

When You Are Engulfed in Flames            David Sedaris

And I find this chap vastly over rated and also abandoned his “humor” which of course has no second u.

In France

Bobby Fischer                        Biography

I started this but lost interest quite quickly.  Sad.

Dance for the Dead                 Thomas Perry

I sometimes think of Thomas Perry as The Ancient Mariner.

He grabs you with his tale and you are unable to go on with even the most pressing appointment until he has finished.

This is a Jane Whitefield novel – she is the Seneca Indian who helps people disappear from nasty people.   As so often with Tom this is about the Hunt – powerful people chasing down the weak and reasonably innocent.   Jane appears as the avenging angel

Blood Money                          Thomas Perry

He gave me his latest Jane Whitefield Novel before I left but I had two here in France so thought I would catch up.  The thriller cliché is you just can’t put it down, but with Tom the tension never lets up.  The image is usually the hunt.   In this book Jane is trying to protect the naïve abandoned childlike Rita and Bernie the Elephant, whose prodigious memory has hidden the accounts of billions of dollars of Mafia money.  They will give the money to charity and post letters and checks from around the country until finally one of the Mafia groups catches up with her.  He never cheats, his observations and perceptions of people are always spot on.  Unlike say  this next book….

The Quickie                  James Patterson

It’s not the genre it’s the author.   This reads like cliché.  Not poorly written, well a bit, but obviously written.   The writing is in an arresting style (obviously about the PD) but it’s also very close to self -parody.  I wanted to know what happened next and was irritated not to find out.   Something that never happens with Thomas Perry.  This is a form of artificial writing that is the equivalent of popular television.   I am unsure I shall finish it

Murder in Amsterdam             Ian Buruma

The chilling deaths of Theo Van Gogh by a Moroccan Dutchman and the earlier death of Pym Fortuyn –by a deranged animal rightist,  both, very Dutch cycling to their deaths raises alarming questions of the nature of Western society to embrace a culture such as Islam which doesn’t accept its prevailing mores.   When does racism begin and rationalism end?  Are we witnessing a de-colonialisation movement within the old colonies?

The Scramble for Africa          Thomas Pakenham

Again the theme of colonialisation.   It’s what we do.  Here in their urgency to grab territory and empires – for financial as well as political reasons – the European powers at least justify their incursions into Africa by the moral claim that they are attempting to destroy slavery which is a very African enterprise, run by the Sultan of Zanzibar.   The American cliché of British slavers is completely wrong – of course the US maintained the slave trade almost a century after some Brits were attempting to eliminate it.

Here the story commences with the saintly Livingstone really rescued by the Welsh born but American raised intrepid and vastly energetic Stanley – who will take over the role left by Livingstone in tracing the Geography of the interior and the track of the Congo to the Atlantic.   Worth remembering that tribe fought tribe throughout Africa, constantly and that it was not some kind of Edenic world destroyed by European tribalism, but that tribal warfare is itself endemic to all human societies.  The story switches to the ambitious Leopold of the Belgians who is searching for a home for his capital and something bigger to rule.,   His eyes light up on hypocrisy (the African Council for world peace…) and the Congo.   Stanley – who has been trying to convince the Brits to buy it – finds his Belgian supporter and the source of many future woes, while the British badgering of the bullying Boers leads to further acres of future disaster.   Deserting the Zulus and provoking a war with a Dutch ought to be enough for any Disraeli/Gladstone government – but the fact is the man on the spot was all too often determined to subvert governmental policy in dreams of Indian Empire building.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union        Michael Chabon

Well I was dead wrong about this last year.  In fact I had barely progressed beyond four chapters. I fell into it again this year and then immediately re-read it from the beginning.  It is a fabulous novel.  His stylish writing simply illuminates the page.   I loved every second of it and flew through this story of a fictitious Jewish community in Alaska part of a fictitious history where Israel failed to be established in 1948 and where the survivors were given a part of Alaska.  Jewish detective Landsman his native Indian partner Beko and former married partner Bina attempt to locate who killed the Rebbe’s son Mendel, a prospective Messiah, who was about to be used by the radical Verbover group to blow up the Mosque where Abraham almost stabbed Isaac, the traditional site of the Temple of Jerusalem.   I shall not reveal who did it as I shall almost certainly read it again.   Chess, mysticism, millennialism, and lots and lots of Jews, or Yids as they refer to each other.   Yes, a great novel.

A Commonwealth of Thieves                     Thomas Keneally

Fatal Shore.   Highly readable account of the transports and the nightmare voyage to Botany Bay –  though soon to be Sydney Cove thanks to the redoubtable Philips, the only reason they survive at all.   I have always loved the bizarre scene of the French fleet sailing into to Botany Bay just two weeks after they have got there, the moment the British fleet are pulling out to sail round the corner into the finest natural harbour in the world.  This is a harsh world to survive in, harvests are poor, floggings frequent, many are hanged for stealing stores.   It is by no means certain they can hold out until relief ships arrive with provisions.

The nightmare of the second Fleet with its financial motivated company cutting corners to make a living out of the dead – they could claim more for them as they never ate any rations– this is truly a survivors tale.   The sight of the poor wretches being carried off the ships on arrival, mainly too weak to live is wonderfully written by the novelist.   Kenneally’s theory is that enclosures caused the rise of the criminality that results in the overcrowded British prisons which is the problem behind the decision to send the inmates of the battered hulks anchored in the leaky English shipping lanes in the harshest winters south to a one way ticket to oblivion.  If this is true it is certainly ironic that the first thing they do is to enclose the commons of the indigenous people who react with tribal violence (in ways impossible for another culture to understand to punish those who break their communal laws of property (and fish.)   I have always enjoyed the rain soaked orgy which followed the arrival of the male and female prisoners ashore.   A white corroboree which seems to set the tone of what will emerge as Australia, a tough sexual active no nonsense society based on no civilising illusions burned by the terrible survival experience of those dumped on the shores of this strange nether world.   A great book.

 

On the plane to Paris and then to Houston I reread: –

Fifty Two Pick up                   Elmore Leonard

Which I realise I must have read on another plane journey recently – probably to Australia – but which I could recall the ending of.   For once!

A good book and I shall finish it again on the way home from Houston.  Which I did and thoroughly loved.  One of his earliest and most memorable books.

A Partisans Daughter              Louis de Bernieres

Bought at Paris airport.  Read in Houston.

A great couple of chapters open the book setting up a tale of a married Englishman for a sexy Serb, but sadly degenerates into a not at all convincing narrative of her Yugoslavian youth,   He simply loses the drama of his narrative in his social and sexual history of Roza the squatter and the book falls apart.  Pity as he has great writing skills but seems to have lost the taste for it.

The Ghost                     Robert Harris

A simply brilliant thriller about a Ghost-writer drawn into finishing the work of his predecessor who has wound up drowned off Martha’s vineyard while working on the memoirs of a Blair-like Prime Minister.  The style is clear and precise and Buchan like, with the narrative driving us every step of the way through the unflinching portrayal of a UK PM accused of war crimes and the ultimate revelation of why the unflinching support for the insane US policies in the Gulf and Iraq which puzzles us all, did take place despite the strong opposition to it in the UK.

 

I was only disturbed from my headlong reading by the sudden intrusion of a familiar lyric from Cambridge – yes one I wrote in 1965 – with John Cameron – for out final farewell appearance at a Footlights smoker:   Cheer Oh Cambridge, a boaters and cane parody of a Footlights Farwell from the Thirties.   Slightly shocking to come across your own work and I shall have to write to him….

 

I did.  On Twitter.  In 2019.  And he was suitable kind.  He does recognise it was satirical.   But it is supposed to be at the same time as the Miner’s strike. 1971.  Which it wasn’t.

May thru June

Netherland                    Joseph O’Neill

A simply brilliant book about a cricket-loving Dutch Manhattan inhabitant who investigates and explores the mystery of a West Indian friends disappearance.   I was inspired to buy six copies to send to friends.

The Loved One              Evelyn Waugh

As brilliant as ever

The Discovery of France Graham Robb

A Historical Geography from the Revolution to WW1.  An interesting whetting off the appetite for Francophiles approaching the subject with interest.  Driving through the Gorge de Verdon my pleasure was enhanced by knowing something of the history of its discovery and exploitation.

The God Delusion          Richard Dawkins

Illusion would have been kinder but Dawkins is not out to be kind.  He has been attacked enough by the Templeton Trust and the legions of financially well-endowed Evangelical idiots who deny Evolution.   He demolishes the cases for God, but most usefully illustrates the lies and propaganda spread about the so called gaps in Evolution.  There is no evidence for the existence of God.   Simple as that.   The brilliant Theory of Evolution (a theory in the same sense as gravitation, and quantum mechanics)  and our latest scientific understanding and knowledge of what we can only glimpses of the Universe leaves the Conjurer God idea flapping in the dirt.   The Universe is far more complex and far more grand than any angry bearded middle Eastern patriarchal imaginary friend.

The Story of Civilization  VI The Reformation   Will Durant

Mainly the chapters on Henry V111.  What a monster.  Unchecked power.

Of course researching after The Tudors…

Six Wives.   The Queens of Henry VIII    David Starkey

Detailed and up to date reworking of the endlessly popular theme.  Most of the story is of course about Anne.  Many excellent new bits which seem heavily featured in the Tudors, from which they have clearly drawn.

The Diana Chronicles    Tina Brown

Re- read and annotated for potential opera.  The book is great.  But the story is religion manifesting itself again.  The icon, the private goddess.  Anne Boleyn meets Anne of Cleves.   The tragedy of the sexually unappealing wife.   Not exactly Grand Opera.  Certainly comic Opera, but far too dangerous to be playing with.  Though I love the idea – of a dim grandchild of Barbara Cartland, polluted by her pestilential ideas of romance, and growing up to pay for it,  and it’s many nuances, with The Princess and the Prince, The Princess and the Sheik, and the Princess and the Crew of the Royal Yacht Britannia – it’s pure trouble.   After discussion JDP and I decided to back off.   I still love my notes and ideas.

American Dream                    Norman Mailer

American wet dream more like.   He says it’s written like Dickens for Esquire – but more like Dickens for Hustler.   Sexploitation.  He can write like a charm and yet wrestles with his own ego constantly tripping up into drunken rants and a desire to stab or butt fuck his way through the world’s women.

A Sentimental Education         Flaubert

Yet once again I started this and then left off again.   As I wrote before I am not such a Flaubert fan as Dickens and Balzac.   What is it about Flaubert? – too prolix, too many arcane disruptions, too slow to get to the scene?

The Postman  (Il Postino)        Antonio Skarmeta

The sweet Chilean story of the postman who delivers letters to the poet Marquez on Isla Negra, involving him in his passion for the local beauty and relishing in the glory of his Scandinavian Nobel Prize and his Parisian honours.  The book behind the beautiful film, but here the Commune idyll is brutally ruined by the coup against Allende and the overthrow of the popular democratic movement with the arrival of the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet.   An idyllic moment in Chilean history destroyed by the greed of the Capitalist Military Junta.   Elegaic.

 

March thru April

On Beauty                              Zadie Smith

I really like this novel.   It is based on her acknowledged love for E. M. Forster and indeed echoes Howard’s End both in it’s start and it’s story and it’s structure.

“We might as well begin with Jerome’s email to his father.”

Here Jerome has fallen headlong in love with the unsuitable Vee as Helen falls for the unsuitable Paul, but both have in fact “fallen in love with a family.” Jerome is the child of Howard (sic!) who hates the Politically incorrect right wing lecturer Kipps.   They are black family – Howard married to black wife so mixed kids.   Clashes in the College world of Boston.

She includes a poem On Beauty by her husband so it is a self aware novel –  there is even a character called Emerson (from a Room with a View)

Mrs Wilcox (Kipps) dies leaving her favourite painting to Kiki – (Howards End) the evidence for which the family destroys.

I find the book complimentary in both senses – it completes and praises.

Howard’s End                                    E. M. Forster

So of course I had to re read this.  I had not realised that Only Connect in fact is referring to making connections within one self.   Here is the key sentence: “she might yet be able to     the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.  Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.  …….Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted.”

The art of the novel is making meaning out of the trivia of everyday existence.  Forster admits sex into the equation, placing him in the tradition of Hardy – though not so obscure – more forthright, more honest, more observant.  Not yet Lawrence but from now on the novel will almost always be about the sexual activity of mankind – if it hasn’t always…

A Prisoner of Birth         Jeffery Archer

You might argue that Jeffery should be jailed for his writing…..  My very sweet friend Chris Beetles got him to sign this for me, and even told him I had read it.   (I told you he was sweet.)   However I did manage to speed read through about half of it while a rat gnawed my stomach.   In the end I preferred the rat….

Irreligion                                John Allen Paulos

A mathematician explains why the arguments for God just don’t add up.

So the imaginary friend does not exist.    Time to move on for this species –

before the seriously demented destroy us all in the name of God.   In many

cases these inner voices are indeed pure madness.

What’s wrong with the ineffable amazement of the extraordinary Galaxy

and Universe in which we find ourselves and which no thanks to religion we

have learned incredible amounts about in a tiny amount of time and which

knowledge dwarves our concepts of any God.

Fidelity                                  Thomas Perry

Tom gave me the proof edition of his latest.  A private eye is killed and his widow pursues the killer – a wealthy San Franciscan into underage girls.

 Hyssop                                  Kevin McIlvoy

The Executor                          Michael Kruger

How To Read A Novel    John Sutherland

Fairly fatuous obvious observations by a Booker prize reader.    The most interesting detail is Banville’s unprecedented attack on Ian McEwan in the New York Post, the first American review of Saturday, which led to The Booker being won by –oh how odd – Banville’s The Sea!  The review as self publicity.    Envy is one thing – Saturday was already a best seller in the UK and Banville was publishing his own tome shortly – but to attempt to destroy the US market for a rival…well I guess that’s the literary world….

Reminds me I was laughing out loud at The LA Times critic (Turow?) bemoaning the fact that film critics were a dying breed….awww.

 Against Happiness         Eric G. Wilson

Arguments in favour of melancholia.  Usual anxieties about drugs curing anxieties…  Get over it.

The Second Plane          Martin Amis

September 11:  Terror and Boredom

Essays and observations on 9/11.  The best of which is the imaginative reconstruction narrative of Muhammad Atta’s last few days.

Also he travels with the Blair.

Nothing to Be frightened of.    Julian Barnes

Memento mori.  A memoir about Brothers and Death.  But mainly his fear of death, which seems all pervading.   Get over it dear.

House of Meetings                           Martin Amis

Also about Brothers and Death.  In the Gulag.  Two brothers share love for one woman Tanya.  But the younger gets her and the older resents it forever.   Mike Nichols sent it to me.   Re-read year later.

Rise and Shine                       Anna Quindlen

This one is about sisters and it is a beautiful New York novel – with ironic glimpses of the sound proofed New York wealthy society.  It is also about truth telling – to power and beyond.  The Diane- Sawyer- like Meghan, a morning TV hostess, inadvertently says what she thinks on air, causing a scandal and a change of life.   She calls an asshole an asshole and we see the hypocritical way showbiz society demands recompense from those it pedestalises.  She runs and hides in Jamaica.  Her son pays for it with his legs.  Written by the Austen-like younger sister, who gets a decent man and twins this is an ironic study of emotion in modern successful Americans, and the strange anomie at the heart of success.

The Uncommon Reader           Alan Bennett

The Queen inadvertently picks up a book and learns to become a human being through reading.  So evolved in fact that she abdicates.   A delightful squib full of delicate writing by Monsieur Bennett.

The Master                     Colm Toibin

Mike gave me this for my birthday (along with the new translation of War and Peace).  I didn’t get very far with it, since it is about Henry James and I have zero interest in the man even in fiction.

Tranquil Star                Primo Levi

Beautiful collection of last short stories.  Now he was a master.

Human Smoke              Nicholson Baker

A unique work of modern history.   Written in a series of tiny vignettes – some only a paragraph long – as the events leading to World War Two show us how history is re-written by the victors.   The inevitable way the US brought on Pearl Harbour, and how it was British bombings of German Cities that led to the destruction of Coventry.   A fascinating book from a man who believes pacifism was justified even in WW2.

Ladies Man                   Richard Price

A seventies novel I lost interest in.

Vanishing Act               Thomas Perry

A June Whitefield Novel.

June Whitefield helps people hide.   Here she hunts down the man who exposes her secret network of people who help her hide people.

Christine Falls              Benjamin Black  (John Banville)

Written under an assumed name, I will have to finish reading it under an assumed name…  (Actually I think I got to like it, but haven’t found the assumed name yet.  I certainly galloped through the sequel.)

Elizabeth and Leicester           Sarah Gristwood

A very fine piece of historical writing.

L. A. Mirage                           Anne Lambton

I didn’t get very far with Anne’s book.  Nothing against it.

A Cellarful of Noise                Brian Epstein

I believe ghost written by Derek (Taylor) – a sweet nostalgic read for someone researching Rutles.   This is a nice first edition I found.  Poor Leggy – dead at 32.   Better he went to Australia.

Hippie Hippie Shake               Richard Neville

About the third time he has shared the secrets of the Oz Trial.  I hadn’t realised how he pulled the same attention seeking trick in Oz.   But he exaggerates the importance of himself and this trial.  Sweet man though he be.

Paris                                      Andrew Hussey

The Secret History.

Great.

Love of Seven Dolls                Paul Gallico.

The Old Curiosity Shop           Charles Dickens

I never really liked this novel, and never got very far with it.  I was pleased to see in the BBC version that I also lost interest and stopped watching.  What is it Oscar Wilde said about Little Nell…?  ‘One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.’

Tolkien’s Gown                      Rick Gekoski

I had already read this but the author gave me a signed copy at the Book Fair and it was sweet of him.

 

January thru February

Clapton                         Eric Clapton    (E-Book)

A strange creature – both him and the book, in which he reveals himself as being rather less interesting than one supposed.   Somewhere along the way I read the Patti Clapton/Harrison book  which is not that bad.   Just stupid.   I wanted to read Eric’s version of events and was disappointed to find out that he doesn’t like himself.   And he paints himself in a poor light.   And you really don’t like him.  This is sad.

Wonderful Tonight                          Patti Clapton

Liv and Dahni went spare about this book but it is far worse in extract with all the gossipy bits dragged out and pasted together in a tabloid.  I decided it couldn’t really be trusted when she wrote I went down to dinner with George and her in their house in Esher, something that really never happened….

The Red Badge of Courage      Stephen Crane

An amazing book.  A novel of war written by a poet.   It is his use of verbs that is staggering to me.

God Is Not Great           Christopher Hitchens  (E-Book)

Re –read with glee

Rites of Peace                Adam Zamoyski

The Fall of Napoleon and The Congress of Vienna.

Almost as long as the Congress of Vienna and at times almost as tiresome, this fulsome account of the dance of the Czars and The Kings of Austria and the rise of the new state of Prussia and the machinations of Metternich and Castlereagh and Talleyrand et al is made up for by the sexual shenanigans and the Balls and the shagging which prove that the Congress of Vienna was indeed a sexual position.   A very interesting account of how self interest and personalities dictate foreign policy, which set the stage for the rise of Germany and the eventual horror and devastation of Hitler.

Tom Cruise

A highly readable account of the life of this fairly gifted actor.  You begin by liking him and his struggle to break out and succeed in his life and you want him defended from the fall out of fame, but gradually as the marriage with Nicole Kidman breaks up and the clouds draw in and the Scientology succubae suck him into a maelstrom of highly unhealthy proto-Nazism with his little weird pal Miscavige (of Justice) you see what fame, and paranoia and sheer madness can do to unhinge an actor – someone who has precious little grasp of their centre anyway.

This is a very clear example of how this malign cult is a genuine threat to society.

The King’s Cardinal

The  very long  life of Cardinal Wolsey

Was ever a book so looked forward to and yet so summarily dismissed?  Was ever a book so overpriced– its value inflated from seven pounds to 98 dollars, and yet so mouldy and smelly when it finally arrived, its prose as dry as dishwater, it’s tale as poorly told as printed.  I can’t believe I spent so long looking for this book, and so quickly chucked it….

All The Sad Young Men          F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A wonderful collection of short stories, published immediately after Gatsby this is a first edition from 1926 I picked up for $5,000 from the antique book market.

The Rich Boy contains that most famous quotation

“Let me tell you about the very rich.   They are different from you and me.”

And tells the sad tale of Anson, who suffers from a superiority complex.

The increasing difficulties he has to commit to love – that prevent him living a happy and fulfilled life, and may be described as the tragedy of the rich, so that at the end he is driven desperately to find someone – anyone –  to spend an evening with him – this is a wonderfully observed despair about a certain kind of person, out of touch with his own feelings.

“I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something.  What it was I do not know.   Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.”

Winter Dreams is a complimentary story about the female equivalent.  A girl who rides roughshod over boys, getting her way through seducing them and yet dropping them and moving on to the next, a kind of serial flirtation, that reinforces her sense of power, and extracts the tribute due to beauty – even at the casual hurting of fellow women.   These seem to be very modern types observed by Fitzgerald for the first time.  Perhaps thrown up by the vast change in American society following the doughboys disappearance into France.  The stories are about entitlement, plus a nostalgia for the innocence of lost youth and the vanished opportunities of a bright future, now gone forever, in the land where his winter dreams once flourished.

He seems to be able to tell story almost entirely through metaphor…. Extraordinarily fine writing.

 

 

 

 

              2007

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

January thru February

Wittgenstein                                                      Avrum Stroll

Excellent summary of the life and philosophy

The Trial of Queen Caroline                                        Jane Robins

The scandalous affair that nearly ended the Monarchy.  The ugly wife of the big fat twat Prince Regent and his attempts to ditch her once he became George IV, showing that the British taste for Royal scandal and intrigue was always strong.  She, despite a string of affairs with swarthy Italians and foreigners all round Europe, improbably and implacably enjoyed the full support of the British people, perhaps a measure of how much this profligate selfish Prince of Pleasure was disliked.  To sue for adultery while his many wide mistresses were the talk of the town is perhaps the measure of the man.

Ungrateful Daughters                                                 Maureen Walter

The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father’s Crown.  The fall of the Catholic James 11, brother of the rather more attractive Charles, betrayed and deposed by his son in law, the prig (and possibly poofy) Dutch William who was married to his daughter Mary (all from Mary Stuart) and sister of the rather less pleasant Anne, who spread the lying rumours of the bed pan baby birth of the Pretender Charles.   Anne meanwhile with her very odd relationship with Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, (and the rather turn-coaty military genius Duke) had seventeen miscarriages and still births in seventeen years – clearing the way for the Hanoverian succession of George 1^st – all Catholics having been excluded by law.

The Fire                                                                    Jorg Friedrich

The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945.  This book is just too depressing to read.  An endless story of constant civilian bombing against more than ninety cities of Germany, and the firestorms that were deliberately started to kill as many civilians as possible.   Surely such evil cannot be justified by “they started it.”    The wholesale destruction of Medieval Germany is only a small part of the horror and terror waged in the name of freedom.   It is as well to remember that indiscriminate bombing from the sky (and there is no other sort) is always terror, no matter in what name or cliché it may be unleashed.   Shaming, and shaking and deeply disturbing.

The Death of Tragedy                                                 George Steiner

A swift re-reading, of this perhaps too texturally argued thesis.  Rather an odd theory, including the strange idea that Judaism cannot embrace tragedy because of God.  But suppose for a moment that that was a mistaken concept.  And if there is no contemporary Jewish tragedy then what is Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross?    So then, brilliant, but wrong.

Medieval Lives                       Terry Jones & Alan Eriera

A highly readable and entertaining view of history.   Terry always takes the converse view, which is what gives him his heart and his humanity.  But here this oddly leads him to defend Kingship, and distrust democracy, which is something I would not have predicted.  He is always interested in the quirky and the bizarre, and is only predictable when he takes the part of evidently homicidal weirdoes like Richard 3^rd, whom I suspect very much of being history’s highest born serial killer.   And that if anything Shakespeare overlooked many of his misdeeds.   It is no use using the city of York to defend Richard of York.   Of course they liked him there.  They liked Giuliani in New York…

The Planets                                                                Dava Sobel

A slightly touchy-feely gallop through the solar system, with many interesting facts and perhaps just a little too much breathy goshness about the whole thing. Though I did enjoy this, Carey’s Christmas gift to me.

American Fascists                                                      Chris Hedges

The Christian Right and the War on America.  I sped read my way through this, which is a slightly shrill and hysterical, though none the less true, account of how America is being undermined perhaps in the same way as Rome, and by the same perverse religion…

A Handful of Dust                                                      Evelyn Waugh

Once again seduced by the brilliance of the prose in the opening of this novel to read  at least half again.  It becomes depressing and very personal.   And it’s hard to read it as jolly comedy.

Not To Disturb                                                           Muriel Spark

Nice first edition I found.   Something about a Butler and so on.

The Nobel Lecture in Literature                                   J.M.Coetzee

A rather fine little monograph, endearingly about how proud his mum would have been.

Vile Bodies                                                                 Evelyn Waugh

Edward 11                                                                 Christopher Marlowee

Running Scared                                                         John L. Sullivan

The unofficial biography of Steve Wynn.  Reasons to be fearful.

And careful.

Housekeeping vs The Dirt                                           Nick Hornby

Maintaining his reputation for dangerously irrelevant titles this is a collection of his entirely readable articles in The Believer.  Such a fan am I that I plonked down for a season ticket to the rag only to be deserted by the Arsenal Fan plunging into a sabbatical.   It had better be a good book he has written, or perhaps a long epic poem starring Hans Lehman.  Or maybe he just moved to a new stadium and here the Arsenal gags must definitely stop. Because the rest of the mag is fairly ordinary stuff masquerading as modernism.  This however makes you want to read your eyes off.   He is so similar to me in his reading (and discarding) habits that at times I think it’s me, except he is much cleverer and expresses himself far better.  Always makes me want to buy books.

 

March thru June

Then We Came to The end                                           Joshua Ferris

Though in fact I never did.   I enjoyed this novel about Office Life, recommended strongly by Hornby and then got a bit bored by it.

Assassination Vacation                                               Sarah Vowell

Recommended by Hornby.  His friend’s trip round the assassination sites of American presidents.  Too bad the habit dried up, muttered the Englishman sardonically, thinking of the C grade student and his shady friends.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot                                            Sarah Vowell

Sadly a little goes a long way.   She has lots to say about a little

Take The Cannoli                                                       Sarah Vowell

Enough already.  She is a journalist.

 

Ghosting                                                                    Jennie Erdal
Disappointing.  The novel as memoir.  Not enough narrative drive.

The lead character Tiger is dull.  Problem when friends recommend friend’s work.  Hornby likes her ergo he likes it.  Not good enough.

The Damned and the Saved                                         Primo Levi

Breathtaking.   And devastating.  His last book.

Disturber of the Peace                                                 William Manchester

The Life and Riotous times of H. L. Mencken

Only dipped.  Found a nice first edition.  Maybe there wasn’t a second!

The Damned United                                                    David Peace

Fictional version of the true story of Brian Clough taking over Leeds United – the team he hated most – with disastrous consequences.

Citizen Vince                                                              Jess Walter

Hornby recommend.     A good thriller.   Very well written.  About a Crook.

The Zero                                                                             Jess Walter

Sent me in search of this new book, which I found less than thrilling

Bambi vs Godzilla                                                                David Mamet

I enjoyed these polemics against the all prevailing Producers of Movies.   Fortunately none of it matters since they are all only movies and not art.  (Art being something created by individuals, not by committees of warring interests.)

How Soccer Explains The World                                           Franklin Foer

The back story behind the racist teams, Spurs love of Judaism, superstar Ref Collina, the facism of Real Madrid, the leftism of Barcelona, the Generals and Argentina etc etc.   Fine and fun.

I believe soccer demonstrates the moral force happening in the world before our eyes.  So that there is some underlying meaning to life where beauty and force and strength and power are all important elements to successful outcomes….that there is a successful shape to evolution which involves beauty and truth and that the beautiful game not only represents this but channels testosterone competitiveness into useful and creative areas, instead of religion and bloodshed.  We are only here because we successfully annihilated other species, and as we are our own predators there has to be someway we can channel this into healthy pursuits – hence the Olympic Games and soccer.   And I suppose in the ice bound states, the incredibly violent ice hockey.  Though of course cricket is far from the sedate pastime non croyants believe…

What Does Mrs Freeman want?                                            Petros Abatzoglou

Who cares?

The Trojan War                                                                   Barry Strauss

(Optimistically titled A New History)   From the Mustave school of historical writing.  “It mustave been a great sight to see the sails swelling….

It mustave been a state dinner where Paris met Helen….

It mustave been an extraordinary day when….”

Not history but historical drama masquerading as history.   And rather annoying…

The Kingdom of Auschwitz                                                   Otto Friedrich

Lest we forget what all mankind is capable of.   This is a chapter from his master work The End of the World.   Always worth re-reading.

 Peter Pan                                                                           James Barrie

I love the way this turns into the moral dilemma of Hook, who having been at Eton (slyly referenced by a certain Wall Game) is troubled by the moral dilemma of Poor form.

A very funny and effective novelisation of his own play, this delightful written and slyly satirical tale of the boy Pan and the “mother” Wendy has enough for several volumes of psychoanalysis.  It seems fresh myth, spun out of a mythical golden period of Edwardian childhood, drawing on the Pan God in the same way Wind in The Willows does.  But the book is also filled with real violence from which Barrie does not shrink so it never becomes sentimental, unlike the work of his major “borrower” Spielberg.

On Chesnil Beach                                                                Ian McEwan

A novella.  And nicely done.  Probably win the Booker.

At The Center of the Storm                                                   George Tenet

My Years at the CIA

He didn’t speak up when he could have and he didn’t keep quiet when he should have.  The weasely and self-serving memoirs of a second rate man in a fifth rate government.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire       Edward Gibbon

The perfect work of history.   Dipped in and out over the last two years.   So much to re enjoy.

The Zimmermann Telegram                                                 Barbara Tuchman

An almost perfect work of history.   In this delicate little book she dissects the crucial British intercept of the German naval code which enabled them to discover the Kaiser’s plans to involve Mexico and Japan in a war against the US before Wilson (who was determined to avoid it) was forced to bring the US into WW1.  The laying out of this proof, and the folly of not even denying it, despite the German and Irish-American cries of fake, made the end of the war inevitable, in the way the Junkers had ominously predicted for themselves yet still could not prevent.   History at times seems to be people stumbling inexorably towards the inevitable defeat that stares them in the face, which they somehow seem to deny.  (cf The Bush years)  Here it was the unleashing of the U-Boat on neutral shipping (i.e. US) to starve the British into submission.   A fascinating glimpse into another battlefield of that most terrible war.

The Meaning of Everything                                         Simon Winchester

A slightly less than gripping tale of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Put Out More Flags                                                    Evelyn Waugh

I love this book.   It seems to me to bridge the two styles of Waugh from  the bleakly satirical earlier novels, where he controls exactly how you think and respond to his characters, to the later more mature War time trilogy, where the characters breathe and survive more realistically and you can choose how to respond to them.  Of course the eloquence of his writing is undiminished.   And his delightful humour – where the three pathetic Connollies are used by Basil Seal – billeted amongst the middle classes and then bribed away – is hysterical.   The book I have enjoyed most this year.

Divisadero                                                                  Michael Ondaatje

I guess I liked it.  But I forgot to write about it at the time, so now…

A tale of two sisters.   Northern California.

 

Bangkok Haunts                                                        John Burdett

The thoroughly delightful and continuing exploits of Buddhist detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, of the Royal Thai Police and the solving of the snuff film puzzle.

Tokyo Sucker Punch                                                   Isaac Adamson

Martial Arts reporter in Tokyo mobster mystery.   Interesting first novel.

Tested on Orphans                                                               David Mamet

Proved to this orphan that Mamet is no cartoonist…  Nice gift from Billy Connolly,   Autographed copy.

Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinary Literate       Eugene Ehrlich

And yes I did read it and yes I will read it again so that I always remember what solipsism means to me…

The I Chong                                                               Tommy Chong

Meditations from the joint.  Sadly God was behind everything.  He seems to have survived without really questioning anything very deeply, but this Canadian has certainly survived.

Restless                                                                      William Boyd

Oddly though I disliked this book on first attempt I enjoyed it the second time.  Perhaps because it is in paperback.

Summer Reading

July  thru August

The Diana Chronicles                                                          Tina Brown

Impressively well written, flawlessly researched, and eminently readable.  A classic biography.  Finally the facts of the fairy tale, by one who is in a position to know, an English doyenne journalist who has spoken to everyone and has sufficient wit and judgement to assess the astounding multiple interests involved in the essentially tragic lives of Diana Spencer and Charles Not King, and the many conflicting and sentimental reasons they were thrown together.   This is Greek Royal Tragedy and it is with sympathy and concern that we watch the sad protagonists descend through the jaws of the paparazzi into public hell and humiliation and of course death.  With the weird performance of Mohammed Al Fayed in his own Greek Comedy, a sickly funny Oedipus in Denial.    This is almost an examining magistrates view of the events, and Tina Brown balances our tabloidal fascination with the world’s model Princess (eerily echoing the death of Princess Grace) with the search for truth and reality.  A great achievement.

Death of a Dissident                                  Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko

The not-particularly well-written but fascinating story of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London and the return of the KGB under the putain Putin.  The involved story of why Litvinenko, the ex- Kremlin agent, had to die and why they needed to kill him, written by a partisan supporter of Boris  Berezovsky.  The first stage of capitalism seems to lead inexorably to gangsterism.  The conflicting gangs of new Russia carved out the remains of the communist Empire and made huge personal fortunes so they could buy Chelsea and corrupt the world.  The connection between football, Moscow and corruption is a story that is not yet over.

10 Questions Science Can’t Answer                                                 Michael Hanlon

Time, the Universe, dark material, why we remain who we are etc.   Succinct and thoughtful essays on a variety of meaning of life questions written by a scientist who has a knack for explaining simply the physics of our universe.

Up in Honey’s Room                                                   Elmore Leonard

Not terribly convincing but it was an ok read.  I felt finally that all the characters were straight out of an old movie, from the lovely Honey who drops her clothes at the drop of a hat, to the impossibly fabulous Carl, who comes from wild west fiction.   At one point Leonard has a go at Zane Grey and I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic, since some of his figures seem to have sprung from there.

Set in Nazi hunting US Detroit towards the end of the war, and fairly improbable in plot and dénouement, the leading villainess shoots the leading villain.  As usual it is Leonard’s command of language and his simple style that keeps us reading, and of course I read it quickly and enjoyed it, but afterwards, like a less than good movie, I went…hang on.

No Brow                                                           John Seabrook

The Culture of Marketing.

About the perverse effects of the marketing of culture, a job he himself has not done badly.   Essays about the Americanisation of America, the culture shift from highbrow to no brow as reflected by the subjects and style of the past and current New Yorker, by a New Yorker writer. These changes are represented by the rise and eventual removal of Tina Brown and this book reflects her ten year tenure.  Seabrook is though, an intellectual wannabe, a real no brow if you like, and is not a penetrating enough analyst of the condition which he has accurately diagnosed.

God is not Great                                                Christopher Hitchens

God is not great but Hitchens is.  The second brilliant book by an ex-pat I have read in a week.   Magnificently written, eloquently argued, the simple thesis that religion poisons everything is clearly and convincingly demonstrated.  With many examples from all sides of the aisles, mosque and Kirk.  Can mankind survive heavily armed superstition, will ignorance triumph, Hitchens shows us the terrible past and the terrible present and the terrible consequences if we ignore them.

My French Whore                                                      Gene Wilder

Signed first edition from Hatchards.   Although he can undoubtedly write Gene Wilder manages to be both sentimental and clichéd.   He is essentially a parodist, but one who seems unable to tell when he is being real and when he is simply parroting something else.   Without seeing the pretension he thanks his two “mentors” Hemmingway and Jean Renoir.  Despite this tip off it would be impossible to miss the old fashioned cinematic style and scenes he chooses to write; the way the characters speak and behave are all conceived in glossy black and white scenes from old films.   It’s as though Wilder is camp without being quite gay.   He seems not to have observed the difference between Hemmingway and Hemmingway movies, and it all sounds like a clipped parody of itself, the very same way he acts.

Brideshead Revisited                                                   Evelyn Waugh

I had put off re-reading this, perhaps aware that my revisiting of Waugh would not allow this to live up to expectations.  Afterwards I found out that this was the only book he wrote after the death of his detested father.  Perhaps there is something in that.  Whatever the reason I found Brideshead disappointing.  It is essentially  a gay novel.  It fails to rise to the levels of comedy of the early books, or sink into the arms of reality of the great War Trilogy, that I find the best of his work.  Sebastian is a snob and a sot and a fool, and to fall in love with him seems a lapse of taste, even if he is very pretty in his Rupert Brooke way.  I liked only the rough army beginning, which leaps off the page as reality before descending into the gilded, nostalgic world of youth and Oxbridge.  I think the society that Waugh observes the most closely is the army.   The world of Boy Mulcaster and Mayfair madams seem to be a purely Wooster world, only a derivation of Wodehouse, not a real connection to any living reality.  For me, only Fitzgerald, in Gatsby, captures the pointless banality of drunkenness, its lapses of memory and sudden time shifts and serendipitous happenings. The Sword of Honour trilogy remains Waugh’s most honest, moving and truthful writing and the real culmination of his undoubted genius.  Brideshead  is heritage writing, awaiting the glossy TV treatment that it was perfect for.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union                                    Michael Chabon

I feel as though Chabon has swallowed Joyce.  His style I find perversely unreadable.  His prose, irritatingly, continually stands in the way of understanding.  I am constantly having to go back and re-read sentences.  This is disappointing and frustrating as I am interested in his tale of the “dead Yid” on the floor of the Alaskan hotel and the attempts by the local kosher police to investigate this death, but I found myself constantly interrupted by his self-conscious choice of phrase, which acted as a barrier between my mind and the clarity of the scene and the yarn he is trying to spin.  I don’t think it is just the continual use of Yiddish expressions, which are frequently hilarious, it is just that he frequently made me wish to stop reading.   Not a good thing in a novel.   See Later retraction!

Silence                                                                       Thomas Perry

Tom Perry sent me his very readable novel, which I found absolutely delightful.  His protagonist, the inevitable ex-cop turned private eye, has to hide a woman who seeks to escape death threats.   Six years later he has to find her and dig her up before this threat reaches her again and bring her in to testify to save her unjustly accused friend from being charged with her murder, while paid assassins pursue her.  This simple but effective plot drives the story forward to its finally safe conclusion, leaving the pair of married assassins to escape to Spain, each plotting the death of the other as they go.  A nice conclusion to a very nice tale, well written and more enjoyable than the latest Leonard.   I will seek out and read more of his books.

Citizens                                                                      Simon Scharma

Another book which at first I couldn’t wait to put down.   And I had been savouring the chance to read this for a long time.   Scharma seems unable to express anything simply.  We are clearly to be impressed by his erudition and wide reading.  This is history written in the grand essay style, so very little is described, the scenes are all too rarely created for us, only commented on, as if we must know the story so thoroughly already and are only reading for the brilliance of his revisionist thesis, with which I must agree, that history is the result of the actions of great men and not purely the underlying forces of society.  In other words the FR was not inevitable but was brought about by a series of interconnecting actions and choices by Louis XVI and his ministers, in particular their financial and military support of the American Revolution, which led to the pigeons homecoming.  I did, like the French monarchy, persist, encouraged by the news that the Marseillaise was neither written in, about, nor commenced in Marseille, but created overnight to order on the North East frontier to encourage les autres before battle.  It gets better but he is so prolix that his erudition enables him to wander effortlessly off track.  I would say it was almost a great book.  And he is enlightening in simpler scenes, like the surprisingly attractive Charlotte Corday who assassinated the appalling Marat.  He sees the Terror as a means to maintain control of a country falling apart by invasion and insurrection, and observes how it paved the way for Buonapartism.  It seems all revolutions invariably lead to despotism, since only the strongest in any murderous situation prevail and they will be either the army (Bonaparte, Idi Amin, Nigeria, the generals of Burma,) or the politically ruthless (Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Milosevic, Mugabe of Zimbabwe) or the Church (Ayatollah, Rome, etc).  Perhaps because the American Revolution was not so much a revolution, but a liberation of a colony, and therefore had a specific enemy and a goal (i.e. the departure of the British) it escaped this bloodbath and non-democratic end.  The Civil war is far more revolutionary.  Indeed it is an insurrection and a failed revolution, an attempt to maintain a nostalgically old fashioned state, complete with slavery that was the fuel for its business success, against the modernising influences of the All Men are Equal libertarianism of the original American revolution.

The End of Faith                                                                 Sam Harris

A brilliant and timely warning against wishy washy liberalism tolerant of the evils of religion, and how this is not reciprocated by any of these religions.  Indeed the major danger for the survival of the world are these very religions, in particular Muslimism which seems to threaten the survival of us all.

In another book I found that the Library at Alexandria was burned by a Muslim fanatic, since there are only two kinds of book – the Koran, which they have, and everything else, which is unnecessary.

Time to stand up and yell fire in crowded places!

The Truth About Muhammad                                               Robert Spencer

This theme of dire warning is continued in this book.  Although clearly sponsored by the suspect David Horowitz his theme is how little we know of Muslim belief and how little it differs from what we are now pleased to call Islamism – to differentiate the naughty fanatical version from the good happy official version.  He (and others) say there is no difference, the Prophet enjoins his followers to kill all unbelievers, as well as a host of other people in all manner of unpleasant ways.   A critical life of Muhammad and his enmity and hatred of the Jewish people.  One of at least five books on the same subject by the same author who, we are assured, is safely in hiding.  Almost certainly I would guess, in Israel.

Don’t expect to see The Truth About Moses from the same people.  Though their God seems equally petulant and jealous and non-existent.

It seems that Muhammad was not only clearly insane but utterly bloodthirsty and ruthless.  This type seems to gain control so frequently in human affairs, perhaps because of their homicidal certitude, I suppose we should be grateful Hitler is not a religion.  Though fascism, like Stalinism, bears all the hallmarks of a creed.

Richelieu and the French Monarchy                            C.V. Wedgewood

Short, dry, but informative history of the brilliant man who survived the court of Louis X111 and paved the way for the French monarchy to expand its power under LIV.

Moving On                                                                 Larry Thompson

Events around a rodeo featuring riders, their photographers and lovers and various graduate students in sixties Texas.   He’s good, but not as good as I once thought.   This re-reading of his 1969 book reveals he is in fact a kind of TV writer, which is not to put him down.  It is really effortless reading, but doesn’t penetrate to the heart of things.

Tiger Patrol                   Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss

A true story of Men and War.

Tales of Unrest     (including Karain: a Memory)   Joseph Conrad.

Both books deal with the same issue: how to live with the haunting

memory of murder.  i.e. guilt.  Conrad typically mixes his tale with memory of love lost, but then he is a novelist and they are only historians, so he may stick closer to the truth.  His is a ghost story “the homeless ghosts of an unbelieving world” in which the unbelieving white world assuages the haunted neurosis of the Malay world with the talismanic gift of a Jubilee sixpence, bearing the embossed image of Queen Victoria.  This is ironically given to Karain, the tortured, haunted, apparently all powerful leader of a small group of villages in the Malay peninsula, by a young seaman to relieve his fear of haunting by an old victim.   It is Conrad’s ability to draw meaning from the mundane in the most glittering language that brings the shoreline, the sea, the light, to life, as well as the simple delineation of cynical seafarers engaged in the smuggling of arms.  The clash of an old Eastern culture with the new white western trading companies. The arrival of adventure capitalism as the liberator from superstition… Another of the  stories is of two white traders delivered (like Conrad himself) into a trading station in the heart of Africa who get broken by the isolation and the terrible mysterious unfathomable things that go on there and end up with murder and suicide as the trading boat, long overdue, finally calls to pick them up out of a white fog.  Written with a fine knowledge and hatred of life as an ivory (and unwitting slave) trader and clearly a precursor to Heart of Darkness. 

A fine discovery of a 1922 first edition in my French shelves.

 

Tiger Patrol is also (unwittingly) about guilt.   None of the men who, driven to extremes by continual fear, drugs and despair, became the inhuman slaughterers of the Song Ve valley, shooting peasants as easily as partridges, could return to normal civilian life or survive for long once they had descended into their own personal hell.  Decorating themselves with necklaces of ear hacked from their innocent victims, wasting women and children, dropping grenades into bunkers packed with civilians, the real evil bastards are the General Westmorelands, who promise the easily deceived American public victory in a hopeless cause, while composing policies which involve the removal of all Buddhist farmers to a relocation (concentration) camp behind barbed wire, or else be killed, in order to deny their rice to the NVA.   Yes they spray their fields with Agent Orange.   Once in this camp the Buddhist men will be inducted into the corrupt and hopeless South Vietnamese army.  What a choice.  No wonder so many fled or hid.   The Tiger Patrol’s task was to clear the area, and this they did, ruthlessly and mercilessly.   None of them ever escaped the memory of what they did and how they did it.  None of them would ever pay in a court of law (the enquiry was inevitably buried by the Pentagon) but they all paid for the rest of their lives reliving the horror and attempting to escape the guilt and memories through drink and drunks.  None succeeded.  They all died early.  Guilt really does operate as a factor in mankind.  Though I would hesitate to delineate it as religious, it is certainly ethical.  Perhaps there is some moral imperative in DNA, that you may not destroy your own species with impunity, as this would run counter to survival.   A fine book, well written and researched by two deservedly prize winning journalists.   How every war is the same, in that it takes the misfits abroad to behave as powerful and sadistic conquerors in someone else’s land from which they must return as rejects to their own country.  At least we now know about Post Traumatic shock syndrome.

The Congress of Vienna          Harold Nicholson

A study in Allied Unity  1812 – 1822

The comfort of reading great prose (like Conrad) is that the balanced rhythms and finely constructed sentences take you effortlessly onwards.  Harold Nicholson, I was surprised to observe, is one of the masters of this.  Indeed he may be ranked as one of the finest English prose writers.  This study of post Napoleonic Wars Europe, published in 1946, is written, poignantly, in September 1945 with a victorious Europe once again facing the problems of how to maintain alliances with conflicting Allied interests, and avoid the Peace becoming the pretext and cause for the next war.

 

Enemies of Promise                                                                                       Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly is a twat.  That’s official.  The real enemy of promise is him.   He screams and yells at hype and contemporary famous authors, but his book is no more than a long Sunday Times article.  He is The Culture.  Envious, needy, greedy for fame, fighting his petty jealousies in the book review columns.  The classic wanna be, he wants to write a great book before ten years pass.   Well sweetie this ain’t it.  His argument is fatuous.  He attacks 18^th century style using examples of Addison and Keats.  He is a wanna be academic as well.  Oddly most of the examples of what he called overblown and over praised novels, are the very ones which have survived.  It was he that was over blown and over rated.   The only good thing is the book starts in the Var. Now that really was early to be in the Var, and in an oddly typical first line he both illuminates and confuses, which is actually representative of his whole book.

Brown’s Requiem                                                                James Elroy

Rather like reading Elmore Leonard, I began some way in to get the feeling that I had read this before.  And of course I had.  But perhaps that is the point of detective fiction.  If you have forgotten the ending you can re-read.  The main delight is the plot, what happens next, so providing you don’t know who precisely does what and why to whom till the end then one can easily read it again.  This genre is always in first person singular, and the style is very informal and chatty. (Perhaps derived from radio drama?  Certainly the intimate voice over is part of film noir).  In this book both the protagonist and the antagonist love classical music, both are “failed” cops and they both shoot each other.  This is Chandler style, the ex-cop as Private Eye.  This one is a part time repo man who is invited by the anti-Semitic guilty man to investigate his victim (a wealthy Jewish former bookie, now furrier) and his motive (his incestuous love for his sister).   A novel twist – never quite explained is that the main suspect – a lunatic caddie who sleeps on the golf courses of Beverly Hills, starts the trail of investigation against himself.  Couple of Chandler themes:  incest, pornography, ultimate rejection, in this case by rather than of, the female.  He even feels the ghost of Marlowe as he enters a building.  Elroy is good, but not wonderful.  Readable, but not literature.  The detective form is essential deceitful because it is constructed like a gag, it hides the punch line till the end.  I liked the hero’s struggle with alcohol while scared shitless in Mexico, and I liked the unsentimental way he uses hookers for unsatisfactory sex after having bedded the heroin.  So, while stuck with the limitations of the detective story, Elroy gives glimpses that he is a more honest and truthful writer confined by the limitations of his genre.

Empire                                                                               Robert Harris

I find he is typing not writing.  His yarns are good enough – here one would have been sufficient.  I Cato is really what he is writing.  Roman history as novel.  The story of Tiro the slave, but without the genius of Graves.  Pot boiler.

The Pickwick Papers                                                            Charles Dickens.

I had trouble with the Pickwick papers, as I did so long ago.   The problem is that it is so episodic it would be better to receive a few chapters every two weeks, as originally conceived, than to sit down and swallow a whole reading.  This is Victorian soap opera and sit com combined.   There are many fine and funny characters but the book lacks an overall plot, something Dickens would soon learn to correct.  Pickwick and his preposterous friends blunder about the country (oh how well he describes their many frozen journeys on top of a coach) in search of interesting things to write about.   Almost like Dickens himself.  In fact the most poorly represented character is the eponymous Pickwick.  Somewhat ironically drawn, Dickens keeps us guessing as to whether he really is a fat bumbling hypocrite, or a jovial much-beloved good-natured fellow.  He is a cipher available for comic adventure, being sued for breach of promise, being ripped off by Jigger the con artist, engaging Sam Weller (and his good natured unhappily remarried father) to roam the Kent countryside in search of interesting subjects for the papers of the Pickwick club – a bye election, a shoot, a military parade etc etc.  In the end enough is enough, a taste is sufficient.  This old copy of mine on very thin paper has deteriorated through many damp winters in the Cabanon, since the signature inside says Eric Idle 1965.   Clearly an early Cambridge buy.

Too Loud a Solitude                Bohumil Hrabal

Written in Czech in 1976 and constantly reprinted this is a little gem of a book, from its arresting and repeated opening line:  “For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper, and it’s my love story.”  Hanta’s job is compacting used (and banned) books in a cellar, from whence he savours and saves all manner of printed things, art books, and philosophy and masterpieces, collecting certain books for some and treasuring the joy of literature and the beauty of books for himself, hundreds of whom he rescues.  But one day he visits the huge new socialist compacting machine where hundreds of young people in yellow uniforms and blue gloves compact hundreds of thousands of books, whole editions, without even glancing at them, or savouring them.  A visiting party of schoolchildren rip enthusiastically into them too.  He realises he is doomed, his way of life and his respect for books and the written word is done.  His Gypsy love long since gone.  He climbs into his own old compacter with his favourite book: Seneca’s On Tranquillity of Mind and like Seneca he pushes the final button…  A carefully and beautifully written metaphor by the author of Closely Observed Trains whom Milan Kundera calls “Czechoslovakia’s greatest living author.”

Blood Rites                            Barbara Ehrenreich

Origins and History of the Passions of War.

I began reading this a couple of years ago and found it here again in Cotignac.  Her theme is the origin of warfare, which she examines as a development from the hunt and the consequent shortage of animals that resulted from mass killings.  She reckons this is due to male and masculine evolution identifying itself with warrior who must prove his manhood through war.  I’m not sure I entirely buy this feminist explanation.  I always favour a DNA version of events.  Things are thus because one strand wraps round another going in different directions but together.  Opposites only attract.  Warfare may be one part of DNA invading in order to ensure that opposites meet and do not develop in isolation without benefiting the gene pool.  This may be seen as optimism run riot, but failed wars (and what war isn’t?) open the doors to a breaking down of barriers.  Post war rape may well be commonplace and the conquerors genes spread into the defeated gene pool but the intermingling of random genes may be the point.  If one were to argue that the strongest gene pool won (survived) then it immediately becomes diluted by the eggs of the conquered.  This may seem a callous view but DNA has no emotion, beyond survival.  That does not mean it appears to have no morality.

Barbara Ehrenreich makes some strong telling observations about War and The State, that it is war that leads to the State and vice versa.   Warfare is necessary to the state both to strengthen it and to keep the citizens in line.  But isn’t violence the cutting edge of survival, don’t we self predate precisely so we can go on evolving and not settle happily back in our niche twiddling our Buddhist thumbs while expanding beyond the limitations of our food processing abilities?  DNA must go forward or die.  We have to survive ourselves.   Society must evolve beyond the constant petty rivalries of statehood, constantly at the mercy of petty tyrants no matter how they are selected, playing out their own psycho dramas with the lives of others.   Anyone for the UN passport?

 

My own feeling ( and for a third year I am re-reading the end of this book in Cotignac) is that Killing is What We Do.  And perhaps What We Do best.  It is the cutting tool of evolution.  Survival of the fittest means obliteration of the weak in all niches.  There has never been a time when warfare isn’t what we do.   IN fact Peace is the rarity.  It is imnextricably linked with hunting.   Do we sharpen our hunting skills so we may kill the next tribe or vice versa.  Thank God for Football which seems importantly to be vital replacement therapy.   The Turks can fight the Croats and nobody dies….

Dancing in the Streets                      Barbara Ehrtenreich

Well to be honest I read this earlier this year.

A History of Collective Joy

From Dionysus to dancing in the streets.  Carnival.  Fascism.   Soccer.  Rock.  Tribalism and thereafter.  Mass hypnosis, the mass and the masses.

Her wide ranging interests and biology background make her always interesting.

Diary of a Bad Year                         J.M. Coetzee

This questioning of the State and the power of the state is the initial concern of the new Coetzee, as he puts it “We are born subject” and we are powerless to do anything about it. Occasionally the state offers us choices between A & B as to who is to rule, but the option for neither is never offered.  This is the first of a series of 31 short opinion pieces in the First Diary and a further 24 in the Second which the author is writing for a German publisher.  The uniqueness of the book is that the page is divided into three, in the bottom two tranches of which the ageing author lays out a story about himself and the gorgeously bottomed blonde Filipina who he finds in the launderette of their shared Australian apartment block, and whom he persuades to type these pieces, so that he may have some continued contact with her youth and freshness and perfection.  He regrets his own lost youth and sexual power while still thinking erotic thoughts of this divine young Aussie, whom he makes no attempt to touch.  The young girl’s partner Alan, who does something with money, attempts to persuade Anya first to help him rob Senor C and then humiliate him.  But Anya surprises the unpleasant Alan by leaving him after he gets drunk and abuses the old man and then demonstrates her extreme concern that the writer not die alone, expressing the wish to return to hold his hand as he dies, for he has led her out of her servile sexual state (as the trophy girl of a  smug, morally ambivalent, yuppie forty year old) into an independency of thought where her own ideas count.   The uniqueness of the book lies in its ability to be both inside the mind of the writer, with his opinions about Bush and Iraq and the State and Hobbes and Australian politics, while watching the story of the old man who is thinking and writing these things unfurl.   We experience the duality of existence: the clarity of  inside the mind and the mortal and shabby humans who are capable of such illuminating and rational thought.   A great achievement.

 

September

Nightlife                       Thomas Perry

Continuing the Perry-fest.  Highly readable, very enjoyable tale of a female serial killer from Portland, who begins to stalk the female detective who is searching for her.

Loser Takes All                      Graham Greene

Bought a 1^st Edition for 450 quid in Henley then picked up another for $250 at the Santa Monica Book Fair.  It’s a novella.  He calls it an entertainment.  It’s rather more like a movie.  Short moral tale about poor newly weds going to Monaco, where they fall apart because he wins money and becomes rich, then throws it away so he may once again be with her.  A fairy tale. Not all that well written.

 

The Nightmare Years 1930-1940                William L. Shirer

From Kabul to Ur, through Paris in the Daladier riots, but inevitably to Berlin to his great work, chronicling the rise (and ina  post script the fall) of the Nazis.  More importantly smuggling his crates of diaries out before they could be censored and destroyed.  This is what it is to be a diarist recording history (and his thoughts about it) as it happened.  We are fortunate for his sensible honestly.

London                                  A.N. Wilson

Short, nicely written popular history of the city.

Tactical Exercise                    Evelyn Waugh

First American Edition of the collected Short stories, included Work Suspended – which is now counted as a novel.   Most of these which I re-read are also in the following

Decline and Fall            Evelyn Waugh

A wonderful book.  In Akroyd’s book on Dickens he says Dickens is the premier English comic writer but Waugh must come close.   Waugh is more cynical, Dickens is bleaker but more sentimental – his characters are “characters”  – they know they are characters.  Waugh’s characters are closer to ciphers. (Humours)   His Paul Pennyfeather is only a little less naïve than a Wooster figure but what happens to him:  seduced by a school friend’s rich mother (Best-Chetwynde) who sends him off to Marseilles to save her brothel business,  arrested on his wedding day, jailed and sentenced to seven years hard labour, while his wife to be runs away becomes Lady Metroland and sends him fine meals in jail, eventually contriving to have him sprung, and fictitiously die, while he escapes to Tuscany,  is deeply cynical and critical of an upper notch of society which Waugh feels inferior too and hates beyond belief.  I love in this book the way all the characters he meets at the Welsh boarding school, Grimes, (who runs away twice) the Headmaster Dr Fagan and the eventually to be beheaded doubting clergyman (Mr Prendergast), the prig Potts , all recur later in London society and again in the prison.   These are all recognisable English types.    As Waugh observes prison is easy for anyone who has been at an English boarding school.   Picked up and dunked by drunken boat club rowdies of the Bollinger Club and expelled from Oxford for immorality for being found in a fountain without trousers, Paul manages to survive and return with a new identity and a moustache.  In the same way Waugh survives and becomes the wider maturer Army writer.

A marvellous book from a marvellous writer.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh      Evelyn Waugh

Wonderful treasures

The Ballad of the Sad Café                        Carson McCullers

An odd tale of an awkward lonely woman, her drunken husband and her unrequited love for a cowardly hunchback.    Strange material indeed for an oddly moving classic.

City of Djinns                William Dalrymple

Writer and his wife spend a year in Delhi.  His knowledge and love of Delhinese history are the best bits.

Dame Edna Everage               John Lahr

I very much enjoyed this book, written in a deceptively simple style by a sympathetic observer, John Lahr, who knows something about comedians, and engagingly and sympathetically watches his man in many circumstances and gets as close as possible to a comedy demon who wants to hide and ridicule mankind.  We follow him backstage into the West End and on a triumphal visit to Jersey.  The Edna gags are always great and here are many pages of them faithfully recorded, from his eighties re-incarnation (The height of the Thatcher era where Edna appears as virtually a Thatcher doppelganger. )  Barry is a quiet, pleasant man with a raging anger who has created demonic characters in which he can rail at the world.  His anger is transmuted into humour.  Dame Edna says the cruellest things and escapes by charming us.  Somehow she cannot really mean it.  Interestingly, Humphries conceives of himself as a clown, with the lipstick and face paint and bright colours.  Certainly the mask helps him to cut loose, and may explain the menacing quality of this not quite ready for pantomime dame.   Barry has also always liked the cruel situational non joke, from his earliest Dada days, shocking the public. In difficult situations he likes to disturb everyone around him.  He is similar in this respect to John Cleese, with his cruelty and lack of empathy and desire to control the situation. “Faced with hostility, Humphries’ impulse is always to attack and reverse it: controlling rather than being controlled by others.”  This, Lahr writes, is “a means of mastering fear by creating it.” He has also, like JC,  been known to aggressively kiss men on the mouth in public.   Again a dominance thing.  Lahr quotes Harriet: (a backstage person) “Barry likes to laugh at everybody else, but he can’t stand people laughing at him.   He’s so hurt if you laugh at him.”   This is the same defence mechanism at work in John.   An aggressive pacifism.

October – November

No Country for Old Men         Cormac McCarthy

I ran out of books at Denver airport and was happy to reread this in paperback.  First of all it is very simply written, like a screenplay, with un-inverted comma’d lines of dialogue and deceptively simple passages of action.  But it is a very bleak book. One might call it Bleak Horse. It clearly leads the author directly into the apocalyptic world of The Road.   Here is a writer who has lost all faith in human nature.   The themes of the book are being old, failure and death, both of the country and of the individuals in the tale.   The first person narrator Sheriff, looking back on the events the book describes, finds the country has become corrupted by drugs and easy money.   There is a new breed of casually violent dope dealer around, who kills the innocent as easily as his enemies.

Who the hell are these people? He said  …I used to say they were the same ones my granddaddy had to deal with….But I don’t know as that’s true any more.   I aint sure we’ve seen these people before..

Chigurh the representative of this new evil kind says this just before he kills the innocent wife of Moss – a man he has already killed:

Most people don’t believe that there can be such a person.  You can see what a problem that must be for them.  How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.

So this is a profoundly pessimistic book.  For the first three quarters it is pretty much a thriller and then McCarthy just jacks it in, and suddenly we casually learn third hand of the death of Moss (the protagonist who steals the drug money he comes across, thereby starting the inevitable pursuit).  We are left with the long italicised ramblings of a retiring sheriff who bizarrely confesses to his dad that he did not deserve the medal he won in WW2, he ran when he surrounded abandoning his beleaguered mates.   What must we make of this bleakness about America?  Specifically defined as the result of the Vietnam experience. The new ugly world America has become.  But when was it exactly pretty?  Surely it was always about guns and theft.   There is no novelistic outcome, people are shot, some for no reason, some casual victims of lunatics.  Chance rules.

A very powerful book.

Dead Aim                      Thomas Perry

A good detective novel is like a card trick.  There is a show, a distraction and then a final surprising revelation.   Thomas Perry pulls this trick off continually.

Frequently his books feature an older man (often an ex cop, but here an ex bail bond man) trying to understand the painful necessity of the world which forces him into violence.

Often he uses multiple viewpoints, the switch to an entirely new and unexpected character, which appears at first to be random, but which turns out to be vital to the plot.  This keeps his fiction constantly surprising, for nothing is ever just haphazard and nothing is ever simply irrelevant; it is all vital to our understanding of what is going on. And it permits us to discover what is happening for ourselves, rather than being told.   This means we experience and enjoy the pleasure of discovery, one of the delights of the Mystery form and one in which Thomas is particularly adept.

This book commences with a ruthlessly executed execution followed by the callous destruction of an entire family in an apartment who might possibly be witnesses to this hit.  Then there is a switch to an older man on a beach who becomes a witness to, and saves a young woman from, an attempted suicide.  She persuades him to have sex with her somewhat against his will, and then disappears from his home and is found shortly afterwards as a suicide.  The protagonist sets out to find out why – partly because he feels he has failed her somehow, and partly because his sister committed suicide at college 33 years before and he still feels somehow responsible.  He recruits a former colleague, a Bail bond investigator, Lydia,  to help him and stumbles across the main theme of the book, which concerns an Eric Prinz type of extreme self defence training school – controlled by a couple of ex South African mercenaries, which specialises in teaching people to kill for revenge, and eventually for pleasure.  As in the hunt.    But the plot brilliance is here where the character of Marcia – a student at this college– intrudes into the story, which skilfully sets us up for the discovery of the plot.  Only now half way through the book do we begin to suspect that this newly intruded storyline is not purely random, but ties in with the puzzling killings at the beginning and propels us forward into the second half of the story, where we watch his friend Lydia hunted and killed.  Again a common Thomas theme where the hunter becomes the hunted.

 

I also read and enjoyed

The Butcher’s Boy                           Thomas Perry

His very first novel.

Metzger’s Dog                        Thomas Perry.

A funnier thriller, featuring Leroy “Chinese” Gordon and his testy cat, Dr Henry Metzger, who befriends and tames a huge wild canine they steal while….

It’s all good.

 

Fair Game                    Valerie Plame Wilson

A great story but not a great book.  Partly because huge chunks are cut by the CIA, so that what we most want to know is excluded, and partly because this is a rape story told by the victim, and because as she was with the CIA she has learned to minimise the real extent of the hurt and anger and damage done to her.

Someone else needs to tell this story when the endless red herrings thrown up by the right, can be side stepped to reveal what an utterly heartless vicious criminal mind Cheney has that he can get away with encouraging treason – the outing of a professional in his countries secret service in order to revenge himself on her husband – a man who revealed the depth of their shabby lies over WMD.  In fact the true scandal is how this country continually puts up with these tyrant nazis who have subjugated their system, where everything is topsy turvey.  And still on an interview with Wolf Blitzer he spent time discussing the accusations against her (that she used nepotism to get her husband a job he did for nothing!) compared to the lie that Bush told, how he would remove anyone from the White House involved in the leak, which led inexorably to his pardoning the patsy Libby.

 

Dickens                        Peter Ackroyd

In many cases an author’s books describe and reflect his own life.  In the finest novelists we feel their own presence in the book so that the story teller is as much a character as the people in the fiction.    This is true of Austen, Conrad, early Mailer, Lawrence … perhaps everyone.-

It is most true of Dickens.

The life of Dickens is a novel.  And this is a very fine biography bringing a novelists understanding to both the man and his work.  It is the force of his character that stamps itself on the narrative so that he eventually becomes the finest exponent of his own work, reading it aloud publicly and virtually becoming his own work.   The pressure and stress of doing this eventually kills him, but even though he knew the dangers of this to his health he could not stop.  He had become his own celebrity.   This is his greatness, that he is both the man and his work and his own performer.

 

Reality Show                 Howard Kurtz

T.S. Eliot says in Murder in the Cathedral “Mankind cannot bear too much reality.”   I certainly can’t bear too many reality shows.   And I couldn’t bear too much of this book.  It is about the reality of the network news shows which is of course really about realty – the real estate of television, with its millions of addicts.  To truly understand what is going on on American TV, and the way the truth is handled and blunted and changed needs someone with far more cynicism and cruelty than this author.  Never before has an Ostrich mentality so imposed itself on a society.   Do we really care about Katie Kuric.  Is it really that important which painted face reads the heavily slanted news to the American public?  Is any form of news that sells advertising, ever to be trusted?   Of course not.

I read as much as I could stand about these powerful though dull people and the only redeeming feature was the odd fact that John Stewart’s parody news show seems to be the most accurate.  That of course has now been silenced by the writers strike, as has the only other serious comment about American leaders in the jokes of Leno, and Letterman.  A brilliantly cynical manner to squash public criticism in the wind up to an election.   Though only a cynic, or comedian, might suggest that might be one of the intentions…

Speedboat                     Renata Adler

This first novel did not seem to me to live up to the acclaim it received when it was first published.   Perhaps he beauty and intelligence fooled everybody…

The Curtain                  Milan Kundera.

An Essay in seven parts, none of which I can for the moment recall..

Hotel de Dream             Edmund White

Edmund White writes of the last chapter in the life of Steven Crane (The Red Badge of Courage) as he is dying broke in England, and then France,  but improbably has him dictating a gay novel about a married banker in New York who falls for a young boy prostitute Elliot, thereby ruining his life, his wife, his job and his bank balance.   Is this wish fulfilment?   White claiming Crane for his team?   He writes beautifully and the tale was fine enough but is it true, or is it merely fantasy?

Conrad and Lady Black           Tom Bower

Tabloid biography at its finest and I’m not ashamed to say I was fascinated to read the downfall of this arrogant man and his rather greedy wife.

Paris           The Secret History                  Andrew Hussey

A wonderful book.  A comprehensive history of this frequently violent city.  How frequent is the amazing part of the story.  Incorporating art and society and not at all just a tale of Kings and Queens.  Thoughtful and intelligent, he charts the change and development and evolution of this organism.

 

The Late Hector Kipling                   David Thewlis

This isn’t just a good novel, a comic novel, an English novel, a very well written novel:  it’s a Northern novel, and not just Northern it’s a Lancashire novel.  Lancashire has the most delicate, delicious form of understated humour,  (Rob Wilton) much subtler and funnier than the rather more obviously funny Yorkshire humour.

This line captures it for me, as the hero, crawls past a traffic accident involving a dead florist.   “There’s a man who’s sold his last flower” he says.

 

 

November – December

 

Sex  With Kings             Eleanor Herman    (E-Books)

A great pot boiler.   History as gossip and twice as interesting.

A Christmas Carol                  Charles Dickens   (E-Book)

A gem.  Still and forever.

A Tale of Two Cities       Charles Dickens   (E-Book)

Not as great as I remembered, but still with some fairly awesome creations – the knitting women and their implacable hatred.

Death Benefits               Thomas Perry   (E-Book)

The one about insurance scams – and a whole town involved.  Rather less believable than most and the first one of his I have read that didn’t entirely satisfy me.

Pursuit                         Thomas Perry       (E-Book)

Though this one was very good and very gripping.  Thirteen bodies are discovered in a small Louisville restaurant just after closing time.  The local Police call in a retired cop now a criminology professor – relentless pursuit of a cold blooded killer by an ex-cop..

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Things Elmore Leonard  (E-Book)

Well you can’t blame a guy if the publishers want to.  Nicely illustrated.

The Tipping Point          Malcolm Gladwell   E-Book

Excerpt only.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              2006

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

November – December

Madame de Stael                    Maria Fairweather

The daughter of the Swiss banker Necker who almost prevented the French revolution, this extraordinary intellectual swam through the murky waters of the Revolution and managed to survive even the implacable hatred of Napoleon: she would call a spade a tyrant.   Friend to many (Talleyrand etc) and a novelist and essayist and historian, this is a fascinating tale of the woman who crops up everywhere.

Great tales from English History       Robert Lacey.

Just what it says – a quick nice gossipy history of tales from Chaucer through to Isaac Newton.   No particular axe to grind, but several heads to sever.

Pharos and Pharillon                       E.M. Forster

1923, travellers tales of Alexandria, through history and then contemporary Egypt.

The Americanization of Emily           William Bradford Huie

A lovely highly readable novel of English gels at war and the American invasion of Britain.   Including the Normandy invasion.   A really enjoyable book.

Intimacy                                Hanif Kureishi

A man leaves his not very nice unloved wife, planning to sneak away to his friends flat only to discover at the end that he is really gay…unless I misread it???

The Road                               Cormac McCarthy

Bleak.  Simply bleak.   But elegant as hell.

Firmin                                   Sam Savage

A rat who lives in a bookshop.

Ancient Rome                         Simon Baker

A TV type scamper through the highlights.  Not very well written.

Through the Children’s Gate            Adam Gopnik

Leaving Paris returning to New York in time for 9/11 and the five subsequent years bringing up the kids.   That interesting.   Or not.

The Aeneid          Virgil          Translated by Robert Fagles

A brilliant translation.  Highly readable and very entertaining and about time I read it.

Chrysanthemum Palace          Bruce Wagner

Despite being named by name in this book I had trouble getting through Bruce’s latest.  It’s because the new trendy five-stream story novel is very confusing to read, five simultaneous stories means that if you pick the book down in the middle for a moment or two you haven’t a hope in hell of remembering who anyone is.   Some of the stories I found moving and affecting and would have preferred them to play out in their own time, so I was overall disappointed and need to return to this work and try again because I so love Bruce and he is so great.

A Perfect Spy                         John Le Carré

Well I had misgivings and I must say I soon found out that he has by this stage of his career become prolix and distended and otiose and his sentences are long and his rhythms are clumsy and he is altogether unreadable.  And he started out so spare and tense and every word counted.  He must have started to believe his own reviews and the thriller writer thought of himself as a literary figure.   A pity.

 Ghost written                         David Mitchell

Nine characters linked, a terrorist cult member in Okinawa, a record shop clerk in Tokyo, a money laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old Buddhist woman running a tea shack in China, an entity, an art thief in St Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist hiding from the CIA in Ireland and a late night DJ in New York hurtle towards a shared destiny.  Awesome. One of the greatest and most interesting contemporary novelists.

What is the What                    Dave Eggers

Normally I like his stuff and he sent me a bound proof as well as a hard back, but I can’t get into the African story thing.  It is me.  I will try again and I do feel bad because he is a great guy and a wonderful writer.

Number 9 Dream                    David Mitchell

Set in Japan, this story of a young man searching for his father in Tokyo and his terrifying involvement with the Yakuza underworld is everything that his first novel promises us.    What a writer of prose he is.   Certainly the best young novelist currently at work.  There is only one strand I found difficult, which was some kind of story within a story and I frankly skipped it without losing anything from the novel – and a good editor would have removed it altogether.   Gripping and moving, including the moving story of his grandfather as a Japanese human torpedo, altogether pastoral, historical, tragical.

Cloud Atlas                            David Mitchell

A nest of dolls or Chinese boxes.  Of many stories, and many narrators inter-related and inter-connected.  Of different styles, and eras and  Dazzlingly brilliant.  Almost impossible to summarise.  He is pure genius.

Protobiography              William Boyd

Short Penguin 70.

June 1941                     John Lukacs

The proof that history is made by individuals.   Without these two, World War Two would never have been so successful.   Amazing to watch the aggressive paranoia of Hitler turning to stab his ally in the back to begin his own downfall.  Did ever two monsters more deserve each other?  I loved the way Stalin could not believe it and took to his bed for days so Molotov took over till he recovered.   How nuts they were.  It’s beyond time psychological testing was used to satisfy an electorate of the mental health (and types) of candidates.   Would Bush have even passed?   But mankind needs defenses against the duplicity and cleverness of the insane.  Especially when they come disguised as religions.   I suggest an Independent Office of Psychological Counselling which advises the electorate.

Scott-King’s Modern Europe            Evelyn Waugh

A failed novel.   Starts off well, and fails.   He is smart enough to notice and abandon the book.   this I have a nice first edition. (illustrated by the author)

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh     Evelyn Waugh

What a joy he is.  Many gems in here.  Early days of Apthorpe.  Troubles with women.  An endless treasure trove of bits and pieces for dipping into and re-reading this master of 20^th Century prose fiction.

Walking Zero                                  Chet Raymo

A history of time and the cosmos along the Prime Meridian.

The Collected Stories                       Amy Hempel

Very fine.

September- October

Fascination                   William Boyd

Stories now in paperback.

Restless                         William Boyd

I couldn’t get into at all.  Really disappointing spy tale and without any of the stamp of truth.  In truth this fall there are a whole series of novels I couldn’t pick up.    All disappointing.

Kalooki Nights              Howard Jacobson

The usually reliable Howard Jacobson left me wanting less.

House of Meetings                  Martin Amis

And Martin Amis, well, I was done before I sat down.   What is it with this current spate of English writers?    Is it the Booker?   Are they all trying to win prizes instead of writing novels?   Or are they all turning failed film scripts into novels?     But I still persisted!   Sent by Mike Nichols initially.

Tales from the Tower     Daniel Diehl & Mark P. Donnelly

It was a relief to turn to this light work of history of fascinating tales from the Tower.  Fun to read of the sack of the Savoy in the Peasants revolt while actually in bed in the Savoy.   Many excellent tales.

The Confident Hope of a Miracle               Neil Hanson

A history of the Spanish Armada which tells the tale of yet another leader launching a military expectation trusting to God and the future.   Neither of which turn out to be reliable. If only Bush could read he would learn so much about history’s assholes before him, where the wished for event replaces the possibility of failure.  The Armada proceeded in optimism, relying on God, where a sensible plan, and a better idea might have saved it from it’s fate.   But is God blamed and punished?   No he gets off scot free…and on to inspire the next lunatic who thinks he is talking to someone.

The Rings of Saturn                W.G. Sebald

Are they novels, biography, memoirs or philosophical essays?  The books of Sebald encompass all four at once.  The narrator is on a walking tour of the east coast and the following subjects cross his mind:   Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the temple of Jerusalem, Conrad, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, the massive bombings of WW11 the dowager Empress Tzu Hsui and the Norwich silk industry…!  What makes Sebald so interesting is this is how we think.

One or two Orphans as usual at this time of year.

The Big Empty                       Norman Mailer

Dialogues and essays on Sex, God, Boxing Morality etc etc

Not One More Death               Brian Eno, Le Carre, Pinter

Highly political polemics against the Iraq war.  Angry and outspoken and by God sadly needed.

The Death of Kings                 Clifford Brewer

Morbidly fascinating tale of the death of every King & Queen of England, which reminds you that death ain’t pleasant, welcome or always kind….but that amongst the royals, syphilis is king.

The Wah-Wah Diaries            Richard E. Grant

The making of a film.    Fab film, fab diary.  Should be taught in film school, about the evils and horrors of raising the money for independent films and holding the pieces together in time and long enough to make a movie.    Sometimes fortune seems to favour those who didn’t!

The Case for Impeachment               David Lindorff & Barbara Olshansky

As always a book written by two is less than more.  But of course this is about the evil Bush.  May his soul rot in hell.

Campo Santo                          W. G. Sebald

The last book by Sebald doesn’t disappoint.   Not really a book but a series of unfinished pieces.   The main unfinished part of the book is memories of Corsica, but the best piece Between History and Natural History On the literary description of total destruction  discusses the lacuna in German literature immediately after the war, where the Germans are so shell shocked and guilty that they do not write about their sufferings after the tremendous damage wrought on them.  They were bombed back to the stone age living in the rubble, but could not describe these sufferings adequately because of the monstrous revelations that they were learning about themselves and what they had done to the Jews.  He makes a fine distinction between passive resistance and passive acceptance, which we would all do well to ponder in these Bush days.

 

By far my favourite reading this fall has been stumbling on some first edition Waugh’s and delightedly re-read Officers and Gentlemen his great trilogy.

Men at Arms                 Evelyn Waugh   (first edition)  1952

Officers and Gentlemen  Evelyn Waugh   (first edition)  1955

Published 1952 this delightfully honest story about being caught up in World War two and the chaos of the army has great characters  (the hilarious Apthorpe and his thunder box, the one eyed General) and reeks of reality.  But his mature writing style is so good I think him now better than Greene.   Even his theme, of the natural gentleman of England, is bitterly ironic, since the gentleman he so admires, Ivor Blair, with his oriental garb and Pekingese, is the first to desert his men at Crete, and turns up safely to be saved from the consequences of his cowardice by the appalling society hostess Mrs Stritch.   Apthorpe too with his pretence at superiority is exposed as a lying fool.   Guy Crouchback blunders his way through the war, and the bleak boredom of army life, interspersed with moments of terrifying horror, and terrifying humour, has never been so realistically captured.   To me it’s Waugh and Peace.

Unconditional Surrender    (first edition 1961)

A third volume a few years later.  More wistful, and unexpected, the sudden death of his philandering wife Virginia, after Guy takes her back, and the completely unexpected happy end.  The death of the one eyed Brigadier.  It’s not a totally satisfactory ending to such a great trilogy.  Perhaps he left it too late, too long.  But the glitter of the writing leaves me almost completely happy.

 

And what can one say about

The Python Years                   Michael Palin       Diaries.

Except the give away inversion of the title and the extraordinary timing of the publication, to co-incide with the opening of Spamalot, reveals the rather dull narcissist underneath the niceness.   We learn almost nothing of the feelings and emotions of the real Palin,   perhaps he has none.   Is this the Oxford way like Alan Bennet constantly backing shyly into the limelight with another enormous volume about themselves.   I am singled out for character abuse, though it is like being savaged by a smiley face, since most of the abuse and contempt he feels for me is thirty years old.   His more recent comments in the Sunday Telegraph left me feeling hurt and betrayed and of course I had to fight the impulse to strike back “This book is very hard to put down: but well worth the effort” being one good one liner I have had to bite my tongue not to use.   It wasn’t easy having the Telegraph serialise this and having headlines about my selfish self hanging on my door in the morning but I learned to take the paper without looking and fling it down the hall and after a moan to Terry J about feeling hurt, and a call to my shrink, I took an executive decision to rise above it, and talk to Michael privately later about what felt like a betrayal.   He offered me lunch and I didn’t want to see him.   Since he accuses me of only liking famous people perhaps he no longer qualifies as a friend….Pity.  Nice bloke, I hear. But God if this is the highlight of his diaries and there are another fifteen volumes.   Nothing like a narcissist to save you on Horlicks.

Jane Austen  A life           Carol Shields

Just that,   but quite interesting.

Bizarre Books                Russell Ash Brian Lake

Just that.   Hilarious titles, like I was Hitler’s Maid and Fish who Answer the telephone.   All apparently real books.

Portraits in Miniature    Essays        Lytton Strachey

A nice find.  First edition signed by “The Author” from 1931.

Among the Cities           Jan Morris

The prolific wanderer with some elegant tales of cities.  Bath, LA etc

The Deserter        Peter Bourne

A gift from Carey, the first novel of his friend Matthew’s dad.  I didn’t expect a lot and it seemed ok but I didn’t stick with it.   Needed a good editor and in this season of disappointment for novels it came as no surprise.

 

July-August

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy                          John Le Carre

Really a detective story.  His strength lies in his characters.   The absurd Smiley and of course the leathery old schoolmaster spy teacher Jim Prideaux  a sort of modern Buchan character, decent shy and violent when necessary.  Like a detective story he only lets us know what he wants when he wants so we have no real insight and it is largely surface.

 

Vertigo                                           W.G. Sebald

Sometimes great, sometimes banal.  Great sketches of historical figures as in Lytton Strachey.  He seems unable to distinguish between the particular and the prosaic.  Highs and dulls.

 

The Honourable Schoolboy              John Le Carre

I thought I would give him a re read to see if he stood the test of time, and actually he doesn’t. This one I could hardly wait to stop reading.  Occasionally interesting but more frequently tedious as if cranked out for a greedy publisher on a roll.  I think the early books a good deal better.

 

Farewell the Trumpets                     Jan Morris

Part Three:  An Imperial Retreat.

The magnificent conclusion to the extraordinary trilogy.    This is a great achievement and fun to read the decline and fall of an empire which is so filled with amazing people and stories.   All empires resemble each other.  That’s what we do, build empires.   We can no more avoid it than ants.

 

Colossus                                Niall Ferguson

As an ironic counterpart to the above this is the American empire which is not only in denial but seems to be about to collapse before forming.   The fault of his book is the same as some teachers – they cannot resist telling you what the book is about, then how they will describe what it is about and then etc etc.,   get on with it!

 

Coronation Everest                          Jan Morris

Binge reading Jan Morris.  This tells the story of my involvement with Everest, and Empire.  The ten year old at breakfast at boarding school and the radio announcing Everest had been conquered.  Perhaps bigger than the World Cup!   I had no idea it was Jan then James who brought the good news, and even laboured half way up the mountain with Hunt and co.

 

The Captain and the Enemy             Graham Greene

The one where the con man kidnaps the willing boy from unhappy boarding school as a companion for his girl Kath, then is absent being largely villainous.   Boy grown up goes to South America and largely fails to tell the Captain that his girl is dead, then he does, then he dies and then he dies.

It’s two books, second part much stronger if more familiar Greene overseas, but still not a masterpiece.   Found a nice First Edition.

Tales from the Tower of London       Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly

Very easy fine potted historical scenarios of the long and extraordinary history of the tower, of blood, of rebellion, of escapes, of theft, I mean this is television at its finest.   Bought it for Lil but devoured it myself.

 

May – June

The Happy Island          Dawn Powell

Really the mistress of irony.  This 1938 dissection of the mad occupants of the island of Manhattan and its values is superb.   A stunning and wickedly witty expose of the gay, the glittering, the glitterati and the simply rich.  Try these:

“it seemed to him the sky…was very pretty, with the hickory trees and the distant mills against; if carefully done would make an unusually bad oil painting.”

“One was drunk…because of intolerable boredom or because one’s play was a flop or success, one’s lover was lost or regained, one had won or dropped a fortune – any one of these was legitimate excuse for excess; but to be drunk…merely out of poverty was more than decent people could bear….”

“As usual at these affairs Dol sat in the big yellow wing chair by the fire, smiling fixedly and ignoring his guests,  But today of all days his smile was too fixed, his stupefaction so obvious that Neal and jean came over to nudge him into consciousness and found that he had not passed out as they had unfairly suspected, the man was merely dead,”

 

“It was bad enough to have Dol die….but to have him drop dead right in the middle of a party – even though it was his own, and he had a perfect right – and make so many people feel uncomfortable was so unlike him, so gauche, so lacking in taste as to be almost unforgivable.

Laurel Canyon     Michael Walker

A fascinating story of the occupants of this Wonderland Canyon from the sixties to the present day.  A well told highly readable tale of two titties.

Sock           Penn Jillette

Nicely written enough with all his energy and drive, but I hadn’t a clue what it was about and ducked early.

The Emigrants              W.G. Sebald

Finely written and elegantly constructed with the eerie use of real photographs but I got a little tired of it.

Bush On The Couch               Justin A. Frank

So there is plenty to worry about!   At least it helps to see what creates a monster.  O Poor America that it should be in such dangerous hands.  A man who failed at everything, now fails at the most important job in the world.    What did they expect?

Our Man in Havana               Graham Greene

The vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited by British Intelligence to be a spy in Havana and creates the characters of spies and chaos, but is allowed to walk away with the girl and the proceeds.   Very funny and masterful Greene.

The Shipwrecked                    Graham Greene

I’m having a Greene season.

May We Borrow Your Husband                 Graham Greene

Wickedly bitchy Greene at his best

Travels With My Aunt                      Graham Greene

The finest non Gay Queen we ever had.

Rough Crossings                    Simon Schama

Scary and beautifully written story of slavery in the New World and how when the Americans were forming to rid themselves of slavery they didn’t mean actual slaves but only freedom from the British who were seeking to restrict and ultimately ban slavery.  An odd different view of history where the Brits guaranteed the freedom of slaves in the war of independence.   Then continues with the story of Sierra Leone which was less fascinating.

Black Green         Down                   David Mitchell

A wonderful novel, a year in the life of a young boy in 1982 Worcestershire.   Amazingly written.   And best novel of the year.

Inventing a Nation                           Gore Vidal

Founding fathers and their foibles in the birthing process of a Nation.

The Pharmacist’s Mate           Amy Fusselman

Short and sweet

Shalimar The Clown               Salman Rushdie

I really loved this latest Salman, which tracks the story of a Killer of Max Ophuls and his daughters revenge. It isn’t so much the story of a terrorist as a Revenger’s Tale.   Good to see Salman writing so well when most of his contemporaries are just making pot boilers.

Hand To Mouth                      Paul Auster

Memoir of a young writer.

Everyman            Philip Roth

Thank You Jeeves          P.G. Wodehouse

The usual rot with yachts and fathers and Wooster in love with inappropriate American gels.

Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone James Baldwin

Story of a black American actor.

The March           E .L. Doctorow

I loved this civil war story set around Sherman’s march through the South pillaging and burning.

 

 

March – April

The Big Laugh              John O’Hara

I very much enjoyed this novel about a soul-less scoundrel who becomes a star and even a better person through fame.  His dialogue is terrific, and the psychology of sex seems both modern and accurate.    Surprisingly good.

The Geographer’s Library                John Fasman

A Best Seller, and ok but I gave up under the weight of it’s pretensions.  Perhaps it’ll make a nice film.

Napoleon in Russia                 Alan Palmer

A fabulous telling of the invasion of Russia.  The pride and fall of Napoleon faced with the hubris and trapped in his own world view.  Highly readable and the exquisite torture of the Grand Army in the harshest of all environments.

The Possibility of an Island     Michel Houellebecq

Almost unreadable.   Certainly incomprehensible.  Fragments from the future?  I dunno.  The danger even good novelists fall into when indulging in science fiction.

Catherine de Medici                Leonie Frieda

All here, the young Medici girl who married a King Henri 11 only to be widowed at a joust and then to fight like a tigress to keep France from collapsing.   She held apart the warring factions with consummate skill though the bloodletting of the Reformation was impossible to prevent and collapsed into the murderous Massacre of St Bartholomew which oddly, in the end, led to the ascendance of a Huguenot King Henri 1V at the expense of a mass.    And yes, Paris probably is worth it….   Fine history.

The Comedians                      Graham Greene

A wonderful novel.   Set in the chaotic world of Papa Doc’s – the writing and the images – the dead man in the empty swimming pool – the sense of inevitable defeat against the implacable Ton Tons.  This is a fine novel even by his standards.

Her Majesty’s Spymaster                  Stephen Budiansky

Very much enjoyed this history of Elizabeth’s man Sir Francis Walsingham, who defended and protected her in the turmoils of the Reformation against the machinations of her step Brother-in Law Philip 11.

A Short History of Myth          Karen Armstrong.

Probably not short enough for me since I can remember nothing….

Slowing Down                        George Melly

The discomforts and embarrassments of aging are so unpleasant and unwelcome that even in George Melly’s ironic and humorous hands I could not continue.    Perhaps it’s a bit too close….

State of Fear                 Michael Crichton

I see I got well passed the half way mark before chucking this so called thriller.  He seems to argue against Global Warming which seems eccentric at the least.   Perhaps he’s a Bush pal…   I used to think he wrote better than this, but now he is down there with Grisham for me in the Unreadable Best Seller Category…

1599   A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.  James Shapiro

Even though I couldn’t wait for the year to end, this book is still crammed with interesting and valuable insights.  The scenes of them moving the Theatre across the river in winter in themselves are worth the admission, plus the many connections between the Essex rebellion and Julius Caesar The writing of As You Like It, and then the creation of the breakthrough play Hamlet, where soliloquy led him into a whole new existentialist essayist way of writing plays.  A good fine book.

 

January thru February

Austerlitz                      W. G. Sebald.

I loved this part memoir part novel of early childhood in Wales. Where the child finally discovers his holocaust story background, transported out of Austria.  The tale of a survivor.

 

Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History  Frederick Merk

So American foreign policy has always been driven by lies and greed.   Don’t know whether this is refreshing or depressing to learn.  Best not to be Mexico or Iraq at times like this to stand in the way of the megalith armed with the bible and the knowledge that God wants you to do what you have just decided you will do.

1453                                                          Roger Crowley

The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West.  A very topical reminder that history is always relevant and that those who do not read it or understand it are…well everywhere.   Particularly in government.   I myself was ignorant of this engrossing tale of the Sultan Mehmet 11 and his siege and eventual conquest of the thousand year city of Byzantium, ruled by Constantine X1, the 57^th Emperor of Byzantium.  The fall and destruction of this ancient city is simply and well told.

Over the Edge of the World               Laurence Bergreen

Another fascinating historical book of the struggle, journey and death of Magellan, and his extraordinary epic voyage, this Portuguese commander leading a Spanish flotilla of five ships into the unknown, in search of a short route to the Spice Island and eventually circumnavigating the globe, though losing his own life, stabbed by islanders he was subjugating when he believed his own publicity that he was acting for God.   How often God misleads those in command to their own destruction. Almost as if he sought to demonstrate his own non existence.

Party in the Blitz                     Elias Canetti

Very fine, beautifully written, occasionally bitchy literary memoir by a man who knew them all.  Elegant prose and effortless style and memories of life in the blitz by the exiles from Europe.    Always good to see the British appreciated for their brave stand against tyranny in the forties.

London 1945                          Maureen Waller

Similar vein, though more clinical and historical.   This tracks the days of the V2 the Vengeance bomb, that was the worlds first supersonic space missile, that landed on England and created mass destruction, in what everyone thought was the end of the war.   After five years of slaughter two thousand or more of these missiles shredded the streets of London, creating thirty feet craters and felling whole rows of terraces.   A miracle anything survived.  The bravery and guts of the civilians and the terrible last strain of sleeping in the tubes and in freezing Anderson shelters after years of an exhausting war.  They should be honoured.

Into a Paris Quartier                        Diane Johnson

A little poule au pot boiler.   Nicely produced, easy to ignore.

 

The Good Life               by Jay MacInnerney

Love and adultery under the shadow of the twin towers.  Wife goes on. Neither as gripping nor as dramatic, nor as believable as the real thing.

It’s not that this is a bad novel.  It’s just that it’s not a good novel.  He writes essays about his characters, essays about what they were and what they did, so that their words and behaviour don’t reveal who they are because he is too busy telling you.   It’s almost journalism.  Yes he has a great gift and it took a while before I realised I had had enough.

 

102 Minutes                  Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

The untold story of the fight to survive inside the Twin Towers.    Terrifying and informative, and instructive about Guiliani lying.  The firemen could have been saved…

 

 

              2005

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

January thru February

The Kreutzer Sonata                        Margriet de Moor

A rather beautiful slender tender novella about a blind music critic and his powerful love for and jealousy of a Dutch viola player.   Didn’t quite end up where I expected, but is an interesting tale really nicely told.

 

The Sirens of Titan                          Kurt Vonnegut

I re-read this on the strength of Hornby’s rave in the Polysyllabic Spree but experienced severe disappointment.   Am I alone in thinking this rather heavy-handed and overdone?   Like all fantasy fiction when the world they create becomes didactic rather than recognisable I find I resent being lectured at.

The Line of Beauty                                   Alan Hollinghurst.

The Booker winner.  I shouldn’t have ignored Hornby’s hint about this one.  I don’t know how bad the others were but this was clearly a political correct decision…. I may go back.   Do I have to?

The Ancestor’s Tale                         Richard Dawkins

A backward look at history to where ancestors broke off on our journey.  Interesting and then a bit dry.  Too much, too detailed.   His conceit of it as a Canterbury Tale of our biological history is too conceited.

Napoleon’s Women                          Christopher Hibbert

The man through his women, an interesting look at the man who did so much to ensure there are so few Frenchmen today.   Of course small penised and selfish sexually, but he did love Josephine and never won another battle after he divorced her.  Hibbert is good readable history.   Gives quite a bit of credence to the murder theory too….

The Wealth of Mr. Waddy                         H. G. Wells

A discovered unpublished 1969 edition of a book he abandoned and which virtually became Mr. Kipps.  Actually very funny, very well written and very Dickensian, until the eponymous hilariously bad tempered Mr. Waddy expires and rewards the rather dull grocer Kipps with his fortune and even Wells can’t be bothered to finish the story of him losing it.   There is a very funny character called Chitterlow who is an impoverished actor and is hilarious.    Much that is funny here.

I am Mary Dunne                            Brian Moore

A nice early New York novel about a women losing her identity and feeling herself defined only through the men in her life.  In this case a rather tiresome alcoholic called Hat, who may or may not have suicided over her.  Nice touches, nice observation of Manhattan and the cultural cringe of the Canadian’s coming down to visit.

Speed The Plow                               David Mamet

The fine play, with wonderful dialogue about a newly promoted studio exec and the fight over his soul by his friend and rival and a temp secretary who almost wins him to art before crap wins out.   A dialogue of the virtues and vices of cinema.

Parallel Worlds                               Michio Kaku

Steven Weinberg “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”   Much to think of in this trip round the current state of the Universe, nicely and patiently explained, though even the most patient layman can hardly follow the abstruse illogic of super string theory which may hold the clue to everything.   I guess we have to trust them.  A nice guide and a thoughtful and sensitive writer the Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Grad Center of the City University of New York.

March thru May

Franklin and Winston             Jon Meacham

Mike Nichols gave me this story of friendship at war between Churchill and Roosevelt.   A beautiful story.   How history is changed by individuals.

The Way of King Arthur          Christopher Hibbert

Tales of the history of myth.

The Rules of Engagement                Anita Brookner

School friends and rivals and their jealousy over a man.

Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure             Giles Foden

The true story of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika and a tale of the absurd lengths men will go to kill each other over national rivalry.

1215  The Year of Mana Carta          Danny Danziger & John Gilligham

Concept driven history and not as readable as it might be.

The Chrysanthemum Palace             Bruce Wagner

Another lovely book about the people who inhabit Hollywoodland.

Force Majeure              Bruce Wagner

A re-release of his first book.   (inscribed by and a gift from the author)

Susan Sontag                Regarding the Pain of Others

Essay on death and art, and capturing the moment in painting and photography

Saturday                                Ian McEwan

A day in the life of Henry Perowne surgeon who wakes to see a plane falling in flames into Heathrow, encounters violent men in a car and questions his life and values.

Persuasion                             Jane Austen

Snobby old Sir Walter Elliott falls on hard times and takes his family to Bath where the mousey daughter Ann finds true happiness with the right one in the end.

Fascination                            William Boyd

Stories.  I enjoyed it.

On The Yankee Station           William Boyd

Re-reading these earlier tales because I found a nice first edition copy.

A short history of Nearly Everything    Bill Bryson

A great primer.   An essential book.   Just everything.  Amazing.

The most impressive concise statement of what we think we know and what we know we think.    Actually the Bible of the Unbeliever.

Never Let Me Go                    Kazuo Ishiguro

Bust sadly I did.  Weirdness about kids being raised as replacement parts.

Hotel Babylon               Anonymous and Imogen Edwards-Jones

Great fun.  The “true” story of a day in a great hotel in London from the viewpoint of one desk clerk.  Obviously many episodes of outrageous human behavior are exposed with great hilarity and glee.

June

The Finishing School              Muriel Spark

Oddly the finish is the least good, but at 85 she is still going strong. A tale of revenge and competitive creation.

 

Antiquity                                Norman F. Cantor

The F tells us everything we need to know.  Not nearly well-written enough book on early history.

July

Where Angels Fear to Tread             E.M .Forster

Beautifully written, great irony, becomes a little Grand Guignol, but nonetheless fine novel.   England and Italy theme again, though this time the voyage to Italy isn’t quite so successful, then it become starkly tragic as the demented English sister turns out to be nuts.

 

The Philosopher’s Pupil                   Iris Murdoch

I liked this a lot and then I got very tired of it.  Control freaks and obsessives and I got to not care about any of them.

A Sentimental Education                           Flaubert

I started this again and then left off again.   I am not such a Flaubert fan as Dickens and Balzac.

The Venetian Empire                       Jan Morris

A magnificent eloquent brief and descriptive history of the rise and fall of the Venetian Empire (the biggest since Rome) from the Fourth Crusade and the iniquities of the Doge Dandolo subverting the enterprise and destroying the Byzantine Capital instead, to the arrival of the short arsed arrogant control freak Napoleone in St. Mark’s Square.  Empire is the story of civilisation, it’s what we do.  If only Americans read history or had even heard of it…

Mr Paradiso                                             Elmore Leonard

I re-read half of this on holiday.   It’s not as good as the next two he came out with.

Life Force                     Fay Weldon

Five chums and their husbands and Leslie with the Magnificent Dong and his wife’s vindictive paintings of the locations of their adulteries

 

 

August thru October

True Crime                   Jake Arnott

Very fine circular narrative, but ultimately the multi-personality narrative is a bit confusing.  Still he is extraordinarily good.

 

 

Bangkok Tattoo             John Burdett

The tales of the Thai Police force again.  Fab.  This one in search of a demented Jap tattoo artist.

 

The Gamblers                John Pearson

John Aspinall James Goldsmith and the murder of Lord Lucan.   Yes Aspers bumped him off to prevent him coming home and revealing how much they had all been a part of the plot to kill his ex-wife.  Fascinating, nicely written well very readable

 

I have had a sequel of not finishing novels

Which ended with

No Country for Old Men         Cormac McCarthy

Which I adored

But among the unfinished casualties were

Arthur & George                    Julian Barnes

Which I couldn’t get into

Lunar Park                            Bret Easton Ellis

Which I lost interest in

Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles   Will Clarke

Which was never of much interest and

Slow Man  by J.M.Coetzee

Which disappeared up it’s own arse when one of his previous characters appeared as the author apparently writing this one.  The Post Modernist always Rings Twice….

 

Sometimes it is good to remember that you don’t have to finish reading it just because somebody finished writing it…

I didn’t quite finish reading

The Other Shulman   by Alan Zweibel

But only because I saw the end coming.  I did enjoy it.

And I heavily perjured myself by writing nicely about

Are My Blinkers Showing                 by Michael York

Even though it wasn’t as good as I said.   But it made him very happy.

 

Film Actors have to be insanely optimistic, dogged as they are by rain, pain and disappointment.  Michael York cheerfully and wittily suffers on location in rainy Moscow providing a sympathetic guide to the trials and tribulations of independent film making.

 

Pity the poor actor:  the innocent victim of producers, weather, and wardrobe malfunction.  Michael York uses his other persona of intelligent human being to paint a picture of the haphazard world of independent film making.  A sympathetic, witty, and occasionally painful account of the new Russia and the insanely maddening world of motion pictures.

 

My big delight was

Heaven’s Command                Jan Morris

Part One of the Pax Brittanica series which I found utterly magnificent.

(see note)  and Part Two

which I didn’t quite finish though I intend to

An Instinct for War                 by Roger Spiller

Seemed far more interesting in the bookshop than when I got it home.

 

I also picked up lots of tiny books from Penguin celebrating their 70^th which makes great pocket reading

Two Stars                               Paul Theroux

On the narcissistic dwarf Elizabeth Taylor and the deader iconic Marylyn Monroe.   A  man of merit discussing the merely meretricious.

Likewise

The Christians and the Fall of Rome           Edward Gibbon

And

The State of Poetry                by Roger McGough

Pretty and pithy

And the other Penguin mini’s

            Summer in Algiers                             Albert Camus

            The Bastille Falls                               Simon Schama

            Caligula                                              Robert Graves

            Otherwise Pandemonium      Nick Hornby

The View from Mount Improbable   Richard Dawkins

 

 

Orpheus in the Underworld              Weinberger

I read  this the libretto for Offenbach’s great romp for research.

 

I read all of

Persuasion                                          by Jane Austen

On planes and stuff which I liked enough

And re-read as much as I could take of

Emma                         by Jane Austen

When I spotted a second hand book in Scotland.   But I realised I didn’t like Emma enough to stay with her.

 

1759 by Frank McLynn

was also pretty interesting though fairly poorly written.  I mean dryly and academically and not with the shining brilliance of the scenes from Morris.

 

The Hot Kid         by Elmore Leonard         

Seems to have raised the stakes in this great writer’s career and is approaching the literary novel status

 

Notes from a Small Island                 Bill Bryson

I was enjoying the grimness of being British

And really quite enjoying

You Shall Know Your Velocity                     by Dave Eggers

 

At Freddie’s                           Penelope Fitzgerald

I loved this small gem about a woman who runs a Theatrical school in London for its honest portrait of a flawed but fabulous theatrical female. And I sent it to Tim Curry as a gift.

 

November thru December

 

The Trick of It                        Michael Frayn

Christmas gift from Mike Nichols who adores it.   A lit lecturer meets and marries the object of his studies a female novelist, and deconstructs her, partly in letters to his friend in Melbourne, who aptly manages to lose them.

I’m not quite sure why Mike adores this book so.  Though it isn’t bad.  Perhaps something to do with how he suspects he interferes with writers not necessarily to their benefit.  Although his fears would be misplaced.

 

The Brooklyn Follies              Paul Auster

I’m not quite sure why I didn’t stick with this longer, abandoning it when it turned into script dialogue, a novel form I don’t care for.   Uncle and nephew story that didn’t catch for me.

 

The Counterfeiters                           Hugh Kenner

Literary and cultural criticism.   The counterfeit world.

Coleridge             The Cambridge Companion Edited by Lucy Newlyn

Having read a bit about him in the next book I needed a quick reminder of his bio.

Men of Honour              Adam Nicholson

Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero

Contender for Book of the Year his remarkable recreation of the defining naval battle and above all the sheer horror of those days at sea off Trafalgar, the effects of cannon fire on the bodies of ships and men and the sheer nightmare of the storm that follows, makes you realise the reality of warfare apart from the jingoist bullshit.

The City of Falling Angels                John Berendt

Another Book of the Year.  Unputdownable eye witness tale of the fire at the Fenice, the investigations, the trials, the rumours, the high life, the low life and the workings of Venice, this most fascinating of cities.

No Man’s Land             Graham Greene

Short novella, crossing into the Iron Curtain, became a movie.

Bob Dylan Chronicles, Volume One

Yes he can do anything, and he is just as interesting in prose.   A remarkable achievement by a remarkable man.

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life,  Steve Leveen

Too many words in the title, not a good sign.  Someone has no sense of the obvious intruding.   An attempt to get on the best seller list.  Hope it failed.

Death In Venice            Thomas Mann

Never my favourite, he falls into the Henry James list (just) for me, and I didn’t change my mind here.

Blinding Light               Paul Theroux

Going through a period of not finishing books, and I stopped this when the sex scenes overtook the probability factor of a travel writer drugging himself to blindness to get in touch er.. with his…it became a pornographic memoir and stopped being interesting or credible.

The Year of Magical Thinking          Joan Didion.

Just too damn sad to finish.  Death of husband and daughter, oh God.

Layer Cake                    J.J. Connolly

I really liked this.  Fabulously written and great action, East End villain yarn.

1759                                           Frank McLynn

The Year Britain became master of the world.  Fascinating vignettes but not always well told

Pompeii               Robert Harris

OK historical yarn made interesting by the facts of the eruption.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores         Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Old man, final wish, young virgin.

A Man without a Country                 Kurt Vonnegut

Old man, no virgins, some philosophy

Magical Thinking                   Augusten Burroughs

Blenheim  Battle for Europe    Charles Spencer

I learned much from this Diana brother account of his ancestors march to the Danube, and not just how to deal with Cleese.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

adulk               2004

Ctrl-Alt- 1-2-3

 

November thru December

How we are Hungry                Dave Eggers

Excellent and indeed wonderful book of short stories which are finely matched by the handsome production of this McSweeney’s book.

The Polysyllabic Spree                     Nick Hornby

A good and appropriate way to end the year, with fourteen essays from his book column in The Believer.  His enthusiasms are contagious and I went out instantly in search of many of his suggestions.

Nabokov’s Butterfly                         Rick Gekoski

Stories about great authors and rare books by a bibliophile American in England.

I am Charlotte Simmons                   Tom Wolfe

Oh no you’re not, you’re Tom Wolfe.  This is a strangely 19thCentury novel.  A big female biography written by a male.   I think of Richardson, George Eliot or Hardy.   The weakness of Wolfe is that instead of describing life he writes an essay about it.   He is more journalist than novelist.  This doesn’t make him bad, but it does make him long, an almost fatal mistake in this case for after a while you get it and just give up.

 

The Fatal  Impact                            Alan Moorhead

The classic elegantly written study of the effects of Captain Cook’s exploration of the Pacific, Australasia and the South Pole.   All to some extent disastrous.  “The fateful moment when a social capsule is broken open” and the native populations are confronted with European “civilisation”.   Here the source of the story about the Aborigine’s not recognising Cook’s boat as it was too big for them to recognise…

 

A Murder of Quality                        John Le Carre

This is a nice crisp quick crime novel.   His second book, memorable for the wonderfully precise description and depiction of the snobby English Boarding School and the two v gown conflict.

 

The Fourth Crusade                        Jonathan Phillips

And the sack of Constantinople.   Incredible if sold as a movie, unbelievable as history.  But all true.  The way the fourth crusade oversold itself and instead of attacking Jerusalem was diverted to attacking Constantinople for financial reasons.  Now where have we heard that before?  Amazing to think that the Crusades are still continuing in all their ignorance and claims to be acting for God.   It’s time God was put on trial for war crimes.   Fine, well written popular history and oh boy…

Krakatoa                                         Simon Winchester

The Day the World Exploded August 27^th, 1883.   A rather over long but interesting account of plate tectonics and the deadly effect in the Javanese straits, which will continue.  Amazing to think I had finished college before most of the theories about Continental Drift were expounded and proven. I found that the best part of the book, aside from the actual cataclysmic event itself, but then he kept being diverted by lesser information and a welter of footnotes.

October

Will They Ever Trust Us Again         Michael Moore

Of course they will.  Poor fools.  Heart-breaking letters from the war zone.

The Making of Henry                       Howard Jacobson

The Manchester world of adultery and finding who is really who, when Henry inherits a sumptuous apartment.

The Elementary Particles                 Michel Houellebecq

A surprisingly good book.  Elegaic and wistful as befits the subject, a farewell to mankind.   Really about two brothers alienated sexually and lovingly by their selfish sixties mother, one of whom effectively puts an end to mankind’s’ evolution by his research into cloning techniques, which makes sexual reproduction redundant.  A good gag and particularly funny on the French..

The Da Vinci Code                          Dan Brown

A second rate thriller about the perennial conspiracy theorists wet dream, the Quest for the Holy Grail.  More a movie than a novel, people behave conveniently for the scene and not for the reality of the story.  No dafter than a Tom Cruise movie, but ultimately tiresome.

Dead Sexy                              Kathy Lette

Tiresome for a kind of nudge nudge writing and incessant annoying one liners.  It’s instantly forgettable.

 

August & September

The Family                            Kitty Kelley

Guess who’s coming to Dynasty.   The unspeakable in pursuit of the undesirable.  Very readable Kitty Kelley, really dumps on the first Bush and as for this one:  God help America…

The Lemon Table                   Julian Barnes

Short stories themed around “aging.”

The King, the Crook & The Gambler          Malcolm Balen

Highly readable history of John Law in France and the South Sea Bubble in England, which reminds you that everything is repeated in financial history too, and Greed is it’s own reward and the high and mighty will always shift the blame, but thankfully not for ever…

Sweet and Vicious                   David Schickler

Good opening, but the plot goes awry and it eventually becomes a movie treatment, which is the modern curse of the novel.

 

Skinny Dip  Carl Hiassen

Really a movie waiting to happen.  Things are motivated more like movies than novels, or even life.   But it’s all eye catching stuff, blondes pushed off the back of cruise liners are fished out by agreeable middle aged ex detectives, elaborate revenges on worthless husbands are plotted out with comic violence.  Just not Elmore Leonard.

War and Peace              Leo Tolstoy

The greatest story ever told.   Certainly the greatest novel.  I love the war, hate the peace.  Well the peace doesn’t quite live up to the spectacular way he recreates Austerlitz or the occupation of Moscow, through the eyes of several participants at once.   In the end he can’t let go and it turns into a series of essays on the shittiness of Napoleon, but we’ve got it already.  No need to keep banging on.   Prince Andrey dies several times, Pierre, the Count Behuzov becomes a pain in the ass when he goes through his Masonic stage, but these are mere quibbles set beside the masterful writing and characters he effortlessly creates.

Swann’s Way       Marcel Proust

Got about half way through this new translation by Lydia Davis before realizing that still I don’t much care for Monsieur Proust…

Lions and Shadows        Christopher Isherwood

Not quite honest memoirs of the homosexualist and his pal Auden, carefully disguised and cleaned up.  But the Cambridge days are very good indeed and that trepidation and joy of first setting foot on the Continent as a young schoolboy.

 

June & July

Heroes of History          Will Durant

Essential.   Elegantly written history of civilisation.  Thought, religion, history, philosophy.   Very fine indeed.

The Pat Hobby Stories             F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I loved re-reading these interlinked stories about a shameless alcoholic writer in the Studio days of Hollywood.   This would make a very good HBO series!!

This Side of Paradise              F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The iron pansy.   Early and irritatingly flashy.

Babylon Revisited                   F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald is best at irony and close details of reality.  The Diamond as Big as The Ritz is a Fairy Tale and all his skills are therefore redundant.  It’s as if he is suddenly trying to become Roald Dahl.  What he is good at is so much harder to achieve that this is a waste.   May Day reveals his innate snobbery.  Dickens would never have talked of the working classes as “vermin.”    Perhaps as he is an aspirer and not really from the Uppers, he is afraid of the class beneath him.

 

1066  The Year of the Conquest        David Howarth

Nice compact concise telling of the events of the most fateful year, when the nasty bastard William grabbed the throne of England from the much nicer but desperately unlucky Harold.   Author suggests it was the pope and the papal excommunication of Harold that made the difference.

Tender is the Night                 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Oh how lovely.  My final attempt to read this work, which I have never previously enjoyed.  This time I think it is fantastic.  First book is particularly good, then there are time leaps, but as it took him seventeen drafts to write it I am not surprised it took me about three to read it.    Now I love it.   It is clearly one of his finest books.

Positively Fifth Street              James Mc Manus

The tale of the murder of Binyon, the owner of the Horseshoe hotel, by his very nasty wife and her boyfriend, and the author’s achievements during a poker tournament in Vegas.   Perhaps a little more poker than you might need, but none the less a fascinating book and you can see why it achieved best sellerdom.

Sixpence House             Paul Collins

A lovely tale of an American’s attempt to move to the village of Hay-on-Wye a town full of books, and try and live there.  He at least has the sense to return to the states after a year.  This is a lovely book, by, for and about bookworms….

The Truth About Lorin Jones           Alison Lurie

A feminist author identifies with her artist subject only to discover that there is more (or less) to her.   I didn’t stay for the entire truth.

May

The Five People You Meet after Death

One was enough.  In many ways death seems more attractive…

Eats, shoots and leaves

A pleasant punctuation amongst more serious reads.

War is a Force that Gives us Meaning                 Chris Hedges

An essential text book for understanding the main human occupation.  A brilliant and thought provoking book.   Utterly recommended.

Ten Days To D- Day                        David Stafford

Essentially snap shots, cross-cutting technique, virtually TV documentary style, which non the less utterly succeeds in giving a multi-viewpoint picture of the extraordinary events up to D-Day.  To cut from the Furher hosting a wedding in the Bergdof to Ike preparing his main gives you a God’s-eye perspective of the most important event of the 20^th Century.   You slip behind the lines, Jewish people in hiding, resistance workers, it is a brilliant and appropriate technique and comes off very well.

D-Day                           Martin Gilbert

A precise, concise telling of the D-day landings.   Nice and brief but at the same time comprehensive.

Nothing Lost                 John Gregory Dunne

Despite his rather irritating use of multi-viewpoint first person narrative, so you are never quite sure who is speaking at first, and his refusal to use quotation marks for dialogue, this is still an effective novel, that draws together a difficult story,  essentially a mystery murder, trial and Washington expose mix.  Some nice digs at the shallow race who inhabit the chat waves and the superficial level of the coverage of complex stories on a sexually obsessed media.

The Art of Travel                             Alain de Botton

Elegantly written essays combining love of literature with travel.  Essentially literate travel articles, but with interesting information about writers particularly Wordsworth.

Bech is Back                          John Updike

Continuing my summer re-reading.  This starts strongly and then weakens.  But then, what doesn’t?

Strangers on a Train               Patricia Highsmith

Somehow and oddly this one didn’t grab me.

Paris in the Fifties                  Stanley Karnow

A lovely book, about just that:  Paris in the Fifties…

 

April

Miss Lonely Hearts                 Nathaniel West

The classic.  A re-read.

The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker    David Boyer

An eccentric and rather funny novel of a crack up, elegantly written.

The Great Gatsby                    Scott Fitzgerald

Still the most perfect American novel.   The control and the simplicity of the structure and the lyrical freedom of the writing, and the taut plotting, so that what seems to be fairly random drives straight towards the tragic ending.  I had forgotten how savage he is with the character of Tom, who essentially creates the tragedy by lying,  and how Daisy in the end colludes with him.

I could re-read it instantly.

Middlesex                              Jeffery Eugenides

In the end this book was more Homeric in length than I needed and I bailed, but I certainly liked the early Greek tale of the Grandparents leaving Greece and it’ll probably become a fairly long film.

 

March

Sixty-Six                       Barry Levinson

I really liked Barry’s telling of his Diner early days and the characters of Baltimore just leaving High School.  Nicely written and sharply observed.

Trouble                         Fay Weldon

The trouble with “Trouble” is that the single narrative roman a cle can be very useful but only if it doesn’t create just a single minded desire for revenge.  We need to feel the world around.  It works best if the voice permits irony rather than hammering on telling us what to think until in the end we grow weary of being hectored.

The Last Tycoon                     F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I like this book a lot.  I like it I suspect more than I would have liked it if it were finished, judging by the rough plot outlines that remain.  Stahr, a man haunted by the ghost of his wife, falls for a young woman who looks like him, but cannot give up the hard work that drives him to his death.  This romance of an older man, is beautifully done by F. and the glimpse into the methods of the novelist, how he goes about constructing his scenes, is more than instructive, it gives the book its claim to be the first post-modern classic.  Its tale and message, the surprising choice of narrator – Cecilia, a young daughter of Stahr’s envious studio rival – makes it stay in the memory for day’s afterwards, so that you puzzle out what is happening, rather than having it spelled out, as in a regular novel.

The Stranger at The Palazzo D’Oro      Paul Theroux

The Stranger at The Palazzo D’Oro is almost a novella, and fascinating and very well written.  There are a bunch of short stories, some about Africa, perhaps the best is Dishevelled Nymphs.  Mostly the theme is old lust at sixty.  The appeal of the novella is the nostalgia for the lust of lost youth.

The Berlin Stories                   Christopher Isherwood.

A fine first edition of both, sent to me by a casual acquaintance.  The Last of Mr Norris (the American title) is less good than I previously thought, and Goodbye to Berlin collapses with the early departure of Sally Bowles.   I had not remembered that fact either.

 

Deep Water                            Patricia Highsmith

The usual utterly engrossing read.    Melinda the giddy flirt who takes lovers and Vic, the coolly observant husband who kills them, and eventually Melinda as his psychosis takes over.   How odd then that we should so sympathise with Vic and hope that he will not be caught, and even detest the people who rightly suspect him of murder!    She is a fabulous if weird writer.

Chicago Loop                         Paul Theroux

I found a nice first edition and decided to try this again.  I don’t like books where the protagonist suddenly turns out to be mad or a murderer.  This is the latter.  I find it deceitful and dislike it.

The Seven Ages of Paris          Alistair Horne

Destined to become a classic.  The most enjoyable book I have read in a very long time.  A thorough but very readable history of Paris from Roman times to De Gaulle.  Wonderful and great.  I dreaded coming to the end.  A must re-read book.  He is right, Paris has a much more interesting history than London.

The Good German                           Joseph Kanon

It starts off like a book, and a very good one, and then turns into a book of a movie.   So he’s not exactly the new Graham Greene but someone making novels out of Graham Greene movies.   It  ain’t bad, it just is less than first rate.  A murder mystery set in the ruins of Berlin.

February

Before The Deluge                  Otto Friedrich

Berlin in the 20’s.   Yes I read it again.

Down and Dirty Pictures         Peter Biskind

More than you ever needed to know about Harvey Weinstein and the world of “independent” film making.  I found it depressing, overfull, and in the end boring.  Like Harvey…

Michelangelo and The Pope’s Ceiling                 Ross King

Perhaps a bit more than you needed to know about either.  Uncomfortably written.  Both of these last two books are essentially articles…

January

A Pound of Paper

Confessions of a Book Addict.  A great memoir and essay on books, book collecting and the romance and the appeal of books by the Australian writer and book fiend John Baxter.  A great start to 2004.

 

The Price of Loyalty                Ron Suskind

Appallingly written best seller which sounded much better as a sound bite.

How a rather dull man worked for a rather dull President and found him to be a manipulative and motivated bastard.

 

Mr. Paradise                                   Elmore Leonard.

I’m going to confess to a little disappointment.  This one seemed to me to be by the numbers.  Plus his writing is getting so cryptic, this is almost a shooting script, and I had to keep going back and checking who was who.  It’s very confusing since one of the protagonists is asked to masquerade as one of the victims, and that took a bit of sorting out.  It was an undoubted pleasure as he can never be bad, but it was tinged with some regret.

Absolute Friends                    John Le Carre

I enjoyed most of this, then it lost me, then he got me again.   This is a cry against the current invasive form of America.   And a surprisingly loud one.

Though Mundy, the exiled bowler-hatted Brit comes to life the best friend Sasha remains a cipher.  The paradigm is friendship – the Anglo/American as much as Mundy/Sasha.  How far should you trust your friend?  The answer is you shouldn’t when they are motivated by beliefs you don’t share as they will get you killed.  In it’s way as subversive as the Quiet American.

 

The Best Awful                       Carrie Fisher

Awful.   A thinly veiled book.  After day one of her Postcard from the Ego she reveals her husband is gay, they have a little girl and she fucks Jack Nicholson.   Wow.  The novel as ego trip.  I threw it away hard.

 

 

              2003

January – March

 

Robert Maxwell Israeli spy

Probably the most fascinating account of the bloated white shark who was found abandoned at sea off his luxury yacht in the Med. and how he got there – pushed overboard by Mossad for whom he worked and whom he was trying to shake down.    The picture of the ruthless efficiency of Mossad is very convincing and fascinating.  But the way Maxwell interfaced between Presidents and tyrants and what the elder Bush was up to – wow!  What a read.

Kafka was the Rage                Anatole Broyard

A Greenwich village Memoir.  Interesting and finely written.

The Red Notebook                  Paul Auster

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich          William L. Shirer

The most fabulous book.   Incredibly detailed and always highly readable.  The incredible fact that Shirer was present in Berlin as an American correspondent during the advent of Nazism in the thirties adds such depth to his tale of the rise of the fanatical bloodthirsty megalomaniac and how Hitler achieved it democratically, led the country into war and never looked back until he had torn it to pieces.  I loved every page of this most amazing history book.   A warning in these times.

Yoga for People who can’t be bothered to do it.    Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is not a particularly nice person and he doesn’t try to disguise it, but he is very self-obsessed and highly driven and he is rarely dull and he can certainly write.

 

The Last Lion                         William Manchester

The second and apparently final volume of a three part biography of the greatest Englishman.(!)  The pre-war wilderness years leading up to the  outbreak of war and at last the eleventh hour call to make him PM.   The courage and the bravery of tracking Hitler and his rise almost single-handedly while Chamberlain and his skulking rascals looked the other way and were constantly hoodwinked by the rise of evil…how often they might have called his bluff and prevented bloodshed.  How often they sought appeasement as they tried to avoid the horrors of World War One only to march straight into the horrors of World War Two.  Salutary and breathtaking and great history.  What a story, what a time, what a man.

Holiday Reading:          March

The Long Goodbye                  Raymond Chandler

Marlowee picks up a drunk guy with a scar who eventually becomes a Mexican with a face job.  In the meantime rich women get shot and the poor get drunk.   Near parody writing sounds like Humphrey Bogarde.  Neo-misogyny, alcoholism, quasi-racism and a total refusal to accept money makes Marlowe somewhat priggish by today’s hero standards.

 

Dreaming Oil                Gore Vidal

Paranoia is just possession of the facts?    Some quasi facts and lots of paranoia from the master of the dispossessed about Bush Cheney and their connections to Bin Laden and oil politics in the middle east resulting in this current godawful war.   Killing for Christ?

 

Transparent Things                Nabokov

An experimental novel.   Like a movie in many ways, with odd cuts and interesting sequences, but never totally holding you.

The Last Days of Hitler           Hugh Trevor-Roper

The first and classic account, subsequently revised and reprinted.   It is such a joy to watch the dawning realization of total defeat on the century’s number one totalitarian bastard.     A very good book.

April – May

Waiting for the Barbarians               J.M.Koetzee

The Royals                             Kitty Kelley

Thoroughly enjoyable and readable and certainly an eye opener – and thankfully written before Diana’s death so that hagiography has not yet set in and one can see her for the schemer she really was.   Also a fairly sympathetic portrayal of poor Charles and his appalling parents.  Dad’s mistresses etc. Good pop biography.

The Indian Lover                    Garth Murphy

How do you tell a friend?   Quite well written not very interesting..

The Autograph Man               Zadie Smith

I’m not quite sure what all the fuss is about.   It kind of leaves me a bit cold.

Bone in the Throat                           Anthony Bourdain

At last something to shout about.  A great crime writer.   Realistic, witty and great.  A book writing chef.   Chapeau!.  I couldn’t put it down and raced to buy anything else I could.

The Bobby Gold Stories           Anthony Bourdain

And indeed here it is, his finest novel.  Romantic, well crafted, a wonderful read.   Excellent work.

 

June – July

Kitchen Confidential               Anthony Bourdain

A Cook’s Tour of backstage in the kitchen and memoirs of a young chef, and an important reminder always to tip well in a restaurant and never eat fish on a Monday.

The Orchid Thief                    Susan Orlean

I found this best seller somewhat tiresome, poorly written and unfocused and I totally understand why the poor fuck who had to write the screenplay decided to write about himself having to do it.

Bangkok 8                             John Burdett

A very readable and highly enjoyable novel set in Thailand about a Buddhist policeman and his search for the killer of his murdered partner.

Not quite the heart of darkness but certainly the liver – with a memorable narcissistic American black athletic Army sergeant suspect.

Between Meals                       A.J.Liebling

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is why Ricky Jay finds it so compelling he sends it to everyone he knows.   It’s a gourmets guide to Paris, both historical and pastoral.   If you like eating meat and drinking to excess and reading about it, then this is for you.   If not – it’s like having your ear bent by the fat drunk at the next table.

The Best democracy Money Can Buy          Greg Palast

Shocking.   If only even a half of what he asserts is true we are in deep doo-doo.  Amazing just how much evil American journalism can overlook while kissing the ass of the White House occupant.  How the election was stolen – and the story of Ms Harris and the Florida rolls – it’s all very scary.

Stupid White Men                            Michael Moore

Moore of the same.  Nailing the Prez and his horrible henchmen.

The Pleasure of My Company           Steve Martin

But alas the company of his pleasure is more desirable.  How to tell your pal that his next book is disappointing?  I never like novels about nut cases.  In this case the hero is a compulsive semi-stalker.   I was happy putting the book down.

The Beginning of Spring                           Penelope Fitzgerald.

Didn’t begin well enough for me to stay till summer.  Bummer.

The Little Sister                               Raymond Chandler

Enough already.  Let’s just say that Chandler’s reputation couldn’t get any bigger.  Metaphors that draw attention to themselves, improbable plots, unlikely characters and everything written as a Humphrey Bogarde voice over.   When does one yell Cut?  He’s Hammet without the Prince.  I’m tired of him.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life       Robert Sellers

Great title by the way.   The rise and fall of Handmade Films as told by the victims.  For me fascinating and I definitely got my oar in.  As far as I can tell accurate portrait of the con man that was O’Brien and the arrogance which led to his demise.

The Cliveden Set                              Norman Rose

A history of the house – the horrible Astors and their appeasement set.  Anti-semitic Nancy.  Shame they don’t cover the Profumo time which is far more fascinating.

The Gangs of New York                   Herbert Asbury

So many fascinating true stories it’s amazing they managed to make such a dull unrealistic film of it.   Never be fooled by the apparent calm surface of history – underneath there is a constant thieving and murdering, conniving and contriving cess pit of the underworld, here brilliantly recreated.

To Kill a Mockingbird                      Harper Lee

I had never read this Pulitzer prize winning novel.   And now I have.

Drop City                               T.C.Boyle

I liked the bit about Trouble in the Hippy Camp, but lost interest when they all moved up to Alaska.  A kind gift from a visiting Palin, who must have run across T.C. on his own book tour.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle              George V.Higgins

A great classic thriller.

Gone Bamboo                        Anthony Bourdain

I like his crime books.  A lot.

Diary of a Djinn                     Gini Alhadeff

Missed the point.

Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley   Alison Weir

She is way too prolix.  I wish she had an editor who would cut her books by a quarter.  She does the scenes from history very well but there is endless historical discussion.  She should just write popular history or be an academic – this falls unsatisfactorily in between.

Scipio Africanus            B.H.Liddell Hart

Greater than Napoleon.  But not as interesting.

 

September

Murder by Hollywood             Steve Bochko

Excellent, gripping, funny and rude

Bringing Down the House                Ben Mezrich

An inside story of six M.I.T. students who teamed up and took Vegas for millions.

Breakfast of Champions                   Kurt Vonnegut

A re-read and I forgot to take notes…  The one with drawings

Marlborough                          Winston S. Churchill

The Life and Times Book One.  A brilliant history of his fascinating ancestor

Our Tempestuous Day                      Carolly Erickson

A good gossipy history of Regency England.

Freaky Deaky                                  Elmore Leonard

The second time I’ve read it and enjoyed it and I’ve still forgotten the plot already.

The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency              Alexander McCall Smith

I didn’t get into this much admired series.

Executioners Current                       Richard Moran

Edison, Westinghouse and the Invention of the Electric Chair

Fates Worse than death                    Kurt Vonnegut

Essays and memoirs.

The Age of Reason                           Harold Nicholson

Pages of history.  From the Czar to Rousseau to Thomas Paine. A History of the Enlightenment.

The Greedy Bastard Tour

October thru December

Foreign Affairs                                Alison Lurie

A wonderful tender book about an elderly Anglophile English professor and her adventures in England amongst the acting classes – the quite dreadful and realistic Rosemary.   And a tender portrait of an elderly Houston man, who seems to be a crass tourist but whom she reveals and paints perfectly as a sad and sorry victim.  The dog of depression as a character.  (1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)

 

Jafsie and John Henry            David Mamet

Very enjoyable essays by the ferocious one. He writes with elegance and eloquence on a variety of subjects – from malt whiskey to the “house envy” he suffers when visiting despicable film producers in Hollywood.

 

Hard Times                            Charles Dickens

Actually a great opening and then descends into mawkishness and tedium.  It’s a kind of Dickens play with the Northern accents…

The Girl in Blue                     P. G. Wodehouse

Great opening.  So clear, so funny and so real.   I lost interest when he gets into the usual English country house types.  I think he has a unique talent which never quite stretched itself.  It’s almost as if he settles for peaceful comedy when he could really have been more Waugh-like in his satire.

Elizabeth Costello                   J.M.Coetzee

A delightful novel about an Australian English professor at large.  Really a long discussion about the meaning and importance of the novelist and how she defines herself in the modern world.  An important discussion about Evil and how and whether it should be dealt with by the novelist, in West’s book about the execution of Von Staffenburg.  (I’m unsure if he is a fictitious character or not.)   The whole thing for me is marred at the end by a sort of Kafkaesque post life inquisition.  The wheels come off the vehicle, which is a pity as this is otherwise a great novel.

Yellow Dog                            Martin Amis

I’m sorry, I thought this was crap. He seems like a talent without focus.  Almost as though he suspects he is faking it, when he has all the tools to do the job properly.

 

Still Holding.                          Bruce Wagner.

Fabulous novel.  Wonderfully written and executed.  I loved every minute of it.  A Buddhist discussion and Hollywood story about a star Kit, who is bashed on the head and enters a vegetable state.

Oracle Night                          Paul Auster

A weird novel.  Somehow unbelievable.  The plot seems contrived.  He writes about novelists and novels within novels and somehow it never comes to life.   Disappointing work.

 

Bravemouth         Pamela Stephenson

Living with Billy Connolly.  Like a fanzine after the first book.  She is so discreetly not naming names about the Fiji holiday that we learn way too much about the fa’fafine.   Too soon, too little.  Obviously for the money.

Good title though.  (By me!)

 

The Statement                        Brian Moore

Tense and taut and as tight as the best of Graham Greene.  A re-reading of one of Brian’s finest.  You can’t put it down.

 

Prey                                       Michael Crichton

All plot.   I was going along happily and then put it down for a day and then thought who cares?

Good Omens                          Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

That rarest of books a funny novel.  About the forces of Lucifer in South London…

 

 

December end of year

 

The Blunderer               Patricia Highsmith

What makes her so good is she always avoids the predictable, and just when you think she might be going there she changes focus.  This about the loser husband who doesn’t murder his wife but is murdered by the man who murdered his wife.  Very Hitchcock.  Unpredictable and quirky and like life.  She has the inability of characters to understand what is happening to them down perfectly.

 

Inventing a Nation                  Gore Vidal

Historical essays by Gore on Washington, Adams, Jefferson.  I’m not sure Gore has quite made up his mind…
2002

December

Rich Dust                      George Greenfield

A gem of a book.  Rather beautiful little novella of a small army corps sent out to delay Rommels advance in North Africa, so that the British army could dig in at El Alamein.  Through tiny details he makes you appreciate both how character can be misinterpreted and how it can also make a difference in a vast battlefield.   His knowledge of being there and the banality of war is what makes his story telling unforgettable.

When the Women Come Out to Dance                 Elmore Leonard

Longish short stories from the master.  He is at the top of his game.  He evokes story character and plot effortlessly.  Any one of these could have developed into full length novels.  Three or four of them are disappointing only because they’re short….He seems brimming with creativity and getting even better.  Wow.

Who’s Sorry Now          Howard Jacobson

I like him.  But this one – about the philanderer swapping wives with the good husband left me a little unmoved and somewhat confused.  He’s trying to understand the nature of male sexuality, but seems to give up with his hero submitting to bondage and a beating.   Not his best.

White Teeth                   Zadie Smith

I really liked it.  And then I got a bit bored half way through.   Way too long.   But she can write.

Power and Greed           Philippe Gigantes

A short history of the world.   A great reach and a damn fine overview.  A book about human power, greed, warfare, theocracies and the realities of world history. Including September 11^th.  Very very interesting

The Dreadful Judgement                           Neil Hanson

The dreadful writing.   Fascinating story of the Great Fire of London, overtold and oversold – for example with fictional scenes interspersed.  Though you cannot utterly ruin the subject.  Still he tries hard.

War and Peace                       Joseph Byrne

The survival of the Talbots of Malahide.  Local Dublin history of the castle, 1641 – 1671

In Between the sheets              Ian McEwan

Short stories, erotic and occasionally violent.

The Heart of a Dog                          Mikhail Bulgakov

 

November

The Book of Illusions              Paul Auster

A damn fine novel.  Elegantly written and breathlessly told story of the re-awakening of a shattered human.

Dark Knights & Holy Fools              Bob McCabe

Which Terry is I’m not sure.  Perhaps a Dark Fool….

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace    Gore Vidal

Perpetual bickering from the Sapphic master of moans.  He only goes too far in his attempt to sanitise Timothy McVeigh whom he seems to have fallen in love with a la Truman Capote and his murderous little friends.   Perhaps this is a function of his homosexuality – the ultimate rough trade thrill.    He was definitely cold shouldered when he broached the subject at Wendy Asher’s dinner party.  McVeigh is a pathetic result of the Gulf War not a Government martyr.

The Switch                    Elmore Lepnard

An old one and a good one.  Of course.  But which one erm….  The one where the husband doesn’t don’t want the wife back and the sexy kinapper lets her go, and shoots the others…

The Life and Times of Charles 11               Christopher Falkus

A fascinating childhood and escape on the run for the self indulgent man who observed his father murdered and re-gained the crown and then spent most of his time shagging actresses while London burned……

Elegy for Iris                 John Bayley

A lovely wistful elegiac book about his great love for Iris Murdoch and her sad decline into the veil of Alzheimmers…

1688  A Global History            John E.Wills

Just that.  A look around the world that year.  And what a fascinating way to treat history.  Simple and yet broad in scope.  From Versailles, to Ireland the British Revolution, to Africa and slaving, to China, to Islam.  It reminds us of just how diverse this planet has always been.  Recommended.

The Four Agreements             Don Miguel Ruiz.

I forget what they are but it’s hard to disagree.  The mass marketing of the meaning of life.   Shades of Castenada – this time it’s the Toltecs whose wisdom was so etc etc…

Step Across This Line              Salman Rushdie.

Collected non fiction.   Essays and journalism from this aggressive and honest mind.

Killing Pablo                          Mark Bowden

The great chase for the Columbian monster, who was finally hunted down with bags of clandestine US support and some help from his ego.  A bandit and a ruthless one.

Kissing Manhattan                          David Schickler

Interconnected stories of slightly weird sex in Manhattan.   Nicely constructed, bright, realistic people, artfully handled and very well written.  A very fine book which I enjoyed.

The Debt to Pleasure                        John Lanchester

Is it just too self assured, just too divinely written, or is that needless carping?  It’s certainly engrossing but something – the sheer nauseating loquacity of the narrator perhaps – filled me with disquiet, and yes I know that was the intended effect but shouldn’t I have been more elated by this very well written novel, than I ultimately was.  (That’s the way he writes…)

The Mimic Men                      V.S. Naipaul

Colonial man in a post colonial world.

All the stories of                      Muriel Spark

From Paris to the Moon          Adam Gopnik

Wonderful story of Americans in Paris.  Excellent memoirs of life in Paris for a young writer and his wife and child.  Makes you want to catch the first plane.

September – October

 

Blood Feud                   Harry Potter

Yes that is his name.  A history of the interminable gang warfare between the Stewarts and the Gordons and the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots.  Here is the full range of Mafia killings, murders, greed and revenge…Nicely told.

Caligula                                 Divine Carnage

Odd history of the very bad things of Caligula, Nero and Heliogabalus.

Written by bizarre people!   The sodomists guide to Rome.

Farewell My Lovely                Raymond Chandler

Second and most wonderful novel. A true classic.  I became aware how well he wrote, how much he set the scene with poignant details of colour and smell and weather and texture of clothes, and cars and weatherbeaten houses with tiny details like a big radio set so that we see the scene very much as in a movie.   It is novel as movie building up to almost unbearable tension as he goes out alone to face a gambling boat.   The moral value of the self effacing hero is what shines through the mess.  The lone gunman is the lawman is the private detective, the final moral arbiter in a city of corrupt cops, mayors and gambler where the weak are preyed on and the foolish deceived.

Ignorance                     Milan Kundera

It is perhaps bliss in this disjointed and unsatisfactory novel.

The Last Lion                Visions of Glory             William Manchester

Part one of William Manchester’s superb biography of Churchill, a man who led at least three full lives before the end of this first part.   There is the insecure and ignored boy who matures into the young dashing Churchill, the hero of Africa, who boldly escapes from the Boers.  There is the trench Churchill, the Naval Minister who conceives of the Dardanelles plan and is then held responsible for others inability to see it through, and there is the witty parliamentarian.   Superbly researched, consummately written and deservedly a classic.

Whatever                      Michel Houellebecq

Whatever indeed.  He writes both easily and pretentiously.  Best seller in France, tells you more about the French

Atomised                       Micel Houellebecq

Begins unreadably and ends in porno.   The great French partouse –

Platform                                Michel Houellebecq

Highly eroticised novel by a French writer of his father’s death and subsequent affair and the place of Islam in sexual tourism.  Outspoken and frankly arousing.   I quite liked his third book.  Very sexy.  Quite contrived ending, but he has good strong hatreds, and he has been accused of racism.  But his attack is on the radical puritanical Islamicists.

 

Bruno’s Dream                      Iris Murdoch

Old man, spiders, flood, drowning.

Gardener to the King              Frederic Richaud

An exquisite book.  Pithy, wise and beautiful.   The gardener of Louis XIV

 

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan    Edited by John Lahr

Intimate thoughts of an ex-critic and dramaturg.  Enlivened by his honesty about sexual matters and his spanking mistress.  Ken Tynan emerges as something of a snob and an egotist.

 

 

July- August

Any Human Heart                           William Boyd

As usual I really loved this latest form the prolific Boyd.  He seems to write so intimately, so honestly and so much!      This is a brilliant idea – the diaries of one Logan Mountstuart, who lives to a ripe old age, through most of the 20^th century – indeed the book is almost several books, so many lives does Logan lead,   all fascinating, and all interesting.  From a gawky schoolboy, through Oxford, disappointments in love, bad first marriage, tragedy in war, even the sixties art scene in New York, Logan is Everyman is everywhere – and thank God for it.  I really enjoyed the whole thing. A definite must read.

The Map That Changed The World   Simon Winchester

Fascinating story of William Smith – whose dogged persistence, honesty and hard work, altered our knowledge of the planet and quite possibly prepared the way for Darwinism.  Readable and informative.

J.M.Coetzee                           Youth

A study of failure.  A bright student seizes up in the UK on arrival from South Africa.

The Cutting Room                  Louise Welsh

A breathtaking novel, about a gay book dealer who stumbles across a snuff photo with which he becomes obsessed.   A brilliant debut with extraordinarily fine prose.

Nero and the Burning of Rome                  Tacitus

Just an extract but mouth-watering stuff…

The Blue Flower                     Penelope Fitzgerald.

An odd historical novel.   Not bad, not unforgettable.

The Theory of Everything                 Stephen W. Hawking

At last a book of his you can read.  Almost entirely understandable.  Probably because it’s made from seven lectures.

Human Voices                        Penelope Fitzgerald.

A great short book, about the BBC and people who work there in wartime.   The minutiae of human behaviour, romantic and ironic.

The Mandelbaum Gate            Muriel Spark

Didn’t get all the way.  Not my favourite Spark.  Set in Jerusalem on the border (as it then was) with Jordan.

Notes on Journalism               Lillian Ross

Interesting enough, but still only journalism.  Her insistence on writing only about people she likes perhaps over-influences her to like the people she is writing about so that we don’t see what we should, or is that just the new journalism?

Elegy for Iris                          John Bayley

A lovely and understanding book, and as elegiac as it suggests, about the approach of Alzheimer’s in the amazing novelist Iris Murdoch.

The Reader                            Bernhard Schlink

A fascinating and brilliant novel.   An erotic youth memoir transmutes into a book about an elderly observer of a Nazi camp failing to adequately defend herself in a war crime trial in the most unexpected way.  Illiteracy becomes the subject.  Highly satisfactory well considered novel.

Innocence                              Penelope Fitzgerald.

Italian story.  DNF.

The Stars Tennis Balls            Stephen Fry

Revengers comedy.   Ideal summer hammock read.

The Middle Passage                V.S.Naipaul

Great on action, long on comment.  The opening is exquisite, a somewhat snobby Trinidadian ex-patriot revisiting his homeland on an immigrant ship.  Observation of his fellow passengers is acute and delightful but as soon as he gets ashore his pontificating becomes tiresome.

The Metaphysical Club           Louis Menand

Staggering achievement, a history of ideas in America from abolitionism to Darwinism.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Pierce, Azziz and John Dewey, character study as history.  Brilliant.

Mrs Ames                              E. F. Benson

The wicked pen of the quondam mayor of Rye, exposes flirtation and adultery in Riseholme, 12 years before Mapp and Lucia.

Balzac                                   V.S.Pritchett

Somewhat prosaic biography of the celebrated prose writer.

 

 

May – June

Watch Your Mouth                          Daniel Handler

An odd opera of a novel about a golem and incest and – but he is a very good and interesting writer.

The Waning of the Middle Ages                 Johan Huizinga

A classic book on the shift of sensibilities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

War Music                             Christopher Logue

A re-reading of this great modern poetic classic.  Not a translation but a brilliant re-interpretation of Homer.

The Perfect Heresy

The best book about the Cathars.   A wonderful history magnificently told, a great read about the horrible Simon de Montfort and the pogroms instituted by the Catholics against their fellow French in the South West of France.  It took 150 years to suppress this kindly gentle version of Christianity.  One ought to remember that the RC Church’s survival is no accident and has entailed mass murder and evil throughout its history.

History of the Peloponnesian War     Thucydides

Dipped

Nigger    Randall Kennedy

Essays about the N word by an African American law student.

The Name of the World   Denis Johnson

Harp    John Gregory Dunne

Memoirs

In the Wake of the Plague     Norman F Cantor

The Devil’s Mode          Anthony Burgess

Henry Esmond       Thackeray

Long Catholic novel….   Really stirring start

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom   Charles Busch

Funny plays

The Age of Catherine de Medici  J.E. Neale

Simple short history

 

 

 

March – April

Something to Declare                       Julian Barnes

Essays.   Good ones on the Tour de France and Brassens but way too many on –of course – Flaubert.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other          Darcy O’Brien

An immaculate beautifully written book of childhood memoirs of a boy who grew up in Hollywood, with his father a star of Westerns and his mother a screen goddess.  A fine, ironically observed brilliant book.   A must read.

About a Boy                                    Nick Hornby

I liked it less well than others have.  I guess I find North London stories depressing.  The movie will be better I suspect.

The Big Sleep                                  Raymond Chandler

Stands up to re-reading.   Struck by his use of colors.  Characters are identified by them.  The Rainy LA weather.  It starts fine with his laconic prose and builds constantly.  Masterful.

Salt                              Mark Kurlansky

After Fish comes the Salt.   But you can have too much of a good thing, fascinating though the early tales of the salt trade are.

The Flaneur                                    Edmund White

A delightful stroll through Paris that makes you immediately want to go to that fabulous city.

 

 

January and February

The Flaneur                                    Edmund White

A highly readable short stroll through Paris, that immediately makes you want to go there.

The Beast God Forgot to Invent                 Jim Harrison

I can’t seem to get into him anymore.   What is it?   He used to be so good.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint                 Brady Udall

And I enjoyed this too about an Indian boy who gets run over by a Mailman, though I confess I didn’t finish it – but more my fault than his.

The English                           Jeremy Paxman

This I did finish and enjoyed.  A most interesting discussion of the nature of these people and who and how they are and got to be so.

I’ll Let You Go                       Bruce Wagner

Oh dear, I did so want it to be good.  But Bruce is so busy showing you what a great writer of sentences he is that he forgets we read by scenes, and he is constantly interrupting the flow of his narrative to prove just how clever he is.  So you can never get into anything,  You are jogged out of every scene.  It’s unreadable.  And highly favourably reviewed!!  Odd.

The Island of Dr Moreau                  H. G. Wells

I never really liked this, and I never finished it this time either.

The Bell                                 Iris Murdoch

I thought this became predictable and I sort of lost interest.

The Bulgari Connection          Fay Weldon

Light, bright reading – falls away at the end as so many of her books do.  She doesn’t quite have the persistence to be Muriel Spark.  About the painter and ex-wives and irritating women in the media.   Enjoyable.

On Politics and the Art of Acting       Arthur Miller

An excellent essay about both actors and politicians.

Symposium                   Muriel Spark

About a dinner party and the people who prey on them.  Light and funny and carefully plotted.

The Long Firm                       Jake Arnott

Definite book of the year candidate.   Effortlessly written, a brilliant gangland tale which powerful evokes the London of the early sixties with all the Rachmans and the Krays and the Mandy Rice Davies figures carefully and semi-fictitiously recreated, which, paradoxically, makes them even more real.  I thought it was fabulous and long to re-read it.

He Kills Coppers            Jake Arnott

Of course I had to rush out and buy his next book, which is not quite so densely written, though still in the same sixties world of coppers and “verbals” – a retelling of the Harry Roberts saga, quite unusually sympathetic to all elements – coppers and the bad ones.

America The Beautiful            Moon Unit Zappa

And how clever of her to have written this – though I did get a bit tired of the girl whiny tone after a while.   I’m sure it’s not pleasant to be dumped by boyfriends but it’s not pleasant to read about either and in the end her suffering isn’t all that funny.

Tishomingo Blues                   Elmore Leaonard

Of course a great read.  Don’t we take him for granted for this.  About a professional diver in Florida, involved with a Civil War recreation group, which is being used as a cover for a murderous attempt to control a local drug scene.  The shoot out is a Civil War OK corral.   I liked it a lot.

Nights at the Alexandra           William Trevor

Elegant. Irish.  Short.

The Only Problem                  Muriel Spark

And a nice limited edition I found too.   A parable about the book of Job.  A man studying The Book of Job living in France wishes only to be left alone, which in Spark’s world is the cue for ex-wives to become terrorists, for police intrusions, for media demolitions and a thousand grievances, but al turns out OK as usual in her gently satirical world view.

The Book of Evidence             John Banville

Scarey and intensely well written.   The casual murderous nature of an Irishman is brilliantly exposed in an ironical confessional memoir style, which is fabulously written and a joy to read, though the matter be very dark indeed.

Reality and Dreams                 Muriel Spark

About a film director,  as I wrote before in 2001.  A story of a movie director, a stalker and a crane accident.  Funny and short.

March

Warrior Politics                      Robert D. Kaplan

An elegant book, political essay, historically based, relating to the nature of politics in a world of different kinds of society.  Very interesting on Machiavelli, on Kant on Hobbes and Malthus and Churchill.   About the nature of leadership and the sentimental dangers of the media.   I could easily re-read it soon.

Testaments Betrayed               Milan Kundera

One of the most pleasant discussions to re-read – combining his love of musical form and the highest form of novel.  I love his appreciation that parts of the world are not in The Modern Era – which is the age of the individual.   Filled with excellent and wise perceptions and a great hatred for superficial criticism and subjective biography, which attempts to make literature nothing more than failed attempts at autobiography.  Three cheers for Kundera.

 

 

 

              2001

Fall and Winter

The Family                            Mario Puzo (completed by Carol Gino)

The sting is in the tail.  How much was Puzo?  This quickly descends into the school of bad historical writing.  Disappointing and despite the subject being the Borgias it fails to come alive.

Paris Trance                          Geoff Dyer

Another interesting novel from the very readable Geoff Dyer.  This one mimics Women in Love, two males in love with two girls in Paris, one male fails the test and goes off to live in London.  One scene of sodomy from Lady Chatterley and several quotes from Hemmingway, but still many fine scenes of first love and first time in Paris of exiles.

The Diving Bell & the Butterfly                  Jean Dominique Bauby

Best seller, about paralysed man dictated by his eyelid.    Life as a vegetable.

Tender is the Night                 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well having stayed at the hotel in Juan Les Pins one could hardly not, but again I found this the least engrossing of his novels.   (I change my mind the next time I read it.  I wonder which version this was.)

Wittgenstein’s Poker               David Edmonds & John Eidinow

The legendary dispute with Karl Popper in a room in Kings, where a poker was or was not used to threaten and make a point or not about visiting lecturers.   Starts off gripping but turns into a book.  Perhaps we should know which of these two is a writer.

Prince of the Clouds               Gianni Riotta

I enjoyed this Italian novel, about a military historian who finally gets to fight a battle, in a peasants revolt against landowners in Sicily – all the historical battles are revisited most interestingly – the good and the young die as they must, but won’t when the film comes out.   Good book.

Half a Life                             V. S. Naipaul

And half a book.  Sadly not involving. Fulfilling the odd fact for the Nobelist that you get awards as your powers fail…  I liked the early English bit then it skipped unaccountably twenty years to Africa and for me began to fall apart.

Atonement                             Ian McEwan

And this is the result of prizes.   The most disappointing book of the year.  Pretentious and I’m afraid, uninteresting.  I felt he was impersonating Iris Murdoch.

Reality and Dreams                 Muriel Spark

A story of a movie director, a stalker and a crane accident.  Funny and short.

Dusklands                              J. M. Coetzee

A story of an boorish Boer ancestor with an unconcern for killing kaffirs.  I preferred the first part set in Vietnam.

Nightwood                             Djuna Barbes

Didn’t get far in this dike classic.

Embers                                  Sandor Marai

An old man waits in a castle to face his old friend and  rival at the end of his life, to reveal what happened to his wife and this lover, to learn of his betrayal.

Something Special                  Iris Murdoch

A very short illustrated Irish tale.

The Right Hand of Sleep         John Wray

Recommended by my friend Carey Harrison.   A fine and powerful novel set in Austria about Nazism arriving in Austria.  Beautifully written. Truly great.

Territorial Rights                    Muriel Spark

Betrayal in Venice.  Comedy of betrayal.  Very funny.

The Stan Cullis Blues             Martin Hall

A book of poems.  My heart leaped with joy to read the title of these poems by a fellow fifties Wolves lover one poem of which includes the entire Wolves 57-58 team – Finlayson, Stuart, Harris, Slater, Wright, Flowers, Deeley, Broadbent, Murray, Mason, Mullen.  Found in a bookshop in Bath, which I later used for my novel.

Now We Are Sixty                   Christopher Matthew

Funny idea which does not fill the book.  Like a great idea for one poem.

Summer Reading

Provence, St. Petersburg, and UK.

Football against the enemy               Simon Kuper

Gift from Jim.   As the great legendary Liverpool Manager said “Some people think football is a matter of life and death, but it’s much more important than that.”  Excellent scenes from football’s wars and rivalries, plus the revelation that Argentina bought the World Cup in 78.  The World Coup actually since the Generals seized power in ’76.  Don’t ever underestimate the importance of World Games to fascist or communist governments….

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon          William Makepeace Thackeray

Didn’t get too far.  Think I preferred the movie!   Oops…

Cranford                                Mrs Gaskill

I found a rather pretty edition in a bookshop in Ballater which I paid altogether too much for.  Illustrated, and this edition 1898. (First edition 1891)

Dawkins and the Selfish Gene           Ed Sexton

A brief encounter with the facts of what Dawkins actually said in The Selfish Gene about the nature of evolution and the role or existence of God, as opposed to the bad mouthing he received from the religiously impelled crowd of detractors.

Red, White and Blue               John Gregory Dunne

A vastly enjoyable book, written with tremendous energy and verve.  The characters are vital and credible, from the all-too believable defence lawyer Leah (very Leslie Abramson) to Bro, the trendy Catholic Priest close to the president.   It began to sag a little and then recovered and ended strongly.   A surprisingly great achievement, published in 1987.

The Way of the World                               David Fromkin

Just about everything you ever needed to know about the Universe, and the evolution of life and the history of mankind.    From chimp to human in six million years. Astounding and succinct and eminently portable complete reference – fabulous.

Browns Requiem                                       James Ellroy

He doesn’t convince me, it reads like a pastiche of Chandler.   Everything seems borrowed, the PI bitter ex-detective who likes classical music, it sounds stolen and his dialogue sounds stilted.   It’s a pity but it’s like screen writing – you feel it’s been done.

Shakespeare’s Kings                                  John Julius Norwich

Fascinating history and well written history interspersed with brief discussions of the History plays from an historical perspective and a discussion as to how and why Shakespeare departed from the literal truth of history for dramatic necessity and to telescope events into two hours.    The most fascinating period of Kings, following the murder of Edward 11, including the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses, culminating with the ultimate pathological king, the terrifying Richard, which no amount of revisionists can exculpate from his crimes, murdering two Kings, (Henry V1 and Edward V)  a brother and possibly a wife.   Mercifully he didn’t last long before ending up in a car park in Leicester.

An Unfortunate Woman                            Richard Brautigan

Part travelogue, part diary, part good.  But then again easily forgettable.

Louis and Antoinette                                 Vincent Cronin

He is a bit dry but the story is exciting.  From the affair of the diamonds to the end.

A Sentimental Education                           Flaubert

A long and most interesting book.  About half way through I became irritated by Moreau’s passivity and ability to be taken in by the patently grasping people around him, but persisted and was glad.  The writing is very fine.  It is really a story of failure, told in hindsight and tinged with regret.  Moreau never consummates his grand passion with Madame Arnoux, his best friend steals the young girl who is devoted to him and whom he would have successfully married had this been Dickens.  But altogether it is more honest sexually and more true to life.  Though perversely I feel this makes it slightly less of a great novel.  The world of Paris and the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals in the turmoil around the 1848 revolution.   A world away from The Pickwick Papers.  Some consummate description of things and nature.  His painting of scenes is – well like a painter.  Perhaps that is the difference.  He is in the middle of the Parisian painting explosion and Dickens is really an actor, strong on drama and staged scenes.

Headlong             Michael Frayn

Noted, because I am not sure I shall finish it, since I have already spotted the whole art thing has to be a scam.   I find Frayn too polite and Sunday-Timesy to be a real writer.  He is pastel.  I find it slightly phony in town.  Hampsteady.

A Distant Mirror            Barbara Tuchman

Picked up where I left off and the fascinating amazing, bloody, weird century continues.  A different aspect of the Hundred Years War.  I took up from Poitiers, the French disaster, and for everyone a calamity where a French King was captured.  Interesting reading of the Jaquerie in May 1358,  how it prefigures the French Revolution, the same instant callous slaughtering of a hated class, and the even more efficient putting down of such revolt.   She is such a good historian with such a fine overview and yet a telling eye for detail and a good sense of tale telling.  Enguerrand de Coucy

A Severed Head                                        Iris Murdoch

A very fine novel.  Deceptively simple, tautly written in a way which suggests menace throughout.  The prose is exceptionally fine, but it is the plot which drives it forward.   You always want to know what is going to happen next.  It is sudden, surprising and masterly.  Or in this case mistressly.  A dark tale of adultery betrayal, romance and control.

The Thirty Nine Steps                               John Buchan

A fine opening, so gripping, and yet everything good about the movie is not in this book, no memory man, no hero handcuffed to a girl, no girl, no Thirty Nine steps as a code name.  Also many heavy anti-semitic references which while written in 1931 will look very sick and sad only ten years later.

 

July 15th

A Massive Swelling                                   Cintra Wilson

The journalist as star.  A massive moan, a whingeing rant of anger about everyone more famous or beautiful than her, written in a transparent UK tabloid style with too many adjectives and everything exaggerated, so any truth is subsumed in hysterical over-written purple rock journalistic prose, so you end up hoping something really nasty will happen to her.  The female she-bitch journalist as diva.  Yeuch.

The Defeat of The Spanish Armada            Garrett Mattingly

A sober and detailed treatment of the events leading up to the arrival of the massive Armada, harrowed by Drake and sent packing by God and the tempests, ending up with bitterness and defeat for the monastic monarch Philip of Spain and his madness.  The most interesting part of the story is that of Henry 111 and his eventual murder of the uppity Duke of Guise and the whole French post-Bartholomew, Huguenot struggle.   I very much enjoyed the whole complicated tale, which defused the simplistic myths which have built up around this 1588 event.

Big Chief Elizabeth                 Giles Milton

And I very much enjoyed this more popular form of history in the easy writing and well told tale of Sir Walter Raleigh and his attempts to kick-start American colonisation.   I had not realised the significance of Roanoke island and how Drake saved the colonists.  Also the Indians could not be further removed from the Disney view of the pleasant nature-loving innocents – women scraping the skin off their captives with scallop shells having set fire to their feet.    But Pocahontas and her brave act is still an amazing moment in history.  Elizabeth plays everyone off, Raleigh against the incredibly vain, stupid Essex.    You can see the greed of the New World, and the dreams of money evolving.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone                 T. K. Rowling

Amusing enough and I can’t wait for the movie.  But dare I suggest a little goes a long way.  Lily loved it and went through all three books in three weeks.

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon Esq                       William Makepeace Thackeray

I found this very disappointing and longed to see the movie again.  Not a patch on Vanity Fair, which also I remember faded at the end.  You’re no Becky Sharp Barry.

The Comforters                                                 Muriel Spark

One of the few disappointments for me, too arch, too clever (is it really a novel) and her first book.  She will go on to much better and shorter stuff.

Loitering with Intent                                          Muriel Spark

Set in London in 1949 Fleur works in the literary world, attempted rip-offs, Sir Quentin steals her manuscript and life begins to imitate her novel.  Amusing and well told and mischievous.  She opens her books so well, you cannot resist them.

Out of Sheer Rage                                             Geoff Dyer

I really liked this book about a man failing to start writing a book about D. H. Lawrence.  Funny and interesting observations in a very pleasant and deceptively elegant prose style.  “The pavement was grey with cold, the sky was pavement grey….If the sky was supposed to serve as a conduit for light then it was no longer working.”  Plus great angry comedy “That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches…..Still I thought…the general point stands: how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?”   A funny and honest talent.

Flush                                                                Virginia Woolf

Nauseating.  About Elizabeth Browning’s dog.   Perfect.  I was sent it for a movie.  I almost threw up.  This was her best seller.  And serve her right.

June

The Bachelors                                                   Muriel Spark

Bang on form, observing the single men and their anxiety ridden shenanigans.

Closely Watched Trains                                      Bohumil Hrabal

A beautifully written book (in translation anyway!) about a young Czech railway worker and his brave act of resistance, on the day he loses his virginity and his life.  I always loved this movie.   And I really loved his other book How I served The King of England.

Fat City                                                            Leonard Gardner

Good pulp, but a little too much blood,  sweat and canvas in the boxing world for my taste.

Aiding and Abetting                                           Muriel Spark

An absolutely brilliant book, based on two Lord Lucan’s in Paris, undergoing psycho-analysis, from an analysand who has herself escaped from an unpleasant and criminal past-life (faking stigmata!).  The woman is pure genius and I found a first edition.

Silk                                                                  Alessandro Baricco

A beautiful tale of a Frenchman who falls under the spell of a Japanese geisha – though he never touches her – and is finally rescued from his obsession by his wife – though this he does not discover until after her death.  Simple, unusual and moving.

Provence                                                           Lawrence Durrell

Brilliant.   Historical view of Provence largely through Roman eyes, and the great defensive battle fought by Marius to save civilisation.   Also some mediaeval stuff though.   With his sense of place and history this is the sort of perfect book I could carry with me always.   I remember visiting his house in Nimes, when his brother Gerald was occupying it, and from there visiting the Pont Du Gard, surely the most awe-inspiring Roman building outside of the Colisseum.

 

May

The Quest for Graham Greene                                     W. J .West

Continuing the Quest for the hidden man.  A few new lights, mainly on his tax dodge scam.  He and Philby seem to have balanced destinies – both believers in totalitarian doctrines, one Communism, one Catholicism.  Both betrayers.   Greene is such a paradox, the Catholic serial adulterer, who can only find comfort with another man’s wife, not his own.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger                              Christopher Hitchens

Good on you Hitchens, you nail the bastard.   The facts and figures and lately released transcripts which show you what you knew all along that this Strangelove bastard was a right shite.

The Girls of Slender Means                                Muriel Spark

Continuing my Muriel Spark revival binge.  This one a slender tale of post-and wartime girls in a genteel hostel that is ultimately destroyed by the bomb in the garden.  Sex and nylons and men.  Funny Bayswater comedy – post-war young ladies making their way in London (in search of the Bachelors), delicate, humorous and explosive (literally)

Three Tales                                                       Gustave Flaubert

Simply beautiful, and very elegantly translated, a late masterpiece from the Bovary man.

Hotel Honolulu                                                 Paul Theroux

I liked this sprawling novel about a writer who retires to Hawaii and becomes a hotel manager for the owner Buddy.  The intrigues and the various tales are more like interwoven short stories, but his characters are so alive and real that they leap off the page.  I thought it flagged heavily about two thirds through and with good editing might have been much better, but still his prose and his style and his love of Hawaii and the exiles who live there are fabulous.

The Copenhagen Papers                            Michael Frayn and David Burke

An odd, but short, true tale of the actor in the play Copenhagen, who hoodwinked the gullible Frayn into believing that some documents he forged were actually real wartime German mss. No satisfactory outcome.  Like all practical jokes you wonder about the mental state of the perpetrator.   Controlling or what?….

Caesar’s Invasion of Britain                      Peter Berresford Ellis

I, sadly, had not realised that it was Claudius and not Caesar who successfully invaded the Brits.   Simple clear illustrated history.

Good as Gold                                           Joseph Heller

One of the funniest books ever.  He is hilarious, had me laughing out loud.   He manages to skirt the line between the farcical and the tragic.   One minute we are in the real world of his nightmare father’s tyranny over his extended family, and the next in the surreal world of Washington politics where Gold is constantly being abused for his Jewish roots and his desperate social climbing.   It’s the Reagan cabinet, but is suddenly topical again with Bush2.  I just adored this book.   (First edition)

The Heart of The Matter                           Graham Greene

Such a gifted novelist.  Too bad about the superstition.   Once again his characters agonize over truly silly choices.  It is noticeable that the noble way his characters behave (i.e. Scobie commits suicide to benefit his unloved wife) is not the way Greene himself behaved.  They are almost fantasies of his own riddled guilt.    It is such a waste.  Almost perverse.

 

April

 

The Third Woman                  ??

Exploration of Graham Greene’s affair with Caroline someone.  The married woman and the affair which inspired The End of The Affair.

The End of the Affair                                         Graham Greene

If there is a sillier book than this then I don’t know it.   It stars off as a completely masterful piece of work, the first 50 pages almost flawless.  The self-depiction of a self-hating jealous lover and his feelings for the woman who has ended his affair.  He is drawn to her husband Henry – at first a boring man but then he paints him as sympathetic and long suffering.  Cruelly the narrator sets a private detective on to his wife to satisfy his own cravings.   But after about 80 pages comes the revelation.   She was not having an affair with another man at all: she was having an affair with God.   We get some drivel from her diary about the great You and then can you believe it she becomes a virtual saint, even working three miracles – saving Maurice’s life, curing Parkis’ boy and dying a tragic and noble death.   Greene is a fascinating fellow but if ever a good writer was spoiled by religion here it is.

World War 3.0                                                   Ken Auletta

Microsoft and its enemies.   More than perhaps we need to know about the man Gates. Essentially journalism writ large – and fast.   Trial by trial.

The Driver’s Seat                                               Muriel Spark.

You see there is some point in keeping a list.  I was able to search and find I read this some time ago.  In August of  1994  and this is what I wrote then.

A strange little tale about a woman looking to be murdered in a foreign city.  She chooses her murderer.  Odd.

A Far Cry From Kensington                               Muriel Spark

Flawless.   A gem.   A masterpiece.   A delicate and most artfully constructed novel.  Divine writing, divine creation.  I absolutely adored it.   Best book I read this year.

A Game For the Living                                      Patricia Highsmith

Another fine book from this excellent writer.  Set in Mexico, Theodore the ex-patriot painter and Ramon share a lover Lelia, who is found murdered.   Ramon confesses but did he really do it?   Read on.

The Abbess of Crewe                                          Muriel Spark

A fairly nutty novella about a high-tech nunnery and the antics of the Mother Superior.  From the date I take it to be some kind of satire on the Nixon White House.   Quite amusingly drawn Nuns and some good gags.

The Clothes They Stood  Up In                           Alan Bennett

I think they must be the Emperor’s New Clothes.   Shamelessly affected and potty and dull in that snobby English way.   Everything one despises about Sunday Times Literacy.  Yikes.

Kepler                                                               John Banville

Another medieval biography from the pen of Banville.  I must confess I got a little bored and ducked out half way.

The Public Image                                              Muriel Spark

I liked this short tale, set in Rome, about a film star and her husband who commits suicide to revenge himself on her Public Image (her PR).  It is refreshingly honest about movie people and doesn’t dump on the actress indeed leaves her a clever coup de grace.

Rides of The Midway                                         Lee Durkee

A very fine first novel indeed.   Powerful and unique.  This book will travel. Small town Mississippi teenagers staggering towards grace.  Great.

Omerta                                                             Mario Puzo

Astorre Viola and the Apriles – mob stuff.

The World of Rome                                            Michael Grant

The History of the Roman Empire from 133BC to AD 217.

Good, readable, concise, fascinating.    A brief history then fascinating discursive chapters on Architecture and Beliefs etc etc.

I Claudius                                                         Rupert Graves

The mother-load as far as historical novels go.   Utterly readable, compelling, completely thrilling and justifiably a classic.

Claudius The God                                              Rupert Graves

But I could never get into the sequel….

January – March

The Sun Also Rises                                            Ernest Hemmingway

Jake – has a war wound which means he cannot physically love the English aristocratic alcoholic Brett (Lady Ashley) – who loves the unsuitably semitic Cohn – and the drunken Mike.  A kind of weird parody of Lady Chatterley – but he writes immensely readable prose – especially the opening in Paris – and his descriptive passages of landscape, and activities, such as fishing and bullfighting, or just simply train riding  – are unsurpassed.  The detail and the delicacy of his prose is incredible.

Unweaving the Rainbow                                     Richard Dawkins

More fascinating thoughts on science.

Rhode Island Blue                                             Fay Weldon

Normally yes.  This one abandoned.

Show and Tell                                                   John Lahr

Wonderful profiles by the master of Showbiz profiles – particularly fond of the ones on Mike Nichols and Eddie Izzard.

The Constant Gardner                                       John Le Carre

I abandoned this when I neither believed in nor cared about the characters and whatever they were up to….

The Untouchable                                               John Banville

One of the most compelling and finely written novels I have ever read.  A thinly disguised novel of The Cambridge conspirators – this is largely the tale of Sir Anthony Blunt, sympathetically related in its historical content, with Philby, Maclean and the strange role of Graham Greene.   A must read and a contender for my book of the year.

The Newton Letter                                             John Banville

I liked this. He is essentially a poet writing novels.  His prose has a striking, visual, originality –  “From the train I looked at the shy back-end of things, drainpipes and broken windows, straggling gardens with their chorus lines of laundry, a man bending to a spade.  Out on Killiney bay a white sail was tilted at an angle to the world, a white cloud was slowly cruising the horizon.”  Fresh, original and good.

Doctor Copernicus                                             John Banville

His fascination with historical figures is also interesting.  Here in a very fine historical novel we feel the world turning as the heliocentric universe is cautiously explored, at the risk of death.

Eclipse                                                              John Banville

However his latest I did not get into.  Something about the actor suffering from a nervous breakdown, wishing to leave wife and daughter and live in his mother’s old house – well perhaps not exactly my choice… but it was too slowly paced and lacked the intimacy of his previous.   I may be missing something here.

Caesar’s Invasion of Britain                               Peter Berresford Ellis

Or rather his failed invasion and then return.   Simple history simply told.

Edith’s Diary                                                     Patricia Highsmith

A slightly different Highsmith, with a strange central character whose husband deserts her, whose child is completely useless, and whose fantasy world denies all this in her diary.  The onset of madness in the ordinary world.  How people lose their grip is movingly and utterly believably constructed.

Juggling the Stars                                              Tim Parks.

I’m not mad about Tim Parks.  I always think I’m going to really like it, then I find myself losing interest.  This about a penurious language teacher in Italy who kidnaps a wealthy student daughter.

The Tenth Man                                                 Graham Greene

Unfinished pieces, ideas for movies that never made it.   Writing for Hollywood.  Not a patch on Third Man or Rocking Horse Winner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              2000

 

September – December

The Cry of The Owl                                  Patricia Highsmith

My book of the year.   An extraordinary novel which takes a voyeur who falls in love with a young woman and makes him the victim of her boyfriend’s violence so that we utterly want him to succeed in his love for her.  A quite extraordinarily fine novel.

Those who walk away                                Patricia Highsmith

Another great novel, this one set in Venice and the Lido with the recently bereaved Ray, pursued by his vengeful murderous father-in-law.  Again she has that wonderful relationship between victim and aggressor.  The opening of this novel is quite spectacular as she lets you in on the characters behind the action, her control is masterful, she starts like cinema but this is much deeper, and she has an ability to switch viewpoint effortlessly so you get inside the heads of her characters and feel their thoughts and how trapped they are.

Mistress Anne                                          Carolly Erickson

The sad and touching tale of the silly woman who bewitched Henry V111 only to lose his love.  The mother of Queen Elizabeth, who was to learn so much about the ways of men from her mother’s end.   Carolly Erickson is more readable though less scholarly than Alison Weir and a perfect writer of popular history.

The Two Faces of January.                                Patricia Highsmith

Fascinating and unpredictable as ever this is set in Greece and features Rydal who relentlessly pursues the murderous Chester as far as Paris.  This unspecified pursuit to be near someone with a shared violence is a theme of Highsmith’s and is as good and as gripping here as anywhere else.

The Princes in the Tower                                    Alison Weir

Amongst her best and most readable histories – this one is really about the murderous psychopath Richard 111 and his many evils, which in this case involved the murder of a legitimate King, his nephew.

The Tremor Forgery                                          Patricia Highsmith

Set in Tunisia, at many (to me) familiar locations, this reminds me of how well she writes location and how important it is in her novels, the precise feeling of place, streets, the ordinariness and sheer precise reality of her prose description which makes the violence seem both banal, random and utterly believable.  You always feel that even her characters don’t know what is coming next.   This one features the writer who may or may not have killed an Arab but who escapes the wrong woman.

All We Are Saying                  Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Conducted by David Sheff, it says.   Oh dear, perhaps one of the worst things that can happen is people take down your words and publish them.  The misunderstood thoughts of rock and roll.  How they despise the very education they lack…

Lennon Remembers                                           Jann S. Wenner

If only he forgot.   Angry and nasty.  Nasty remembers only too well not to be nice about those who were beside him…

The Road to San Giovanni                                  Italo Calvino

I remember nothing of this, not even where I stopped reading…

Found in the Street                                            Patricia Highsmith

This is the only Highsmith I didn’t like.  I hate stalkers and stalker books and couldn’t bear to read on.   The man finds a wallet and returns it to a loony neighbour stalker of a young woman.

The House of Medici                                          Christopher Hibbert

Interesting history of the rise and fall of the Medici Family who ruled and built up Renaissance Florence, preserved it against the envy of other states and the many artists it supported and patronised by its wealth.  Even winning the Papacy and providing the French with a an influential Queen.  Exciting tales from the town that bred Machiavelli.

The Battle                                                         Richard Overy

Fine, pocket account of the Battle of Britain, where the few fought against the quite similar in number actually, and saved Britain from invasion in 1941.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII                              Alison Weir

And here they all are in their confusion,  married to the biggest pig in Christendom.  Two of whom he murdered, one of whom really cuckolded him.   Great stuff.

Pagan Babies                                                    Elmore Leonard

Begins unusually in Africa with a questionable priest and a massacre and spills into more familiar Leonard territory back in Detroit, with fraud and mobsters.

Sweet Smell of Success                                       Ernest Lehman

I really enjoyed these bitter sweet tales from Broadway and Hollywood.  Noir stories from the decadent PR narrator, exposing the nastiness of comedians, the sleaziness of gossip and what people will do for fame.

Eleanor of Aquitaine                                          Alison Weir

Less than gripping account of the twice married wife of Henry 2^nd.  The uniting of whom created the Plantagenet Empire – and a century of wars to come.

Son of the Morning Star                                     Evan S. Connell

An account of the death and fabled life of Custer, the man who attacked an innocent village of Native Americans and thankfully was made to pay the penalty.   A man who had his eye on this gesture of massacre in order perhaps to sway a Convention, to be, yes, President.

Gilliam On Gilliam                                            edited by Ian Christie

Interesting to know how little he thinks of one….Apologies by the enfant terrible for some of the terribly infantile stuff he was not really responsible for.

King of Paris                                                     Guy Endore

A novel in the style of Alexander Dumas about the life of and loves of Alexander Dumas, novelist, duellist, and romanticist.

July- August

American Rhapsody                                           Joe Esterhaz

Joe Esterhaz is the American wet dream come true.  He has gone from being a crap writer on Rock and Roll to a crap writer of movies.   Now he has written a crap paean of praise to himself.  The ego has landed.  Marginally musing about Clinton and Monica he reveals the great love affair between himself and his ego.   He too fucked Sharon Stone after he “created” her.  But he never betrayed the country by “lying”.  Oh give us a break and crawl back to your wank-pit in Malibu.   Nobody cares.  Rock and roll never mattered enough to write about and neither did you.  Compelling as a car crash, a world in which Jann Wenner is King is not just the country of the blind, but the blind drunk.   Too bad they didn’t get him for Vietnam.  He is a waste of a good body bag.

Love, etc                                                           Julian Barnes

The slightly irritating structure of various voices revealing the rather nasty revenge of the slighted husband, and an interesting portrait of a friend who has grown slightly beyond his promise into a failure.  (Dare we identify this with Barnes and Amis?)   Academic rather than compelling narrative structure fails to ignite.

The Godfather                                                   Mario Puzo

Great holiday reading.   He is really very good. Amazingly deceptive sentences, but great details and observations.   This is the history of the century through the Corleones and it is somehow appropriate that for once the films live up to a great book.

The Sicilian                                                       Mario Puzo

Kind of sideways sequel – like an insert between the two Godfather movies – what happened the day Michael Corleone left Sicily and the history of the great bandit Guiliano, finally betrayed by his best friend (and the Mafia) as he attempts to flee to America.  In between about as much tension, character insight and contemporary post-war history of Italy as you could possibly wish.   He really writes broad contemporary historical novels.  His breadth of understanding is outstanding.   Almost Tolstoyan, if more relevant to our times.  I really like him.

Anna Karenina                                                  Tolstoy

My second failed attempt to get through this celebrated book!   I think at a certain point I find Count Vronsky to be a self-involved uninteresting vain dull man and I am not at all interested in their love affair.   I do not see what draws them together, except pure lust, and this, it seems to me, did not really become the subject of the novel until Lady Chatterley.   After Lady Chatterley there is no other subject. Very fine writing but alas I bailed again.   (I later, in 2012,  change my mind encouraged by the brilliant Nabokov essay and his excoriation of this particular translation and recommendation of a finer.)

George 111                                                         Christopher Hibbert

Fascinating and interesting account of a much maligned and rather tragic porfiria victim.  Died the most popular of English Kings.   Such a long life.   So earnest and good intentioned and like Charles – who is his g.g.g.g.grandson.  So muddleheaded and mistaken over his choice of ministers, so fortunate in having Pitt thrust on him.    A great age and a great time and a great tragedy, the painful indignity to slip three times from monarchy into madness.

Godel, Escher, Bach                                          Douglas R. Hoftstadter

A metaphysical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carol.  Too much math and too many faking tortoise and hare dialogues for my taste.

May – July

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman

The shitty pants school of writing.

Ripley Under Water                                           Patricia Highsmith

The fifth and sadly the last of the Ripleys which I have really enjoyed this year.   This is a detective story backwards.    You think you know who the killer is and you keep waiting for the murder to happen and hoping he will not be caught.  Actually she contrives a brilliant solution to avoid your expectations…

The Boy Who followed Ripley                             Patricia Highsmith

Since I read these with great pleasure over a few months I list them together.   This one is about the Ripley admirer boy who seeks out Ripley after killing his father, gets kidnapped in Berlin and returns to the US only to commit suicide.  As usual it is the atmosphere and ordinariness of the character’s lives in the little French village that gives complete authenticity to the sudden and surprising violence in their lives.     And of course how much we sympathise with Ripley who is able to look objectively at his violent past almost with regret.

Ripley’s Game                                                   Patricia Highsmith

This is the one where he finally manages to eliminate a couple of Mafiosi – because he hates them.  How much we enjoy Reeves Minot and his Hamburg world of small time crookery.  A man called Jonathan is involved whom Ripley tries to aid almost because he dislikes him (Ripley).  Someone says this is the Book of Job – Ripley plays God.

Ripley Under Ground                                         Patricia Highsmith

In which we get the background to the Derwatt art fakes painted by Bernard who threatens to expose the fraud to an American collector, whom Tom eventually murders in the cellar, and is almost killed in turn by Bernard who eventually commits suicide in Switzerland, enabling Ripley to switch bodies. How I love Madame Annette and Heloise the rather sketchy wife.

The Big Bounce                                                 Elmore Leonard

By contrast and not to be bitchy I remember nothing about this plot.   I think it’s because Leonard’s books are more like movies – you are gripped by the plot mechanism and dragged along very happily but they do not resonate with life as we live and experience it.

The Children of Henry V111th                            Alison Weir

Brilliant history.   Illuminating and filled with characters.   Rarely has history been so alive.   You begin to understand all the characters and why they behaved in that way.  The paranoia – oh boy.   I loved it.   The brilliant boy Edward VI and his tragic young death; how Mary became Queen over the silly puppet Lady Jane Grey, how she married Philip, her hysterical pregnancy and her manic Catholicism alienating the people and burning many who disagreed.  Her near paranoid fears of Elizabeth and her timely death, leading the flirty Elizabeth to her virginal apotheosis.

The Life of Elizabeth 1                                       Alison Weir

And I really enjoyed its sequel.   She really brings Elizabeth to life.  The fierce intelligence and yet the strange person she became.  Her flirtatious brilliant handling of an all-male court.  Her cleverness and her genuine genius at heading the nation and providing them with the impetus and the direction they needed.  Above all a woman in charge so not all those testicular wars!   Her Volta dancing,  lute playing, Greek reading, Latin speaking intellectual brilliance and at the end her constant fear of death.

William Shakespeare                                         Gary O’Connor

Reading the Elizabeth book reminded me so much of Shakespeare. The plots and twists of Essex, his depression, constantly suggested Shakespeare plays and I hadn’t quite appreciated the correlation between the politics of the time and his plays – plus echoes of Henry’s days and familiar popular history.  Now comes this interesting life of Shakespeare by a stage director, which is enjoyable if somewhat speculative.  Noticeable mostly for the discovered portrait of Shakespeare by Frans Hals.  Certainly the most convincing portrait I have ever seen.

A Handful of Dust                                             Evelyn Waugh

A delightful novel with a dreadful end.  I still hate the end.

The Loved One                                                  Evelyn Waugh

A quick re-read of the classic novella.

Anil’s Ghost                                                      Michael Ondaatje

Now this I found really disappointing.  I’m a big fan but I got very bored half way through this prolix and somewhat tiresome tale of Sri Lanka.   Here his technique of darting about the place made the book discursive rather than illuminating and his central female character just did not come to life at all.

The Comfort of Strangers                                   Ian McEwan

Gripping.   Tale of sinister couple of murderous pair in Venice preying on British couple.   Thrilling and chilling.

That Great Lucifer                                             Margaret Irwin

A wonderful portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, almost a fan’s view.  She really adores him, but Sir Walter comes alive in this book until that bastard James cuts his head off.   Great history.   Started me off on a big 16^th Century reading jag.

Up at the Villa                                                   W. Somerset Maugham

Now a movie.   I’d avoid both…

UFO’s, JFK and Elvis                                        Richard Belzer

Amusing popular paranoia from the master of the sardonic.

Perfume                                                            Patrick Suskind

Many people told me but I always suspected I wouldn’t like it and I didn’t.  The prose didn’t grab me and I bailed early.  I hate horror as a genre,

The Gold Coast                                                  Nelson DeMille

Again a popular best seller, but I gave up about half way through.  Just didn’t care enough.  Like bad tv.

 

 

March – April

The Talented Mr. Ripley                                     Patricia Highsmith

I loved this.   Had everything the movie lacked.   If we can only keep that silly director’s hands off more good English writing.

Touch                                                               Elmore Leonard

Got a ways through before realising I had read it before.  About the healer with power.  Originally called Cat Chaser I find….

The Book Shop                                                  Penelope Fitzgerald.

A rather sad tale of loss as a middle aged lady attempts to open a bookshop in a kind of Tilling and loses to the snobbish all powerful bitch of the village.   Very well written but very English ending.   She loses everything.

A Working Girl Can’t Win                                  Deborah Garrison

A fabulous collection of stunning poems.

Strip Tease                                                        Carl Hiassen

A rather longer version of Leonard – but not so great.  He overwrites and wants to show us how to respond to his characters.  Too much the journalist perhaps.  But he has great tales and this was a good enough holiday read.

City of God                                                        E. L. Doctorow

Fascinating and thoughtful book.   Which pretty much disposes of the arguments for God advancing cosmology and modern scientific thought and then inexplicably offers a solution of conversion to Judaism.    Did I miss something?    But I enjoyed the argument, and the excellent prose.

Mr Majestyk                                                      Elmore Leonard

Great Leonard about the melon grower and the personal vendetta with a casual hit-man.

The Great Mordecai Mystery                              Kyril Bonfiglioli

Last Mordecai novel from this master of the magical mystery and he is in great form.  What wit, what disdain, what amusement.   Here finished by Craig Brown (though I’m afraid I spotted the join).   Nevertheless we should be grateful that we had this joy.

All the Tea in China                                           Kyril Bonfiglioli

Not so this one though.  The rather laboured historical novel which has surprisingly familiar Dickens characters in it.  I left it in Mexico to find its own audience.

Which Lie did I tell?                                          William Goldman

I find him interesting and totally entertaining when in anecdotal mode and almost unreadable when he writes us screenplays to show us how it should be done.   Who gives a shit?  Is there anything more unreadable than a screenplay? From its dull font to its endlessly abbreviated terms it is the exact opposite of reading.

The Hours                                                        Michael Cunningham

Crap.   And pretentious crap at that.  Winner of a Pulitzer.   A story about Virginia Woolf.   Yuck.

Dombey and Son                                               Charles Dickens

I gave up where I did before – shortly after the death of young Paul.   For me the novel dies here and I can never finish it.

January thru February

The Mordecai Trilogy                                        Kyril Bonfiglioli

Three Novels

Oh yes the best and the finest, the funniest and the most fabulous discovery.   Ronald Firbank meets Raymond Chandler.   Divine writing, hilarious description, gripping action.  Everything and more.  If there are three better books this year I will eat my wife….

Man and Superman                                                    Bernard Shaw

What a prosy writer he is.  Long and boring stage directions.  I don’t know, the acceptable face of Ibsen.  Perhaps the best you could hope for from a critic – I like only Joan and Caesar and Cleo and My Fair.

Last Orders                                                                Graham Swift

Four pals burying a chum.   I’m not as wowed as some people have been with this Booker prize-winner,(1996)

Belling the Cat                                                           Mordecai Richler

Journalism and selected pieces which is OK but not his novels.

Lola                                                                           Delacorta

Very French.   Not very good.

My Movie Business                                                     John Irving

More interesting after I met him.  A writer struggles to make a movie of his book.   Interesting ballsy guy.

Picture Palace                                                            Paul Theroux

About the American female photographer – really great start and then sort of tails off.  But he is undeniably a good writer.

Creation                                                                    Gore Vidal

Oh dear Gore.  The best Essayist in the world but what a bore as a novelist.   Was very happy to have Salman Rushdie agree with me the other night!

King of Cannes                                                           Stephen Walker

Yes the usual – pushy drunk English boys attempting to expose the successful – waiting for Harvey.   Probably better as TV which it became.

Karka’s Curse                                                            Achmat Dangor

Didn’t get far – sorry.

The Consul’s File                                                       Paul Theroux

I absolutely loved this book.  Beautifully connected short stories about an American consul amongst the ex-pats in Ayer Hitam. Funny, savage and dramatic.  Modernised Maugham Malaysia,  Really good.

Everybody Smokes in Hell                                           John Ridley

Bang bang you’re dead.   What the violent movies look like as a novel.  I got bored frankly and didn’t care about who survived who.

Guerrillas                                                                  V.S. Naipaul

How far away they seem the Notting Hill Black radicals and their murderous return to Trinidad.

The Feathers of Death                                                Simon Raven

Early Raven.  Lieutenant colonels and so on.   Gave up.

Greenmantle                                                              John Buchan

Gripping of its type.   Not the 39 steps though.

Napoleon 111                                                             Felton Bresler

Big bountiful biography which I really enjoyed.  I didn’t know much about Louis and it was a fascinating life from high to low to high and back.   Very well done history with lots of interesting anecdotes and great scenes.   An excellent book.

Big Women aka Big Girls Don’t Cry                             Fay Weldon

Excellent Weldon – tracking the lives of four women from the end of the sixties to the present as they age marry and start feminist publishing houses.  Very funny, very touching and very accurate.

Killshot                                                                      Elmore Leonard

Think I read this before – guy who is part Indian who comes over the Canadian border to kill.

Barbary Shore                                                            Norman Mailer

I found this disappointing this time and abandoned it.

Nelson’s Women                                                         Tom Pocock

Fascinating look at the man through the women – and not just Emma or his wife – both well drawn – but the sisters and related family.  Excellent.

Cowboys are my Weakness                                          Pam Houston

Beautiful, lyrical wonderful honest short stories about woman and her endless puzzlement with man – here largely macho and hunting man. Most excellent writing.

Mondo Desperado                                                       Patrick McCabe

I find sadly he is not for me.  Is it the Irish thing?

Popcorn                                                                     Ben Elton

The book of the play I saw.  His characters all conform to make his point. They have no lives of their own.  Not people, but headlines.

Cat Chaser                                                                 Elmore Leonard

I really liked this – but then again I have forgotten the plot – oh yes the man a divorced motel owner is in love with the wife of a Salvadoran ex-Police thug – and helps her escape him – also visiting his youth and the young woman who tried to kill him when he was on service.  Gripping of course.

Jackie Brown       aka Rum Punch                               Elmore Leonard

The book of the prolix film.  I still think there was a good movie somewhere here – in fact the change-over of the packages was better in the movie.  It just needed savage editing.  The book doesn’t suffer from that.

The Museum Guard                                                    Howard Norman

So so Canadian fiction kinda predictable.

 

 

 

              1999

This year let’s do the months backwards please, to avoid all that scrolling down by December.

November – December

The Mangan Inheritance                  Brian Moore

A gripping novel.   He can really write excitingly though this reminded me somewhat of Robertson Davies, yet as soon as the story hits Ireland the plot and the tale telling is totally compelling.

Timeline                                Michael Crichton

His writing has been going steadily down hill since Jurassic Park 2.  He began to write like bad screenplays.  Now he writes like bad teleplays.  Too bad because he has great talent as a story teller.  I threw it away when the twelve year old boy turned out to be a twenty three year old girl.  Written like studio notes.

Yes we have NO                      Nik Cohn

The real seedy England exposed.  The flabby underbelly of soggy hippies and sad people with bloody attitudes.  Very well observed.

In the Skin of a Lion               Michael Ondaatje

Beautifully written, great tale about Toronto in the 20’s and the building of the bridges by the immigrants who built the city.  Fabulous.

Disgrace                                J .M. Coetzee

Brilliant writing and deservedly the Booker winner – which I read before the announcement and thought it my book of the year.  The disgrace of the father and the rape of the daughter, woven together in totally compelling way.

How Far From Austerlitz                 Alistair Horne

Napoleon’s fall from the zenith of Austerlitz.  Very fine, very readable history of the French mass murderer.

Sick Puppy                             Carl Hiaasen

I was enjoying it and then I grew tired of the characters.  And then I gave up.

Love and War                         James Hewitt

The strangely compelling tale of the twit who was used as a fuck buddy by the sainted Di.   She pulled him, she rode him, she dumped him.  Ah Hello Magazine.  I felt sorry for him, especially with the Mirror stealing his letters and then denouncing him!  The shits, ah the tabloid shits.

Losing Nelson                        Barry Unsworth

Very readable novel about an obsessive Nelsonite – until he cracks.

The Sun King                         David Ignatius

I apparently read this, or some of it, recently, but it all escapes me…

Double Indemnity                   James M. Cain

Quite like the movie.

Dream Story                                    Arthur Schnitzler

More erotic than the movie, and more credible.  The Jewish dimension adds the sinister element to Austrian life which is entirely missing in Kubrick’s version.  Why would a Jewish writer and director remove the underlying anti-semitism of this story?

The Mighty Walzer                          Howard Jacobson

I really loved this tale of the Manchester ping pong players.   Very true and real and funny.  I like him a lot.

For Love or Money                          Alex Fynn & Lynton Guest

Journalism really, about Man Utd and England and money.

The Dark Room at Longwood           Jean-Paul Kauffman

A sentimental Frenchman returns to Saint Helena to understand the sadness and loneliness of the demented mass murderer who was allowed to live there, unlike all his millions of victims.  How bloodily sentimental the French are about their revolution and their emperor.   Of course the English are to blame for everything…..  thank God.

In Hell before Daylight                    Ian Fletcher

Wellington’s bloodiest victory – and mighty gruesome it was too – the tale of the siege and storming of the fortress of Badajoz, 1812 which was to lead to waterloo – and a reminder that both sides Generals cost a great deal in lives.

Reality Check                         Brad Wieners and David Pescovitz

What happens in the real future.  Inventions etc.

A Star Called Henry                         Roddy Doyle

Despite meeting him, and him signing the book I don’t really get it.   A bit too jovial for me.

 

September – October

The Way we Were                   Dominic Dunne

Very disappointing – name dropping of the rich and dull.  Plus even less interesting photos.

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis            Will Self

Nicely written but the usual postmodern hero – drinking and snorting his way to oblivion in the Amis – Easton Ellis – ex world of the eighties.

Is Paris Burning                     Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

Answer no.  Thanks to some good Nazi’s.  In particular the General who refused to carry out Hitler’s order to utterly destroy Paris.   De Gaulle is the self-determined man of destiny who commits hundreds of allied lives to the liberation of Paris on his time table – ensuring Paris is liberated and the war lasts much longer.   But he had to beat out those wretched commies who stayed there!

The Ballad of Peckham Rye              Muriel Spark

Lovely writing, lovely story, lovely times.  The fifties and the Teds and the fairly innocent malevolence which resulted in a punch on the nose!

The Irish Famine                            Colm Toibin

The shameful story of how an Empire turned its back on the struggling starving population of Ireland and ensured much misery for itself in the future.

Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare           John Toohey

A fascinating account of the epic voyage where Bligh sailed his tiny dinghy and delivered the survivors to safety almost through the force of his own fierce will.

Split Images                  Elmore Leonard

Rich psychotic bastard likes to kill for kicks and video them.   Interesting because he doesn’t relent and save his heroin.   She is out and out murdered by the fascinating spoiled hero.   Perhaps the only untrue thing is that he doesn’t get away with it.     Epic Leonard.

Mother Night                         Kurt Vonnegut

On trial for being a Nazi war criminal.

May – August

Napoleon The Final Verdict             Various authors

Fascinating essays on this most interesting of bastards.

Saint Augustine                      Garry Wills

I found this rather too contentious for what this series aspires to be – potted biographies of Saints you might have missed.

Bandits                                  Elmore Leonard

The last of three holiday Leonards – about the guy who works in the morgue and an ex-nun, trying to pick up the money raised by for the contras.

Be Cool                                  Elmore Leonard

The latest – Chili Palmer’s latest escapades amongst the music moguls and Russian Mafiosi.

California Fire and Ice           Don Winslow

Best novel of the summer – gripping read about insurance investigator and the various scams in insurance, also with the Russian mafia.  Great read – soon to be  major picture, you bet.

Jules and Jim                         Henri-Pierre Roche

Cute up to a point.  Up to a point where you gag over the serial seductions.  Interesting essay by Truffaut who made it into a much more impressive movie.

How to Read a Poem               Molly Peacock

An essential work.  Inspired me to pick up and read a lot more poetry. Such a simple book.  Such a simple idea. Yet written with such care and dedication.  It’s nothing short of inspiring.

Courtesans and Fishcakes                James Davidson

Yes all eight for a bit, but essentially someone’s pop PHD.  Not detailed enough to be a PhD and not punchy enough to be pop.

Dangerous Kiss                               Jackie Collins

Dear Jackie- she can’t write for anything.   I got only a few pages in before tossing.   Away not off….

Protecting the Gift                           Gavin de Becker

Slightly déjà vu re- treading of his previous masterwork – but interesting and indeed vital info for parents.

Bit Number 4                                  Fry and Laurie

Hilarious skits from the masters of hilarity…(Now a major book!)

Joan of Arc and Richard III             Charles T. Wood

Bit dry.   Probably make good kindling for the deluded French saint…

Cleopatra’s Palace                                    Laura Foreman

Interesting lavishly illustrated history of Cleopatra and her affairs and her life.   She is such a fascinating person.

The Year 1000                                 Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger

Life as it was lived at the turn of the previous millennium.

Monty Python Speaks                       David Morgan

Nicely laid out paperback of intercut excerpts from the Python boys.  Not bad at all – though Took is busy writing himself into the history.. and one or two little bitchy moments.   Cleese is outed finally as the control freak he is.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet          Salman Rushdie

A stunning opening in South America followed by a disappointing stroll down the old territory of Bombay.   I couldn’t finish it.

Josephine                                        Carrolly Erickson

Unashamedly popular presentation of history, and a brilliant read it is too, about the more sympathetic half of the Bonaparte’s.   A fabulous woman who did well despite all.

Bringing Out the Dead                     Joe Connelly

Ambulance men and their world.  Sort of Taxi Driver for 911.

True and False                                David Mamet

Explodes the myth of Stanislavski’s method.   Acting is fooling people not emoting publicly.

The Wild Party     by Joseph Moncure March, drawings by Art Spiegelman

A naughty ballad beautifully illustrated.

Crazy Horse                                    Larry McMurtry

Great potted biographer of an interesting character in the most fascinating period.

A Positively Final Appearance          Alec Guiness

But you can be sure it won’t be!   He brims over with such urbanity could one possibly describe him as suburban.   He is so serious and such a snob that one is reminded of Peter Seller’s wickedly accurate portrait of him.

 

March – April

The Fall of Paris                    Alistair Horne

One of the best and most fascinating history books ever.  About the siege of Paris and the Commune  1870-71.  Totally fascinating.

By Design                              Richard E. Grant.

Richard’s Hollywood novel about the depraved and decadent acquaintances of one Vyvian an interior designer, and his masseuse partner Marga.

Stars Screaming                     John Kaye

I totally loved this Hollywood novel, which has the seedy flavor of total authenticity and zooms between the fifties and contemporary LA.  Highly original and beautifully written by a native of Southern California.  Wonderful writing.

The Things They Carried                 Tim O’Brien

Utterly absorbing and wonderful book about Vietnam.  About being there and coming home.  About death, mud, but most of all about life.   Wonderful writing.

Love in a Blue Climate            Hanif Kureishi

A shabby world of short stories.  I got tired of grunge lit.

Single & Single                      John Le Carre

Father against son, deception and betrayal in the arms and blood trade to the post Cold War Eastern bloc.  Makes you nostalgic for simple war.   Gripping but not entirely convincing picture of the father.

The Cement Garden                Ian McEwan

Kids burying dead mum in dad’s cement yard.  Not for me.

Joshua Then and Now            Mordecai Richler

Classic reminiscences of ageing Joshua by the Canadian master of humor and wit.  Skeletons in family closets, incestuous siblings, all of Canada dry is here.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn                 Mari Sandoz

Absolutely masterful short history and recounting of two most fascinating battles.  Wonderful writing and gripping history.

Crime Wave                                    James Ellroy

Yes it’s good, but I began to have enough of the writing by the end, though the true stuff is fascinating, about the murder of the author’s mother.

Why We Write                                 Screenwriters

Pictures and statements from the poor bastards at the front line in the least enviable, but highly rewarded job in Hollywood.

With Nails                                       Richard E.Grant

Splendid stuff from  the spell-binding Swazi spieler.  Great yarns, great tales of filming, plus the desperate insecurities of being an actor.

It’s the stupidity, stupid           Harry Shearer

Eloquent, elegant and rather brilliant essays about why people hate Clinton, which would have been a much better title.

February

Dixie City Jam               James Lee Burke

Tight, well written thriller, set in New Orleans, about sunken Nazi subs and neo fascists, with Detective Dave Robicheaux

Hell                              Kathryn Davis

Didn’t get it.

The Travelling Horn Player              Barbara Trapido

Bang on form again. Hooray.  Artfully constructed tale with many viewpoints from the different characters involved in the tale of the death of Ellen Kent’s sister Lydia and the way this accident involved so many and how it affected and changed their lives, with the big Trapido style bump into the right person suddenly happy ending, which works.  I enjoyed it very much.

A Hard Time to be a Father              Fay Weldon

Excellent stories from this wonderful writer.  She is always interesting, especially about female betrayal, and deserting men – a recurring theme with her.

January

Amsterdam                    Ian McEwan

A gem of a book.  Exquisite.  Elegant, eloquent.  Tightly constructed and beautifully written,   The deserved winner of the Booker Prize.  A little masterpiece.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover          D. H. Lawrence.

Lawrence’s final work.  A deserved classic.  It is the least filthy of all modern books, though it is partly about sex, but really it is about the life-affirming thin dark wiry man versus the cold unfeeling blond male (the same conflict as in Women in Love.)  I was struck by how well he wrote the early part and the breakdown of Connie’s relationship with Clifford.  Also the ambivalence his characters have.  Mellors is absolutely not without flaws.   He has the 20’s class down.  It’s like reading a much more modern Forster.   I think this book will last.

Glamorama                            Bret Easton Ellis

I’m sorry this will not do.   Long, name dropping first half, is enough to make you anxious that you have missed several editions of Vanity Fair, followed by an unbelievable bombing story set in London and Paris.   Reminds me that I like Jay MacInnerney.  This man can write but he needs to find a more interesting subject than the Manhattan model world.

The Invention of Love             Tom Stoppard.

The blessed Saint of our stage again with a new and interesting play about (amongst other things) A. E. Housman, which stoked my interest in this poet.  How exquisitely well he writes, his wit and his jokes are well up to standard as he plays with Oxford and Hades and death and mortality and morality.  I always feel more adult when reading Stoppard.

Heavy Water                          Martin Amis

Heavy weather?  Well no not exactly.  It seems to me there are two Amis’ still with us, the pretentious one who gets an idea for a sketch and then writes a whole novel on it, and the brilliant observational novelist who captures the ugly side of modern lower class warfare life.   The mobile phone carrying shell suited yob with aspirations.  I adore this latter and he is here represented in at least two excellent longish short stories, which are both really excellent (State of England and The Coincidence of the Arts.)  The other has this idea to swap poems for screenplays and …oh dear.

Enduring Love                       Ian McEwan

Nice pun in the title.  The brilliant opening (a man is accidentally dragged into a fatal ballooning accident) and is haunted by an obsessive born again sufferer from de Clerambault’s syndrome.  Becomes a taut thriller, after it’s staggeringly brilliant start.  He is such a good writer of prose.  Very enjoyable and actually scary.

A Certain Justice                    P.D. James

I bought this off a bookshelf in Vegas when I ran out of reading but I was disappointed in her.  Very ITV drama style writing to me.  If intriguing story about a barrister killed in Chambers.  But I didn’t believe a word of it.  I’d probably enjoy the TV version of it though Inspector (Dalgliesh).

The Professor and the Madman                          Simon Winchester

The odd and intriguing and very well written story of how Porfessor James Murray the editor of the huge and brilliant OED discovered that one of his major contributors was a Minor (Dr. Chester) an American murderer schizophrenic.  True tale.

 

 

Written for The Daily Mail.

8 October 1999.     I am currently reading the latest Roddy Doyle novel “A Star Called Henry”– because he gave it to me when we were both signing books in San Francisco last week – and anyone who has read “Hello Sailor” (my first scurrilous novel published 22 years ago) deserves a plug.  The best novel I read recently  was “California Fire and Ice” by Don Winslow – a gripping read about a Californian Fire Insurance investigator, and bound to be a major picture soon.   “Stars Screaming” by John Kaye is a superb Hollywood novel, which has the seedy flavour of total authenticity and zooms between the fifties and contemporary LA.  Highly original and beautifully written by a native of Southern California.  I love Barbara Trapido and I found her bang on form again in “The Travelling Horn Player” which was artfully constructed from many viewpoints, with the big Trapido bump into the right person suddenly happy ending, which works.

The most inspiring book I read recently was Molly Peacock’s “How to read a Poem”, an essential work which inspired me to pick up and read a lot more poetry,  and the most disappointing was Dominic Dunne’s “The Way We Were” which sadly failed as gossip and led me back to re-read Richard E. Grant’s splendid “With Nails” which is deliciously gossipy without ever becoming malicious.   I always read a lot of history and recently I have enjoyed “Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare,” Carolly Erickson’s highly readable “Josephine” and “The Fall of Paris” by Alistair Horne, which is the best book about the siege of Paris I have read.   If I ever have the misfortune to be cast away on a desert island without the Bible and Shakespeare then let it be Dickens, “Bleak House” or “Our Mutual Friend” would do fine.

 

 

              1998

 

January

Wellington                                               Christopher Hibbert

A fascinating man, though not a fascinating author.  I couldn’t disagree more with Antonia Fraser, but then she too writes history badly.  I have never read a bio of this odd but heroic figure before.  Enjoyed the life.  Waterloo still stands triumphant as a brilliant but close run thing.

The Price of Admiralty                              John Keegan

I had to read about Trafalgar as a companion to Waterloo.  He vividly recreates the carnage and amazing bloodshed on those fantastic wooden ships locked together firing broadsides into each other.  Seems Nelson’s willpower was the cause of victory (as well as superior tactics.)

The Crystal Frontier                                 Carlos Fuentes

This has been my year to find Fuentes disappointing.  This book is way too angry about the Yanks.  It was only enlivened for me by reading about a character on the beach in Zihuatanejo, as I lay reading the book on the beach at Zihuatanejo.

The Campaign                                          Carlos Fuentes

See above.  Gone off him this year…

The Grave of Alice B. Toklas                     Otto Friedrich

Magnificent essays by the consummate master of historical writing.  I just adore him and sadly learned he has died.  From Mozart to the last emperor of Rome (a woman), his essays are never less than enthralling and informative.

A Single Man                                           Christopher Isherwood

I got a bit tired of him and left him in my beach hotel room…where I’m sure he’ll soon be picked up.

Truman Capote                                        George Plimpton (editor)

An odd shape for a book – rather like a TV documentary, all talking heads, but a nevertheless revealing look at this odd but wonderful writer.   Some people are bitchy and more revealing about themselves, notably Mailer and Gore Vidal, but still the sense of shock when all his New York friends dumped him, and his inability to realise it was inevitable and utterly predictable, (what did he think the rich would be nice and understanding?) make it both sad and interesting.   What a talent though.

 

February

Lucky Jim                                                Kingsley Amis

It is a funny book and a classic, but I get a bit tired of Dixon and his inability to move away from Margaret the detestable leach.  So many girls like that in the fifties.

Night Train                                              Martin Amis

A detective story, first person narrative, female cop.   It all depended for me on the end, and I just knew it was going to be ambivalent and disappointing.  He can really write, but chooses odd things to write about.

Great Expectations                                   Charles Dickens

The movie sent me back to the book and “O” level English days.  I can re-read Dickens for ever.   This is surprisingly wittily written.  I had forgotten how funny he is in his narrator voice.  Brilliant.  Classic.

The Royals                                               Kitty Kelley

Much more interesting than I had expected.   Particularly fascinating about the young wives.   Fergie comes out as a nightmare.   It will probably be the last unvarnished portrait of Diana for a while.   What a manipulative person.  Good to remember how she preyed on the husbands (Will Carling etc).

Cuba Libre                                               Elmore Leonard

Rather disappointing.  Set in Cuba in history it reminds one how some writers cannot and ought not escape their milieu.

Barney’s Version                                      Mordecai Richler

Totally hysterical.   That rare bird  – the really funny novel.  I completely recommend it to everyone.   Wonderfully honest and utterly incorrect.  Great.   (Recommended to me by John Irvine.  Thanks.)

Before the Deluge                                     Otto Friedrich

A portrait of Berlin in the 1920’s.   Magnificent, chilling, account of the rise of Nazism.  How insignificant they were.   How free Berlin was.  How quickly power vacuum and deflationary economics can lead to fascism.   Chilling.  Brilliant. He is a great historian.

Paradise                                                  Toni Morrison

Yes.  Well.  Certainly imaginative writing.  I couldn’t get into it.  Can’t imagine what Oprah’s fans make of it.  I kept getting the characters confused.  She writes well, but not well enough for what she is trying to be I think.  Got almost to the end before hurling…

Philippe, Duc D’Orleans                           Christine Pevitt

A fascinating history of the Regent of France, the nephew of Louis XIV.  I had never really read the history of the Regency before (since A level).  John Law and his attempt to create money.  All the fabulous intrigues of the Court at Versailles, the amazing attempts at poisoning and so on.  I really liked Philippe, and got an excellent picture of him from this book.    Very interesting and highly readable.

 

March

Scoop                                                      Evelyn Waugh

Re-reading the novel about the mistake of the thinly disguised Beaverbrook character sending his gardening correspondent to cover a war in Africa.  Not as funny as I remembered it, or has it just been disserved by a less than brilliant TV series?

The End of the World                                Otto Friedrich

Re-reading bits of this excellent history of the times when people believed the world was going to end.   Very frequently.  End Times time a hundred.  One of my favourite histories.

Into Thin Air                                            Jon Krakauer

A padded out article on the blizzard that killed so many on Everest. Worth skipping to the last chapters, which is an extended article and the most fascinating part.  Why do they do it?  Because they’re there?

The Universe and The Teacup                   K. C. Cole

Feminista journo tackles large subjects.  Alas less than gripping prose, though many of the facts are fascinating, her discussion of the mathematics of the Universe fails to ignite.

Maximum Bob                                         Elmore Leonard

The judge is Harry Dean, the lady is Jackie Brown.  The yarn is good.  The alligators are a bonus, and the Judge’s wife has a black slave girl inside her.   Interesting and good enough to be a movie, or did I see it already?    Charlie Dore writes the most wonderful song about this novel.

April – June

Riding the Rap                                         Elmore Leonard

Oddly enough the sequel to the above, picked at random.  Good flying material these paperbacks.   Sometimes I find his style disjointed, when he switches scenes like a movie.  The eye follows this transition easily on the screen, but the mind needs some clue where we are rather than just dialogue.   I see now what Martin Amis was trying to do.  He worships Leonard.  Actually me too.

The Switch                                               Elmore Leonard

1978, amusing yarn.   This is oddly the plot of The Bette Midler/Danny De Vito funny movie, about the kidnappers who snatch the wife he wants to divorce for his bimbo.  More realistic and in many ways funnier, with a neat twist, she helps them kidnap the bimbo.

 

Kafka Was the Rage                                  Anatole Broyad

I came I saw I got the gist.  Actually be honest I read bugger all of this.  Something about growing up non-Jewish in New York.

Falling Off the Map                                  Pico Iyer

Nice pieces from lonely places.  Good travel writer.  But with me a little travel writer goes a long way.

Too Loud A Solitude                                 Bohumil Hrabal

After the one book – I served the King of England – it’s all been downhill for me with him.  This one’s about a trash compactor.   Wish he’d included this…

High Concept                                           Charles Fleming

Mind you for real trash you can’t beat a life of Don Simpson.   Utterly meretricious.  There is almost nothing of interest about the man except that some people apparently took him seriously.  But only in Hollywood.   His films are trash, his life was shit.   You could reverse that sentence and it would still apply.   Poor Don, sadly not missed.

Le Divorce                                               Diane Johnson

I came, I saw, I got the gist. Pleasant enough, but not ultimately gripping enough story of American girl betrayed by a Frenchman.  Yipes.   How surprising.   The Parisian setting gives this familiar jilting tale a fresh twist, but pour moi ca suffis.

Laughing Matters                                     Larry Gelbart

Amusing memoirs from the master wit of the dining table.   A splendid man.   Nice to run into him again after all these years, at the Aspen Comedy Festival, and watch Cleese (“I don’t want to make any movies”) pumping him for film scripts.

Twenty One Balloons                                William Pene du Bois

1947 adventure yarn.   Not my tasse de tay.   Someone asked about a movie adaptation but I never finished the book.

Espionage                                                Ernest Volkman

The Greatest Sy Operations of the 20^th Century.  Including the great operation where Norma Peal became Norma Peal.   Not really.  Interesting yarns not very well told.  More like journalism than a book.

Cities of the Plain                                     Cormac  McCarthy

And then comes the occasional book that make it all worthwhile.  The book you dread will end because you know you won’t find another that is like it this year or many a year.   This is the final act of the border trilogy.  The final inexorably tragic story of the love affair of a young Texan cowboy for a Mexican whore, that has, you know it, to end tragically.   But the nobility of the writing and the way he plays it out.  Ah yes, the  writer de nos jours.   Some of these pages take your breath away, and will continue to do so long after we are dust.

 

Becoming Human                                     Ian Tattersall

Fascinating book on the evolution and human uniqueness that takes its point of departure the arrival of the extraordinarily different homo sapiens Cro-Magnon, in Europe 25 kyr’s ago.  Written by a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and primate behaviourist, this is not an easy read but a great and worthwhile study of our origins and our place in nature.

The Demon-Haunted World                      Carl Sagan

The alas late semi-great Carl. A wonderful populariser of science, here attacking the assholes of new age beliefs and stupid twaddle.   He really does demolish a lot of the unconventional wisdom which passes for the Gospel according to Shirley Maclean.

Labels                                                      Louis de Bernieres

I love this guy.  A tiny little pot-boiler book about a collector of labels and his hobby which made him a fortune when he began to turn around cat food as gourmet canned dishes.

Girl’s Night Out                                       Kathy Lette

Ozzie girls, cappucino, double pay Double Bay.   Shopping and shagging in Sydney.  I felt I’d been there and done that.  She gets better after this I think.

Team Rodent                                            Carl Hiassen

Nice anti-Disney polemic, showing how the mouse devours the world.  Or tries to.  Have a nice day.

Offshore                                                  Penelope Fitzgerald.

I rather enjoyed this Booker Prize Winning Novel set aboard the Barges on the Thames reach that seem so familiar from the sixties.   Nice characters well drawn.  Deceptively good stuff.

On the Edge                                             Edward St.Aubyn

Jerry Hall asked me to read this.  She wants to make it into a movie.  God knows why.  It’s not that it’s bad, it isn’t.  It just ain’t a movie.  Various couples get together and finally find the light through orgasm at Essalen.  Is Jerry drawn by the therapy, the new age search or the tantric sex?   I shan’t stick around to find out.   From the book I mean…

The Monty Python Encyclopaedia              Robert Ross

More things I never even knew let alone wanted to.   Very nice raves about all my work anyway.   Certainly worth replying to the author!

 

July-August

 

This was the month I got very confused by Elmore Leonard.   I found I could re-read one of his books without noticing I had read it before.    Not really a problem with a page turner, but a bit of a worry.  So I list a few here and will try and differentiate.

Cat Chaser                                               Elmore Leonard

About a Franciscan monk who has the touch.   Faith healing, and whackos.  I gave up reading this because I suddenly remembered I had seen the movie version called God knows what with Matthew Maconiky and I’m not a big fan of his..

Freaky Deaky                                           Elmore Leonard

Now this I did enjoy.  The girl Robin and Skip, her dope smoking friend, trying to extort money from Mr. Woody, the hugely fat drugged-out wealthy man.    Chris the ex-bomb squad man trying to be a cop saves all, when Robin gets blown up through not listening, and serve her right too.

La Brava                                                  Elmore Leonard

Confusingly I even have two copies of this, but I believe I only read it once, but these editions don’t carry a synopsis, just reviews, so you’re on your own.    Damned if I know what happens.  Ben Torres is in it, but he’s in a few.  Looking through it now I was almost positive I had read it, but then, guess what, I don’t know what happens – dang, I could read it again! (I did)

Pronto                                                     Elmore Leonard

No, this one I do remember.  I only read it a week ago though.  It’s about Harry the bookmaker and how he wants to retire to Italy, but the mob think he has been skimming and put the heat on him, and he is only saved by the cop with the Western hat on his spare time, who falls in love and ends up with his girl.  He sure does keep the tension going though and I liked it.

Les Bon Mots                                           Eugene Ehrlich

Preparation for holiday reading.  Everyday French sayings.  Most haven’t stuck alas.  C’est la vache.

A Literary Companion to Venice                Ian Littlewood.

Including seven walking tours.  Indispensable pre-Venetian reading, much of which I recalled as I wandered amongst the canals and Canaletto’s.  Fabulous historical moments at every corner of Venice.

Venice Observed                                       Mary McCarthy

Fabulous writings and musings about Venice.   She made me aware of the sensual beauty of the textiles and fabrics, so I stopped and went in when I found that lovely shop with the Marco Polo hats and voila! Tania has a new coat.    Easy to re-read this each time one prepares for a trip to the most essential city.

Midnight’s Children                                 Salman Rushdie

Sala’am Salman.   Holiday reading, and I read it in Venice and Greece and France before finding I had had just a bit too much of Mr. Rushdie grabbing me by the throat and challenging me to dislike him.  Oh yes a great book, and way too long and one day I might just finish the last hundred pages and see what happens to all those midnight children born on the stroke of India.

The Iliad                                                  Homer

Well guess where I went on holiday, but this fabulous translation of the brutal behaviour of the Gods and the warlike warriors who dished it out on the beaches for ten years kept me gripped.  I haven’t finished but I shall.  It’s not the excellent version by Christopher Logue, which is a must read, but still fairly excellent blank verse translation.    Not much to do with a luxurious Greek cruise though!

The Red Notebook                                    Paul Auster

Don’t think I read a lot of this.  The French poets leave me cold.   But I dipped into it because he writes of visiting France from America.   But he goes to Paris and he is young, and I went to Provence and I am old and I think the two are not the same thing at all.

News is a Verb                                          Pete Hamill

A little polemic about the rotten state of newspapers today, by a sentimentalist and someone who was fired by Murdoch.

Blood and War                                         Barbara Ehrenbach

War is to do with being preyed on by predators.

 August thru September1998

La Brava                                                  Elmore Leonard

Hotel in Miami and a dry out clinic and an attempted kidnap and a double crossing ex movie star.

A Tidewater Morning                                William Styron

Exquisite writing.  Three beautiful short stories, about the death of an old slave, boys in the war and poverty all set in the tidewater district of Virginia.

News of  a Kidnapping                              Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Journalism, but interesting about the insufferable kidnappings in Colombia by Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel.

Barnaby Rudge                                        Charles Dickens

Half way through, Dickens is excellent travel fodder for journeys and making movies.   One of his few “historical” novels set in the Gordon riots, many fabulous characters as usual.  More later…

Model Behaviour                                      Jay McInerney

And seven stories.  I enjoyed the stories more.  I find his talent is so delicate and his scene setting so good, and his characters so exquisite that the stories come out best.  Especially one about Hollywood.  The novel itself is that 101 of American fiction the hard drinking, hard living New Yorker about to lose his girlfriend, and it still stinks, because we don’t give a damn about her.   I like his writing though.

Sir Vidia’s Shadow                                   Paul Theroux

A story of a friendship and a pupillage ended. Finally after 30 years of being in his shadow Theroux steps out and yells foul at the slightly objectionable human being that is Naipaul.   Interesting about writers, writing and new wives.  Theroux still leaving fiction for autobiographical tales and he does it painfully well here.

 

October – November

The Mystic Masseur                                  V. S. Naipaul

Of course the Theroux book made me want to read Naipaul.   I’m not sure that was his intent, but he really is very good.  This book about the Trini mystic who became MP and then finally Surrey man.  A very funny book about colonial life and aspirations.

Finding the Centre                                   V.S. Naipaul

An essay about his start at the BBC writing his first novel, and a reminiscence about his Trinidad family life.

Marvellous Possessions                             Stephen Greenblatt

Thoughts on Columbus and the New World and Language.   If only his narrative sense led him and not his academic talent.  Much of this is totally fascinating, and I bought it because we were friends at Cambridge.

The Hotel Eden                                        Ron Carlson

A wonderful collection of short stories.  Quite remarkable in fact.  Look out for more by him, as I rarely read short stories.

Wormholes                                               John Fowles

Essays and collected writings.  I think visiting Greece made me want to read this, and he is certainly good about his time teaching in Greece at a strange British school there.  Ultimately it is odd bits mixed with the towering ego of the writer.  I didn’t read them all. Because they didn’t really grip me.

England, England                                    John Barnes

A major disappointment for me after the achievement of his last book.  Sadly it became that dreadful thing – the comic novel.  The sad thing is that everything is predictable once it is set in motion: the nasty Maxwell character pays for sex in nappies in home counties bungalow brothels etc. etc. I had to give it up in despair.  I hope he’ll return to serious things.

Barnaby Rudge                                        Charles Dickens

Finished and very much enjoyed this.  Of course there is the usual sentimental pairing off of all the young people, and this book is not a sharp as many, but his moral outrage over humbug and hypocrisy is good, though you never quite understand the connection between Gordon and his riots. One or two good characters Chester the self-satisfied knight, the happy hangman who is hanged, Ned the saturnine Edmund in Lear character.

Peter Cook                                      A biography by Harry Thompson

A hilarious account of the life of the funniest man in the world.   With many wonderful quotes “Tragically I was an only twin.”  His funny voice echoes through the book.  Very well written and very enjoyable.

The Man who Loved Only Numbers           Paul Hoffman

Biography and studies in the mathematics of Paul Erdos, a wandering mathematical speed junkie obsessive.  Still reading.

The Barmaid’s Brain                                Jay Ingram

Strange tales from science, including the burning of the ships of Syracuse by Archimedes. I bought for an article on laughter which discovers a centre in the brain which causes laughter.  Still dipping.

The Road Home                                       Jim Harrison

I didn’t get very far before ditching this long tome.   He just never grabbed me.  Needs editing and focusing.  Has the feel of a writer doing it because he must, because he needs the advance.  Pity

Armadillo                                                 William Boyd

Now this I did enjoy.  A comic tale, but very seriously told, set in the real world, not the BBC sit-com world Barnes writes about.  About an armour collecting Insurance Loss Adjuster who is shafted by a deep scam in his paranoid world, his Romanian Bessarabian family background, and how he refuses to accept the role written for him.  Great page turner and very well written. I always enjoy Boyd and look forward eagerly to his books.

December

The Village                                              David Mamet

Great dramatists are not necessarily even good novelists.

Sap Rising                                               A. A. Gill

A very dirty but funny book.

Unweaving the Rainbow          Richard Dawkins

A plea for the poetry of science.  A reminder of just what little genetic basis there is for religion and superstition, in the cold hard world of DNA, and a brilliant series of essays, including the amazing timescale of our world and the supreme unlikelihood of our lives…  Very good.

A Man in Full                        Tom Wolfe

Full with a vengeance.   A very heavy book.  I feel he is more of an essayist who writes novels.  There is something utterly unconvincing in his yarns.  This one he hooks you on the story and sort of abandons it.  Just too damn long for his own good.  Set in Atlanta about a real estate shit he cannot totally hate, and a young wimp who discovers Epictetus and Zeus and, oh whatever…

The Luck of Ginger Coffey               Brian Moore

Found a first edition to read as a bit of a corrective for the lengthy Wolfe. Brian can write.  About the Irish immigrant in Montreal desperate for a job, who almost loses his life.

So that’s it, another year of lovely reading.

 

 

              1997

January

 

My Other Life                         Paul Theroux

There is no such thing as a novel anymore…What has already taken its place?   The work that is nearer to autobiography or memoir.”

This is the leitmotif of this wonderful book and this fictional memoir is probably closer to the truth of his life than any autobiography. It calls itself a Novel yet the novelist Paul Theroux is central to the tale, wandering through reminiscences of his life in the wake of a failed marriage.  (Nomadism in modern novelists – discuss!)   He is remarkably good on the female, especially the predatory female (Lady Max, Wanda Fagan, the rich wife of the American entrepreneur who wants poetry lessons, even the Queen.)  It is full of rich ripe writing, with instantly memorable scenes.   Funny, touching, haunting, he gets better and better.  I doubt I’ll enjoy a book more this year.

 

My Name Escapes Me                      Alec Guiness

The diary of a retiring actor and modest genius.   He writes well of his life.  I do hope he doesn’t destroy his diary as he threatens here to do – I suspect they are a good deal cattier and bitchier than this and he seems anxious to avoid offense, which makes him a good man.   Fifties men and Catholicism – discuss with particular reference to Guinness and Greene.  Perhaps it is the need for authority and categorical imperatives that makes their generation so in love with either Marxism or Papacy.   We live in shiftier times – and have the nomads Chatwin and Theroux.  You are nowhere nowadays unless you are going somewhere.

 

Making History                      Stephen Fry

Started brilliantly, then slips into the time travel thing – how to eliminate Hitler.  Hero pops up in an American body at Harvard.  Slightly weird playing with ideas.   I like his writing about everyday life.

Penguin 60’s

Year One                                             Marianne Faithful

The Portrait of Mr. W.H.                    Oscar Wilde

The Atheists Mass                              Honore de Balzac

The Trial of Oscar Wilde                   Richard Ellmann

Rumpole, Younger Generation           John Mortimer

Nero and the Burning Rome   Tacitus

Anatomy of Restlessness Bruce Chatwin

More exquisite collected pieces from the finest writer.

February

Faithfull – An Autobiography           Marianne Faithfull

Very well written rock reminiscences of the mad fun days of the sixties when she was for a time Mick’s consort.    When she becomes a junkie it becomes, like junkies, much less interesting.

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder                Lawrence Weschler

Rather fabulous description of a rather fabulous museum of the fabulous.

David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Santa Monica.

The Prince, The Showgirl and Me              Colin Clark.

Six months on the set with Marilyn and Olivier by another naughty son of Lord Clark.  Very indiscreet memoirs of the film acting world from a 3^rd AD’s point of view.   A rather tight-arsed Olivier and the completely maddening world of Marilyn. Very funny.

So Long, See you tomorrow              William Maxwell

Rather dry reminiscences (novelised) of childhood.  Starts with a murder but wimps out.  I didn’t finish.

Utz             Bruce Chatwin

Oh rare one.    A Czech collector of Meissen prefers to maintain his own cabinet of wonders rather than leave the East, and his revenge on the predatory state waiting for him to die.   (He smashes it all.)  Exquisite.

The Handmaid of Desire                  John L’Heureux

A very funny send up of post modernism and American English Departments by a practitioner.  Skewers political correctness and I actually preferred him to Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution.

 

The Gift of Fear                     Gavin de Becker

Excellent book by a friend on violence and trusting your instincts.

March

In the beauty of the Lilies                          John Updike

Began this wonderfully written story, set in Paterson New Jersey, after reading about it in Paul Theroux’s new book. Elegant history of a family and their varying fortunes.  I must say I had enough by pp255 though, still only about half way through.   I might return to it.

 

The Husbands                                 Christopher Logue

Part Three of his epic and wonderful translation of Homer’s Iliad.   It gets better and better.  I can’t wait for more.   Truly great.

The Wars of the Roses                      Desmond Seward

The History of the Yorks and the Lancs and the incessant gang warfare that devastated England and Scotland.  How young they all where, and how many of them died.  If you picked the wrong side you’d had it.   Much insight into the Fifteenth century and facts I was woefully ignorant of – for example King Edward IV was King twice – once deposed then returned.  Richard IIIrd, so young, and so violent.   Shakespeare was not so far out this history affirms.

Monster                                          John Gregory Dunne

The story of how a movie got made from the tortured writers.  Eight years of rewrites and drafts proves at least that movies are not a writer’s medium. But a re-writers.   Nothing much new if you’ve been there, but certainly from the heart and vindictive.

Cocaine Nights                                J.G.Ballard

Not a great writer, but a very good plot point kept me hooked.  Why did the narrators brother plead guilty to murder?    I have now forgotten why exactly but I needed to know and kept reading.   The thesis is that evil (or at least theft and crime) is essential to keep a community alive and vital!   Set on the Costa del Brit.

A White Merc with Fins                   James Hawes

Modern British writing.  Ex junkie exhale.  But I got into the story of the bank job, and liked the characters, despite initial reservations over the hip and trendy style.  I stuck with it and enjoyed it.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil   John Berendt

A wonderful book, set in Savannah and beautifully written.   Purportedly a true story, a writer settles in to the South for a look around.   The indolent pace quickens as one character becomes involved in the murder of another.   Many quirky and unforgettable characters, (a black drag queen called Chablis for instance)  including a very funny scene at the trial of the freeloading Joe Odom.   Rather wonderful and a classic.

Enigma                                           Robert Harris

Boys Own stuff set in wartime Bletchley amongst the cryotgraphers.   Nearest in spirit to John Buchan really.  A yarn rather than a novel.  Sort of movie idea really.  Ideal part for Ralph Fiennes.

 

 

 

 

April

Hollywood Handbook/Chateau Marmont    Andre Balazs (ed)

Stories and pictures from the history of everyone’s favorite LA Hotel.

A Season In hell                                       Arthur Rimbaud

Wonderful French bullshit.   Unintelligible in both English and French.

Pocahontas The Life and The Legend                  Frances Mossiker

An interesting romp through the life.   Full of too many “probably’s” to be good history.

Lives of the Monster Dogs                Kirsten Bakis

A birthday present.  Got a bit bored with tales of dogs in New York city.  Enough bitches all ready.

A Very Long Engagement                Sebastien Japrisot

Beautiful French novel of WW1, and a kind of who-dun-it tale of shot deserters, pushed out into No Man’s Land by the French army.

The Names of the Dead                    Stewart O’Nan

A wonderful post Vietnam war novel about a survivor stalked by a determined killer and victim.  The clash between the banal world of the bread company, the failure of his marriage, and the increasing boldness of his stalker leads to a fine tension, which does not quite finally succeed at the end.   But a great read.

My Antonia                                     Willa Cather

At last I read her, and see why so many people recommend her.   Her prose is quite simply wonderful, her tale simple and powerful.   About the settlers in America and their struggles to survive in the harsh winters of the mid west, after long treks from Bohemia.   No sentimentality but plenty of sentiment.

May – June

Snakes and Ladders                         Gita Mehta

A wonderful collection of essays and reflections on modern India after 50 years.  The most interesting book on India I have ever read.  Superb.

Kowloon Tong                        Paul Theroux.

Hey Paul, maybe you’re being a bit prolific.  Maybe two books a year is too much.   This is a Hong Kong pot-boiler, and as such a warning about the loss of Hong Kong for the Brits.   It is trying to be Greene, and doesn’t quite come off.  About a factory owner who is shaken down, and out, by the Chinese army.

 

Dinosaur in a Haystack           Stephen Jay Gould

Essays in Natural History by a most interesting man who alas cannot write.  If only his prose was as as advanced as his mind.   A Pity because I really am interested in his subjects.    I’ll keep dipping.

 

Fermat’s Last Theorem                    Simon Singh

The best book I have read for ages, and certainly the best book on Mathematics I have ever read.  He makes understanding the world of mathematics accessible to the non-mathematician.  I really loved the whole book, the shape, the intrigue, the history…fascinating.

 

Best of Young American Novelists              Granta

Short stories.    Readable.   Varied.

 

City of Nets                            Otto Friedrich

A portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s.  Fascinating.  Very well written history of this strange town, the German exiles, the Jewish leaders, the scandals, the vandals and the deaths of stars….    Very enjoyable.

 

The Last Party                                 Anthony Haden-Guest

Almost as boring as a night at Studio 54.  Purports to be a history of disco.  The inmates of a mental asylum might be more interesting than the usual dull suspects of Liza, Andy, Steve Rubell, whacked out of their tiny minds on Quaaludes, posing as emperors.    Just like cocaine, there is not a single memorable line…..

 

Golden Girl                            Alanna Nash

The story of Jessica Savage.   Having read the John Gregory Dunne book and watched the movie, I thought I would read her story.  Sadly, this is even more uninteresting.   From the author of Dolly, the biography of Dolly Parton.   Her prose says it all…

The Television Plays 1965- 1984        Tom Stoppard

Oh what a master he is.   A chance to re-read my favorite TV play “Professional Foul.”   Amazing how he manages to tie in a demonstration and a discussion of ethics with professional football.   He is the genius de nos jours.

 

The Hill of Devi                      E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster in drag.  Dressed up, working at the Court of a young Maharaja in 1921 as a Private Secretary.

 

Six Tales of the Jazz Age and other stories           F. Scott Fitzgerald

I only read one, about the Jellybean.  Might dip more, or might just re-read Gatsby.   He is a master.

 

July

The Frequency of Souls                   Mary Kay Zuravleff

Comedy.  Sort of forgotten.  Quite liked it at the time…er

The Alan Clark Diaries                    Alan Clark

Interesting enough, bitch, but after a bit you become overwhelmed by the impression that he is a self satisfied pompous oaf, snobbish and filled with a mistaken sense of his own importance.  Perhaps betrayal is his real talent.   Sexual, social and political.   How revealing are diaries…

Testaments Betrayed                        Milan Kundera

A wonderful thought provoking book.  Essays on creation and the artist, with special reference to Kafka, Stravinsky, Fuentes.  Full of witty and germane observations about creativity, criticism and the making of art.

Eat Me                                            Linda Jaivin

Rude female Australian porno best selling book.   The cover leaves nothing to the imagination.  Nor does the writing.  It is what it is.  Porn chic.

Terra Nostra                                            Carlos Fuentes

A very long mad insane trip of a book.   Spain, the Spanish, redemption at the time of Philip 1 and 11.  Recurring patterns and characters through time and space.  Odd to read.   Enough was enough at halfway.

August

Cod                                                Mark Kurlansky

The most unlikely but totally interesting book.   “A biography of the fish that changed the world.”  Elegantly written and fascinating.  I was hooked!

The Waste Land                              T.S.Eliot

A re-read of a classic.

The Annals of Imperial Rome           Tacitus

Marvellous, wonderful history of our favourite Romans.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s                      Truman Capote

A total gem of a book.   Refreshingly wonderfully delightfully crafted and written.  With two other short stories House of Flowers, Diamond Guitar.

Maigret and the Flemish Shop          Simenon

Typical Maigret.   Good holiday yarn.

A World Lit Only By Fire                          William Manchester

One of my favourite books of the year.    History of the close of the Medieval era and the Renaissance.   Clearly, concisely written for the general reader.  All the Popes and their nastiness.  Very good indeed.

 

August – December

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts Louis de Bernieres

Wonderful novel by a wonderful writer.  Set in South America with magnificent characters.

The Gentleman in the Parlour          W. Somerset Maugham

Record of a journey from Rangoon to Haiphong.  I prefer his stories.

Esprit de Corps                       Lawrence Durrell

Sketches from diplomatic life.  Re-read about Antrobus, the epitome of the Foreign Office.

Brideshead Revisted                Evelyn Waugh

Re-read the classic novel.  Holds up very well as one of his finest books.

Answered Prayers                   Truman Capote

Elegantly decadent.  There is something very sad about this book.

In the Dutch Mountains          Cees Nooteboom

Circus performers in a Dutch magical mystery tale.  Bit dull.

The Great Gatsby                    F.Scott Fitzgerald

Dipped into for a quick re-read.  What a writer.

Diplomatic Bag                      Edited by John Ure

Anthology of diplomatic incidents and anecdotes.

Sex and The City                    Candace Bushnell

New York mating rituals.  Been here before.

Manon Lescaut                      Abbe Prevost

Another tale of a young man ruined by a courtesan.  Very French.

Timequake                             Kurt Vonnegut

His final novel. I love Vonnegut.

Starship Titanic                      Terry Jones

Just dipped into this.  Terry has written the novel of Douglas Adams’ CD game!   I only briefly dipped in order to avoid any clash with mine.

Dinosaur in a Haystack           Stephen Jay Gould

Essays in Natural History, which prove once again that though he is an interesting talker he is not a natural writer.   It’s a pity his prose style is so tiring, for his subjects are usually interesting.

Questioning the Millennium    Stephen Jay Gould

A pot-boiler which suffers from the same defects I find in all his essays.  He is not a natural essayist.  More’s the pity.

The Old Religion                    David Mamet

A Jewish man trapped in a world of prejudice, is eventually hanged for the murder of a young girl.

Diana                                    Carlos Fuentes

The story of a Mexican writers affair with an actress, based on his own with the sad Jean Seberg.   About jealousy and the end of a love affair.

Olympia                                 Otto Friedrich

A beautiful book about Manet’s great classic painting, the model who sat for it, the appalled reception it received, and the group of Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Pissaro) and their Parisian world which was utterly changed by the foolish Franco-Prussian war with Bismarck, which caused the fall of Louis Napoleon and the awful suffering of the winter siege of Paris by the Prussians, and the artists who fought against them.

Graham Crackers                   Graham Chapman

A pot-boiler of pieces, which shows the paranoid side of the old pipe smoker.   Foreword by John, backward by me, and sideways by Terry Jones.  Rather too many dull sketches written by Graham with Jim Yoakum.

My Uncle Oswald                   Roald Dahl

Raunchy  tales of Uncle Oswald the boy entrepreneur with his aphrodisiac beetle, and Yasmin the sexy and seductive.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis               Giorgio Bassani

A rich Jewish family in Ferrara.  Love and growth and the terrible banality of the unpredictable nightmare world of evil that was approaching.

The Magician’s Wife                        Brian Moore

Oh dear.  He gave me a copy personally signed and I don’t like it!    It’s the first of Brian’s I haven’t cared for.   He doesn’t seem to warm to his theme, maybe it’s the historical period, Louis-Napoleon, he does seem to evoke the bleakly ambivalent modern world best.  I couldn’t finish it.  Too bad.

Another City Not My Own                Dominick Dunne

A novel in the form of a memoir.    (Isn’t this where the year started?)  He cleverly names all names but his own.  His narrator is fictional, and murdered by Andrew Cunanan.   Everything else works but this last.   His gossipy expose of the rich and trivial and their obsession (shared with the world) at the monstrous farce of the O.J. trial.

 

The Intrapsychic Experience of Fame                 Pamela Helen Connolly

And lurking behind that married name is one who knows, the really hilarious Pamela Stephenson.  In this thoughtful and original dissertation she begins to dissect the unenviable experiences of fame.   Very good, very useful to the damaged.  I am one of the hidden interviewees.   Should become a book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              1996

 

January

 

Juggling                       Barbara Trapido.

Oh she has gone off so much.  She was so good.  Oh dear.

 

The Lost World              Crichton

Typing not writing.  Bares the baleful effect of written for the cinema.  Plus the deathly (for novels) hand of Spielberg, put some cute kids in it!

 

Aspects of the Novel                E.M.Forster.

Excellent, wry amusing lectures on the novel and novel writing.

 

The Quiet American                Graham Greene

His elegantly written, beautifully constructed novel.  Revenge on America for a war that hadn’t started yet.  If only Generals read novels.

Ageing cynical correspondent arranges for death of naïve but deadly CIA operative who wants his Vietnamese girlfriend.

 

February March April

(Got rather behind in the list, so in no particular order I find I have read, dipped into or discarded the following..)

Cruising Paradise                   Sam Shepard

One of the best books of the year.  Wonderfully written.

Myra Breckinridge      Gore Vidal.

Suppose it is redundant to say that it is such a gay novel that I got a little bored with the re reading of it.

 

Swimming Underground           Mary Woronov

She very kindly sent me her book.   I liked it to start then as always the story of weird Andy and other people’s drugs got me less than interested.   She is great though.   I love her painting as well.

The Astonishing Hypothesis             Francis Crick

So astonishing I kept falling asleep.  It is not a late night book but I am intrigued by this scientific search for the soul and do intend to keep dipping.

 

Lectures on literature.             Vladimir Nabokov

I love this book.   This time I read the stuff on Ulysses, which seems a lot more interesting than Ulysses.   But this novelists guide to novels is the most instructive and informative literary criticism I ever read.  To have been there for the lectures!!

 

The Paris Review.  Number 136.  Whither Mirth

Of course as part of my research but pretty bloody interesting nevertheless….  It is really more about humor and humorous writing than comedy itself.

 

The Real Sleeper           Theodore Roosevelt Gardner 11

I wonder who the first one was.    One would have seemed quite enough.  Two is definitely excessive.   Impulse buy, and swiftly chucked.

 

Youth:  A Narrative       Joseph Conrad.

Oh yes.   The Penguin one.  Great re-read.  Though his books seem to remind me of the ancient Mariner.    I read several of these tiny pocket penguins including…

The Great Fire of London   Samuel Pepys.

Wonderful diaries.   What an extraordinary event to have witnessed.

 

The Empire of Rome AD 98 -180.   Edward Gibbon

God’s Utility Function    Richard Dawkins

The Alan Clark Diaries     Thatcher’s Fall.

 

Tartuffe.         Moliere

Yes, well it is wonderful.   Amazing how cleverly constructed.  We hear all about Tartuffe long before we see him, so that he doesn’t have to do that much to create the villainy.   Of course the great scene where he jumps on the wife – with the wife’s permission, with the husband under the table is wonderful.  The end with the Deus ex Machina as Louis XIV is still a bit of a fraud.

I’m Losing You             Bruce Wagner

He sent it to me.  Very graphic writing.   Everyone has aids, shrinks, death, vices, drugs, in Hollywood.  I found it a little difficult to differentiate between the characters (many of whom talk to us).   Which is not so good.   He can hammer it out though.

 

Light Fantastic              John Lahr

I find him really good on Showbiz.   Especially comedians.   Less interesting on the playwrights, usually because I haven’t seen the plays.   But he is an interesting chappie.

 

dancing lessons for the advanced in age               bohumil brabal

I have used lower case and no full stops because that is what he has done for no particular reason or effect I like the way he writes but this is a little artful very short and not as good as I served the King of England.

 

May

 

Reviving Ophelia                    Mary Pipher

Tania’s great find.  The sad story of adolescent girls and a grim warning for the future….

 

Cross Channel                         Julian Barnes

The book of the year so far!     Short stories all about and in France.   Fabulously written and constructed.   That wonderful sort of book you dread finishing.  Lingering, hauntingly beautiful and elegantly written.

I loved it.

Slowness                                Milan Kundera

Translated from the French is it cheap to say it sounds like a translation of a translation?    A chateau where a writer dreams of his characters who are engaged in a scientific congress one of whom then encounters a young man who has been double crossed at the time of Les Liasons.   It is indeed like a scenario for an opera.

The Last of the Savages                    Jay McInerney

A sweet book, if a closet dream.  The good friend writes the life of his wild 60’s dropout classmate (Memphis – music), and finally provides the sperm for his baby, while marrying and yet still being really gay.   That sounds bald.  It is in fact fairly good, touching writing. Though I always like him.

 

June

Some Clouds                                   Paco Ignacio Taibo 11

Kind of Mexican Chandler, only not as interesting.  Private dick, gumshoe pulp.  Junked.

 

Of Love and Other Demons              Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I think I’ve had quite enough of this sort of thing for a while.   Done better by him elsewhere.  I got bored.  Magical realism thing.  Sorry Gabby.

 

Making Movies                                Sidney Lumet

About making movies.  Almost as interesting as the real thing.  And about as long.  Directors seem so fascinated by themselves on such little evidence.   Of course I should have been warned: it came warmly wazzu recommended by Roger Ebert, the fat one of the twin critics.  Junked.

Murderers and Other Friends           John Mortimer

Very much enjoyed his continued reminiscences.  Although I am not a huge fan of his other writings (with the exception of Voyage Round My Father) I always find his anecdotal reminiscences interesting because of his honesty and the clarity of his writing.

Fever Pitch                                     Nick Hornby

Confessions of an Arsenal fan.  Poor demented supporter during the dull days at Highbury.   More interesting than the team.   And made into no less than two movies, though one about the Boston red sox filmed, fortunately for the Producers, during their first successful World Series.

 

July

Hit & Run                     Nancy Griffin & Kim Masters

The ampersands say it all.   It’s that kind of writing.   The unbelievable story of how Gubers and Peters made so much money off Sony.    Quite as dull as the real people.   I junked it early.

Make-Believe Town                David Mamet

At first I was engrossed, the terse elegance of his style, his interesting flair, his remembrances of a Lake Shore life.   About the time he began to describe sitting in a tree for days at a time with a painted face in order to slaughter deer I began to dislike him.   By the time he complained that putting up Christmas trees were anti-semitic he completely lost me.

Abba Abba                    Anthony Burgess

Not very interesting.

The Prague Orgy                    Philip Roth

Less interesting than the title.   Junked.

Coming Through Slaughter              Michael Ondaatje

I love the way he writes.   This is the story of Buddy Bolden, a New Orleans jazz trumpeter who went nuts while playing in New Orleans.   Beautifully written, almost like a scenario, he brings everything to life.

August

Worst Fears.    Fay Weldon

I think dear Fay is writing way too much because I can’t honestly remember a thing about this.    Oh yes, something about an actress and her dead husbands adultery.   Like an ITV play.

What Am I Doing Here?          Bruce Chatwin

Wonderful travel pieces.  He writes so well.   Some pieces written around the time I met him in Australia (83?).  What a great writer.

City of Angels                Larry Gelbart

The book of the Musical.  Some good bits, but all a little bit stock.  I enjoyed it, but felt it was a post modern musical, almost written in quotes.

The Law of White Spaces        Giorgio Pressburger

Translated from the Italian.  Medical short stories.  Well written.

Boy                              Roald Dahl

First part of his life, goes some way to explaining the dark mix of this Norwegian/Welsh writer.  Boarding school with its dark terrors is minimised.   Not so in Matilda where the truth emerges.

Hotel Paradise               Martha Grimes

Okay holiday read, except way too long, and I lost interest.  About the long ago drowning of a young twelve year old written by a contemporary twelve year old who’s parent owns a hotel.  In the Appalachians.    Not chosen by me but suggested.  Never a good experiment.

Eugenie Grandet           Honore de Balzac

A remarkable book.   About the miser Grandet and his daughter.  It ends like life and not like a normal novel.  Very modern, very real.

Portrait of a Marriage             Nigel Nicholson

Hilarious.  Unconsciously so.   Dear Vita and her lesbo love affair with Violet Trefusis and V. Woolf.   I laughed out loud, insensitive, uncaring sod.  I’m just too middle class to take all this Bloomsbury wanking seriously.

I love the way her poor husband writes though.   Her son takes it all a bit too seriously.   I think it would make a very funny show…

September

The Last Don                         Mario Puzo

In great form, the Mafia family feuds of course. Even unto the second generation.  Vegas, Hollywood.   Great moral yarn about the corrupt and corruption.

Putting On The Ritz                Joe Keenan

Hilarious.  Incredibly funny, beautifully comedically written yarn about two gay men and their tubby female friend, involved in a chaotic form of infighting between two rich feuding publishers – clearly the Donald (Trump) and an old faggy seventy year old (Forbes),   Some truly funny set pieces and inspired dialogue.

Something Like Fire      Peter Cook Remembered.  Various authors

“I would like to invent something useful.   Something like fire.”  E.L. Wisty.

Wonderful, hilarious and touching reminiscences of the great, kind, loveable man, from an assortment of friends, rivals and devotees.  Fry the best, also contributions from me, Mike, John, Bill Goldman etc etc.   A very fine memento mori edited by Lin his widow, who writes of his garden.

Blue Heaven                          Joe Keenan

The first novel, of which Ritz is the sequel.  Same characters.  This time the plot revolves around a gay man (Gilbert) marrying an unspeakable fibber in order to collect on the wedding presents from the family.   Unfortunately the family turns out to be a Family, and Mafia men abound.    Very funny.  Not quite as hilarious as Ritz, which it preceded.

Pere Goriot                   Balzac

An interesting novel of the rich old man Goriot and his unspeakable daughters who take him for everything to advance in to Parisian society.  Almost Dickensian satire, contrasting the low life of the boarding house and the lodgers with the glitter and artificial emotional life of Paris.   Not entirely pulled off, since Balzac is better at realism than Dickens and this is a satirical subject.  Balzac succeeds with the portrait of the young student and the sexual realities which Dickens would not have gone near.

The Far Corner             Harry Pearson

Another of those incessant books about football and the weirdos who give their lives and love to following sweaty men in striped shirts.   We’ve all been there alas.   This one is of course funny, but by its very nature repetitive, so by the time you get to the tenth match there is nothing particularly fresh or interesting to learn, so I packed it up.

The Last Thing He Wanted                        Joan Didion

A strange book.   At first I found it very irritating.  She obscures rather than reveals plot and character, preferring to reveal through hints and obscure glimpses rather than lead us straight through narrative.  This is deliberate, and apt, given the clandestine world of the subject,  Fathers, arms dealings, CIA, Caribbean uprisings, mistrust, set-ups, double dealings.   In the end I liked what she was doing. It is a 20^th Century stratagem plot,  not quite Le Carre, because you know what is coming, but still you feel the events and the people “through a glass darkly.”  This prevented me from warmly embracing the book, though I read it swiftly.

October

The Great Fire of London       Samuel Pepys.

The shortest Pepys.  Wonderfully dramatic excerpt from the nightmare two weeks when London burned.   It’s in the detail that makes him such a good writer.

A visitation of the Plague                  Daniel Defoe

Again the Penguin extract but read in conjunction with the above is a great slice of London history.     This was truly a nightmare time in the City.

Down the Yangtze                   Paul Theroux

Again just the short extract, but beautifully observed/

Less is More Please                 Barry Humphries

Fab writing in this short extract from a must read book.  His prose is so elegant, his memory precise and haunting.  Who would have thought this sensitive well off Australian boy lived inside Dame Edna?  (For whom more is always more!)

The Vipers Club            John H. Richardson

Schlock Hollywood novel by former Joel Silver aide.  Poorly written suspense novel revealing what goes on beneath etc. etc.    Junked.

Out of Sight         Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard is like Chinese food.  I can’t remember a single thing about this book I read two weeks ago!   I found that was true of Get Shorty too.   Its modern America, bland, violent and unmemorable.   Oh that’s it, its about the female agent who falls in love with the runaway prisoner.   Yeah right, lets get casting….

U and I                Nicholson Baker

A fascinating, elegantly written peon to John Updike.

Inventing Wonderland            Jackie Wullschlager

An excellent account of the golden age of children’s writing, from Lewis Carroll, via Lear, Kenneth Grahame to Milne.   How odd that I am strangely in sympathy with all this at this time (Ratty and Owly.)  Thoroughly excellently researched and well written book.

Longitude                              Dava Sobel

There has been a lot of fuss about this book, but it is no more really than a long monograph about the genius clock maker John Harrison and attempt to make a clock that would keep time at sea, for Longitudinal purposes.   Interesting but not quite the hype.

The Tailor of Panama             John Le Carre

I found this most disappointing.  It is a cliché now to say that his writing died with the Cold war, but as Brian Moore observed to me he is truly a genre writer and outside his genre he is horribly exposed.    This is a story about a minor character, a tailor who is no more than a caricature who should have remained in the background.   It is a total reworking of Our Man in Havana, and exposes Le Carre to the inevitable comparison.  Greene himself said Le Carre wasn’t a good novelist and how ironic he should prove it in trying to emulate his critic.

Mad Cows                              Kathy Lette

Not a funny or as brilliant as Foetal Attraction.   Suffers a little by comparison.   Many fine things but not the real thing.

The Designated Mourner                           Wallace Shawn (play)

Haven’t a clue what the fuck this is about except Wally’s ability to write endless monologue about the minutiae of life.

After Hannibal                       Barry Unsworth

I thought I should enjoy this “comic” novel about building homes in Tuscany more than I did.   Perhaps my own experiences in that field prevented me from seeing the fun in it all.   It had a certain ITV drama feel to it.   A little too pat, or too ex-pat.

 

December

Burning Chrome                    William Gibson

Hutton gave it to me and insisted I read it.   I never really enjoy his work.  Sorry.

Four small Penguin classics, 60’s.

Florence Nightingale     Lytton Strachey

He is a little harsh on her.   But a good re-read of his monograph.

Thirty Obituaries from Wisden

I loved this.   Fabulous.  What a joy to wallow in this celebration of the language of cricket.

Childhood, Anthony Burgess

Very fine writing about earliest childhood from the musical maestro.

Meeting Dr. Johnson              James Boswell

Oh happy Doctor, oh happy Scot.    Perfect reminiscences.

Lost Illusions                         Honore de Balzac

A Harlot High and Low                     Honore de Balzac

I didn’t finish these two.    Not quite as good to my mind, these scenes of Paris.   There are some wonderful attacks on journalism though, which make today’s press seem quite noble!   Recurring characters, part of the Comedie Humaine.

Napoleon and Josephine         Evangeline Bruce

My book of the year.   A wonderfully descriptive social history of France through the Revolution and the Empire.   Her only book and a fabulous one.   History has never been so alive, or the shit Napoleon so brilliantly skewered.  He is like a little mob chieftain from Sicily.

Airframe              Michael Crichton

Christmas present and the usual fast read.  He is so much reads like film scenarios which this will shortly be, that I think he has lost it in the millions of dollars.  Compare his exact contemporary Paul Theroux, for the man who stuck to his last and makes words dance on the page.  Crichton keeps you turning pages, but almost nothing remains.

 

 

 

 

 

 

              1995

January

 

Great Catherine.                     Carolly Erickson.

Not the most gripping but certainly interesting history of the German born woman who rose to take over the throne of the Czars.

 

Dutch Shea Jnr.            John Gregory Dunne.

Wholly uninspired writing.    Under-dunne.   I junked it.

 

Edward Lear              A biography by Peter Levi

Edward Lear is interesting.  Peter Levi is not.    This is the second book by him on one of my favourites I have been forced to abandon through boredom.  (Shakespeare bio being the other.)  He cannot write prose.   Perhaps his poetry is better.

The Captain and the Enemy        Graham Greene

I read for a few chapters before realising I had already read it, and by then I’d kind of lost interest.

Selected Letters           Madame de Sevigne

Dipping.    Fascinating world.  Oh them French.   No wonder they invented the bidet.

The World As I found it                  Bruce Duffy

Fascinating novel, recommended by the Brentwood brother Doug Dutton, about Bertrand Russell and the extraordinary Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein.   A daring and unusual book, not everyone’s cup of tea but fascinating about Cambridge in 1912, and right on period for my Miramax parody.

River Out of Eden     Richard Dawkins                      March 10th

Fascinating history of DNA and the clear statement of the modernist Darwinist position.  The greatest Utility Theory, which explains that DNA is there solely for the advancement of DNA and has no sympathy or sense of cruelty or sentimentality.  From the author of The Selfish Gene.

Our Game                John Le Carre

Seized on with delight as usual.  And tore through it until by the end I realised I had become less than interested in the missing character Larry whom Tim Cranmer is tracking down in the Caucuses.  His best friend and agent who double crosses him with his younger girl Emma isn’t sure for half the book whether he has murdered him or not, and spends the second half looking for him.    Frankly Larry is such a pompous shit only a guilt ridden ex-spymaster could care tuppence if he lives or dies.  A great pity really.

He seems to get going these days and then run out of steam.

The Secret Pilgrim                           John Le Carre

Thought I’d have a bit of a re-read, but they are unused episodes being used up cleverly.

Blood Meridian                      Cormac McCarthy

Or the Evening Redness in the West.

Wow.  I loved it.  Not sure I understood it.  But boy if Joyce has balls and could write about how the West was won this would be it.  Wakes Finnegan up.

 

The Thirty-Nine Steps                                               John Buchan

I just love the opening.  Didn’t get far, it’s a ripping yarn, and as he says a pot boiler, but he sets the pot boiling brilliantly.

 

Pulp Fiction                                                   Quentin Tarantino

Didn’t get far.  Decided to see the movie again instead.

 

A Swell Looking Babe   Jim Thompson

A swell old tale.  Fifties prose.  You can practically feel the sweltering past of LA.

 

Splitting.    Fay Weldon

Split personality while splitting from the ex.   More tales of revenge from the marital front line.  Multi personality.

 

The Ern Malley Affair           Michael Heyward

Oz poet hoax.   Jokes.   Didn’t get far.

 

Granta.  Fifty.    Short stories by William Boyd and Julian Barnes.

 

May

 

The House of Mirth               Edith Wharton

Recommended by Mike Nichols.   To me it’s Henry James in drag.   Lily Bart is like a Hardy heroine, headed straight for inevitable disaster when she holds all the cards.  I like triumph over adversity as a model of character.  I don’t like the sentimental – the strain of novel that runs through Richardson’s Clarissa.   I like Dicken’s characters, but perhaps not so much the sentimental.  I like toughness and character.

 

The Loves of Faustyna                      Nina FitzPatrick.

I was attracted while browsing over the very funny opening.

“In the autumn of 1967 a cloud in the shape of human buttocks appeared over Krakow.”

She keeps it up for a good long time, and is a very funny Irish writer, but in the end I junked it because it didn’t seem to matter what order the chapters came in.   i.e. I had enjoyed her characters but there was no story to hang on for.

 

A Tidewater Morning.                       William Styron

Dated short stories.   They have the feel of writing from another age, which I guess they are.

Harold and Maude

         The screenplay.   Still amazing for a first effort.   Just shows that you can do a lot better in movies without people to help you.

Pictures from an Institution              Randall Jackson

Rare novel by a poet.    Recommended by Mike Nichols.  I was not so riveted or fascinated.     Precious prose careful crafted didn’t quite swing for me.  I kept missing the measure, perhaps it’s an American rhythm.  Something slightly precious and E.F. Benson’s Georgy about it.    A bitchy tale of a harpy female novelist coldly using her tenure at an American University to create characters for her next.   The sad bitchy ordinariness of American College life.   Not so much a hot bed of intrigue as a cold bath.  About Mary MacCarthy writing a savage book about College Life.

 

The Loved One                       Evelyn Waugh.

Found in a second hand bookshop in Orlando, while promoting Casper.  Mainly sci-fi books with a raft of second hand things.    Still fairly amusing pot boiler but not the Great Waugh.

 

 

June

The Sun Also Rises                 Ernest Hemingway

Picked up an old copy in a second hand shop, hiding amongst bad furniture.    Do the books of our youth still haunt us.    Did I like Hemingway more this time around?   The deceptively short prose.  The emotional understatement.   But still disappointed me a little.   This is more a novelist played by Humphrey Bogart than a great novel.   They go from Paris to Spain.  They fish, they experience the Feria.   The girl having slept with the sad boxing Jewish friend absconds with the bullfighter from her drunken English husband.

 

The Information                           Martin Amis.

I don’t know which I’m more tired of, modern Amis or the modern UK he paints.  Both seem utterly lost.   There is something very nasty about him, even if he has written a novel pointing out there is something nasty and meretricious about himself and his success.   It’s all a bit Serge Gainsborough for me.  Too smelly, too post heroin world of self indulgence.    Gave up near the end and thought fuck it why bother.

 

Get Shorty         Elmore Leonard

Shortly to be a much more interesting movie.   Almost forgettable, sketch for flick.

 

 

From July 1995 (in the UK)

The Wind in the Willows         Kenneth Grahame

Much loved classic.   Research and delight.   The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is an interesting Sixties passage.  But it is the characters that keep the book alive.

The Orchard Keeper               Cormac McCarthy

Densely written.  A bit too densely plotted for me.   I loved the early stuff with the Bar over the hole in the ground.  Then he lost me.  Deliberately obfuscating the levels of narrative, but his words dance delightfully in the mind’s eye.

August

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success     Deepak Chopra

Dedicated to George, who thinks he is a bit too dedicated to success.

From Wimbledon to Waco                Nigel Williams

Nervous Englishman abroad.  The family man peers myopically at America.   Revealing nothing much more than a superficial glance. Journalism.

Mini Penguins

 

Raymond Chandler.                Goldfish

Don’t bogarde that plot my friend…

Damon Runyan                       The snatching of Bookie Bob & others

Brilliant.

Truman Capote                       From First to Last

Master of Mystery, artificial artifice; Cote Basque, realistic realism, lunch as a lethal weapon.

Oscar Wilde                            The little Prince.

A little dull.

Camille Paglia.

A fascinating essay and necessary corrective to the loopier elements of feminism.

William Boyd.                          Killing Lizards

Short stories from the good man in Africa.

Robert Louis Stevenson                      The Pavilion on the Links

Excellent dramatic suspense from the master of Ballentrae.

Fat Chance                    Simon Gray

Bileful champagne-swigging bitter revenge on Stephen Fry’s flight from his poorly reviewed West End Play.   Frankly I was rather proud of Stephen for his bravery in not letting the show go on – surely the dullest of clichés.   Why should the show go on if it is no good, or they hate you in it.   I eventually personally found Stephen hiding in Belgium via the Internet – and he was spirited away to JohnCleese’s beach house in Montecita, where I passed some interesting times with this delightful and sensitive man.   This book is Gray’s dig at his anatomy and it is quite interesting about Rik Mayall and also Simon Gray, about whom one learns a little too much.

The Black Album                                        Hanif Murashi.

Clash between Email and Female and the Prophet’s restrictions on enjoying yourself.   Funny but ultimately the loonie Muslims get one down.

The Destiny of Nathalie (and other stories)    William Boyd.

Short stories. Nice (that’s the town) based.  I really like his writing.

Oblivion                 Josephine Hart

Best to be consigned to oblivion.  I wish I’d remained oblivious.   Pretentious and dull.   Dumped it.

A Memoir (not the title)                    Anthony Sher

Clearly not that memorable.   Perhaps it was about his year of playing Richard III like a spider.

The Moors Last Sigh       Salman Rushdie.

Excellent epic of the Zogoiby family, the strange half Jewish Indian ex Moor’s adventures in the spice trade.  Magical realism, gripping and beautifully written.

The Statement               Brian Moore                          October 95

Almost as good as Graham Greene.   Mooreland inhabits the same grey areas of ordinary people facing great moral choice in their daily lives.    He is one of those very few writers whose new work one eagerly awaits.   Great yarn of the South of France and the pursuit of a French Vichyssoise Nazi hidden by the great from reprisals.   Spectacular opening.

Palimpsest                     Gore Vidal

Brilliant recollections in tranquillity with laugh out loud writing.

Morality Play                Barry Unsworth

Worthy tale of priest becomes player, and players invent a new form of reality drama in unravelling of medieval murder.    Not Booker winner though surely?

The New York Trilogy    Paul Auster

Specifically City of Glass.    Starting gangbusters then somehow went underground like the story.   Ran in to sand.   Disappointing because he can really write.    I didn’t dip in to the other two.  I’ll revisit.

The Biographer’s Moustache      Kingsley Amis

Really funny.    Full of shockingly funny lines.   Real characters, real situations.  I didn’t realise he was this good.   And he is forgiving of people’s foibles, unlike his more spiteful son, whose characters are just hateful.    Sadly missed.   Remember he was present at the Footlights Smoker where J. Lynn and I first got elected!   Young Don at Peterhouse.

Short stories                           Ernest Hemmingway               December

Quite exquisite.  He is at his finest in the short story.  I read them with mounting delight.   I like almost all, except the “Western” ones, which for some reason do not interest me.

Temples of Delight               Barbara Trapido                December

Having some trouble with this I put it aside, then picked it up as flu decimated all my reading material on the boat, only to discover on the jet home round about page 246 that I had read it before.    Durn.

Letters from London               Julian Barnes

Pleasantly written pieces reprinted from the New Yorker.   About the Royals, the fall of Thatcher, the rise of Blair, the Short World Chess Championship, and the fatwah on Rushdie etc.

Don Quixote                  Cervantes             December

Found a nice new modern translation and am taking it a bit at a time.  A little goes a long way.  In my case not very far.  It will remain unread.

The Misanthrope           Moliere                December

A mistaken attempt to read Tartuffe.  (It happens.)    Quite where the fun of this “comedy” is I can’t quite see.   I’d like to see it acted.  (I think it’s better than this. EI 2019)

The Doctor In Spite of Himself         Moliere

Not a bad farce.   As you can see I’m repairing a few holes in my French fences.

Paperweight                  Stephen Fry

Sick at sea, and hospitalised on a private yacht, the Talitha G, this was a luxury cruise in the Caribbean ruined by a horrible flu the host brought and spread amongst the crew and passengers.  I enjoyed these sly pieces from the spry Fry which cheered me up when the fever ran high.

Selected Writings           John Betjeman

Poems, writings, and the screenplay of Metroland, a remarkable combo of poetry and documentary.

Mrs ‘Arris goes to Paris          Paul Gallico                           December

Rather badly written sentimental yarn about an English charlady and a Dior dress, which would make a perfectly commercial sentimental film, which is why I picked it up and read it.   I believe my literary instincts are superior to my commercial ones, so I had trouble finishing it.

The First Man                        Albert Camus

Wonderfully written.  A poetic reflection, unfinished novel of a childhood in Algiers.    Delightful.  How good he was.  What a sad car accident.   This manuscript discovered in the vehicle.  Just published.

 

              1994

 

January/February/March.

 

Farewell to My Concubine.              Lilian Lee.

Suprisingly good.   Well written yarn set in Chinese opera.  Much better than the movie of course.

 

Gazza Agonistes.    Ian Hamilton.   Granta.

Legless in Gazza.       Not as good as the match.

 

The Client.   John Grisham.   Unreadable.

The MacDonalds of writing.

 

Disclosure.     Michael Crichton.

His latest.   Apparently even women can be bastards.

 

Binary. Michael Crichton.

 

A History of Warfare.    John Keegan.

Great for suggesting that regiments in the British Army are in fact tribes.

 

Talking It Over.   Julian Barnes.

One of those books you start to read  again, only to find you’ve read it already, and you still can’t finish it.

 

The Terminal Man.  Michael Crichton.

Page turning as ever.  Though like Chinese food; nothing sticks.

 

The Blue Afternoon.    William Boyd.

Story within a story.   I like his writing.

 

Et Cetera Et Cetera.    Lewis Thomas.

Essays on words and their origins, with musings on language and its origins.

 

The Fragile Species.               Lewis Thomas.

Picked up reading again from the fall.   The Essay on the origins of language is the finest, with his interesting hypothesis that language is invented by children.    I observe this to be true from Lily.

 

Playing God.    Charles L. Mee.

Seven fateful moments when great men met to change the world.   (Attila.  Henry V11, Cortes and Moctezuma are the best)

April.

To the Scaffold.  The Life of Marie Antoinette.   Carolly Erickson.

Touching and poignant reminder just how beastly the French can be in a fit of fervour.   Marie Theresa’s daughters fall from everything.

 

Julip.  Jim Harrison.

The same, but three great yarns, from the macho monster of Michigan.    Saw him at Dutton’s.

 

Delusions of Grandma.     Carrie Fisher.

Delusions of writing.   I can’t tell if I know Cora and don’t like her or if I just know Carrie and don’t like her character.    She moves the goal posts so far on the Brian relationship that you wonder if she’ll do anything to get an ending.

May

The Longest Journey.    E.M. Forster.

His irony and wit strikes even more me this time.

 

High Wind In Jamaica.    Richard Hughes.

I can’t believe I haven’t read this delightful and tough tale about children before.  Totally recommendable.   Better than Lord of the Flies.

June

Foetal Attraction.  Kathy Lette.                                              (France)

Hilarious, as funny and witty as the lady herself.     Makes Carrie Fisher look like an actress.

 

The Hippopotamus.   Stephen Fry.                          (France)

Reads surprisingly like Simon Gray. He is so clever, and brilliant.  Passages are hysterical, but the sum is slightly less interesting than the parts.

 

The Waterworks.   E. L. Doctorow.                           (France)

Certainly his most interesting book since Ragtime.    But then he strays into the pretentious, and his yarn reads less interestingly than the tale.

 

East of Wimbledon.  Nigel Williams.                      (France)

Knockdown funny.  A book to cheer the soul of Salman Rushdie.   Worth a thinwah if not a fatwah.   Though like all comic books it is paradoxically easy to give up on.       And I did.

 

Lunch.     Karen Moline.                                         (London)

Hustled into buying it at Hatchards by the authoress, I soon regretted it.    Dull porn.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.

July

The Oldest Dead White European Males.    Bernard Knox    . London

Greek culture by a Geek.

 

The Great Train Robbery   Michael Crichton.    His first novel, really trying way too hard.  Overwritten to a fault. The Victorian cockney underworld slang is so thoroughly researched no one can understand it.   He learned to cut out the writing and just leave the tale.

 

The Orange Tree Carlos Fuentes.                         July 20th L.A.

Cortes again.   Beautifully written interleaved stories from the New World,  set around the Orange tree.

 

Jefferson  Saul K.Padover.                             July. San Fran/L.A.

Edited bio of this fascinating founding father and third Prez who came up with the brilliant concept of The Pursuit of Happiness, as well as the Bill of Rights and the Louisiana purchase – almost the entire West of the Mississippi – from Napoleon.        An inspired visionary hero.

 

Unwelcome Words  Paul Bowles                    August.

Unwelcome and unpunctuated.   Very short.   The style is pleasant on the ones with punctuation.   I could read much more.

 

The Driver’s Seat  Muriel Spark.                     August

A strange little tale about a woman looking to be murdered in a foreign city.  She chooses her murderer.  Odd.

 

The Alienist. Caleb Carr.

The writing alienated me.   I couldn’t stay interested and chucked it.

 

A Way In the World   V.S.Naipaul.                           August 15th.

The most beautifully and elegantly written book.  Crystal clarity.  Deals with a series of unsuccesful revolutionaries and adventures who came to grief in Venezuela and Trinidad, from the final pathetic voyage of Raleigh,  searching his own mind for El Dorado, to Miranda, (a previously unheard of mate of Simon Bolivar) and a typical pleasant but bullshitting revolutionary of the sixties.  Reality against fantasies.   Oddly described as a novel.

 

Empress Josephine  Ernest John Knapton                  August L.A.

A very well written and highly readable, and uncensorious account of the life of the Creole who became an Empress.  She was almost executed in the Terror, her first husband was,  then she married the young Napoleon who was besotted by her, went off to become the conqueror of Italy and made her an Empress.   He divorced her to form an Austrian alliance and breed an heir, but never ceased to love, visit and write to her.

 

Playland  John Gregory Dunne.           August

Memorable for its controversial dedication to Leslie Abrahmson.

A yarn with second hand characters.  I’m sure the gangster was in several movies before, and the child star, well, strong sense of already seen.  Page turning, pleasant enough, totally unmemorable a week later.

 

The Sheltering Sky  Paul Bowles                  August L.A.

A remarkable and unique novel.   A sad, moving story of three American travelers in North Africa, conveying the great brooding heat of the Sahara and its inhabitants.   An extraordinary work, and clearly a classic.

 

Artistic Differences.  Charles Hauck          September Santa Barbara

Hilarious and salutary tale about the monsters that TV sitcom creates, apparently based on true tales of Suzane Somers.    Stinks of reality.

 

The Mystic Masseur  V.S.Naipaul.          September Santa Barbara

His first, and comic, novel.      Interesting tales of Trinidad.

 

Daisy Bates in the Desert   Julia Blackburn          September L.A.

Intriguing vividly imagined empathic tale of Daisy Bates and her fantasy world.

 

Bunny Bunny  A sort of Love Story.   Alan Zweibel.

The most touching, heart-breaking and hilarious true story I have read.    The lovely man that is Alan Zweibel remembering the lovely woman that was Gilda, and their odd, wonderful relationship.   The best.

 

The Informers  Bret Easton Ellis.                   September

He moves from the whacked out world of the valium assisted dysfunctional marital world, to the coked up, spaced out world of their dysfunctional children, into the savage (and unwelcome) world of child torturers.  He has a bleak compelling vision of modern life, which is impressive, but I hate the savagery that lurks beneath the skin of his characters, though I cannot ignore it.

 

Closing Time  Joseph Heller                           October

Ominously  described as a sequel to Catch 22 it has desperation in every page.   There are flashes and of course the same names but much more in common with the dull endless unshaped rambling of Something Happened.     I closed early.

 

Sphere   Michael Crichton                                          October

Formulaic.    The formula is good, but somewhat predictable in this yarn about discovering a time capsule from the future that has been buried in the ocean for three hundred years.  They enter the sphere and are changed.    Hokey but good hospital read… I still like him.

 

We Bombed In Burbank    Vance Muse                     October

Totally forgettable book about the making of a totally forgettable TV sitcom by Jay Tarses.  Artistic differences it ain’t.  Bad journalism. Chucked

 

The Fermata   Nicholson Baker.                                October

Like all good erotic writing it reaches the loins.    But it also has a neat idea about the fold – the time stopping ability which allows the narrator/hero to do disgusting things we’d all like to do given the power to halt the rest of the Universe at will.   Interesting.

 

Corelli’s Mandolin     Louis de Bernieres                       November

Beautiful novel set in Cephallonia during WW2 about the Italian occupation of Greece, Dr Iannis, his daughter Pelagia and her romance with the mandolin playing Captain Corelli.   Moving, and tragic and beautifully written.   One of the best this year.

 

Exile and The Kingdom   Albert Camus                      November

Paradoxically found the first two stories less interesting than Paul Bowles and may return to the last four later.

 

Throat Sprockets   Tim Lucas.                                                November

Vaguely dirty.  Obsession with the throatal area in the female.  I suppose a budding vampire.  Abandoned early from lack of interest.

 

All The Pretty Horses    Cormac McCarthy.                  November

Fabulous.     Mike Nichols recommended.   Absolutely wonderful book, elegantly and originally written about three Texan boys and their adventures in Mexico.     Just brilliant.

 

How to Travel with a Salmon   Umberto Eco             November

Remember to travel without Umberto.   Occasional pieces reprinted that would have been fine in yesterday’s newspaper.

 

Child of God  Cormac McCarthy.                                   November

Once you’ve read one you have to read the lot.   He writes so  wonderfully.    This one about the strange Lester Ballard and his violent and strange half life and murders.    The writing is so clear and clean and superb that it hurts.

 

Prisoners of Childhood     Alice Miller                                       November

Interesting, again for research.     Narcissism and the false self touched on.

 

Female Rage  Mary Valentis & Anne Devane                 December

Interesting and well written.   Again read for research.    Why are they so mad?     Medusa is the metaphor.   Certainly not easy to cut their heads off.     Must be nice to have men to blame for everything though.

 

Fear of Fifty    Erica Jong.                                                   December

Will she ever shut up?   Never has so much been written about so little.   She is the only argument in favour of clitorectomy,  it would have saved us hours.    I read only to glean something about the dilemma of the fifty year old woman.    No help alas.   Skimmed and dumped.

 

 

 

              1993

 

Barchester Towers.     Anthony Trollope                                        March

So memorable I have forgotten the title. (Irony marks needed)  Something to do with becoming Dean of somewhere.  I find him effete and I’m afraid dull.   Major’s favourite.   Figures.   I left the book in Mustique….

 

Martin Chuzzlewit.                                         Charles Dickens.                     April

The incomparable Pecksniff.  The overdone Gamp.  And the slightly unsatisfactory middle in America, which all gathers pace for the revenge on Pecksniff, which is delightful.

 

May Week Was In June.                                 Clive James                 April

Clive and I!   The ego has landed.   More tales of the man who took Cambridge by storm.    It was love at first sight.   Clive James fell in love with himself at first sight.  Curiously touching funny and pretentious at the same time.   Just like Clive.

 

Battles of The English Civil War.     Austin Woolrych.                   May

Historical treatment of three major battles.

 

A Season In Purgatory.                                   Dominick Dunne                                May

Tale of Irish political family who hush up a murder in the family so that he can become Senator.  Can’t imagine which family he’s getting at.

Met him at a party, and always like his stuff.  He gave a few nuggets about the Menendez boys and their lawyer Leslie Abrahamson, who apparently can’t get off their case, even though they can no longer afford her, in case they turn on her and reveal all the stuff she made them say, and get off that way!

 

Barry Lyndon.                                    Thackeray.                                          May

Great historical romance of the Irish scamp who from a scoundrel turns into a selfish and unpleasant man.   Falters a little at the end, but he knows his man.

 

The Third Man/ The Fallen Idol         Graham Greene                                   June

Incomparably concise stories for two great movies.

 

The Leopard.                                      Guiseppe di Lampedusa.        June

Beautiful tale of a Sicilian Prince at the time of the Risorgimento and the decline of Princes in Italy with the arrival of Garibaldi and the new Italian state.  Published posthumously.  A great classic.

 

Ariel,  A Shelley Romance                 Andre Maurois                                    June     “England in one of those crazy fits of virtue which alternate with periods of the most amazing licence, had just hounded Byron from her shores.   When he entered a ball-room every woman would leave it, as though he were the devil in person.  He determined to shake for ever from his shoes the dust of so hypocritical a land.”

 

Vanity Fair                              William Makepeace Thackeray                 June

The great and memorable Becky Sharp.   My but he knows his England.    To think VF is now a trashy rag sycophantically profiling boring farts in New York or Hollywood.

 

The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear.

And utter.   Delightful to know Mr Lear, even though he’s exceedingly queer.

 

 The Owl and the Pussycat.                                        June.

Still one of the best verses in the English language if not one of the best poems.      he’d have been jailed and hounded for child abuse in our PC times.

 

Mayday       Jonathan Lynn.                           July 19th 1993

Pre-publication copy of Jonathan’s novel, for review, which was supplied.    Very funny tales from Hollywood.

 

The Night Manager   by John Le Carré.                     August

Good yarn of anti-arms dealer heroics from the Spymaster, but the arms trade has not quite replaced the paranoiac world of the Cold War.   His characters seem tailor-written for certain English actors in the TV or film version.

 

Pocahontas   by Grace Steele Woodward.               August.

University of Oklahoma Press.     Interesting story of the first American heroine, which would make a great film but for Political correctness…  (Actually I got to Hollywood and found it was announced as a coming movie!   Doubtless it’ll star Daniel Day Lewis as John Smith and blame the Brits for everything.)

But for Pocahontas the original (and earlier than Mass. attempts at colonisation would have failed utterly.)   Her act is one of startling heroism.

 

The Fatal Shore     by Robert Hughes            August 17th

Picking up the tale of colonialisation a century and a half later.  Hughes is angry at everything…

 

The Bridges of Madison County   Robert James Waller    August 26th

Almost as affecting as the real thing.

 

Rising Sun    Michael Crichton                     August 28th

Blames the Japs for their underhand and unscrupulous behaviour.  Which unqualified abuse was removed from the dreadful film version.

I wonder which nationality’s Corporations own the studios?

 

Shear  Tim Parks.       October 3rd

The most beautifully written novel.  Utterly recommendable.

 

Visiting Mrs Nabokov.  Martin Amis.

Not worth the visit.

 

Congo.    Michael Crichton.    November 1993

Apes go ape.   Shortly to be a movie.  Gripping stuff.  His tales are the nearest thing to actually reading a movie.

 

The Stolen Years  Roger Touhy & Ray Brennan.    November 1993

Memoirs of a Capone enemy in bootlegging.  Given me by Uncle Carmine, whom I suspect was there!

 

The Andromeda Strain.    Michael Crichton.  Nov/Dec 1993

Sickness from space.

 

The Fragile Species.   Lewis Thomas.

How we’ll miss him.    The most delicate and interesting essayist of the natural world.

 

 

          Pre-1992

 

Pre-1992

The following is a random selection of books found in my library, when we were going to make the Novel game.   By no means comprehensive, the choice of book is random, and I’m not sure I read them all.

 

INDEX

 

 

GENERAL FICTION

 

Richard Adams – The Plague Dogs

Kingsley Amis – I Like It Here

Martin Amis – London Fields

Jeffrey Archer – Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less

George Axelrod – Where Am I Now When I Need Me?

Iain Banks – The Wasp Factory

Julian Barnes – Metroland

H.E. Bates – Oh! To Be In England

Brendan Behan – The Scarperer

Malcolm Bradbury – The History Man

Anita Brookner – Hotel Du Lac

Henri Charriere – Papillon

Len Deighton – An Expensive Place To Die

Marilyn Francis – The Women’s Room

Freddie Gershon – Sweetie Baby Cookie Honey

Gunter Grass – The Tin Drum

Joseph Heller – God Knows

William Horwood – Duncton Wood

Captain W.E. Johns – Biggles In The Orient

Ken Kersey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Laurie Lee – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Peter Menegas – The Doll Hospital

Jay Mcinerney – Story Of My Life

Colin Macinnes – Absolute Beginners

George Orwell – 1984

Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar

J.B. Priestly – Lost Empires

Luke Rhinehart – The Dice Man

Tom Robbins – Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Salmon Rushdie – The Satanic Verses

J.D. Salinger – The Catcher In The Rye

Tom Sharpe – Wilt

Muriel Spark – The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

Leslie Thomas – The Virgin Soldiers

John Updike – Roger’s Version

Keith Waterhouse – Bimbo

Tom Wolfe – The Bonfire Of The Vanities

 

 

SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY

 

Douglas Adams – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Isaac Asimov – Prelude To Foundation

Terry Brooks – Wizard At Large

Arthur C. Clarke – The City And The Stars

Robert A. Heinlein – Citizen Of The Galaxy

Frank Herbert – Dune

John Wyndham – The Day Of The Triffids

 

 

‘ROMANTIC’ FICTION

 

Charlotte Vale Allen – Time/Steps

Virginia Andrews – Flowers In The Attic

Beryl Bainbridge – Sweet William

Noel Barber – A Farewell To France

Tessa Barclay – Garland Of War

Constance Bartel – A Woman Like That

Sally Beauman – Destiny

Maeve Binchy – Echoes

Barbara Taylor Bradford – Voice Of The Heart

Jacquelin Briskin – Too Much Too Soon

Barbara Cartland – Paradise In Penang

Jackie Collins – Hollywood Wives

Shirley Conran – Lace 2

Jilly Cooper – Harriet

Monica Dickens – Dear Doctor Lily

Robyn Donald – A Summer Storm

Torey Hayden – The Sunflower Forest

Judith Krantz – Mistral’s Daughter

Doris Lessing – Martha Quest

Erich Segal – Oliver’s Story

Danielle Steel – A Perfect Stranger

Josephine Tey – The Expensive Halo

Fay Weldon – The Hearts And Lives Of Men

 

 

HORROR

 

John Christopher – The Little People

Robin Cook – Mutation

Patrick Harpur – The Rapture

James Herbert – The Fog

Stephen King – The Tommyknockers

 

ACTION/MURDER/MYSTERY/SUSPENSE

 

Desmond Bagley – Running Blind

Agatha Christie – 4.50 From Paddington

Dick Francis – Reflex

Andrew M. Greeley – Virgin And Martyr

Graham Green – The Honorary Consul

Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon

John Le Carre – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

John Mortimer – Paradise Postponed

Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea

Ruth Rendell – An Unkindness Of Ravens

Sidney Sheldon – If Tomorrow Comes

Neville Shute – No Highway

Mary Stewart – My Brother Michael

Craig Thomas – The Last Raven

 

 

HISTORICAL FICTION

 

Chaim Bermant – The Patriarch

Marcelle Bernstein – Salka

Madeleine Brent – Golden Urchin

Margaret Campbell Barnes – With All My Heart

Catherine Cookson – The Mallen Streak

Alexander Cordell – Requiem For A Patriot

Barbara Erskine – Lady Of Hay

Georgette Heyer – The Reluctant Widow

Victoria Holt – The House Of A Thousand Lanterns

Lena Kennedy – The Dandelion Seed

Beryl Kingston – Tuppenny Times

Nora Lofts – To See A Fine Lady

Claire Rayner – Gower Street

Anya Seton – Avalon

E.V. Thompson – Becky

T.H. White – The Once And Future King