Reading 2024
2024
Ok I’m still playing catch up. Many of these I read some months ago. I’m unsure in which order but I start off as usual with a re-reading of:
Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald
Which I enjoyed more than ever and indeed am now convinced that this is his greatest novel.
I loved the opening prose so much that I picked it up a few weeks later and found myself once again happily on the plage in Juan Les Pins, intrigued by the story of Rosemary and her mother meeting the Americans of all sorts on the tiny beach. I could read it again today.
Black Water Joyce Carol Oates
I met this incredible lady at Steve’s New Year’s Eve Party and I had to rush out immediately and buy something. I knew her name but not her work, so I grabbed this, and really enjoyed it. A fascinating novel based on Chappaquiddick.
The Snow was Dirty Georges Simenon
A Man’s Head Georges Simenon
Maigret’s First Case Georges Simenon
Félicie Georges Simenon
A Maigret Christmas and other stories Georges Simenon
I love everything Simenon, Si mais non? Mais oui.
Same Time Tomorrow Bob Cryer.
A funny and revealing and sweet remembrance of my old pal and mentor, his father the wonderful, legendary and sadly missed Barry Cryer. Tears and laughter.
Territorial Rights Muriel Spark
She is one of my favourite novelists. I just love her books. She never disappoints.
The Prague Orgy Philip Roth
He still re-reads well.
Byron, A Life in Ten Letters Andrew Stauffer
A lovely idea and a clever way of dealing with the life of the much biographied perhaps over rated poet. He definitely poured his art into his life. This is a fascinating and succinct romp through the limping upper class shagnasty, who poured his sperm into many of the most fascinating women of the early 19th century.
I used to be charming. Eve Babitz
The rest of Eve Babitz.
Read in paper and Kindle. Essential reading. I adore her.
City of Dreams Don Winslow
His penultimate novel, continuing the tale of Danny Ryan who fled Providence providentially to discover gold in Las Vegas.
City in Ruins Don Winslow
His final novel, which he very kindly sent me an advanced readers edition of, so I could start to miss him sooner. Luckily he is going to pop up on television and movies rather a lot and he leaves us a huge body of work, which, at my age I can often re-read without knowing what is going to happen. That is obviously why I began to keep a Reading Diary. This, the third part of the crime trilogy loosely based on The Aeneid, which itself I must read one day …
Sex and Rage Eve Babitz
A novel. I prefer her more direct books. This is about her writing a novel, and is of course about her attempts to write a novel. She was always a writer. And is a delightful read.
Dickens and Prince Nick Hornby
A fascinating coupling. Coming next Proust and Elvis.
Vertigo W.G. Sebald
I loved the opening chapter and always have, but a rereading of the rest of the book I found disappointing.
Agostino Alberto Moravia
A wonderfully written, and absolutely touching novel. I doubt I will read anything as great as this again this year. He is a magnificent novelist. An excellent translation too.
Answered Prayers Truman Capote
This gets better over time. Thanks to him who would ever have heard of these women?
He tried for Proust but he revealed something about the wealthy and entitled without changing their names and sexes like Proust did and so he was bashed around by the rich and powerful, as they do. Writers are always observing. What else should they write about?
Somewhere along the way I fell in love with the short story. Maybe because with the decline in memory it is easier to remember what just happened in a short story! In particular the two great American masters of the modern short story Carver and Cheever. Amongst the collections I read and enjoyed were:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Raymond Carver
Exquisitely, and very briefly written stories. Very short some of them. Lightly sketched the caricatures seem to breathe effortlessly.
The stories of John Cheever John Cheever
A wonderful collection of this admirable writer. I had read them before, Mike Nichols gave them to me, but the great advantage of the memory loss of old age is you can read books again without remembering. Obviously all great books get better on re-reading. This is one of them.
Gutshot Straight Lou Berney
Don Winslow recommended it and I bought it and I’m happy to say that even when I realised I had already read it, I carried on a read it with even more enjoyment. As we have learned, that is the mark of a good book.
Springtime
Feel Free Zadie Smith
I very much enjoy her essays. Some are a little esoteric for me. If I don’t like the writers I skip. But she is so clear headed and damn sensible I read 90 per cent of them with great enjoyment.
Knife Salman Rushdie
An account of the monstrous and fearful attack on him, which he barely, but mercifully survived. As I wrote to him, “the last thing I expected from your book was that it would be a love story,” and yet indeed it is. A hymn to his love for Eliza, who raced to him and whose love and patience encouraged him to continue life to all our great relief. Sometimes a man can be married many times but only find his true love at the end. So it was with Mike Nichols, so it seems with Salman. A great, and deceptively simple read.
A Hitch in Time Christopher Hitchens
Sometimes when Salman came to LA to do Bill Maher, he would bring Hitch over and we would have great conversation and fun. I was very excited to learn that often at the end of a contentious interview Hitch would burst into my Philosophers Song – to which he knew all the words. These collected articles on a variety of subjects are greatly entertaining and never less than fascinating. A great and funny man, a wit, a philosopher, a great drinker and a great companion. Subjects range from Princess Margaret to P.G. Wodehouse. You can’t get more eclectic than that.
Blood Rites Barbara Ehrenreich
Origins and History of the Passions of war.
I devoured this book when I first found it, but left it somewhere in France, so I was happy to stumble on this paperback in Vromans and raced through it. A fascinating and deeply interesting discussion of the origins of war in homo sapiens with many intriguing new thoughts and suggestions. I have always thought war was something we evolved once we had dispatched of predators, for we self-predate in order to keep evolving. Though she does indeed go into the beginnings of when we were prey, this simplistic idea is far more interestingly explored here. I want to read a lot more both from her and on this subject. War is the curse of our planet. Can it be cured? Let us hope so. It seems unlikely. As long as they build armies, they will use them.
The Pole J. M. Coetzee
A poem of a book. A sweet an delicate romance between a middle aged Spanish man and a courtly Chopin loving Polish pianist. Delicately sketched but deeply felt. I loved it and read it through again immediately.
Goodbye Columbus Philip Roth
It is a short novella and I remember reading it with enjoyment. This time reading it I was struck with what an amazing and precocious talent the young Roth possessed. This Modern Library edition comes with five other short stories.
The Ghost Writer Philip Roth
I have been re reading Roth with great enjoyment but this one I remembered not liking much the first time and my mind was not changed. I think when he goes into the weird story of Ann Frank being still alive I remained puzzled and unconvinced. I know some people love this, but it ain’t for me.
France An Adventure History Graham Robb
I fell on this book with delight and relief at the soi-disant Best Bookshop in Palm Springs when I had run out of reading matter on a short birthday break in Desert Hot Springs. I loved it, but only got half way through as I was more interested in his wonderful scenes from history, than his own personal memoirs of a cycling tour of France, even if it was up Mont Ventoux. Fortunately a couple of months later I picked it up again and I couldn’t put it down. He is the most amazing writer of French history I know. It kept me spell bound till the end. Of particular interest to me is Louis Napoleon where history becomes almost buffoon like. A totally great read.
The Beginning of Spring Penelope Fitzgerald.
A Moscow novel set in 1913. I notice I had read this before in 2019, when I wrote briefly “Interesting but not perfect.” I think I stopped around the same time this time. Not for me. Though I love many of her books.
Uncle Vanya Anton Chekhov
I gave it a read because it has been so successfully revived at Lincoln Centre, but I think I would have preferred to see it. This to me was always the one play of Chekhov’s that never grabbed me. It didn’t grab me this time and I think there is something I am missing.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Raymond Carver
I have recently become much more fond of Short Stories, largely because of this brilliant writer and in particular because of this almost flawless collection. He is extraordinary. Totally brilliant.
Dark Ride Lou Berney
A man sees two kids who have been tortured by cigarettes. He sets out to discover them and their mother to see if he can get anyone to help him rescue them…. A charming thriller. So I wrote a year ago but I went out and bought it again and was once more completely engrossed.
Black Swans Eve Babitz
I picked this up and re-read them with even more enjoyment. The first time I had scrolled in pencil in the back of her book “She’s half a journalist and half a novelist. So occasionally the fiction gets too factoid and the facts get too factionary – with the occasional brilliant balance.” On re-reading I think this is far too simplistic because as I also observed “she is interested in the truth” and it is this search to capture life in words that makes her such a captivating and deeply honest writer. So I was happy re-reading.
Burn Book. A tech love story Kara Swisher
I loved this. She was so in on tech and the people who would matter so early, that her story is fascinating to read. When I recommended it online there were a few instant haters, but I think that’s because she is fearless and takes no prisoners. Very much worth a read for all she has to say about men who have now become monsters.
Summer Reading
Everywhere an Oik Oik. David Mamet
I loved this book and I would have said so even if I hadn’t found later on in the book he says how I made him laugh his ass off. I remember the occasion very well, Mike Nichols 75th Birthday Party and I was determined to be funny and I went for it, shamelessly and successfully. It’s rude its disgusting, and that’s just me. I looked up to see David Mamet choking for breath! I was proud of Mamet for not holding back at all in this book, and slightly ashamed I hadn’t realised just how many movies he has directed. Proud to be included.
The Beautiful and the Damned F. Scott Fitzgerald.
For travel I took a tiny Collector’s Library edition of this book which I hadn’t read in a long time. The satisfying clarity of the print and the fact it has a built in book mark ribbon makes it a good choice for a travelling companion. Swiss Air ensures my ride is efficient, on time and I am well fed and pampered. The book is really a tragedy. The love story of Anthony for Gloria, a wonderful romantic tale, declines into the demise of the bright young things in a heady mixture of balls, idleness and alcohol. Having no purpose but pleasure ruins the pleasure of pleasure. Managing to insult his rich and future benefactor his great expectations are snatched away, and he grasps at the straw of a long lawsuit. Even his stint of self-punishment in the army leads to no overseas glory in WW1, as the armistice comes to soon for his glorious suicide and leads to further feminine distraction. It is a harsh self-portrait of himself and Zelda and Tender is the Night will be a more accurate account of the inner secrets of both. It ends both tragically with him as a bum being ejected for New York places where he once was heralded, and ironically, with him finally winning the lawsuit, and being wealthy confined to a wheelchair on the deck of a liner to Europe, sadly imagining that he has won.
Nero Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth
Matricide and Murder in Imperial Rome
As a change I picked up this large but interesting new book on Nero. We all know a little and indeed he does become history’s monster but before he does so there are many fascinating tales of him growing up an heir in the dangerous world of Augustus. His mother Agrippina pushes him towards the Imperial throne in her own quest for power. He will coldly remove her, after having poisoned his brother Germanicus at a banquet, removing any potential challenge to his power. This is a highly readable history of Rome under the Caesars including quite a lot about the dangerous barbarians who live in the British Isles. (Clearly not much has changed.). Enjoyable popular history which gives a fresh look at one of history’s greatest tyrants with many corrections of historical cliches. Hint: he didn’t fiddle while Rome burned.
Where Angels Fear to Tread E.M. Forster
As a palate cleanser I turned to this beautiful short novella which highlights the delightful comedic talents of Morgan Forster. The Herriton family are worthy precursors of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia. Mrs. Herriton is a monster and has brought up a priggish daughter whose smug British confidence will lead to tragedy. Lilia, an unhappy widow escapes from the rigid captivity of her controlling mother-in-law in the social sterility of the society of Sawson for freedom in Italy. She finds escape in an unfortunate love affair with a young Italian, her friend Miss Abbot is unable to help her and Philip, Mrs. Herriton’s son, sent to prevent the match, fails to save her. A delightful read.
Life as a novel Martin Amis.
A sad and lovely book. Amis, aware he is pegging out invites you into his own demise. Come in, sit down, have a drink. He calls it a novel. Of course. It contains perhaps one of the most dislikeable and manipulative female characters in literature. Poor Amis, both fascinated and disgusted with her, is easy meat. Enter the dreadful Phoebe, who recurs throughout the book like a bad habit. With a masters or mistress degree in prick teasing which keeps the poor chap on the hooks long after he should have run for the hills. (Perhaps rivaled only by Larkin’s appalling Monica.). But who Catriona now assures me is a fictional character, so I am completely confused!
I had read some of this before, for instance The death of Hitchens. Like an 18th century painting.
Still as sad and as poignant, but his own demise shortly following had me completely and horribly shocked. I always thought he would be here with a new book to cheer me up. Slightly too much Bellow for my taste. This “fictional” highly readable autobiography. is an odd but lovely farewell.
The Island Adrian McKinty
I find it odd that the only two books of this brilliant author I have had to abandon were his two best sellers. This and The Chain. I think it is because I am personally averse to horror, in books and the cinema. I found both manipulative, whereas the Northern Irish novels, where horror is a daily fact, seem to me realistically and beautifully written. I agree it’s my fault. I apologize. As a counterpoint to this let me mention three of his novels which I read recently and loved:
The Dead Yard Adrian McKinty
City Street Girl Adrian McKinty
Falling Glass Adrian McKinty
And any of his exquisite Northern Ireland detective novels you can lay your hands on. He is very very good.
The Wager David Grann
In contrast to which I found The Wager, long, boring and dull, and was happy to jump overboard early.
The Kind worth Killing Peter Swanson
Seizing on a palate cleanser I found after a few pages I remembered reading this recently. It’s good, a little strangers on a train, and a little Gone Girl it is wonderfully crafted and it will keep you guessing.
Unless you had already read it. Which is I guess the problem with Who Dunnits. If you can remember who there’s no point in re-reading.
Cocktails with George and Marsha Philip Gefter
I did very much enjoy this book about the making of the movie of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, not just because of my love for Mike Nichols, here revealed as a very powerful young first time director, able to stand up to Jack Warner, to insist that the movie be made in black and white and not colour, and to gently remove Ernest Lehman’s “improvements” from his film script adaptation of Edward Albee’s brilliant stage play, in favour of Albee’s own words. To be able to direct Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, at the height of their tabloid fame, is in itself remarkable. To pull it off and fight off the censors, and cleverly manipulate the widow Kennedy into saying at a screening “Jack would have loved it” cutting the feet from beneath the studio censors and the powerful nay sayors, is remarkable.
A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth Henry Gee
4.6 billion years in 12 Pithy Chapters.
My favourite book of the year and maybe the decade. Henry Gee is both brilliantly funny and brilliantly informative. So many times I found myself saying out loud “Oh my gawd” as some fact or information came at me. We are not the end of evolution. We are not even the summit of it. We are mistaken about our place in the incredible and very long evolution and continuous breaking of new life forms on earth. I shall read this book again and again. You might find the early chapters a little dense because there are so many monocellular Latin forms of life. Don’t be afraid to skip, move forward, the story gets better and better with incredible chapters on animal life and the evolution of mammals. Learn your place in the Universe, which is both incredible and unlikely and puny.
Kindle Reads
Cocktails with George and Martha Philip Gefter
Being just about to publish a book about Mike Nichols I naturally seized on this. The balls of the man. His first movie and he is telling Harry Warner it has to be in black and white. He was so funny and so talented, he had told me a few tales but amazing to see him pulling a hit movie out of this unlikely Broadway hit play – mainly by cutting all the Hollywood apapted bits and letting the play speak. Imagine your first cast are Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the prime of their fame but also their talent. A fine tale well told.
(Sidebar: I fell in love with Edward Albee early, directing The Zoo Story with John Shrapnel and Johnny Lynn at Cambridge. I was at the same time an enormous fan of Mike Nichols and Elaine May and had their album.)
Eve’s Hollywood Eve Babitz
I am totally in love with Eve Babitz. I think she is the most wonderful and fascinating writer. I recommend trying all her writing. Some of her essays are to die for. They can vary widely between autobiography, sexual reminiscences and barely disguised fiction. But she is never boring and she tells the truth, shamelessly, breathlessly and wonderfully. Many males can learn a lot from her tales. Enjoy.
Ask Not. Maureen Callahan
The Kennedy’s and the Women they destroyed.
A timely and essential reminder of just how appallingly the Kennedy boys sexual ethics were covered over and dismissed. We must never let people behave like Kings. Apart from their appalling Father, Joe, their avoiding mother Rose seems to have helped enormously into creating the entitled bastards so many of them became. No women should have to put up with this. I found her insights insightful. JFK sex was all about power and not enjoyment. Jackie seems to have finally survived to become a normal person, but they wounded and used and injured and killed so many women, the horrible mound of Ted and his public display of cowardice, all in the name of achieving the Oval office, is a warning, that the pursuit of power attracts the most appalling people. America was set up to avoid this officially, but it hasn’t and it is constantly at threat.
The Michael Forsyth Trilogy. Adrian McKinty
Fifty Grand,
The Dead Yard,
Dead I May Well be.
Perfect holiday reading. Check the order. I love the way he writes. Just a delight. I love his Belfast books. I had a terrific time with these. I think he writes wonderfully. Such a relief to find many books of his I haven’t yet read.
The Accidental Species. Henry Gee
Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. Another fascinating book about our species and the contrast between how we perceive of ourselves and the reality of the fortune of our survival on this planet.
Bambi vs Godzilla David Mamet
On the nature, purpose and practice of the Movie Business
I love the disrespect with which he treats his subject! Always funny and always on point.
The Neil Carey mysteries Don Winslow
I had to slow down to save a couple for my travels I was reading them with so much enjoyment.
I can’t wait to continue the final two.
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
Way Down on the High Lonely
Summer Reading in Books (continued)
Caste Isabel Wilkerson.
The Origins of Our Discontents. She spots that Caste is a very basic and vile form of human social organisation most obviously with Slavery which goes back millennia, and of course builds Empires, and vast fortunes such as paid for and built huge houses during the British Empire, and that the most pernicious and easiest to continue form of slavery to continue is when it involves skin color. The slavery in the Southern states affects US Society today, in a most invidious form for a supposed land of the free. The tales in the book are horrendous, shocking and heart breaking. Hard to read. But important. I was struck how much Caste itself is present in most societies outside of the US. For instance the English caste system which is kept in place by the Monarchy.
Butterfield 8 John O’Hara
A re-reading. Stands up pretty well. Not a classic but a good yarn from that time.
Cathedral Stories Raymond Carver
Sad and wistful stories. Nobody writes better about the US working classes. The lack of money, the sadness, the marriages. I suppose because traditionally in the novel – because they are writing for readers in those strata – people write more about the middle and aspiring or upper classes. Very few D. H. Lawrence although a spate of working class books and plays in the UK in the Sixties.
A Clue to the Exit Edward St. Aubyn
A re reading. A dying man intends to rid himself of his money gambling in the Monte Carlo Casino. Not entirely successfully. He is certainly the finest writer of prose novels currently in the UK.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish James Hadley Chase
So I had no idea until just now that the author of this classic American crime noir novel first published in 1939 was born in England in 1906 as René Brabazon Raymond, began his career as a bookseller wrote this his first novel over six weekends with the aid of a dictionary of American slang and had never even been to America. A very fine and totally convincing work of fiction. It is a dark masterpiece.
Arctic Summer E. M. Forster
Abandoned and unpublished by Forster shortly before he began work on A Passage to India this subversive attack on the code of the gentleman would actually make a fine film and is very nicely written.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Diaz
A superbly written brilliant book, which thoroughly deserves the Pulitzer Prize he won, it is the most wonderful novel set in the Dominican Republic, often during the time of the appalling dictator Trujillo largely about a Tolkien nerd, but actually about so much more. I read it with so much joy I never wanted it to end.
Cadillac Jack Larry McMurtry
I am very fond of his books, but I never quite finished this one. Curate’s egg. Good in parts.
Caesar’s Vast Ghost Lawrence Durrell
Aspects of Provence.
I think Durell writes the best books on Provence even if I hadn’t visited his brother Gerry in the Maz he wrote this book in. He frequently combines history with geography. Here he adds biography and poetry. Once again we get the amazing story of how Marius saves Rome, which I could read every day.
Fall Reading (Books)
Goodbye Darkness William Manchester
A magnificent beautifully written history of the nightmare that was the Pacific War in WW2. We concentrate so much on the invasion of Europe and D Day that we sometimes forget the extraordinary and magnificent struggle the Marines waged against the Japanese, after Pearl Harbor and the tremendous loss and suffering on both sides. William Manchester was there, he fought to take back every island and atoll en route to Japan, each at tremendous cost. This is him revisiting this bloody journey and his memories of the bitter fight he and his companions waged before they were spared the ultimate horror of invading Japan by the atom bomb. It is history from the battlefield itself and the most remarkable book I have read for a very long time. I think it just might be the best war history ever written. We owe them all so much.
A World Lit Only by Fire William Manchester
Of course I then had to go back and read one of my all-time favourite history books also written by him, which is subtitled The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portrait of an Age. If you ever needed to remember just how evil mankind can be, this is the book. The six Popes alone are enough to put you off religion forever. There is much about Martin Luther and the Reformation, where you soon discover that one kind of nastiness is just replaced by another. It is the most agreeable reading of history and ends with a virtual encomium to Magellan, whose genius I had not quite appreciated, and whose religious folly led him to trust in God and not in man, which meant he never made it home, although a few of his crew did stagger back to Spain, completing the circumnavigation of the globe. The first to do it. Sheer, wonderful, magnificent, narrative history.
Chess. Stefan Zweig
A short but highly readable and finely written novella about a Chess Master and a strange confrontation about an Ocean liner. Delightful.
Revenge of the Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell
An interesting sequel to Malcolm Gladwell’s first book and filled with interesting facts about superspreaders of COVID and the overstory which he defines, but which ended for me with the most powerful explanation of the vile achievements of the Sackler Family to make a fortune by starting an Opioid crisis which continues to ravage America to this day. Almost impossible to believe, and virtual impossible to stop, since it has spread to the black market and Fentanyl which continues to kill more and more Americans daily.
Paris in Ruins Sebastian Smee
Another history, this time through the eyes and brushes of the contemporary French artists Manet, Monet, Degas and the amazing Berthe Morisot which shows the horrors that Paris undergoes after the idiot Emperor Napoleon 111rd led France into a disastrous war with Prussia. It led to the siege of Paris with many of these artists remaining in Paris, where rats became a vital food, and then to the Commune, after France had capitulated to Bismarck, when Paris was once again besieged and bombarded, this time by the rest of France. A terrible story, but brilliantly told through the painters who suffered it.
Some books I read on the plane to and from New York, promoting my own book:
The Spamalot Diaries
Bonjour Tristesse Francoise Sagan
The book that begin it all. A very honest story of a young girl growing up in the South of France with her very French father, and his girlfriends. Written when she was 19, this book changed everything.
Every Frenchman has one Olivia de Havilland
A brilliant short and very, very funny reprint of a book by the film star Olivia de Havilland, about moving to and living in Paris, which had me laughing out loud. And that my friends is very rare. Chapeau to Crown Archetype for discovering and reprinting this hilarious book.
The Goodby People Gavin Lambert
Again a reprint, by McNally editions, of a classic collection on stories by a remarkable writer.
And as I head for Sydney and a long tour of Australia and New Zealand I very much continue to enjoy this on my I Pad – the gift to travellers.
Tune In Mark Lewisohn
The Beatles: All These Years Vol 1
A compulsive and terrific and incredibly in-depth history of the Beatles. So detailed and wonderful that I am on Page 638 and Ringo still hasn’t joined. Though we have learned all about him. And them.
Just a magnificent and compelling and definitive history of the world’s pre-eminent Group. I’m totally gripped and glad I have some long flights ahead! Happy Reading! October 12th 2024
Eric
