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??

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

How fortunate to have a writer friend married to another writer.  I loved both the Perry 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.”  But see later. I really enjoyed one.

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 Louis XIV a lot track recently. See Versailles on TV.

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.

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.

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 forthcoming 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 2019

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.   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.

O Lord please reward Jerry Falwell
And take him up gently with you
If there’s room by your side
For a large double-wide
Or a chair by the window will do.
He’s got all of the charm of Darth Vader
He blamed all the gays for Al Qaeda
He won’t be seen dead at a Seder
So please dear God take him away.

I’m sure you’ll adore Jerry Falwell
So lift him up where he belongs
Greeting and meeting and perhaps over-eating
And singing his wonderful songs.
He’s someone we really can spare Lord
You’ve enough milk and honey to share Lord,
We’ll wait here for the Rapture
If you will just capture
His body and haul it away.
We won’t carp we won’t fuss
Just take Jerry from us
You may even like him – oy vey!