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 appetiser, 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.

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.

The Affair of the Poisons      Anne Somerset

Murder, Satanism and Infanticide at the Court of the Sun King.                                        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.  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 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 are 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 ?? 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 revealing moment.

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.

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 more like a modern Le Carré.  Or Len Deighton. 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.

Born Trump                           Emily Jane 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 me 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 it as a corrective to the romantic view of the Circus from his big suprising hit novel, 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 the 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 final chapter I wrote on 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 translate 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 where 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.