ANCIENT LIGHT by John Banville THE ANGRY BUDDHIST by Seth Greenland TRUTH IN ADVERTISING by John Kenney LIONEL ASBO by Martin Amis WAITING FOR SUNRISE by William Boyd A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING by Dave Eggers BULLET PARK by John Cheever RAYLON by Elmore Leonard Plus one CD LONG WAVE by Jeff Lynne

Thought I’d try another since I so enjoyed the other one I read. I gave that as one of my Favourite Books of the Year for Christmas presents: and I know you’ll want to know so my list is above.

Delicately and exquisitely written this book is disappointing in its conclusion. We are set up to expect the routing of hypocrisy. The inexhaustible horror that is Mrs Gamart is surely going to get her come-uppance. We have read our Dickens. Virtue is rewarded, hypocrisy exposed and the wicked punished. Bravery brings its own reward, kindness must triumph, goodness will survive. But no such thing. The genteel horror of Middle Class life is allowed to succeed and poor Mrs Green slinks off to London having lost her bookshop and her house. Such a pity. Nothing makes us feel better than a book that punishes the wicked for their greed and grabbing. For shame. That’s what Fiction means.

A beautiful Kindle edition with pictures and a fine biography of Tolstoy. I found this, the correct Nabokov approved translation, and set off happily into the world of mother Russia.

Tolstoy: Anna Karenin. Superb lecture by Nabokov on this, almost his favourite, novel, which he compares and contrasts with Madame Bovary, as both are about adultery and suicidal wives. Inspired by the brilliant Stoppard script of the wonderful Joe Wright film, I am intending to read the book again soon. I see I have downloaded it to my i-Pad but I see also that it is in the Constance Garnett translation of which VN so disapproves. So I must search for another.

Before I went to London I had been reading Middlemarch, and almost took it with me, but it seemed a little pretentious for British Airways. I would have had no hesitation on Virgin where it would look like a normal outré act, but I felt constrained to be seen reading it on BA, because there are occasionally real readers on BA, who, like me, never switch on the video choices. So I took the Amis Biography instead. Now I pick it up again, and I haven’t read it since University Days in Cambridge. I read more. The prose is refreshing. Two young ladies, whom I respect as serious readers, both cited this as their all-time favourite novel, which is a weighty matter, but I wonder from the subject so far, whether this isn’t a Female Read. I think there are such things as gender preference novels. We don’t all come with the same bag of tricks. And after all whole sections of Bookshops are now segregated off into Gay Novels and Black Novels. I hate all that intellectual apartheid. There are only Good Books and Bad Books. Anyway I think I’ll persist in reading it alongside things like the new Bruce Wagner because the gap between intellectual worlds is so vast, and it’s good to remind ourselves that nothing is everything.

Set in the touchy-burny era of James 1st, shortly after the Gunpowder plot, when Lancashire was the witches capital of England, at least according to the weird superstitious Scottish twat known as James 6.th Nicely written, mercifully brief novel. Hatred of women masquerading as real science, determining who are “witches” envy and corruption. We Will Rack You!

Very hard to come back to the current US from Conan Doyle and pick up this polemical, cruel, almost Rabelasian blast at contemporary celebrity life. I like Bruce Wagner very much but this was too much for me. Having read three quarters of the novel within 24 hours I had to put it down and seek a change. Reality, porn and the interior life of Michael Douglas, I mean, are we to take any of this seriously? I suppose yes if you are American, but I turned for relief to Scott Fitzgerald…I’ll come back to it. But is that America really?

Nice 1926 First Edition of short stories, some familiar “The Rich Boy” for its careful observation of the wealthy man boy who fails to be successful in his own life, the very funny Rags and The Prnce of Wales, which is almost lyrical in its writing, I mean really lyrics, and seems almost like a musical, or a comic movie.

I love the little Collectors Library editions for travel, and this one really packs a punch. It’s many years since I read Conan Doyle and I enjoyed both of these major novels. The Gift of Fear is uniquely constructed, seemingly arising out of the solution (by Holmes) of a murder in the first part, and spinning backwards in time to the coal fields of Pennsylvania. I know of no writer who delivers surprise so well. He is almost a dramatist in this.

Julian Barnes re-ignited my interest in her. Hatchards was out of the ones he loved the most but I very much enjoyed this romantic tale set in a Cambridge College in 1912. His recommended ones are: The Beginning of Spring, and The Blue Flower. Thanks to my reading list I see I have read rather a lot of her novels, some of which I loved and some of which I didn’t. I’ll have to give them another go.

Seventeen Essays and One Short story. About writers and writing, the French, translating, (particularly Madame Bovary), Orwell, Houellebecq, and a whole slew of subjects he is never less than interesting about. He made me race straight out and buy Penelope Fitzgerald. “Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way…they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with a greater purpose and hidden structure.”