I found a nice signed limited first edition of this autobiography of King David and was enjoying it, as was he, until I suddenly lost interest, because no plot had yet kicked in. Odd isn’t it, that that’s the hook that lands the fish. If you don’t tell us a story you’re just talking, and no matter how clever or how witty you are it just won’t do.  So I laid it aside. I had intended to re-read Catch 22 before finding these two at Iliad. I see it’s down in my list of books pre-1992 before the list began and they were all shipped from London.

A rather fine and highly readable thriller by a young man from Portland.   Cleverly intertwining the story of two heists, he has absorbed the many who have preceded him in this form to create a very fine debut. It’s destined to be a best seller and a movie. I have an autographed copy from Book Soup. Very good yarn for a holiday read.

I re-read this in case I see the movie. A beautiful First edition from 1925, with a facsimile slip cover. There is something wonderful about re-reading a favourite book in its original edition. It’s as fine and lovely and epic and poetic as ever. Like a Greek tragedy with its inevitable bloody end. No one is at Gatsby’s funeral. All the people who came to his parties despised him. He causes the death of Tom Buchanan’s mistress and the alienation of his wife, and pays for it, when Buchanan betrays him to the grief stricken Wilson. The book is about wealth, the rich are different. Daisy (who actually causes the accident that kills) disappears back into her wealth. Buchanan feels justified. Gatsby himself is extinguished in his great house looking out towards the green light on Daisy’s dock at East Egg, in the end a metaphor for the gap that these Westerners cannot bridge in their new lives in the East. Carroway hates the Buchanan set more than the pretentions of Gatsby, and is at the end, with him alone in his death.

Perhaps the hardest thing to do in the world is write a comic novel. This absolutely rocks it in a tale of the drug induced, sexually indulgent world of young people in the Seventies. Laugh out loud story-telling, this goes off like a rocket, and even ends darkly, and not sentimentally, which is the downfall of most comic novels. I found a nice 1975 first edition to read and I loved it.  Darker and funnier than even his Dad.

I might indeed have read this before as it was previously published under another title, but I cannot find any trace of it. About two hoodlums and low rent guys in Detroit who aspire to be more successful. Ten rules for getting away with armed robbery. A very enjoyable read.

A delightful book. One of the best of his most recent works. The tale is dark and engaging, and the secret services and political world have become once again the dark places of corruption and intrigue which he first explored in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Quite a complex tale and one I regretted interrupting several times as I travelled, and one I intend re-reading at a sitting, as its yarn demands.

This is a wonderful book, from its hilarious title to its touching and movingly honest ending. It is a terrific tale, the magnificently hilarious story of Jeannette Winterson herself growing up in Accrington, adopted into the home of the freakily wonderful mad comic personage of Mrs Winterson, a creature so fabulously funny that, if you didn’t have to live with her, you might assume she was made up, by someone like Dickens. The now-successful author observes this comic monster in hindsight with precision, and even forgiveness,  and makes of her an all-time unforgettable character. Not since George Melly have I so enjoyed the honest tale of a Northern upbringing.  Strongly recommended for all readers. I picked it up in Seattle airport and could hardly put it down.

An unexpectedly delightful little novel that I picked up as a First Edition at Earthling in Walla Walla. He really is a delightful writer. This 1951 novel about a snowstorm at the opening of a small hotel in Pennsylvania is charming and surprising by turn. The characters swiftly and deftly sketched, and the drama unfolds with great humour. He really is a wonderful discovery. I intend to hunt him down in old bookshops.

I must have picked this curio up at Mr B’s in Bath. It’s the story of a family on holiday and dad’s involvement with an enchanting donkey called Caroline. He’ll do anything for a nice piece of ass. No, sorry. It’s not like that at all.

1947 First Edition picked up at Earthling.  Started with two of the  most hilarious chapters and then settled down into a story of snobbery, about the man pursuing the family myth that they might be descended from Kings, only to find in reality they are descended from a full negro. This is a good gag, but the time in which it is written is more revealing about America’s long crawl out of its racist journey, than how you might tackle such a story today. Mercifully the full horror of the context has evolved a little.

Two really excellent novellas and a third about lycanthropy which I found less compelling. In the first an abandoned daughter learns to come to terms with her murderous revenge instincts towards a cruel rapist and her acceptance of the possibility of love and in the second Brown Dog a native American hiding in Toronto with his adopted daughter, escapes back to America with a rock and roll show. Both of these are tremendously well written, and powerful and great fun.

Described as an Anglo-American tragedy, Waugh’s satirical novella is set in Hollywood, and is about an Englishman who has fallen out of the movies and now works at a pet cemetery. After the literal fall, by suicide of his house mate he becomes acquainted with the world of Whispering Glades, and studies the funeral business for humans, falling in love with the unfortunate Aimee, who is torn between Mr Joyboy, who makes up dead faces into smiles for her, and Dennis who gives her classic poems from the English poets which he pretends are his. Genuinely funny and revealing of a lost world of the English abroad in the Studio System of Hollywood. Nice UK 1948 First editio.