Whatever It Is I Don’t Like It  by Howard Jacobson Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  by Jeanette Winterson The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope & Mother’s Milk  by Edward St. Aubyn Berlin Noir March Violets. The Pale Criminal. A German Requiem.  by Philip Kerr What W. H. Auden Can Do For You  by Alexander McCall Smith And here are the runners up…. A Delicate Truth  by John Le Carré When The Light Goes  by Larry McMurtry Cannery Row  by John Steinbeck Casanova’s Return To Venice  by Arthur Schnitzler Prague Fatale  by Philip Kerr City Primeval  by Elmore Leonard Madame De  by Louise de Vilmorin Levels Of Life  by Julian Barnes The Luminaries  by Elizabeth Catton

I really only read only two novels this month but both were enormous. I also started a biography of Swift, and continued reading about Clive of India. Failed to finish

And

But these two I did enjoy unreservedly...

Found a very nice 1^st edition from 1939 to read this book for the very first time. Shame on me I know. But what a beautiful book. A magnificent novel. Written with a fine anger in lovely poetic prose. He is a true successor to Dickens. Social commentary on the devastating effects of the Dust Bowl and modern farming methods on poor sharecroppers, who are forced to become migrants and face the unwelcoming Californians. Amazing writing, amazing feeling.

Recommended by my daughters room-mate, this is another huge novel. Mercifully for we travelers I found an edition in Seattle which divides it into three paperbacks, and I commenced the first part on the road in Chicago. I thought it was arresting, and very minimal and very well done. It’s about a female assassin and a would-be novelist who is asked by an editor to conspire to re-write a young girl prodigy’s new and slightly strange story. With this slender basis Murakami is good enough to keep you engrossed for the length of three whole paperbacks, twisting the tale into a fine thriller. Seems odd I haven’t read any of him before. Must look around.