I snatched a quick Mexican Beach break at the end of February, partly burned out from six months on the Python show and partly to avoid all the Oscar bollocks that invades this town. I felt confident in my choice of books but in the event I was grateful for my I Pad to which I had to turn for some solid fall-back reading choices when others let me down…

Mercifully I had downloaded some Chandler a long time ago for just such an emergency. The prospect of running out of reading abroad. I had almost forgotten how great he is, and this is simply a magnificent book. A classic. I had forgotten too how good this one is. He is a master of the art of short, simple, writing. I devoured it and,  as with all great books, felt saddened as the end approached.

I always like to take a history book and this one I felt sure would grip me but sadly no. Writers of His Story should remember that half of it is Story. Academically history can be a series of essays about aspects of the period, but only if you’re studying it. Not if you are reading it for character, for drama and for the foibles of mankind, especially the rich and powerful, behaving in unseemly ways and suffering the consequences. Here we need wit, syphilis, mistresses, retribution, Catholicism and Revolution but it’s as dull as a Dissenters Dinner.

I ploughed gratefully into these on iPad, despite the fact I have read them before in hardback. His creation of the sad world of the commuter and the small businessman and family man and the suburban drinking at the club rings so real. Shady Hill is aptly named and those that survive and thrive there and those that implode and fail there are magnificently rendered. Most people lead lives of quiet desperation, and between Rome and Shady Hill he chronicles the life of keeping up appearances, the daily drudgery of the struggle for existence. He is rightly the master of the short story.

Fortunately I had brought a shorter back up Murakami and this one was both briefer and more enjoyable.

Fortunately Bernie Gunther is always busy. Something is always happening. Rich women, famous Nazis, Eichman even, and he loses a second wife to influenza. Some detectives have no luck. Or is it really influenza? The great thing about Kerr is even the smallest threads are tied up. Nothing is entirely irrelevant. And he is a very funny writer. I devoured it and was saddened by the thought that I have now read every single one of the Bernie Gunther books.   More please!

I turned instead to the author I had  recently discovered and enjoyed but I found him annoyingly slow too. I kept waiting for a story to break out. He’s so busy preparing dinner and listening to classical music that it takes ages for something to happen, far too long for a holiday read, so I ditched him too.

I felt confident taking this since so many people seem to have enjoyed it and it is a best seller everywhere but I’m afraid that after the first and highly dramatic opening scene I found her writing so prolix and her sense of drama so long winded that I lost all interest and ditched it fairly soon after I arrived.

Short stories from the Twenties. He’s bang in form, magnificent writing, just shortly after his huge hit This Side of Paradise. He seems to write through scenes, delicately dropping phrases which somehow activate and bring to life a scene, so that his writing is as poetic as Shakespeare who has the same ability in verse drama. Also these stories seem to exhibit a world weariness and an almost sardonic view of relationships, especially amongst the suburban world of the commuter and New York, a definitely satirical view of how they despise the South and southerners. I associate the bitter sweet world of marital problems, and failed aspirations (Head and Shoulders, The Ice Palace) rather more with Cheever, who of course must find it in these stories. A delight. And of course the hall mark of all great books: you dread it ending.

In a finely illustrated Windermere Series, which claims to be published in 1912, but which the good people at the Iliad Bookstore suggested might have been later, and the publishers were still pushing the early print run. Either way a fine edition of a fine read. How strange it was all personal satire from his frustrating years at the pinnacle of power in London under Hervey and Co. Although I’m ashamed to say I still can’t tell a Whig from a Tory….

A rather long biography of Jonathan Swift, an old favourite of mine. As usual, I got fairly nauseated by all the baby talk of the Stella letters, but there is so much else in the book. Perhaps the obverse of satire is sticky sentimentality, for a lot of them seem to have it. And how odd that his great children’s work is a detailed piece of satire on the then Government, which simply falls away for he is such a great story teller. Then of course I just had to read:

And this one too I didn’t really enjoy so much as I was expecting. I found it confusing, and I’m still not quite sure what happens at the end. Perhaps it’s the involvement of the God element, and killing through prayer, which leads us almost into Dennis Wheatley territory. It’s set in the Houston FBI. And of course a chap is entitled not to be hobbled by the extraordinary success of the Bernie Gunther novels, but I can’t wait to read another!

Having spoken so flatteringly about Philip Kerr I had to put aside this book about murdering a serial killer because it gave me bad dreams. I think that is a good enough warning. I cannot watch Dexter. A female detective from a favourite author, but I’m sorry, I have to look after my own mental health.