Early on in June I set off for the big adventure. It didn’t leave me much time to read at first. I traveled with the brilliant Aubyn for whom I am lost in admiration. This is a very funny satire on the Booker Prize, and committees and the vanity of authors. Seriously funny. Well worth another read.

I found calm and elegance in the sentences and quite exquisite writing within this selection. A 1957 classic collection of his visit to several monasteries. An elegant and moving defense of the monastic life, its shocking austerity and its strength in surviving and building over the centuries.

This has been a month of rediscovering Muriel Spark. I always did adore her. I think she is so funny and yet oddly modern. I love her take on characters. This binge began when I found a nice 1984 first edition on Hatchards new old first edition shelves. A really good idea that one Hatchards. This is about a man writing a monograph on The Book of Job and the complicated family interplay when his ex-wife joins a band of terrorists, leading to the unwelcome intervention of the French Police. Out of such unlikely material she makes a thoroughly entertaining and knowledgeable comedy.

This whetted my appetite and I found in Piccadilly a nice illustrated limited 1971 first edition. A squib of a book which reads like a film script. A kind of comic mystery where the entire serving staff of a prosperous mansioned Swiss upper class family conspire to do them in. Each member of the staff is carefully sketched in and it does indeed read like a fast moving movie. Perhaps it was a film script at one time, but anyway it is very funny and lovingly skirts around the gruesome murders at the heart of the story. It’s her black humour I think I find so attractive, done with such a light touch. She’s like a murderous Maggie Smith, for whom of course, she wrote the brilliant movie of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I then found an unread paperback of a more recent 2004 novel. A surprisingly inventive tale of a not particularly happily married couple running a moving school in Switzerland, (they have to keep moving), where in Rowlands creative writing class he is challenged by the arrival of a precocious young man who is already writing a novel which, to his chagrin, is soon picked up for publishing. So this is a story of jealousy and creative envy and things might turn out very nasty indeed, but for a brilliant twist at the end which quite takes you by surprise. Mordant masterly comic writing. I love her.

I bought a lovely signed limited first edition in London and have been saving it up. I love it. He is such a great writer I can’t believe I never read these books before. Musings on evil and in particular the struggle of Cain and Abel. With surely the most wicked female character in all of literature. What a joy to discover a classic at my age.

His latest and he is a good writer but please we want Bernie Gunther and those top Nazis….

Ran out of reading and picked this up at The Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle. Always dependable and interesting short stories.

I liked this one better than...

Continuing the general thriller genre read. Not mad about this one. But the virtue of Simenon is his brevity.