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.

Musings on life, musings on love and loss. Touching and wise. Also fun stuff about Sarah Bernhardt and ballooning…

The joy of re-reading. It gets better and better. Oh how we love Mr. Collins. I like to travel with the little Collectors Library Edition, very thin paper and very light. Perfect for a plane.

Almost a what-if novel. The Yalta Conference revisited with a most surprising attendee. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, all the big boys, with an attempted plot to assassinate Stalin. How he does all this beats me, but I find him effortless and a joy to read, even though Bernie Gunther is not in this one.

Booker Prize winner, rather fabulous and certainly deserved. It’s really a Victorian novel set in the New Zealand gold rush of 1866. We gradually learn just what went on from twelve witnesses to several incidents. Fascinating, and tender and informative and beautifully written, it seems impossible to believe that this is only her second novel. I read it throughout my stay in the UK.

Sometimes when you read a book, you think I got the gist, and put it aside. This is one of those, from the slightly ungainly title, to the sex lives of the less than famous, (with the exception of Graham Greene) this illustrates the truism that in war it’s more than the gloves that come off. What it does paint is the extraordinary image of London in the blitz, where every night more and more of the city went up in flames. The fact that the inhabitants reached for each other in those long terrifying nights could be attributed to DNA or just the fact that terror, loss and death makes you want to fuck.

Last year a nice Norwegian journalist who was interviewing me gave me some Norwegian books so that I might know a little more about Norwegian writers. I could hardly know less, so it was a most kind gift. I enjoyed this beautiful story about a son and his mother and his life and her death. The quotation is from a poem by Mao. This is a line from the book. “It was like it always is with time, that it can slip through your fingers when you are not looking.”

A sweet little book which will whet your appetite for the real thing. A major fan of Auden’s shares his feelings and his favourite poems and his best thoughts.

I finished this which I had started in June and was struck by how well he finishes his books, not something all novelists can do, but something vitally important in the detective thriller. His terrain of the Hollywood cops and the Hollywood moon that sets the denizens of Hollywood buzzing is exactly his own. He has carved out this territory and nobody does it better.

The Life and Death of a British Emperor. I’m slowly working my way through this. I was always fascinated by the Fall of Clive. This history is a little slow but I haven’t abandoned it, since I want to see how it turns out.

Well this is 1984. Actually more like 2084. For those of us who feel I-People are akin to a cult here is the novel of our anxieties. What does it mean when we share everything on line, on camera, on email and twitter? Is this a sinister or a useful human social development? Do we get closer to others, or further away from our real selves? Mae is the Winston Smith of the book, who gets a job at the Silicone Valley online giant The Centre. Her moments of rebellion, solo kayaking, and furtive sex with a mysterious watcher, are used as examples against her. Carefully advised by her counsellors, she learns her lesson, outing herself in a series of Orwellian contradictions. History too is rewritten, as camera and digital data is re-interpreted. So yes it’s a great idea, but I got the feeling that for once the film might be even better. Perhaps it’s the character of Mae who rarely becomes more than a cypher or perhaps we get it too soon, we quickly understand the irony of freedom becoming repressive, and hate the intrusive nature of this Maoist world, where self-criticism is used to keep the individual in line, so that the book seems overlong as it slowly works out its paradoxes: how working at The Centre transforms a bright intelligent young woman into a workaholic vessel, how it affects her relationship with her parents and former lover, how her world view is polluted by the shining guidelines of the Company, where everything is free, and nothing has any value. Where cameras follow you for every waking hour and you must be careful what you think, and you must communicate all day or feel the sting of social criticism. Big Brother is watching you. Dystopia Ltd.

Another from the interesting New Yorker writer. Interesting insights and observations. I’ve used the word interesting twice which alerts me I am trying to cover up the fact I found some parts a little dull….

Found a first UK edition in London. An early Leonard. And highly readable as usual.

The first half I thought was one of the best books I have ever read. Need to re-read it actually. It didn’t quite maintain the vigour and strength of its opening, but still brilliant. A prolonged consideration of the nature of consciousness from a physical, philosophical and scientific perspective. The Oxford dilemma: Stuck on a train in Didcot. Witty, thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent. Superb stuff.

Aspects of Provence. I re-read it, mainly because I enjoy the story of Marius saving Rome, by refusing to battle the vast Teutonic barbarian horde as it heads south to threaten Rome, before he accustoms his army to seeing them as just an enemy and destroys them completely in Pourrieres… A military genius even Caesar thought was the cat’s pyjamas.

My addiction grows. I’m trying to ration myself to one Philip Kerr book a month but I don’t know whether I can. Found a nice autographed copy at Vromans, the excellent bookstore in Pasadena. Between Berlin and Smolensk, Bernie is the same back chatting non Nazi cop. Here he is invited by Joey the Crip to exhume and examine the bodies of the thousands of Polish officers killed by the Red Army, on Stalin’s orders at Katyn. The irony of the Nazis investigating a Communist War Crime is not lost on him or his protagonist. Great stuff.

The trouble with discovering a new author whom you adore, is if you binge on their writing you eventually come across something that you don’t like. This for me was it. The send up of the Esalen, New Age, touchy feely folk is funny for a while, but then reading about them is just as irritating as meeting them. So I chucked it I’m afraid.

He is an ace thriller writer. This one moves between Berlin in 1934 and ends up in Havana in 1954 before the crime is revealed. And you never see it coming. Bernie Gunther is the perfect hero, flawed, smoking, drinking, womanising, hilarious. I defy you not to have a good time with him.

Nice change at the Shangri-La Hotel in Paris to find this thirties yarn by James Hilton instead of some religious bullshit book. It’s very much a Ripping Yan, with the stiff upper lip narrative by Conrad the laconic hero of this improbable adventure, but he keeps the excitement coming in the Buchan style. Characters are sketches, caricatures, but hey, it’s an innocent enough read.

A James Bond novel. I never thought Fleming was any good. I only read him recently and was surprised to find him almost as bad as I suspected, but I do rate William Boyd, so it’s a pity to find him slogging through a Bond novel. It seems his heart isn’t in it. Anyway I left it behind in Paris, for somebody else....