Found a nice UK first edition of this, (1974) with a signed envelope from him, in a secret new treasure trove bookstore I won’t be sharing with you. Couldn’t resist re-reading this. The tale of the manufacturer who resists blackmail and revenges himself on the perpetrators. Classic tale.

I picked up a lovely illustrated edition of this at Iliad. Some of the advice here should be illuminated and hung on the wall of all writers rooms. Many offenders, including a Graham Greene I picked up but put down because it broke one of his rules: “Never open a book with weather.”

I confess I had a bit of trouble with this one. I love him and his writing but to me the writing became very dense and some parts I had to read two or three times to see what was going on. This seems to defy a couple of the basic Elmore Leonard rules: “Try and leave out the parts that readers skip” and the most important “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

I gave it a re-read. To me it’s only a pointer towards what he can achieve. The writing is superb, but I got a little tired of it.

Book of poems gifted by Dylan Moran—most of which I enjoyed.

Co-written by my co-Director of What About Dick, his co-story of his co-work in the great album art of Hipgnosis.  Lavishly illustrated classic album covers (Pink Floyd and co) with tales from the front line. Aubrey is witty and honest and wise. A lovely book. Contains my favourite summation: There are five stages to a project a)  Excitement and Euphoria b)  Disenchantment c)  The Search for the Guilty d)  Punishment of the Innocent e)  Distinction for the Uninvolved. That says it all.

First published in 1935 as England Made Me. A seedy tale of a no good brother and his too-loving sister attempting to help him with Krogh the millionaire in Stockholm. Ends in a seedy death. Nice moments of writing. I apparently read it in 2006 under the other title, but left no notes. Only for the Greene fan probably.

Collection of excellent short stories by the master. He seems to be as intense and as in depth about characters in the short format as the longer. And I never even got to the middle of Middle March and it’s only middle February….

Highly readable and suspenseful as usual. You can’t put him down. I don’t want to give away the plot, as this book isn’t published until March and I am lucky enough to get a pre-publication copy, but it features Jack Till hunting a dysfunctional young hit man with an unusual method of hiding his tracks….

Python memories of filming by Julian Doyle the seventh, eighth and ninth Python.

Essays on writers and writers and Jeff Dyer. Always interesting.

Another highly entertaining novel of the folks at the Hollywood Precinct.  Highly readable, hugely enjoyable, very easy to read, Wambaugh is very funny. His Russian cop Viktor is a hoot of modern Malapropisms. But his novels are also true and touching. Found this in a second hand store and went back to pick up some more by him, and a few Elmore Leonard First Editions.

I have kept on with my pleasant self-imposed tax of reading Anna Karenina. After the excitement of the horse race and Vronsky’s fall, and the proud acceptance of her love and her fate when Anna informs her husband of their love,  the central section of the book is about the less interesting love of Levin for the now suffering Kitty, which as the Intro helpfully explains, is more about Tolstoy himself. But with the eponymous heroine missing the book is less gripping, and we wait impatiently for the return of the now off-stage adulterous pair.

I found a 1964 First Edition for 12 bucks and even I know that’s a foolish price for a Fleming, most of which go for at least five figures, so thought I’d give Fleming another chance. My point of comparison was Conan Doyle, a popular master of  best-selling fiction, but Fleming is far inferior. He doesn’t write well at all. He seems almost tired of his task at times. He labours at scene description, but the plot shifts enough I suppose, and there are plenty of breasts and buttocks, although the sex scenes are indicated rather more by dots and chapter ends than copulatory descriptions. In fact it’s perfect cinematographic writing. Just enough to suggest what will be eventually made explicit by the camera. And not written well enough to tax Producer’s intelligence. He is at his best at fast paced action, which is essentially Bond.

An exquisite novella. I can’t believe I haven’t read it before. A tale of two itinerant workers with an unlikely friendship. Geoff the more normal hobo, travels with a tall, powerful but mentally underdeveloped friend from his village. The story is simply what happens when they apply for a new job, where the boss’ son is a heel and married to a light lady. Two crucial scenes parallel the plot, the euthanasia of the old man’s dog, and the eventual more potent euthanasia. Stark but exquisitely told. I found a nice old copy from a lending library, with yellowing pages, and almost as old as me, from June 1943, which added to the pleasure of reading this classic.

ANCIENT LIGHT by John Banville THE ANGRY BUDDHIST by Seth Greenland TRUTH IN ADVERTISING by John Kenney LIONEL ASBO by Martin Amis WAITING FOR SUNRISE by William Boyd A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING by Dave Eggers BULLET PARK by John Cheever RAYLON by Elmore Leonard Plus one CD LONG WAVE by Jeff Lynne

Thought I’d try another since I so enjoyed the other one I read. I gave that as one of my Favourite Books of the Year for Christmas presents: and I know you’ll want to know so my list is above.

Delicately and exquisitely written this book is disappointing in its conclusion. We are set up to expect the routing of hypocrisy. The inexhaustible horror that is Mrs Gamart is surely going to get her come-uppance. We have read our Dickens. Virtue is rewarded, hypocrisy exposed and the wicked punished. Bravery brings its own reward, kindness must triumph, goodness will survive. But no such thing. The genteel horror of Middle Class life is allowed to succeed and poor Mrs Green slinks off to London having lost her bookshop and her house. Such a pity. Nothing makes us feel better than a book that punishes the wicked for their greed and grabbing. For shame. That’s what Fiction means.

A beautiful Kindle edition with pictures and a fine biography of Tolstoy. I found this, the correct Nabokov approved translation, and set off happily into the world of mother Russia.

Tolstoy: Anna Karenin. Superb lecture by Nabokov on this, almost his favourite, novel, which he compares and contrasts with Madame Bovary, as both are about adultery and suicidal wives. Inspired by the brilliant Stoppard script of the wonderful Joe Wright film, I am intending to read the book again soon. I see I have downloaded it to my i-Pad but I see also that it is in the Constance Garnett translation of which VN so disapproves. So I must search for another.

Before I went to London I had been reading Middlemarch, and almost took it with me, but it seemed a little pretentious for British Airways. I would have had no hesitation on Virgin where it would look like a normal outré act, but I felt constrained to be seen reading it on BA, because there are occasionally real readers on BA, who, like me, never switch on the video choices. So I took the Amis Biography instead. Now I pick it up again, and I haven’t read it since University Days in Cambridge. I read more. The prose is refreshing. Two young ladies, whom I respect as serious readers, both cited this as their all-time favourite novel, which is a weighty matter, but I wonder from the subject so far, whether this isn’t a Female Read. I think there are such things as gender preference novels. We don’t all come with the same bag of tricks. And after all whole sections of Bookshops are now segregated off into Gay Novels and Black Novels. I hate all that intellectual apartheid. There are only Good Books and Bad Books. Anyway I think I’ll persist in reading it alongside things like the new Bruce Wagner because the gap between intellectual worlds is so vast, and it’s good to remind ourselves that nothing is everything.

Set in the touchy-burny era of James 1st, shortly after the Gunpowder plot, when Lancashire was the witches capital of England, at least according to the weird superstitious Scottish twat known as James 6.th Nicely written, mercifully brief novel. Hatred of women masquerading as real science, determining who are “witches” envy and corruption. We Will Rack You!

Very hard to come back to the current US from Conan Doyle and pick up this polemical, cruel, almost Rabelasian blast at contemporary celebrity life. I like Bruce Wagner very much but this was too much for me. Having read three quarters of the novel within 24 hours I had to put it down and seek a change. Reality, porn and the interior life of Michael Douglas, I mean, are we to take any of this seriously? I suppose yes if you are American, but I turned for relief to Scott Fitzgerald…I’ll come back to it. But is that America really?

Nice 1926 First Edition of short stories, some familiar “The Rich Boy” for its careful observation of the wealthy man boy who fails to be successful in his own life, the very funny Rags and The Prnce of Wales, which is almost lyrical in its writing, I mean really lyrics, and seems almost like a musical, or a comic movie.

I love the little Collectors Library editions for travel, and this one really packs a punch. It’s many years since I read Conan Doyle and I enjoyed both of these major novels. The Gift of Fear is uniquely constructed, seemingly arising out of the solution (by Holmes) of a murder in the first part, and spinning backwards in time to the coal fields of Pennsylvania. I know of no writer who delivers surprise so well. He is almost a dramatist in this.