Julian Barnes re-ignited my interest in her. Hatchards was out of the ones he loved the most but I very much enjoyed this romantic tale set in a Cambridge College in 1912. His recommended ones are: The Beginning of Spring, and The Blue Flower. Thanks to my reading list I see I have read rather a lot of her novels, some of which I loved and some of which I didn’t. I’ll have to give them another go.

Seventeen Essays and One Short story. About writers and writing, the French, translating, (particularly Madame Bovary), Orwell, Houellebecq, and a whole slew of subjects he is never less than interesting about. He made me race straight out and buy Penelope Fitzgerald. “Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way…they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with a greater purpose and hidden structure.”

He is very bad. SPLAT. From the naff photograph SNAP of him in his silly dated clothes to his inability PAFF to write anything without sounding like a fifteen year old WOW on acid I hated every inch of this. TOSS.

The early short novel written in Russian in Paris which was the first glimmering of Lolita. Even in translation (by his son) he is unable to write badly. Here the predator is discovered by his would-be child mistress masturbating and races out to commit suicide. The eventual novel is far more daring.

This is a painful book. Painful because we know how it is going to end. Mortality isn’t going to have a happy third act. Painful because it is painful to read of the pain that accompanies the end. Particularly with the Big C, and the patience with which people put up with bombarding radiation into their bodies. And most painful because we can have no more Hitchens. Even the sad eyes and lugubrious expression of the balding victim on the cover is painful. And yet he doesn’t let us down. He looks unrelentingly at his own condition and tells us what it is like, and what it looks like and what it feels like. Some things are just too painful.

Very disappointing. Badly written. It began to read like the outline of a book. I abandoned ship.

A New York intrigue, not quite intriguing enough. Nothing wrong, just not particularly engaging. A NY socialite and her constant amour but never married friend who gives her a ring which she first loses, then recovers and then finds it stolen by a nanny.

A clever and very quick read about a Cambridge blonde literally seduced into the secret world of MI5, and her amours which lead to her involving herself with a writer whom she is to arrange to sponsor secretly, and his revenge once that secret is leaked by an envious co-worker. Finely done yarn with a very smart ending one doesn’t see coming.

Paperman, a Jew from Broadway (so described) arrives on an idyllic Caribbean island with the intention of buying a run-down resort. It’s the fifties. He meets a married femme fatale, learns to dance to the steel band and is accompanied by a frightful huge man called Atlas.

My first ever James Bond. A weird tale this one, written in the first person by a young Canadian girl, who is in a cabin motel in the woods, and almost half the book is taken up with her young life story from girlhood in Quebec to London and the two men what done her wrong, one an English twit, and one a German co-worker. What’s odd is that the story doesn’t kick in till he has gone into all this, and then two thugs turn up and she is in peril and then, almost as if by magic, James Bond turns up. What are the odds. But Fleming handles the subsequent battle well. I guess that’s his appeal.

A compilation of short autobiographical pieces

I took this as a travel book to London, and of course got interrupted and side tracked and jet lagged and random. I was enjoying it and will pick it up later.

The play adapted from Carl Reiner’s novel. Later it became a movie, and I think a funny one as I recall.

An odd fish. An Icelandic novel. The narrator, a self-important nobody, of excruciating behaviour, lectures on the Importance of Cod to the development of the superiority of the Scandinavian. They go on some sort of voyage where the First Mate retells the legend of the golden fleece. Small gestures, tiny ironies, occasionally indelicacies, this will delight one in a hundred, but that one will be utterly delighted.

A “new” version by Christopher Hampton, well actually from Broadway in 1972. And yes of course I was just in Norway. They showed me round the National Theatre. Thought it was about time I checked in with old Henrik. His plays of ideas seem more fun that Shaw. Need to check the last line in the old translation. About the little wife, kept in a virtual prison by her condescending husband, and how Nora grew up and learned to love herself.

Two early plays by the Number One.

Found a first edition in Earthling. A weird one, about an ex Nun and an attempt to heist Contra money off a murderous Nicaraguan Colonel. Something of a fairy story set in New Orleans. Not his best, but he is never ever dull. And yes I just checked and found it in my reading diary from May to June in 1999.

A friendly Norwegian journalist brought me this to read. I’m not a great fan of the serial killer genre although I did enjoy the Larsen Trilogy, mainly because of the wonderful eccentricity of the eponymous tattooed lady. This one I was enjoying when the most gruesome and creepy murder of an innocent female turned my stomach and I bailed. I can’t even get into Dexter. I find violence against the female insupportable as entertainment.

I enjoyed Salman’s memoirs of the Fatwah. Ten years of self-imprisonment guarded by Special Branch and abused by British newspapers. It’s a fine and revealing memoir. I think it would be twice as good if it were half as long, but this was the whole experience he went through. I even went to his wedding with Padma Lakshmi. I don’t think any of us expected it to last.

Civilized company for a modern and historical ramble through the streets and waterways of this great city. The problem is that this is written in the 90’s and Sydney (like London) is evolving so very quickly that things have changed quite a bit since then. Worth a dip.

Another summer orphan. Described as Unpublished Short Stories, sometimes there’s a good reason not to publish things. Of course once you’re dead nothing can prevent Greedy Bastard Publishers laying hold of your left overs. Not that bad, but also not compelling, which is a rare thing to say about the wonderful Vonnegut.

I also swiftly tired of this. Again it’s a summer orphan, staying on the shelves for another year, crying out forlornly, finish me.

Started really well, but once this ex-African Peace Corps hand returns to the idyllic land where he had such a seminal experience growing and helping the villagers, it grew into some kind of Evelyn Waugh story where the white man is trapped by resourceful natives, and I found it less interesting. I liked his observation that Africa like the rest of us, has grown cynical and exploitive. More re-writing please.

A wonderful book. I sometimes wish though that she would be edited because she writes history (story) so well, but occasionally bogs down into historical detail. Particularly research questions, maybe this, maybe that. Of course that’s history but we want narrative. A bit of blue pencil work would help a lot, but she is a serious historian of course and would hate that. By concentrating on the fall of Anne Boleyn we see the nightmare side to the Tudors, the savagery and the falling from grace, in this coup d’état engineered by the unlikeable Thomas Cromwell.

I was enjoying this but was forced to abandon my copy in London by the constraints of travel baggage. He loves his Dickens and his actors approach to this great author means he sees and feels the human being behind the novelist. One feels that Callow himself has suffered and empathises with this most humane and dramatical of novelists.