Vintage Carver. Literally and publishing. This Vintage book 2009. The original from 1981. So simply written, so brilliantly expressed. Often the same sad tale of alcohol and the falling away of love. These are wonderful short stories. He is amongst the greatest of the genre. Found them in Brisbane and devoured them.

His first novel. The end of the world caused by anthropology. Fabulous, funny and brilliant. An anthropological discovery near an expanding Casino, causes fascination, theory and ultimately chaos to the whole world except the discoverers in ways you neither predict nor could foresee. He really is the real thing.

An ironic life of Shostakovich or how to live under tyranny, oddly the same subject that Adam Johnson tackles so brilliantly in The Orphan Master’s Son, though here done as a narrative biography of the real composer. Perhaps because it is based on truth and isn’t fiction it fails to come to life. It isn't biography either but a strange hybrid. It’s hard to know who is telling this tale. It is pseudo biography but it stirs no emotions except pity. You feel sympathy towards this highly gifted composer being forced to compromise for Stalin, but I think by adopting this method of telling his story it feels more like a lecture and I miss the dialogue and character at which Julian Barnes is so amazingly good. A puzzler.

An interesting Maigret. He starts with a mystery he immediately explains, and follows the runner, a middle aged business man weary of his dull life who escapes to the South of France.

In the fine translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I am about half way through my third reading of this amazing book, and let’s face it, probably my last…. In a copy sent to me by Mike Nichols. As I am off on tour I shall continue reading the same translation on my I pad. Certainly easier on the wrist. Of course inspired by watching the exceptionally good BBC TV series. This is one of my favourite novels.

Both an explanation of the theory of American exceptionalism through history, and how it arose, and a warning that it has now become dangerously politicized, which led in the second Bush administration to a serious of disastrous foreign policy decisions, from which America still suffers. To be honest I wasn’t really aware of AE, or for that matter Manifest Destiny, so I’m catching up. Good book to start. He is very gentle with America, which makes his case far more effective. “My thesis is not that American exceptionalist thought is intrinsically corrupting or that it was destructive in the past, but that what has been essentially a liberating set of beliefs has been corrupted over the past thirty years or so by hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system.” A thought provoking and interesting book.

A wonderful book, beautifully written, with great thought, about the enormous changes wrought in this month to America. From the fall of Richmond, to the noble and dignified surrender of Lee to the courteous wisdom of U.S. Grant at Appomattox, and the other brave decisions of the Southern Commanders to relinquish arms, rather than committing the nation to endless guerrilla warfare. The assassination of Lincoln only six days after the actor Booth shot him in the theatre might have revived the whole bloody mess, but mercifully it didn’t. A very fine book with unforgettable scenes right to the end when the extraordinary General Lee joins a black communicant kneeling at the altar rail before a shocked community in a Richmond Church. So many great moments. A really thoughtful, succinct, yet wide-ranging tale of a nation almost rending itself in half, but coming together at the last moment. A classic. I caught the flu and in my delirium I dipped into many books. Some of them I did not finish. The fault, if there be any, is mine. I may or may not take them up again for I must leave on a long journey soon and they cannot come with me. So for the fallen, a salute:

I know many people, the wonderful Christopher Hitchins for one, who adore this book. I got about half way through. He is very good, but he doesn’t do what some other writers do for me, which is make themselves indispensable in my life. I will return…

I was enjoying this Booker Prize Winner of 2014, an Australian tale of sons, and fathers suffering on the Burma Railroad. And oh how they suffered, and oh how few came back, to the shame of the honour of the Japanese nation. The book contains important lessons about individualism against Fascism. The modern world has embraced the individual. That is the way forward. In many ways World War Two is a moral triumph of the individuals of a nation against the mass forces of insanity, led by single insane leaders. About half way through.

(Digital Original) A fun essay about his week on a Caribbean Cruise Liner for a glossy Magazine inspired me to read:

I shall not finish this before I leave on my journey, 150 of 1,000 paperback pages. A richly textured, extremely dense novel, I think his second, set in a tennis training camp for young men (such as the one he attended) but here in Phoenix, Arizona, it is intriguingly leading off in many other directions, most of which seem more promising and one hopes he will get on with it. Prolix, lengthy, and certainly editable, there are a further 75 pages of small print notes at the back. I think part of being a great novelist is choosing what to leave out. He couldn’t resist about 100 notes at the end of his essay. Is all this necessary one wonders? Yet there is no denying the scope of his genius and the power of his writing, amongst the cornucopia of drug references, which indicate the speed in which and probably on which, he wrote. Fascinating.

Excellent historical background to the lengthy and highly rewarding time Shakespeare was writing for James 1^st and not Elizabeth 1^st. Something we easily forget. Amongst the fears and threats of home terrorism of Catesby and Guy Fawkes and others in Warwickshire, very close to Shakespeare’s Stratford. I find his history better than his literary criticism. But certainly it is filling an essential gap in my knowledge of the greatest writer ever. I am not entirely sure what point he is making.

These are the books I chose to send to friends this year. Happy Reading in 2016! SLADE HOUSE  by David Mitchell SUBMISSION  by Michel Houellebecq THE FLEMISH HOUSE  by Georges Simenon THE LADY IN THE LAKE  by Raymond Chandler HEAT WAVE  by Penelope Lively LOW LIFE: THE SPECTATOR COLUMNS  by Jeremy Clarke GIDEON’S SPIES  by Gordon Thomas THE LADY FROM ZAGREB  by Philip Kerr DEAD IS BETTER  by Jo Perry

Sometimes reading a book one can feel ambivalent, unsure whether you’re totally enjoying it. I enjoy this writer and have enjoyed many of his books. He writes nicely and interestingly although anyone who starts a novel with a young man heading for the trenches, well no doubt how that’s going to turn out. With this book I was still ambivalent for almost two thirds, but I felt I needed a break as the year ended. Not sure why.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin And the Remaking of Israel. Really the end of the peace process… So sad for all concerned.

A wonderful very well written murder mystery. A great read and a great thriller. Alternative viewpoints from the various characters keep the suspense till the end. Perfectly accomplished and a great achievement. I loved it.

An excellent book by John Banville under his pseudonym. I don’t know how I managed to miss this one. Short, taut and almost perfect.

I was enjoying it, which surprised me, but he writes nicely and then it just seems to go on and on, and I realised that I believed neither in Pip, the female lead, or the asshole Andreas Wolf, the murderous East German spiritual leader of young women in Bolivia. Really? I tried and tried and then went, oh fuck it.

A very funny book that would have made my Xmas selections if I had read it sooner. Very amusingly called “the Catch 22 of dentistry” by Stephen King no less, his style and his subject reminds me of Joseph Heller, and indeed Philip Roth, which is high praise indeed. Very enjoyable and original.

Sometimes you can be reading a novel which starts well and just feel the air go out of it. I like William Boyd’s writing very much and have enjoyed almost all his books, though not his last one, the Bond job, and this at first excited me and raised my expectations because he strayed into W.G. Sebald territory by including pictures, but somehow it collapsed. I ceased to believe in it. Mainly I think because I didn’t feel he wrote a convincing woman. I felt he has used this shape before in a novel I really liked, (Any Human Heart) but that he was dealing unconvincingly in slightly clichéd areas. I am sorry for this and to have to say this as I think he is a very fine novelist.

Essays. And this led me to read…

A puzzling book, about memory and a good beginning about Stendhal with Napoleon, Kafka in Italy, Casanova in Venice and he himself going back to South Germany. I wrote in 2006 when I first read it “Sometimes great, sometimes banal. He seems unable to distinguish between the particular and the prosaic. Highs and dulls.” This was a first edition I picked up in Hatchards.

I very much enjoyed this beautiful short novel of the Swedish settlers in Hanover, Nebraska. Love and loss and lyrical writing. Great. Written in 1913.

A brilliant ghost story, a form I never would have imagined enjoying so much, but he has made it so modern and above all so believable that you are seduced into it and cannot put it down. I read it from cover to cover between JFK and LAX and was utterly pleased and thrilled. I have very much enjoyed his previous books and he is an astonishingly good writer. This I think will be a best seller for him. It’s chillingly good.

A very funny novel. Satirical and withering. And deadly topical. I read it just before the Paris attacks. He demolishes modern France a step at a time, through the eyes of his louche academic who studies Huysmans and teaches at the Sorbonne. Step by step he goes from the contemporary to the inevitable. It is both a warning and a great gag about the triumph of Muslim fundamentalism. I liked it a lot.