SWANN’S
WAY, Marcel Proust, 1913 heavy going; acute;
far too wordy; unique
THE
CORRECTIONS, Jonathan Franzen, 2001 intelligent,
funny, dark, cheering, depressing, fresh, humane
BOB
DYLAN DREAM: My Life With Bob, Roy Kelly, 2015
touching, beautiful, intelligent memoir of an ordinary life roughly
contemporary with mine & Dylan’s
EMOTIONALLY
WEIRD, Kate Atkinson, 2000 sometimes very
funny, sometimes too silly (improbability not counteracted by enough
comic success), but the main character is likeable & it’s the
only postmodern novel I’ve read that works, so that it ends up
clever rather than irritatingly clever-clever
VANITY
FAIR:A Novel Without a Hero, William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847-8
fascinating
in its mix of modernity - pioneering C19 realism & an
anti-heroine yet using C18 literary devices (which have a touch of
postmodernism, we’d feel now); a sweeping satire on money, the
class system and snobbery (a word he coined)... BUT! he’s not as
deep or heartfelt as Dickens and his characters are mostly less vivid
DOWNHILL
ALL THE WAY, Leonard Woolf, 1967 upper/upper-middle
class man of letters and politics, Virginia’s husband, writing this
in his 80s; clear and conscientious prose from a very fair-minded man
acutely aware of both others’ even greater privilege and the great
majority’s lack of it; a real socialist with servants
FUGITIVE
PIECES, Anne Michaels, 1997 irksomely opaque
start but opens into one of the most articulately heartfelt,
intelligent, beautiful & distinctive of books
THE
THUNDERBOLT KID, The Life & Times of, Bill Bryson, 2003
auto-Bryson with clunky research padding out a very superficial account of his upbringing
THE
LIE, Helen Dunmore, 2014 moving and
vivid on rural Cornwall life in 1920 & on
the horrors of WWI trench warfare and its afterlife in the narrator’s
mind; an intelligent novel yet comfortingly English & traditional
THE
INVENTION OF WINGS, Sue Monk Kidd, 2014 potboiler
with a heart, but with none of the originality of "The Secret Life of Bees"
FLUSH,
Virginia Woolf, 1933 rather good: her language is very
alive and without showiness
SLANG
OF HANDS, Bernhard Widder, 2009 Austrian poems
about northern UK; ok
JOY
IN THE MORNING, Betty Smith, 1963 sister of the
more famous “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”; had to give up on it. Too
cute, sprightly, implausible & 1950s-sordid: all virginity &
sweet-little-woman & manly cigarettes & plucky struggle
THE
JOKE, Milan Kundera, 1967 [1992 translation] gloom-inducing
portrait of mid-C20 Czechoslovakia & by extension general Eastern
European gloom; it may linger, but it was sententious, with terrible
attitudes to women, and mostly a pain in the arse to read
THE
MOONSTONE, Wilkie Collins, 1868 seldom resorts
to dodgy melodrama and overall a work of near-genius; pioneering
detective novel, and for the first half, very funny thanks to a
captivating narrator figure, old servant Betteredge
NOBODY
MOVE, Denis Johnson, 2009 an indifferent
contemporary Chandler, or perhaps a pale imitation of Cormac McCarthy
ANGEL,
Elizabeth Taylor, 1957 quiet, superior
page-turner about the power of vanity & self-deception, spanning
a lifetime; it deepens into pathos as it goes
THE
MILL ON THE FLOSS, George Eliot, 1860 tremendous,
and so substantial. Early
on, its pastorality (if that’s a word) strongly prefigures Hardy;
but Maggie Tulliver the child and Maggie the adult seem too much like
different people, which is its real flaw
TO
THE LIGHTHOUSE, Virginia Woolf, 1927 lapidary,
powerful
modernism yet with strongly drawn
characters and their vivid interaction (with the Chapter17 dinner party as fine as any I know in literature); lively, intensive prose, great
clarity and wit. A triumph
KNOTS
AND CROSSES, Ian Rankin, 1987 first
Rebus novel; surprisingly badly written; every character a cliché
with a quirk; less than thrilling story; pallid suspense
EARTH,
Emile Zola, 1887 good C19 solidity,
vivid characters & uncompromising portrait of wretched French
peasant life, in which degradation cheats just desserts
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, Cormac McCarthy, 2005
addictive, violent, very modern;
sometimes so stripped-down you can't work out what's happening; but
always saved by its brilliant dialogue
A
SEASON IN SINJI, J.L. Carr, 1967 a very
English & appealing personality well rendered, but lacking either
some essential depth or else some rapier thrust of asperity
CIRCLES
IN A FOREST, Dalene Matthee, 1984 it took
me 100 pages to like this, the first of her four "forest novels"
(too much on poor-noble-Afrikaans-woodcutters) but it became an
intensely detailed imaginative achievement and thoroughly absorbing
story
MURDER
ON A SUMMER'S DAY, Frances Brody, 2013 a
1924 setting allows for massive snobbery & conveniently primitive
evidence standards, but it's also a setting that recalls the English
atmosphere still prevalent in my 1950s childhood, and it's a satisfyingly lengthy read & a satisfyingly Christiesque trad
detective story
BERTOLT
BRECHT: A Literary Life, Stephen Parker, 2014 encyclopaedic
uber-detail, and using newly available post-Cold War archives, sewn
into a readable, attentive narrative... but I had to give it up on
realising, after long immersion in his adolescent tics, maladies &
hypochondria, that I still have absolutely no interest in Brecht or
his work
DYING
IN THE WOOL, Frances Brody, 2009 the first in
the series (I was given a set as a present); very readable but an arch, over-confident
heroine-narrator sorting out shorthand characters
CHARLES
DARWIN: VOYAGING, Janet Browne, 1995 The
first of her 2-volume biography. I've never read a better non-fiction
book in my life (except, possibly, 'The Road To Xanadu: A Study in the
Ways of the Imagination' by John Livingston Lowes, 1927, about Coleridge & his notebooks)
GONE
GIRL, Gillian Flynn, 2012 Exceptionally
sharp-minded (in a very American way), electrifying page-turner,
dazzlingly well plotted; a let-down ending, though not everyone will think so
MOBY-DICK,
Herman Melville, 1851 lively start, then
tediously garrulous for several hundred pages; a hard, grim voyage
for this reader, which surprised and disappointed him
CHARLES
DARWIN: THE POWER OF PLACE, Janet Browne, 2002
The second volume: a book I'm so grateful to have read and sorry
to have finished
FLIGHT
BEHAVIOUR, Barbara Kingsolver, 2012
Terrific; strong, convincingly detailed and sympathetic portrait of
today's deprived, Appalachian rural life
SIGNS
FOR LOST CHILDREN, Sarah Moss, 2015 half
the book extremely
gruelling, the other half boring; a
powerful writer but with such talent, why do this? And the story's
resolution isn't one, because the man in it never exists
MIKE
AND PSMITH, P G Wodehouse, 1953 light
jollity there's no point objecting to on political/class-snobbery
grounds; a much needed balm after "Signs for Lost Children"
THE
LADYBIRD BOOK OF THE HIPSTER, 2015 very funny
THE
DOG: A LADYBIRD BOOK, 2016 even funnier:
perfect Christmas trivia
________
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