The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

I must have been a genius as a kid - evidence that brains degrade with time - because I read this book as a youngster. I found it tougher going as an adult. It's a morality tale of the first order, unsurprising of course given its age. Tom the chimney sweep falls into the river and becomes a water baby, with a wonderful little frill of gills round his neck. He has adventures, learns to be kind to others and finally meets up again with Ellie, the white lady whose chimney he had been cleaning when he was frightened and ran away to fall in the river. Seeking to please her he takes on one last challenge, to find and forgive Grimes his master. He does and receives his heavenly reward – or something like that - Sundays in paradise, which seems to mean returning to earth. It's interesting from a historical perspective, the values children were taught, and so forth. For my money the best thing about it was the gills - what I wouldn't give for a set of those pretty frilly things round my neck!

The Infinities by John Banville

This was so hard to read because I am glutton for narrative and this was slow, slow, slow. But beautiful. It’s the day in the life of a family where the father is dying from a stroke and they all gather, along with the playful but wicked gods. You get to see inside the minds of all the people and gradually their secret thoughts, their trials, their fears all unfold. They are petty and small but exactly the sorts of things we all live with, no matter how grand and important we are. Almost stream of consciousness really. Zeus pops into human form and bonks the beautiful daughter in law, Pan interferes and has done since the beginning, and Hermes also pretends to be a human being and arranges a marriage. But it is languorous, not fast and funny. Some reviewers claim it was a pretentious book and perhaps that's so. But can you ever get past Banville's language? 31/2 stars.

Smoke in the Room by Emily Maguire

I liked Emily Maguire's Pornstars and Princesses treatise on feminism. This though is fiction and it's dark. A story about a young girl with depression and suicidal tendencies. The book charts her progress but I don’t know. It’s quite realistic and so is depressing in itself you don’t feel uplifted or positive for this kid. 2 stars

Pompeii by Robert Harris

This was a sort of thriller about an aquarius, or water engineer in charge of the aqueducts and water supplies in Rome. It had a bit of a plot about a disappeared aquarius who had been taking bribes to provide cheap water to Pompeii and make the bad guy rich, but had realised an eruption was going to take place and had been caught by the sulphur and died. The young aquarius has to find the problem (caused by preliminary earthquakes as it turns out) and he discovers the corruption as part of that. Most of the book is detailed description of the eruption itself and as such is a bit dull unless you’re a vulcanologist. The aquarius escapes by going down an aquifer with the bad guy’s beautiful daughter. Ho hum. 1 1/2 stars

Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham

This is the story of Beryl aka Buzz, a rock star PR person, who gets sidelined into World Music as she gets older and her business is sold. She goes on tour with a bunch of Bulgarian singing grannies, and of course life changes and she falls in love with them blah blah blah ... It has charm though, a lot because of the funny mispronunciations they make, but also because of the characters and their homespun philosophy. It’s not great literature but it’s entertaining enough. 2 stars

In the Kitchen by Monica Ali

This is the story of Gabriel Lightfoot, a chef working in a big London hotel. He is planning to open a restaurant with a businessman and a politician and to marry his girlfriend Charlie. Then he meets an illegal immigrant Lena and takes her into his home and his life begins to unravel. He discovers an illegal employment ring for migrants and tries to bust it. He has a nervous breakdown really and gives up on his job, his restaurants etc. It was a dark story and the characters were pretty awful but the detail of Ali’s observation is incredible.. 3 stars

Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow

This is the fictionalised true story of the Collyer brothers, hoarders and eccentrics, who were finally found dead in their Harlem brownstone, Langley when a booby trap fell on him and Homer from starvation. It’s a weird and amazing story, sad, but kind of nice with the wistful voice of Homer charting the years. 3 1/2 stars

Corduroy Mansion by Alexander McCall Smith

This is a lovely book, full of McCall Smith gentle wit and humour, wry observation and quirky characters. As usual nothing is resolved but the not-getting there is wonderful. It is about the lives of several people who live in Corduroy Mansions or thereabouts – William the wine shop owner, Marcia his would be lover, the girls in the flat downstairs, a politician called Oedipus and his mother and her brother and his girlfriend and her new lover. It’s a bit disjointed, almost unfinished, like a slice of life rather than a novel, or if it is novel, it’s unfinished. But I enjoyed it all the same. 3 stars

A Life Like Other People's by Alan Bennet

Oh how I love Alan Bennet. This is Alan Bennet’s family biography, from his grandfather who killed himself through his father and mother, who suffered from depression and finally died of Alzheimers. It’s a bravely honest account of his feelings. He talks about his aunties Kathleen and Myra, one dead of dementia as well and the other of pneumonia, and their weird marriages, one to an Australian man. I can hear his voice telling this story and it’s a fantastic insight into the British working classes, with all their pretensions and limitations. There's a kind of resigned sadness about the past and the limits placed on people's lives and an awareness of their suffering that runs through it. He has such a strong voice. 4 1/2 stars

We Are All Made of Glue by Monica Lewycka

At first I thought this book was going to be too chick-litty for me but it won me over. The woman in it, Georgie, is actually very authentic and the writer has combined her with a cast of eccentric Jewish and Palestinian characters, some sleazy real estate agents, do-gooder social workers and a gay workmate thrown in to entertaining, if stereotypical, effect. It’s the story of Naomi Shapiro an old bag lady type who is at risk of being forced out of her old home. Georgie uncovers the story of her life and a whole heap of other people get involved and of course everybody falls in love and lives happily ever after. Good for reading in the bath because it has lots of froth and bubble. 2 1/2 stars

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

It has been years since I have read a book in one sitting but this one was incredible. What a writer. It is the story of a woman rescued from a mental hospital after 61 years incarceration. The story of how it happened is pieced together through the broken memories of the Alzheimers afflicted sister Kitty, the internal voice of Esme herself and through her young relative Iris. Esme has been put away because she is uncontrollable – these days we'd delight in her as a girl with spirit and imagination. Roll on the age of the feminists. It’s described by the Times as ‘almost ridiculously pleasurable …shocking, heartbreaking and fascinating’ and I couldn’t agree more. Wow, wow, wow. 5 star reading.

The Untouchable by John Banville

The diary/memoir of a spy of the between the wars Cambridge school, cousin of the Queen, son of a bishop, homosexual, art critic and professional. He has been unmasked and reflects on his life. Banville likes these slower, introspective novels and the approach certainly gives him the opportunity to ponder on the moment without being drive to distraction by a racing plot. Mind you there is plenty to keep the pages turning in this lovely book. The writing is exquisite, no other word for it. Glorious. 4 1/2 stars

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

There are many reserves out at the library on this book and I really don’t know why except that it’s about vampires perhaps. It’s very, very long and very, very wordy. It has three or four versions of the narrative all mixed up – a bit like a history research project with lots of original sources used to make the case. But there’s nothing elegant about it. I don’t know why I bothered finishing it actually except for sheer orneryness – it’s about a group of people who mysteriously obtain books with a dragon in them and then when they do some research on vampires get warned off because horrible things happen to people near them. Some, inevitably, get sucked into the vampire’s net. Rubbish really. 1 star.

Sovereign by CJ Sansom

This was fun for a holiday read on the beach - a sort of murder mystery political thriller set in Tudor times. It revolves around the possible fact that Henry V11 was the bastard son of Cecily Neville, (married to the Duke of something), and an archer from Kent. She actually admitted this when her third son Richard III seized the throne – whether she was trying to muster support for his claim or not is uncertain I guess and I haven’t read much about it. The ‘real’ king would then be an Australian sheep farmer, King Michael I! Anyway it was fun and well enough researched to give you a bit of insight into what life must have been like at that time. (I always though Henry VIII must have been a bit of a bastard and all those old kings a pack of violent psychopaths.) 2 stars

Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

Another in the line of gossipy portraits of people living in an apartment building in Edinburgh. He’s such an astute observer and has in this one an aggressively trendy mother, who is hothousing her little kid; a smoothly over confident entrepreneurial type, an earth mother anthropologist type and so forth. They were more a series of people portraits, often only tenuously linked, than a novel with a plot, conflict and any kind of resolution. But what characterisation! 2 1/2 stars

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

An American woman escaping a messy divorce and heart breaking love affair decides to spend a year travelling. This is the chronicle of that year in Italy, an Indian ashram and Ubud in Bali. Much as I am wary of these ‘year in’ books, she’s a great writer and her observations about Italy were so close to my own that I felt I could have written what she said. She’s incredibly open and honest about her feelings, able to laugh at herself and is in fact quite a likeable character. Read it for the Italian section even if the hippy new age feel of the ashram and Ubud sections is going to drive you crazy. 3 stars.