The Magicians by Lev Grossman

People, unspecified because I can’t remember who but nevertheless people I must respect because I listened to them, raved about this book. In fact they recommended the whole trilogy. So I was nearly going to buy it but got it from the library, just in case it wasn’t worth the investment. It WASN’T! Poorly written, blatantly derivative – at times I didn’t know whether I was in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe or Harry Potter or The Hobbit and he even has a bloody QUESTING BEAST straight from TJ White’s Once and Future King in there – and just plain tedious. I ploughed on and on through this book, skimming great chunks of it, just to see it through. But really I don’t know why I bothered. It’s clearly aimed at the adolescent market, with all its clumsy attempts at sexual allusion and doing drugs and getting drunk and the difficulties with relationships between this group of schoolies. Maybe Grossman thought he was channeling Donna Tartt? Anyway, he’s making a fortune because it obviously appeals to someone. Just not me.

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy’s Son by Mark Colvin

What an interesting life Mark Colvin led. There’s a little about his father but no real detail, probably unsurprisingly when you think about it. The rest of the book details his travel and reporting on various places around the world. It was interesting reading about Moscow in the seventies and about political crises in other parts of the world that I remember from the time. The depth of course is not there, because of lack of space, but from time to time Colvin in extremely prescient in his comments – for example when he talked about the potential for a power vacuum should Saddam Hussein fall, which is of course what happened and we all know what filled it.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

My second book about spies in a couple of months – must be something going on. This one was a fascinating collection of memoirs and family snippets covering Le Carre’s career as a spy and later as a novelist. I absolutely lapped it up. It was full of veiled detail about spies he knew and diplomats he met and worked with, as well as a lot of detail about the workings of the post WWII government in Germany, which remained full of Nazis who had changed their spots. He talks at length about his conman father, who sounds like a combination of a complete bastard and an utter charmer, the sort of personality they make movies about. It’s not written in chapters but in sections, some as short as a few lines and others continuing over twenty or more pages, so it’s ideal to pick up and put down. Neither is it chronological, which also makes it accessible for the haphazard reader. And of course his writing is superb. I now want to go back and reread all his fiction!