Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this book. It’s a sweet book, about a sensitive soul on a mission to distract himself from his miseries. Arthur Less is an aging gay writer, whose novels are not show stoppers but who is continuing to try. His lover of nine years has left him to marry another man. He is about to turn fifty. So he escapes on an around the world journey that takes him places like Milan and Paris, Morocco and Mexico, Germany and Japan. It’s a charming book, and a sweet love story. It has humour and grace, and the character of Arthur Less is beautifully observed. There’s tongue in cheek humour, as subtle as it is clever, and lovely, lovely language and metaphor.

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell

The most frustrating thing about books like this is that I forget most of what I’ve read almost as soon as I have finished the chapter. And this wonderful book is packed with fascinating details that I do so much want to remember! Jack Hartnell is an art historian so here he is writing about medieval bodies as the people themselves saw them and lived in them, and how we can see evidence of this in the contemporary art of the times. The book is divided into chapters about the various areas of the body, such as head, feet, stomach and so forth. Each chapter contains wonderful anecdotes (Jack Hartnell understands the importance of story telling to capture an audience), medical opinions and treatments of the time, and spin offs – in the chapter about feet for example, we look at travel and cartography. I enjoyed some aspects of this book so much that I sent emails to long suffering friends about characters like Roland the Farter, a member of Henry II’s court, employed for his skills in jumping, whistling and farting all at the same time. Because this is fundamentally a serious book though, and absolutely packed with information, it requires some concentration to read. Not for the beach but definitely for a rainy day on the couch!

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr

This is such a lovely book. Anthony Doerr writes about the year he spent in Rome with his wife Shauna and baby twins Henry and Owen in 2004. On the day the twins were born, he received a one year fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, which involved moving the family there and living and writing there. So what he ends up writing, three years later once all that experience has had time to mature, is this story of his year in Rome. For someone who knows Rome well, has lived in Italy herself for a year and returned over and over and over again, this is like reliving the experience all over again. It’s not a travelogue, but rather a quiet and detailed observation of daily life in Rome throughout the year, the small sights, sounds and tastes of the city. With two tiny babies in a pretty basic rented apartment, no car and a book to write, Doerr and his wife are not tourists per se, but genuine visitors absorbing the life of the city. Quite simply, it made me very, very homesick for a city I love. And I haven’t even mentioned the writing, which is quite simply gorgeous. Doerr’s language is beautiful and his observations thoughtful. This is a lovely book.