Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

This is a collection of several short stories and a novella, all inspired and in response to the writer’s father’s suicide when Vann was just a youngster. I thought it was autobiographical for a while, and I still think there is a lot of that in it, but the novella had me quite confused because it presents a different take on events. It is particularly powerful and often uncomfortable reading of the squirmy sort but certainly a book that ought not to be missed. Vann is a beautiful writer and his stories are so so sad, not in a sentimental way at all but to the depths of his soul. 4 stars

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham

Well, I was on holidays, wasn’t I? So I sat by the pool in Chiang Mai and read this silly, pompous thriller about a faked kidnap and murder. The best thing about it was that after I’d finished it I could leave it behind, making more room in my suitcase for shopping. 0 stars.

Collected Short Stories by F Scott Fitzgerald

I really don’t like F Scott Fitzgerald – I’ve tried and tried but his gloomy view of the world and the people in it just gets me down. I got through three of his stories before I decided to give in and return the book to the library.

The Cut Glass Bowl: an upwardly mobile young couple receive a cut glass bowl as a wedding gift; it almost becomes a malevolent character in their lives, being somehow connected with a series of tragic events that alter the course of their lives

May Day: an unpleasant story of Yale graduates and their drunk partying and returning soldiers and their drunk rioting – a real event I think – and the shallow people caught up in between.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: a fantasy tale where John Unger is invited to a fantastically rich classmate’s home to discover the sinister and immoral origins of the wealth and the evil his narcissistic hosts will enact to preserve it. It’s an anticapitalist tale indeed.

Solar by Ian McEwan

It’s interesting that a writer can choose such an unpleasant protagonist and yet have his reader so compellingly drawn into the narrative of this character’s life.

Solar is about a physicist, Michael Beard, a brilliant, womanising, cheating liar who nevertheless has a certain smarmy and superficial charm about him that initially draws people in.

The story charts the course of more than a twenty years, as he navigates his relationships with wives and lovers while developing new solar power technologies.

Like most of McEwan’s books, Solar is uncomfortable, squirmy reading. He is an acute observer of the everyday details of life and he uses them to build an excruciating picture of this awful man and his behaviour.

I think McEwan is a genius. He focuses on moments in people’s lives that are at the least uncomfortable and often very threatening – obsession, home invasion, suicide, lies and betrayals – and puts them under a sort of literary microscope using characters we all recognise from our own lives. I loved Solar.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

What a joy to have time to reread things. I can‘t actually remember when I did read this book first but the rereading was quite wonderful.

This story of the trial of a black man for the rape of a white girl is told through the innocent eyes of young Scout, daughter of Atticus Finch, the lawyer who is defending the man. Of course it is much more than this, indeed a portrait of southern American society in the 1930s from the ignorant ‘white trash’ families through to the old plantation families of the south with the black population caught somewhere in between.

You could write a thesis – and I’m sure it’s been written many times over – about what Harper Lee is saying in this book and I’m not even going to try to go into it here other than to say that essentially it is a story about being human, about being compassionate, and about the struggle that young people face when they are faced with the ugliness of people’s minds. Five stars, of course

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

This is an odd book, with an interesting structure and uncomfortable characters. It’s about a literary minded woman, Susan, whose ex husband of 25 years sends her a manuscript for criticism. We read the story – a gruesome thriller – along with her and she critiques it. Inevitably parts of her own life story – the marriage and divorce from the writer, her problems with her second husband and her failure to realise her own literary potential – unfold along with her musings about the thriller.

The thriller is OK for the first part but becomes quite ridiculous towards the end. The characters in the thriller are unlikeable and thin, of course, given the abbreviated length of it. But maybe that's OK. It's only a manuscript after all.

The second story is of course more interesting but I felt it never really developed and that Susan’s musings were obscure. Did the first husband write this thriller to show her he could indeed become a writer? Did he intend to create some sort of nasty allegory of their marriage? I might be a bit thick, but I really missed the point of the whole thing. 3 stars for the idea.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

There has to be a name for this genre – beach book perhaps? It’s a page turner allright, the story of the lives of the ‘help’ (black maids) in the 1960s era in Mississippi. It’s told from the point of view of two black women and a white woman and I think there has been some discussion about how authentic their voices are. I wouldn’t know but I did find the characters all a little too good to be true. The white woman, Skeeter, really runs the story and I wonder whether Stockett isn’t perhaps just exploiting the history of the black underclass to frame up a nifty and politically titillating novel. Dunno.

Essentially, while it raises those black rights issues, it does so in an Anita Shreve, Anne Tyler, Bryce Courtney second tier verging-on-chick-lit type of way that includes all those relationship issues – the love interests, the miscarriages, the drinking problems, shocking injustices visited on the underclass – that so absorb writers like these. Books like this always leave me feeling like I just wasted a whole lot of hours on something that really ought to have been serialised in the Womens Weekly. Still, not-quite-chick-lit is like a bag of jelly snakes: I can’t stop until I’ve finished the whole lot and then I wonder why I stuffed myself with a bag of sugary sweet gummy stuff that does nothing to improve my health or state of mind! So read it because it’s compelling but beware. 2 ½ stars.