The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

“The international best selling sensation”. Also the reason I haven’t put anything on my blog for a month or more. I cannot finish this book. It is sitting half read, blocking me from getting into anything else, and driving me crazy. I do so hate abandoning books. I really wish someone would tell me what all the fuss is about with this book. It’s about Allan Karlsson who escapes from an old people’s home on his hundredth birthday and through a series of slapstick mishaps manages to rip off some drug dealers. He teams up with a group of people and they go on the run with dealers and cops in hot pursuit. Interspersed with all this are tales of Allan’s youth and if you think the contemporary story was ridiculous, wait till you read these flashbacks. I actually find this book insulting. It’s like a cartoon but in words, simplistic characters, banal language, entirely focused on the narrative ( and then… and then…and then…) and containing nothing to engage with the reader. Actually a better description comes to mind: it’s like naïve art – Grandma Moses in prose.

Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene

I launched into this book, which I should have read many years ago but didn’t, expecting something of the Aunty Mame of Aunt Julia (and the Scriptwriter) ilk. But this aunt is a seriously naughty woman. There’s no indulgent smile as you watch her get up to all manner of really wicked deeds: she is indeed utterly selfish, unrepentant and single mindedly bad. Despite all that I did like her and I also liked her nephew, the stitched-up retired and boring bank manager and narrator, who is in the throes of finding himself through the good offices of Aunt Agatha. Grahame Green is a ‘proper’ writer so there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in his language and especially in his wit. And this book is witty, a terrific satire of English life in the vein of Mitford and Huxley.

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

What an utterly delightful book. I picked it up on the bookshelf of our apartment book exchange (recently installed in the common garage) and found myself compelled by its charm. Barbara Trapido is an accomplished writer, who knows her literature and her music and her language, so it’s a genuine pleasure to read, quite apart from the story. The narrative verges guiltily on the chick-lit, but avoids it because it has a true voice. It is the story of Katherine, a rather displaced young woman leaving school and starting at university, who becomes friends with her professor’s family. It covers about ten or fifteen years of her life, as she matures, works her way through relationships and losses and finally, of course finds happiness. This book won the Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction. I’m going out to find more Trapido books now as they are a light enough read to put on the detestable Kindle for my three months of travelling this year.

Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

It took me ages to read this book because I wanted to remember all the detail, which of course I haven’t. It is too chock a block full! Abundance is a great antidote to the pessimism that grips my world. Its subtitle is ‘The future is better than you think’. His chief premise is that if you fix basic needs like water and food and health, then you fix problems like overpopulation and scarcity. And this can all be done through technology and technophilanthropists. The book begins with a fascinating discussion of perspective, which challenges our default position of negativity. I loved this part because it told me to wake up and get a grip. There follows a lot of fascinating detail about the problems facing the world and the technological solutions that are available and becoming available to resolve them, cheaply, simply, quickly. I loved the philosophical bent of this book too – it’s almost like a self help book on the power of positive thinking but with good reason: it’s the young and brave who solve the problems because they have unfailing belief in themselves and their ability to do it. I bought this book for several friends at Christmas. Enough said.

All That I Am by Anna Funder

Wow. I loved Stasiland and I loved this book too. I love the way Funder gets underneath a story and although it is based on truth manages to make it mysterious and compelling reading. This is the story of a cohort of largely Jewish playwrights, journalists and political activists who were exiled to Britain and France before the war and worked against Hitler’s regime from there. It is told by Ruth, who was a member of the upper class Jewish elite and Toller, a writer and activist. Central to both their lives is Dora, their cousin and lover respectively, a star around which the story revolves. It is obvious from the moment you open the book that Dora is dead, but what takes a while to unfold is that the story is told in two different time frames: during the thirties leading up to the second world war, and the present, when Ruth lives in Australia. What was really moving about this book is the enduring presence of Dora in Ruth’s life, some seventy years into the future.

The Monkeys Mask by Dorothy Porter

An astonishing book really, a thriller starring a gritty, vulnerable, tough lesbian detective, and written in compelling verse. It reminded me of the old Beowulf type epic tales, originally told and retold in ancient halls and finally written down.

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

I had a lot of trouble with this book which is about a Nigerian refugee who escapes from detention and tracks down the English couple who witnessed the incident that led to her flight. This would be a good book to read if you had little understanding of the refugee situation. But I found the book quite depressing. The reviewers on the cover described it as profound and provocative, and one even said it was seriously funny, but I found it grim, predictable and exhausting.