The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

Nine hundred odd pages - wow! I'd read this before, when I was much younger, and had seen the television adaptation. But it still has great power, the horror of being stuck in a loveless marriage, or worse in fact, one where you are actively repelled by the man you're married to. And that period where a woman is the property of the man, with no more power than a child. We've all been watching Downton Abbey, set in the same period, but really there is no comparison. One is romanticised and forgiving, set amidst perpetually sunny rose gardens, while the Galsworthy is incisive, shrinking from nothing. I enjoyed reading the saga of the beautiful Irene, the breakaway Young Jolyon, the oily Soames and his conniving, property obsessed relatives. It helps me see where all those middle-class attitudes about hard work and saving come from! It's also interesting to see how bad decisions and sadness in one generation can pass down a family and affect the future generations. It's a sort of English version of Anna Karenina, both in sentiment and length.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I really wish I hadn’t seen the film of this book even though it was so many years ago. The incredible force that is Maggie Smith still pervades the book, which I’m re-reading for the NSW Art Gallery lecture series on at the moment. I like reading it as a mature person though as it puts the foolishness of Miss Brodie into perspective. What a character. And of course it really is all about her, with the six girls and the drawing and music masters, all lightly drawn, orbiting her like the sun. Everybody is a bit in love with Miss Brodie, and more than a few them get burned by the heat. She really is a very dangerous woman when let loose on a bunch of impressionable children. This is a one of those delightful pieces of writing where the characters and the story are teased out in the retelling, and although it all seems quite genteel when you read it, it’s really a story about sex and lust and procurement and manipulation. One thing I really enjoyed abut her character is that she is a ringer for a friend I had once, a similarly dangerous person who is utterly convinced and religiously fanatical about her beliefs. I hear her speaking every time Miss Brodie opens her mouth to make one more confident pronouncement. Isn’t that great writing when a character is so authentic?

A Room With a View by EM Forster

I’d seen the film, listened to the music, but never read the book. It’s charming, as the young and inexperienced but potentially ‘wonderful’ heroine Lucy Honeychurch discovers herself. She and her cousin Charlotte spend time in a pensione in Florence and meet up with a group of people who become part of their lives – George and Mr Emerson, Mr Beebe the clergyman, Miss Larkin the novelist – and when Lucy returns home and becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, all of these characters play an important part in what happens next. It’s a story about manners and customs and pretensions, beautifully written, with some period moralizing, but with a sort of wonderful, almost languid rhythm that carries you along with the flow of the story.

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.