The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

What awful characters, not one among them you can sympathise with and like. This is an incestuous tale of a sordid little village and the ugly spirited people who live there, all brawling and conniving over a vacancy on the local council and the consequent vote in the removal from their jurisdiction of a low class housing estate. Rowling writes in an easy flow but I’m not sure this story was worth the effort.

Questions of Travel by Michelle Kretser

Miles Franklin award winner this year – but why? This is a long winded book, told from the points of view of Laura, a drab writer of travel material, and Ravi, a refugee from Sri Lanka. Nothing much seems to happen and I spent a lot of the time reading this book wondering what was the point of it. Indeed I found it quite depressing, two hopeless miserable people battling their way through life and never really communicating with anyone else. The writing is, however, often excellent and there is some joy in that. But it wasn’t enough to save this book and I finished it with relief. As for the ending ….. for goodness sake. The woman at the bookshop told me she had read part of it but not finished it, couldn't remember why she hadn't, but it was supposed to be a great read. I should have folowed my instincts there!

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

The blurb describes the narrator of this book as a cross between Holly Golightly and Dorothy Parker. And it is a delight. Everything about it is great: the writing – stunning, arresting, causing you to stop and reread whole paragraphs just for the sheer pleasure of the language; the characters: intensely likeable, fascinating and complex; the story – unusual and intriguing. And yet it is a quick light read. It’s set in New York in the 1930s and tells the story of two girls, Katey Kontent from a working class Russian immigrant family and Evie Ross, from a wealthy mid western family, who try to make their way in the world. They meet Tinkey Grey, a wealthy businessman, and their lives change. This would be a great book for people who belong to book clubs, or anyone for that matter.

Stranger in the Forest by Eric Hansen, October 2013

This is an older book, written in the 1980s, detailing Hansen’s trip across Borneo accompanied by local guides. He explored parts of the country that were completely unknown to white people and spent a lot of time in camps and long houses with various local tribes. I read it while I was travelling in Borneo. His observations are interesting though a bit dated and of course, very personal. So I’m not sure how accurate they are – though this is a book full of personal experience and opinion and doesn’t purport to be a text. What shocked me was how much has changed in Borneo since he was there: the jungle is disappearing daily, sacrificed to logging, mining and palm oil plantations. It is extremely likely that most of this rainforest will have disappeared by the end of the decade and the extensive range of animals, plants and birds, representing one of the most diverse populations in the world, will be extinct.

Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry

This is Stephen Fry’s wonderful autobiography, covering the first twenty years of his life with excursions into philosophy and everything else you can imagine. He is almost excruciatingly honest about his experiences and his feelings, and the sense that here is an essentially humble man comes through even though he is absolutely frank about what a genius he is. It’s not a light, fun read, but well worth the effort.

In One Person by John Irving

ANOTHER fantastic read from John Irving. One of the things I love about Irving are his epic family tales (Until I Find You for example) where an emotionally isolated young man seeks to know himself and his family. There’s a real lost father theme and also a close male-female relationship that borders and sometimes crosses over into the sexual but is really about knowing and accepting one another. And the characters are always extreme, bizarre in many cases, wonderfully eccentric. Dig a little deeper and you find you do actually know people like them I think. This book is about Billy/Bill/William who is bisexual. He struggles with his sexual identity all through school and early adulthood, trying to make sense of who he is against the backdrop of homophobia (and everything else of a ‘different’ sexual nature-phobia) of the 70s, 70s and on. I loved this book because it charts Billy’s discovery of himself and growth into confidence and self-acceptance with humour, tenderness and intelligence. It’s hard to imagine how a straight man, as I believe Irving is, could have put himself so realistically into this first person narrative.

Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall-Smith

This novella is too elegant. It is a series of confessions about love made by four passengers in a compartment in a train on the way from Edinburgh to London. There is a long winded explanation about love and confession at the beginning but honestly it just didn’t do it for me. I thought it was more banal than anything else. The subtlety of it, and I’m sure other people will find it subtle, was lost on me.