Quantico by Greg Beard

I read this thriller about biological warfare because the writer was someone PW Singer talked about in his book Wired for War. According to Singer books like this one are on reading list in military training programs, and the military sometimes approaches manufacturers and researchers with such sci fi concepts as appear in them requesting them to develop real life versions. So that was fascinating. The story itself is about a middle east conflict, American terrorists, whacko cults and all sorts of other stuff and is a page turner of sorts.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Wow, wow, wow. What a great book. I loved it, from the moment it began to the moment it ended. I struggled between wanting to gulp the story down in great big hunks and wanting to revel in this writer’s wonderful language. I loved the structure, as the story is told from several points of view, each of which overlaps a little with another and contributes to the wonderful depth of character that he creates. I loved the characters who weren’t goody goody people, who were often not particularly likeable but not awful, just real – and sometimes turned out to be better than you thought was going to be possible. I loved the way Franzen sticks it up political correctness and not-so-correctness, the behaviour of powerful people in the USA (and beyond probably), the mindlessness of the masses, the selfishness of people – all that. I loved The Corrections and I think this one is even better, or at least as good. 5 stars.

The Family Law by Benjamin Law

Benjamin Law is a witty young columnist. These stories are interconnected tales of his life and his whacky Chinese family as he grew up on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. They are funny and warm stories, with some great character development. The standout character is his mother Jenny, a foul mouthed eccentric who embodies all those crazy immigrant mothers you read about from Portnoy right through. This is a terrific holiday read.

Inheritance by Nicholas Shakespeare

It’s unusual I think to have men writing these emotional journey books, but this one is quite good. It’s about a young rudderless bloke with limited prospects, who inherits a heap of money. The rest of the book is about how money doesn’t solve life’s problems and about his search for self etc etc. It’s not a bad holiday read. 3 stars.

Wired for War by PW Singer

This is an incredible book. It deals with every aspect of the arrival of robots at war: indeed it is subtitled The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. For lots of people I know it would be riveting reading because it is all about technologies of the imminent future. Singer talks about everything from the hardware to ethics, to legal rights of robots to roboticising people – one possibility is implanting a chip in a person’s brain so they can just download a book. I wished I’d had that for this book because the complexity and depth of information is such that I’ve already forgotten most of it, fascinating though it was. Singer’s style is readable and free flowing. I really recommend this book to people interested in science fiction, the future, technology and so forth.

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

Despite – or perhaps because of – this book’s notoriety I never got around to reading it when it came out. I’m glad of that now because it’s only with a little life experience that I think you can really appreciate the humour and the characters in this novel. Portnoy is so wonderfully angst ridden and sex obsessed, so Woody Allen in many of his film incarnations; Sophie Portnoy, his mother, is the gold standard Jewish mother, with a bloody good dash of all the controlling, anxiety ridden mothers you’ve ever met elsewhere as well. There were times when I could even see something of myself in her! Theo had trouble sticking with the book, largely because it’s a stream of consciousness monologue and short on obvious narrative, but there is in fact a strong story there as Portnoy pieces together the story of his life as part of his confession – did I just say that? – his conversation with his psychiatrist. And it’s funny, so full of irony and black humour, hysteria, wit and even moments of sheer slapstick. I loved the characters, Alex Portnoy and especially Sophie of course, and The Mouse, but also Portnoy’s long suffering dad with his constipation and resigned approach to his daily grind. It’s a great piece of writing. 4 1/2 stars.

Falling Angels by Tracey Chevalier

This is a soap opera set in the early 1900s and narrated by several different characters. It’s salacious in its way, with hidden moments of illicit sex around which the plot revolves. It’s the story of two middle class families living ‘proper’ lives, their children and the Highgate cemetery. It was entertaining enough but another book to be left behind at the end of the holidays. 2 stars.

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

As I might have said before, Margaret Atwood is among my favourite writers, except for her sci fi gloomy stuff. This collection of short stories is a gem. The same characters flit in and out of the stories so you gradually build up a picture of them and a relationship with them. And I got the sense that she was telling the same story from different points of view, a very clever use of the short story genre I think. These are elegant and subtle stories and show Atwood at her restrained best. 4 stars.

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.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

This is the second time I’ve read this book (getting ready to read his new book just launched) and it is one of the most powerful portraits of dysfunctional modern family life that anyone has ever written I think. Alfred, the father and emotionally brutal patriarch, is suffering from Parkinsons, and his wife Enid is not so valiantly trying to manage his condition. But, as the name of the novel suggests, his illness becomes the catalyst for all kinds of emotional corrections to take place amongst the family members – Chip the ne’er do well son, Gary the materialist, Denise the successful chef and of course Enid herself. The novel is rich in emotional detail and I’m sure everyone who reads it is going to recognise some uncomfortable personality or experience from their own lives. It homes in on people and their personalities with all the accuracy of a heat seeking missile. It’s uncomfortable, it’s funny, it’s shocking – it’s brilliant. 5 stars.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

What fun this book was. It’s written by an American so it’s clearly a romanticised version, an Americanised idea, of what a traditional British major living in a pretty English village in a house called Rose Cottage might be like. So it’s nonsense, but it’s charming nonsense.

Helen Simonson has allowed all her fantasies to run riot. The protagonist, Major Earnest Petttigrew, is almost exactly like my mother’s second husband, who would have lain down and died for the Queen and the British Empire – even though it no longer exists. The Major is pompous and correct, but of course his view is all underpinned by tough British standards of morality and tempered with a good dose of intelligence and wit.

As an established figure in the village, the Major thinks he has his life all sorted out – and he is indeed very comfortably resigned to an ordered old age (crikey he’s only 68!) and a gentle sort of contentment. But along comes a Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs Ali, who become the love interest in the book and sets everything upside down.

We know the plot – boy meets girls, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again – backwards, but Simonson has a lot of fun with it, even while gently introducing the problems that the mixing of cultures can present. She sticks it up the British ruling class, the deadly upper middle classes who run village committees, even the brash Americans, all with gay abandon.

This isn’t great literature but I don’t think it was ever intended to be: Simonson wrote this with her writing group after having put her career on hold to bring up the kids, so why not enjoy herself? I certainly did.

Deerhunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant

We went to hear Joe Bageant speak at Glebe Books last night and he is the real thing - a southerner, self-proclaimed 'redneck, white trash' come good. He left school at 16 - all working class kids were encouraged to do so by the school - joined the navy and then, on leaving, picked up a scholarship of some kind to study. He's been a journalist for forty years. He writes a lot of what I call the social outrage genre.

Deerhunting is about the poor working whites in America, people whose earning power diminishes as capitalism thrives, who are only the next pay away from losing their homes (which are worth less than they paid for them), who cannot afford health insurance and for whom a serious medical condition will spell bankruptcy. He explores why these people continue to support the Republicans, the role that religion plays in their worldview and the reasons they refuse to seek education and advancement if it means taking any 'handouts' from the state. It's a little repetitive but he's passionate about this - or passionate but resigned I should say.

Last night he spoke with an air of sad acceptance about the state of first world countries. He doesn't believe that things will change and he can see only doom and gloom for the working poor people who live in them. He says the USA will only see itself as achieving 'recovery' when it gets back to the same corrupt and out of control state it was in when it caused the GFC, which of course spells further disparity between rich and poor and further disaster.

One of the things he did mention was the role of television - Fox obviously - as the only source of information for these uneducated people. He says the television medium grooms people's emotions - it's Christmas so it's time to shop, it's football season so it's time to cheer, it's war so it's time to fly flags - and it just guides people through the seasons of their lives. There's something scifi about this concept: I'm sure I've come across this type of mind control in Blade Runner and in various novels. I'm just as sure it's happening in the press here in Australia, spectacularly in papers like The Telegraph, but also slightly more subtly in the broadsheets. And of course on TV, though I can't manage commercial television so have no exposure to it.
Anyway, it's interesting to read what Joe Bageant has to say. He lives in a second world country, Mexico, now and seems to have adopted the Buddhist approach of living a small life well, which while it doesn't deliver a big solution at least allows him to accept what he sees as the inevitable collapse with calm and grace.

The Other Family by Joanna Trollope

This must be the month for chick lit. I read a favourable review about this book in the SMH, saying that these types of books – can’t remember whether the reviewer called them second tier or mid-range or some other similar description – deserved greater respect and that this one was a goodie. Well, maybe. But really, there’s so much else worth reading and so little time and this is like a bookish version of Sex in the City or Friends. Trash really. It's about a bloke who dies and how his second family copes when he leaves something in his will to his first family, whom they’ve never met. The mothers of both these families are caricatures and really, really irritating. In fact all the bloody characters are caricatures and really, really irritating. Perhaps for a distracting train journey or when you’re sick with the flu and don’t want to concentrate…. 1 star

Roddy Parr by Peter Rose

This book was recommended by someone on the panel of the First Tuesday Book Club – Richard Flanagan perhaps? It’s about a young literary PhD grad who through a family friend ends up being absorbed into the world of one of the great literary families of Australia, as secretary, later friend, and biographer. The jacket is covered in accolades from people I respect, like Helen Garner, but somehow this book irritated me. To begin with, you get the sense that these fictional characters are real characters in the Oz literary world in disguise, which is perhaps why the folks at the book club were so keen on it – they may have recognised themselves or someone they knew. The whole thing is peppered with references to Sydney and Melbourne personalities and places, like Tony Bilson and Bill Henson and Patrick White and The Flower Drum, and somehow that annoyed the hell out of me too because they ended up being involved in the plot with White saying this, and Bilson saying that, again as if the writer is trying to pass this thing off as a piece of non fiction.
The story line - the unpacking of family secrets and development of relationships - is interesting enough but the characters don’t ring true. They keep saying awkward things that nobody says, like one woman talking about entertaining people to dinner and saying ‘I just give them a chop’. Now, who says that? It’s like something out of PG Wodehouse. And there’s lots more of this irritating lack of authenticity in the characters and the way they speak.
And finally the writing – OTT. This guy has ‘discovered’ literary language so his prose is full of dreadful metaphors and unwieldy language that just goes clunk at the bottom of the bucket. Nothing seems to live, not the characters and not the action. The main character Roddy is an onlooker, who reports, diarises, but barely lives the action. Contrived and awkward I think. 2 ½ stars.

House Rules by Jodie Picoult

Jodie Picoult is my guilty secret. She writes what I would term girly thrillers, with a lot less blood, violence and graphic sex and a lot more relationships and soul searching angst! This one is about a young man with Aspergers who is implicated in a murder but his condition prevents him from communicating what exactly happened. It takes a lot of pages to unravel I can tell you! I spent the best part of a day on the couch racing through it and as a thriller it was fairly absorbing. 3 ½ stars

The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst

The problem with books like this is that the moment you finish them, you’ve forgotten all the detail. This is a wonderful summary of history, which for me filled in a multitude of gaps and connected all the pieces together. There were so many ‘aha’ moments in this book for a person who hasn’t formally studied history, and possibly for someone who has as well. The book is a series of lectures by a history lecturer at La Trobe university in Melbourne, designed for first year students whom he thinks have studied too much Australian history and have no understanding of their place in ‘civilisation’. It’s a broad brush approach but it really provides the context that allows the rest of the detail to fall into place. It’s full of fascinating details and is one book I will be reading again and probably again. 5 stars.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Perhaps this isn’t the best thing to be reading on the second day of convalescence after the foot operation, when you’re a bit worn out by pain and over the adrenalin rush that sustains you through the event…. It’s a book about how a woman looks after her friend who is resisting dying of cancer. I read everything Helen Garner writes: I love her honesty, her sparse language, the way she goes to the heart of any matter no matter how uncomfortable or unpopular her position. This is supposed to be a novel but it is peppered with references to her life and her work, so I am assuming much of the experience is real. The friend is a superannuated hippie type, and reminds me incidentally of certain close friends from my past who were addicted to dancing under moonlight or any sort of whacky therapeutic practice that might provide a madcap alternative to research-based modern medicine. Anyway, I digress. The friend is trying an extreme and unproven treatment at a very dodgy clinic in Melbourne to cure her of cancer and to allow her to avoid facing the realities of the disease. The load she places on Garner is enormous and not willingly shouldered, really, although Garner loves her dearly. That’s what I mean about Garner’s honesty – who else would own up to not being up to the burden of care? It’s a very short novel, thank goodness, because it’s uncomfortable reading. It’s also not Garner’s best because I think it gets a bit sentimental at the end, but then what a topic! 3 ½ stars.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

If you’re going to get yourself laid up in bed with a foot operation for a week or so, this is the book for you. It is a piece of wonderfully intricate, detailed historical fiction, dealing with the early part of Thomas Cromwell’s career with Henry VIII. Mantel gives Cromwell a human face, a far more familiar aspect than you get from the historical accounts, where he appears as a brutal and manipulating force (which I’m sure he was). This book is a fascinating exploration of the complex politics of the time – it certainly makes the nonsense the current political parties get up to seem like kiddies’ play! A definite 5 star read this one.

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

Some months ago I read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and somebody recommended The Secret Scripture as a follow up. This book is just as good. It covers the same sort of ground, a modern day mental hospital about to be demolished and the long term patients assessed for re-entry into society. This one is written in two voices, that of the patient herself, Roseanne, and that of her doctor, William Grene. It becomes a quest to discover what the truth really is, whether Roseanne is delusional or whether she has been misjudged and mistreated. Set in Ireland in the early part of the century, the book is tangled up with Irish history and the values of the time, particularly pertaining to women, sexual mores and the power of the Irish Catholic church. I had two problems with the book, the first that it is written in rich language that takes time and concentration but the underlying story is so powerful that I just wanted to KNOW what happened, and to hell with all the words. So I didn’t enjoy that language as much as it deserved to be enjoyed. The second is the ending, which is pretty unbelievable. Though perhaps in Ireland, with its tiny population, perhaps…. Anyway, this is a terrific book. 4 ½ stars.

The Museum of Innocence by Orham Pamuk

This was a difficult and very long book to read but it is a book that I’ll come back to in my mind for a long time to come. It’s the story of Kemal, a Turkish playboy who becomes engaged to a suitable girl but is also having an affair with his distant cousin Fusun. He becomes obsessed with Fusun, and this obsession allows his character to develop and sadden over years and years. Of course you realize very quickly that something tragic happens because he is narrating the story in the past and has spent his life creating a museum to honour the life of the girl. It’s an interesting book because the question of virginity and its importance, then and now, in Turkey is central to the novel. I felt I got some real insight into the attitudes and values of modern day Turks. Worth the effort. 3 ½ stars.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

The thing that taught me most about literature as a kid was the study of essays, a form of literature that seems to have disappeared from the 21st century classroom. I remember greeting a lesson involving essays with sheer delight. Here was an opportunity to analyse, to look at structure and language, to argue a case.

So I was pleased to buy a copy of this new book from Michael Chabon, which is a series of essays about reading and writing. I’ve read only one, with a pencil in hand and joy in my heart. It’s like sitting down to a great meal. Yum yum.

The argument, much of it verbatim, presented in Trickster in a Suit of Lights is:

Entertainment has a bad name – it means junk and too much junk is bad for you according to clever people.

But maybe these intelligent serious people are wrong. Maybe the problem with entertainment is that we have accepted such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment and as a result mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained.

He also says entertainment gets a bad rap: because it’s pleasurable it’s somehow tacky. This hasn’t been helped by mass production of entertainment leading to shoddy products.

Chabon wants to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.

He thinks it’s time writers reclaimed the role as entertainers and suggests short story as an ideal way to do this.

Short stories, though, suffer from a sort of constipation of form that results from the abandonment of genres – rather than writing things like horror, science fiction, fantasy and other genre pieces in their short stories, writers are focusing instead on the trendy and overworked ‘moment of truth’ story. Readers are dying of boredom because every story is the same.

Genre he says is regarded as unworthy of a serious reader’s attention because it implies formulaic writing. He says much of this emphasis on the formulaic and conventional stems from the approach of publishers and booksellers who use genre largely as a marketing tool, complete with trashy covers and standardized imagery. Some mainstream writers do occasionally break out and write something with a suspiciously genre-like focus but the publishers treat these books differently and they never appear as, say, science fiction because they are presented and located as literature. He would like to see all fiction set on shelves together.

Chabon goes on to say that accomplished writers who do work in the genres use the formulae and rules as the basis for playing, as an opportunity to flout, invert, break or ignore the rules.

Developing this theme of mockery and inversion, he moves to discuss the Trickster in literature, a character who appears in a multitude of literary traditions and who is always associated with borders and crossroads. Trickster goes where the action is; indeed many writers also ply their trade there, in the no mans land between genres, the land the Trickster inhabits, stirring things up, breaking the conventions, undoing history and challenging the nature of art. And here at last we have entertaining and interesting writing.

A satisfying exercise. I look forward to the rest of the book.

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

I know I said I don’t like ghost stories but this one is better than most and Rebecca Stott writes nicely. It’s a sort of thriller where a friend is found dead and the woman takes on the job of completing the friend’s research and writing work. This is where the ghosts come in and they are malignant, so it’s creepy enough. Interwoven with all this is the main character’s love affair with a charismatic scientist and the involvement of a group of animal rights protestors. However this novel is so complex that it gets a bit murky – Stott never really resolves things quite clearly and it’s a bit like those religious fundamentalists I was listening to at the Writers’ Festival who said the explanation of faith is faith itself. So it’s an entertaining enough read, especially if you’re interested in 17th century history and she has a good turn of phrase. 3 stars.

Lustrum by Robert Harris

This follows on from Imperium and charts the next five years of Cicero’s life. It’s a rattling good read if you like historical fiction and covers the time of his appointment and reign as consul, the rise of Julius Caesar and Cicero’s fall from grace. Harris paints him as the one honourable man left in Rome, which is interesting. My ancient history is so appalling that I can’t even form an opinion but I enjoyed the story and will look out for the next one which I presume will cover the last stage of Cicero’s life.

Twelve Books That Changed the World by Melvin Bragg

I feel a bit of a cheat about posting this book because I only read half of it. It was good but highly specialised in its interest: each of the books he wrote about focused on a critical aspect of society and how it had been influenced by a major publication. The books about feminism and human rights and evolution and even football I found interesting but I really couldn't get into the stuff on the invention of various sorts of ploughs and spinning machines NOT WHEN I HAD A NEW iMAC AND A NEW KINDLE AND A NEW NETBOOK PC TO PLAY WITH!!!!! Yes, I was seduced away from it all by new technology. In the absence of my new toys I probably would have finished Twelve Books, and learned something wonderful, but for the moment it has gone by the board. The first half rated four stars though and it would be a specially good book for a bloke to read, what with all that equipment in it. (BTW the new technology is wonderful and I've loaded six books onto the Kindle.)

Imperium by Robert Harris

Now this is what historical fiction should be – accurate, well researched and the history itself robust enough so that it doesn’t have to be propped up with all kinds of fanciful love affairs and other assorted bits of rubbish. This is the story of the early part of Cicero’s life as he rises from being a simple lawyer through the various ranks of the senate to become consul. Along the way he deals with all sorts of famous personalities including Pompey and Julius Caesar. The political manoeuvring is riveting, especially since it’s based on fact. I can’t wait to get into the next in this series. I have to amend my star system because although it’s not 5 stars like great literature is 5 stars, it certainly is in the historical fiction genre.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

What I like about Sarah Dunant is her research. This historical novel is set in Ferrara in the 1600s in a Benedictine convent. At the time the Council of Trent had passed stringent new rules governing life in convents, banning the small luxuries of life such as music (other than the organ), books, visits from families and the like. According to Dunant about half of all noble women ended up in convents so they weren’t really vocational places in the way that they are today. Families who couldn’t afford large dowries to marry their daughters could put together the smaller dowries to place the left over women in the convents – they were more communities of women who worked and amused themselves in a holy sort of way but possibly no holier than very devout married women outside the convent. This story is about an unwilling conscript who is trying everything she can to be reunited with her lover outside. The major character though is Suora Zuana, daughter of a doctor who has ended up in the convent on his death but acts as the official medicine woman in the place. She ends up deeply involved with the girl and her fate. This is a terrific historical novel, one that gives you some insight into what the politics of these places must have been like, and the role of women at that time. 3 1/3 stars

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

I really loved the originality of The Time Traveller’s Wife and Niffenegger is trying to replicate something of that here – but it’s a ghost story and while I could accept the time traveller thing, I was less willing to suspend disbelief for this one. I really didn’t like any of the characters much, nor did I find them plausible. The story is about twins whose aunt, the twin of their mother, dies and leaves them her flat in London. And of course she haunts the flat. The twin thing continues with a lot of grief about dependence and jealousy, and when a love affair with the dead aunt’s boyfriend begins, then all sorts of difficulties ensue. The blurb says it’s a book about ‘love, loss, identity’ and perhaps so, but there are so many little hitches in this book – the character of the aunt, the logistics of the action, I don’t know, so many things – that for me the whole thing just didn’t work. Some reviewers have described it as ‘bewitching’ and if you want to explore the fantasy of ghosts and death being only the beginning of another phase of existence, maybe. Very quick easy reading – on a plane perhaps – but not as good as her time traveller tale. 3 stars

The Women in Black by Madeleine St John

This book was written quite some time ago by a classmate of people like Clive James, Germaine Greer and Bruce Beresford. It’s a witty, entertaining little social commentary describing the lives of four women who work in what was possibly Mark Foys in Sydney selling women’s clothing. I liked it because it reminded me so much of my childhood – the way anyone who was not Anglo-Aussie was described as ‘continental’, the sexist and moralistic attitudes that while we lived with them were pretty stifling but in retrospect are quaintly amusing, the expressions that have disappeared from the language now. It’s an Australian version of a Nancy Mitford novel, not great literature but delightful all the same. The character of Magda the Continental is memorable indeed. 3 ½ stars

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Somebody – my friend Kathy I am almost certain – recommended this book to me. As I was reading it I thought, ‘This man writes like John Banville.’ On the back cover, afterwards, a reviewer describes ‘prose of Banvillean grace’. Aha! Vindicated!

This isn’t a book for people who want story. Having said that, of course it’s got story: a rather endearingly distant, solitary Dutch banker, Hans, and his wife go to live in Manhattan just before 9/11; after the terror, she leaves him and returns home to England with their child, a separation that lasts for a couple of years with him travelling home regularly to see the child, while she works out whether she wants to be with him or not. Eventually he moves back to London and they manage to reunite. Underneath all that is the story of the relationship he has with a man called Chuck in the two years he is living alone in New York. Hans meets Chuck through his interest in cricket – he joins a West Indian team to fill in his solitary hours. Chuck is a Trinidadian who wants to build a cricket stadium in the US, but he’s also a bit of a dreamer, a bit of a gangster, a bit of a mystery. Information about Chuck is patchy, as in all real life relationships – Hans doesn’t have the benefit of the novelist’s omnipotent eye. It’s a sometimes tender relationship, sometimes ambivalent, which is of course how authentic relationships work.

But we know the plot from the beginning so the book isn’t about that. It’s about the internal life of Hans, the fluctuations in relationships that are so hard to identify with their unspoken understandings, their miscommunications, their lies, their poignant moments, the way one small action can change the course of your mood. On the larger scale it’s about post 9/11 and the impact it’s had on New Yorkers as individuals. There are some unforgettable images in this novel – one of a child in a row boat on the water under the stars at night, afloat in the universe; one hysterical moment where a cop pulls a gun on an inflatable Ronald McDonald that is threatening to escape its handlers; a time where the wife says she feels she would like to stay in the marriage because she feels a responsibility to see her husband through his life. Much of the man’s internal dialogue really resonates.

There’s a kind of melancholy running through it that I associate with modern day America. It’s highly critical of American foreign policy and culture, it’s angry and at times desolate. Netherland is an intelligent and witty book, beautiful reading for someone with the time and patience to spend on absorbing every phrase. 4 stars

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I count Margaret Atwood among my favourite writers but I do find her scifi stuff creepy. This book is a sequel to Oryx and Crake, which I didn’t like a lot. It is set at the same time and involves a different set of characters who are affected by Crake’s actions in setting off a pandemic virus that wipes out the world. Some of the characters from Oryx and Crake appear in this as well, so it’s quirky and, I’m sorry, contrived. Essentially it tracks the wiping out of the population of the genetically modified world, who live in walled compounds or crime-ridden pleeblands. In this book the Gardeners cult plays a central role. They’re fundamentalist greenies, who predict the end of the world, and plant little arks of supplies around the place to ensure they survive. The story is told first person by Ren/Brenda, a child who grows up in the Gardeners commune but is returned to the compound, and in third person from Toby’s point of view – she’s a refugee from violence who becomes a sort of strong, herbalist beekeeper, saint type of woman. The plot is simple – the virus, the fall, the struggle to survive, the beginnings of reconstruction – and the characters straightforward, so the story rests on a combination of the horrific detail of human behaviour under stress and the what-next shock value of all the things that this futuristic world has invented and the way values have changed, which is almost voyeuristic and a bit scary as some if it is not beyond the realms of possibility. 3 stars

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly

I am really annoyed that I spent time reading this. I usually avoid thrillers but somehow the hype got me in and I read this one. It’s all on the back cover – a detective in LA gets involved in a murder case with Triad suspects. His daughter lives with his ex-wife in, you guessed it, Hong Kong, a detail which is emphasised so often that you have no doubt about what’s going to happen to the daughter. The ending is just lame too. But then it is a thriller, so what did I expect. 1 star

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This is another book that had good reviews. It’s about a woman, obviously Olive Kitteridge, and her character and certain parts of her life story are told through a series of almost short stories. Some of the stories are about her and some about the people whose lives she has touched – girls she’s taught, neighbours etc. It’s quite cleverly done as her rather unsympathetic character unfolds and you piece the story together to come to a grudging sympathy for her after all. Although there are some men in it, notably Olive’s husband Henry, it’s essentially told from a female point of view. There are some sad little vignettes in here - the girl whose mad mother ruins her relationship, the family trying to cope after their son kills his girlfriend – and there’s definitely a theme of craziness running through the characters. Strout comes to grips with all sorts of human difficulties such as the place of love and passion in long and enduring marriages, the role of overbearing mothers in their children’s lives, unrequited passions and other Oprah-style fascinations. But overall it was a dark sort of book that I shouldn’t have read while I had the flu! 2 ½ stars

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Why are historical fiction books so darned long? This one goes for 700 pages and I am not sure why I stuck with it. It’s a mystery of sorts, told through the diaries of four different people living in Oxford under the reign of Charles II in the 1600s. There’s Marco de Cola, a travelling Italian merchant, James Prescott, the son of a noble killed for treason, Dr Wallis, a mathematician and priest, and Anthony Wood, a historian. A priest, Dr Grove, is murdered and the whole story revolves around that and the part that Sarah Blundy, a poor servant girl, plays in it. Every story adds something to the tale and by the end it all comes together as a kind of political thriller thing. It wasn’t a satisfying story, a stupid premise that isn’t believable, and the writer tries to write each person’s contribution in what he imagines to be the style of the time, except of course it isn’t, so the language is tediously overblown and completely unauthentic. However for historical fiction lovers, it might be fun. 2 stars

The Children's Book by AS Byatt

This is a hugely complex, long and incredibly detailed book set during the period that spans the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of World War I. It is about the lives of several families, the Humphry Wellwoods, the Basil Wellwoods , the Benedict Fludds and the Prosper Cains largely, and the huge group of people connected with them. Olive Wellwood is a writer of fairy tales and she is creating a book for each of her seven children and it’s that that strings the story together. It begins with a boy Phillip who has run away from the potteries and is found and quasi-adopted by the Wellwood Cain group and apprenticed to master potter Benedict Fludd. The saga flows from there.

It’s a dark sort of story as the individuals wrestle with their own failings, some of them very grim indeed, and the ideas of responsibility at a time of enormous social change in England and Europe. There’s a mass of detail about the Fabian society, about the intellectuals and philosophers of the time, about concepts like free love, about the new ideas of psychoanalysis, and of course about the craft movement in England. The book is littered with appearances by people like Oscar Wilde, Emmeline Pankhurst, Kenneth Graham, Rupert Brooke and George Bernard Shaw which adds a sense of reality but leaves you reeling as you try to grapple with all their 'stuff' – suffrage, homosexuality, censorship and so on.

The writing is strange, often very simple as if narrated by a child who lists the chronology of events without going into any kind of analysis. So it reads ‘and then this happened and then that and then that and then so forth..’ At times I found this style quite annoying, adding unnecessary length – this book is over 600 pages long. It’s densely packed with references to events of the time but these references are almost in passing, listed not explained, sketchy, so only the most avid historian of the period would really understand the significance of them, either as real events or in terms of the novel. You feel you must stop and look up chapters and chapters of history to get a sense of what it is all about.

I came away feeling a bit overwhelmed and quite exhausted by this book but glad to have learned a bit more about the Fabians and ready to look into this period of history in greater depth. 31/2 stars

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

‘This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing life together. In this way, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unobtainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired. And anyway, she scolded herself, the moon is hanging low and gigantic and golden over Amed, I am with my handsome husband who loves me and encourages me, who makes me feel safe. I am safe and that’s all the world wants, only the young and the deluded would want anything else, believe that there is anything more to love than that.’

There are too many words in this passage. This overblown guy could learn that less is more. And I am betting that he neither likes nor understands women.

I really don’t know about this book. It’s had such huge press and I had to wait half a year to get it from the library. But it’s like a Greek male macho version of a Danielle Steel novel, full of sex (his personal fantasies I am thinking!) and a soap-opera-intensity focus on the gritty details of people’s private lives. The premise is interesting enough – a bloke at a BBQ slaps a brat of a kid, the parents press charges and that polarises the family and friends who are at the event. The emotion surrounding their responses creates fallout for their relationships. Marriages come under pressure, friendships strengthen or fail, individuals tell lies and create mayhem in other people’s lives.

I didn’t like the characters or the characterisation, which I thought relied on shallow stereotypes. I could almost see the writer lining up a whole bunch of people he’d met in the working class Greek community and popping them into the story. I didn’t like the gratuitous language, which I still believe acts like speedhumps in the story, and I didn’t like the explicit detail of the sexual encounters – I really don’t need to know where anyone sticks their fingers, not even if it’s only in their ears. I just thought it was trashy.

But then I did think he had a handle on some of life’s experiences. The relationship between the old Greek parents rang true as did the way that some of the characters struggled with concepts like love and fidelity. Like the curate’s egg, this book was good in parts. 3 stars.

La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

There’s an undercurrent of sadness running through Kingsolver’s books. This is a really interesting story about a lonely child brought to Mexico by his dysfunctional divorcee mother and struggling to grow up. He winds up in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and becomes entangled with their lives, a relationship that becomes dangerous when Trotsky arrives fleeing Stalin’s assassins. After Trotsky’s murder, the young man finally returns to America where he becomes a famous writer but is subsequently caught up in the post WWII anti-Communist purges. Through it all he keeps the diaries that become the basis for this book, which is posthumously published by his dedicated secretary Violet Brown. It’s great fiction - intelligent historical fiction - and beautifully written. There are particular images that remain with me – the flashy colours of Mexico that are a reflection of Kahlo’s paintings, and the image of Trotsky’s wife’s shoes, parked like little black motor cars by the bed. A book for greedy reading! 5 stars perhaps.

Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh

This is actually a trilogy: Men At Arms, Officers and Gentleman and Unconditional Surrender. So it is long and detailed and there’s plenty of time for plot and character complexity. It’s the story of Guy Crouchback, an upper class Englishman whose wife has divorced him and who is seeking to do his bit to justify his rank and privilege. The book is a detailed description of his wartime exploits between 1939 and 1945 with a 1951 epilogue. Deemed too old for active service, Guy joins up through the intervention of a friend of the family. He gets into the Halberdiers, a traditional regiment who recruit from the gentry by and large, and he goes on to do training in various parts of the country. He gets involved with a rogue brigadier, ends up moving to the Commandos, who are a group of special forces, eventually is posted to Egypt and then Crete, which is a disaster but from which he escapes in a fishing boat. Over the course of the war he doesn’t actually fire a single shot but wanders through a series of leadership and administrative jobs in an environment that is nothing short of chaotic. The story corresponds closely with Waugh’s own wartime experience, which I found horrifying because, as I said to Theo, it’s like an upper class British version of Catch-22. The characters are either hopelessly stitched up upper class Brits who are bound by pointless traditions and are utterly incapable of making a logical decision, or opportunists who are making their way in the world at war in any way they can whether it’s through spying, cheating, deserting or betraying their comrades. The conduct of the war is farcical, at times humorously so and at others, shockingly so. All of this is told in Waugh’s understated arch, satirical tone and with the character of Guy as a gently observant, somewhat gormless but rather likeable human counterpoint. My bookseller, Ian Moir, says he goes back to this book every few years and I will too if my book pile ever reduces to a manageable level. 4 ½ stars

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

I must have read other Erdrich books in the past because their names are so familiar but for the life of me I can’t remember any of them. Perhaps it’s because her plotting is sooooooo complex. This story is told by a series of characters and you do have to work hard to remember who is who and what timeframe they are talking in. But it’s worth the effort because the tale is interesting and the ending extremely satisfying. The story is set in North Dakota and is about the tension between Indians and whites – except it is how I imagine the tensions really play out, not in some exaggerated form but subtly, in attitudes and silences and for the most part, lack of action. The main character is Evelina and she’s half Indian; her grandfather plays an important role and tells his tale through her voice. There are characters including the judge and the off-the-rails cousin Corwen and the incredible members of a Davidian type sect. Over the course of the book Evelina grows up and that’s one plot but there are also the plots about the grandfather’s family history and the judge’s love affair and all of them are tied in with the one about the family of white people who are massacred and for whose death a pack of white vigilantes lynch a group of Indians. But the overriding themes are about life in small town America, and that incestuous knowledge of everybody's life and affairs that passes down over generations. The connections between people are complex and at times I found myself wondering why a particular part of the story was being told and then suddenly making the connection - oh, he’s the son or whatever. There are moments that make your heart sink in horror, moments that make you cringe, moments that make you laugh out loud and moments of such poignant tenderness that although I found this book harder work than many to read, I’ve come away glad I kept with it and convinced that Erdrich is a really accomplished writer. 4 stars

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris by Leanne Shapton

In his book Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster outlined a series of about six plot styles and said that all books conform to them. While this one is the boy meets girl, boy loses girl and then boy (sometimes) gets girl back again version, the writer has taken a really interesting and entertaining approach. She tells the story of the lovers, Leonore and Harold, through an auction catalogue. The descriptions of the items, which include many notes and letters to help the story along of course, detail their meeting, their passion, their lapse into mundanity and their separation.
It’s quaint and quirky and a very quick read. It’s a bit like a treasure hunt as you build up a picture of what the two characters are like as people. It’s also a comment, I think, on how in this society we define ourselves by things. 3 ½ stars.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

The critics have loved this book – and so do I. Its appeal for me was immediate: it’s about a period in history that I find most fascinating, between the two world wars. It’s set in Czechoslovakia and Vienna, with references to the artists working at that time. And it is about the history of a house designed by an architect who worked with van der Rohe and Loos, architects I learned to admire during our time in Europe. The wealthy Landauer family employ the architect to build them a house and he creates a humdinger of a place, hanging off the hillside, with a vast plate glass fronted room that becomes a centre for art and culture in the city. The novel follows the lives of the people associated with the house - Liesel, Ottilie, Martin, Kata, Marika and Viktor and their friends Hana and Oskar - as the war progresses through first the Nazis, then the Soviets, then socialism and Dubcek. It’s sparsely written and avoids excessive imagery and embellishment, so although there’s a lot of sex and emotion, it doesn’t get out of hand and collapse into the type of sensational nonsense that a lot of historical novels do. My only criticism is that I found a couple of the sub plots unnecessary and a bit irritating and the ending a bit sentimental, almost as if he had to tie everything up neatly, which isn’t actually what happens in reality. There’s a great device at the beginning of the last chapter that really cheered me up – it’s not often you see some sort of literary trick that really ought to be but the beginning of the last chapter is just so satisfying. 4 ½ stars for this one.

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

One of the wealthy elite in London decides to give a dinner party at the end of the week. This book follows the lives of some of the people invited to that party; from time to time their paths intersect, unknowingly. I find that intriguing because it must happen all the time in real life. Faulks does incredibly detailed research into the technology of things and this book has given him the opportunity to discover how hedge funds work and to explore the way big money movers operate just within the law. I found that part quite difficult to follow and skimmed over a lot of it. But there are also characters like an Islamic activist, a bitter and twisted literary reviewer, a rather bemused Polish football player and his porn star girlfriend Olya, and a lawyer who becomes involved with a woman who spends much of her time playing virtual reality games on her computer. The window into their thoughts and motivations is quite interesting. Having said all that, I’m not the biggest fan of Faulks – sometimes it all stalls a bit and I often come out of one of his novels feeling a not quite satisfied. This one, 3 stars.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

This is another in what seems to me to be a real Indian genre of books: gritty, heartbreaking, wryly amusing, beautifully crafted. It’s a collection of wonderful portraits of people living in a fictional Indian city. It’s grim but very, very human. These young Indian writers have never heard of Hollywood endings and while that’s great and, refreshingly, you never know what’s going to happen, you need to be feeling a bit stoic to get through the sadness of these people’s lives. The characters and their stories have such an extremely authentic feel about them – a middle aged Communist, a struggling coolie, child beggars, an idealistic newspaper editor … the people of real life. Together they build up a fascinating picture of life in modern India. 4 stars.

The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

If you're going to read a thriller, enjoy this one. It's about Frankie Machine, a retired hit man for the mafia. Although I'm pretty sure Don Winslow is a dedicated Sopranos follower, I thoroughly enjoyed the references all the same. (It must be great to have had The Godfather and the Sopranos and all those other mafia movies as reference points - saves months of research and ensures that your readers immediately appreciate what you're talking about. I particularly loved the gumars!) I kept picturing Frankie as Roy Billing, who played Aussie Bob Trimbole in Underbelly. This was a great page turner, and excellent entertainment for an afternoon on the couch. 3 stars for entertainment

Lovesong by Alex Miller

How elegant is this little novel? It's a love story as told to a somewhat jaded 'retired' novelist by a man he meets at his local pastry shop. But of course it's a different take on the traditional sentimental love story. It's the story of Sabiha, a beautiful Tunisian woman, her Australian husband John, their life in Paris and their longing for a child. The jacket blurb says Miller is compassionate, and I think that describes his approach to this story nicely. It also describes the book as 'pitch-perfect'. I like Miller's clarity of language, his understatement and simplicity of approach. I enjoyed this almost as much as Conditions of Faith, the first of his books that I read and the one I find most remarkable. His approach is always fresh and his perspective of ordinary things quite original; he digs a little and finds the story beneath ordinary lives. Very, very nice story telling. Lovesong is a very quick read too - one day for me in between medical appointments, waiting for a lunchtime concert to begin and the bus ride home. I'd like to know what people think of the ending - did the writer betray John? 4 stars

Arabesques by Robert Dessaix

Aren't arabesques intricate dance movements? I think this is what Robert Dessaix thinks this book is about. It's really quite an odd book. He follows the footsteps of Andre Gide, a French writer who won the Nobel Prize for his writing but whose work was subsequently banned by the Vatican. Gide was an extremely wealthy homosexual writer who nevertheless married his cousin but who never consummated the marriage. He spent much of his time travelling to places like Algiers and Tunisia in search of voluptuous boys, not children but newly pubescent boys, and his books describe his sexual awakening (called his 'casbah moment' by Dessaix) at the instigation of his friend Oscar Wilde and his exploits into old age. Dessaix read him at 14 and I can imagine was immensely relieved to find someone who reflected and validated his own sexual longings. So, fascinated by him, Dessaix travels to all the places Gide stayed to absorb the atmosphere and ponder this man's life. Along the way he has some amazingly intellectual conversations with various people too and these can be a real pleasure to read, especially his comparison of Protestantism and Catholicism. He's really got a handle on the cultural basis of religion (as opposed to the belief basis.) The book is languid and slow and thoughtful and of course, like everything Dessaix writes, extraordinarily beautifully crafted, but nothing actually happens so if you're plot driven, give it a miss. And of course, it accepts without in any way confronting the fact of sexual tourism in another age, and that could disturb some readers. Towards the end of the book, Dessaix confronts the question of pederasty and concludes that while he doesn't approve of men prowling schoolyards, 'it is appropriate to love whoever knowingly invites our love and enjoys it.' He also emphasises that Gide's (rarely achieved) ideal was sensual chastity - hence the angst and guilt I guess. While Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide on the prowl for young goatherds and waiters might be a bit Dolly Dunn for some, Dessaix makes no judgment - he is an accepting and distanced observer of the writer and his life. I'd give this book four stars for Dessaix' gorgeous language alone.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

What an extraordinary book. It’s a series of six or so strands written in different voices at different times in history that are unconnected yet connected in a pattern that you finally discern describes the rise, corruption and fall of western society. It’s very entertaining in parts, (for me, especially when it leaps into science fiction, where the language and concepts become extremely witty, albeit terrifying.) The structure, the memorable characters and the oddness of the connection between the narratives make it a pretty satisfying but quirky read.3 stars.

Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy

This book needs a good editor. It just goes on and on and on with all sorts of mind numbing detail, like how much the grocery shopping is and what she pays for a pair of shoes. I mean, who cares. This woman has all sorts of terrible things happen to her – a mother who hates her, a father who took off when she was a kid, dead lovers, lost jobs, blah blah blah, and in between she gets more and more morose. I think it’s supposed to be a story about life overcoming all but really ….. and yet, there are half a dozen reserves on this in the library at the moment. One star.

The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

I must have been a genius as a kid - evidence that brains degrade with time - because I read this book as a youngster. I found it tougher going as an adult. It's a morality tale of the first order, unsurprising of course given its age. Tom the chimney sweep falls into the river and becomes a water baby, with a wonderful little frill of gills round his neck. He has adventures, learns to be kind to others and finally meets up again with Ellie, the white lady whose chimney he had been cleaning when he was frightened and ran away to fall in the river. Seeking to please her he takes on one last challenge, to find and forgive Grimes his master. He does and receives his heavenly reward – or something like that - Sundays in paradise, which seems to mean returning to earth. It's interesting from a historical perspective, the values children were taught, and so forth. For my money the best thing about it was the gills - what I wouldn't give for a set of those pretty frilly things round my neck!

The Infinities by John Banville

This was so hard to read because I am glutton for narrative and this was slow, slow, slow. But beautiful. It’s the day in the life of a family where the father is dying from a stroke and they all gather, along with the playful but wicked gods. You get to see inside the minds of all the people and gradually their secret thoughts, their trials, their fears all unfold. They are petty and small but exactly the sorts of things we all live with, no matter how grand and important we are. Almost stream of consciousness really. Zeus pops into human form and bonks the beautiful daughter in law, Pan interferes and has done since the beginning, and Hermes also pretends to be a human being and arranges a marriage. But it is languorous, not fast and funny. Some reviewers claim it was a pretentious book and perhaps that's so. But can you ever get past Banville's language? 31/2 stars.

Smoke in the Room by Emily Maguire

I liked Emily Maguire's Pornstars and Princesses treatise on feminism. This though is fiction and it's dark. A story about a young girl with depression and suicidal tendencies. The book charts her progress but I don’t know. It’s quite realistic and so is depressing in itself you don’t feel uplifted or positive for this kid. 2 stars

Pompeii by Robert Harris

This was a sort of thriller about an aquarius, or water engineer in charge of the aqueducts and water supplies in Rome. It had a bit of a plot about a disappeared aquarius who had been taking bribes to provide cheap water to Pompeii and make the bad guy rich, but had realised an eruption was going to take place and had been caught by the sulphur and died. The young aquarius has to find the problem (caused by preliminary earthquakes as it turns out) and he discovers the corruption as part of that. Most of the book is detailed description of the eruption itself and as such is a bit dull unless you’re a vulcanologist. The aquarius escapes by going down an aquifer with the bad guy’s beautiful daughter. Ho hum. 1 1/2 stars

Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham

This is the story of Beryl aka Buzz, a rock star PR person, who gets sidelined into World Music as she gets older and her business is sold. She goes on tour with a bunch of Bulgarian singing grannies, and of course life changes and she falls in love with them blah blah blah ... It has charm though, a lot because of the funny mispronunciations they make, but also because of the characters and their homespun philosophy. It’s not great literature but it’s entertaining enough. 2 stars

In the Kitchen by Monica Ali

This is the story of Gabriel Lightfoot, a chef working in a big London hotel. He is planning to open a restaurant with a businessman and a politician and to marry his girlfriend Charlie. Then he meets an illegal immigrant Lena and takes her into his home and his life begins to unravel. He discovers an illegal employment ring for migrants and tries to bust it. He has a nervous breakdown really and gives up on his job, his restaurants etc. It was a dark story and the characters were pretty awful but the detail of Ali’s observation is incredible.. 3 stars

Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow

This is the fictionalised true story of the Collyer brothers, hoarders and eccentrics, who were finally found dead in their Harlem brownstone, Langley when a booby trap fell on him and Homer from starvation. It’s a weird and amazing story, sad, but kind of nice with the wistful voice of Homer charting the years. 3 1/2 stars

Corduroy Mansion by Alexander McCall Smith

This is a lovely book, full of McCall Smith gentle wit and humour, wry observation and quirky characters. As usual nothing is resolved but the not-getting there is wonderful. It is about the lives of several people who live in Corduroy Mansions or thereabouts – William the wine shop owner, Marcia his would be lover, the girls in the flat downstairs, a politician called Oedipus and his mother and her brother and his girlfriend and her new lover. It’s a bit disjointed, almost unfinished, like a slice of life rather than a novel, or if it is novel, it’s unfinished. But I enjoyed it all the same. 3 stars

A Life Like Other People's by Alan Bennet

Oh how I love Alan Bennet. This is Alan Bennet’s family biography, from his grandfather who killed himself through his father and mother, who suffered from depression and finally died of Alzheimers. It’s a bravely honest account of his feelings. He talks about his aunties Kathleen and Myra, one dead of dementia as well and the other of pneumonia, and their weird marriages, one to an Australian man. I can hear his voice telling this story and it’s a fantastic insight into the British working classes, with all their pretensions and limitations. There's a kind of resigned sadness about the past and the limits placed on people's lives and an awareness of their suffering that runs through it. He has such a strong voice. 4 1/2 stars

We Are All Made of Glue by Monica Lewycka

At first I thought this book was going to be too chick-litty for me but it won me over. The woman in it, Georgie, is actually very authentic and the writer has combined her with a cast of eccentric Jewish and Palestinian characters, some sleazy real estate agents, do-gooder social workers and a gay workmate thrown in to entertaining, if stereotypical, effect. It’s the story of Naomi Shapiro an old bag lady type who is at risk of being forced out of her old home. Georgie uncovers the story of her life and a whole heap of other people get involved and of course everybody falls in love and lives happily ever after. Good for reading in the bath because it has lots of froth and bubble. 2 1/2 stars

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

It has been years since I have read a book in one sitting but this one was incredible. What a writer. It is the story of a woman rescued from a mental hospital after 61 years incarceration. The story of how it happened is pieced together through the broken memories of the Alzheimers afflicted sister Kitty, the internal voice of Esme herself and through her young relative Iris. Esme has been put away because she is uncontrollable – these days we'd delight in her as a girl with spirit and imagination. Roll on the age of the feminists. It’s described by the Times as ‘almost ridiculously pleasurable …shocking, heartbreaking and fascinating’ and I couldn’t agree more. Wow, wow, wow. 5 star reading.

The Untouchable by John Banville

The diary/memoir of a spy of the between the wars Cambridge school, cousin of the Queen, son of a bishop, homosexual, art critic and professional. He has been unmasked and reflects on his life. Banville likes these slower, introspective novels and the approach certainly gives him the opportunity to ponder on the moment without being drive to distraction by a racing plot. Mind you there is plenty to keep the pages turning in this lovely book. The writing is exquisite, no other word for it. Glorious. 4 1/2 stars

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

There are many reserves out at the library on this book and I really don’t know why except that it’s about vampires perhaps. It’s very, very long and very, very wordy. It has three or four versions of the narrative all mixed up – a bit like a history research project with lots of original sources used to make the case. But there’s nothing elegant about it. I don’t know why I bothered finishing it actually except for sheer orneryness – it’s about a group of people who mysteriously obtain books with a dragon in them and then when they do some research on vampires get warned off because horrible things happen to people near them. Some, inevitably, get sucked into the vampire’s net. Rubbish really. 1 star.

Sovereign by CJ Sansom

This was fun for a holiday read on the beach - a sort of murder mystery political thriller set in Tudor times. It revolves around the possible fact that Henry V11 was the bastard son of Cecily Neville, (married to the Duke of something), and an archer from Kent. She actually admitted this when her third son Richard III seized the throne – whether she was trying to muster support for his claim or not is uncertain I guess and I haven’t read much about it. The ‘real’ king would then be an Australian sheep farmer, King Michael I! Anyway it was fun and well enough researched to give you a bit of insight into what life must have been like at that time. (I always though Henry VIII must have been a bit of a bastard and all those old kings a pack of violent psychopaths.) 2 stars

Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

Another in the line of gossipy portraits of people living in an apartment building in Edinburgh. He’s such an astute observer and has in this one an aggressively trendy mother, who is hothousing her little kid; a smoothly over confident entrepreneurial type, an earth mother anthropologist type and so forth. They were more a series of people portraits, often only tenuously linked, than a novel with a plot, conflict and any kind of resolution. But what characterisation! 2 1/2 stars

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

An American woman escaping a messy divorce and heart breaking love affair decides to spend a year travelling. This is the chronicle of that year in Italy, an Indian ashram and Ubud in Bali. Much as I am wary of these ‘year in’ books, she’s a great writer and her observations about Italy were so close to my own that I felt I could have written what she said. She’s incredibly open and honest about her feelings, able to laugh at herself and is in fact quite a likeable character. Read it for the Italian section even if the hippy new age feel of the ashram and Ubud sections is going to drive you crazy. 3 stars.