None of them ever escaped the memory of what they did and how they did it. The sad story of adolescent girls and a grim warning for the future…. My new Bible. Here’s what I wrote in 1999. I want to read more. Exciting tales from the town that bred Machiavelli. A wonderful book of memoirs and thoughts and essays and above all honesty. I read it just before the Paris attacks. After reading Muriel Spark my eye was caught by the Penguin reprint of an old favourite of mine The Charlie Mordecai novels of Kyril Bonfiglioli. Just that. Brilliant. Do not bother with it unless you are very bored or somewhat medicated. I attempted this novel, which is not bad at all, set in South London, but the whole depressing world of bad drugs, bad teeth, bad sex and bad weather reminded me of what a depressing scene London can be. Sphere Michael Crichton October. He has all the skills but lacks the “negative capability” which allows any character room other than Mailer himself. A Season In Purgatory. Dad’s mistresses etc. Everything you’d ever want in a thriller. Just about everything you ever needed to know about the Universe, and the evolution of life and the history of mankind. Powered by . A mystery. In his work I like the older more mature voice. This was a great month for new novels. They have the feel of writing from another age, which I guess they are. The Night Manager by John Le Carré. Controlling or what?…. Hadn’t read them in sequence in living memory – the first twenty five of them are addressed to some friendly aristo begging him to marry and reproduce his own beauty before it is too late. Need to check the last line in the old translation. It is indeed like a scenario for an opera. He says it’s written like Dickens for Esquire – but more like Dickens for Hustler. It’s almost totally stream of consciousness and with him that means fishing, and sex, and alcohol. A big break for him, and this is not one of my favourite genres, because I find the world complicated enough to understand without having to invent another fictional world with its own set of rules. Small gestures, tiny ironies, occasionally indelicacies, this will delight one in a hundred, but that one will be utterly delighted. The weakness of Wolfe is that instead of describing life he writes an essay about it. Here in a very fine historical novel we feel the world turning as the heliocentric universe is cautiously explored, at the risk of death. Freedom of speech is the theme, and certainly it was a hard won freedom in the time of the Enquiries, but it was somehow too much for me, though I finished it. A good fine book. The most beautifully and elegantly written book. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one……But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for. Also he falls into a trap of his own cleverness, with technology, so we who do not share his cleverness, kinda skip the tech bits. July 20th L.A. Cortes again. I also downloaded this onto my mini-pad as it is a wrist-breaking monster of a book. Great on action, long on comment. In fact I had barely progressed beyond four chapters. He learned to cut out the writing and just leave the tale. One feels that Callow himself has suffered and empathises with this most humane and dramatical of novelists. We can no more avoid it than ants. Here the bullied figure comes back for revenge, and the upper class twit is saved by the middle class boy who has partially betrayed him. Such a simple book. It never is, I don’t think, when a relationship ends. Eric Idle. And where Bush’s win shame. Edinburgh Festival Fringe – First TV appearance. But there is something slightly pouty about the chap and the endless left wing bollocks. With surely the most wicked female character in all of literature. Too bad they didn’t get him for Vietnam. Similar vein, though more clinical and historical. Filled with excellent and wise perceptions and a great hatred for superficial criticism and subjective biography, which attempts to make literature nothing more than failed attempts at autobiography. I was fascinated to see the novelist constantly at work, examining character for fictional uses, and almost always playing life back into fiction and vice versa, it’s as if he is more comfortable with fiction than reality. Or in this case mistressly. Again desperate for something to read I picked this up again. Not entirely pulled off, since Balzac is better at realism than Dickens and this is a satirical subject. i.e. Ran out of reading and picked this up at The Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle. Some acquaintances have fallen away, some have been married, divorced and become drunks (Stringham.) He’s good. Early on they discovered just how cheap it is to bribe policemen, Detective ranks particularly, and in the Sixties they happily collaborated with the Metropolitan Police busting pop stars for possessing grass and helping to plant drug evidence to ensure conviction for The Stones and some Beatles. So much is unnecessary. Unfinished. Affable enough, but in the end not good enough I’m afraid. Found a first UK edition in London. Not just the wonderful people he has met, and the encounters he has had, but many sharp observations about life, secrecy, parental disappointment and what turns us into us. I read more. Who assaults tramps? He gave me a copy personally signed and I don’t like it! A very funny send up of post modernism and American English Departments by a practitioner. Robert B. Parker writes very well, and continues an interesting start which begins with Marlowe married to Linda, plots it elegantly and writes with style and simplicity so that it is as readable and enjoyable as Chandler. The incomparably sad life of the policeman. I’m sad because I seem to have done the lot in such a short space of time. The book itself turns into a pretty fair thriller, where Lysander becomes a kind of post-modern Richard Hannay, with shady encounters with espionage figures almost from the pages of John Le Carré . A kind gift from a visiting Palin, who must have run across T.C. More like journalism than a book. She manages to become involved with Joseph Koni and his abducted captives, and in her savage anger she brilliantly exposes the Aid money racket which keeps the whole business of abducting young girls going, everyone needs the money, since they steal it from the beginning, and so they are not motivated to do what the money is supposed to be encouraging them to do: stop him. Our ambivalence about ourselves and our desires. Three characters meet on a boat headed to Port au Prince: comedically they are Smith, Jones and Brown. Still one of the best verses in the English language if not one of the best poems. The lesson wasn’t about Russia. He arrives in depression, believing in nothing, contemptuous of everything, fleeing a disastrous affair, which is so Greene. Excellent Irish detective fiction by John Banville. Magnificent 1932 biography of this fascinating diplomat who outplayed and survived Napoleon, who called him a shit in silk Stockings. Sadly I found this memoir of Norwegian adolescence over long and rather easy to put down. My heart went out of the reading. He is very good. Romantic, well crafted, a wonderful read. Welcome back Cutter. Meanwhile he blusters on and on, justifying his geriatric sex antics that one grows quite tired of his endless justifying of his own desires, and his harking back over his happy days with the whores of South America. The patient rise and fall of mountain systems, the constant subduction of continents, the continual spreading of the ocean floor. Ok Jay McInerney is the real thing. It’s very much a Ripping Yan, with the stiff upper lip narrative by Conrad the laconic hero of this improbable adventure, but he keeps the excitement coming in the Buchan style. Amazingly deceptive sentences, but great details and observations. He gave me his latest Jane Whitefield Novel before I left but I had two here in France so thought I would catch up. Moi?) Will be good TV or movie. Mostly dialogue and action. He is fully into his stride, and what makes him a great writer is the underlying humour which is never very far away. There is the trench Churchill, the Naval Minister who conceives of the Dardanelles plan and is then held responsible for others inability to see it through, and there is the witty parliamentarian. The reason Pnin is disqualified from teaching in the French Department is that unfortunately he speaks French and, worse, he can read it. A very fine book with unforgettable scenes right to the end when the extraordinary General Lee joins a black communicant kneeling at the altar rail before a shocked community in a Richmond Church. A wonderful portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, almost a fan’s view. A coming of age novel, a New York novel, and a behind the scenes at a restaurant novel, very nicely written by a very talented young lady. The opening is exquisite, a somewhat snobby Trinidadian ex-patriot revisiting his homeland on an immigrant ship. Mr. Winslow only occasionally. For a start the poetry slips away and is replaced by large dosages of prose – and turgid comic prose at that. He writes so well and is so consistent. It’s a novella. About half way through. I might give it another go, a) because I was on pain killers and b) I think it should be better than it is and I don’t want to misjudge it. Poor America. He writes “Only Fair” opposite one paragraph. Dull porn. Prussian Blue Philip Kerr. Written in 1913. Order it now. Everything you ever wanted in a great fuck-off read. Really great. Maintaining his reputation for dangerously irrelevant titles this is a collection of his entirely readable articles in The Believer. The fact that the inhabitants reached for each other in those long terrifying nights could be attributed to DNA or just the fact that terror, loss and death makes you want to fuck. Greene explores the roles we all play in our lives. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. It’s really a Victorian novel set in the New Zealand gold rush of 1866. In Capote and Isherwood’s versions they are clearly camp longings for a diva – but Styron is not gay and shags his Sally. Richly, wittily and poetically written these tales of the fictional alter ego of a blocked mid-life American writer as he travels to Russia and Rumania and London, as he leaves one sister for another on the beaches of Long Island, as he examines the meaninglessness of existence, and pointlessness of literary fame compared to the Universe, without ever surrendering his hold on either, makes this breath-taking little book, published in 1970, still a gem, and still glow incandescent in the flame of his bright prose, ensuring that he will be read long after this year of his death and has truly ascended into the Pantheon of the notable that he so wonderfully mocked with perhaps the greatest literary list of names since Fitzgerald. “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. (Art being something created by individuals, not by committees of warring interests.). Revealing nothing much more than a superficial glance. I had no idea it was Jan then James who brought the good news, and even laboured half way up the mountain with Hunt and co. Gives quite a bit of credence to the murder theory too…. And then of course there is Simenon, who is like eating fine patisserie between long gourmet dinners. The greatest story ever told. What a joy to discover a classic at my age. He really is a delightful writer. Enjoyed an article on Blair running for re-election and Gore not. Wickedly entertaining, highly readable. Especially comedians. Running out of books in Sydney I picked up two I was fairly sure I’d read, and re-read half of this before economising on my packing, knowing I have it at home. Interestingly I’m working on an old novel from 2002 where I wrote this: You know the feeling? I had forgotten how funny he is in his narrator voice. It is essentially a gay novel. Again a dominance thing. that we reject as absurd. A different aspect of the Hundred Years War. These are all recognisable English types. Not his best. Step by step he goes from the contemporary to the inevitable. Bright start. She pulled him, she rode him, she dumped him. Well this time I liked it a lot more and it’s true that I didn’t finish it this time, but next year I shall. The F tells us everything we need to know. I have really enjoyed the later stories: e.g. Movies are made by moguls, monsters and mobs. At first sight I disliked it, discarded it but constantly came back to it until I could not put it down. Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers. His tales are the nearest thing to actually reading a movie. It’s a Hitchcock plot, and probably deliberately, because there are film references throughout. A little polemic about the rotten state of newspapers today, by a sentimentalist and someone who was fired by Murdoch. His books are being re-released and Apple sent me this one, which I loved before and love now. What a simple device – to have the character speak directly to us about himself – and yet how richly it becomes vital to his dramas and enables The Shake to show what only the future novel is able to reveal – the subtleties and unconscious ironies of the way we think and behave. A very readable and highly enjoyable novel set in Thailand about a Buddhist policeman and his search for the killer of his murdered partner. You learn about yourself. I was wondering if he remembered me – only to find I appeared in the opening sentence of his Prologue. The stories are about entitlement, plus a nostalgia for the innocence of lost youth and the vanished opportunities of a bright future, now gone forever, in the land where his winter dreams once flourished. Like a fanzine after the first book. This 1949 First Edition with original slip cover was a delight to read and I love the way he writes sexy, seductive, but psychotic women. If only Americans read history or had even heard of it…. It shows us the framework, when I wish to forget the scaffolding and enjoy the building. Many excellent new bits which seem heavily featured in the Tudors, from which they have clearly drawn. The Shadow Puppet Georges Simenon. It’s very enjoyable. Good to see Salman writing so well when most of his contemporaries are just making pot boilers. Comedy. Essays on words and their origins, with musings on language and its origins. I began with the Henry VI trilogy because I had not realised how big early hits they were for the Shakester (I know I hate that too) – and was surprised how fabulous they are as great reading. Blues Brothers in Chicago) it was fascinating for me. He really is very good. I had heard of her but never read her. I thought this was magnificent. I was going along happily and then put it down for a day and then thought who cares? I once came face to face with him in St. Paul de Vence. , political essay, historically based, relating to the dark mix of this man... 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