Reading Part 3

After that short interlude for Christmas festivities and the eating of wild boar in the Dordogne, here is the final part of my reading list. I hope that you are all having seasonal fun and that you were given lots of excellent reading matter.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Jonasson, Jonas
Deadpan Scandinavian comedy about a very old man and a band of criminal misfits.

Landfall, Helen Gordon
I bought this book as a present for my mum, read the first chapter and was hooked. It's about a young woman's return to her parents suburban home and the accompanying accidie.

Around her the quiet mysteries of suburbia were in the perfumed thickness of the silently lighted houses, the thickness of so many private lives together and separated. The mysteries were in the almost-countryside. They were in the dark alleyways, quiet railway bridges, empty cul-de-sacs, chained, railed parks at night-time. 

Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation, Stuart Kelly
Everything you ever wanted to know about Walter Scott in short, snappy chapters.

Drown, Junot Diaz
Short stories about young Dominican men. 

Garnethill and Sanctum by Denise Mina. I met Denise Mina at a conference in Spain last October and discovered that she had lots of interesting things to say about women writers (and readers), the Scottish school of detective writing dubbed tartan noir, academia and popular literature. She's an excellent writer too.

The light in Scotland is low in the autumn, gracing even the most mundane objects with dramatic chiaroscuro.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott

Great book. Lamott has a very distinctive voice. Here's a funny quote:

then went to the library and said, “Do you have any other really funny books about cancer?” And they looked at me like, Yeah, they’re right over there by the comedies about spina bifida.

And here's a random quote I agree with completely, totally and utterly:

I have girlfriends who had their babies through natural childbirth—no drugs, no spinal, no nothing—and they secretly think they had a more honest birth experience, but I think the epidural is right up there with the most important breakthroughs in the West, like the Salk polio vaccine and salad bars in supermarkets.

Mortality, Christopher Hitchens
Great writing; melancholy subject. 

Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan
This was an enjoyable novel but I think I may have read it too quickly because I can't remember much about it beyond: attractive woman, MI5, writer husband, duplicity, lots of wine drinking.

All Made Up, Janice Galloway
This is a fabulous, fabulous memoir. I grew up in a similar place at a similar time as Janice Galloway but in very different circumstances. Despite the ambiguous title, it all rang true.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D. T. Max
The first biography of David Foster Wallace. It's very factual and somehow I liked the writer less after I'd finished it.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer
Two books in one - both about crumbling, watery cities. Excellent.

Mother Country, Jeremy Harding
I came to this memoir via Harding's writing for the LRB (he occasionally writes about Bordeaux where he has lived). It's the sensitive story of his search for his birth mother and the revelation of his adoptive mother's past.

The Moment, Douglas Kennedy
Absorbing novel set in Berlin when the wall was still standing. 

Death in Bordeaux, Allan Massie
I'd never read anything by Massie before (I don't particularly like his conservative brand of Scotsman journalism), but the title of this novel was too close to home to resist. It's a competent detective novel set in wartime Bordeaux; apparently the first of a planned trilogy. You'd think the publisher would have people able to use Google maps to check the street names though.

Emma Hearts LA, Keris Stainton
I followed Keris and Stella on their adventures in LA as Keris did the research for this YA novel. It's a fun book and I'll be recommending it to E just as soon as she's old enough to read about boys and romance (ie. when she's 20)(kidding).

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions, Martin Amis
This is a 1994 book and I'm not sure how I came to be reading it in 2012. Amis is easy and amusing. I guffawed at his descriptions of Elton John "looking more like Big Ears than usual", wearing a "Billy Bunter suit", then a "Humpty Dumpty outfit". He's good on Updike's upfrontness too:

Yet the case of Updike is unquestionably extreme. The textural contrast between your first and second wife’s pubic hair, for instance, is something that most writers feel their readers can get along without.

The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst
An erudite novel. This passage could serve as an epigraph to this series of posts on books:

Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside – a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.