The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I could be living the best and happiest of lives if only I were not a fool.”

There are countless such wise and witty comments in this affecting tale of a young man suffering from the malady that is unrequited love. The word "young" in the title is the key, I think - our hero spends much of his time mooning around the heroine and bemoaning his unfortunate lot, much as most adolescent males do when they first fall in love. Crucially, Werther never loses the sympathy of the reader.

I gather that Werther is regarded as the first romantic novel focussing on the romantic travails of a self-absorbed protagonist. No Werther, no Adrian Mole. A sobering thought.

The Woman of Andros - Thornton Wilder

The main interest of this novella lies in its Classical Greek setting, although there are moments when the description of the milieu gets in the way of the plot.

A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell

Anthony "so posh you say it Pole" Powell; I've always been meaning to read some and I've finally got around to it. His prose is gorgeous and the funny-but-serious tone is very similar to Evelyn Waugh. He's not particularly fashionable these days, I suppose because he writes about a world of minor aristocracy and boarding schools. I loved it, though, and the best bit is that it's the first of a 12 book sequence called "A Dance to the Music of Time".

The Adventure of English - Melvyn Bragg

I chanced upon some of the TV series the other day, and the book had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while so it seemed a good time to read it.
The story of the English language is told with great verve and readability.

By necessity, the tale takes in a good deal of social and political history, which I also enjoyed. I really should read more about truly heroic figures such as Wycliffe and Tyndale, and the existence of Gullah was a revelation.

One tiny quibble; the word "tip" for gratuity is not an acronym for "to insure prompt service". Michael Quinion suggests that it is more likely that it stems from a pickpocket's trick of unobtrusively passing small amounts of cash from one gang member to another.

Run, River - Joan Didion

The comments on Amazon suggest that this is low-grade Didion, which given the quality of this novel means that she is a mighty fine writer. Although it lacks the precision of the other stuff I have read, this Faulknerian tale of Californian families is both interesting and moving.

First Love - Ivan Turgenev

I'd never read any Turgenev but I'll be sure to read more after enjoying this sweet and insightful novella. The tale is one of a middle-aged man describing his first love from his teenage years - a slightly older woman with a coterie of admirers. The dog-like devotion, hanging out in the gardens with a hope of catching a glimpse of the girl, reminded me a lot of my teenage years, i'm sorry to say.

Lucky I'm so mature now, eh?

Turner - Peter Ackroyd

The Turner and Claude room in the National Gallery in London is one of my favourite places and a regular lunchtime haunt when I used to work around there, so I was delighted to pick up a short biography of England's Greatest Painter* by a particularly fine writer.

Ackroyd is as good as ever at contextualizing London life, and he paints a sympathetic portrait of a character often regarded as eccentrically cantankerous.

I also liked this from his description of Turner's late masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire:

...the art of colour itself is taken to the highest possible pitch. It is deployed, like music or the language of poetry, for its own sake without any recourse to some ultimate reality. the light is not of this earth but has the effulgence of a vision.

* Hogarth and Freud being his only serious competition

Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope

The second of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire is a joy despite being pretty long and having essentially no plot. the fun is mainly in the characters and their petty scheming - the oleaginous Obadiah Slope is particularly memorable.

I also liked the regular interventions by the authorial voice, which are reminiscent of Sterne. for example, he assures us early on that our heroine will not marry either of her unsuitable suitors, which made me laugh and detracted not a whit from the telling of the tale, as we knew this wouldn't happen anyway.