Fireworks - Angela Carter

I read heaps of Carter back in my undergrad days, and it was a pleasure to return to her imaginative short stories and richly expressive language. The tales are mainly set in exotic locales, and carter makes Tokyo and London as otherworldly as her completely imaginary settings. Similarly, her characters bear little relation to people in the "real world", but their stories are nevertheless capable of moving the reader.

I was reading this book in a lift at MPOW, and a bloke started telling me how he got to know Carter in Japan in the 1980s. He told some pretty funny stories about her, but sadly they are too raunchy to relate in a family blog such as this.

In A Free State - V.S. Naipaul

A Booker winner in 1971, this themed collection of short stories and a novella adds up to an interesting take on displacement and colonial exploitation. The migrant experience has been one of the predominant themes of literary fiction since the 1970s, and I think that In A Free State must have been influential in this sense especially.

What's The Matter With America? - Thomas Frank

Frank explains brilliantly why low income Americans consistently vote against their own economic interests. Essentially, the republicans bypass economics completely and campaign on easily elucidated "values" issues such as guns, evolution in schools, gay marriage and, especially, abortion. The Democrats talk about core issues like education, health and jobs, but the complex arguments get drowned out by the shrill right wing.

The right also ensures that they maintain the status of victimhood, railing against a "liberal elite" media (owned by Murdoch et al of course), and suggesting that Christianity is in serious danger from..well, something or other. If only! The unwinnability of most of the Republican totems merely ensure that poor people can be kept enraged, and vote in "values" politicians who (a) fail to enact any legislation on moral issues, and (b) give massive tax cuts to the rich.

This is not a very good precis of the book, I'm afraid, but Frank makes a persuasive case. Unfortunately the book is padded out with irrelevant digressions and anecdotage but it's worth reading for some insight into the bizarre world of U.S. politics.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams

This has been an anomaly in my list of Books To Read for years, fanboy as I am of Hitch-Hiker's Guide and Adams' scientific brilliance. Stumbling across his headstone in Highgate cemetery the other day finally prompted me to pick it up off the shelf.

It's a fun read, throwing together a skipload of ideas into a convoluted plot and featuring plenty of engaging characters, particularly the titular gumshoe. It was published in the eighties, and is set in Islington leading to some nostalgic moments. I couldn't help but smile that, in a sci-fi book involving time travel etc, a plot point revolves around somebody buying one of those fancy new phones with buttons instead of a dial.

England Made Me - Graham Greene

Early Greene, and nowhere near as effective as his later work. At times you can see him over-stretching stylistically to poor effect. Nevertheless, there is some value in his characterisations and scene-setting. In particular the monstrous Swedish industrialist Krogh is a memorable amalgam of Melmotte (from Trollope's The Way We Live Now) and that bloke who owns IKEA.

The novel also provided inspiration for this great song:

State of the Nation - Michael Billington

Towards the end of this history of post-war British theatre, Billington states that "more than any other medium, (theatre) is a vehicle of moral enquiry". Really? Well, this book makes a decent case for it, because it looks at the stage very much in it's social and political context. Billington is the main critic for the Guardian and his political sensibility is what you might expect, but this doesn't take anything away from his overview.

I was particularly interested in the early histories of the NT, the RSC and the Royal Court. In my theatre-going life these three have been well established pillars of the scene, so reading about their early days as radical upstarts was fascinating.

The book also left me frustrated that I will never get to see so many of the legendary performers of the likes of Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier, Littlewood, the Berlin ensemble and so on. Oh well, perhaps I should get myself out to more theatre here in Sydney so as not to miss the next big thing.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

The sequel to Tom Sawyer is Huckleberry Finn, one of the great masterpieces of the English language. This is not in that league at all, but it's still an evocative and enjoyable depiction of Mississippi life in the early nineteenth century.

Twain has a marvellous gift for recalling the workings of the adolescent male mind. Different adventures intertwine throughout the book and the boys barely differentiate between the imaginary (pretending to be pirates) and the all-too-real (the menacing Injun Joe), which rings true to me.

Like Huck Finn, it's marred a little by a weak ending.

Continent - Jim Crace

A curious collection of seven fables set in an imaginary seventh continent that seems to represent the Third World/Developing Countries/LDCs/TPLACs*. The style is straightforward but imaginative, and the common theme is exploitation - economic, cultural and sexual.

*It's a Yes Minister gag: Tin Pot Little African Countries. Sorry.

Author, Author – David Lodge

I have a long-standing love of David Lodge’s work, so it was a treat to get my hands on his latest. It is a fictional biography of Henry James, famously published at the same time as Colm Toibin's The Master and rather lost in the avalanche of praise for the other book. This is particularly piquant given that one of the major themes here is literary rivalry.

The depiction of the private life of a great author riven by self-doubt and popular indifference is extremely convincing, informed as it is by Lodge’s own experience. There are also intriguing differences between this and The Master, particularly in the depiction of James’ sexuality.

Park and Ride – Miranda Sawyer

I am child of the suburbs and I’ve always enjoyed Sawyer’s journalism, but this light read came as a major disappointment. There are too many of the forced jokes and arbitrary decisions common to the “journalist takes a light-hearted look at X” genre which is a shame, because the brief mentions of true suburban totems like the Ideal Home Exhibition show what could have been.

The oddest thing for a book published in the year of Tony Blair’s ascension to office is the lack of political context – where were the mentions of the Daily Mail, or the tensions between Major’s Britain and Cool Britannia?

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

My dad has always talked about this book with admiration and I have recently become interested in Dawkins’ sceptical activities, so it seemed the right time to finally get around to it.

Despite blinding me with science once or twice, this is a cogently explained and thoroughly convincing argument for the primacy of genes as the main unit of behavioural determinacy. Importantly, Dawkins stresses the capacity of humans to overcome our genetic programming and impose our own moral codes over Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.”