London Voices, London Lives - Peter Hall

It's not every day I read a book based on a qualitative research project, but my interest in London and my uncle being a professor of social policy combined to make this one of my more unlikely Christmas presents last year.

Essentially a series of interviews with Londoners about their lives, this contains some pretty obvious conclusions (London transport is unreliable) as well as some fascinating insights, particularly into racism and immigration.

As a book it's way too long and the linking prose tends towards the leaden, but the excerpts of Londoner's own voices are wonderful. Their words are scrupulously reproduced with hesitations, elisions and non sequiturs intact, and they may prove as interesting to linguists as to sociologists in the future.

The Beggar's Opera - John Gay

Since having kids I have found it impossible to get to the theatre as often as I'd like, so you can expect a few more plays to start appearing here as I try to compensate.

The Beggar's Opera was huge in its Eighteenth Century heyday and it is often referred to in subsequent literature, so I am glad to have read it. Obviously the musical components don't transfer to the page, but the pace is fast, the lowlife cast of theives and whores are vividly memorable and the punchline is a corker.

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan

Swoon! McEwan here confirms his status as the greatest British novelist currently producing. It's a short novel that I enjoyed in one sitting, essentially a single scene with some flashback exposition, but it leaves one with a sense of exquisite sadness.

I thought that the tale of a trivial yet tragic misunderstanding between two newlyweds in the early 60s may have been inspired by Larkin's wonderful poem Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)-
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up till then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle For a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me)-
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas de Quincey

There is quite a lot of back story to get through in this classic narcotic memoir before the climactic and revelatory opium dreams, but the writing is so good and the payoff so rewarding that one does not begrudge anything. The Romantics are not usually my scene unless you include the Gothic writers (all that navel-gazing) but this is great stuff.

I read the shorter 1822 edition, which I gather is superior to the more well-known 1856 version.

The Wisdom of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton

You have to overcome some very dated attitudes to enjoy Chesterton, and one of the tales here is breathtaking in its racism, even taking into account the mores of his day. However, on the whole a feeling fo amiable fun predominates and Father Brown himself is a charming character, with a pointedly un-Holmesian approach to solving crimes:

"I attach a good deal of importance to vague ideas. All those things that `aren't evidence' are what convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities."

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark

I lived on Peckham Rye for a brief period back in the mid-90s, so this depiction of the area in the early 60s held a number of delights for me. The prose is as impeccable as always from the divine Spark, and it has a devilish plot combining sly humour with deceptively savage satire.

The use of repetition is a key stylistic device in this book, reminiscent of the same author's brilliant use of flash forwards in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Bone: Out of Boneville - Jeff Smith

My wife has been praising the Bone comics for years, and I've finally got round to starting them. They are fairy tales, with all that implies; a little twee, full of mystery, featuring engaging styorylines and an unsettling attitude to sex.

Against Nature - J.K. Huysmans

An exceptionally odd book in which I think the reader is supposed to relate to the "hero", a decadent, utterly selfish misanthrope. Fed up with life, he locks himself away from humanity whereupon absolutely naff all happens for 200 pages, the novel consisting entirely of digressions about Christian apologetics or latin poetry.

What keeps you reading is the baroque prose and the odd gem, like this explanation of exotic (from a 19th century Gallic point of view) English cuisine:

...rumpsteak pie, a warm meat dish cooked in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust, like a flan.

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

It is a curiousity that an avowed atheist such as me should find Greene's novels of spiritually tortured Catholics so powerful. Obviously the quality of the writing has something to do with it, but I think it's the overwhelming sense of humanity that the books demonstrate that is the key. Even characters that flit into the story very briefly are beautifully defined, and the reader can sympathise with their decisions even as we disagree with them.

Superb.

Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon

This is a straightforward tale of adventure told in an unusually elaborate prose style. Chabon says that the book's true title is "Jews with Swords", giving a fair indication of the stories dual interest in yarn-spinning and subtle identity politics.

I should also mention that the library copy I read was a particularly lovely artifact. The cover was lovely, there are attractive maps on the inside cover and there is a full-page illustration in every chapter. The publishers really pushed out the boat on this one.

Lady Susan - Jane Austen

I consider Austen to be the best that has ever been (in English, at least), so having read the six novels I suppose it is inevitable that I should turn to the juvenilia. This brief epistolary tale is fun, with the scheming title character causing havoc in genteel Regency society. The crucial ironic narrative voice is not present, bypassing the essence of her great books, but an early understanding of human foibles is evident and the prose is already impeccable.

Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje

I have been a bit of an Ondaatje fanboy since undergraduate days, and I would still unreservedly recommend Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion or The English Patient to anybody. I feel a bit more ambivalent about this, his latest, however.

The prose is as pristine and rarefied as expected, and the first half provides us with a gripping plot revolving around the dissolution of a family after a violent incident. To my bafflement however, this tale is abandoned on a cliffhanger and never returned to, and we get an extended flashback about entirely different characters for the last 100 pages. I suppose the idea was that themes and character would resonate between the two sections, but I must be too dim to get it.

Frost On My Moustache - Tim Moore

I've read a fair few books in the post-Bryson genre in which a journalist goes on a quirky, themed journey for no other reason than to write a subsequent book about it. It's a tough trick to pull off, and here it's a mixed success.

The journey is a recreation of an earlier Scandinavian trek by a Victorian aristocrat, and some of the business early on with the original chap's descendants is a scream, but descriptions of, say, sea-sickness on a container ship are less than enthralling.

This was published in 1999, which made for a laugh when Moore researches his predecessor on the internet and gets 8 hits. 8!

I, Claudius - Robert Graves

Wow, I'm not sure I've ever read a book that works so much on the level of incident as this Roman tale of power and debauchery. It is a constant, dizzying whirlwind of murder, suicide, incest, warfare, witchcraft and other such Good Stuff. Characters appear, ascend to prominence and then suffer a catastrophic switchback in their fortunes within a few pages. As such, it can be hard to keep up with events, especially given the insanely convoluted family connections, but the action is so relentless that it scarcely matters.

There are very few unimpeachable participants in this sordid story, but a special mention must go to the primary villains, Livia and Caligula. She is a scheming, malignant poisoner and he is a madly reckless, all-powerful egomaniac. Between them they crank up the novel's energy levels to still more delirious heights.

We know from the start that our narrator will eventually attain the unlikely status of emperor despite his many social failings, mainly because everybody else is dead by the end. My wife suggests that Claudius is a bit like Stalin, keeping a low profile until the perfect moment to seize power. In fact he reminded me a bit more of Steven Bradbury:

Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde

One's taste for Jasper Fforde's books is largely dictated by one's tolerance for forced puns. This one contains a succession of clearly doomed partners with names such as Cannon & Phodder, Dedmen & Walken, Lamb & Slaughter and so on. I quite enjoyed those, but the half-brother villains Jack Schitt and Schitt-Hawse are somewhat less witty. Make of it what you will.

I enjoyed the first Thursday Next novel enough to give number 2 a belated stab, and it suffers from the same strengths and weaknesses: some fantastic and amusing ideas at risk of getting lost in a bombardment of curates-egg jokes and incident. It is also horribly over-plotted, with a central strand about The End Of The World largely drowned out by the love story, social events and other trivia.

The literary allusions are fun, but I was irked by a running gag about the most boring classics ever. The Faerie Queen and Pilgrim's Progress perhaps, but Paradise Lost and Moby Dick? Gah!