Stranger in a Strange Land - Gary Younge

This is a collection of journalism from one of my favourite Grauniad writers, and as such many of the pieces were vaguely familiar to me. Younge's big themes are race and politics in the USA, but I also enjoyed his quirky and interesting article on Sesame Street and an interview with one of my current heroes, Jon Stewart.

Books Do Furnish A Room - Anthony Powell

Books Do Furnish A Room has long been a favourite title of mine, ever since spotting it on my mum's bookshelf many years ago. In fact, I can't think of a better one except perhaps Far From The Madding Crowd.

A Dance to the Music of Time is also pretty fine, and utterly appropriate to the series that constantly alludes to other artistic forms. The dance corresponds to the grouping and regrouping of the same large group of characters, as in a formal ball, and the music refers to the formal motifs of repetition, variation and shifts in tone. It's all masterfully accomplished.

Plot-wise, the war is over and the literary life reasserts itselfs, now tangled up with politics in the person of the terrible Widmerpools.

Newton - Peter Ackroyd

A biography of one of the great minds of any age by one of the best writers of ours. The emphasis is correctly on the Principia and Opticks, but I was intrigued by some of Newton's extra-scientific endeavours such as his anti-Catholic campaigns and his formidable stewardship of the Mint.

Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

Dealing as it does with drunken Englishmen discussing God in Mexico, this is a Graham Greene type story but written in a modernist style that reminded me of Virginia Woolf, only worse. It's a real slog in terms of prose, and covers only one plotless day in 400 pages.

Here's a sample:

The street was now absolutely deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two firce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly, of how in her heart's eye, before she'd met Louis, and when she'd half imagined the Consul back in England, she'd tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe.

I mean, really.

The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell

It has become clear that the twelve novels of A Dance to the Music of time form a quartet of trilogies, creating a parallel between the human life and the months and seasons of a year. Book nine completes the war years, in which major characters that we first met as children are killed in action, and Widmerpool completes his transmutation from comic buffoon to sinister monster.

The Secret River - Kate Grenville

I was stunned by the quality of this novel, probably the best Australian work I've read since, ooh, Oscar and Lucinda I guess.

It is a foundational Australian story about a convict and his family being sent from London to New South Wales and eventually making good with devastating consequences for the indigenous people. Obviously it is an allegory for the European settlement/invasion of this continent, but Grenville always keeps the characters to the fore allowing the story to work brilliantly in its own terms.

Both unblinkingly brutal and unstintingly humane, this is a truly great contemporary novel.

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

I would characterise my understanding of science as reasonable, probably the kind of reader that New Scientist is squarely aimed at; I've got the basics, I'm interested, and I'm genuinely excited about the Large Hadron Collider getting switched on this week. As such, I am probably more clued up than Bryson's imaginary reader here, and I didn't learn many new ideas beyond his excellent description of the inner workings of a cell.

Where this overview really scores is in the many tales from scientific history. It is crammed with eccentric egomaniacs and unsung heroes, strokes of brilliance and selfless drudgery, all told with the author's familiar, breezy enthusiasm.

One dictum quoted late on regards the fate of major discoveries and rings all too true:

First they don't believe you, then they tell you it isn't important, then they credit the wrong person.

Bone: The Great Cow Race - Jeff Smith

This is the second of the Bone comic books, and I think I've got the flavour of them now - cutesy fairy-tale charm, I suppose you would call it. The stories and characterisations are fairly simple, as is the line drawing style, but it's pleasant enough and zips along undemandingly.

The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell

Part 8 of the Dance, and another masterpiece of elegance in construction, observation and narrative control. I'm going to be sad when it's over.

The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac

Here's Kerouac's alter ego advising his girlfriend how to write:

I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold it back, don’t analyse or anything as you go along, say it out

No, no, NO! Consider, craft, edit and re-edit until it's as close to perfection as you can envisage. DON'T just dribble it all out in a drug-hazy fug, you self-indulgent, tedious solipsist.

Not a favourite.

The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde

More Thursday Next literary whimsy involving Miss Havisham road-racing Mr Toad, a rampaging minotaur and Solomon franchising out his wisdom. This is the third in the series and Fforde has straightened out some of the plotting problems of book two allowing the jokes to come to the fore. A debate about the prevalence of the awkward constructions "had had" and "that that" is inspired, and many of the jokes comment entertainingly about the disparity between the fictional world as written and the actual world as experienced. Take this, at the end of a long conversation:

"Mr Grnksghty?"
"Yes?"
"How do you pronounce your name?"

House of Meetings - Martin Amis

It is an interesting direction for Amis to start writing about modern Russian history through his fiction, but I am hoping that this is a dry run for a more successful future work. The whizz-bang prose is toned down here, but the first-person narrator is so obviously a proxy for the author himself - he even repeats chunks that I have read in Amis's essays - that the recurrence of familiar tropes (male brutality, rivalry etc) becomes a distraction.

I have read a lot of first person narratives recently, and it is certainly easier to digest stories in which the narrator strongly resembles the author (Garner, Waugh, Powell). Whether the fault lies with me, the author, or the technique itself I'm not sure.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Another effortlessly brilliant novel from one of the true greats. This is often touted as Waugh's masterpiece, and the word "mature" is often used, which means its like the earlier stuff but he's replaced lively satire with nostalgic melancholy. I suppose its a fair swap, but I was disappointed to see the story's most idiosyncratic character (seductive posh boy Sebastien Flyte)essentially disappear half way through.

But I quibble - this is genius.

The Gathering - Anne Enright

I actually read this a few weeks ago and somehow neglected to post here. The fact that I can remember only patchy details is indicative that this is not the most impactful Booker winner I've encountered. There is some decent writing and an interesting evocation of childhood memories contrasted with adult knowledge, but the central revelation is utterly unsurprising and it does go on a bit.