Monkey Grip - Helen Garner

This heavily autobiographical novel depicts life in the Melbourne counterculture of the 1970s. There are brief moments of lyrical writing and emotional insight, but no plot at all, just a few inconsequential incidents, often involving indistinguishable secondary characters. Who would have thought a book with this much sex and drugs could be so dull?

The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell

A different feel in this instalment of A Dance to the Music of Time, in which Jenkins leaves his normal milieu and joins an obscure Welsh regiment for the opening stage of WWII.

I'm not sure I have ever read a book with a more passive narrator. Jenkins persistently takes a minor role in events, and his dialogue is almost always written as reported speech.

I usually try and avoid quoting blurbs on this blog, but this from Simon Raven in The Observer nails it:

"The Valley of Bones" is sheer delight. It is immaculate in period and military detail; it praises duty while at the same time making educated play of its absurdities; it recognises heroism but is swift to prick pretension; it evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom; and it is exceedingly funny throughout.

What he said.

Mim and Toutou Go Forth - Giles Foden

This curious book tells the true WW1 tale of 2 British ships being dragged through the east African jungle and deployed on Lake Tanganyika to destroy a much larger German fleet. It starts out as a boy's own adventure yarn but then morphs into something much more serious. Finally, there are a pair of epilogues detailing the tale's connection to The African Queen and a bit of travel writing about how the events resonate even today.

It sounds like a mess, but Foden skilfully pulls it off. His recreation of the skirt-wearing, vain, duplicitous but ultimately heroic Commander Spicer-Simson is one of the best characters I have read about in a long time.

(Thanks to Andrew for the recommendation).

My Friend Maigret - Georges Simenon

A finely plotted and tautly written tale, pungent with the atmosphere of its French Mediterranean setting.

I've been reading lots of French stuff lately. Why? Je ne sais quas.

The Pawn Report - Alan McKee, Katherine Albury & Catharine Lumby

(That should be an "or" instead of an "aw" in the header, but I don't want to upset anybody's net nannies).

An interesting survey of pawn use and production in Australia, designed to explode the myths about violent or child-based content, and the average user as a raincoat-wearing loner. It largely succeeds, but the academic research is undermined by the authors' tendency to editorialise and use subjective terminology in a non-scholarly way.

The DIY "cottage industry" amateur stars sound like a jolly bunch.

Clear Light of Day - Anita Desai

This meticulously crafted book about the tribulations of a family following the partition of India has some lovely passages but feels very old-fashioned. In 1980 it was shortlisted for the Booker , which was won in 1981 by Midnight's Children which changed the rules for Indian fiction.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

This is a loooong novel, often exasperating, occasionally tedious, but ultimately worthwhile.

The main plot is grand Victorian melodrama, featuring the petty criminal turned saintly Jean Valjean and a cast of wicked villains, pure-of-heart women, brave-to-the-point-of-stupidity-and-beyond heroes and impish street urchins. I particularly enjoyed the indefatigable and morally neutral policeman Javert, surely the model for Tommy Lee Jones character in The Fugitive:

"I didn't kill my wife"
"I don't care"

Like War and Peace or Moby Dick, the reader is expected to indulge the author's wild digressions from the narrative thread. The first 70 pages are an eventless description of a pure-hearted bishop who plays his role in the story but dies shortly thereafter. Depictions of Waterloo and the Paris sewers betray the research that went into them all too obviously, and the story is often abandoned for slabs of lengthy historical exegesis.

The book has many faults, but the pay-off is great, particularly in the climactic street battles of the July revolution, when the main characters come together in a miasma of confusion and canon fire.

Good, trashy fun.