Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier

I should hate this book for any number of reasons. It is essentially a hack reworking of Jane Eyre, with a frustratingly dim and passive heroine and some truly rotten prose. The plot is baggy and largely predictable, and repetition is used to a ridiculous extent.

Yet, despite all these misgivings, I found myself under its spell. It's a mood piece par excellence, and I feel as though I won't be able to shed the ominous atmosphere for days.

Incidentally, I've seen the movie a few times and I think the changes made to the plot are largely improvements (other than a shift Max's role in the death of Rebecca, which was done for censorship reasons). It was impossible to read the book without picturing Olivier in my mind, perfect casting.

Choke –Chuck Palahniuk

If Kurt Vonnegut had been a sex crazed psychopath, he might have written something like this.

Palahniuk wrote Fight Club, and this is most easily described as Fight Club for sex addicts. The story is pretty good with a damp-squid twist, but some of the set-pieces are utterly outrageous. The highlight for me was a mutual rape fantasy that descends into farce, I couldn't quite believe that he'd written it or that I was laughing at it.

In The Winter Dark – Tim Winton

A brief chiller about mysterious goings on in a remote valley. Diverting and atmospheric, but insubstantial.

The Constant Gardener – John Le Carré

A solid effort from Le Carré, satisfying and polemical but missing the magic of his Cold War stuff. The plot doesn’t hold enough interest for such a lengthy work, and there’s a curious beginning focussing on a character that ultimately becomes peripheral, but the depiction of the British governing classes is superb.

Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett

A fantastic early noir about gangsters, private eyes, femmes fatale and bucketfuls of booze. It’s a violent tale and characters die with astonishing regularity, each fatality being reported in a really offhand manner.

Bone; Crown of Thorns – Jeff Smith

The grand finale of the series largely follows the expected path, with a big fight and the return of the dragons. There are enough twists and turns to keep up interest, and it’s always nice to see plot strands come to neat and appropriate conclusions.

Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

I saw an excellent theatrical production of this a few years ago, so I had a rough idea of plot and tone, but I was nevertheless impressed with Winton’s style and his control of a fairly rambling storyline. In many ways it’s a classic example of contemporary Auslit; a picaresque tale of larrikins, displacement and relations between white and aboriginal Australians, which can be read as an allegory for European colonisation. Despite these predictable tics, I enjoyed the sense of fun and the warmth of the characters depicted.