Travels With My Aunt - Graham Greene

The theme of an uptight man becoming liberated through a relationship with an unconventional and unrestrained woman is hardly unusual (cf just about every Woody Allen movie) but the twist here is that the woman is not a sexually available youngster but an elderly aunt. Hijinks ensue to reasonably entertaining and beautifully written effect, but some of the social attitudes are a little embarrassing for something published in 1969.

A minor Greene, to be sure, but not without it's pleasures.

Trick or Treatment?: alternative medicine on trial - Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst

This is a comprehensive but rather dry overview of the published literature on alternative therapies, focussing particularly on acupuncture, homeopathy and herbalism. Their performance is predictable. As the old joke has it, there is a word for alternative medicine that has been shown to work; medicine.

I would suggest Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to somebody interested in issues such as scientific methodology or the placebo effect, but this is a handy reference book for debunking specific woo-woo therapies.

The Hard Shoulder - Chris Petit

If J.G. Ballard had rear-ended Raymond Chandler on the Kilburn High Road sometime in the mid 1980s, this is the book that would have been found smouldering in the wreckage. The genre is low-rent existential thriller, and the pace is slow until a revelation about halfway through brings in a more emotional aspect.

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

This is a really lovely coming of age tale about a young woman leaving Ireland for America, then being pulled back by events. In the end, she has to make a decision and it’s heartbreaking.

Toibin is a really fine writer both in terms of sentence writing and plot structure, and after this and The Master I’ll be seeking out more of his work.

The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald

A classic Fitzgerald tale of glamour, decadence and downfall. The writing is, of course, magnificent, and the story is compelling.

The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham

Somehow I’ve never got around to Maugham, but I’ll be reading more after enjoying this splendid novel. The structure is brilliantly conceived and I was emotionally engaged with the characters throughout.

Tommy Cooper; always leave them laughing – John Fisher

Spoon, jar, jar, spoon.

Cooper is one of my comedy heroes but I knew nothing much about his life except the nature of his death. I have now remedied that with this overlong but perfectly readable tome. The author worked in television during the relevant era and uses his insider knowledge appropriately except for way too much detail on Cooper's dealings with his manager. The subject himself comes across as mean and none too bright, but he was apparently universally liked in the profession which probably tells us what we need to know.

If you're unfamiliar with the great man's work, here's a taster:

2 Maccabees

Another historical book closes out the apocrypha. This one reads more like the Iliad than most other biblical books, what with all the war and suchlike, but its nice to know that they settled the status of Jerusalem once and for all, never to cause any trouble again.

Next up: the gospels.

1 Maccabees

This is basically a historical text chronicling the Jewish people’s wars and negotiations over a few generations, most intriguingly with Alexander the Great. God barely gets a look-in.

2:46 And what children soever they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised, those they circumcised valiantly.

Valiantly?

Bad Science – Bad Science

This is a splendidly lucid and entertaining romp through the reasons people misunderstand science, and the consequences such misperceptions have on the real world.

The book opens with a broadside against the alternative medicine industry and the cult of nutritionism, which is fun but pretty well self-evident to the careful observer. Next up comes Big Pharma, which is frankly derided as evil but not for the reasons you may expect. Finally the media come in for a roasting for swallowing PR-reviewed pseudoscience and churning it out uncritically as news
I am a fan of Goldacre’s Bad Science column in my beloved Grauniad, so much of the material here was familiar to me, but the expanded format allows a more overarching thesis to be explored (briefly: we are all to blame), as well as providing room for more detail and more, often hilarious, jokes.

Goldacre suggests that the books main arguments could be summed up in the t-shirt slogan “I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that”.

Superb.

Bel and the Dragon

More stout Daniel cleverness; he sounds like quite the character.

Susanna

An odd little moral fable, in which a pair of dastardly elders try to blackmail our heroine into sex, she refuses and is condemned, but a wise young man called Daniel conducts some elementary detective work and saves the day. The moral point is supposed to be about trusting God, but surely the correct lesson is that you should demand evidence before making important judgements?

Chess – Stefan Zweig

I enjoyed this intriguing novella, in which a mysterious stranger appears on a cruise and turns out to be a chess genius. The revelation of the man’s background is satisfying and the mood remains after the book’s end.

A Mathematician’s Apology – GH Carr

The author was apparently a genius, by his own estimation "for a short time the fifth best pure mathematician in the world”. This wryly self-deprecating assessment gives a good sense of Carr’s charming manner, which won me over completely, aided greatly by C.P. Snow’s lengthy biographical introduction.

It was published in 1940, possibly the last time that “real” (i.e. very advanced) maths could be defended as harmlessly useless. Within a few years the Enigma code breakers helped win the war (think Alan Turing) and the computer age began to stir (think, er, Alan Turing).

Alan Turing, eh? What a guy.

Prayer of Azarias and Hymn of the Three Children

This prayer can be paraphrased as “We were wicked so you set us on fire. Thank you! Praise the ever merciful God!”

Oookaay.

Baruch

Inconsequential and brief, this is a real obscurity. It’s quite jolly in parts, for example:

3:34 The stars shined in their watches, and rejoiced: when he calleth them, they say, Here we be; and so with cheerfulness they shewed light unto him that made them.

Darkness At Noon – Arthur Koestler

Although rarely included in British or Australian versions, this often shows up in American “great novels” lists. It deserves to at that, a brilliant evocation of totalitarianism from the perspective of a former party apparatchik now being held prisoner by the regime.

Wisdom of Sirach

This longish book of Biblical wisdom contains the usual immiscible selection of prettily worded loveliness and wickedness, with the overall impression being that of eccentricity. I was interested to come across the word “huckster”, which I had ignorantly assumed was a much more recent American coinage.

The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson

The question being, presumably, “What was the point of that?”.

Trumpeted as the first comic novel to win the Booker, it seems to me to be too parochial to be really worthy of the prize. If you’re not a London-based academic/media type (like the Booker judging panel, I’m guessing), it’s hard to imagine why you would share most of the character’s concerns. There are a few good jokes, though.

The Iron Staircase – Georges Simenon

I was expecting a more typical Simenon, which is to say something that would fit more comfortably into the crime genre. Although centred on the psychology of a crime, this curious book is much closer to the fever state of Crime and Punishment than a Maigret mystery.

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

This book caused quite a furore when it was published back in 2003, both due to its fiery subject matter (a Columbine style high school shooting) and the critique of motherhood. It took me an age to get into, and I think the first half of the book could do with losing at least 100 pages, but it pays off in the end despite a completely obvious plot event that appears to be intended as a twist.

It is written as a series of letters from Kevin’s mother to her absent husband, and the best effects come when we start to doubt her version of events and are forced to interpret the story for ourselves.

Trouble With Lichen – John Wyndham

What if you discovered a means of making people live for 250 years? What if that means came from a specific lichen that was in seriously short supply? And what if that supply was a lake close to the China/Russia border?

It’s a great set-up, and for the first two thirds of the tale I was gripped despite some horribly reactionary undertones. Sadly, the final part of the book descends horribly into a cack-handed attempt at social satire.