Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov

I can think of no other novel with a hero defined by his indolence, and a plot driven by non-acts of complete laziness. Oblomov doesn’t leave his flat for the first 170 pages, and by the end of the novel he has lost everything thanks to sheer inactivity. The tragicomedy works because somehow we end the story still liking him, our sympathy outweighing his apathy.

By the way, my mum gave me this book with a twinkle in her eye when I was a teenager, and I’ve finally got around to reading it 20 years later. Make of that what you will.

My Name Escapes Me - Alec Guinness

I am delighted to report that Sir Alec is exactly how you want and expect him to be in this diary; conservative and eccentric, amiable and grumpy, highly cultured and a very fine writer indeed. I was touched by his devotion to his wife of many years, and the fact that he refers to them as "M and I" (as I do with my wife in informal writing).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson

There are certain basic techniques that any haf decent writer will employ in such a way that the reader will barely notice. Such things as;

1) Show not tell
2) Unobtrusive exposition
3) Including detail that's relevant and excluding that which is not
4) Choosing a narrative point of view
5) Controlled revelation of plot

This novel fails in all of these basic facets.

1) Lots of information is provided by the flat authorial voice. At one point we are told that the heroine's friend has a feeling of dread, then that her mother gives her a haunted look and then the author tells us that it's almost as if she's had an ominous premonition, all on the one page. Well, duh.
2) Exposition is too often through chunks of uninteresting third person prose, or (cardinal sin) characters having conversations that contain the phrase "As you know, xxx..."
3) I did not need to know about the heroine's choice of IT hardware, the hero's reading habits or the details of most of the violence. In a long book, much could have been omitted.
4) POV switches all over the place, often in the same paragraph. Simple incompetence on the author's part.
5) A central revelation is obvious from the prologue but only "revealed" towards the end. The heroine engages in a sadistic set-piece to access bank funds from her evil guardian, but later cleans out a major corporation through what sounds like a simple piece of hacking, suggesting that the earlier unpleasantness was simply unnecessary. And so on.

OK, its a piece of populist thriller writing that perhaps I shouldn't analyse so critically, but I ca't believe that this is so popular even amongst sophisticated readers. Larsson is a little better than Dan Brown on a sentence-by-sentence basis but in the end The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is, in some ways, even worse than the Da Vinci Code. When you are writing about a subject as serious and upsetting as sexual violence, you must do it with more skill and sensitivity than this.

Cannery Row – John Steinbeck

Poetic, rambling and brilliant account of life in a small working community in Monterey. The plot, if it merits that word, involves various characters trying to organise a party with good intentions but comical and touching shortcomings. Also interspersed throughout the book are vignettes and prose poems that work superbly in complementing the bawdy mayhem elsewhere. Superb.

Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons – Bill Watterson

We’re big Calvin and Hobbes fans in our house, and this one was well up to scratch. Watterson famously has no children himself, but now I’m a parent I get even more enjoyment from the depiction of a hyperimaginative boy and his pet tiger.

The Autograph Man – Zadie Smith

The Autograph Man has the reputation of being Smith forgotten novel, sandwiched between her wildly popular debut White Teeth and the magnificent On Beauty. At first I thought this was unfair as I got quite involved with Alex-Li’s entertaining relationships in suburban London. However, he then jets off to New York and things go horribly astray. The book is an attempt to analyse the modern craze for celebrity but can offer no insight, and the fictional corrolaries of real-life celebs are pretty painful.

2009 Review

2009 was the Year of Reading Dangerously with no library borrowing and no new purchases (well, one) so that I could get through the backlog of material on my bookshop. In the end I read a new record of 107 books, which meant that my bookshelf went from a double layer:



To a single layer:



Which is quite good, but 2 weeks into the new year and already it’s back up to this;



Best books: The Alexandria Quartet, The Go-Between, The Human Factor, Fingersmith, Framley Parsonage, The Restraint of Beasts, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Poisonwood Bible

Worst book: Either Alice's Masque or The Private Patient

Longest book:Not sure...Framley Parsonage, maybe?

Shortest book: Nehemiah

Non-fiction books: 17

Australian authors: 13

Female authors: 14

The complete list

Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West
Churchill and Australia - Graham Freudenberg
Joan Makes History - Kate Grenville
Inside the Whale and other essays - George Orwell
The Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Child in Time - Ian McEwan
Silas Marner - George Eliot
The Human Factor - Graham Greene
Mr Darwin’s Shooter - Roger McDonald
Intimacy - Hanif Kureishi
The Map That Changed the World - Simon Winchester
The History Boys - Alan Bennett
Bob Wilson’s Ultimate Book of Peculiar Sporting Lingo - Bob Wilson
If This Is A Man - Primo Levi
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Kowloon Tong - Paul Theroux
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
London; A Pilgrimage - Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold
Gould’s Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Bone; eyes of the storm - Jeff Smith
The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley
The Viceroy of Ouidah - Bruce Chatwin
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
The Pianoplayers - Anthony Burgess
The Private Patient - P.D. James
Bound For Glory - Woody Guthrie
Justine - Lawrence Durrell
Balthazar - Lawrence Durrell
Mountolive - Lawrence Durrell
Clea - Lawrence Durrell
The Meaning of Liff - Douglas Adams & John Lloyd
Bone: The Dragonslayer - Jeff Smith
Brave New World Revisited - Aldous Huxley
Kingdom Come - J.G. Ballard
The Subterranean Railway - Christian Wolmar
Sabbath’s Theater - Phillip Roth
1 Samuel
Leviathan - John Birmingham
2 Samuel
The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov
The Biographer’s Tale - A.S. Byatt
Seats In All Parts - Leslie Halliwell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Into The Wild - Jon Krakauer
Bone: Rockjaw, master of the eastern border - Jeff Smith
The Europeans - Henry James
Bloody Margaret: three political fantasies - Mark Lawson
Shakespeare Wrote For Money - Nick Hornby
Absolute Friends - John le Carre
1 Kings
2 Kings
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Humphrey Clinker - Tobias Smollett
Framley Parsonage - Anthony Trollope
The Steep Approach to Garbadale - Iain Banks
Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
Wake Up - Tim Pears
All The Conspirators - Christopher Isherwood
According to Queeney - Beryl Bainbridge
Stone’s Fall - Iain Pears
Mary - Vladimir Nabokov
The Lieutenant - Kate Grenville
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills
The Third Man & The Fallen Idol - Graham Greene
King Rat - China Mieville
1 Chronicles
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins - Rupert Everett
Bone; Old Man’s Cave - Jeff Smith
2 Chronicles
Shakespeare - Bill Bryson
Ezra
Bone; ghost circles - Jeff Smith
Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold
Nehemiah
Esther
The Rip - Robert Drewe
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
The Riders - Tim Winton
The Millstone - Margaret Drabble
Alice’s Masque - Lindsay Clarke
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Lush Life - Richard Price
Doctor Sally - P.G. Wodehouse
Illywhacker - Peter Carey
The Devil’s Pool - George Sand
Shepperton Babylon - Matthew Sweet
The Light of Day - Graham Swift
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
My Life as a Fake - Peter Carey
The Service of Clouds - Delia Falconer
Bone; treasure hunters - Jeff Smith
Job
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby
Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
Bone; crown of thorns - Jeff Smith
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
The Constant Gardener - John Le Carre
In The Winter Dark - Tim Winton
Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier
A Big Life - Susan Johnson
The Comedians - Graham Greene
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
Talking It Over - Julian Barnes

Talking It Over – Julian Barnes

In which the 3 central characters take turns to address the camera in a tale of a newly married couple , the husband’s best mate and a predictable betrayal. Barnes is never less than effortlessly readable, and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel.

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

I expected not to like this. I think I am suspicious of “worldwide bestseller” type stuff because I equate popularity with poor quality. To be fair, the rule holds true most of the time.

Anyway, this was brilliant. The plot involves a nutty missionary taking his wives and daughters to 1960s Congo with predictably awful consequences. Each of the female characters takes turns to narrate events, and each of them is convincing and well-differentiated. The reader is sucked into their hellish and touching existence and I was very affected by some of the events.

Kingsolver also extends her ambition to a wider view of African history and colonialism, which doesn’t work quite as well but was educational to me.

The Comedians – Graham Greene

Impeccable fare, this, set in the regime of Haiti’s horrifying Tontons Macoute but applicable to dictatorships everywhere. Here the moral quandary is one of passivity versus activism; would you risk yourself in a probably hopeless cause or keep quiet and muddle through? Throw in some bits about Catholicism and class and you get classic, top-notch Greene.

A Big Life - Susan Johnson

I’ve read a fair bit of Oz literature from the last 20 years and I’ve detected a few patterns, as follows;

1) Themes of emigration/immigration and displacement
2) Analogies about the indigenous Australian experience
3) Anglo protagonists with a multiracial supporting cast
4) Larrikins
5) Lavish descriptions of the landscape
6) A note that “this novel was made possible by the generous funding of the xyz Arts Council”

I guess the arts council types know what they like.

A Big Life falls squarely into this tradition, but is nevertheless very readable. I found the Sydney passages more effective than the passages set in London, but the central character is compelling and the descriptions of the acrobatic shows are beautifully done.