Jeeves in the Offing – P.G. Wodehouse

Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly correctly. Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle. But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph, espieglerie and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb. In her society you always had the uneasy feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop. You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.

I  really don't need to say any more. Peerless prose, imperishable characters and beautifully contrived plotting make for a delicious blend. I feel a Wodehouse binge coming on.

That Movie Book – Marc Fennell

This is the kind of book in which critical analysis is represented by such paragraphs as "City of God is incredible. Seriously. It's just an amazing flick."

It is them kind of book in which, for comic effect, the phrase "Like you do" gets its own paragraph.

To paraphrase Truman Capote, the isn't writing, this is blogging. The feeling of a rushed first draft is exacerbated by the number of irritating typos, unacceptable in a book published by the ABC.

Sigh. Not only do I know more about movies than the author (except for some aspects of cult cinema), I can also write better than him. The only fun I had with this was getting righteously outraged at some of his pisspoor recommendations.

The Invention of Hugo Chabret - Brian Selznick

I've never before read a 550 page novel in a single sitting, but this was something of a cheat as it is a story largely told in picture form. The pictures are beautifully rendered pencil sketches (plus the odd photograph), telling the two linked stories of Hugo's life and that of a great figure of cinema history.

It's a wonderful read, simple in a good way and emotionally satisfying.

My motivation for reading what is essentially a Young Adult title was having enjoyed the Scorsese movie so much. I was impressed at how smart the adaptation is, tweaking the story slightly where necessary but generally being faithful to both plot and tone. The big differences are in the setting, which is far more promninent in the film, and the fleshing out of some minor characters, particularly the station manager.

The Book of Sand - Jorge Luis Borges

Borges' final collection does not deviate from the expected themes; mind-bending alternate realities, the centrality of literature and South American history. I think I perceived a rather stronger melancholy undertow than in other books, presumably thanks to imminent mortality.

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen

Given the critical praise this has received, and the qualified admiration I have for Franzen's earlier novel The Corrections, this was a real clunking disappointment. It's another attempt at the Great American Novel that falls a mile short of similar works by, say, Don DeLillo or Philip Roth.

Basically a family saga about a pretty unlikeable bunch, the main problem is a general flatness. I can cope with unsympathetic characters but not when they are a bit dull. They all speak in the same smart-ass, stylised way regardless of age/gender/personality, and when the third person narration is taken over by the main protagonist the prose is identical. As a consequence, I didn't believe in any of them.

The plot doesn't help either, a rambling and episodic plod through various, often unrelated events. For example right at the end we get a lengthy description of the break-up of an inheritance involving characters we've barely encountered before. Am I supposed to care?

Very poor, then, and way too long.

Slowness – Milan Kundera

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who tries to forget a disagreeable incident he has lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

This one passage justifies reading this odd concoction on its own, brief as it is. Otherwise, the book is a bit of a mish-mash of ideas that struggle to cohere. There are some nice moments, but the attempts at erotica are toe-curling.

Before She Met Me – Julian Barnes

This early Barnes is by no means formative. In fact the closest parallel is with his latest, The Sense of an Ending.

In common with the Booker winner, it is brief, both funny and chilling, and concerned with the past being simultaneously unknowable and inescapable. This is the best character introduction I’ve come across in some time:  

Jack Lupton answered the door with a smouldering cigarette lodged in the side of his beard.

Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson

This short story cycle is an interesting portrait of small town America in the early twentieth century and an affirmation of the importance of the small things in life. While not an amazing read, it has its moments, and there is an obvious influence on later, better writers such as Steinbeck and McCullers.

Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

Although written in close collaboration with Jobs himself and published soon after his death, this is no hagiography. Straightforward in describing his shortcomings in areas such as parenting and personal hygiene, Isaacson successfully shows how the personality traits that lead to these problems conversely lead to the passion for design and bull-headed perfectionism that make Apple so successful.

There is a fascinating thread about his relationship with his great rival Bill Gates. I must say I am philosophically closer to the Microsoft man in terms of open source and philanthropy, but the fact that our household now contains 2 iPods, 2 iPhones and an iPod pretty well speaks for itself.

There’s nothing here on the working conditions of the Chinese workers who actually put the things together. Perhaps this is one subject the author dared not broach?

Eyeless in Gaza

Unapologetically complex and "literary", this was more of a challenge than I expected having only previously read the comparatively lightweight Brave New World. There is a nonlinear narrative, lots of philosophical debate and a whole bunch of unsympathetic characters to cope with. The reward is serious meaty, downbeat novel, laced with some humour and some startlingly accurate predicitons. It's a shame more people weren't listening to Huxley in the 1930s.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Charles Dickens

And so, just in time for the 200th centenary of his birth, I finish the last of Dickens’ novels and can therefore put him aside until the time comes for a re-reading. What a fantastically entertaining author. From the whimsy of Pickwick to the shadows of Our Mutual Friend by way of the twin masterpieces of Great Expectations and Bleak House, I’ve enjoyed every second. Well, except for bits of Martin Chuzzlewit.

Drood is famously incomplete, but there’s enough there to leave the impression of an odd mix between Wilkie Collins (the mystery plot) and Anthony Trollope (the ecclesiastical setting).

There are some typically memorable supporting characters, but I am not aching inside over the fact that it was never finished.