J. Lees-Milne, Another Self
S. Sturlsson, King Harald's Saga
B. Unsworth, Land of Marvels
Read (13)
BOTM: B. Bryson, Life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid
J. Darwin, After Tamerlane
M. Drabble, Jerusalem the golden
H. Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
T. Mann, Death in Venice
G. Menzies, 1421: The year China discovered the world
G. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
S. Sturlsson, King Harald's Saga
G. Vermes, The Resurrection
F. Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo covered the world
A. Wilson, Late Call
Some major disappointments this month: Hesse, like all his work I have read save Steppenwolf, was disappointing, with a good premise vanishing into absurd mysticism and a rubbish end. Vermes, sadly, is past it. BOTM was deserved, though for a fun filled romp through my favourite post-war decade (and constrasts strikingly with Drabble which I read immediately after covering a not dissimilar period). Bryson literary skills are well known, and it's a mark of how effective they are that he manages to essentially write about nothing for 300 pages or so without the reader feeling this drags at all, and to evoke that feeling of optimism and fear that characterised the 1950s, and in some ways, children of all (recent) times. There are other works here with more lustrous reputations, but Bryson was better.
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