Bibliography, October 2014 (Booker edition)

BOTM: E. Waugh, Men at Arms

J. Ferris, To rise again at a decent hour

K.J. Fowler, We are all completely beside ourselves 

H. Jacobson, J
N. Mukerjee, The lives of others
A. Smith, How to be both
E. Waugh, Helena
E. Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen
E. Waugh, Unconditional Surrender
M Zusak, The Book Thief

&, for completeness but not actually finished till November, R. Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north 

This has become a bit difficult. I delayed this because - for the first time ever - I've managed to read all the Booker shortlist. Unlike last year, they appear to have been right. So, Flanagan would have been BOTM had it been in the month, but it wasn't. Anyway, It's still difficult to award pick a favourite then because I can't really call out which one of Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy is the best. The last one is the nicest to read because it gets resolved, but I think it's the first one that does what it does best, though that may be because I found the great character of the mad brigadier (Ritchie - Hook) more amenable than the monstrous Ludovic who stalks Officers and Gentlemen. The trilogy, it goes without saying, is magnificent.

For the record, I'd rank the Booker shortlist as follows: 1. Flanagan, 2.Fowler, 3. Mukerjee, 4. Ferris, 5. Smith, 6. Jacobson. If I could have read just the first half of Ferris or the second half of Ali Smith (in my version, the modern story), they'd have done better.

Bibliography, September 2014

BOTM: D. Brown, Bury my heart at wounded knee*

M. Atwood, Oryx and Crake

J. Berger, Ways of seeing

M. Kundera, Immortality

L. Lee, A moment of war

D. du Maurier, My cousin Rachel

H. Murakami, Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

R.L. Stevenson, Kidnapped*

I've had to abandon my objection to Margaret Atwood doing Science Fiction, because - aside from the Handmaid's tale, which is a bit clunky - it turns out she does it really well. However, her achievement pales beside the feat of historical re-imagining that Dee Brown manages with his famous, and wonderful, account of the history of the end of the plains Indians. Reading it for the second time, I looked up the reaction, and the criticism. Some of that criticism is probably fair. It is a whitewash, and no attempt is made to analyse and understand the acts of the settlers. But, more than ever, I don't think that matters. What he does is to give a vanished people a history, albeit one without a happy ending. And he does so with a voice that isn't that of the victorious Americans. That's astonishingly hard to do - we are all prisoners of own historiography - and here it's done with style and an emotional punch that still smarts long after I finished reading. Were I to do one of those ten books challenges, it would be there.

Bibliography, August 2014

BOTM: M. Kundera, Life is Elsewhere 

R. Calder, Willie: a life of Somerset Maugham

T. Hunt, 10 cities that made an Empire

D. du Maurier, Jamaica Inn
E.M. Remarque, All quiet on the Western Front
K. Roberts, Pavane 
A. Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 

I had forgotten just how much I like Kundera. I've picked up a few ones I didn't have in charity shops recently (including one I accidentally bought for the second time). Rather nicely, they seem pretty much to have come in chronological order. Anyway, this one was great - light, funny, and touching. I don't think it's his best, but it was good enough this time.

Down with the Manor of Northstead

Douglas Carswell may have given an undeserved victory to Ed Milliband, and he has certainly given a filip to Nigel Farage, for both of which he should ashamed. People seemed to have talked about that a lot. However, he is definitely taking Parliament closer to the tyranny of party, which is much worse, and people haven't really talked about that enough. I don't believe he's doing it cynically - there’s no doubting that he is a man of principles, but so was Lenin. Neither's happen to be mine.

I feel we are underplaying the constitutional impact not so much of what he has done, but how he has done it. We have had MPs defecti before - there are a surprising number. They make excellent copy, and they are disastrous for parties. However, most don't resign their seats. In fact the last MP to do so was Bruce Douglas-Mann in 1982. Reflexively people tend to think this is bad, arguing that MP's who switch allegiance should be forced to face their electors again. Apparently this is more 'democratic.' Obviously, I don't really care if it's more democratic. Douglas Carswell does. But where does this end: when Claire Short resigned as a Labour MP, should she have faced the electors? When parties discipline members by withholding the whip, should that trigger an election? Should all the Liberal Democrats fight their seats anew after their volte-face on a manifesto promise?

Of course they shouldn't. We don't elect parties; we elect people. Their electors elected them; next year they get to vote again. Let us roll back party, not entrench it. Switching party shouldn't be privileged. If we believe in having independent-minded people in public life, in the power of Parliament over government, then we need less party, not more. If this becomes the norm, we move ever closer to party lists and the horrors that attend it. 

The electors of Clacton elected Douglas Carswell. Turn down the Manor of Northstead and in the name of God, Stay.

Bibliography, July 2014

BOTM: A. Solomon, Far from the tree

K. Atkinson, Life after life
A. Christie, Passenger from Frankfurt
D. Darke, A house in Damascus
D. du Maurier, The du Mauriers
C. Moran, How to be a woman
V.S. Naipaul, The Masque of Africa
J. Updike, Couples

I'm liking this month's selection. Broad, and good; many were excellent. However, none could compare to Solomon's astonishing, detailed, documentation of the lives of disabled and 'different' children and their families. Obviously, this feels like a dangerous book to read when a baby is on the way, but it's not. It was warm but not fuzzy; emotional without being sentimental; and a worthy tribute to the people it recorded. There is more on it here. It did also make me cry, but that is a function of the coming baby. 

Bibliography, June 2014

BOTM : B. Wilson, Consider the Fork

J. Baker, Longbourn

J. Barnes, Sense of an Ending

A. Christie, Ordeal by Innocence 

A. Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: an adventure

N. Douglas, Old Calabria

P.L. Fermor, ed. A. Cooper and C. Thubron, The Broken Road

It’s all been Patrick Leigh Femor this month – his last book, his biography, his favourite travel book (that was Old Calabria and it hasn’t aged well) - but better than them all was Consider the fork – about the history of food technology. Specifically, about how we have cooked over time and the implements we have invented to do it. What struck me was simply how recent many of the essentials in the kitchen are. And I'm looking at some of my utensils with more gratitude than I imagined I ever would.

Bibliography, May 2014

BOTM: P.L. Fermor, Between the woods and the water*

R.E. Feist, Magician*
P.L. Fermor, A time of gifts*
A. Koestler, The thirteenth tribe
A. Koestler, Darkness at noon
P. Roth, Exit Ghost
B. Unsworth, Stone Virgin

Decent bit of rereading last month, almost by accident. And Koestler - how have I not read Koestler before. Anyway, magnificent though he was, this was inevitable. I'm rereading Paddy Leigh Fermor's first two volumes of his trip to Constantinople in preparation for reading the posthumously edited third. They are as glorious as I recall, and the second one is the better, though I'm not insensible to the charge that that's due to my own sympathies, not purely literary merit.