Bibliography, December 2011

Read: 10
BOTM - A. Agassi, Open

A. Leslie, Killing my own snakes
N. Lewis, Naples '44
J. Le Carre, The Spy who came in from the cold
J. Morris, Venice
A. Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
F.Scott Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby*
J. Williamson, Darker than you think
J. Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit
J. Winterson, Why by happy when you could be normal?


Thanks heaven for Christmas. On the 20th, I'd only read four things, but a very relaxing in-law Christmas took me well beyond that. I spent almost all of the month thinking BOTM of the month would be Cry, the beloved country - it deserves its classic status, and prefigures some of the more famous apartheid literature by a good few decades. But I finished Agassi this morning. Now, this clearly won't be a classic in fifty years: it's a bit hammed up, you really need to know who the people are (Pete Sampras' dullness only gets mentioned a few times, as a reader you need to fill in the blanks a bit), and it's a memoir, so there's a bit of post-rationalisation about the past. But for now, it's a classic. The voice is compelling and engaging (much like the man), and the emotions are no less real for being a bit two dimensional. It's a great book in a genre that all to often fails to deliver them.