Bibliography, August 2025

BOTM: Tan Twan Eng, The house of doors (2023)

M. Albertus, Land Power (2007)

P. Barker, The silence of the girls (2018)
--------,    The women of Troy (2021)

--------,    The voyage home (2024)
J. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984)*

H. Chang, Bad Samaritans (2007)

J.M. Coetzee, Summertime (2009)

Y. Kawabata, Thousand Cranes (1952)

J. Lees-Milne, The last Stuarts (1983)

R. Perlstein, Before the Storm (2001)

G. Redmonds, Christian names in local and family history (2004)

J. Thurber, The 13 clocks (1950)

Great holiday month; I read loads of things, and some of them were really really long. And, with the exception of Land Power, I think they were all good. My favourites were Barnes, Perlstein, Chang and Eng. Barnes is dismissed as lightweight, which I don't think it is at all, just very finely balanced (I loved it just as much the second time round). Perlstein was fascinating. Key conclusion: America has always been nuts; and racist. Chang was fantastic, though I think less interesting to read now, 18 years later, because some of that thinking has become mainstream, particularly post crash. I do have quite serious regret that I didn't do more economic history as an undergraduate. 

Best of the lot was Tan Twan Eng's book on Maugham, which I thought was outstanding. I do really like Maugham, so I am biased around books that cover him, but this was a splendid sideways access onto a fragment of his life, and that of those strange eastern imperial Englanders. It's better than his excellent prior novel, and I'm going to seek out his other one too.