Big brother, by Lionel Shriver

This is plainly and simply the best book I have read this year – and probably for several years. I recommend it unreservedly to everyone. I found it hard work at the beginning, when the American style had me stumbling over sentences that didn’t quite read as I had expected them to read (and this isn’t a fault, but only what you will get with an American writer and an English reader), but I got used to it and became engrossed in the story. And I am not going to say any more than that – go and read it for yourself!

Mr Ogilvie

I am horribly, irrationally and embarrassingly terrified of dentists. I don’t know why, as I have only once been hurt by a dentist (he was the one I bit, and we were never friends afterwards – but this happened long after the story I am about to tell). My first dentist, the one from my childhood, was a tall man, rather handsome in a Dr. Kildare sort of a way, and the father of two sisters who went to the same school that I did. His surgery was in a terribly smart, white modern house, all angles and big windows and shiny Sixties style (not surprisingly, as it was the Sixties), and there was an overwhelming impression of brightness and gleaming hygiene and efficiency. I can’t remember why I stopped going to him, whether I disliked the connection through his daughters or whether I just threw a teenage strop. Maybe I had heard the tales of Mr. Ogilvie and wanted to see if they were true.

The town was divided on the subject of Mr. Ogilvie. Most people thought he was mad, and possibly dangerous and, having visited him once, never returned for their next appointment. A few, like me, thought he was the best dentist they had ever had and were loyal through thick and thin. He was different in every way from my first dentist.  Instead of a smart modern house, he operated out of an old-fashioned terrace, and for all I know he lived on the premises. Certainly the place had an air of domesticity, well-worn and not too tidy. It was dark and welcoming. The same went for his equipment which had seen better days, and many of them.  The chair was battered and comfortable. But it wasn’t the slightly tatty surroundings that put people off, it was his chairside manner.

Most dentists, like hairdressers, stick to the same, familiar and predictable conversations – where their patients went, or are going, on their holidays, what the weather was or is doing. Dull, dull, dull – and unchallenging. Mr. Ogilvie eschewed such niceties. He talked about whatever interested him, whatever was in his mind at the time. And as he was a widely-read and intelligent man, he followed trains of thought that were entirely unpredictable. I remember him telling me on one occasion about the rate of decomposition of bodies in the ground, for example, and on another occasion, the varying capacity of the human bladder. I think this is what used to terrify his patients. Perhaps they found the subjects distasteful, as they lay stretched out in the chair. I think they thought he was mad. I, on the other hand, got interested and engaged, which of course took my mind off the dentistry that was going on at the same time.  Even if the subjects didn’t appeal, their sheer inappropriateness amused me. And, as Mr. Ogilvie told me once, it is impossible to be scared when you’re laughing. And that made me think that Mr. Ogilvie wasn’t mad at all, just very good at making a nervous patient relax.

Confronting the classics, by Mary Beard

I only read one and a half books on holiday this year (as opposed to five last year) - a sad indication of something, though I am not sure what. Anyway, this is the one that I finished.
I was initially disappointed, having picked it up in haste and not realised that it was a series of essays when I would have preferred a connected narrative, but having said that, it did make it easier for the kind of pick-up put-down reading that holidays prompt. It was also disappointing that it was a reprint of essays and book reviews published some years ago, rather than original and new work, though I don't know why I carp about that as I hadn't read any of them before.
I have always had a yen to go back to the classics - to pick up the Latin I learnt at school, to get some of the Greek I wasn't allowed to learn at school, and to weave that in with classical history and literature. It was going to be a project for my retirement, until I saw how few and far between opportunities for such adult education were, and how blisteringly expensive. Many places have ceased to teach Latin and Greek. I seem to have missed the boat.
Therefore I am grateful to Mary Beard for dragging the classical world back into the limelight.  One day I really will read Herodotus (even though he is apparently unreliable) and the other classical authors.  And of course it helped that I read the book beside the sea - mostly on this jetty, facing the Roman settlement of Alcudia - and there is nothing like Mediterranean sunshine to make you feel a connection with history.