The clothes on their backs, by Linda Grant

This is the first book in a while that hasn't been a recommendation from someone. I chose it for myself, even though it wasn't the one I really wanted, which was Linda Grant's new novel, Upstairs at the party - but this was only available in hardback at the library and I didn't want to carry such a heavy tome home, never mind lug it to and fro on the train. So much for literary discernment - my choice determined entirely by convenience.

Having said which, someone saw me reading it and started enthusing about Linda Grant's work, and isn't it wonderful? Well, yes. Even though second choice, it wasn't a disappointment. It was a strange story, taking a historical character and spinning fiction out of it, which wouldn't be strange at all if it was set centuries ago, but does seem odd (to me, at least) when the events were within my lifetime and therefore can't be described (by me, at least) as historical fiction. It was very evocative, though, and the place and time lingers with me, even if I felt less than sympathetic to some of the characters.

Now I have a mind to try some real historical fiction - Patrick O'Brian - on the back of a very enthusiastic review in the Guardian. So, watch this space.

Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks

It is pretty hard to say anything about this book without giving something away that may spoil your enjoyment - and you certainly will enjoy the book. It is about a Cambridge student who goes missing... and that's all I'm telling you.
It's a good, intelligent read (and I say this as someone who doesn't normally enjoy thrillers but who did enjoy putting the clues together in this one). It is also one for anyone who remembers being a student in the early 70s.
Go on - read it for yourself.

Cricklewood

We got to Cricklewood. The train was already fairly full, but I had a seat beside a window and near the door, so I saw the whole drama unfold. The two of them were there on the platform as the train drew in, a man and a woman, older people but not elderly – perhaps the kindest word would be “mature”. Probably about my age, in other words.  The man climbed on, and dragged a suitcase behind him, but there was nowhere for him to sit and so he was left standing beside the door. He was already wearing a backpack. I was expecting the woman to follow him on, but she didn’t. She had a bright, kind, intelligent face. They were saying their goodbyes and she was clearly telling him to take care, waving, smiling, as the doors closed and the train started to move. 

It was really only then that I looked at his face. It was a bit like hers – perhaps they were brother and sister, it seemed more likely than that they were partners – but his face was soft, blurred and flushed. I thought he was red in the face from the exertion of manhandling the luggage, but when I looked again I thought perhaps he was upset. 

So I started to wonder what the story was. Why was he upset? Had he been to stay with his sister and then, the visit over, was facing a return to a lonely life on his own? Or was he returning to an unhappy marriage, or to the duty of care for an elderly and cantankerous parent? Was his sister’s kind attentiveness genuine or was it a mask – was she pleased to see him go and was he aware of that? For her part, did she go home relieved that, duty done, she wouldn’t have to see him again for a while? Where was his journey going to end and would be back home by nightfall?

And I shall never know.

The tortoise and the hare, by Elizabeth Jenkins

This is not a book I would have been likely to pick up just on a whim, but it was recommended to me by a friend – it is a novel originally written in the 1950s but republished in the 1980s by Virago and championed by several notable writers. I will be honest and admit that I had never heard of Elizabeth Jenkins and was sceptical that it would be the overlooked jewel that it was claimed to be. I  was doubtful that I would enjoy it. But I did. 

It is a domestic drama, on a small scale, nothing epic about it. It doesn’t flash and burn. The style is impeccable and elegant and for that reason unremarkable (except that impeccably and elegantly written books are hard to find). The characters in the love triangle – for that is what it is about – are none of them totally sympathetic, none of them totally unforgivable. Not much happens, but it is minutely observed and riveting to read.

And that was the interesting thing.  Just recently I have not been reading much. I have rather got out of the habit. Given the opportunity to read, I have often chosen not to, preferring to do something else or to do nothing at all. I have enjoyed many of the books that I have read, but it has taken me a while to finish them and I found that I would have lost the thread each time I went back. This is the first book in more than a year that I have actively wanted to read and have become totally engaged with. I do not know whether this is because of the book itself or because my mood has changed again. It will be interesting to find out how I get on with the next book on the list.

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.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

Having gone back to Scott Fitzgerald and been disappointed, I thought I would try to read again a book I did not enjoy on first reading, just to see if my tastes really have changed. And it looks like they have.

It took me ages to read it, but that was more about my having lost the habit of reading at the same time as I lost the commute; and if I don't read a book fairly quickly, I tend to lose the thread (memory fails as age increases) so there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing while I tried to get back into it. But I did find it amusing in a bitterly cynical kind of a way, which is more than I did on first reading.

I think it says more about me than about the book.

This side of paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Having ploughed through a couple of books that fell short of expectations, I picked on this as being a quick read and pretty much a banker in terms of satisfaction (and also because it had twice come up, once as the answer to a crossword clue and once as a question on Mastermind - or maybe it was University Challenge. Fate's serendipitous finger seemed to command. Anyway...).  I was fairly sure I would enjoy it, having read it before.

Which is where I was wrong. The date inside the book - the date I bought it - is January 1973 and I expect that I read it soon after. In 1973, I was not far off the age of the protagonist and not far off the age of the author when he wrote it, and I thought it was wonderful. I thought that life really was like that, or would shortly become so. This brilliant scintillating intellectual society with its bright young things was waiting for me just around the corner. By heck, I was going to be a bright young thing too.

Given the many annotations in the margins, I read it for a module on my university course. The comments are fair - it is stylishly written, nice turns of phrase, etc. But, forty years on, the protagonist is no longer a hero, but a snobby little prat who could do with a slap; and the writing style grates as it tries so hard to be witty. I lost all sympathy with it long before the end and I don't know if I mourn more for the loss of reading pleasure or for my own lost naivety. I never was, and now never will be, a bright young thing.

South from Granada, by Gerald Brenan

It isn't as bad as it looks - I finished reading this some time ago, and the delay has been in the writing about it, not the reading. It is true to say, however, that this isn't going to make it up into my top ten books - or even my top 100. Indeed, it may find its way back to a charity bookshop (and I only very very rarely dispose of books).

I bought it because I like the part of the world he is writing about and hoped it would be an antidote to the "Driving over lemons" style of travel writing (DOL is set in the same part of the world and is by no means the worst example of its kind, so it may be unfair to pick on it as a comparison). Gerald Brenan lived in Spain at intervals between 1920 to 1934, going there after being demobbed after the First World War. It quickly becomes clear that Brenan is no "ordinary Joe" - public school, offficer class and a circle of acquaintances which enable him to devote one chapter to a visit from Lytton Strachey and another to a visit from Virginia Woolf.

I found the whole book strangely flat and humourless. I am not sure but that I didn't enjoy DOL more.