Pre-revolutionary reading: "Pure" by Andrew Miller

Some books are not quite what you expect. Pure was on a list of books recommended to me by a man with form for recommending well-researched historical novels, often with a francophile slant (recent example: An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris; otherwise basically anything by Hilary Mantel), viz one Julian Priestley. So what was Pure? Well, a well-researched novel set in a Paris on the cusp of the French Revolution.

The odd thing about Pure, though, is that it doesn't feel like a historical novel. There is a creepy ominousness about it which gives it the feel of a ghost story, rather than the parable of a harbinger of a new rationalistic age it ostensibly is. Of ghosts there are none. Of the supernatural even less. But both seem to be lurking below the surface, in the pre-rational psyches of the even the most rational protagonists, and emerge not as paranormal manifestations, but as inexplicable violence, strange choices or hidden motivations. This hints, in the mind of a reader who knows what happened only five years after the events recounted in this novel, at how the rational revolution can go wrong, how the highest of ideals can merge with the basest of impulses.  Explicitly, we hear little of the impending Revolution, but it is constantly there in the juxtaposition of the scientific and the irrational mindset, talk of the party of the Future, whiffs of rebellion in anti-royalist street graffiti and the staging of Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro (one of my A level set texts coming to haunt me!), the bulldozing of popular sentiment by "enlightened" authorities and in an ultimate act of purifying violence by a hitherto inarticulate and mostly-unheeded subclass.

Mid-life reading: "The Guts" by Roddy Doyle

Exactly as I was supposed to, I picked this book up in Waterstones in Nottingham on a quick impulse, thinking: "I'll give that one a go". The cover gives you'll the clues: Roddy Doyle, the author; not one, but two references to The Commitments, and its protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte; as well as the life-affirming and triumphant citation from the Irish Post.

Why didn't they just put something like: this book is for 50 year-old men who twenty plus years ago loved Roddy Doyle's Barrytown novels but who are bit older now and need a dose of humorous reassurance  about that fact, not to mention about actually pretty nasty things that are starting to impinge on their lives, like bowel cancer?

Well, enter your (still, just) 50 year-old guy, who, in a considerably pre-blog era, devoured the three joyous Barrytown Trilogy novels - The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van - as well as the successive Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which, although undoubtedly less joyous, remain among the most powerful and memorable works of fiction I have ever read. I stuck with Doyle for one more, A Star Called Henry, but than drifted away, as I think many of Doyle's readers did. Perhaps it was he who drifted away.

But who more than me, and my like, to snaffle a copy of The Guts, with its promise of a nostalgic return to Barrytown and curiosity about how our fictional contemporaries are ageing?

So, now, having completed the book, do I feel like a victim of a marketer's ploy and the need of an author to cash in on past glories? 

In a word, no. 

The Guts perhaps does not have the crazed energy of the The Commitments but it does have the humour, the sense of place and the terrible language of its predecessor combined with, yes, a degree of subtlety and grounded wisdom which would not have been right for the younger Jimmy Rabbitte. 

Unflinching reading: "Levels of Life" by Julian Barnes

This is an odd book. It is in three parts. The first, The Sin of Height, is essentially an historical essay, relating the story of early ballooning in France, and in particular the exploits of Nadar, the first man to take aerial photographs. The second, On the Level, is a quasi-fictional account of a love affair between English balloonist and general Victorian man-of-action, Captain Fred Burnaby, and the renowned French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. It ends disappointingly (for him), when Sarah shies away from the marriage he was preparing to propose, but not before they have been ballooning together, relishing their love and their ability to soar over the people below.

These two sections, which are engaging to read, but strangely light, do prepare the ground for the third part of the book, The Loss of Depth, through parallels and metaphors of love, transcendence and loss, but, more than anything, they feel like a way for Barnes to pace himself, to work up to the searing, intimate, astoundingly honest account of his own grief at the loss of his wife. 

Julian Barnes' wife, with whom he spent thirty years of his life, was Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent. She died in 2008, just thirty-seven days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Barnes nursed her through her last days. The Loss of Depth is not however about the illness and death - in fact Barnes respects his wife's privacy and tells us little about her - but about his experience following her death. Every love story is a potential grief story, he writes early in the book, and his description of his grief at her loss is a testament to the depth of love he felt for her.

Disaster!

Not a book review, but a news flash. Grim tidings, a disaster indeed, or at least a significant blow to the quality of life. The Foyles bookshop in St. Pancras station has CLOSED. (To be replaced by a John Lewis.) 

Late lamented

Where will I buy my serendipitous books now? Here's the roll of honour:

The Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
The Rivers of London
London Under
How to Thrive in the Digital Age
Underground Overground
Expo 58
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Circle
Sputnik Sweetheart
Tatiana
Savage Continent
Broken Homes
1984
The Tudors

All bought in Foyles, St. Pancras... The last nine all bought on the same day this year, in what turns out to be my last purchase there (and the point at which it had become so regular, and thus, I suppose, not serendipitous, that I stopped mentioning the fact in the posts). Obviously it wasn't enough to persuade them to keep the shop open.

Shame. Another small setback for civilisation.

Abnormal, psychotic, chaotic reading: "Stuart: A Life Backwards" by Alexander Masters

An extraordinary book, put in my hands by my most literary friend, with the admonition: "see what you think of that". Well, what do I think of that?

But first, what is it? A biography, and the story of writing a biography. Alexander Masters is a PhD student, who - quite how we are not sure - has agreed with one Stuart Shorter, multi-convicted, long-term homeless drug-abuser, prone to outbursts of psychotic violence and surpassing flights of insight and eloquence, to write his life story.

The first attempt goes badly. Or in Stuart's words, it's bollocks boring. He has other ideas:

He wants jokes, yarns, humour. He doesn't admire "academic quotes" and background research. "Nah, Alexander, you gotta start again. You gotta do better than this." 

He's after a bestseller, "like what Tom Clancy writes. 

"But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs," I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add. 

Stuart phrases it another way, then: "Something what people will read."

Somehow they come to the conclusion that Masters will write Stuart's life in reverse, starting with his apparently quite stable present, working back through the homelessness, the drugs, the prison terms, the violence, the abuse, back to before things went wrong. As we go back in Stuart's life, we go forward in the story of its writing, Alexander and Stuart camped out together in front of the Home Office with half of London's homeless, no-hopers and weirdoes to protest against the wrongful conviction of two managers of a homeless shelter; Stuart "losing it" and trashing Alexander's flat; Stuart showing Alexander where the dossers shoot up; Stuart explaining the brutal and bizarre bye-laws of prison, and so on. We trace the writing of the biography as the reverse biography reveals itself and we dig into Stuart's past.

Itinerant reading: "A Short Ride in the Jungle" by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

Three, perhaps two and a half, degrees of separation lie between Antonia ("Ants") Bolingbroke-Kent and me.  Her book, which was lent to me by a friend, contained a dedication addressed to him by the author. "Do you know her?" I asked later, after I had read the book. "Not really", he replied, "I've never met her; she's sort of a friend of a friend, but I was in touch with her during her trip on Facebook, exchanging a few thoughts about Vietnam and so on." 

So two and a half degrees is about right.

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent is, in her own words, a "writer, TV producer, traveller and lover of the curious and quirky". As a TV producer, we discover, she has worked on many BBC travel documentaries which have taken her professionally to - or at least in the direction of - places in which she has subsequently undertaken personal journeys. Such is the case of the subject of this book, a solo exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, previously visited while working on a Top Gear special featuring the nation's favourite three uber-blokes larking around on scooters in Vietnam. You don't have to read too closely between the lines to discern that such programmes are very far from what they seem, with our laddish heroes accompanied by hordes of mechanics to fix the machines they bust and insisting on five-star hotel accommodation to help them recover from their exertions of an evening. No such cosseting for Ants (I shall call her "Ants"; everyone does, it seems, and besides getting us past the aristocratic resonances of the name, Ants is also considerably shorter to type than Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent), for whom the journey was explicitly an exploration of place, history and self. 

The idea was indeed, also self confessedly, rather mad. I had been under the impression, admittedly without having really considered the matter, that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was, well, a trail, i.e. a single route linking two places. But no, the Trail is a vast network of often near-impassable trails, threading through the mountains and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. With two seconds thought, this is rather obvious. To commit the entire military supply line to North Vietnamese forces to a single route would have been suicidal. Even the network of small hidden trails running through three countries was intensively, mind-bogglingly so, bombed by the USAF. 

Last of the holiday reading: "The Tudors" by Peter Ackroyd

Lots of people have remarked that I seem to have read quite a few books over the summer. Well, folks, that's over.

This is the last of the books started in balmy Pescara, but the first to be completed on a small aeroplane bumping down through the cloud into a ridiculously cold and bleak late August day in Birmingham (whence Nottingham), a trip marking the end of summer as we know it. Expect a reading slowdown, as the grim world of work resumes.

Elizabeth: badass compromiser

Meanwhile, how not to be a fan of Peter Ackroyd? This is a history book bought unashamedly on the strength of the reputation of the author as a writer, rather than as a historian. I imagine it must be frustrating for real historians (perhaps one of whom will let me know if Ackroyd can or cannot be considered a historian), but there's no arguing with this man's ability to tell a story, be it as a novel (Hawksmoor (astounding, by the way - had me prowling the East End of London in my precious lunch hours in distant 1988 just spotting Hawksmoor churches); The House of Doctor Dee), or as non-fiction (London: The Biography; London Under). Moreover, my appetite for the Tudors had been whetted (of course) by two marvellous Hilary Mantel novels (this and this), as well as Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.

All of which to say, like most of the middle-class anglosphere, it seems, I'm currently in a fascinated-by-the-Tudors period and in any case stand a fair chance of buying any book which has "Peter Ackroyd" on the cover.

Cutting edge history, however, I suspect this is not. I recall a reviewer's comment from somewhere saying that this book tells "familiar stories", and that is indeed the case. However, Ackroyd tells these stories exceptionally well, and has the gift of bringing the protagonists to life. That is a key strength of this book, the personalisation of this period of history, in which many great public events seem indeed to have been driven by personal characters and impulses (Marxist historians beware!). This is hugely valuable in itself.

Yesterday's dystopian reading: "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell

At least as an adult, I have never been a re-reader of books. There just seems to be so much new stuff out there... However, this is an exception. 

It all comes down to a remark made by a old friend, by the name of Sam Moreland (for the record), whom I saw again a month or so ago, who had himself just re-read 1984. "I wondered what it would be like to reread a book I first read as a teenager," he said, "Would it be the same?" His conclusion was that it was a really interesting thing to do. He recommended reading the appendix on Newspeak ("which nobody reads") and, on the book in general, concluded: "Actually, it's all about sex." 

Anyway, all of that, together with a reissue of the book by Penguin with a clever new cover (the title blacked out but legible in relief) induced me to undertake the novelty of a reread. I shared Sam's curiosity about how such a seminal work, which we have all read as teenagers, would seem to the adult me. I am very glad I did so. 

The first thing I have to do however is to dissent from Sam on a couple of points. First, I did read the appendix first time round. Maybe it was my linguistic tendencies showing through, maybe it was because, just as I was brought up to finish all the food on my plate, for me it was a kind of a moral obligation to read everything between the covers of a book. (Notes aside, I still do this, as well as finishing my food, even - bad idea - when in America.) Second, 1984 is not all about sex. There is a lot more sex in it than I recall, and it is a more important factor in Winston's rebellion than I remember, but, sorry Sam, the book is still what I thought it was about: a nightmare of totalitarianism. That said, I am sure that like most teachers at the time I first read the book in the late seventies, mine rather skated over the sex stuff.

Rather frivolous reading" "Broken Homes" by Ben Aaronovitch

No one will blame me, methinks, for something a little lighter after the last one, and indeed I have gone to the other end of the spectrum. 

Broken Homes is the fourth in Ben Aaronovitch's series about streetwise, magically gifted copper Peter Grant, fighting "weird stuff" on the streets of London. On this occasion, the skulduggery leads our hero, together with partner Lesley and boss Nightingale, to an only-slightly-fictitious brutalist housing estate at the Elephant and Castle, but one which turns out to be imbued with special properties unsuspected by its residents. 

As ever, the plot rattles along, in the always agreeable company of PC Grant, whose knowing take on police procedure and contemporary London street life are a genuine delight. The usual cast of improbable multicultural river deities, faeries, water sprites and wood nymphs is also out in force, and by now we are expected to know who they are and where they all come from. 

Utterly chastening reading: "Savage Continent" by Keith Lowe.

If there were ever a risk that I would become too frivolous in my holiday reading habits, this book most decidedly redressed the balance. A gruelling read, not because it was badly or turgidly written, but because of the stories it tells. Lowe's intention with this work is to fill a gap, especially for the general reader, in the usual accounts of European history which take us from the end of the Second World War into the postwar era.

As aficionados of this blog will be aware, there have been quite a few history books covering the final stages of the War, the great power politics of the immediate aftermath and the early stages of the Cold War. But for me at least there was indeed a gap, about which I had often wondered: what was happening "on the ground" in the year or two after the formal end of hostilities? As Lowe points out, the Brits and Americans in particular are prone to place a full stop at VE Day (one definitely relativises the term "victory" after reading this book), after which Europe gets into the business of rebuilding and recovering. Well, as Lowe demonstrates, it ain't quite that simple.

We knew that, of course, but I guess many people, like me, had no concept of the sheer scale of the horrors which filled the years between 1945 and 1949 (for many well beyond that). At the outset, Lowe sets the scene by giving some indication of the sheer scale of death and destruction unleashed by the War itself and the utter devastation visited on vast tracts of the continent, which, particularly in the East, we're beyond the imaginings of British and American observers. The physical infrastructure was in ruins, vital supplies were lacking (hundreds of thousands starved to death across Europe in 1944-5) and millions of people were homeless and displaced. In this situation, civilisation breaks down. As Lowe puts it in his introduction:

Imagine a world without institutions. It is a world where borders between countries seem to have dissolved, leaving a single, endless landscape over which people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. There are no governments any more, on either a national scale or even a local one. There are no schools or universities, no libraries or archives, no access to any information whatsoever. (...) There are no banks, but that is no great hardship because money no longer has any worth. There are no shops, because no one has anything to sell. Nothing is made here: the great factories and businesses that used to exist have all been destroyed or dismantled, as have most of the other buildings. There are no tools, save what can be dug out of the rubble. There is no food. Law and order are virtually non-existent because there is no police force and no judiciary. In some areas there no longer seems to be any sense of what is right and wrong. (...) Goods belong only to those who are strong enough to hold on to them, and those willing to guard them with their lives. Men with weapons roam the streets taking what they want and threatening anyone who gets in their way. Women of all classes and ages prostitute themselves for food and protection. There is no shame. There is no morality. There is only survival.

It sounds like a Hollywood script for some post-apocalyptic movie, but this was reality for millions of people across swathes of Europe.

Post-Soviet thrills reading: "Tatiana" by Martin Cruz Smith

I wonder if I get two books mixed up in my recollection: Archangel by Robert Harris and Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. In fact, I don't wonder, I know I do. I read them around the same time a few years ago and they kind of blurred together a bit.

All this to say that this perhaps accounts for my perhaps excessive expectations of Tatiana, the latest Russian tale from Cruz Smith based on the character of Senior Investigator Arkady Renko. Put another way, I was maybe - and unreasonably - expecting something more Harris-like.

I'm not saying this is not an enjoyable book, just to say not to expect much more than a run-of-the-mill thriller, complete with crusty-but-heroic cop, courageous (and beautiful) investigative journalist, awkward-but-talented family member, cynical-but-loyal side-kick, and, of course, a whole cast of hit men, glossy and not-so-glossy mafia bosses, bent policemen and corrupt officials.

The plot has its thrills and spills, twists and turns, as you would expect, and they keep the pages turning. In the end, as ever in this kind of hard-bitten thriller, the good guys triumph in a pyrrhic and rather inconclusive kind of way and that's that.

Well, not quite. There was a dimension of the book which did endear it too me a little more than the plot line alone would justify, the setting. Not so much the juxtaposition of gangster-bling and grubby dereliction which have become emblematic of Putin's Russia, but the specific location of much of the action, Kaliningrad. This weird Russian exclave, a Cold War relic left adrift several hundred kilometres from the country of which it is part, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, holds a certain fascination for me.

Orbiting reading: "Sputnik Sweetheart" by Haruki Murakami

The first time the word "Sputnik" appears in this Murakami novel is as a mix-up for the word "beatnik", but it is, as you might expect, a meaningful confusion. As we are quickly reminded, Sputnik means "travelling companion", and it is in this sense that it is intended throughout this strange novel, albeit applying principally to a character who is an aspirant beatnik. 

Sputnik Sweetheart is characteristic of its author in many ways, with at its core a tale of unrequited love, impossible desire and shifting personalities. There are three characters to speak of: "K", the male narrator, a solitary, kind, bookish schoolteacher; Sumire, an aspiring writer of the beatnik sort, given to frantic, talent-filled, but ultimately inconclusive, bouts of writing, 3.00 am phone calls to her friend K to discuss matters of intimate import and a preference for charity shop coats and workman's boots; and finally, Miu, a sophisticated rather older woman, a smart, wealthy, cultivated importer of European wines to Japan.

K loves, and desires, Sumire. He has done since they were students together, but has assumed the role of friend and intimate confidant because, though she trusts him totally and loves him as a friend, she cannot return his romantic feelings for her. It is thus he to whom Sumire turns to tell him of the sudden and extraordinary passion she feels for Miu. This loves comes out of nowhere - Sumire had no prior notion of being a lesbian, indeed of being anything very much other than a writer, before meeting Miu, if that is in fact what she is - but becomes the dominant force in her life, transforming her. She takes a job working for Miu, she begins to dress elegantly and fashionably, she starts wearing makeup. The two become close, but, as becomes clear in a scene written with extraordinary power, Miu cannot reciprocate, not because Sumire's attentions trouble her - she wishes she could respond - but because she is unable to feel any desire or physical connection with another.

Dystopian reading: "The Circle" by Dave Eggers

Two or three weeks ago, I attended a rather flashy conference in Brussels. It was the annual "communication summit" organised by the European Association of Communications Directors, and it was heavily themed around technology and how it is affecting the work of communications professionals. At the end of the first - fascinating - keynote session, by Jimmy Maymann, CEO of the Huffington Post, a questioner from the audience piped up: "Have you read The Circle by Dave Eggers, and what implications do you think it has for us?" The question was at least a little different from the others and the audience - most of whom, like me, had probably at least heard of the book - waited for the answer. But sadly Jimmy Maymann had not read the book and declined to comment. Oh well, nice try.

However, the questioner was not so easily put off. She asked the same question of the next speaker too, who similarly had not read the book and was not to be drawn. Over the rest of the two day conference I heard the questioner ask the identical question to various panels and speakers, and I am sure I wasn't there on every occasion she did. As she repeated herself, and nobody, but nobody, she asked had read the book, the reaction of the audience evolved. There was much discreet eyeball rolling, some less discreet sighing... Our questioner was gradually becoming a bit of a freak, some sort of obsessive in the desert, for pointlessly insisting with her question about internet technology getting of of hand. Perhaps if the conference had lasted longer, she would have been openly heckled, discouraged, marginalised, even excluded? 

Apart from the fact that it is surprising to me that not one of the speakers had read the book - perhaps they are simply all too busy tweeting to read books any more - there now seems to me to be a surprising message in the treatment of the obsessive questioner. She implicitly challenged the groupthink of a tech-enthusiast consensus and rather than being engaged with on the substance, she became boring, irrelevant, just a bit weird. Something similar happens to a character in The Circle, a man who rebels against the encroachment of the internet on every aspect of life, ranting about its erosion of privacy and its negation of the possibility of solitude. He too becomes a figure of fun, ridiculed for not "getting it", and his attempts to opt out simply considered weird. In the end, his fate is rather more dramatic than that of the conference delegate, who probably just left rather frustrated, but bears comparison.

Perhaps though I should backtrack a bit. What is The Circle about? 

Dreamtime reading: "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

There are some writers who just leave you agog at the sheer fertility of their imaginations and inventiveness. Neil Gaiman is such an author. This was another book-in-a-day, devoured over a slow morning in waiting for the weather to improve and then, once it had, lounging at the beach, not wanting to interrupt the story even to get into the inviting water. 

Gaiman's stories are magical, and for that reason come burdened with the label of the "fantasy" genre. I'm guessing that this puts some people off, and, yes, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is in very many ways a fairy tale, full of fairy tale tropes: the mysterious farmhouse at the end of the lane, three wise women, blindly uncomprehending adults, evil disguised as beauty, a magical world bursting through into the real one, a kind of elemental savagery combined with a form of natural justice... Gaiman gladly embraces the fairy tale world, and in his hands it becomes true, truer than the humdrum adult world which frames this story. He also embraces its techniques. Most of the novel is a memory of childhood, evoked by an adult visit to a duckpond (the "ocean" of the title), in a example of what I once learned to call Rahmentechnik (framing technique, aka a story-within-a-story), beloved of eighteenth century German novella writers, writing stories frequently featuring magical events in mysterious forests.

The knowledge of childhood

But this is very far from fairy-tale-by-numbers. Gaiman not only writes a page turning story, but also a beautifully evocative one. I notice how many times I have already used the term "adult" as a contrast to the heart of this book, which is, perhaps more than anything, an evocation of what it is like to be a child, like the seven year-old protagonist, living in a world far more open to interpretation and discovery than it is to an adult, full of fears and comforts lost to adults, and to which the child feels a much more intimate physical connection than the adult. 

A sense of place, and of home, is very strong in this book. It is revealing that Gaiman explicitly built the physical environment of the novel on his own memories of his childhood home. Whether or not we as readers feel in any way similar to the boy protagonist (who never, I think, acquires a name), I am sure that everyone will recognise the way he both knows and feels the world in which he lives: the details of his room, the house, the garden and the immediate surroundings. At one point we find a little explanation of this: 

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never accurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

Jolly modern reading: "Expo 58" by Jonathan Coe.

I knew I would like this book from its shamelessly retro cover and the knowingly B-movie enticement of the words printed below the title: "Spies, girls and an Englishman abroad. Trust no one." Except of course, this Englishman trusts everyone. But more of that anon.

In any case, this looked like excellent summer reading fare, and so it turned out to be, at the same time a cut or two above the Kingsley Amis style pastiche which it could have been - and which, frankly, would probably have kept me happy for a day or two anyway. I say that advisedly: ever since I greedily read PG Wodehouse novels as a teenager, I have harboured a weakness for tales of a rather innocent, terribly-English hi-jinks from a bygone age. At one level, Coe certainly delivers that: his protagonist is the quintessentially naive, rather staid young chap (barely conscious of his own extreme handsomeness - plot point there) thrown in way over his head to an exotic foreign world (Belgium!), teeming with glamorous women, Cold War intrigue, Russian spies and dangerous modernity. It is a world where an agreeable roommate is a "decent sort of cove", a young woman is encouraged to continue smoking during her pregnancy to calm her nerves, spies do wear raincoats and trilby hats and where an olive, let alone the dry martini into which it is dropped, is an impossibly decadent foreign novelty.

So far so pastiche, but, as I say, it goes a bit further than that.

Counter-intuitive reading: "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell

Here we go again. Why do I keep buying books by Malcolm Gladwell? They always leave me a little enlightened and rather more irritated. It always goes pretty much the same way: starting with a remarkable counter-intuitive story, then the central insight of the book, explaining why the counter-intuitive makes perfect sense, followed by anecdote upon anecdote broadly reinforcing the idea.

The trick should be either to read the first chapter and leave it there, or to read an article somewhere summing up the argument. What adds self-inflicted insult to injury in this case is that I did have that summary before I bought this book, in the form of an item on the excellent TED Radio Hour podcast I heard in which Gladwell explained his take on the David and Goliath story. And I still bought the book! It was prominently displayed and well marketed in a bookshop, and, yes, the TED talk had indeed made me eager for more. Except, of course, you don't really get more. or much more at any rate.

So what's the interesting idea at the heart of this book?

The subtitle actually gets you quite a long way. In full, the book is titled David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. The central idea is that what we would normally consider an advantage: e.g. being big and strong, getting into the best possible university, being in a small class, having the full might of the state at your disposal, is not necessarily an advantage at all. Conversely, what we might consider a disadvantage: e.g. being small and weak, being dyslexic, having no tall players in your basketball team, belonging to a persecuted minority, can perversely be an advantage. 

Through anecdote and, in some cases, quite a lot of statistics, Gladwell shows how the counterintuitive switching of advantage and disadvantage in his anecdotes actually makes a great deal of sense and can be explained in the most rational terms. 

Pithy reading: "Sh*t My Dad Says" by Justin Halpern

A quick post on a quick book, I think, for this one. 

I picked this little book in Barnes and Noble in Palo Alto (as one does... can you name-drop places?) nearly a year ago as a little light entertainment for a train or plane or something. Somehow, however, I never read it. Until last week, that is, when I scanned the "unread books" part of the shelves to see what was lurking there.

I didn't expect enlightenment, or philosophy, or gravitas, of course, just a few laughs. However, Sh*t My Dad Says turned out not only to be extremely funny, but also quite engaging and ultimately rather touching.  So what is this book?

Halpern explains its origins at the outset. He was brought up with his brothers in middle class San Diego by a pair of hard-working parents, both of whom came from quite tough backgrounds. We only glimpse the mother occasionally, mainly because his father is the show stealer. It is his way with words, and an attitude to life you might summarise as no-bullshit-enlightened-macho, that single him out as the subject of this book. At some point, Halpern decided his father's earthy pronouncements deserved wider appreciation and created a Twitter feed (@shitmydadsays) to pass them on. It was only meant for friends, but spiralled quickly to a following of over a million, and ultimately a book deal was proffered.

Close to home reading: "Leaving Azzurro Behind" by Paola Buonadonna

It is with some trepidation, and a sense of novelty, that I click on "new post" to discuss my latest read. It is close to home in several ways. 

First - and this is the trepidation bit - the author is a friend and a (former) colleague. She is also a prominent Facebook friend, which means she will definitely see this review. I considered not doing a review in this case, really out of some sort of quintessentially English embarrassment, but justifying this with the notion that I could not be expected to be impartial and objective in the case. But then it struck me that there is no particular expectation of impartiality or objectivity on this blog, and, besides, I promised myself that I would post on every book (well, proper book) I read. So I'm posting, that's that. Besides, I did at one point promise Paola that I would tell people about her book.

Second, lots of people who read this (yes, there are four or five who do, assuming they are not lying through their teeth when they "like" the related FB posts) also know Paola. So there is a kind of in-the-family feel about this.

Deeply amoral reading: "Power - Why Some People Have It and Others Don't" by Jeffrey Pfeffer

In July 2013, I was fortunate enough to attend a Stanford Business School course. It's title was "Leadership and the Effective Use of Power". The term 'power' makes many uncomfortable. At the very beginning of the course, the professor put the question to the class: "Which of you wants power?" A couple of hands rather hesitantly went up, but everyone else looked rather uncertain. Then the professor asked a second question: "Which of you wants to change the world?" No problem this time, lots of hands up. Then the professor again: "So how are you going to do that without power?"

The course was about leadership, and far from being a education in the brutal subjugation of others, it was about things like building effective teams, influencing without direct authority,  giving and receiving feedback, accessing resources, managing upwards... All rather Californian in fact. So it was something of a shock to the system when, on the penultimate day, a guest professor was brought in to stir things up a bit. His name was Jeffrey Pfeffer, and he had us out of our new Californian comfort zone in no time at all.

He started his class by contrasting the behaviour of two corporate leaders in broadly quite similar circumstances. The first was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the second Tony Hayward of BP. Both were testifying before Congressional committees following disasters their companies were responsible for, sub-prime lending based financial meltdown and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. His point was that Blankfein, for all that his company was - in Pfeffer's view - even more culpable than Hayward's, came out of the process completely intact, having cowed the congressmen with a display of personal and corporate power, communicated in what he said, how he said it and in his general demeanour and body-language. Hayward, by contrast, was weak: he evaded questions, he hid behind lawyers, he stonewalled, he deferred to his questioners, allowed himself to be interrupted and, ultimately, he apologised. "Never apologise!" 

Deyfusard reading: "An Officer and a Spy" by Robert Harris

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you can't go far wrong with Robert Harris. Not is the same way as you can't go wrong with, say, Sebastian Faulks or Paul Auster, because he is not that kind of literary genius, but because he is an infallible storyteller: sophisticated, super-well-researched and utterly gripping. He combines the merits of the instinctive thriller writer with those of the journalist, and for me it is no accident that his novels are almost always based on real and/or historical events, reported, adapted, extrapolated. 

You never know where he is going next. He still has to complete a trilogy set in the political world of ancient Rome, he has famously imagined Nazi occupied Britain (Fatherland), recounted the extraordinary story of Bletchley Park's WW2 code-cracking (Enigma), related the eruption of Vesuvius (Pompeii), visited modern Russia (Archangel) and analysed the motivations of Tony Blair (The Ghost). However, it was, for me at least, something of a surprise that his latest novel, An Officer and a Spy deals with historical events which seem rather more arcane.

That is undoubtedly the consequence of my own ignorance and a certain cultural conditioning. As a Guardian review I read nicely put it: "the Dreyfus Affair is one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about". Yes, one is vaguely conscious that the Dreyfus Affair was a big deal in late nineteenth century France, yes, one knows it was a miscarriage of justice with a strong anti-semitic dimension and, yes, wasn't that the thing that Emile Zola wrote his J'accuse thing about..? 

Unexpected reading: "Stoner" by John Williams

It's not often these days that I read a novel cover to cover in one day. And yet this is what happened yesterday, entirely unexpectedly, with this book, Stoner, by John Williams. 

Stoner... who? you might say, as indeed I did. It seems to be a common reaction. I was given the book, in a nice hardback edition, by a very good old friend, but when I picked it up I couldn't remember what, if anything, she had told me about it or why she had decided to give it to me. Only after I had finished did I check online, to find that this was a widely-reviewed 2013 must-read, awarded the Waterstones Prize, no less. Strange though that, for all its eminence, every review of the book starts by remarking on the obscurity of the author and the slow-burning nature of this novel's success. It was first published in America in 1965, and in the UK in 1973. It seems to have been picked up by some critics, particularly in continental Europe, last year and to have enjoyed huge sales. Perhaps fittingly (as we shall see), this is all considerably too late for the author, who died in 1985.

However, I didn't need all those reviews and accounts of revival to register the quality of this book. For one thing, I read it in a day. For another, though I was at a concert in Bozar last night, I heard little of the music, as my mind was stuck on trying to work out how and why this book worked its peculiar power.

Jokily philosophical reading: "Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates", by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

In the last review on this blog, after a particularly (and unjustifiably) long slog over Bring Up the Bodies, I said:  "I'm pining for a book that grabs me, a page-turner that needs to be read at every opportunity". 

So here I am writing about a book on philosophy as it pertains to death... Not really what I had in mind.

Not the obvious page-turning choice, perhaps, but - d'you know what? - it is a page turner, and I did pick it up whenever possible. Perhaps it's the jokes. Yes, the jokes help a lot... And the cartoons. For this is, to quote the blurb, "like the Intro to Philosophy class that you wanted to take in college but couldn't because it wasn't offered". The authors, Messrs Cathcart and Klein, are the real deal, that is to say they know their philosophy, being Harvard philosophy graduates and having written a lot (not all of it jokes), but feel the need to communicate it in a way which your regular guy (he's called Daryl, by the way) can understand. That means a lot of jokes and anecdotes.

Yet more Tudor reading: "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel

I feel I should be brief. So here goes.

This is once again an extraordinary and outstanding novel, a brilliant evocation of a historical period and the minds and motivations of the characters in its great political drama. It also took me an extraordinarily long time to read it. Though I wanted to dedicate quality time to it, I never seemed quite to manage it. 

In my post about Wolf Hall, best part of a year ago, I mentioned a similar phenomenon: the paradoxical experience of these books as both wonderful novels and rather hard slogs. Many people have since told me they feel the same. On this occasion, there was perhaps less difficulty - after reading Wolf Hall, it is easier to slip into Mantel narrative mode - but also less discovery.

And yet, don't get me wrong, this is a must-read, and when part three of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy comes out (The Mirror and the Light, apparently, expected 2015) I will definitely be reading it.  All the nice things I said about Wolf Hall hold good.

But right now, I'm pining for a book that grabs me, a page-turner that needs to be read at every opportunity. How that works out will emerge in the next review, coming a bit sooner than this one did, I hope.

And that's it. After the length, the brevity.