The significance of small things: "The Hare with Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal

I suppose I would have picked up on the phenomenon that is Edmund de Waal's singular book sooner or later myself. Since I started reading it, I seem to see it everywhere. But I was actually put onto this by two great friends, not as far as I know particularly coordinated in their reading habits, enthusing in equal measure about this "extraordinary" book as we sat around our regular Monday night dinner table in Strasbourg. I was left unclear about what sort of a book it actually was, but very clear about the fact it had to be read. After all, these were two understated Englishmen (OK, one of them is understated) showing almost Latin fervour about something.

Oddly revolutionary reading: "The Last Hundred Days" by Patrick McGuinness

This one was an impulse buy in Brussels Waterstones, where I had gone for something completely different. My eye was somehow caught by the grainy black and white cover photograph of a motorcade of large boxy black cars progressing through a wide urban boulevard. It seemed to me to be something to do with 1960s America, but turned out on closer inspection to be a scene from 1980s Romania, and to be a novel about the end of the communist bloc's most capriciously despotic regime (save perhaps Albania), that of Nicolae Ceausescu and, to an extent I came to appreciate, his pseudo-scientist and fellow head-case wife, Elena.

Authentic thriller reading - "Rip Tide" by Stella Rimington

I feel a connection with Stella Rimington. Her Mum used to live in the same street as my Mum, in a house to which I, as a boy, regularly delivered the village newsletter, though not, I think, at the time that the aforementioned mother lived there. That came later, and was surrounded by some wonderfully naive gossip about the special protection laid on by Britain's security services for the mother of the head of MI5. Well, this was pre-9/11 and not a lot happened (or indeed happens now) in this place, so it's entirely reasonable that the occasional unfamiliar car parked in the street should provoke a little flurry of excitement about "heightened security". 

Zeitgeisty reading? - "A Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

I feel a strong sense of guilt about this book, which is perhaps I haven't got round to reviewing it before completing the next book (following review). This is a slim volume, barely 160 pages in its hardback manifestation, and should be one of those novels (some have even called it a "novella") which you digest quickly in satisfying chunks. The guilt comes from the fact I read it in an itsy-bitsy kind of way, distractedly, and now I can't work out if that is entirely my fault, or has something to do with the book itself. 

Overwhelming reading: "Gomorra" by Roberto Saviano

For non-Italian readers, you need to know that Gomorra is one of those rare books which really changes public discourse across an entire country. This book caused a massive stir in Italy and made a household name - and marked man - out of its author, Roberto Saviano, who can now go nowhere without bodyguards and is probably wondering when, not if, the killers will get to him.