Enthused reading: "One Summer - America 1927" by Bill Bryson

In the people-I-might-actually-like-to-be stakes, I have already identified Bill Bryson as a front runner. This book has done nothing to modify that opinion. Again, I am struck by the guy's sheer curiosity and the delight he takes in serving up stories of both the ordinary and the extraordinary, both of which he finds in the midst of its apparent opposite. It is typically Bryson to alight on one particular year - indeed the summer of one particular year - and lay it out for us in a breeze of fascinated enthusiasm and anecdote. As ever the research is formidable but lightly-worn, the details arresting and illuminating, the regard inquiring and amusing.

Yeah, so I liked it...

But why 1927, I hear you ask, it is not one of those usual suspects, 1914, 1929, 1933, 1968, 1945, 1989 for example, usually included in the pantheon of twentieth century landmark years. There is a rationalisation for the choice, to which I will come back, but my own suspicion is that Bryson's interest in the year started rather with a typically rather boyish attraction to the two centrepiece occurrences of the book. The first is the famous Lindbergh transatlantic flight and its extraordinary aftermath, the second the remarkable season enjoyed by that supposedly over-the-hill baseball star, Babe Ruth. Hmm, thin pickings, one might think, on which to construct a 550 page popular history, especially for a European audience, which may have heard of Babe Ruth, but does not know the difference between a batting average of 0.295 and one of 0.375, and may be more familiar with Charles Lindbergh as a noted Nazi sympathiser than as aviation hero.

Ambiguously nostalgic reading: "A Delicate Truth” by John le Carré

My heart wasn’t really in this post. A Delicate Truth was the tail end of my holiday reading in Australia, not however completed until well after being thrown back into the frenzy of the rentrée. It duly got finished bittily, rather than in the quick but substantial bursts appropriate to a book like this. Moreover, all this was a while ago, meaning the novel has faded rather from my memory.

Was it a bad book? Actually not at all, with some critics describing it as something of a return to form for Le Carré. I was unaware that he was particularly out of form, except inasmuch as his Cold War glory days (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) are growing ever more distant, though the Constant Gardener was of course a bit of a hit more recently. Over time, I have dipped into Le Carré’s recent novels mainly for lightish relief, often in the form of audio books on long journeys (always read by the author himself, a job he does very well, by the way).

Such was the spirit in which I undertook this book, boosted by a couple of positive reviews in Sunday newspapers.

London-fantastical reading: "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman

Something of a pattern emerging, methinks. I'm getting predictable. As I start this post, I realise that there are a disproportionate number of presaging books for this, indicating that I have some sort of compulsive-obsessive disorder.

I do not refer to the fact that this is the second book by the same author, of course. Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods impressed me mightily a while back, so fair enough to return to him for some more crazy imaginative invention. However, I am beginning to wonder if I have Morlock-like troglodytic tendencies, focused on London. Consider some recent reads:

August 2013: second magical Met copper yarn, Moon Over Soho
July 2013: quirky history of the London underground, Underground, Overground
June 2012: Ackroyd's history of underground London, London Under
January 2012: first magical Met copper yarn involving underground rivers in London, The Rivers of London

Sequential magical reading: "Moon Over Soho" by Ben Aaronovitch

Sometimes it's probably just best to stick with a good one-off. Like my last book, this one was a sequel, but of a rather different nature, the second in an "urban fantasy"series of tales featuring Metropolitan police officer and apprentice wizard Peter Grant facing up to various forms of malevolent weirdness in contemporary London. I liked the first book in the series, which I had randomly bought on the strength of its cover. It was an imaginative, funny, streetwise and page-turning story.

Moon Over Soho picks up where the first book left off, embarking on a fresh tale of magic intersecting with the day-to-day life of the great metropolis, indeed two tales, for, as in the first book, a principal plot line and a sub-plot are woven together and gradually merge. Many of the same qualities are there: streetwise humour, a good eye for the multicultural realities of twenty-first century London, an ability to keep you turning the pages as the plot twists and turns... But, I still felt slightly disappointed. It's not that Aaronovitch has lost his touch, I think it's just that so much of the pleasure of the first book lay in discovering a new imaginative world, the gradual revealing of a parallel reality, as novel and surprising to the protagonist as it is to the reader. The trouble is, you can only do that once, whereafter the next story has to be pitched in the by-now-familiar framework. Somehow, JK Rowling pulled this off better in the Harry Potter series, maybe by keeping more back at the outset, maybe also by having a stronger multi-volume narrative arc. An unfair comparison perhaps, but one that serves to illustrate the point.

Discontentful reading: "Seasons in the Sun - The Battle for Britain" by Dominic Sandbrook

In the lengthening series, "wildly inappropriate reading", this short review concerns the second (actually the third, by my second) volume of Dominic Sandbrook's super-detailed history of the nineteen-seventies, here covering the years 1974-1979. Inappropriate, because the my surroundings, variously an Etihad business lounge in Abu Dhabi, unseasonably warm midwinter Sydney, and seasonably warm northern Queensland, seem a million miles from the bleak, grimy and seemingly terminally declining Britain of the seventies, described in this book. 

These were the years of all-powerful (or so it seemed) union bosses, the decline into  bizarre paranoia of a once hope-bringing prime minister (Wilson), the overwhelming of his successor, a politician who deserves better of the historical record (Callaghan), industrial decline, punk rock, strikes, more strikes and the famous Winter of Discontent, which sets the stage, though few, probably including the protagonists, realised to what extent, for a political and cultural sea-change beginning with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. It is also the period when I personally went from being ten to fifteen years old, and therefore began to acquire some meaningful consciousness of what was going on. (Though, having read this, less than I thought.)  

I don't actually have too much to say about this book, not because there is not a lot to say, but because I have largely said it already, in the review of the preceding volume. Sandbrook writes masterly history, fusing conventional historical sources with germane and insightful references to popular culture, in particular, and justifiably in the context of the seventies, TV programmes such as the Morcombe and Wise Show and The Generation Game, whose audiences were so huge as to represent significant proportions of the population. Again and again, as with the previous volume, this book brought numerous moments of recognition ("yes! I remember that, even if I was only twelve"), as well as new information which had totally passed me by at the time and had somehow failed to impinge since, such as the genuinely weird role played in British government by Marcia Williams, Harold Wilson's advisor, subsequently Lady Falkender.