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.