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.   

Geriatic reading: "The Hundred-Year-Old Man: Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson

Nordic literature (TV series too, at that) is supposed to be dark, introverted stuff, right? Well, The Hundred-Year-Old Man: Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is not dark at all, but a joyous geriatric romp through the Swedish countryside in the company of a motley crew of ageing and really-not-that-bad crooks, led, bizarrely by our hero, the 100-year old Allan Karlsson. After he absconds from his old people's home, just before his 100h birthday party is due to begin, steals a suitcase full of drug money and hits the road to nowhere in particular, events continually conspire to expand his band to include an unlikely selection of characters up to and including an escaped zoo elephant.

The vicissitudes of the group, on the run from law enforcers and law-breakers alike, take on the nature of a Swedish road-trip, complete with a couple of relatively harmless murders. But this is all less than half the story, for much of the book is spent in flashback, telling us the past of Allan Karlsson - a past which spans pretty much the entire twentieth century.

Turns out that Allan Karlsson is a kind of long-haul Swedish Forrest Gump, an idiot savant with a knack of being where the action is, hobnobbing with world leaders and incidentally taking a decisive hand in pretty much everything from the Spanish Civil War, through the invention of the atom bomb and Mao's Great March to Reagan's Star Wars programme. Karlsson is on cordial (usually vodka-drinking) terms with two US presidents, Mao (and Mrs Mao), General Franco, Kim Il-Sun and Albert Einstein's not very clever half brother, to name but a few. Pretty much the only one the avowedly apolitical Karlsson cannot get along with, vodka consumption notwithstanding, is Joseph Stalin, who he finds over-sensitive and lacking in human warmth. Besides, that encounter ends badly, with Karlsson spending six years in the Gulag for a minor faux pas.

Over the book's not inconsiderable, but eminently readable length, the flashbacks and the road trip converge, as the forces of law and order converge on the unlikely gang and Karlsson gravitates slowly back to his homeland. What happens then, well, really confirms what we have come to expect of our improbable hero.

Is this all supposed to have a deeper meaning? Well, yes, there's satire; yes, there's moral relativism; yes, there's a quizzical eye cast on world history, but really this is just fun. A lot of fun.

Recommendation? This is one to take to the beach for your summer reading. You can't fail to enjoy it (unless you think it is all really a bit too silly) and it'll go by in a flash. Ibsen it ain't, but if you're up a bit of clever Swedish fun, give it a go.

Perverse reading: "Underground Overground" by Andrew Martin

It is a pretty perverse choice, it has to be said, to read a sideways-look at the history of the London Underground while doing an "executive leadership" course in the Silicon Valley sunshine. But there you have it, it was next in my reading queue. In my defence, I could add that this was my first e-book, thus appropriate to the location, read on my new kindle, which I recently bought in the face of the reality that I cannot practically schlep my usual pile of summer reading books on the long distance holidays we have planned this year. In my further defence, I would say that if you have been obliged to read the latest work of your Stanford Business School management guru at the same time, a little bit of drizzle-doused, understated English quirkiness is probably a reasonable antidote.  (Complimentary copy of said tome, Power Up - actually lower case power up - is beside me as I write. Don't expect a review here...)

At the risk of slightly undermining my apparent commitment to new technology, I should point out that I do possess the old-fashioned paperback version of this book, and bought the kindle version later for travel purposes. I mention the fact merely to point out that this is yet another of that now venerable category of serendipitously-found-books-in-Foyles-St-Pancras. Yes, that modest bookstore worked its magic once more, a few months ago, only to be overlaid by the technological revolution by the time I got round to actually reading it.

Post Soviet Baltic reading: "With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows" by Sandra Kalniete

I have professional dealings with Sandra Kalniete, though she does not (yet) know me personally. She is a Latvian Member of the European Parliament, and is a familiar name to most in the Parliament because of the constant stream of emails emanating from her office publicising exhibitions, films and other events focusing on Latvian history, usually its bleaker aspects. In my case, things are a little more specific, as I was one of a number of addressees of a letter from a group of MEPs, but coordinated by Mrs Kalniete, complaining that the small history section of the Parliament's visitor centre, the Parlamentarium, for which I am responsible, places almost exclusive emphasis on Nazi atrocities in World War II, with scant mention of those committed by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. (As so often, the holocaust and Auschwitz are cited as the lowest point of human history from which Europe had to recover in the post-war period.)

This complaint is indeed is a relatively common one of Members from Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular from the Baltic States, against what they see as a cultural and historical bias towards a Western European narrative of history requiring correction, or at least balance.