It has been a relatively active year so far for reading and listening. Audio books have predominated because of the amount of garden and house tasking in the run up to selling our house. There have been some very enjoyable surprises from being compelled to choose from the limited number of titles available through Manchester City Libraries' online audio book service. This uses Overdrive but I suspect that their subscription only permits access to a smallish selection, which is heavy on the most popular books for adults and children. Literary fiction and non-fiction are much less represented.
13 Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926) ***
A confident whimsy about the put-upon childless sister, dispossessed of her family home on the death of her beloved father. Deciding that she has had enough of childcare for her brother in the capacity of maide aunt she decided to move to the country and become a witch. This naturally involves consorting with the devil, who turns out to look after his own.
12 Flannery O'Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge (A) (1965) *****
I have hovered around this book several times over the years and what a treat it turned out to be. Margaret Flannery O'Connor was the daughter of a Savannah realtor who had an ear and an eye for the weirdness of the South. These stories, with various excellent readers are wry, brutal and arrestingly forthright and they sing out a truth across the decades.
11 Adam Mars-Jones: Kid Gloves, A Voyage Round my Father (2015) ****
An interesting memoir that peters out a bit but beautifully written for the most part. Some very good anecdotes and the curiosity of living at Gray's Inn. Reconciling his father to Adam's gayness is a large part of the book and winning his acceptance is ultimately an anticlimax and even disappointment.
10 Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants (2007)(A) ****
I have had this on my list for a long time and how fortunate that I did not miss it. A transporting tale, beautifully written and read. The shady but exciting world of the train-transported travelling show during the Depression is excitingly realised and her love of animals radiates.
9 Michael Connolly: The Overlook (2007)(A) ***
A tale of stolen Caesium and possible terrorism, concealing another. Well plotted but increasingly unlikely and Harry's maverick carry on is all too predictable. Still, a good yarn.
8 Michael Connolly: Echo Park (2006)(A) ***
Just how many serial killers can there be? A sick society, indeed.
7 Michael Connolly: The Narrows (2004)(A) ***
Pretty good final novel in The Poet sequence. Harry Bosch has retired from LAPD.
6 Diego Marani: New Finnish Grammar (2000) ****
A striking novel, definitely not a barrel of laughs but it examines what amnesia might do to a person brain-damaged as a result of a head injury in wartime. He doggedly learns Finnish, one of the most complex languages on the planet but gets no sense of his past, turning to despair when his fragile supposed identity is found to be a chimera. A thwarted love affair and the gloom of Lutheranism complete the picture.
5 Jane Austen: Persuasion (1817) (A) **** Read by Anna Massey
An interesting novel, in that the treatment of the realities of the lives of young gentlewomen is laid out even more starkly than usual. There is a happy ending but the dangers of marriage to a sea captain are made plain. The battle of the sexes is there and Wentworth says that literature shows that women are fickle but expects that her rejoinder will be that, for the most part literature has been written be men.
4 Attica Locke: Pleasantville (2015) (A) ***
Pretty good sequel to Black Water Rising, the debut for black lawyer Jay Porter (apparently). Locke has worked as a writer for TV dramas and comes from Houston, where this is set, Pleasantville being a black aspirational middle class suburb established after WWll and the focus of the murder of three teenage girls and a dodgy mayoral election campaign.
3 Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)(A) ****
An extraordinary book, which I failed to get round to as a child, but which is the oddest children's book. It includes hired 'nancies' from Cuba, dressed as women, child abuse and the murder of a sea captain by Emily, aged 10. The thrills of a wild childhood are beautifully evoked, presumably based on tales from Hughes's mother, who was brought up in Jamaica. Also the economic context and the hostile black/white relations after slavery was abolished. Hughes was 29 when this was published, after Charterhouse and Oriel.
2 Philip Kerr: If the dead rise not (2009) ****
The sixth Bernie Gunther novel and my first. PK turns out to be very prolific but none of his books have been filmed yet. Bernie is an ex KRIPO homicide cop who is no keen on the Nazis. The writing is very well researched and, like Flashman, Bernie manages to turn up at various events in European history and encounter notorious figures. In this novel he is mistreated by Nazis and A US Jewish gangster, ending up 20 years later in Cuba, doing some work for Meyer Lansky during the Battista régime.
1 Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)(A) *****
Off to a cracking start with a reminder of how good is this surreal, magical real novel, which he wrote in 1939-40. Beautifully read for Naxos by Jim Norton, the charm of rural Ireland and the love of language and talking come across loud and clear.
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