So, just to prove it is possible to read many books at once I read this fine biography, by a Cambridge Historian, of the tragic Queen who fell into the hands of the all-powerful Elizabeth.  Her end is well known, but her beginnings in the Court of France under Catherine de Medici, married to Henri II of France, her education by his mistress Diane de Poitiers and her Uncles, the occasionally all-powerful Guises is a fascinating tale. Mary is married to the weakling King of France Francis II, who doesn’t last long, after which she returns to Scotland for the first time as an adult and has to deal with the obnoxious Knox, the mistrustful and inscrutable Protestant enemy Cecil and his vacillating virgin Queen as well as the jealousies and intrigues of the Scottish nobles and the powerful surges of Protestant and Catholic hatred. One can feel nothing but pity for her as she has husbands and friends murdered around her, falls for the horrible Bothwell, is kicked off the throne and imprisoned in England for nineteen years by the insanely jealous Elizabeth, before leading Cecil’s secret service to the proofs of her desperate plots to escape, her inevitable trial for treason and the tragic farce of her execution. The stagecraft which she employs, to set herself up as a Catholic Martyr, is her final scene of Tudor Reality TV. The Kardashians have nothing on her. This is the best book I have ever read on her.

A novel about sex in old age. And a good one. He picks up the tale of a character who first appeared in The Last Picture Show and who he has revisited often. Duane Moore comes home to find a young attractive executive working in his office. He fancies his shrink, and she, deep in grief, abandons the profession to give him some much needed tips on sexual pleasure. The beneficiary is obvious, but satisfying. Highly enjoyable. Like sex in old age….

From the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger I really enjoyed these tales set in Kittur, India. However, I did find that the track of the stories were similar, people seeking to rise above their station and falling from their aspirations, as they banged against the class and caste systems of this Indian city. Once this pattern emerged, I found them harder to enjoy, as each protagonist suffers the same fall, and so they are all about loss and disappointment, which is perhaps an Indian attitude. Or maybe it’s Oxford?

I was shocked at how good these four novels are. First of all he writes better prose than Bruce Chatwin and the tales he tells are full of dark truth. You know these things took place. I was actually shocked by the child molesting which occurs early in the first novel in the sequence Never Mind and the books explore the attempt by the protagonist Patrick Melrose to put his life back together after his appalling father bullies and assaults him in the early sixties in Provence. But they are also brilliantly witty and hilarious. In Bad News the tale jumps starkly forward to the now grown boy’s junkie years in New York, to return in Some Hope to an hilarious account of an upper class birthday party with an outstandingly funny pillorying of Princess Margaret which had me laughing out loud with joy. He captures the whole braying world of a really nasty class of English people which is at once a joy to read and a necessary corrective from the soft soap opera of the dear aristocrats portrayed so untruthfully and nauseatingly in Downton Abbey. Funny, and bitter, and satirical, it is at once better and grittier than Evelyn Waugh, and that from me. (?) I read all four in one lovely Picador Paperback original which restores one’s faith in Publishers. I can’t wait to get home and finish At Last, the final book in the series, which I was enjoying, but got distracted from when I picked it up from Mr.B’s last year. I understand now why. It is important to read them in order.

Well yes I’d read it before ( in July 1998) but who doesn’t love this first tale of US Marshall Raylan Givens, tracking the corrupt bookie who flees to Italy to avoid being hit by a fat, lazy Florida mob boss. Leonard says that Raylan is his favourite character and no wonder, he really is the old Western sheriff, with his country hat and his cowboy boots and his unshakeable pursuit of villainy. I love Justified and it’s Raylan than makes it work and it was a treat all the way to read this again. This book ends where the TV series begins, with his fast draw down on the Zip at a restaurant table.

I can’t believe I have never read this beautiful poem of a book before:  elegant, short, exquisitely written interweaving tales of the inhabitants of a small Northern Californian fishing town. It’s the refreshing non-judgemental attitude of Steinbeck to his characters that makes it so enjoyable.  That and his prose. How’s this for an opening? “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories, and flophouses. It’s inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.” First Published in 1945 I read a beautiful Penguin Steinbeck Centennial Edition paperback, set in Bembo. I shall read it again.

Finished the month with a Leonard. I had never read one of his Westerns before and of course he never disappoints. Is it Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is the point of fiction? Anyway it leaps off the page and is excellent summer reading.