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By Eric Idle, September 1, 2020 12:36 pm

August

Trust Exercise               Susan Choi

I thought this book had a magnificent opening.  The first chapters were clever and brilliant.  A fictional memoir of young actors at a Performing High School in a southern City on the East coast.  I was bowled over and so enjoying it.  Then she pulled an interesting move.  She advanced the story ten years, when one of the characters in the memoir interestingly doorsteps the memoir writer at Skylight Books.  The confrontation is between the “real,” what Karen the “character” girl thinks happened, and the fictional memoir by Sarah the memoir writer.  So far so good.  But it quickly gets confusing.   Where are we going?  Revenge?  Hatred?  Resentment?   It’s unclear.  Then a third character enters, Kevin, who also begin narrating.  I’m sorry.  Three narrators is a play.  She is undoubtedly brilliant and I shall try other books but I miss the first one she was writing here.

Intimations                   Zadie Smith

It seems slight, it seems light, but it is heavy and essential reading, with serious questions to ask ourselves about 2020.  She is quietly despairing of racism in this country and concludes “that my physical and moral cowardice have never been tested, until now.”   Delicious and deceptively simple these philosophical essays have great resonance, and set a benchmark asking the question where we should begin considering how much we owe to ourselves as self-centred evolving individuals and how much we owe to being part of a society in a pandemic at a time of great civic unrest.  The essays are scattered with little observational character gems that she drops effortlessly into her wonderful prose:  “Ben…makes baldness look like an achievement..”   A book to carry around, re-read and reconsider.

I’m thinking the Wordsworth allusion is to make us think of Mortality.  Which is really her subject.

November Road             Lou Berney

Recommended by Don Winslow.  This book really crushes it. Everything you ever wanted in a great fuck-off read.  In New Orleans in 1963 a low life is assigned to remove a vehicle from a Houston garage and dump it in the Ship Channel.  A Cadillac that has come from Dallas.  With a used Mannlicher rifle in the trunk!  Kennedy’s assassination is on TV everywhere.  Oswald is shot by Jack Ruby.   The guy realises he is wanted by everyone from the FBI down and must try and escape from all those who want him dead.  Very sweetly he hooks up with a battered wife and kids on the road to eventual, but subtle, redemption.

Gutshot Straight.           Lou Berney

I decided I need to read more of this guy and so I downloaded his first novel.  Written during the Writer’s Strike of the first decade of the millennium, the influence of writing for the screen can be seen in the characteristic short scenes which are whole chapters and the general smart pace of the piece, which is essential for a thriller.  Cut to Cut to… But he has a great talent.  And I’m starting his penultimate one…

July

Utopia Avenue      David Mitchell

The latest by a favourite writer, I loved this novel for most of the time.  Sometimes I think he is channelling me, he refers to so many places and events I recall.  Black Swan Green is set in Worcestershire where I played third wicket keeper for Redditch XI’s.  Then there’s Butlins, Skegness,  The Marquee Club, watching the psychedelic early Pink Floyd play at UFO in the Tottenham Court Road, I remember dancing for hours to those lava lamp oil projections, to Granny Takes a Trip, Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s, yes I was there,  but he is at least a decade younger.  This story tells of life back stage in cheap gigs on the road with an evolving British Pop group (Utopia Avenue)  in the Sixties.  Real people, like Bowie, Marc Bolan, Sanny Dennis etc pop[ in for the odd cameo. Three creative talents, all writers brought together into a group by Levon, Canadian entrepreneur friend of (real person) Joe Boyd. Elf, Jasper and Dean.  I was never quite convinced by Dean, the lead singer.  I couldn’t see him.  Elf is interesting, but Jasper (de Zoet) develops an inner poltergeist, which takes his life off at a tangent.   So while it was fun and terrific, and it was great to visit the Troubadour again and watch them making it, I don’t think he quite nailed it.  I’m not quite sure why, but I’m going to read the ending again and see what I think.

The Border          Don Winslow

The third and possibly the most powerful of an extraordinarily fine Cartel trilogy, the tale spans over 45 years of the powerful warring drug cartels, the men who lead them, the agents who fight them, the women they seduce and the cold continuous bitter-cruel killing that only escalates the more money the endless War on Drugs pumps in to the whole corrupt mix. This longest, endless and most unwinnable war undertaken by America, continues to corrupt civilization and destroy democracy while delivering daily death to US junkies, and misery to thousands of Mexicans.  It is clearly only slightly fictional and has so much relevance for and disgust with the current political kakistocracy in the US.  He has been writing this story for thirty years.  It is a huge achievement and a great read.  I kept asking myself, as  a contemporary novel, what is this like? It has the social reach of Dickens, the anger and the despair, the view of the helpless poor trapped by the hypocrisy of the greedy,  but in its savage view of the depths of human behaviour and betrayal it is more like Dostoyevsky, or even Webster.  Throwing kids off a bridge being the most notable of the many outrages he evidences.  For this reads, not like fiction, but like truth. Dickens uses comedy to sustain.  Mr. Winslow only occasionally. His books are deadly serious. Not afraid to lay the blame, his finger points to the highest in the land, the US President’s son-in-law is involved raising money from the cartels for his campaign.  It’s all there. The New York property draining away their financial security and the complicity of foreign banks to come to the rescue of a campaign that is happy to accept help from gangsters and Russian mob leaders. We read with belief, yes this is how it is, and despair, yes this is what will happen.  Corruption prospers at a trough.  Turn the tap and watch the piggy’s feed. We need to end the War on Drugs, legalize them and treat them as the social health problem that they are.  Amazing work.  Bravo.

June

The Novellas of John O’Hara

I was reading these in a nice Modern Library Edition (1995)  They are just great to dip into.  I dipped deep.  Great bedside book.

Push through…             Carey Harrison

The last in a quartet of remarkable novels that is his life’s work and a singular achievement.  I love the way he can handle large scenes with multiple characters, because he is also a very fine playwright, and can manage this very difficult skill.  He may be an old friend but he can really write.. but since he has been my friend since 1963 I will quote someone else: This novelist of such amazing dexterity, humanity, inventive skill. He reminds me of Durrell, of Burgess – yet with a sense of tenderness often missing in those showmen. I’ve since read as much as I can of this writer, unfailingly inventive – as I read his work, I often feel (as with Powys often, and Lawrence sometimes) that I’m reading a detective story that turns out to be about me.”  1968 he began what was to become a quartet of novels:  The Heart Beneath, beginning publication with Richard’s Feet (1990) Cley (1992), and Egon (1993), and completed in 2016 by How to Push Through, a project which the author regards as his primary life’s work.

The Newton Letter         John Banville

I reread a flawless novella from 1982 from John Banville.

The Comedians             Graham Greene

One of my favourite books. I love re-reading it. Greene explores the roles we all play in our lives. Even beginning with a joke, the three men who meet on a boat into Haiti are called Smith, Brown and Jones.  He is Brown, the lost soul, who loses his mother, loses his hotel, his mistress, but not his wife, ends up ironically as a Funeral Director.   He misses what others see in Jones, whom he foolishly thinks is a rival.  It is a very fine novel which I enjoy more and more.

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By Eric Idle, June 7, 2020 4:24 pm

May

Until the End of Time    Brian Greene

I read this in a hurry as I was about to join him on The Infinite Monkey Cage, but now I find myself going back and dipping into some of the fascinating things he reveals about the Universe.   It’s more interesting than science fiction.  In fact the whole Universe is far weirder than the bearded conjurer theory.   I want to read more.

I downloaded two Don Winslow books on to Kindle because they are so heavy! Alas I began to read the wrong one.  I meant to read The Border, the third part of his trilogy but I inadvertently started….

The Force            Don Winslow

…so I continued.  It was very prescient, a book about Police Corruption and the Manhattan Police.  Fascinating.  A brilliant portrait of a corrupt cop and what happens on the streets of NY.

Now perhaps I can finish his brilliant Trilogy.

Laugh Lines         Alan Zweibel

My life helping funny people be funnier.

Hilarious.  I loved this book.  He is a wonderful man.  I’m so glad I have known him since SNL in 1976.  I am very proud of him.

Strangers on a Train      Patricia Highsmith

Was this her first?  Hitchcock made the movie.  This was not my favourite read of hers.

Catch and Kill      Ronan Farrow

I started this brilliant book in hardback when it first came out, but finished it recently on Kindle.  It is an amazing achievement and worthy of all the awards he picked up.  He takes down the appalling sexual bully and rapist Weinstein, as well as NBC and their misguided attempts to shield Matt Lauer from the retribution he totally deserved.  Along the way he has to face many attempts to stop him, including the attentions of Black Cube, which is, reassuringly a post Mossad group for hire, if you have, you know raped anyone recently.  They can help.

Talking to Strangers               Malcolm Gladwell

I finally finished this intriguing book.  He is always readable.  Like a feast for the mind.

Maigret and the Old People.     Georges Simenon

Wonderful as usual.

So you don’t get lost in the neighbourhood.   Patrick Modiano

A bit French for me.

American Dirt               Jeanine Cummins

Starts fantastically well but I felt it ran out of steam towards the end.  I prefer Don Winslow in the horrendous world of the Mexican cartels, but she is certainly impressive, and he recommends this, if indeed it is not quite The Grapes of Wrath.   The Rapes of Wrath?

April

Hi Five                Joe Ide

An IQ novel

Well into his stride now, his books are effortlessly readable.  I’m not quite sure I get much of a picture of IQ his protagonist, I still don’t quite have an image of him in my mind,  but I really enjoy reading his author.   This one concerns someone who is accused of murder who is a Multi, and that in itself leads to complications.  Highly original.  Good stuff.

No Bones             Anna Burns

The great thing about age is you can happily re-read a book you just read recently with only a dim awareness of what happens.  This was her first novel and I liked it very much. Her writing is wonderful, in Belfast rhythms with slang and issues, a young girl, her family and friends at the beginning of the Troubles. I did indeed read it in January 2018 and said then “ She manages to be both bleak and satirical at the same time, as well as the finest prose writer.”  I agree with me.

Lady in Waiting             Anne Glenconner

My Extraordinary Life in the shadow of the Crown

A highly readable memoir of the Upper Classes and the poor woman who was married to the loony Peer Colin Tennant, the King of Mustique.  She becomes Lady in Waiting to the less than fabulous Princess Margaret.  This is a fascinating glimpse of the children of the Bright Young Things. Her description of the Coronation, where she was one of the six ladies in waiting carrying the train of the Queen at that extraordinary event, is worth the price of admission alone.  Kindle.

Maigret in Vichy

A memorable one.  Maigret is a fish out of water, taking the waters in Vichy, when a little old lady he and the Mrs have been holiday watching is suddenly found dead. Of course the local police ask for Maigret’s help and of course he can’t resist.

Apropos of Nothing        Woody Allen

Interesting autobiography of America’s most famous comedian and director of our time.  Interesting that he says he is not an intellectual, and indeed he never went to college. It was fun to read about his movies.  But we were all waiting for how he writes about HER… and he does.

Read on Kindle.

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By Eric Idle, April 19, 2020 6:07 pm

March

The Splendid and the Vile        Erik Larson

A terrific read.  About Winston Churchill in the dark days of 1940, replacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister with the country in imminent danger of German invasion.  It’s about his crew, Beaverbrook and Tree and so on, his loyal family, his determination to bring America in, via Roosevelt during two years of one hundred and fifty German bombers overhead.  The cruelty of the Blitz, and the nightly raids which killed thousands of Brits is particularly relevant in the age of CV.  There are indeed worse things.

Framed                Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Why Michael Skakel spent over a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

Robert F. Kennedy sent me this, because, unbelievably, the murder of Martha Moxley took place during the first ever broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS in 1975 and several of the protagonists were racing home to watch it.  More importantly, I was convinced by this book that a major injustice took place, prodded by Dominik Dunne and Mark Fuhrman the OJ Cop, when Michael Skakel was suddenly accused of and shockingly convicted of the murder three decades later, despite never having been a suspect and having a cast iron alibi.  I think he is out now.  I hope so.

Vegas                  John Gregory Dunne

A Memoir of a Dark Season

I have been searching for years for this book and I finally found it at the Pasadena Book Fair. It was certainly worth the search.  A very fine semi-autobiographical novel of a writer and his nervous breakdown in Vegas. Sharp, funny and sometimes cruel.  I loved it.

February

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        Victor Hugo

I’d forgotten just what a damn good writer Hugo was.  The French Dickens.  This abridged version was really good.  Completely captivated me.  Musical anyone?

Frankissstein                Jeanette Winterson

Lake Geneva 1816 and Mary Shelley is writing her classic on a wet weekend in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley and meanwhile in Brexit Britain a man is making robotic sex toys

The Man in the Red Coat        Julian Barnes

Much as I love him he didn’t grab me with this odd tale of a bunch of Frogs in Angleterre in the summer of 1885. The Belle Epoch in London and of course very gay Paree.

January

A Very Stable Genius              Philip Rucker & Carol Leonnig

A fine book on the Orange Monster.  But after a while I no longer wanted to continue reading about how crazy this terrible tyrant is and I put it away.  He is making everyone nuts.  Poor America. Will it ever recover?  The Trump Presidential Library is going to consist of nothing but books exposing what an insane malignant narcissist can do to democracy, when tutored by Putin and Roy Cohn.

The Catch            Mick Herron

He seems to be very good at these short novellas, perhaps inspired by Simenon.  This is great.

Maigret and Monsieur Charles         Georges Simenon.

Another brilliant one.  The great thing about the novella is it’s hard to run out of steam, as so many novels do.  Even great ones.

Serotonin             Michel Houellebecq

The same bleak view from a loser.  Compelling writing and total honesty.

Pal Joey               John O’Hara

Wonderful short letters from a Chicago nightclub singer to a better.   Became the basis for the Rogers and Hart musical.

Rogue Lawyer               John Grisham

Fine character.  A rogue lawyer.  Really interesting and very well told. I had picked up a large priont format but it was already very easy to read.

Maigret Hesitates           Georges Simenon

…but not for long.  Slight resemblance to another story of his, where he learns in advance a crime is to be committed. This one really surprises him and he hesitates to call the outcome.

More Than Likely          Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais

Fabulous memoirs from the two great writers (and Director). I loved every second of it.

Likely Lads, Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

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By Eric Idle, February 17, 2020 12:19 pm

December

Agent Running in the Field     John Le Carré

Interestingly he seems to be writing a corrective to Nick Herron’s Slough House series…also it seems to be about the agent runner being seduced.   One might say penetrated.  But hard to tell so far.

The Two Faces of January      Patricia Highsmith

So often her novels concern two characters (usually men) circling each other, the one trying to murder the other. The would-be victim usually triumphs, often by killing his assassin, but in this particular long and complicated dance of death set in Greece, a young American aids and abets a rather nastier American in covering up a murder because he looks like his father, the intended victim saves his would be murderer from the Police.

Those Who Walk Away            Patricia Highsmith

A study in no revenge.  Set largely in Venice, a man will not kill or expose his father in law, after his very young wife has committed suicide in Majorca.

It’s Only Life                   Ash Carter and Sam Kashner

Mike Nichols in quotes from his 150 closest friends.  Witty, brilliant and I wrote notes all over it.

Talking to Strangers               Malcolm Gladwell

Misunderstandings and how to understand them and what they tell us about how we work.  Or don’t. Another fine book from the finest current essayist.

Grand Union                          Zadie Smith.

What can I say?  I adore her.  Favourites:  Downtown is wonderful and  Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets is wonderfully funny.

Maigret’s Patience                  Georges Simenon

A recurring character is bumped off.

The Madman of Bergerac        Georges Simenon

A very good one.  Maigret jumps on a train and is almost bumped off.  Who is the madman??

November

Winter                          Ali Smith.

Some discussion about how good we think this quartet is.   I didn’t finish this one.

Pity The Reader     Kurt Vonnegut & Suzanne McConnell

On writing with style, from a master, nicely interpreted and linked. Finely chosen and edited.  Excellent advice for writers.

Dark Places                   Gillian Flynn

An early novel about the sole survivor of a massacred family, as she grows up and deals with just what happened that night when her brother may have murdered her entire family.

A Small Town               Thomas Perry

What joy to have a writer friend who sends you his latest thriller every year?   He always has a great premise.   Here a Prison Break devastates a nearby local town, and sets in motion a female cop with a million dollars bounty to destroy the twelve who plotted, murdered the officers, escaped, invaded the local town with murder rape and mayhem.  And he returns to his Jane Whitefield books theme with a powerful female, tracking, hunting and in this case eliminating some really nasty people.

Everything happens       Jo Perry

How fortunate to have a writer friend married to another writer.  I loved both the Perry books.  Stepping away from her excellent Dead Dog series, this is a fine novel where everything happens at the end.  It’s very short and I could have taken a lot more.

Queen Lucia. Part 1.  Make Way for Lucia.  E.F. Benson

Re-reading these wonderful books.  Lucia and Georgie are surely two of the greatest comic inventions in literature.  The book is exquisite, hilarious, and a delight.  A Curry cook appears as a Guru to fool Miss Map and her rival acolytes. Exquisitely bitchy novels about life in home counties rural England.

Camino Island      John Grisham

I’m not a big Grisham fan.  To me he writes like a lawyer.  I abandoned this. I wrote earlier (1995) about him the rather cruel line that he is “The MacDonald’s of writing.”  But see later. I really enjoyed one.

October

The Library Book          Susan Orlean

I’m afraid I put it back on the shelves.  I might give it another go, a) because I was on pain killers and b) I think it should be better than it is and I don’t want to misjudge it.   For me it’s always about the writing.  Are they good at writing a sentence?  Compare any page of this to Salman Rushdie’s latest novel and you’ll see the difference.  Salman’s prose sparkles.  It feels effortless, which of course indicates a great deal of effort went into it. I know that’s not fair because Salman is a genius. I think it’s the shape that she’s chosen and I might dip into and see why it doesn’t grab me when I like everything about the story.

Maigret’s Anger   Georges Simenon

Maigret is perplexed by the murder of a nightclub owner, which threatens his reputation.

The Captain and the Glory      Dave Eggers

The rather wonderful Dave Eggers sent me a copy of his latest book.  He dispatched the text to me in the summer and I giggled happily through the entire, though rather short, fable, about an ignorant, vain, hopelessly inadequate, newly appointed Captain of a ship. I can’t imagine who he had in mind.  I found it hilarious, and I sent him a quote, not just because he wonderfully interviewed me about my Sortabiography in San Francisco last year, but because I thought he successfully lampooned the Idiot in Chief where many I think have failed.   They allow their hatred into their writing.  Here he just gently, mildly mocks and it is so much more deadly.  He had me laughing out loud.  Not an easy thing to achieve. I hope it does well. The Trump Presidential Library will be a room filled with books about what a useless, treasonable, shite he is.  A new book drops every day.  Dave’s is different. It’s funny.  I think Trump is funny, though dangerously so.

Quichotte             Salman Rushdie

An exquisite read.  Salman at the top of his game.   His writing is delightful.  His take on Quixote is brilliant.  I shall re-read it soon.

Offshore              Penelope Fitzgerald

The Booker Prize winner from 1979.  A perfect short novel.  Entirely built up with close character observations of all the outsiders who live on the boats at Chelsea Reach.  Delightful, less is so more.  I was happy to read it again, and would again.

Joe Country         Mick Herron

A Slough House novel.  The 8^th in this series about the losers at Slow House.   Great characters.  I think I’ve read every word he wrote.

The Beginning of Spring         Penelope Fitzgerald.

A Moscow novel set in 1913.  Interesting but not perfect.

July thru September

My Purple Scented Novel        Ian McEwan

Short, little novella.   About revenge.   Of the literary kind.  A tiny book which packs a punch.

Hapgood              Tom Stoppard

A play about Nils Bohr and Quantum Theory.  first produced in 1988. It is mainly about espionage, focusing on a British female spymaster (Hapgood) and her juggling of career and motherhood.

Jean de Florette    Manon Les Sources.      Marcel Pagnon.

Lovely French novels about the search for spring water in the south of France.

(Read in French.)

Written on the Body                Jeanette Winterson

A very fine writer.  I love her work.

City of Light, City of Poison     Holly Tucker

Abandoned.  Rather been down this Louis XIV a lot track recently. See Versailles on TV.

The Cartel            Don Winslow.

Part Two of the epic trilogy.  Totally gripping.

White Teeth          Zadie Smith

I love her.  This was the first.  Happy to catch up.

Ravelstein            Saul Bellow

Ravelstein is Saul Bellow’s final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it received widespread critical acclaim.  It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written in the form of a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, a renowned professor, and Nikki, his lover. Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies. After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce. Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write the memoir.

The Smiley Trilogy.

Great re-reading.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.             John Le Carré

The Honourable Schoolboy.            John Le Carré

Smiley’s People.                                John Le Carré

The Unsteady Captain             Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers sent me this book.   “Mr. Idle —Hope the summer’s been good to you and yours. No obligation to read this, but given your interest in politics and humor I thought I’d send this. After trying many thousands of ways to address this horrible time, I wrote a sort-of satire. Maybe it’s some kind of distant cousin to Hello Sailor. Do not bother with it unless you are very bored or somewhat medicated.

In other news, I hope you are well.”

I replied:  “It’s fucking hysterical. I was concerned at the beginning because a writer I admire failed to make a funny Trump book work.  There was too much hatred. I think what you got exactly right and why it works so well is the tone.  The form of the narrative.  It doesn’t seem to comment while delivering hundreds of brilliant back handers.  It’s a kind of naive narrative “Oh and then this happened” as if it were all perfectly normal.  For instance when we find out they haven’t yet left port.  Both the metaphor and the story play perfectly together. You manage to conceal every gag, which means for example, when you deliver the daughter gag, we hadn’t actually seen it coming.  The first essential with comedy. I laughed out loud so frequently I was amazed because I’m not that easy to make laugh out loud.

Hotel World.         Ali Smith

Hotel World is divided into five sections. The first section, “Past” tells the story of Sara Wilby  The second part, “Present Historic”, is about a homeless girl (Else) begging for money outside the Hotel. The “Future Conditional”, the third section of the novel, Lise, a receptionist. The fourth part is “Perfect” with its far from perfect character Penny. The fifth section of the novel titled “Future in the Past,” is entirely Clare’s memories on the life and death of her sister Sara. “Present” is the title of the last part of the novel.

The Constant Gardener           John Le Carré

is a 2001 novel by British author John le Carré. The novel tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. Believing there is something behind the murder, he seeks to uncover the truth and finds an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucracy and pharmaceutical money. The plot was based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria. The book was later adapted into a feature film in 2005.

Ripley Underground               Patricia Highsmith

Instantly addictive.  Binge novel reading.  I downloaded the next on Kindle.  I needed it now. She writes about the killing in the same low key uncommitted way she does about everything.   Brilliant.   Only now and again she lets Ripley’s underlying hysteria and madness bubble through, like a barely controlled manic episode.  In this he has a French wife and lives just beyond Orly.  She repeats her themes of killing and impersonating here, with a twist, when Tom disguises himself as a dead painter, whose work they have been forging, with the legend he is in Mexico. An American collector suspect his is a forgery.  Actually they are all forgeries.   The painter makes an assault on Tom.   There is a whole second story about the German fence.