It seems obvious that lockdown has encouraged a thriller binge, reading for fun and escape, so it should be no surprise that my favourite book of the year is:<\/p>\n
Fabulous.\u00a0 Five or six novella length stories.\u00a0 Quite brilliantly written. Don Winslow has filled up the hole in my life left by the death of Elmore Leonard. It is the sheer joie de vivre of his prose, his fuckit let\u2019s tell this story style, that makes him so readable.<\/p>\n
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A whole community arises before our eyes, of surfers, of cops, of cops who surf and surfers who cop, in Pacific Beach down by San Diego. Here we meet Boone Daniels, the ex-cop PI surfer and his crew including Sunny, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God and Johnny Banzai, members of The Dawn Patrol who surf before work, to be replaced by The Gentleman\u2019s Hour, older men who talk as much as surf.\u00a0 It\u2019s an intricate California social world, set around La Jolla and the beaches, of a new world of modern housing estates, intruding on an old world of surfers. Breath-taking narrative and a delight to go along with.<\/p>\n
The surfing guys again.\u00a0 Many people want to get rid of Frankie Machine.\u00a0 If they can find him.<\/p>\n
No not Muriel\u2026 Totally fascinating.<\/p>\n
A fascinating and absorbing breath-taking ride.<\/p>\n
Travel writing.\u00a0 Miller in Greece. Lovely tales.\u00a0 Interesting he was great friends with Lawrence Durrell.<\/p>\n
Such a delight.\u00a0 Thomas Perry comes through for Christmas again.\u00a0 The Butcher\u2019s Boy is back again.\u00a0 He cannot hide.\u00a0 So he must run, first to Australia, then to America, to try and destroy who is trying to kill him.<\/p>\n
So often with Simenon it\u2019s the weather he starts, with, the early summer in Paris, the fog on the coast, the heavy barges ploughing along a rainy Seine.\u00a0 This one starts with a heat wave in Paris.\u00a0 Maigret investigates the murder of a tramp in Les Halles, the Covent Garden of the capital, which leads to the unsolved case of a naked girl, with two lovers, \u00a0strangled in a nearby apartment.\u00a0 Was one culpable?\u00a0 All these years later the\u00a0 truth begins to unravel.<\/p>\n
Fabulous.\u00a0 Five or six novella length stories.\u00a0 Quite brilliantly written.<\/p>\n
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Fine writing, slender book.<\/p>\n
Both sides of the Vengeance Weapon unleashed on London in the last few months of WW2.<\/p>\n
More terrifying than the V1, but it seems the tremendous cost of this final weapon to turn the war around was too much.\u00a0 It\u2019s terror was real.\u00a0 It\u2019s creator Werner Von Braun would defect to America at the end and take the US to the moon.<\/p>\n
A tragic shooting in a Mall Movie House.\u00a0 Time passes.\u00a0 Wounds are not healed.<\/p>\n
Re read.\u00a0 Fascinating news about our species.<\/p>\n
This surprisingly won the Booker Prize of 2019.\u00a0 Sadly it didn\u2019t win me.<\/p>\n
As in \u201cWe\u2019ll turn Manhattan into an..\u201d\u00a0 A love letter to New York. 1996 early Don Winslow.\u00a0 Beautifully written.<\/p>\n
I read a first edition from 1950 to remind me what Greene is good at: storytelling, and prose.\u00a0 In his Introduction he disparages this story, as it changed when it became a film, but it\u2019s still very good.\u00a0 Martin Amis said he didn\u2019t like him and for the same reason I used to quote:\u00a0 God.\u00a0 You simply don\u2019t want Him banging around in your books.\u00a0 Fortunately there are many fine Greene novels where He doesn\u2019t appear.\u00a0 And they are much better than just good.<\/p>\n
A very interesting book, which is a memoir written by a novelist as fiction.\u00a0 I always used to think of him as one of the new young writers but I realise that he is now over 70.\u00a0 This, appropriately is a Memento Mori, a book about death, and in particular about four, deceased, extraordinary men who played a huge part in his life:\u00a0 Christopher Hitchens his great friend, and a remarkable friendship it was too, his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, and his<\/em> closest friend the poet Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow, an adopted father really, whom Amis considers the finest American novelist.\u00a0 Along the way we get very useful insights into the theory and practise of writing, and some lovely autobiographical scenes, frequently with The Hitch which are always thoughtful and touching.\u00a0 He memorialises the wonderful Hitchens and the bravery of his last years, when he was suffering so badly from the smoking that killed him and so many others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n And he does write brilliantly about snow, which pervades this whole yarn: a detective mystery tale about a dead Priest in a Protestant family Mansion, two hours from Dublin.\u00a0 A Prot policeman from the Garda\u00a0 has to deal with a Cluedo-like cast of characters.\u00a0 Quotes on the back compare him to Nabokov which is ridiculous.\u00a0 Here he is closer to Simenon.\u00a0 We know he loves Chandler as he wrote a whole book in his style and his affection for the thriller is obvious here in a very smart, interesting, Irish revenge story.<\/p>\n A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.<\/em><\/p>\n A brilliant history of The Troubles.\u00a0 Essential reading.\u00a0 Quite brilliantly told. I loved every second of it, and lived through quite a lot of it in London.\u00a0 I think I even met the Price Sister at some trendy lefty thing in London. \u00a0Fascinating. In any other year this contemporary history of Northern Island would be my book of the Year.<\/p>\n A brilliant thriller, recommended by Don Winslow.\u00a0 A terrific narrative hook this highly readable page turner is currently Thriller Writer winning awards.<\/p>\n Another thriller with a clever narrative hook.\u00a0 Two sisters on trial for murder accuse each other.\u00a0 Who do you believe?<\/p>\n A vagrant dead in Montmartre in Les Halles.<\/p>\n Such a brilliant opening, it suggests to me he took a short story and expanded it into this novel which is never quite as good as it\u2019s beginning.<\/p>\n Pythons in Florida.\u00a0 Funny and deadly.\u00a0 The perfect beach book but oh where is the perfect beach?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Two intertwined stories, the flight and arrest of Dr. Crippen and his lover Ethel Neve who were arrested on an ocean liner after an international hunt.\u00a0 Their capture as they fled to Canada was entirely due to transatlantic messages relayed for the first time through Marconi\u2019s new transmitter.\u00a0 The other half of the book is the story of Marconi himself, his remarkable invention, his travails trying to make it work and his eventual success, marriage, etc. etc. The problem is that the story of the pursuit of the runaway couple, he wanted for the murder of his wife, \u00a0she disguised as a boy, the chase all the way to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and their final arrest by the Scotland Yard Detective Dew, who arrives before them on a faster boat, is played out with the whole world watching, while they remained ignorant of the international excitement.\u00a0 This <\/em>story is far more thrilling than Marconi\u2019s squabbles with competitors and\u00a0 his many attempts to connect ships to shore, which cannot match the tale of a quiet cold-blooded psychopathic wife-murderer, a Doctor who chops up his spouse, disposes of her bones somewhere locally (probably the Canal) and then buries the skin and viscera under the cement in his basement coal cellar, all within 24 hours, without arousing any attention.\u00a0 I had not known that Crippen and his wife Cora were both American. Ethel Neve not.\u00a0 This book would be twice as good with half the material.<\/p>\n An English professor is offered a bizarre chance to get his hands on a believed extinct Chaucer poem.<\/p>\n A short story length book and excellent as usual.<\/p>\n Always reliable.\u00a0 The perfect pocket book.\u00a0 The perfect palate cleanser.<\/p>\n Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman.<\/em><\/p>\n Slightly pretentious sub-title but good fun.\u00a0 An enjoyable romp through the casting and filming of the movie. \u00a0Including the song, the song, the song\u2026.\u00a0 Moon River.\u00a0 When they did this as a musical in London (with Anna Friel) they unaccountably left out this amazing song which was as daft as leaving out What\u2019s it all about? <\/em>from the remake of Alfie.<\/p>\n By a much-loved old pal, this is a very fine alphabetical stroll through the Beatle song canon. Stemming from his Radio show of the same name, it is deceptively simple and easy to read, but crammed with great perceptions and personal memories, it is an invaluable look at the serious business of song writing.\u00a0 Peter worked at Apple, while his sister Jane was dating Paul McCartney and he was often either present in the house while Lennon and McCartney were writing some of their classic Beatle songs, or else when in the studio recording them. Highly enjoyable and informative, his insights and memories make this a unique look at the greatest British composers of the Sixties.<\/p>\n A Surfing Life<\/em><\/p>\n A bit more than I ever needed to know about surfing.\u00a0 It won a Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so for it is very finely written but I had had enough of surfing after a while, only to stumble into the world of Don Winslow!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My favourite Book of the Year 2020 It seems obvious that lockdown has encouraged a thriller binge, reading for fun and escape, so it should be no surprise that my favourite book of the year is: Broken\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Don Winslow Fabulous.\u00a0 Five or six novella length stories.\u00a0 Quite brilliantly written. Don Winslow has filled up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":770,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}October<\/u><\/h1>\n
Snow\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Banville<\/h2>\n
Say Nothing\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Patrick Radden Keefe<\/h2>\n
The Chain\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Adrian McKinty<\/h2>\n
Fifty Fifty\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Steve Cavanagh<\/h2>\n
Maigret and The Loner\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Georges Simenon<\/h2>\n
The King in Yellow\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Raymond Chandler.<\/h2>\n
Squeeze Me: A Novel\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Carl Hiaasen<\/h2>\n
September<\/u><\/h1>\n
Thunderstruck\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Eric Larson<\/h2>\n
The Lion \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thomas Perry<\/h2>\n
Maigret and The Informer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Georges Simenon<\/h2>\n
Fifth Avenue 5 A.M.\u00a0 Sam Wasson<\/h2>\n
The Beatles from A to Zed. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Peter Asher<\/h2>\n
Barbarian Days\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 William Finnegan<\/h2>\n