The Biography.\u00a0 I wonder if the biography of a novelist is ever as interesting as his books.\u00a0 I doubt it.\u00a0 This one certainly isn\u2019t and now I find the book itself is actually more interesting because it has been cancelled and withdrawn by the Publisher.\u00a0 We seem to be heading into dangerous waters.<\/p>\n
A lovely, elegant book, succinct, interesting, and beautifully written, it clearly shows the intellectual that David Bowie was.\u00a0\u00a0 Sympa, hip and erudite at the same time O\u2019Connell cleverly avoids the pitfalls of pretention and has written a tremendous tribute to an extraordinary man and gifted artist and also a good reading (and listening) guide to anyone interested.<\/p>\n
One of the most elegantly written Maigret\u2019s I remember.\u00a0 His books are never so much as who but understanding why. This one the murdered man has done everything to ensure the list of people wanting him dead is huge, as he is a rou\u00e9 and an adulterer.\u00a0 He is shot, leaving a fashionable but very discreet brothel.\u00a0 But who?\u00a0 Maigret suffers from a cold and sneezes his way across half of Paris before retiring to bed and of course solving the puzzle.\u00a0 A lovely book.<\/p>\n
Precision bombing. For and against.\u00a0 The politics and problems of firebombing in WW2.<\/p>\n
This is a must read to understand the pandemic and the response to it.\u00a0 Quite oddly it starts with George Bush and the unlikely fact that he had read a book that fired him up to realise that no one in the entire Government was in charge of any pandemic response.\u00a0 He insisted on starting such an organisation right away. \u00a0And did. \u00a0So kudos to him, though no amount of planning could forestall the damage a Trump can do. The book tells of the real heroes, mostly mavericks and outsiders, who persisted, often at the cost of their jobs, to prepare America for some kind of a response while the Trump Government utterly failed the people.\u00a0 A gripping and fascinating story.<\/p>\n
I loved this book.\u00a0 Hilarious.<\/p>\n
The foolish naivete of the American family who came to the American Embassy in Berlin in 1933, when everyone was busy trying to pretend that the Hitler regime was no big deal. Tourists and other Americans beaten by the Nazi thugs made it hard to look away but daughter Martha manages to, for quite some time, before inevitably the true nature of the organization reveals itself. The book is a picture of American ignorant innocence against vilely motivated right-wing gangsters, which foreshadows what we have all just witnessed in the late White House.\u00a0 Never forget, Hitler said the next place for Nazism would be America.<\/p>\n
Contains more than you ever thought you would want to know about eels, almost all of which is totally fascinating, including the amazing fact that they all originate in the Sargasso Sea.\u00a0 I\u2019d skip the fishing bits.<\/p>\n
I hadn\u2019t read this one, so it\u2019s catch up time, because I adore this writer. I enjoyed this, what, her second novel? very much.<\/p>\n
The Life of Louis XIV<\/em>.\u00a0 A lengthy but readable life of a man we have seen a lot of recently.\u00a0 An extraordinary life as he constructed a glittering cage for the nobility to entrap them in a Court where they must compete for favour and affection.\u00a0 I was intrigued to read about his early Pilgrimage to Provence in 1660 to give thanks to God for himself.<\/p>\n The Mystery of Robert Maxwell<\/em>.<\/p>\n Not much of a mystery since he was a crook and con man from the moment he left the army, after WW2 as a decorated young officer with an enviable reputation for bravery. Giant balls and no morals, it\u2019s the story of Murdoch and Trump.\u00a0 The mystery to me is how he managed to get his hands on the millions of dollars from his own employees pension fund.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t just him who went belly up.<\/p>\n I like dipping into these tales which contain the seeds and the characters for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, though the raping of American nurses by American soldiers is not selected as a theme for Broadway.<\/p>\n I raced through this book of Essays (2003 \u2013 2020) with increasing delight, mixed with anxiety at his story of his own long battle with Covid.\u00a0 But the book is a refreshing brain shower that sets off all kinds of resonances and a need to search, look up, re-read and basically have a good think.\u00a0 I have to declare that he asked me for permission to quote I\u2019m Not Yet Dead<\/em> from Spamalot<\/em> but I had forgotten about that till I got there.\u00a0 Likewise I was very moved by his elegy to our mutual friend Carrie Fisher.\u00a0 The first thing I did after reading this was to re-read\u2026<\/p>\n The first half of which I found absolutely delightful, and the second half less so.\u00a0 Vonnegut is so funny and smart and great and always tries to keep the reader with him.<\/p>\n Can I declare I don\u2019t quite love him?\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s the prose.\u00a0 It gets in the way for me.\u00a0 He\u2019s like the school of Tom Wolfe where you are so busy looking at the writing BAM you get snapped out of the world of the novel.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to give it another go.\u00a0 I was wildly excited by the Patrick Melrose novels, and I shamelessly gushed to him at a Memorial.\u00a0 I kept losing my way in this new one.\u00a0 I have learned to put books by serious authors aside and come back to them. So I will.<\/p>\n Not Maigret.<\/p>\n In the prequel to Savages, this does exactly what I find Ellroy\u2019s prose doesn\u2019t, it simply and succinctly paints the scene. Minimalism in the prose maximises the impact of the action.\u00a0 I really enjoyed this as indeed I do all his books.<\/p>\n He very kindly sent me an early copy of this elegant new first part of a trilogy of novels based on the Aeneid, though you probably wouldn\u2019t have guessed if you hadn\u2019t been told that, since it is set in Providence, Rhode Island. Brilliant and compelling. He is absolutely at the top of his game.\u00a0 This is a must read. And for me a Must Read Again.\u00a0 (Comes out in September). Can\u2019t wait for the next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Philip Roth.\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\u00a0 Blake Bailey. The Biography.\u00a0 I wonder if the biography of a novelist is ever as interesting as his books.\u00a0 I doubt it.\u00a0 This one certainly isn\u2019t and now I find the book itself is actually more interesting because it has been cancelled and withdrawn by the Publisher.\u00a0 We seem to be heading into […]<\/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-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","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=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Fall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Preston<\/h2>\n
Tales of the South Pacific\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 James Michener<\/h2>\n
Languages of Truth\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Salman Rushdie<\/h2>\n
Slaughterhouse Five\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Kurt Vonnegut<\/h2>\n
Widespread Panic\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 James Ellroy<\/h2>\n
Double Blind.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Edward St. Aubyn<\/h2>\n
The Krull House\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Georges Simenon.<\/h2>\n
The Kings of Cool\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Don Winslow<\/h2>\n
City On Fire\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Don Winslow<\/h2>\n