Encyclopaedic history and art history by this cultural monster. Highly entertaining and informative. My own view of Rome is permanently clouded by the six months of hell on Gilliam’s Munchausen and I still felt depressed about it when I revisited Rome last year. I would rather go back to boarding school than wake up and find myself still on that movie. Rome is a brilliant and extraordinary city and it was amazing to live in The Ruspoli Palace and commute to Cinecitta past the Coliseum and along the Appian Way…but still it was a Dante-esque hell.

It’s short, wise and very funny. Like its author.

I have enjoyed discovering O’Hara, and read Butterfield 8 recently, which is much better than the Elizabeth Taylor movie (natch). It’s about an actor who uses his charm and sex appeal to get ahead in Showbiz. He has no moral compass and gets to conquer the world, becoming a movie star, which is the appropriate place for charming actors with no moral compass, as O’Hara knows. Here is the ending: Even in the jet age, it takes time to get from place to place, and Hubert Ward’s year is segmented by travel and the brief stopovers in California, Texas, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and France. He has long since learned the names of the permanent servants in their various establishments maintained by Mary Jo, and half a dozen times a year he accepts their welcomes and farewells as genuinely cordial, which in some cases they are. He is Hubert Ward the movie star, and no son of a bitch can take that away from him.                 Ha ha ha ha ha.

I had a terrible existential problem with this: I couldn’t decide whether to read the signed edition or the unsigned, which I had bought earlier. I wasn’t sure which would be funnier. I went to see them both at Skirball on their book tour: an evening of pure hilarity. Eventually I went with the unsigned edition so I could save the signed in mint condition, or sell on ebay…. They wrote this tale together separately, sending chapters to each other as a challenge. A fine idea and a very funny book. A kind of improv novel. I think the signed edition is funnier.

I can’t remember why I put this down as I remember being quite impressed to start with. It’s set at a funeral and funny, in a sort of wickedly gay way. But I lost interest. I must have picked it up from Mr. B’s in Bath last fall.

I have started the new year with the second of my packages from Mr. B’s Bookshop, a nice big fat Dickens bio. It’s delicious. The wonderful thing about Dickens is that the life is a perfect companion to the books. He, more than any other writer, has told us in his novels about his inner life and his deepest and most painful experiences growing up. We can deduce from Shakespeare that he was feeling such and such at a certain stage in his life (especially armed with Stephen Greenblatt’s great book) but all is transparently clear with Dickens, the hurts and grief and shames of childhood are clearly exposed. This book takes us further into the side of Dickens he was keen to hide, which, of course, is therefore most interesting, his affair with the actress and his rather poor behavior towards his wife.  Of course there is no reason why anyone should be a paragon just because they are intensely famous and much loved, but Dickens had more to lose than most. Writing is a solitary and bad tempered experience, so it is easy to forgive him some sexual joy in his later life, and of course blaming the innocent for our own moral mistakes is what we do well. How irritating to have a wife whose kindness and innocence is no excuse for his middle aged lust. Funny that Dickens the supreme moralist (which he is) should succumb to such a desperate condition as to be cruel and mean and harsh to the mother of his children, but how wonderful that we can learn more and more about the complexity of people instead of less and less with time. Ms. Tomalin is a fantastic biographer and has delved deeply and fairly sympathetically into a part of Dickens which he would rather have concealed, but which in the end, is as revealing as his novels of our ability to become monsters.

Of course I picked this up immediately and consumed it at once, but was able to re read it again within two months (see later) due to the unexpected circumstances of falling in love with the TV series Justified which turns out to be all about Raylan and the cast of cock-eyed characters who surround him in the coal fields of Kentucky.

An Adventure History of Paris I took this as a very good plane read. Robb is not the most gifted of wordsmith’s (I find myself continually re-reading sentences) but he is a good historian and has a smart eye for the story in history. Here, many tales of Parisian life (and death). Who knew for instance that Emile Zola was murdered? An excellent book for all Francophiles, and a great book for picking up and putting down on travels. I also enjoyed his The Discovery of France.

On a quick trip to London I read my wife’s guru Chelsea Handler on my I-Fad. She is very funny and witty and totally adorable. And of course she’s fun in bed. To read, to read…

A very large book. I found one chapter absolutely exquisite, deliciously written and I slipped off my shoes for a good read, only to find it stumbling on and on, without shape or plot or direction. I am rather uncomfortable with all the anti-Semitism which I know is meant ironically, well I hope so anyway, and is attempting some kind of history of this sickness, and I like the illustrations, which make the book seem old, but the biography of this person who may or may not be the person who thinks he is or isn’t becomes so confusing that eventually you don’t care. Nice big book, makes a great door stop.

“The last act of the desperate writer is to introduce himself into his own novel…” That’s what I wrote about a Theroux book, and my heart sank as an interesting start turned post-modern with the arrival of the author in the story. But H goes a step further. He has himself murdered in his own novel. Talk about anticipating the critics. Actually he won the Prix Goncourt with this one, and I have enjoyed his previous books, and I really like his writing style, but I found this increasingly irritating. I couldn’t wait to find out who dun it, so I dumped it.

More thought-provoking essays by this most interesting essayist from the New Yorker. Part One is described as Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius and Part Two as Theories, Predictions and Diagnoses. He is so interesting. Once his interest has been piqued he will not let go but follows the story. In his fascination with what he describes lies the secret of why he is such fun to read. He is the almost perfect holiday or travel book, topics can be taken up, browsed and discussed. This one was published in 2009.

I found this book at O’Hare, (not O’Hara) and had not realised either that this novel was by O’Hara or that it was a best seller in 1935. Of course for me it will always be linked with the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and the climactic events that followed my being discovered watching an X film at a Wolverhampton Cinema…. But this book is much better than I had expected. Almost a Capote like heroine, perhaps he got his idea for Holly Golightly from this book. Here Gloria is a well raised middle class good time girl adrift in the amoral world of New York Speakeasies in 1930. It’s a kind of sad tale too, as she is pursued by her married lover and accidentally falls off the top of a steam boat to her mangled death. The wages of sin and all that. It is noticeable that by the time of Capote it is no longer necessary for a naughty girl to die, but she certainly has to disappear. The tone of the book reminded me of the books by that other fine New York novelist whom Gore Vidal so much enjoyed: Dawn Powell.

A book of raunch. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. I think the best way to think of it is comic pornography. The sound of one hand reading.

A Psychological Portrait A psychobiography. And perhaps the only sensible way to approach the infant Bush. This way one can read about him without being consumed by hatred. How he became President is such a puzzle, let alone how he could appeal so much to so many, despite fulfilling Gore Vidal’s accurate prediction that he would become the worst President in history. Mind you that’s quite a tough category, there are so many entries in the race. I had hoped the Bush recession would remind America not to put an incompetent in charge of the business again, but well, the Tea Party beggar description. Even Evelyn Waugh could not have invented them. They seem invented by Dickens at his most anti-American. (He did get over that by the way, though Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes will give you some idea of the fear and loathing stage he went through.) So back to the Bush wars. If you did a portrait of Bush warts and all you’d only have the warts, so at least this psychologically sympathetic book attempts to understand rather than condemn. (A unique idea I know.) The early death of his sister when he was seven (with no parental warning) seems to have been the key element, rather than the Oedipal struggle with his father, whom he loves and idolizes. W comes out as both more pleasant and less naïve than in other portraits, but still, even if we can forget his wars, what he did to the world economy is going to take some surviving.

Is there any sadder sight than the mob waiting outside Oscar Wilde’s house the morning after he was sentenced, to bargain for, to buy at auction, and in some instances purloin his priceless precious library. Wilde could apparently consume a whole book in half an hour and answer detailed questions on it. That he was well read is a given, but that he was also an intellectual genius is something I had somehow failed to pick up on. Educated in Ireland at the finest schools and encouraged by his poet mother, he had the finest classical education, took an effortless first at Oxford, and was probably the finest read English writer since Coleridge. This is a nice idea of a biography, the subject seen through his reading. Of course you couldn’t do George Bush that way…

Dipped into this pond. A memoir of his two years on Rhodes.

Picked up a 1922 Modern Edition Library in very bad shape and was immediately seduced by the prose. Yes it is a touch too Oedipal but his descriptions of young love, and the anguish it brings to the young is incomparable, I liked him all over again. Paul Morel. Reminded me of discovering him and this book at 16.

Fabulous 1968 First Edition Amis, at his finest. Here a TV host pursues the weird daughter of the wealthy, winning her on his own merits. In many ways more readable even than Lucky Jim.

Collected by Martin Amis. And incomparable.

Now this is how you write a mystery. Not a word too many, never a dull moment. Not stooping to conquer. Not a pretence that you might instead be writing a Booker Prize Winner, this is simply fabulous. I read the first half all the way to Chicago and the second all the way back. Couldn’t put it down. Utterly engrossing. It’s a Jane Whitefield novel. She is the Seneca Native American who helps people escape into new lives. This one even ratchets the temperature up higher, but I won’t spoil it for you. If this is your first, do yourself a favour and read your way up to here. All of his books are wonderful. This is an advance copy and is not published until next March. I cannot wait for the next.

John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. A new Quirke Dublin Mystery. But not a very good one. I think Black’s work is affecting Banville’s. Certainly not as good as the previous Quirke’s. This time Dublin is having a heat wave…. But the usual murky suspects to a suicide of a wealthy businessman or is it murder? The victim’s odd French wife has an affair with Quirke. Never really believable.

Short stories.

Another of his most interesting pop psychology books, this one about the power of instant decision making, and the need to trust that first impression, whether it be judging an art fake (which comes complete with provenance) or choosing cellists (preferably blindfold, or they are always men!) De Becker respectfully referenced.

The Values of the Worst Family The incomparable Hitchens takes on the impossible Clintons. Far more here than an objection to their style, or to Bill’s endless womanizing. Seen here, Clinton appears more of a serial female abuser that one had cared to think. Including a pair of possible rapes. Fine-tuned hatred, like a blow torch. Wouldn’t care to find Hitchens on your ass. Is it the whole story? It’s whole enough.