And where Bushes win shame. A simply brilliant book, about the great Pat Tillman and his amazing family, who stand up to the bullying Bush propaganda machine, which replaced a tragic and unnecessary killing of a brave, true American from friendly fire, with a bullshit tale of a football hero killed by the Taliban. He also goes into the Jessica Lynch bullshit story. Again a total propaganda fabrication of a real fuck up mission. This book ought to be compulsory reading at schools, to warn people of the depths to which Governments will sink when selling a war to the American people.

So good I read it twice. And I could re-read it again right now. Just read the opening sentences and you are right in. Zuckerman starting his literary career, and falling afoul of his father. He is letting down the Jews. And he encounters Anne Frank, who has survived (maybe). A story about the importance of telling the truth in writing, ignoring all the pressures of parents, society, religions etc. Zuckerman listens in on a great author and his young mistress, with whom he is staying overnight, and is shocked, disturbed and elated. “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life.” This after his father has submitted an unpublished story of his to a Judge who writes an hilariously funny letter to its author. Roth is as daring and as honest as any writer. He is also revealing of the imperious and dictatorial insistence of the writer…

Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman has now gained great fame from writing Carnovsky, but this has brought shame on his parents and shabby stalkers on the streets. So this is about the ambivalent side effects of literary fame on a literary lion.

For me it’s been a big Roth year, which began last year when I so much enjoyed The Human Stain. This latest tells the tale of a healthy protagonist, working at an inner city school during a terrible year of Polio, which kills some young healthy baseball kids. Encouraged by his girlfriend to escape this plague and abandon his city kids, he allows himself to be persuaded to join her at an upstate summer camp teaching kids and counsellors to dive. He becomes the unwitting bringer of polio to this idyllic backwater and then succumbs to it himself. But what marks the book is his grasping at failure. In the final chapter we learn from one of the polio victims who finds him in late middle age that to punish himself he renounced his fiancée who wished to live with him as a cripple. Self-hatred then becomes the motive. And guilt. There is something Job-like in all this, and something also of a Conrad move in the narrative.

Gay memoirs of New York in a very gay period. He writes well and finely.

Short stories of the war and its warriors in the South Pacific, the killer boredom of war, interspersed with moments of terror, and its occasional surprising violence (US troops raping US nurses? This sure didn’t make the musical…) This of course became the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, and I read these related tales because I was interested in seeing how they adapted the musical from this original source material. The stories are good and well told and it’s interesting to see how the adaptation took place. A nice first edition I picked up in Washington.

A biography of T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. I was once asked the difference between D. H. and T. E. Lawrence, and I said D. H. was Lawrence of a Labia. (Rim shot) So yes T. E. was undoubtedly a hero, a great military strategist, a remarkable stoic, an extraordinary historically important person, an unusual warrior and a weirdo… This is an enjoyable biography and a useful look at the beginning of oil politics in the 20th Century, when all those States were just arguments in the desert, and Lawrence rallied the tribesmen against the Turks.

This one is set amongst pirates in Djibouti, but of course I have forgotten everything. I love Leonard but he is the great Chinese food writer. Twenty minutes later you want another.

Early. 1965 First Edition. Small tales of amateur spying and the setting up of the secret service in the UK, at its most porous. This will lead to the great Tinker Tailor world…

I went to see Dave Hicks interview Steve Martin at a Writer’s Block event in LACMA where he was very charming and had a lot to say, indeed almost too much as the subject was Steve Martin and we were there to hear him discuss his fine novel about the art world An Object of Beauty. Hicks is an agreeable chap and conversationalist and it was interesting to meet him afterwards and hear about the multi-disciplinary work he is doing on campus in (I think) New Mexico, but anyone who was an Art Critic from the University of Las Vegas is clearly not simply interested in just art. Sex and drugs and rock and roll are his real loves. I don’t think you can be a critic of that quite yet unless you work for Rolling Stone or The Rolling Stones. In the end I find these essays promise much but deliver little. Hicks is always about to make some devastating point but never quite gets round to it.

Nice Modern Library edition picked up in Washington State. Classic writing, classic book. He is very influenced by Scott Fitzgerald, whose influence one can easily detect in this, but the country club snobs and the way his protagonist Julian English drinks his way to insulting friend and foe to his ultimate downfall is very well done. I loved it.

Not quite Life as we know it, but certainly life. In a petrie dish. Three years ago I had dinner with Keith’s ghost writer James Fox because he desperately wanted me to tell him “anything I could remember” about Keith, because, he said, Keith could remember nothing. At the forefront of this book Keith says “I haven’t forgotten any of it.” Really? Hm. This book has been so well written by the very clever Mister Fox (White Mischief) in collaboration with KR (the Noel Coward of Rock) that it is highly readable. Keith is at his best talking about song writing, about which he has a lot to say and all of it true. In fact he is a closet intellectual, and I believe he took all those drugs only so he could tolerate the barely tolerable fact of having a brain and being on a rock and roll tour. He is erudite and very well read. Incidentally none of my anecdotes were used in the book, most of which were about Keith being out of his mind, but always conscious of what was going on around him. The book is very good until the end when he turns on Mick in a classically ungrateful act of ungenerous fratricide. I remember times in New York when Keith was in a rehab recovery unit upstate and Mick spent hours going up to visit him and taking him books. Of course nothing is more annoying than ones partners, but to leave shameful things in your book about people who have dragged you round the road, well it’s just unkind and seems petty in the full course of a life. Pity. Because he is a really nice man, and really bright, and really funny, and has given me some wonderful nights of laughter and madness. And quite a few headaches…

Essays by my favourite historian. I found a 1931 first edition, signed by The Author. He writes briefly and very well about people like Voltaire and Boswell, and Historians such as Hume and Gibbon. Lovely stuff. It’s because he is gossipy and campy without being cutting or queenly and yet his judgment is unfailingly fair and accurate. He sympathizes with humanity.

And I also read this short biography of Cromwell on my iPad. I love being able to browse and then order up a book. And the iPad is so much easier to read than the Sony Reader.

Of course I became obsessed with the subject of the English Civil War, which I have not read very deeply about since school and so re-read this classic account of those unruly times. It even has my teenage signature in. Oy 1958!

A great book of history written by an excellent young Cambridge scholar. Highly readable story of the weirdo Charles 1st and his extremely Catholic French wife Henrietta Maria, and how her religiosity, and his stupidly wavering arrogance led to the Civil War and ultimately his execution. Though in many ways that was the finest thing he did. His second son would also be thrown off the throne….

And I really enjoyed this new John Le Carré – of two innocents abroad ( a tennis playing British lecturer and his lawyer girl friend) falling into the maws of an expansive Russian mob character, desperate to flee with his family to the UK, for whom they act as go betweens with MI6.

A brilliant and artfully constructed novel and certainly my favourite of his so far. It is thrilling and gripping, but also beautifully written. Highly recommended! Read it.

I think I liked this book by a Dutch writer, which I found at Mr. B’s Bookshop in Bath, and read it on a short flight to Copenhagen, but how quickly one forgets….

Read on the plane flying from London to LA. Interesting because of the notes and the insights into how much work he put into constructing his novels and characters. His writing seems to come effortlessly to him but here we see that there is indeed a great deal of effort in it, plus he is harshly self critical. He writes “Only Fair” opposite one paragraph. These notes in many ways are more valuable than the unfinished novel because they show the artist in mid brush stroke. The only thing I don’t find convincing on re-reading is the narrator – the female character Cecilia. She doesn’t really come alive for me. Does he ever try and inhabit another female narrator? I still love the Pat Hobby stories for the shabby view of Hollywood, but here you see that Fitzgerald was actually really seen and appreciated for what he was, when he first went to Hollywood. Stahr really knows him and appreciates him. “There are no second acts in American lives.” Does he use this elsewhere? What exactly did he mean? Certainly no second act for Monroe Stahr who goes down in flames. “Action is character.” I like this, and it’s certainly true of the movies, though I vaguely remember something similar from E. M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel?)

The last one of his books I hadn’t yet read and as engrossing and thrilling and page turning as ever. A Jane Whitefield novel. In this one she marries Carey – well hell I’m not going to spoil it for you. Enjoy.

A fabulous and most enjoyable book. I won’t spoil any of the plot twists but I found it the best of his books. Read it.

A study in pain – the writer in neck pain and guilt at his Portnoy success, can only shag women and take increasingly powerful drugs, which leads him to overreact against a critic of his work. Not a complete success or as good as this next which was one of my books of the summer:

Starts off brilliantly with a geological history of London, and then the Celts and then the Romans, but by early medieval times it is getting a little draggy and slipping into the Mustava type of history (it must ’ave been a fine sight). I will dip and return next summer.

Laughter and the Twenty Million. The Book of the summer. Essential reading. Shamefully the crimes of Stalin don’t get the same publicity as those of Hitler. Perhaps his propaganda was more effective, for thousands cried when this monster finally died. And it’s one of those great death scenes – like Robespierre’s – where you are so on the side of Death. He killed more of his own people than anyone in history, and he killed anyone close to him especially those who lived near him (like wives) or came from his own region (Georgia.) The cold white hot anger of Amis as he exposes this humorless monster makes this a brilliant must read. It should be required reading in schools, instead of all that Scarlet Letter bullshit.