…turned out to be very disappointing. I kept picking it up again – only to put it down again. It’s like a bad version of Kingsley Amis – though Amis would never have permitted himself to be so dull, and Michael Beard, the unfortunate scientist, is never as funny as Lucky Jim. Is this supposed to be humorous? It drags on and on and on…

Desperate for something to read I picked this up again. It has one of the most hilarious opening chapters of any book since Catch 22. This is billed as the sequel. This time – thanks to my reading list I knew I had read it for the third time. I wrote previously: “Heller is really funny, the funniest of all his contemporary Jewish/American novelists. Yossarian in hospital determined to get the doctors to find out he is really sick though he has no symptoms is hilarious. Paradox is his field. The Chaplain pees heavy water and is disappeared by the security forces. He has high contempt for Washington “that prick in the White House” and all human institutions. His knowledge of the depth of corruption of industrial man, his appreciation of greed and self interest as the major motive of mankind, gives Heller a Swiftian vision of bureaucracy. He keeps doing the negative option – the funny option in language (that is non sense) that we reject as absurd. It is a rich vein for him and he is very Pythonic as he takes the absurd seriously.” Sometimes it seems when reading novels this common pursuit can go flat, everything seems dull, stale and unprofitable. Is it me, is it them? I’m not sure. It began with an awareness that Nostromo, so far from being a great book, was actually rather tedious. I had been enjoying re-reading Lord Jim, and was anticipating pleasure – maybe it was using the Sony Reader – whose latest incarnation has left everything a dull grey, so different from the 1910 rough cloth-bound edition of Lord Jim I had been reading, but I was forced to discard this tale on the plane to NY and searched in vain amongst one or two of the other things I had loaded – a dull (Oz) book about Catholicism and masturbation – surely the only good thing about Catholicism is masturbation, (increasing its pleasure by increasing it’s guilt.) Anyway, reading makes you blind. On my return from the West Indies I searched desperately for reading material – only to be progressively disillusioned. The new Ian McEwan…

This is what I wrote last year. “Sometimes when picking up books again, or when continuing to re-read from where I left off they seem a lot better than they had at first appeared to me, These short stories for example.” I felt this even more so as I picked up the paperback in New York. “His themes are betrayal, adultery, the suspicion of love failing, the falling apart of couples, particularly after marriage, childbirth and pregnancy (abortion too: he is a Catholic after all.) He writes of these things honestly and with no squirming or ducking both the selfish male search for sexual release and the female hardening of the hearteries. In his work I like the older more mature voice. (Putting Daisy Down) I think he will develop into a great writer, he has the skill, the time and the control.” A third timeI am even more impressed. He is a great stylist.His subjects are “Failing to connect, Manhattan man, the pressure of the city – especially post 911 - and the ennui of the commuters to Connecticut.”

On Sony Reader. History as People Magazine. OK for a plane.

On Sony Reader

A beautifully written brilliant account of the eve and the day and the destruction of Waterloo. 43,000 dead and dying on the battlefield at the end of the day….The horror, the bravery, the fortune, Napoleon out of it with hemorrhoids and cystitis. Not a good day to be sick….. Howarth uses eyewitnesses from around the battlefield with shifting viewpoints so you feel the gruesome horror of the long drawn out day of bravery and death, whose outcome (thanks to Blucher) changed the world.

He always starts well but can’t maintain it for me. Which is why he sells so well in airports… His characters are usually quite nasty. Not as good as Elmore Leonard but then who is?

The third in the Millennium trilogy. He turned in all three parts and then died, so some editing is missing, but he is such a great deliverer of suspenseful plot – I think almost as good as Le Carré in the Smiley books. Even at the end he has another twist and another ending.

The five steps….

Wonderful opening. Wonderful subject – the gap between self delusion, illusion, what we hold to be ourselves and the observation of our flawed character from the perspective of others. This is his finest writing, but sadly eventually the book peters out – as so many books do. The problem is that the story of Jim is told second hand – so Conrad has to contrive later and later encounters with other eye-witnesses to finish the tale – which to be honest – I never did…

The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405 – 1433 An extraordinarily huge fleet left China headed towards the West. This might just have started the Renaissance. That’s the theory.

Picked up a first edition. He was a friend. I love his books. My favourite is The Color of Money.

I have always loved this play ever since I saw it with Bob Hoskins John Gielgud and John Mills at the Royal Court Theater. It is a fictitious and hilarious account of filming “The Charge of The Light Brigade” with Tony Richardson.

The Year of Four Emperors. History but not brilliantly written.

The Booker Winner and none the worse for that. Not a great book but not a bad one.

The cute one – writes quite nicely of his life on the road. He’s a water gypsy, of course, that makes sense, though when I knew him well he was a brandy gypsy. I always loved him and enjoyed his company.

Lest we forget what we do to each other. Animalis capax Rationis (Swift)

The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton. A wonderful biography of poor Emma, the supermodel who became a money-making star for the Portrait painter Romney – following early whoring, working her way up to becoming mistress of a nasty MP who gave her to his Uncle the wonderful Earl Hamilton. She persuaded him to marry her and take her off to Naples where she then seduced Nelson and the Navy to come to their rescue from Napoleon. She lived contentedly with Nelson (and her old husband Hamilton) until his untimely death at Trafalgar left her to the mercy of the ungrateful Brits. She sadly dies in poverty ignored by an ungrateful Nation.

Picked up a first edition. Pretty good but the film may just for once be better…

Despite the violence I love his books. He is a very good tale teller and his wonderful Thai Buddhist detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is terrific.

Picked up a battered Library first edition for ten bucks! About college girl Franny and her truly awful lunch date as she is sweating, passing out and possibly pregnant. Salinger is a direct Scott Fitzgerald descent but then he acknowledges it on Page 3 of Zooey, quoting from Gatsby “which was my Tom Sawyer when I was twelve”… that everybody suspects himself of having at least one of the Cardinal virtues.” Zooey is narrated by Buddy Glass and is much less good than I remembered.

I love Waugh. My favorite Waugh is the War Trilogy Sword of Honor. I don’t much care for Brideshead and though I picked up a first edition, I still don’t much care for this tale of the paranoia of an elderly writer on a sea voyage who hears voices.

Not quite getting him still….

An odd fish – hybrid of biography, art history and novel about the famous painting “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” by Rembrandt. Heller is one of my favorite writers but this is not my favorite of his.