I feel rather guilty when I finish an enjoyable, lightweight thriller. I ought to have been reading something more improving.
Peter Bradshaw Wilson’s recent comment and something my host said at lunch yesterday has caused me to reassess. Both praise Mick Herron’s skill as a writer and mastery of his genre. Hitherto I had filed Herron as trashy, airport, paperback fiction. My host does share my misgivings to some extent – he alternates light fiction with something more serious.
My serious reading was re-reading Dance to the Music of Time. A friend with good judgement told me he re-reads the series most years and always discovers something new. I found he is right but I have only read the first volume and now have too many thrillers cum detective stories piling up so have deferred the Dance project.
The Spectator this week asked contributors for their favourite children’s books: Enid Blyton, William, Tintin, Watership Down, Paddington, The Wind in the Willows are predictable. Then there are books I have never heard of and Animal Farm (Matthew Parris) and Saki (Rory Sutherland), neither usually considered suitable for children, although pretentiously I read Saki, O Henry and PG Wodehouse as a child. The first book I ever read, with many illustrations, was Robin Hood and I was as gripped by it as I am by Mick Herron today, though I no longer lie on the floor on my tummy to read.
Modern houses don’t have dining rooms and in older houses that do they are either closed up like a Victorian front room or re-purposed as an office. Yesterday we lunched at a round table adjoining the sitting room. On one wall was a distracting bookshelf. We agreed that identifying books in the background of Zoom calls to some extent relieves the boredom. One of us, not me, with sharp eyes pointed out there are two copies of A Thousand Splendid Suns. One would be more than enough. It is not as good as The Kite Runner.
It is now more than nine years since I stopped being a commuter. This morning I joined my host on the 7.10 to St Pancras and found I had forgotten commuting etiquette. He was mortified when I talked on the train.
Above is today’s Mystery Object. Unhelpful Clue: it has two functions.
My favourite novel when I was 11 or 12 was a work of science fiction – FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov. I saw recently that it had just been dramatised for Apple TV so decided to re-read it. Though the idea behind it is ingenious, I now find it quite poorly written. I also noticed that (a) all the characters in it (it is set about 20,000 years in the future) are smoking their heads off, cigarettes, cigars, etc., one character even takes snuff; & (b) there are no female characters at all, although they are presumably there in the background, procreating & looking after the home. In the Apple TV series, however, the principal character (judging from the trailer) is a black woman…
Yes, I read Isaac Asimov when I was young but haven’t picked one up for 55 years.
I give up but am intrigued. What is the mystery object?
For what it’s worth, I write from my dining room table, at which half an hour ago we ate dinner. Is our house modern? It was built in 1931.
It strikes me that my childhood leisure reading was largely violent, occasionally pious, and more rarely both, as when the book involved Jesuit martyrs in early Canada.
Rereading is a joy and I have just reread two, confirming them as the best books ever written. Day of the Jackal and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. How did they manage to create from them both the best and the worst film of the book.