back to books

This year is proving to be extremely eventful. The end of March is not yet here, but already the year has brought me floods, a change of jobs, a couple of papers being accepted, the achievement of a long-held goal, a family wedding, a bunch of concerts and just a generally more active social life. Nonetheless, one of the things I enjoyed more and more towards the end of last year was getting back into reading, and I've managed to keep that up pretty well.

Since the start of the year, I've read 7 books, across a nice variety of genres. In a less busy time I probably would have blogged about each individually, but in lieu of that, and with more busy times ahead of me, I'll just summarize them here:

• The Code of the Woosters (Wodehouse): This was the second of three (see below) in an anthology of Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. I hadn't read any Wodehouse before, and they're nice little stories, very well written and very easy to read. They reminded me in time and tone a little of The Importance of Being Ernest, light-hearted and bouncy. To be honest, I can't precisely remember what this one was about - the three I read tended to follow a fairly similar pattern of interwoven personal intrigues - but its the tone and style and movement that matters more than the story.
• A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters (Barnes): I didn't know what to expect of this book, although Michael L recommended it, which made me optimistic. I wasn't disappointed. The book is a series of occasionally and very loosely related parables about, well, the world, I guess. Its hard to pull out more specific themes - certainly religion is prominent, and the way that it influences people's outlooks on the world. I got the feeling that there might have been deeper analogies going on than I was understanding, but that didn't adversely affect my appreciation of the book.
• Right Ho, Jeeves (Wodehouse): See above, more Jeeves, reliable and fun.
• The Breaks of the Game (Halberstam): This was an impulse buy based on repeated passing praise of this book by the FreeDarko guys and probably other basketball blogs that I've read over the years. Set around the 1980 Portland Trailblazers, its a really very well written insight into basketball people, from players to coaches and administrators, how they got to where they are and how they relate to the larger changes that were going through basketball, be the implications of race, the role of television, the growing professionalism and salaries, or the onset of injury. I can see why the book has the status it does among basketball pundits.
• Claudius The God (Graves): After finishing I, Claudius a couple of years ago, I had started on the sequel, but for one reason or another, be it needing a change of style, or because my copy was so fragile I wasn't comfortable carrying it around, I kept putting it aside. Finally this year I started again, and read it through within a few weeks. Like the first book, it treads a fine line between sacrificing narrative form for historical detail, but on the whole it manages it pretty well. I can't help but feel that the first instalment was better, just because it had more going on in terms of having 3 emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, with snippets of Julius at the start and Claudius at the end) rather than one (Claudius). I also felt that Livia, for all that I read she might have been hardly done by, made for a better villain than Messalina. Still, a good book.
• Notes From Old Nanking (Hamilton): This was a nice little book about observations made by an Australian diplomatic aid in China in the years between 1947-1949. This was the time when the communists overthrew the nationalists, but to be honest, most of the book is vignettes about the lifestyle at the time, and the revolution itself gets relatively little treatment. This surprised me, but changed rather than diminished my enjoyment of the book, in that it made for more of a historical portrait rather than a war story.
• Holden's Performance (Bail): Murray Bail is one of those Australian authors who I have been remiss not to have read before now. I can see why. This is the story of Holden Shadbolt, and his life between growing up in Adelaide in the years after WWII, before moving to Manly and Canberra in the 50s and 60s. He falls in with a bunch of delightful and delightfully named characters along the way - his stepfather McBee, his uncle Vern and friends Flies & Wheelright, the eccentric theatre owner Alex Screech, his love affair Harriet, the womanising politician Hoadsley, and the collection of bodyguards like Colonel Light and Irving Polaroid. The book is frequently funny and delightfully written, and when Bail extends himself he can be really quite adventurous with his prose. The characters border on caricatures at times, but all are treated with love and respect, and come across as very real. Its also really nice the way he taunts us with historical fact, references to the PM R.G. Amen, to the "one syllable PM" who follows him, enough to give us some context, but steering well clear of historical fiction.

So there you go, 7 books in 3 months. Last year it took me until at least September to get to that point, and so far I've been really enjoying the books, and their variety.