Since winter arrived I have found more excuses to ‘curl up with a
book’. That and listening to selected titles on my trusty Audible
App. I’ll give a brief rundown of some books without a lot of comment and
then say a bit more about recommendations.
Continuing with my discovery of the British Library Crime Series
I read Cornish Murder by John Bude and Christmas
in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon. Both enjoyed as comfort blanket
reading.
Perfect over the Christmas interval. Feel free to borrow!
I read my first Ken Follett, The Man from Moscow, a
thriller set in London in 1914. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/ken-follett/the-man-from-st-petersburg/9781509862344
Other titles include Exile by James Swallow,
sequel to Nomad which I thought was much
better. If you like biographies you might be tempted by Becoming by Michelle
Obama. This has been widely acclaimed and very popular amongst my reading
friends but I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, even though her achievements
are phenomenal, I found it a bit too self-promoting. Perhaps it was
not such a good idea to listen to it read by the author herself.
Three to recommend:
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip
Pullman
Pullman’s second trilogy following His Dark Materials is
The Book of Dust.
I read volume 1 La Belle Sauvage
where
the baby Lyra Silvertongue is rescued by Dr Malcolm
Polstead, and enjoyed it because I do get swept up into the alternative world
around which the novels are based. Volume 2, The Secret
Commonwealth finds Lyra, now twenty years old and her daemon
Pantalaimon finding their relationship is put to the test in a dangerous world
that finds Lyra travelling through Europe and to the Middle East in a quest to
be reunited with Pantalaimo whilst Malcolm now a man with a strong sense of
duty and an attachment to Lyra is sent on a journey to find out more about the
mysterious roses with special properties that only grow in a desert referenced
in the diary of a murdered man. Rose growers of any kind, even those
growing “normal” roses, are being terrorised and murdered by mysterious
attackers from the mountains. Both travel far beyond Oxford where the
earlier novels are set to uncover secrets and solve the mystery of the
Dust. I’m not a fan of magical realism but when an author works really
hard to make his narrative credible I cannot help get swept up into it.
Warlight by Michael
Ondaatje
I read this for my French group. This was a rewarding novel to read.
Second Sleep by Robert
Harris
I’ve read most of Robert Harris’s novels (except the Cicero trilogy) and
have never been disappointed. His latest offering is described as a
genre-bending thriller: ‘All my books are about power’ he says. What connects
them all is a preoccupation with power at its apogee, on the brink of
collapse.
“Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of our
Risen Lord 1468”. A young cleric, Christopher Fairfax, is making his way
resentfully to a remote corner of Wessex on the orders of his bishop to
officiate at the burial of a village priest. In his opening pages Harris
conjures a lost England in its mix of religiosity and brutishness. When Fairfax
discovers a display cabinet in the dead priest’s study, its shelves crammed
with illegal artefacts, the truth of this world is revealed. Among the plastic
bottles, banknotes and toy bricks displayed there, Fairfax discovers “one of
the devices used by the ancients to communicate”, its back marked with the
ultimate symbol of their “hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out
of it”. Abruptly everything shifts, slotting those strange anachronisms
into place. Fairfax’s 15th century is not ours but part of a new calendar that
had been reset to 666, the numeral of the Beast of Revelation. In Harris’s
imagined future, God has brought down the four riders of the apocalypse on the
satanic civilisation of the 21st century and the church has reasserted itself
at the centre of the state. “Scientism”, the curse of the ancients, is a
heresy, a mortal sin. Stripped of the medical and technological advances of the
Industrial Revolution, life is once more nasty, brutish and short.
To say more would truly be a plot-spoiler. I found Harris’s
writing so easy on my reading mind, a book that was enthralling. With a
great ending.