Madeira

In a bid to find quick relaxation from two busy jobs we have been to Malta/Gozo a lot over the last twenty years. It didn't have to be there but it became somewhere we knew. We didn't have to work too hard to chill, if you understand me. Since we retired, holiday is probably better described simply as time away.

Which also means that time away doesn't have to be relaxing any more. We both love reading books outdoors near water so that wasn't likely to be abandoned. And we like the warmth of the sun. But a little exploring might be OK, mightn't it?

Many people had spoken highly of Madeira over the years so we decided to check it out for ourselves and have just returned from a very pleasant visit.

Picture 1: tunnels and flyovers

If your first thought on arrival is why the airport is stuck out on the edge of the eastern coast where it is always windy wait until you see the rest of the island and work out where you would have put it. Apparently the runway used to be a lot shorter too. Very hairy.

Some amazing engineering projects have made the journey from the airport to the major city, Funchal, just 30 minutes. See first image.

It's a tough job to find a bad meal in Madeira. The ones included as part of day trips are a bit ordinary but otherwise all was good. Most little restaurants do good things with fish, especially the scabbard fish (dorada) although they serve it with banana if you don't look out. A trip to the Funchal fish market (commended) early doors will show you how ugly the sea things that taste lovely are.

One little sea front restaurant was a decent walk along the coast for us but we did it twice. Doca do Cavacos at Sao Martinho was our favourite place. Grilled squid, sardines and tuna were delicious. Or you can risk grilled catch of the day on a skewer. Probably not worth asking for a dessert anywhere. They aren't good at them and are liberal with cheap chocolate sauce which devastated an almost pleasant tiramisu. Have a starter and you'll not need a pudding. Cheap café pizza and beer is easy and the local bread (bolo do caco) is good (watch out for garlic and spring onions you didn't order). If asked whether you want bread in a restaurant you are agreeing to pay for it when you say yes. It is rarely complimentary. Likewise water.

If you want a Michelin standard meal then book well before you set off. All were full. We didn't go to the famous old colonial establishments but the buzz was that they had lost their way a bit. Lá Ao Fundo in Funchal is a Mozambique/Portuguese fusion restaurant (we were told) which they achieved by offering some  dishes from each country. Not that fused and a bit average, apart from the desserts which were actually great. My crème brûlée was blowtorched at the table, smoking out the neighbours.

Picture 2: maturing Madeira wine

Madeira is famous for cake and fortified wine. On Madeira cake everyone seems to have the guaranteed original recipe (like the way Bakewellians compete about the recipe for the one true pudding/tart). All are OK but don't keep well. Portuguese custard tarts (pasteis de nata) are pretty common in the UK coffee shops now. Several people will tell you where to get the best ones but in our experience they were all pretty similar. Coffee is very strong. Have a glass of water alongside.

There are a couple of good wineries where you can be guided through the fortified process to produce Madeira. We went to Blandy's in Funchal where the smell of 700,000 litres of maturing wine was overwhelming (image 2). I'm out of picture in the corner, smelling the pillars soaked with wine vapour for 200 years. Blandy's Madeira is available at Waitrose.

Sugar cane juice rum is distilled on the island. I enjoyed a tasting very much and had a snooze on the journey back while my passengers screamed in terror (© Bob Monkhouse).

Picture 3: sculpture

Sightseeing is easy and we commend island day trips in a minibus. For Є50 you get a tour of the west or east of the island including a lunch with decent stopovers for coffee, swim, photos or a short walk. 

There are many nice gardens. The one at
Monte, accessed best by cable car from Funchal, is good. It currently includes an exhibition of Zimbabwean and Malawian sculpture (image 3). The Madeira National Botanical Gardens is better known but there are several better gardens in the UK, just not so far up a mountain. Best bits were the view points. We took a taxi up (Є12) and walked back down which made our calf muscles ready for lunch.

Maderia is hugely popular with walkers. Levadas are human-made water channels for irrigation. We did one short walk to a terrifying view/drop. The paths are alongside the water ditches. Farmers pay for the water by the hour and sluice gates are opened to release the mountain stream water. Vines, sugar, bananas and other crops are grown on flattened terraces 

Picture 4: dockside art

on the south facing hills.

At the top of one of the highest points, accessible by car, we were 'entertained' by Peruvian panpipers. The view was better than the vibe. Quiet would have been best.

A stroll round Funchal involves dodging the bar and café owners who want your custom. It is a buzzy cosmopolitan place. There is great street art on the doorways in east town but many of these become restaurants and the art vanishes behind the open doors. Visit early or late to enjoy. The dockside has a mural dedicated to every boat that has moored up (image 4).

Churches and cathedrals are ornate, colourful and often surrounded by beggars. The Jesuit church in Funchal is exceptionally fine. Nearby is a Museum of Sacred Art but we've seen a lot of that so we avoided. The next door café is cracking and does craft ale.

The Museum of Modern Art (MAMMA) to the west of Funchal has a massive 14 room installation on the theme of life's journey. 300 plus pieces are crammed together leaving the thought of whether we find life so over-stimulating we miss the big questions. Є10 for a provocative hour or so.

We were there a fortnight and had a great time. There were enough things we didn't do to want to revisit. I also read seven books.

Holiday Reading 2023

Spent more holiday time than usual doing things (having retired I no longer feel the urgency of relaxation) but still managed almost eight books in a fortnight. Here are my holiday reads. I am pleased to have read a majority of women this time round. Next target is to read more African fiction. I have given a mark out of ten but it represents my enjoyment rather than a comment on the work as literature:

Devil in a Blue Dress: Walter Mosley (7)

I have always read good things about Mosley but had never read him. His most famous character is the detective Easy Rawlins. This is the book in which he was born, more a chancer than a detective in the first instance. It was a fine page-turner to start my holiday and I will be reading more. The story played out well with a context of the extra set of difficulties a black hustler faced in 1950's America.

The Men: Sandra Newman (5)

Another book I had seen much reviewed, this one more recent. What would it be like for all the world's men to vanish in an instant? I enjoyed the early passages describing the immediate problems. I felt the story of how things then turned out was underdeveloped and the glimpses into the back stories of the leading female characters a bit unnecessary. The denouement sucked. Disappointed.

Live Wire: Harlan Coben (7) 

Crime solver and sports agent Myron Bonitar is called to find a missing person. He is an interesting character, often battered and bruised but quick-witted. He has an accomplice/colleague/friend, Win, who often gets him out of trouble and hurts people when he finds it necessary, which is often. Fine story with decent twist.

Oh William! Elizabeth Strout (6)

A friend gave me this and asked me to tell him what I thought, without clue. First thing I discovered was that I was reading book three of a trilogy. It didn't matter. Protagonist Lucy Barton is a writer (and often speaks in writing). She is in good standing with William, her ex-husband, although when she spends long periods of time with him recalls why they are no longer married. But William is recently divorced (again) and Lucy has just lost her second husband so agrees to accompany William on a trip to explore his roots. I enjoyed it enough to want to read the first two; my friend said it was dull.

The Lighthouse: Alison Moore (8)

Thin novel that is easy to read but explores the rhymes and rhythms of life and the generations. Futh is a rather inadequate central character, a naïve abroad on a walking holiday for which he has made careful preparations. He seems emotionally unprepared for everything though. It is seedy, sad and eventually shocking leaving us with a 'Well, what would you do next?' Booker short-listed.

Shrines of Gaiety: Kate Atkinson (9)

One of our best working writers constructs a wonderful tale about Soho in 1926. London underlife, policing methods, missing young girls, illegal drinking and gambling dens and some wonderful characters help the reader jog along. Club owner and social climber Nellie Coker is apparently loosely based on the real life of Kate Meyrick. We expect a dramatic culmination but, as in much of life, the coming together of the characters in the story is not for ever. In a final chapter their futures are sketched out for us. An absolute joy.

The Heron's Cry: Ann Cleeves (7)

This is the second in a series about DI Matthew Venn based in North Devon, from the crime writer who gave us Shetland. It's a bit sleepy when the tourists are missing and not the sort of place you expect to find someone stabbed to death with a shard of fancy glassware. No sooner have we joined the investigation than it happens again. What's the connection?

The Far Corner: Harry Pearson (7)

This was written in the 1990s about a season following football in the north east of England, at all levels. I have a fondness for the north east having lived there for five years and a fondness for football having lived there for more than sixty. It is full of characters and local details and is very, very funny. Each short chapter is based around, and a description of, a different match.

Holiday Reading Recommendations

Here are a few books I read on holiday, or recently completed, which I feel might be good away-from-it-all reads. The score out of 10 is by no means justified in any other way than the level of poolside/beach escapism each provided:

Graeme Macrae Burnett

Case Study

2020

(9/10)

This story is so realistic and convincing that I joined the vast number of people who have googled 'Collins Brathwaite' to see if the novel was based on a real person. Was this charismatic counsellor a regular guest on 1960s cult TV programme 'Late Night line Up'?

This is a cracking yarn. Narrator 'GMB' (the author?) blurs the line between fiction and faction beautifully. The story examines whether a controversial psychotherapist could have caused someone to take their own life. The deceased's sister adopts a false identity to become a patient and investigate. It does her head in.

John le Carré

Silverview

2021

(7/10)

A retired MI6 agent uses a bookshop in a sleepy seaside town as a front for some clandestine stuff. All the usual dialogue-based plot advancing we've come to expect from the master in his final novel, plus a few fine lines of political observation, '...poor, toothless, leaderless Britain ... still dreams of greatness and doesn't know what else to dream about.'

Sarah Moss

Summer Water

2020

(6/10)

I really enjoyed 'The Fell'. This, her previous book from 2020, has the same sense of foreboding and dread that something bad is going to happen, but who to? And what? It is a short, but slow, read until the final pages, which you will read too fast feeling like your roller coaster has hit the first drop. Then you'll go round again to be sure you know what happened.

Anne Tyler

Redhead by the Side of the Road

2020

(6/10)

So it's just possible that the person on Micah's doorstep claiming to be his son is telling the truth. More interesting is the impact this revelation has on the life of someone who lives by routine, once it gets thrown. Short and nicely observed.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Sympathizer

2015

(8/10)

People of my age all have the filtered and edited story of Viet Nam in our heads. It was in the years after the end of the war that the questions began. In 'The Sympathizer' Nguyen addresses these issues through a narrator who is part French, part Vietnamese, a communist trusted by the south who ends up in America. Time in the film industry leads to many discussions about the depictions of the Vietnamese in the movies. When he, nicknamed 'the bastard' because he belongs to no-one, returns to his home country he is needlessly tortured, not for secrets but to admit his own lack of knowledge and identity. Leaving us with the question 'What was all that for?' Funny, moving, gruelling, complex and thrilling. Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016.

John Banville

Snow

2021

(8/10)

My previous experience of Banville is of beautiful, but slow, writing. Here he gives his attention to the death of a priest in a country house murder mystery set in Southern Ireland in the 1950s. DI Strafford (always irritated when the first R is omitted from his name) feels the December cold as he investigates. It is not one where the bodies pile up but where the slow graft of investigation through conversation in the age just before easy mass communication reaps rewards. Splendidly done and well paced.

Broken Ghost

Niall Griffiths

2019

(9/10)

My best read of the holiday. Three people experience a strange spectral vision on a Welsh mountain top. One blogs about it. It goes viral. The place of the experience becomes a place of commune and pilgrimage. Ironically this is at the same time as the actual rehabilitation community nearby loses its funding. The three characters, one closely associated with the commune, return to their chaotic normality - for one alcohol, another sex and a third violence.

I found it easiest to read by giving a voice I knew to each main character as the chapters chop and change between them, and the narrator. So in my world:

Cerys Matthews played Emma

Iolo Williams narrated

Rhod Gilbert was Crawley

Jamie Carragher was Adam

This book is hugely important in its acknowledgement of social problems and authority. It is quite sad but very real. Redemption is dangled and reached for. Who can hang on?

The Appeal

Janice Hallett

2021

(8/10)

This is a very unusual page-turner. A Head of Chambers asks two Junior Counsel to read a file of evidence - mainly messages, emails and transcripts with the occasional post-it note. He asks them who they think was murdered, why, who went to prison and whether that was the right decision.

We read the same documents as them.

They have a stab and are then given some more info. The context of the crime is members of an Amdram society putting on a play at the same time as raising money for a sick child.

Some of the insights into village life are extraordinarily perceptive and funny. But do enjoy solving the case. I picked up a couple of clues but did not piece it all together until the denouement.

Also recommended this year:

T.J.Newman - Falling (page turner airplane hijack thriller) (7/10)

Abigail Dean - Girl A (forensic exploration of siblings rescued from abusive parenting) (8/10)

Steve Cavanagh - The Devil's Advocate (courtroom and thrilling - the new Grisham) (7/10)

Steve Cavanagh - Twisted (7/10)

Chris Brookmyre - The Cut (murder, mystery, thriller) (7/10)

Dave Eggers - The Every (trying to stop big tech taking over the world) (8/10)

Danile Wiles - Mercia's Take (life of a Black Country miner in the C19th) (9/10)

Amor Towles - The Lincoln Highway (road-trip in the wrong direction; beautiful characters) (10/10)

Tim Weaver - No One Home (three couples, one hamlet, all missing) (8/10)

Colson Whitehead - Harlem Shuffle (furniture shop owner does petty crime on the side then gets caught up in something bigger) (8/10)

Holiday Reading

Here are the results of my holiday reading this year. The mark out of ten I offer is not related to literary merit or any sense of genre importance. I use it simply to tell you how diverting the book was as a holiday read:

Pete Paphides - Broken Greek (8/10)
Pete is a music journalist from a Greek family based in Birmingham. This autobiographical book covers his childhood and early teenage years. The pull of the music industry was strong but the peer pressure that formed his early opinions was also influential. As a Brummie who recognises both the landscape and the chart-music of my young adult years (I am older than the author) I loved this journey.


Ben Machell - The Unusual Suspect (9/10)
Ben is a newspaper columnist and feature-writer. This is the account of Stephen Jackley. He was an Asperger's student so his decision making was unconventional. Channelling Robin Hood he began, in 2007, a life of crime designed to help the poor by robbing banks and building societies. It didn't go as well as he expected.


Simon Mayo - Knife Edge (7/10)
Yes, that Simon Mayo. Page-turner, thriller, bit short on likelihood but ticked the boxes for a quick read.


Bill Bryson - The Body (7/10)
A very entertaining account of the different bits of our bodies and how progress into understanding them was made. No need to read in one go. Fit in a chapter here and there between novels. And rejoice that you were born when you were.


Val McDermid - Still Life (8/10)
The very undisputed queen of the police procedural at the top of her game.


Francine Toon - Pine (7/10)
Slow-developing, ghostly gothic Halloween weirdness in a Scottish community. Delightfully creepy with portentous moments regularly spooking the reader.

Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street (9/10)
Two children, a weird guy and a cat take it in turns to narrate this story. All are unreliable witnesses at one time or another. Not so much a whodunnit as a who did what to whom and when? Brilliant.

Holiday Reading

There is a summary of my holiday reading. The marks out of ten are based on enjoyment and escapism rather than any splendid literary quality.

Jane Harper - The Lost Man (8/10)
I enjoyed The Dry, Jane Harper's first crime novel set in a remote part of Australia. This is her third, so I missed one. I read The Lost Man on the hottest driest day of the year so far in the UK. It is set in the Outback where near neighbours are a three hour drive away and everyone tells someone else when they are setting out solo to fix a fence. So how did Cameron Bright come to die alone without shade, shelter, his car, phone or water, miles from anywhere or anyone?

This story unpicks family feuds, local rivalries and complex relationships under the intense glare of the Sun. Did someone do something? What did they do? Who did it? A very satisfying page-turner. It'll make you thirsty for more.


Ben Smith - Doggerland (9/10)
To examine human behaviour, one tool an author has in their box is to remove almost all outside influences. Ben Smith achieves that by having two characters (Boy and Old Man although we are left to guess their ages) charged with the maintenance of an enormous wind farm. They are alone, reliant on the one other character, the deliverer of supplies. Why are they there? What dramatic event led to their dystopian existence? What happened to the boy's much-discussed father? This is a slow page-turner, beautifully sparse. Not unlike Magnus Mills.


Tom Drury - The End of Vandalism (10/10)
Seventy-odd characters wander into this story of life in Grouse County. We are treated to a little of all their back-stories. Sometimes in detail; sometimes just a tease. 'She considered dog issues her speciality, and once, at a convention in Moline, had given a slide presentation on the history of the muzzle.' Do you have questions now? I do.

In my literary world Peter Carey writes the best books, Tom Wolf the best chapters, Douglas Adams the best sentences. Tom Drury is a contender for best-paragraphs.

Before blotting his reputation somewhat, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon was the place to go for this sort of thing. In a foreword introduction another of my literary heroes Jon McGregor suggests that anyone embarking upon this book will, inevitably, become an evangelist for Tom Drury. It is the case.


Andrew Hunter-Murray - The Last Day (8/10)
A second post-apocalyptic novel during a pandemic holiday. This one's conceit is that the Earth has slowly stopped rotating leaving half with permanent cold-dark-night, half with hot-light-day and a narrow band in the centre which is habitable. The author is that bloke from off the tele who takes supporting roles in The Mash Report, and is also a QI elf and a Private Eye journalist. This is his first novel. It's clever and gripping.


Neil Oliver - The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places (9/10)
I like to have a book like this close at hand. 100 short chapters explore Britain in roughly chronological order from 950,000 years BCE to the present day. I did history to A level. It was kind of forced upon me by being the only other timetable option if I wanted to do Geography and Statistics, which I did.

If this book had been available then I probably wouldn't have read it, because I wasn't that sort of kid. But read now, fifty years too late, it makes sense of how all those bits of the curriculum and primary school history stories fit together. I loved it.

It opens for debate if you would have picked the same one hundred places. I think I would have wanted to see Jarrow in there somewhere. At the same time as I was reading, the statue/slavery discussion rose up in the UK. It occurred to me, as I read up about Black Lives Matter, that the chapter on abolition is told from a white point of view and there are black martyrs missing from the story.

It has slightly more Scottish places than I would have expected but I came to see that Scotland has punched well above its weight in contribution to the history of the islands here. So that is not so much a criticism as an acknowledgement of my own ignorance.


Joel Dicker - The Baltimore Boys (9/10)
Moving about in time from the 1960s (briefly) to date, this story is of four childhood friends. Not all related to each other but who came to feel like family. Marcus Goldman, one of the four, is a writer and narrates the story from 2012. Dicker used this character to narrate his excellent, previous novel The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair.

In this latest story we are told, on the jacket, that 24/11/04 is 'The day of the tragedy'. It is written in five parts:

The book of lost youth 1989-97
The book of the lost brotherhood 1998-2001
The book of the Goldmans 1960-89
The book of the tragedy 2002-04
The book of atonement 2004-12

So for the bulk of the novel we know that there is going to be a tragedy (and there are minor tragedies and triumphs on the journey too) but not what it will be. We know from sentence 1 of a prologue that Woody, one of the four, was about to go to prison for five years, a month before the 'tragedy'.

It's a delightful book. Very easy to read and hard to put down.

Updating my CV - Week 8

Whatever the period between week 7 and week 8 is, that has passed, and so time for anther dispatch from the rear guard of lock-down culture. Who knew there were only eight weeks in three months?

My life has consisted of a series of very minor inconveniences since March but it has felt like a side order of water torture - several lost family birthday celebrations, no retreat (it's a clergy thing) in May, the difficulty of doing eye-contact on Zoom. But this week I would have woken up to the prospect first of the breakfast buffet at the Osborne Hotel, Valetta and then a converted farmhouse in Gozo and that is more than I can cope with just now. So, given that TCMT has been told she has to take her booked holidays during furlough, we are enjoying two weeks vacation to the guest room.

There are some advantages. No early alarms to catch flights. Money saved. We will see the purple clematis flower for the first time for ages. We can read hardbacks. No mosquito bites. The bed linen and towels are nice. (Gozo farmhouse bed-linen is beautifully laundered but a little old and, despite being nearer Egypt, hasn't taken any advantage of their cotton prowess. The towels don't dry you very well but in a hot, dry country drying is best accomplished by getting out of the shower/pool and standing still for a bit.)

The flip-side is the difficulty of switching off from work as the holder of one of the few offices where you live amongst your constituency. So the work computer is going off. The work email notifications will be disabled. The landline will not be answered. I will try not to wander into the study (although it is the through route to the washing machine and beer fridge).

We live in a nice part of the country. It is the sort of place we visited for holidays in the days when we lived further north. It has nice walks. We drove ten miles on Tuesday to walk where we might not bump into people we knew. We bumped into people we knew. We also met a charmingly eccentric young man powering an electric bike with a large stick. 'Hello sir' he said 'May I stay and talk to you?' We said that was fine and question two was about how long we had been together. On hearing the answer to that one, he asked if I had made sure '...she had a good meal every night.'

After a few minutes of chatter where minds never met and my own enquiries were not even vaguely dealt with he left with a (can you guess?) 'I'll bid you both good day.' Marvellous.

Yesterday we walked nearer home and did some of the walk called the Nailsea Round. We met no-one we knew because we met no-one.

Last night there was a torrential downpour and the garage flooded. I have tried to be strict about not doing things I wouldn't do on holiday. I'm leaving the washing to stack up. I'm putting envelopes of post unopened on my desk. But not to bail out? That would be silly.

Today it is very wet. Novels, jigsaws and blog posts. A bit like the last three months of eight weeks.

Holiday Reading

It's about this time that I like to show off about my holiday reading. The mark out of ten is nothing about class and all about ability to entertain a man on a beach or by a pool in the sun.

After a fairly light start I spent the whole of week two on a magnum Trollopian opus - all 870 pages of The Way We Live Now. I don't normally advise people to stick with things for the first 300 pages but in this case the middle section, as a series of relationships fold and unfold due to being conducted by correspondence and no-one ever saying what they mean, is fascinating. And later we come to discover whether Melmotte, much sought after for his investment backing and his patronage, is a man of means or just an upper-class gambler. Much serious gambling takes place in the book but only so that a series of IOUs can be passed round a gentlemen's club with no-one ever being so uncouth as to call in a debt. Even the club itself may not be as financially buoyant as it seems. And if it isn't well, where is a chap to get breakfast at noon now?

And its relevance today? How about ''Melmotte was not the first vulgar man whom the Conservatives had taken by the hand, and patted on the back, and told that he was a god.' (8/10)

Back to the start. Never read any Val McDermid before but will be. Broken Ground is a police procedural crime novel. No twists but an unusual story, several turns and a satisfying outcome. (7/10)

Kate Atkinson's Transcription is the story of a war-time counter-espionage project and how it catches up with the young heroine of the book, several years later. It does what Atkinson does best of all - flits between the dramas of 1940, 1950 and 1980 with the greatest of ease. (8/10)

Jon McGregor is one of my favourite authors. He writes dreamily slow-paced page-turners (how does he do that?) with insights into everyday events with an eye not to forensics so much as to the bits of stories that don't usually get told. So Reservoir 13, which I read last year, was about a missing girl but that incident was used as a lens to see the effect the event had on the village in which it was set. The Reservoir Tapes is the story, made for radio, of the people in the previous story; allowing them to be interviewed and to answer for themselves. (9/10)

A Peter Carey is never far from my reach and The Chemistry of Tears was a delightful piece of writing. Museum researcher Catherine, grieving for a dead lover, is given a project to investigate, to rebuild an automaton made by a great inventor to entertain his sick son. (6/10)

Mark Billingham's The Killing Habit is a DI Tom Thorne case inspired by a true life story of the M25 cat killer. Quite a romp. Page turner. Not, it turns out, much about cat killing at all. Last 100 pages shoot by. (8/10)

I try to catch up on things I missed in my yoof. I think school inoculated me against decent writing so Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was probably on some English Literature curriculum. I managed to fail the O Level but would fancy another go now. Gritty real life intrudes on a posh party in a day in the life of our eponymous heroine. (6/10)

And to add a bit of learning. Well Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister and university economics professor, distils his wisdom about trade, money and the future of the world into words his young daughter might understand. Interesting section on how cigarettes became money in WWII prisoner of war camps.

Holiday Reading

Here is a my annual service for those for whom the words 'activity' and 'holiday' belong not on the same sun-lounger. Scores represent the holiday escapism factor and nothing necessarily to do with literary merit. Slightly light list this year due to presence of other members of the family week one and football week two.

Lee Child - Trip Wire (6/10)

It all began back on June 7th and finishing the last 100 pages of a Jack Reacher thriller whilst waiting for a plane. Given there are several more books in the series beyond this one you will deduce that our hero wins again. Not without being shot in the chest though. Not easy this lone-wolf crime-fighting stuff.

John Le Carré - A Legacy of Spies (5/10)

The usual slow-paced, developing narrative as a former intelligence officer is invited back for a chat about an operation many years ago that may have been a bit more, or possibly less, than described at the time. Someone in government has the papers and wants to see heads roll. A spy's career is never behind them. Just a bit too slow for me and the end didn't satisfy. But if you've read le Carré you'll know what to expect.

Michael J. Malone - House of Spines (7/10)

Spine-tingling ain't really my bag (must read a Stephen King some day) but this caught my eye as a cross-dressing narrative. Starts with 'guy inherits possibly haunted house' premise but does some wonderful things with the idea. The 'spines' of the title are the book jackets of the house's library. The super-natural is a girl who likes listening to stories. Then there are some people who think the inheritance is flawed. Nicely done.

Jon McGregor - Reservoir 13 (9/10)

I do seem to have filled my bag with slow-paced narratives this trip. But if you need to take your time on a journey then McGregor is great company. Never a word out of place and an ability to describe things we don't normally see - the spaces between people, the seasons changing in the background, the relentless cycle of village life. A girl goes missing. Time passes slowly. I note the Broadchurchy subtext that your sins will find you out. An investigation into a big crime often uncovers some smaller ones along the way.

Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies (7/10)

What a yarn. Felt like I was discovering the missing connections between Father Ted, East Enders and Breaking Bad. Great characters. Mainly perfectly horrid so who do you root for?

Daniel Kehlmann - F (A Novel) (7/10)

Translated from German this story explores Arthur who has a life-changing experience after reluctantly going on stage for a hypnotist. We mainly see the world through his sons who grow up to be an art-forger, a dodgy financier and a fat unconvincing priest.

Fate, forger, fiddler and faithless. Whose fault is it all? And which is the 'F' of the title?

After this I started Jim Crace's Arcardia, which I know will be good because it 's Jim Crace. In between I read chapters from Tim Harford's Messy but haven't finished yet. However I know now why Le Corbusier's innovative clean architecture wasn't popular with the workers it was built for and why they put gnomes in their gardens. Also, why CPAS's clean-desk policy was a knife in the side of creativity. More on this later.

Holiday Reading

So here are the books I read on holiday. I remind readers that the score is an indication of how much I enjoyed reading them as part of my holiday; not a mark for literature, ground-breaking thinking or great prose.

The Visitor - Lee Child (7)
Start your holiday reading with a light page-turner. I will eventually have read all the Jack Reacher books and will have to wait in the airport lounge bookshop of doom for an annual fix until the franchise is over. Meantime 500 pages pass in the blink of an eye and we do eventually find out who is killing people in baths full of army-issue green paint. And why.

Razor Girl - Carl Hiassen (7)

Another author I will read completely. In fact I am up to date and this is the latest Florida-based thriller comedy full of trademark grotesques. Disgraced cop now food inspector Andrew Yancy, failing to observe the requirement to butt out, investigates a weird kidnapping. If it exists you'll never want to eat in Key West.

Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote (6)

Ignorant me had seen the movie but never read the book. Discovered it wasn't even a book but a short story and, to be honest, I enjoyed the other, shorter stories in this collection more than the eponymous longer one (more a novella). They were:

House of Flowers

A Diamond Guitar

A Christmas memory

Each genuinely short, perfectly constructed and nicely delivered.

But back to  Holly Golightly. She wanders across the pages. We don't really know what she is up to, how she makes her money, where she is from or where she is going. But our narrator is infatuated with her - probably because of the mystery. Even her door plate says 'travelling' where an occupation might have been expected. She is cool, chic, sophisticated - yet a glimpse into her bedroom reveals a laundry disaster. Intriguing. 

Sisterland - Curtis Sittenfeld (8)

My second book by this female author. I love her style, the way she builds a tale, the slow reveal of a thing and yet a page-turner. Twin sisters with an unusual gift - but they don't both exploit it. And an interesting (parallel) reminder that prophecy is useless without context, assessment and validation.

Capital - John Lanchester (9)

My favourite book of the holiday. John Lanchester wrote a wonderful guide to the financial crash of 2007/8 called Whoops! Clearly at the same time he was constructing this novel as the various residents of a London street have their lives affected by the same. A fascinating insight into economic migration, family relationships, the history of houses and the ultimate inter-connectedness of all things.

The Sellout - Paul Beatty (7)

I like to read Booker prize winners to see what the fuss is about. And this is incredibly clever; a satire on racism. Seeing his town wiped off the map our narrator aims to put it back on by re-introducing segregation; harder even than it sounds in an apparently all-black neighbourhood. It is a commentary of contemporary USA. I maybe got half the jokes (but they were excellent). I particularly loved one riff on why white people's skin-tones are never described in the detail given to people of all other colours. But it didn't quite hold my attention all the time. Hard work for the beach. I'd commend it for study more than holiday reading and for that would give it a 10/10.

Julian Barnes - Talking It Over (7)

The three members of a love-triangle take it in turns to narrate their position. Sometimes you can see something coming, know it isn't right and yet can't change the direction or pace of the circumstances. A reflection might follow on the inevitability of sin.

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman (8)

Writing in the mid 80s Postman (no longer with us) reflects on what TV has done to the way we process information. Sesame Street didn't, he says, teach kids to love education; it taught them to love television. So eventually the news became entertainment. He looks back at the days of the nineteenth century when presidential debates could last eight hours and an audience were comfortable with this. As we live in the age of social media it behoves us to reflect if this is having another, major effect on the way we think.

As I publish I am halfway through I Am Charlotte Simmons by the excellent Tom Wolfe. Looks like a 10 to me but I only managed 350 of the 700 pages before the end of holiday rudely interrupted.

Holiday Reading

Just back from our sixteen days in Malta and Gozo. The following summer reading comments are a little lighter than usual. We flew out on the day of the EU referendum and were as surprised as anyone by the result. Even more surprising was a torrential downpour in Valetta on our first full day so we sat in a hotel room watching CNN and updating social media frantically. Imagine if we had gone on holiday in the 'old days' and not had access to news. What would landing back have been like?

Anything happen while we were away?
Well, it's like this. Everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Anyway that is a long way of saying that we read more news websites than we often do and so balanced it out with a slightly lighter reading agenda than usual. My 'edifying' books (with one and a half exceptions) came back to what I still call the UK with me, unread.

As usual the mark in brackets (out of 10) represents the holiday escapism factor and not literary quality:

Jonan Jonasson
Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (7)
From the Swedish guy (in translation) who wrote about the hundred year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared, the story of the dull recptionist, Per Persson, at a sleezy hotel, a priest who has lost most of her faith and a contract killer. They find money. They invest it in barely legal enterprises. It works. People don't like it. There is a body count but most of the bodies arrive in amusing ways.

Carl Hiaasen
Stormy Weather (7)
Hiassen populates his Southern States crime thrillers with grotesques and cartoon characters. Yes foks, it's more of the comedy black I so love. In hurricane season most people move out. Not so the storm chasers, dodgy roofers and inheritors of illegal zoos from where most of the animals have escaped. You will feel hot, sticky and insect-bitten by the end. Great fun.

Alan McGee
Creation Stories (5)
The only way to keep up with excess-loving, substance-abusing bands is to be a similar music publisher. Discuss. This autobiography is appallingly written. In homage to bands who achieve success by breaking musical rules, McGee attempts the same stunt with his book and the rules of grammar, punctaution and syntax. The style is that of a nine year old writing 'What I did on my holidays'. Since he was the manager of Oasis for a while the insights are interesting but I learned more about luck than talent.

Tim Dowling
How to be a Husband (7)
The Saturday Guardian columnist analyses his marriage. It is an affectionate look at a modern relationship and the reality of what sort of things go on in one that works. Relationship by sarcasm and sharp putdown can be a winning formula as long as both parties play nicely and go off alone for a while on jaunts.

Peter Carey
Amnesia (8)
My regular reader will know that Carey is just about my favourite author. He has won the Booker prize twice and been long-listed many times. Here he looks at an act of subversion not unlike Wikileaks. In this case it involves mallware-opening the cell doors of asylum seekers. Unfortunately the virus also lets a lot of really bad guys free from their confinement in the USA. Carey takes us on a journey into the past and back two generations. What makes an anarchist like this? Nature or nurture? Journalist Felix has to track down the perpetrator and write her story. It may save her extradition and her life.

Jonathan Coe
Number 11 (8)
The Number 11 of the title is three things. A Birmingham bus-route. The Chancellor's address. The number of floors down that a wealthy London family are prepared to dig to extend their house when they are told they can't go up or out. This novel is a survey of recent UK popular culture - reality TV, lucky winners, talentless singers, immigrant nannies and dog-walkers, the super-rich and, because Coe is a master and can do this sort of thing, a disabled, lesbian, mixed-race, woman in a central role. Read it and weep baby.

Carl Hiassen
Double Whammy (6)
This Hiassen is set in the murky world of competitive bass-fishing. Sent to investigate if a competition is being rigged, private investigator T.J. Decker finds that everything is as murky as the water in which the really big fish hide. Blame the TV evangelist who owns the broadcast rights to the very-popular angling shows if you want, but he knows people and you may end up swimming with the prize catch.

Owen Jones
The Establishment (7)

An interesting accompaniment to the news from home, Owen Jones' thesis that whatever the result of election after election the establishment always wins seems to be showing up true again. Bankers, newspaper proprietors and politicians don't suffer when things are tough; the poor do. Always and all the time. Jones' firebrand socialism would want to fix that and make the UK fairer. But would the establishment hang around?

Holiday Reading

Not a very adventurous holiday. Just felt a bit like escaping into easy stuff. But these are the books that kept me company this last fortnight. Mark out of ten indicates escapism, enjoyment and in its genre - not simply for literature value.

Mark Billingham
From the Dead
Nice little thriller. Woman comes out of ten year jail term for having her husband killed. Then he turns up. Page turner. Bit of a twist. (6)

William Boyd
Restless
Spy thriller. Beautifully written. Flitting backwards and forwards between modern Cotswolds and Second World War, a woman finds out who her mother really is, what she did in the war and who still remembers. (7)

Dave Eggers
A Hologram for the King
Sparse prose and slow moving. Salesman Alan Clay, in Saudi Arabia trying to clinch a deal, has to do a lot of waiting around for the people to whom he needs to present. Has the USA lost the knack of impressing foreigners? Have the Chinese somehow got it? If you like Magnus Mills you'll love this. (8)

Susan Hill
The Shadows in the Street
A Simon Serailler whodunit. Prostitutes disappear. Many characters with motives are sketched out. The Deanery Close is full of manoeuvring. Not as well done as P.D.James but good fun nonetheless. (7)

John Grisham
Theodore Boone - The Activist
Although not explained on the cover this is a Grisham children's novel. Now I quite like such books. Good to have some to recommend to younger readers. Not this one. Wanted thirteen year old Boone to die horribly. He is an adult who has been drawn as a child, behaving as adults would wish. This is horrid children's writing. An adult writing a book about a child to keep children in order. (4)

Lee Child
Never Go Back
Jack Reacher goes back to meet a woman who he can only say 'Has a nice voice'. Amazing. Turns out she's a looker, fancies him and can also take care of herself. 500 pages later the world is slightly safer, several motel rooms have been abused, the bad guys have their fingers broken and I am back in Gozo, poolside. Can't complain. (6)

David Sedaris
Naked
I'd recommend hearing Sedaris read some of his prose before embarking on a story collection. He has one of those voices that makes you expect something funny. You won't be disappointed. At least five laugh-out-loud moments and I never do that because then you have to explain or read to the other residents and you can't do the accent. The final story, from which the collection is titled, is his adventures with some nudists. 'The absence of clothing made it very hard to describe people. You couldn't say 'Who's the uncircumcised gentleman with all the hair on his ass?''(7)

Kate Atkinson
One Good Turn
In Edinburgh during the festival a few people witness a road-rage incident. Not everyone who has something to report does so because they were up to no good themselves. Then the witnesses start disappearing. Good combo of whodunit and whatdidtheydo. (7)

Gabriel Garcia Marcquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Well you friends and followers know that I try to take something improving with me on holiday. Maybe a classic that I missed or the work of a lauded writer who is known to be hard going. Don't say 'What kind of a holiday is that?' Especially if you go skiing and come back with broken bits. Yes you. You know who I'm talking to. Suffice to say that I'm glad I read it, will probably never read anymore by Marcquez (who recently passed away), quite enjoyed it but, and it's a big but, this is the hardest book I've ever finished. Three page paragraphs and forty word sentences are the norm. Will write a longer post on the impact of this later. (8)

Deadlines

I know this will feel a bit rich coming from someone just half way through a very enjoyable sixteen day holiday, but the end of a holiday can loom at you like a deadline. I am pretty sure that by the end of this week I will be looking forward to coming home (I usually do). There will be things about being away that bug me - hot nights, cheap sheets, noisy dogs, fireworks and church bells are the Gozo distraction - but I wish there wasn't a definite flight to catch and an end point. If there wasn't it may well be that I'd be home earlier than expected. It is the fixed point I don't like. My whole life runs by appointments. I don't want my holiday to end with one.

Same way I don't want my shower to end when the water stops because you haven't pressed one of those annoying buttons to keep it flowing. I want to decide.

OK. I'll get back to relaxing now. Just a control freak on vacation I guess.

Holiday Reading List 2013

OK gang. It was a good year for reading by the pool, on the beach, in the cafe and here is my list. The score after each book is nothing to do with its quality as great literature but simply how enjoyable I found it as a get-away-from-it holiday read. I don't insist upon page-turners, although I like them as much as the next person, but I do need to be excited, educated or entertained. As a departure to my usual habit of only reading one book at a time on holiday I took a few books of essays/ideas and read a chapter from one of these at the start of a reading session, or between books.

Oh and by the way I am not showing off how many books I can read. I love reading and have a holiday partner similarly designed as long as we can talk over dinner later. Which we do.

So, here goes, in the order I finished them and with marks out of 10:

Chris Brookmyre: When the Devil Drives (6)
Christopher Brookmyre writes black-comedy; far-fetched and other-worldly, full of cultural observations. When he uses the name 'Chris' it is to announce a genre-change into more down-to-earth detective fiction. Jasmine Sharp is his heroine - someone who has stumbled into the world of private detection and finds herself in over her head from the off. This is her second adventure as she searches for a missing person who may have a few secrets to tell. So some bad people would like her to stop looking.

This on Church of Scotland ministers, '...if there is a heaven he'll be outside the gates protesting. He always takes a dim view of joy you see.'

Danny Baker: Going to Sea in a Sieve (9)
Baker is a top broadcaster. This is part one of his autobiography. On radio he is charming, witty, generous to inarticulate callers, utterly humble and delightful company. His book starts with a game of double-dare in the back of a burning car wreck and doesn't get any less fun. I laughed aloud a lot. Favourite moment - when an up-and-coming rock band who called themselves Queen turned up to the record shop Baker worked in and demanded to have their music played non-stop for a week.

Lee Child: A Wanted Man (6)
Another unlikely few days in the life of Jack Reacher. Great escapism. The good guys win. You know the stuff.

Naomi Starkey: The Recovery of Love (5)
Unlike me to take a 'Christian' book on holiday but this one looks a bit different and is written by my commissioning editor at BRF. It is a brave effort but I didn't like it. That said, I can think of people who will immediately and it will be on my Quiet Day table as one well worth borrowing or buying. Full review to follow.

Mark Billingham: Rush of Blood (8)
Three couples meet on holiday at a resort where a child goes missing. As they meet again over the months that follow it seems possible that one of the six is keeping too many secrets. And a second child disappears. The opening reminded me of 'The Slap' - I hated all the characters, but in this case it was a clever device to make me see guilt in all of them. It settled down. I never guessed who did it.

James Lee Burke: Feast Day of Fools (7)
The deep south US of A. Hot and itchy. A ranch is used to offer respite help to hungry and thirsty illegal border-crossers. In this context someone with no history of saying anything believable sees something unbelievably bad happen. And then lots of people start to be interested in whether the victim was one of two and the other escaped. He knows stuff. They want him dead. In fact quite a lot of 'theys' want him to disappear. And an unfit wise old cop may be the witness' only friend. As he says, ' Mobs (do) not rush across town to do good deeds,...'

Markus Zusak: I am the Messenger (8)
Underage cab driver Ed starts to get messages in the post. Just addresses at first. He has to work out what is needed at each place. It is a book for older teenagers but lovely as an adult read too. How would you react if you had to specifically go out and do good for a particular stranger each day? This is an early work by the author of one of my favourites, 'The BookThief'.

John Updike: Rabbit, Run (6)
Without meaning to I then found I had four novels and one other book left which had a contemporary North American narrative. Each holiday I try to take something from the back catalogue of great writers who I have never read. This was the package 2013.

My ignorance was such that I knew not that the four Rabbit novels were written a decade apart and thus provide a social commentary on growing up in America. Rabbit is Harry Angstrom and he feels as if his days as a high-school basketball player may have been his best years. Now what does he have to look forward to? His marriage feels suffocating so he runs. But he runs back. It is 1960. This volume felt slow. In fact it is contemporary with the beat novels of Salinger and Kerouac. I always felt their beat was down not up. But I'm sufficiently intrigued to want to read the set.

Douglas Coupland: Shampoo Planet (7)
Between 1990 and today there has been no better observer of young adult culture than Coupland. This, his second novel, has one-liners a plenty, loser characters, loving relationships and friendships, shampoo collecting as a hobby/addiction and a proper storyline. It's a fast, fast world. Coupland stops it for a bit and takes a picture.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Prep (9)
I love books about school. Always have. This is the story of Lee Fiora at Ault School, a long way from home, from age 14 to (I should say 'through' shouldn't I?) 18. I loved her. I loved her because, in a strange way, she is me. At school we both under-achieved. But hear this:

'Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self-deprecation, humour, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I'd ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I find winning people over disappointingly easy.'

This is a book about growing up poorer and less privileged than most in a wealthy establishment. It's brilliant.

Ha-Joon Chang: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (8)
This was the one chapter-at-a session book I finished. It didn't quite leave me thinking that everything I thought I knew was wrong but certainly that I didn't know the whole truth. It helped me understand the financial crash of 2008 a bit better, certainly with a bit more honesty than any politician could risk. I love that each chapter is called Thing 1, Thing 2 etc. And whilst politicians don't come out of this with much merit, there is the lovely endnote that economics is far too important to be left to economists. Full review to follow.

Others
On the American theme I also began dipping into Jonathan Raban's 'Driving Home'. Of all the travel writers I love - Chatwyn, Theroux, Bryson - he has by far the best prose. Every sentence is a magnificent piece of art. Do read something by him. 'Passage to Juneau' is especially good.

Finally I read some of Zadie Smith's essays in 'Changing My Mind'. Good stuff but demanding, especially if you are not very widely read.

Holiday Reading

There is an old joke about the couple who couldn't decide on a holiday. He wanted to cruise; she wanted to go skiing. So they went water-skiing and both hated it.

In fact you need to deconstruct the holiday requirements. She wants activity, hates water but doesn't care about temperature. He wants sun, hates ice but doesn't care what they do. You don't compromise, you reconcile. Water skiing gives them both what they don't want. They go on safari and are both happy.

So Mrs T wants sun and I want to be able to read in peace. We go some-where hot each year with a promise of shade for me. In the picture you can see my shady spot beyond the pool.

Which is a long way round to saying we are just back from our tenth trip to Gozo and here is my reading list. Some brilliant recommendations this year, three of which will be worth a review of their own. The score is nothing to do with qualities of literature or value but simply a measure of how much I enjoyed reading each book at the time.

Mark Radcliffe
Reelin' in the Years
The DJ and presenter chooses a record from every year of his life and uses each to tell his story in his inimitable way. Funny as ever but quietly illuminating and humble too, rare qualities in a celebrity. (6/10)

Steven Hall
The Raw Shark Texts
Not the world's greatest prose but this first novel, a psycho-thriller, is a huge step of imagination. Described, not unfairly, as Jaws meets The Matrix this is that rare thing, an intellectually satisfying page-turner. What Dan Browne should be like. Longer review will follow. (7/10)

Kate Atkinson
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Aware that I might have been asleep the year everyone seemed to be reading this, and also that I don't read enough female writers, I took it to see what all the fuss had been about. Very enjoyable and well constructed as the different branches and ages of a family tree are pulled together. (7/10)

Jon McGregor
Even the Dogs
Fast becoming one of my favourite authors for his ability to lead you at a pace through the everyday and mundane, this is the story of the death of someone at the edge of society. A no-hoper is found dead from poor lifestyle choices at an early age but his life is gradually set out through the voices of those who knew him (but don't normally get listened to) and the post-mortem. Short and brilliant. (8/10)

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
In Nazi Germany pre and during-war a little girl grows up to survive by stealing food and self-educate by stealing books. Take a morality check. Her delight and curiosity keep us entranced while the horrors of war and holocaust destroy her world. One of the five best books I've ever read. Magnificent. Longer review will follow. (10/10)

Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep
One of my personal delights is to take on holiday a classic book I know enough about to discuss but have actually never read. Chandler's booze-fuelled private eye Philip Marlowe investigates a missing person. Cue the bodies. (6/10)

Bill Bryson
At Home
In A Short History of Nearly Everything Bryson brought his considerable wit and curiosity to how the world is and works. Someone has suggested this should be called A Short History of Everything Else. Discovering a secret door in his Victorian Rectory home Bryson embarks on a quest to understand everything domestic. Why do we have salt and pepper on the table? What did Victorians use to keep things cold? Clean? Why did someone once build a hotel of 300 rooms with only 6 bathrooms (true)? I grew up in a Victorian house so this took me back some. Delightful, fascinating and yet leaving a sense of delight not to have been alive at any other time. (8/10)

Peter Carey
Parrot and Olivier in America
Peter Carey nearly always delights. His wonderful prose never gets in the way of what is possibly the greatest literary imagination at work today. He lists 300 works he read to study for this novel, set in the early eighteenth century at the dawn of democracy. Longer review will follow. (9/10)

Bread

Mrs T has given up bread in the morning and now goes to work on a massive bowl of gloop. This means that we have a lot of marmalade in the cupboard with a furry top and that the bread I make goes off before we can finish it.

My mind went on holiday and rested upon Gozitan bread which, fresh from the bakers, is delicious. It is crusty and the inside is moist and slightly chewy. Day two the crust can only be torn - your teeth will not penetrate it - and has an amazing elasticity; the inside is still lovely but by now very chewy and also dry. I don't know how this effect is achieved but I fear it simply demonstrates how many bad-for-you things are in my shop-bought, non-organic bread at home. On day three Gozitan bread is only of any use to the Gozitan Popular Front in their anti-authority campaigns as a flinging weapon of choice. Day four, if you leave it on the floor, the ants come up to you and complain about the quality of supper. Eat fresh bread in Gozo.

Anyway I am now making a loaf and freezing half of it.

Best/Worst

My best/worst book

In times when I need cheering up, or to take a few moments to enjoy a clever sentence or two I reach for some Douglas Adams. As a Christian Minister there is never a Bible far away and I’ll probably get in trouble with the Hezbollah wing of the Church of England for not mentioning this first. Illywhacker by Peter Carey was enjoyable and still entertains me nearly twenty years after I first read it. It is a narrative told by a 139 year old liar called Herbert who uses a giant pet-shop as a metaphor for the growth of Australia.

I have read so many bad books. I try not to finish them but usually plough on. Dan Brown’s, Angels and Demons was particularly awful. There is no reason to read more than one Dan Brown book. I have read two.

My best/worst evening out

West Bromwich Albion have given me some particularly horrific evenings out over the years so I now confine my live football watching to lower league. I normally find something good in any evening out. In May 1972 I saw The Faces, at the height of their powers, in a field in Lincolnshire, top of a remarkable festival bill. It was my 17^th birthday. That was good. Mrs WWA may now sue.

My best/worst CD/record

Whilst all this depends on mood I come back again and again to the eponymous debut album of a band called Sunshine. Nobody else I have ever met has heard of them. Currently I play Radiohead a lot. Drummer Man by Tonight is my favourite single of all time. My family gave me a Des O’Connor album as a joke once. I didn’t listen to it so can’t tell you if it was as bad as Limp Bizkit’s, Chocolate Starfish and the Hot-dog Flavoured Water. It would have to go some.

My best/worst holiday

Two weeks in Canterbury and Hastings in about 1990 with 10 and 8 year old sons when it rained every day. Every day. Any holiday now is my best one, most recently 14 days in Gozo last June. Don’t discover Gozo. Leave it unspoiled for me and Mrs WWA.

My best/worst job

I’ve never had a job I hated apart from going to school, which I loathed. Tasks yes. Jobs no. I hate DIY and will pay ridiculous sums of money to avoid it. I love so much which I can gratefully call work – listening to people, entertaining, writing, making music, preaching. What you got?

Anyone else want to join in this exercise?

Holiday Reading

I was pretty tired when I went on holiday this year so the reading recommendation list has slightly more lowbrow on it than usual. That said there are a few books I'd be happy to endorse and lend if required. The scoring system is nothing to do with literary quality but merely an assessment of how much I enjoyed each book.

John Grisham
The Appeal
A small town firm of lawyers takes on a multi-national to claim compensation for victims of a pollution scandal. When they win, big business fights back in the only way it can - by trying to buy the result of the appeal. Well plotted and good page-turner. May well have some basis in truth.
(6/10)

James Lee Burke
Pegasus Descending
A well written piece of southern states crime fiction. Nicely drawn characters.
(7/10)

Douglas Coupland
All Familes are Psychotic
All Coupland's families are anyway. A bunch of crazies convene to watch the only sane member of the family take off on the Space Shuttle. Three books in a row based in the southern states but the only one in which people actually get thrown into the swamp.
(6/10)

David Nicholls
One Day
Incredibly moving. There was a lot of fuss about this book when it came out and I now see why. The narrative device is to visit two people, who meet at university, on the same day every year from then on. If you've lived in the UK for the last twenty two years it's your history too. Well observed and beautifully written.
(9/10)

Caryl Phillips
The Nature of Blood
Overlapping tales from down the ages about blood links, racism and human spirit. Central story is based on a holocaust survivor. Glad I read it but tough stuff.
(7/10)

R.J.Ellory
A Simple Act of Violence
Ellory came to fame when Richard and Judy promoted A Quiet Belief in Angels on their Book Club. This is a crime novel about a murder which reverses the usual format. This looks like the work of a serial killer but investigation casts doubt on the theory and points to an even more sinister truth. I was greatly entertained.
(7/10)

David Mitchell
Ghostwritten
Mitchell's intellect, imagination and span are enormous. Just stops short of showing off in the way that, for instance, Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon often don't. These nine overlapping tales will have you picking back through to make sure you picked up all the links. Reminded me a bit of the film Babel and the style is like Peter Carey at his best.
(8/10)

John Grisham
Theodore Boone
Picked this up in a small bookshop when I was without reading matter. It is in an adult book cover but is, in style, a book for teenagers about a 13 year old who wants to be a lawyer. Fun little tale to give to the twelve year old in your family for Christmas.
(5/10)

Jonathan Coe
The Rain Before it Falls
Coe is a lovely writer and here he seems to try to mimic a female style (Mrs WWA thought so too). A study of melancholy over several generations using the device (a little over-used these days?) of something found left behind after a death.
(6/10)

I resolve once again to try and read more female writers over the coming year. Any recommendations?

Holiday and Holiday Reading

So we had a family holiday. Here are me and my boys and their girls on top of Victoria Citadel, Gozo a couple of weeks ago.

I know some of you wait with bated breath for my holiday reading list and it will be along in a moment but I just wanted to say that we had such a good time with the six of us that my first week's reading was a bit light. This was a good thing. Hadn't had the whole family away for over ten years so there was some trepidation on my part about how we'd all get on. Answer, brilliantly. Great fun, very relaxing and no awkward moments apart from a cockroach called Senor Alan at the nicest restaurant on the Maltese islands which decided to climb both my boys during the course of a meal and was eventually, spectacularly and unceremoniously, squashed by hero Jon and the body kicked away out of sight with a deft improvised right foot. Footie skills I reckon. I don't recall how we knew it was called Alan.

For those who don't know my lot then left to right we have Ben, Jon's girlfriend Carys, Ben's girlfriend Rachel, me and Jon.

If you saw the Tweet post about the end of my favourite shorts then those are they on their final outing.

The scores in brackets are simply a measure of how much, out of 10, I enjoyed the book. They are not a comparison of quality writing. I read:

Christopher Brookmyre: Pandaemonium (6/10)
The usual level of black comedy, crime and gore once again showing his skill at understanding the mind of the teenager. Very light, very funny, appalling language.

Bateman: I Predict a Riot (8/10)
You wouldn't believe the trouble a Belfast dating agency could kick off with a few interesting introductions. Bateman's character creations are riotous and his skill is in putting very unlikely people together on the same page. He must use the hat system (ask me if you need to).

Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked (7/10)
Back, I suggest, to what he does best. A romantic comedy about a music obsessive, with a twist. Very good.

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (9/10)
Astonishing. Although I need to tell you that Mrs M hated it and couldn't complete. Several over-lapping stories over a huge stretch of time demonstrating how our world is joined up. The breadth of the knowledge, research and imagination blew me away. But you will need to be happy to live patiently with open ends until he returns and resolves them, one by one. Best book I have read this last twelve months.

Howard Jacobson: The Act of Love (7/10)
The slightly erotic musings of a man who wonders if he loves his partner enough to let her, and watch her, commit adultery. Asks good questions about relationships by pushing extremes. Not for everyone.

Edward St Aubyn: Mother's Milk (6/10)
A family revisited on holiday every year for four years as they take stock of their lives, their relationships and their hopes. A young boy offers a depth of comment that asks the reader to wonder how much children understand of what is going on. Well written prose but more a narrative than a story.

Douglas Coupland: J Pod (7/10)
Probably the best Coupland I have read. A bunch of nerdy game designers and their dysfunctional families have a big adventure. One or two nerdy exercises to keep the geeks happy as they read. Can you spot an upper case O replacing a number 0 hidden in twenty pages of digits? Do you want to?

Not Holidays

Strange things holidays. I love them, then want to get home, then when I'm back I wish I was on holiday again. No-one can exist on a diet of the best of everything all the time; it would simply raise your standard of what is the best and you'd need to earn more money to afford it.

Gozo, where I have been for my holidays these last few years, is a small island next to Malta and its principle attraction (forgive me) is that you're not there. In summer it is hot, dusty and the insects nip. It is interesting but not particularly beautiful. People are helpful but not over-bearing.

I relax, swim, sit in the sun, read, eat good food (restaurants excellent), explore a little and reacquaint myself with Mrs T.

'Is it me,' I say to a colleague, '...or has the parish speeded up while I was away?' We conclude that indeed it has, but also that I've slowed down and the combined velocities are a mismatch.

In late 2007 I joined a health club, a step up from the council gym. I confess that the attraction, inter alia, of a large outdoor pool round which to sit and read on a day off, was very powerful. Last year the number of Fridays when this was facilitated by the British weather was a no score. This week has been hot and dry and I thought I might break my duck. Clutching for the positive I count the rain falling on my green garden and my pitter-patter amplifying conservatory as a blessing.

This is a green and pleasant land. All the birds are not sparrows and pigeons. Yesterday 36 starlings breezed into my small garden and cleaned the lawn. Martins and swifts swoop overhead. Dust lasts but a short time, dismantled by water. It's good to be back.

The Isle of Wight

Sorry not to have advertised the fact that I was going to be away and thanks for one or two comments from people who missed me. Since you can trace links from this blog to my actual address I felt that telling the world I was going to be out of town would have been unwise, especially since we have no dogs or sons to guard the house in our absence.

We have been to Ventnor for a week where, courtesy of Sykes Cottages, we rented a little house and explored an island we haven't really done before.

Enjoyable week and one or two excellent pubs found (they'll probably have our names next to them in the 2008 Good Pub Guide), plus the superb Hambrough restaurant which provided the best evening's food since Solo Leamington closed.

Finished a book and started another, caught up with the newspapers, watched a movie, climbed a big hill and found the country's windiest place - the Needles.

Did put the top down on the Saab for half an hour one day but am thawing out now.