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.