Any Human Heart by William Boyd

This is a chronicle of the 20th century sewn together by a human narrative. This human (who is, of course, only fictionally human), is Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, born Uruguay 1906, died France 1991.

Over the course of his life he:
*met Picasso, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and other luminaries of the century,
*pissed off the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,
*wrote a couple of books,
*got involved with some Spanish anarchists and acquired a couple of works by Miro,
*was a prisoner of war in Switzerland,
*slept with his mate's girl (and that's not the worst of it),
*married 3 different women,
*narrowly escaped a rape charge,
*met his dead wife's husband,
*lectured at a university in Nigeria during the Biafran War,
*ate dog food,
*got involved in a plot with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and
*had a threesome with a few pros sometime in his 70s.
Impressive, no?

Any Human Heart is Logan's journal. He goes quite for years, muses endlessly on himself at times, and is remarkably uncritical of himself in the main. Just like any journal you're not supposed to be reading, I read this one with ferocious speed. It was as though, at any moment, Logan might come in and find me trying to shove the book back under his mattress, pretending I'd never seen it.

It's not necessarily great writing, and at least once every 50 pages or so I wanted to punch Logan in the face, but I couldn't put this down. I am certain there are hundreds of historians gnashing their teeth flailing their arms around in despair at this book, so little faith do I have in its accuracy, but none the less, I have learnt to spell Biafran, and that's not shit. What this book achieves is the personalisation of history: It's the same phenomenon as the difference between what you feel if you hear, '83 people died in Blah today when a huge Thing happened', compared with 'My aunt lost her leg today'. It's all about how much you can take it at once. And seeing the 20th century as a 1 man story makes it digestible.

Actually, compiling this list, I realise Boyd has just, pretty much, used violence and conflict as flippers in the pinball game of Logan's life. I guess he could've used inventions, or medical advancements, but then Logan would've been a scientist, and everyone knows writers are way more interesting, darling.

So. Yes. Read. Enjoy.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

As a long-time fan of Indian fiction, I was surprised that I had never heard of this author before, but it seems everyone else was keeping him a secret from me. It even has the slightly dubious distinction of ending up on Oprah’s Book Club. Mistry seems to be the working-man’s Rushdie – telling these big tales of Indian life without all the bells and whistles (and more full stops).

But that’s what I love about Indian fiction; smelling the streets from the descriptions, seeing the crazy colours, knowing the overbearing families that make up this insane sounding country that I’m desperate to get to one day soon. And while the story is undoubtedly brilliant (and the ending one of the most heartbreaking I’ve read), the writing is just a little bit plain. While other Indian books I’ve read have been in vivid technicolour, this was black and white. But maybe I just missed something, because it was Sam’s favourite read of the year and it’s made many others I know cry. It just didn’t have the same impact on me for some reason. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t sections of this book that made me want to scream ‘This is so unjust and unfair and frustrating!!!’ I have a feeling that’s what being in India would be like on a daily basis.

It’s not as brutal as Adiga’s The White Tiger, or as epic as Naipul’s A Bend in the River. It has this pervading resignation to it, that the characters rally against with everything they’ve got, but in the end, Mother India and her Darkness are too strong for the humble tailors who are the protagonists of this tale.

Truth by Peter Temple

I do love a good page turning crime thriller from time to time (hell, I even went through a James Patterson stage in my late teens *shudder*) and before this book blog began, read The Broken Shore, the prequel to Truth, which incidentally won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award.

The fact is, they are practically the SAME book. Slow burning, hard boiled cop married to the job at the expense of his other relationships, crooked pollies and filthy pedos the fodder for what is a fairly grim and ultimately unsatisfying read. You read and you read and you read (then read some more) and it’s all built up until the last 60 or so pages when THE BIG REVEAL happens – but by that stage, I didn’t really care.

Also, this book is so masculine that I’m surprised that a penis didn’t jump out from the page and whack me in the face at some point.

“Vickery gave him the long look. “Yeah, well, the drugs fuck with your brain, my brother-in-law, another prick, he came up with all kinds of shit, incest, you name it. It’s the Super K.’

‘When was it made?’

‘What?’

‘The tape?’

‘Dunno. What’s it matter?’

‘Could matter a lot.’

Vickery turned his back to the bar, glass in hand, looked around the dungeon. ‘Anyway, the problem here’s the wife, bloody Grace’s found God fucking never-never-land shit and she’s sent the DPP the tape.”

Practically smell the beer can’t ya?

Whiter Shades of Pale: Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander

This is the book of a blog. Both are completely hilarious. Neither, however, are about 'white' people. They're mostly about insufferably smug upper-middle class dicks. Like me. And you. I concede that calling your blog 'Stuff Insufferably Smug Upper-middle Class Dicks Like' might not have gotten you the same amount of attention though, Chris, and is there anything insufferably smug upper-middle class dicks like quite so much as they like the attention of other insufferably smug upper-middle class dicks?

Sorry, have I said that I love this? Because I do.

Standouts include:
Self Aware Hip Hop References -

... white people find it particularly hilarious to take slang and enunciate every word perfectly.
“Homey, that bernaise sauce you made is wack. Do you know what I am saying? For Real.”
“Well, I used a different type of butter. I switched the style up, so let the haters hate and I’ll watch the deliciousness pile up.”

Camping -

If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worse case scenario like after plane crash or something.” White people refer to it as “camping.”

Mostly, I love this because I am an insufferably smug upper-middle class dick, and the only thing this book/blog combo fails to identify are the two things we love more than anything:
1. Ourselves
2. Reading about ourselves in an ironic fashion.

Thanks Chris.

Moonraker by Ian Fleming

Once pulp fiction passes a certain vintage, it enters a canon all its own. Clearly, Fleming's Bond novels meet this description, and therefore I will not apologise for indulging in what is essentially literature's answer to a toasted cheese sandwich on white bread with margarine and plastic cheese - delicious, but in no way nutritious.

Here are some of the choicest morsels:

'... their heads were all close-shaved... and yet, and this struck Bond as a most bizarre characteristic of a the team, each man sported a luxuriant moustache to whose culture it was clear that a great deal of attention had been devoted. They were in all shapes and tints: fair or mousy or dark; handlebar, walrus, Kaiser, Hitler -- each face bore its own hairy badge...
... there was something positively obscene about this crop of hairy tufts. It would have been just bearable if they had all been cut to the same pattern, but this range of fashions, this riot of personalized growth, had something particularly horrible about it against the background of naked round heads.'

and this:

'Why had he imagined that she shared his desires, his plans?
... He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure -- the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. The exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.'

Bond, don't you see Old Chap, is just Agatha Christie with cars and guns. Honestly - replace the Brit with a Belgian, replace talk of nuclear armament with talk of a flower show, replace the Beretta was some arsenic, and Bond and Poirot are basically the same person. Is it any wonder I can't wait to get my hands on the next one?