A Gentleman's Domain

Four "classic" books

My lovely friend Julie at  Thinking About…  posed an interesting question.   If you had to choose four books published before 1970 (an arbitrary but harmless date), what four would you choose?  This was actually easier than I thought.  Sadly rejecting

Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace
Diary Of A Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
and even My Early Life by Winston Churchill,

I decided on the following:

Great Expectations  by Charles Dickens
Thank You, Jeeves  by P. G. Wodehouse
The Day Of The Triffids  by John Wyndham
Flashman  by George MacDonald Fraser

Agreement or arguments, anyone?
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And as the sun slowly sinks in the West...

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I tore a label off the other day.   Everyone in the USA will know what I mean – anything made with fabric of any kind other than clothing (upholstery, cushions etc.) comes with a label headed “Do not remove, under penalty of law”  and even though that does not apply to the end user, many people still leave them attached.  I unfolded a portable patio chair a few days ago, to relax in the evening sun with a book and a Pepsi, and with a certain devil-may-care I tore off the label.  Even so, in spite of what my rational senses told me, I did feel a frisson of guilt, and for a moment I was expecting a sudden visit from the police label squad.  “We know you’re in there.  Throw out the patio chair and come out with your hands up!”

There was a second label, and I tore that off too.  I was going to use it as a bookmark but then I read what it said and the implications shook me to the core!  Look what it says.  In effect, the government of the state of California is warning that this chair is not non-flammable enough for them to feel easy that its citizens are sitting in it, and it warns them against doing things in the chair that might cause them to burst into flame.  Well, a pat on the back for Arnie and his state’s government. But I live in Florida.  Where is the warning from Governor Crist or one of his minions in Tallahassee?  Don’t they care?  Are they so unworried at the possibility of my sudden immolation that they can’t even be bothered to warn me?  They need to model their technique on that of Sacramento and be a bit more Californian about it. I don’t actually smoke, or wave naked flames about anywhere near this chair, so the prospect of my seated combustion is remote, but even so, this callous indifference has left me shaken.  I’m not angry, but I’m rather disappointed.

Vets can be so blasé cant they!  Our vet provided us with a bottle of liquid medicine and a syringe (sans needle) and told us to give Sam, one of our cats,  2cc of the liquid every day.  The recommended method was to use the syringe to squirt a measured amount of red liquid into his mouth, once a day.  Ha!  Have you ever tried to give medicine to a cat?   I have never forgotten, from my childhood, when we had to give pills to our Siamese cat, Nokomis.   Normally she was the sweetest, most affectionate cat you could ever meet.  But when we tried to give her pills, she transformed into a snarling, hissing, razor wielding wildcat!  It took all four of us (parents, sister, myself) to do it.  We had to wrap Nokomis in a towel and, wearing gardening gloves, to open her mouth and insert the pill.  And then make her swallow it.  Half the time she fooled us into thinking she had done so, only for us to find it on the carpet a little later on.  So it was with not a little world-weary cynicism that I listened to the vet airily telling me to squirt a small measured amount of red liquid from a bottle into Sam’s mouth.  It takes both my wife and me to do it, and we have had to resort to wrapping him in a bedspread and holding him by the scruff of the neck.  Sometimes we are successful.  I suppose we should use reverse psychology and try to convince him that this liquid is something that he absolutely must not drink.  Not allowed!  Then he’d regard it the way he regards most food that we eat and would spare no effort or deception to get at it and polish it off.

If you are looking for a book to read and you want something more challenging than a nag-and-shag  or a formula thriller, please permit me to suggest The Unbreakable Child by Kim Michele Richardson.  This, I should warn you, is not a fluffy, cuddly read.  It is a harrowing account of how the author was sent to an orphanage run by nuns and for seven years she and her fellow inmates were beaten, abused and degraded by these foul Brides of Christ.  The violence was so unceasing and, it seems, administered for both good and bad behaviour, that it almost beggars belief.  You couldn’t get away with a story like this in fiction  – no one would believe it.  You have to be somewhat dysfunctional anyway to be a nun, but that is no excuse for, to take one example, punching an eight-year-old girl in the stomach and making her eat her own vomit. And of course, these women lied to the girls with terrifying stories about burning in hell.  All this, mind you, did not take place in some Third World country, but here in the USA.  And not way back in the twenties or in the Depression, but in the Sixties.  This was the decade of flower power, free love, The Beatles, Woodstock, the Apollo space program.  And while all that was happening in an increasingly enlightened world, nuns were beating up young girls.  The author does have her own happy ending, I’m glad to say. She is now a happy wife and mother, and was able to bring a successful lawsuit against the Catholic Church.  Read her story!

Still on books,  I have for the last couple of months been a member PaperBack Swap, an online club whose members can swap paperback books (hardbacks and audio books too) with each other.  It’s all very simple (which is probably why I can understand it):  after you join (it’s free) you list the books you are making available  and whenever anyone wants one you get a message, with that person’s name and address.  You send the book off by media mail, and you get one point.  Every point you get entitles you to choose a book from the 3.5 million books that have been posted by members.  The only cost to you is the postage for the books you send out, so you end up with a lot of books more or less at half price, and you know that your unwanted books have gone to good homes.  Check it out here.

Back home in the UK, there were local government and European Parliament elections last week, and as usual these were greeted with a barrage of indifference by most people.  However, about 45% of the electorate did turn out to vote. I won’t bother you with the results, some of which were very heartening and a few of which were downright disturbing.  I will briefly mention one thing, that always makes me feel that there still is some fun in British politics.  I refer, of course, to the existence of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which was inspired by the Silly Party  in a Monty Python sketch.  The Raving Loonies contest local and parliamentary elections, have never won a seat, in all probability never will, but they  do brighten up election coverage as a cheerful alternative to mainstream politicians blethering on about what they will do and how everyone else is rubbish.  So far no one has tried to stop them, though you do once in a while hear some old stick-in-the-mud complaining that the Raving Loonies are cheapening politics.  But no one seems to mind.  How could anyone really object to a political party that fields a candidate who legally changed his name to Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel just before the ballot papers were printed?

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100 books

I often drop in at  Thinking About…  where Julie puts up interesting and entertaining posts.  Not so very long ago she reproduced a list of books that the BBC website had shown some months ago.  There are 100 titles in all and the BBC, or whoever is in charge of this sort of thing at the BBC, reckon that most people (maybe they meant British people, as opposed to people in the English speaking word.  Anyway, I am eligible in either case) will have read only six of them.  Here is the list, and I have used bold print for the ones I have actually read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen   One of those books I was forced to read at school.

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien   I managed 12 chapters before giving up.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible -  I haven’t read all of it; just bits of it here and there when I was at school 30+ years ago.  Haven't looked at it since.

7 Wuthering Heights -Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell   I read this with little enjoyment, but out of a sense that I ought to read it sooner or later.

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens  My fave Dickens book.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  Obviously I haven’t read every play, poem and sonnet.  Just some.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams    Absolutely brilliant!

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown   How on earth does this ridiculous book make the list?

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie   I find Rushdie all very worthy, but quite unreadable.

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare   I’m not sure why this is mentioned, since Shakespeare’s Complete Works are already on the list.

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, there you are.  I make my total 29.  Out of the books I haven’t read there are a few I would like to read, some I think I ought to but probably never will, and several that I have no plans ever to read (Les Miserables and Moby Dick, for example, and the children’s books).  And then there are some I have never even heard of.  How many have you read?
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The Bookshelf Meme

The Bumbles  tagged me for a meme the other day.  It's called The Bookshelf Meme and in it one is asked five questions about one's books.  This was fun to do.

(1)  Tell me about the book that has been on your shelves the longest.

I think that would probably be my copy of Oliver Twist, which my late grandmother gave me for Christmas when I was about ten.

(2)  Tell me about a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (i.e. a person, a place, a time, etc.).

I was spoiled for choice here, but I have picked High Adventure by the very recently late Donald E. Westlake.  I bought it in Hawaii when I was making a leisurely round-the-world trip, and I read a lot of it while lying on a towel on Waikiki Beach.  A great book, and it entertained me during part of a very enjoyable and memorable ten-week journey.

(3)  Tell me about a book you acquired in some interesting way (gift, serendipity in a used book store, prize, etc.).

Admiral Hornblower  by C.S. Forester.  Actually this is an omnibus, containing five Hornblower novels.  I won it as a prize at school when I was 12 for coming first in examinations in my class that term.

(4)  Tell me about the most recent addition to your shelves.

John Major’s autobiography, received from an Amazon marketplace bookstore just a couple of days ago.

(5)  Tell me about a book that has been with you to the most places.

I had to think about this and in the end I picked…. my second passport, valid from when I was 24 to 34.  I travelled so much in those years that I ran out of spaces for immigration entry and exit stamps.  Well, a passport is a sort of book, isn’t it?

I’m not tagging anyone, but if you want to have a go please feel free, and please link back to this post!

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Two Gone Forever

Rather sad.   At about this time last year, one of my very favourite authors died.  George MacDonald Fraser.  He it was who wrote the twelve wonderful novels about the Victorian cad Flashman, each of which I have read and re-read many times over, and will do so again many times.  He was in his mid-eighties, so it wasn’t by any means a surprise, but it was a loss none the less. And of course it meant that there would be no more Flashman books.  There are attempts sometimes to assign plots and characters created by a dead author to another writer, who is supposed to carry the baton, but it doesn’t always work.  These efforts are published under the name of the late author  followed by an apostrophe S,  and the name of the person who actually wrote them is in small letters at the bottom of the cover.  Next time you’re in a book shop just go look for “Robert Ludlum’s” this and “Alistair MacLean’s” that.  I never buy those.  They are not the same as the real thing.

So I am glad that no one has so far attempted to continue writing the Flashman papers, and even though that means there will be no more, that is how it is supposed to be.  And there are still some novels by Fraser that I haven’t read yet, on other subjects.  Since every book you haven’t read is a new book, that means I have many treats in store.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, we lost another of my favourite writers – Donald E. Westlake.   I have mentioned him many times in my Thursday Thirteen book lists as one of the writers I enjoy above all others.  He died on New Year’s Eve, and again I felt the sadness – selfishly, perhaps – that there would be no more books from him.  However,  I can still look forward to reading many of his works for the first time.  He wrote over one hundred novels under his own name and about half a dozen pseudonyms, and I have hardly scratched the surface.  No need for other writers to try to write on his behalf.  No need to go without.  I thank Donald Westlake for his phenomenal industry and energy over his long career and I look forward to many, many hours of enjoyment reading what his mind dreamed up.
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One To Enjoy!

The Misadventures of Oliver Booth 

by DAVID DESMOND

Greenleaf Book Group Press,  205 pages,  $14.95

David Desmond writes about the rich, and the wannabe rich, in Palm Springs.  Since he is Donald Trump’s nephew, and lives in Palm Springs, we can assume he is not unfamiliar with that milieu, and in this novel he  manages to navigate this world of the rich and self-indulgent with ease.

We explore Palm Beach with the Oliver Booth of the title.  As his main protagonist, David Desmond gives us the unpleasant, arrogant, incompetent – throw in obese too – proprietor of a store situated near, but not in, a top class shopping street, where he tries to unload his fake antiques at outrageous prices upon the rich and super-rich. You will look in vain for redeeming qualities.

As we follow him from Palm Springs to Paris on an antiques buying trip on behalf of a client, and back again, bad things happen to Oliver Booth, but he is so unremittingly unpleasant to everyone he encounters in this story – he is either fawning over them or trying to take advantage of them, and very often both – that we feel no sympathy for him when fate slaps him upside the head.  Add a French waiter who is both intelligent and possessed of an easy manner, a very rich old lady and her grandson, and you have the main characters in this comic novel.

At the start of the novel, David Desmond describes for us the nature of Palm Beach society, with its own code of behaviour, hierarchy and  rules, and we are left wondering if all this can be true, but of course since Desmond is describing the place where he lives, we believe every word.  Then he takes up the story of Oliver Booth’s attempt to join that society and make his fortune as antique dealer to the wealthy.  This is a very entertaining and undemanding read. Don’t look for deeper meanings than those you find on the page – just enjoy what happens to the sweaty little toad of the title and those with whom he comes into contact.  It takes a lot for a book to make the reader laugh out loud, but this one succeeded in several places.  The Misadventures of Oliver Booth comes under the category of fun!  Read and enjoy. And if you’re like me you’ll be though it all too quickly, and wanting more; so you’ll be delighted to see that Desmond is writing a sequel.
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Booking through 2008

Every year I keep a list of the books I have read.    I don’t number them, so as I enter the titles in a small notebook I manage to lose count sometime around the end of February. That means that come New Year’s day each year, I can tot up the number of books I have read the previous year and surprise, or disappoint, myself with the total.  Obviously, I spent a lot of 2008 sitting comfortably in quiet surroundings reading, because my total of books read was 101.  Those are only books I actually finished.  Any book I abandon before I get to the end doesn't make it onto the list.

Out of those 101 books there were some very enjoyable ones, a number of indifferent ones which I shall probably not read again, and a few I had to struggle through to finish just for the sake of it.  I have picked a dozen that I particularly did enjoy – seven fiction and  five non-fiction – and for what it’s worth they all carry my recommendation.

1  –  Smoke  by Donald E. Westlake.  I was actually giggling out loud at this book in Starbucks, much to my wife’s embarrassment.  Westlake is a very amusing writer, and this is one of the best I have read of his so far.

2  –  Shakespeare  by Bill Bryson.  An extremely readable, and concise, book on the Bard himself , his writings and his legacy.

3  –  Soho  by Keith Waterhouse.  I didn’t really know what to expect when I ordered this but this gently amusing tale of a young man from the north of England who comes down to London, specifically the red light area of Soho, to look for his  girlfriend, was riveting.

4  –  The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder  by Vincent Bugliosi.  Probably best known as the Assistant D.A. who successfully prosecuted Charles Manson and several members of his “family”, Bugliosi sets out a credible set of reasons why President Bush, in initiating the Iraq war, can and should be prosecuted for murder.

5  –  The Deal  by Peter Lefcourt.  The deal in question is the one required to greenlight a movie.  This is the story of a washed-up producer who stumbles upon a story, and after a number of “conceptual changes” manages to get it made in an overseas location, by a mad director. This is a send up of the whole Hollywood circus.

6  –  Boomsday  by Christopher Buckley.  Another of my favourite writers.  This is about an attempt to legalize voluntary euthanasia for senior citizens in the USA.  It’s a lot funnier than that one-sentence summary would suggest.

7  –  Born Standing Up  by Steve Martin.  An entertaining though brief (204 pages of not particularly small print) autobiography by Martin, who is described on the dust jacket as a writer, artist, actor and performer;  I should imagine that most people think of him with those categories  in reverse order.

8  –  Pompeii  by Robert Harris.  A brilliant novel about the seaside town of Pompeii on Italy’s west coast, and several characters  in particular,, in late August, 79AD, just as Mount Vesuvius was about to erupt and wipe out the town and almost everyone in it..

9  –  Kitchener’s Last Volunteer  by Henry Allingham with Dennis Goodwin.   Obviously Goodwin did most of the writing because Henry Allingham is 112 years old, born in June, 1896.   He is the only man still alive who volunteered to join the British Army at the outbreak of World War One in 1914 and one of only three WW1 British soldiers still living at this writing (the other two were drafted in 1917).  He served throughout the war and this is his story, taken down from his recollections. A vital historical document, secured for posterity before WW1 passes from living memory.

10  –  The Appeal  by John Grisham.   All Grisham’s books are good, and this is no exception.  It’s about an appeal against the decision in a lawsuit between a corporation and the people it apparently has wronged, and the lawyers and judges who are involved in the case.

11  –  Humble Pie  by Gordon Ramsay.  The chef’s own story, told in his own words, expletives included, about his life in a dysfunctional family, his abusive father, how he started a career in football (soccer, if you really insist), was injured, and went to catering school instead.  And 21 years later he is the most successful, and richest, chef in the world.  Some of his frank descriptions of his childhood experiences got him into trouble with some of his family members, but that is bound to happen when you don’t sugar coat things.

12  –  That’s Me in The Middle  by Donald Jack.  Until fairly recently the nine novels about Bartholomew Bandy were out of print but I’m glad to say that several have been reissued by a Canadian publisher and I have managed to get hold of them all.  This is the second volume, about a WW1 pilot from Ottawa who manages against all expectation to become a war hero.  War isn’t normally an amusing subject but this book manages to make it so without indulging in poor taste.
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