Christmas Reading

My Christmas stocking was sadly empty of books this year (don't ask!) leaving me nothing to review. Instead, here's a mention of some of the books I gave to others. My mother received the very well reviewed autobiography by Mary Soames, Churchill's daughter, of the years with her parents up until her marriage. Angus has enjoyed The Private Eye Annual 2011, a Christmas stocking staple in our family which has caused much sniggering and outright guffawing over the holiday period. You sort of feel that this year was the year that Private Eye was at its zenith with the closure of the News of the Screws (in fact, I'm off shortly to have a quick look at the Private Eye exhibition at the V&A before it closes next week). Angus also received (perhaps worryingly from his 12 year old sister) that student staple, The Hungoevr Cookbook (sic). For Laura, Far From Home by Na'imba B Robert, a young adult novel set in Rhodesia and then, forty years later, in Zimbabwe which I picked from this review on Ladybookbird. As a committed Sherlock Holmes fan, she was thrilled with The House of Silk: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz which I suspect we may all read. For Derek, as well as Alice Oswald's Memorial (see Books at my bedside), as a Mac addict, he had to be given hastily produced biography of Steve Jobs and his annual Christmas fix of Slightly Foxed which is a delightful quarterly compendium of reading, sold in the Kew Bookshop. Oh, and we all ate too much and did too little.

The Sense of an Ending

The book group assembled this week and decided that The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes was not really an appropriate read for a Christmas meeting; cheerful, festive and celebratory it is not. My previous post had resulted in two emails in quick succession suggesting, uncharitably, that the book itself was to blame for my memory lapse. In fact, having read it twice (as had my mother who joined us for the evening) I felt more satisfied than I had after my first read through and others suggested that they might read it again. There was a view that it was a little like On Chesil Beach whereby one felt unsated at the end (despite the very clever twist which none of us saw coming).

There was a general feeling that, whilst good, this book was not outstanding and we wondered whether we had all been taken in by the publisher's hype and the Booker furore. But then, how to explain the reviews which are almost universally eulogistic? Had the reviewers fallen for the hype too and were we being manipulated? Was it all a push to get Julian Barnes the prize?

We concluded that the very dullness and ordinariness of Tony and his life, whilst purposeful within the novel, was unsatisfying. We went on to discuss whether we always need or expect characters to be interesting or stimulating. Was the very point of Tony that he was neither? We talked about memory, perceptions, and the way in which shared experiences can provoke differing recollections. Was the book too short - someone said it was like a draft for a longer novel - and there was a sense that every character was underdeveloped; but was this the point? This lead to a wider consideration of the criteria for the Booker prize - there are few - and the constitution of the panel which this year looks pretty impressive and positively attractive with the addition of Dan Stevens (sigh!).

Lack of inspiration and a certain weariness brought on by the excesses of the season meant that we have agreed to free reading over the Christmas holidays with a view to choosing a classic when we meet at Maria's in January.

A senior moment or a Kindle moment?

Oh dear, how to explain this without sounding really stupid. I resolved this week to read A Sense of an Ending for next week's book group meeting and so went to download it onto my Kindle. Not entirely to my surprise, it was already there; I had obviously thought about reading it before. And so I started to read. It felt a little familiar from the start but I assumed that I'd heard extracts on the radio in the pre or post Booker publicity storm. And so I read on. Eventually, about one third through the book I realised that it was familiar because, prepare to be shocked, I had read it before. I have no memory of where or when. What an admission. Now, a few days on, I have determined that this is less of a senior moment than a Kindle moment. I love my Kindle but I'm blaming it for this incident. The problem with a Kindle is you have no mental image of a book - of how thin or thick it is, the illustration on the cover and the blurb on the back, the font or the feel of it. After all, it couldn't be my memory that's at fault, could it?