Category: Books

Stradella (1909): Francis Marion Crawford

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★★★

There are many good reasons to choose a book, but doing so because the author shares his name with one of my favourite fictional characters is probably not one of them. Nevertheless, in this case it had a happy outcome. I stumbled across Stradella (1909) about a week ago, while looking for historical novels set in Venice to complement my visit to the Carnevale. I knew nothing about Francis Marion Crawford (although he was evidently very distinguished in his day) and so wasn’t expecting much. What I discovered was a charming historical romance which proved to be perfect material for holiday reading: undemanding, easy to dip into, and full of Baroque swashbuckling, love and intrigue.

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Royal Assassin (1996): Robin Hobb

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Robin Hobb © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

★★★★ ½

The Farseer Trilogy: Book II

Sometimes, at the close of a book, you feel almost physically drained. I had forgotten, quite forgotten, exactly how tough this series is: I can’t believe I was so young when I read it before. It’s harder and more brutal by far than the work of any other author I can remember reading, even more than George R.R. Martin, who is usually referenced as the example par excellence of an author who refuses to wrap his characters in cotton wool. The miraculous thing is that it all just binds you in to the story ever more tightly. There must be few mid-series books with such a raw ending, but at least the closing mood is one of mitigated triumph.

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Assassin’s Apprentice (1995): Robin Hobb

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Robin Hobb © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

★★★★★

The Farseer Trilogy: Book I

About a month ago, Janet asked me whether I’d ever read The Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb and the answer is a resounding yes, though I haven’t read it for many years. This was the perfect excuse for me to return to the series, because I wanted to see whether Hobb’s work really is as good as I remember. She has cast a very long shadow over my reading life: she was the first author I dared to write to, brimming over with clumsy childish enthusiasm: to my delight, she not only acknowledged my letter but sent me some signed stickers for my books. Although I try to avoid ‘favourites’ when I talk about reading, it’s safe to say there are few stories in the world that I love more than the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. I was given Assassin’s Apprentice for Christmas when I was twelve years old and was almost immediately gripped by the harsh, windswept world it described and by Hobb’s endearing protagonist.

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The Woman in the Dunes (1962): Kobo Abe

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★★

This was an impulse loan from the library, which caught my eye because I’d started looking through the shelves alphabetically, hadn’t read it and thought the cover was rather elegant. I’m fond of Murakami‘s particular brand of magical realism and wondered whether this book, with its stylised and rather otherworldly story, might offer a similar experience. The short answer is that it didn’t. The longer answer is that I really wish I hadn’t bothered, and that I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m simply not cut out to read existential fiction.

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The Name of the Wind (2007): Patrick Rothfuss

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★★★★

I don’t read as much fantasy as I did when I was a teenager, but I still enjoy being able to lose myself in other worlds now and again. Often I just return to the favourite books that are already on my shelves, but once in a while I take the plunge and try something new. It’s never without a hint of nervousness: it strikes me that in fantasy there’s so much more scope for things to go wrong. The task of building a plausible, solid and convincing world is that much more challenging than it would be in any other genre. So, with fantasy, I tend to hang back until the weight of acclaim turns a particular book into a must-read. Over the past year, I’ve probably seen The Name of the Wind in Waterstones at least a dozen times, and each time I picked it up, flicked through it, and put it back unconvinced. Over the Christmas holidays I finally caved in, and I’m so glad I did.

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Homer’s Daughter (1955): Robert Graves

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★★½

I discovered this on my last trip to the library and, in the thrill of finding a novel by Graves that I’d never even heard of, remembered a poem by Jo Walton which I’d read some months ago. There are few sensations to compare with suddenly finding a previously unknown book by an author you’re fond of. Like many people, I’ve read I, Claudius and Claudius the God, but I hadn’t realised that Graves had written any other fiction about the classical period.

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Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite (2011): Brian Sewell

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★★★★

Brian Sewell is now best known for being the art critic of the Evening Standard: ferociously knowledgeable, scrupulously precise and utterly intolerant of pretension. His exhibition reviews are the only ones I trust completely, and I should have read this first volume of his memoirs long before now; but I mistakenly assumed that it would be like the other art-world memoirs I’ve read. Those were dull, lifeless books, little more than a chance for the author to boast of his distinguished friends, settle scores with old enemies and rattle off a list of the famous paintings that he’s sold. I should have known better; and in any case, several people have recently urged me to read it – some struck by the elegance of the writing and others by Sewell’s brutal frankness.

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At Drake’s Command (2012): David Wesley Hill

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★★★

David Wesley Hill’s novel is the first in a planned series, which follows Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world through the eyes of the young cook and crew-member Peregrine James. We first meet Perry in Plymouth in November 1577, where he is being publicly whipped for a theft he didn’t commit. Determined to make a better life for himself, he talks his way onto the crew of the Pelican, which under the command of Francis Drake is said to be heading off on a trading voyage to Alexandria.

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Cloud Atlas (2004): David Mitchell

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★★★★ ½

I’m delighted to be able to kick off the New Year with a post on a real stunner of a book, which I expect will already be familiar to most of you. There are a few literary adaptations coming out in the cinema over the next couple of months and so in principle this gives me an opportunity to revisit the books that I have read and to track down those I haven’t. Cloud Atlas is one of those I hadn’t read before: it came out when I was at university, but I was never particularly attracted to it because all the reviews I read simply lost themselves in hyberbole about its conceptual brilliance and neglected to give me any real sense of the story. Eight years later, having found a copy for £1.50 in a charity shop, I’ve come to realise that actually the critics were right. The concept is brilliant.

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