26 Books

Published in 1930, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying follows Anse Bundren, his sons and daughter on their journey to bury Addie, Anse’s wife and the childrens’ mother. The story is a patchwork of the viewpoints of 15 different characters, each of whose ‘narration’ is simply a stream-of-consciousness monologue. The effect is as entrancing as it is bewildering.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner
Vintage 1996, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

While there is much to admire in the novel – the strong evocation of place, for example, and the ear for country vernacular – it’s the unusual narrative technique that makes the greatest impression. Faulkner makes the reader work hard; his characters do not provide helpful recaps of prior events or of their relationships with one another, which is exactly how real people think. The result is a story that emerges slowly, with questions often remaining unanswered for long periods and the reader forced to fill in the blanks with guesswork.

Though her name is never mentioned in the text, the murderer of the title is Myra Hindley who, with her boyfriend Ian Brady, killed five children between 1963 and 1965. She died in late 2002, which is when this novel takes place. It follows Billy Tyler, the policeman tasked with standing guard in the mortuary on the night before Hindley’s funeral. Tyler’s wife doesn’t want him to go, fearing that Billy will somehow be spiritually corrupted. Billy sees it as just a job.

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2008, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

Still, the tension with his wife has Billy pondering their relationship as his 12-hour shift unfolds and the body he is guarding leads him inevitably to wondering about the nature of evil. He begins to consider the misdeeds from his own past and the times he was tempted to do worse. Are some people simply evil or are we all the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, Brady’s psychiatrist and professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, called a “concatenation of circumstances”?

I have an uneasy relationship with Don DeLillo’s work. Parts of Underworld, DeLillo’s masterpiece, are stunning, among the best prose that I’ve read. However, I just don’t find his characters convincing. They all sound the same and appear to be there not to have conversations but only to express ideas to each other, ideas that aren’t really listened to because characters in DeLillo are always talking at crossed purposes. But I persist because DeLillo’s reputation is such that I feel I must be missing something.

White Noise (Picador Books)

Don DeLillo
Picador 1986, Paperback, 326 pages, £7.99

To White Noise, then, which was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel and tells the story of a university professor who runs a course in Hitler studies and lives with his wife, their son and their children from assorted previous relationships. The professor, Jack, and his wife, Babette, are both strongly afraid of death and obsessed with the idea of which of them will die first.

I got Jill Mansell’s Perfect Timing free with some magazine years ago and it remains one of my favourite uplifting books. Like Jilly Cooper, Mansell excels at capturing people, and makes implausible scenarios seem totally likely.

Take a Chance on Me

Jill Mansell
Headline Review 2010, Paperback, 416 pages, £7.99

Take A Chance On Me is really enjoyable for about three chapters and then dips down into autopilot. Mansell makes an engaging male character (saddled with the hideous lothario name of Johnny LaVenture), makes him warm and witty and generally nice, and then makes him hop around until our heroine deigns to fall into his arms. I know this is always going to happen and it’s not rocket science, but it helps if the story along the way makes its fantasy vaguely realistic, and this may as well be actual Mamma Mia! instead, in which case God help us all.

Reading Angela Carter’s lovely descriptions of south London earlier this year had made me realise how little I read about contemporary London, and this really fitted the bill nicely.

Shop Girl Diaries (Salt Modern Lives)

Emily Benet
Salt Publishing 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where I live, through the @Se1 account. Even though it’s square-shaped. For some reason this really grinds my gears. I like books to be book-shaped, otherwise I feel like I’m reading an accordion or a copy of Meg and Mog. Also, I worry about dropping it in the bath.

Hands up – I absolutely judged this book by its cover. I was hoping Jacqueline Winspear would be some soupy-eyed matron from the 1930s a la Agatha Christie, and deliver me a nice, unchallenging 30s-set murder mystery. The cover’s pastel pink for crying out loud.

Among the Mad

Jacqueline Winspear
John Murray 2010, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Anyway, it turns out the Kent-born Winspear is no such thing: she writes today, but now lives in California, where I hope she will soon develop soupy-eyes and a matronly attitude. And while Maisie Dodds is indeed set in the 1930s, it’s not fluffy and there’s very little 30s slang.

It’s probably a good thing that David Nicholls’ acting career didn’t take him stellar, because people adore his writing.(And how lucky is that, to have two talents to pick from?)

One Day

David Nicholls
Hodder Paperbacks 2010, Paperback, 448 pages, £7.99

And people will, and do, love One Day. Partly because that cheery orange and white cover is gracing every 3 for 2 stand in the United Kingdom and a 3 for 2 offer is basically a Decree From God, and partly because, in Emma, Nicholls has written one of the best characters of the last few years.

Nicholls’s lovely gimmick is that each chapter rejoins two old friends on the anniversary of their meeting at university and gives us snapshots of what they’re doing. Dexter, a good-looking bloke blessed with charm and luck, is an absolute pillock, and is to be tolerated only because his zingy, wry friend Emma is just the most wonderfully-written girl. I started reading it before bed and found it so easy to read and fun that I was pushing myself to read faster so that I could cheat sleep until I’d finished it.

The latest instalment of Charlaine Harris’s chatty, witty and hugely enjoyable Sookie Sackhouse novels comes with a clonking great fib on its front cover.

Dead in the Family

Charlaine Harris
Gollancz 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £14.99

Having spawned the just as enjoyable hit TV series, True Blood, the TV cast adorn the book’s cover despite, in this universe, one of them being dead and another not existing.

But no matter. What will matter is fans of the series launching into this one which would be a colossal mistake given this is number 10: Sookie’s story is miles ahead from the TV series, featuring fairies, werepanthers and others supernatural beasties that haven’t so much as shown up on the box yet.
So while fans of the show should head for the earlier novels (not to worry, they’re so crack-like you’ll rocket through them in a week), Dead in The Family is absolute bliss for established Sookie nuts.

This is a relief more than anything. Harris is a brilliant writer, but ten books is ten books and I was gnawing my nails with worry that, by now, she might have been hit by burnout and expectation (Janet Evanovich’s wonderful Stephanie Plum novels stopped being wonderful around book 10 and yet – grimace – they keep coming).

Fatherhood, it turns out, puts a big dent in your reading time.

The Great Gatsby (Penguin Popular Classics)

F Scott Fitzgerald
Penguin Classics 2007, Paperback, 192 pages, £2.00

As I’m sure that Ready or Not, Mr Croc doesn’t count towards the 26 I decided to rattle through a couple of books I’ve had in the pile for some time, the first being the Great Gatsby. I’ve been rattling considerably more slowly than I had expected.

Pony books get a terrible press. They summon up thoughts of pink-faced young gels in breeches smacking crops against their boots and “winning through” to win umpteen rosettes in implausibly competitive country shows.

Well, Thelwell’s certainly full of these caricatures, and the frankly terrifying Saddle Club series from the 90s scared any competitive edge out of my horse-mad tween self, but pony books from the 40s through to the 60s are wonderful, which was why it was so nice to find a couple hanging around my parents’ house.

As a child, Pink Pony was one of my favourites, up there with St Clare’s and Malory Towers as a totem of a childhood that was far removed from my own suburban London life. Half-French October (brilliant name) spies a beautiful strawberry roan foal in a field one day. Her parents have promised her a horse of her own and she talks them into letting her own it and break her in herself. Bearing, in mind she’s barely 12 when this pony appears, what 12-year-old do you know who could a) commit do that sort of challenge and b) what parents now would let her? Let alone having a pony in the first place, bloody expensive things that they are.