Back in the winter of 2008, just before Christmas, I watched the BBC adaptation of Henning Mankell’s Wallander detective novels. Sufficiently impressed, I worked my way through the books (all ten of them!) plus a collection of short stories. It also engendered a desire to visit Sweden which was never realised, poor ex-student as I was back then.
Once the tranche of Wallanders was finished, I moved on. I read a few more ‘Scandi-noir’ novels – so many in fact that the quality inevitably dropped and I was a little turned off by them. I then discovered Commissario Montalbano and my attention turned to Sicily.
It wasn’t until a chance remark from my sister about a vague wish to visit Stockholm that I thought about Sweden again. And then, in the curious way that the mind works, things went in reverse. The urge to visit Sweden, Skane, Ystad resurfaced and so I went back to the books. Starting again from the very beginning, I am now re-reading the Wallander novels.
It occurred to me that with the benefit of reading the books twice several years apart (as well as watching TV adaptations), now was a good time to start writing some book reviews again. There’s no guarantee of length (or quality) and they won’t appear with any predictable frequency or regularity, but they will appear, promise.
It’s difficult to know where to begin when writing about a book of this magnitude. By the time I reached the end I could barely remember how it began. A lot of the detail was lost to me, but nevertheless I felt like I had learned a great deal simply by reading this book.
This is possibly the shortest novel I’ve read for a long time, if not the shortest ever. It clocked in at less than a hundred pages and that’s one of the main reasons it was read in less than a day.
Following last year’s trip to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I had a heightened degree of respect for VVG. I invested in this biography more for the pictures than the text but both were very satisfying.
It’s much easier to write a critical review of a book than to pin down exactly why it is that I love one. This falls in to the latter category. Over the course of ten or eleven chapters, ADB spends time with a range of people in different jobs and tries to explain the value as well as the costs of working life. He manages to produce a book that is amusing, thought-provoking and in places quite moving. His skill lies in presenting the people in a non-judgmental way, whilst at the same time revealing quite intimate details of their working lives and personalities. I’m preparing to have a clear-out of my books soon and will only keep those which I intend to read again. This will definitely be kept as I think it is the sort of book that can be read repeatedly, at different stages of life, and each time will reveal different things to the reader. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
As always, following a great book is a poisoned chalice. So now what I tend to do is grab a book I know and love to ease the transition into the next book. That way, my craving for something new outweighs the desire for something good and allows me to run the risk of drawing a dud from the ever-present pile of unread stuff. On this occasion, I chose to re-read James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, his reimagining of the events leading up to the assassination of JFK. As ever, he gets you involved with some of the most amoral and/or repulsive sleazebags I’ve encountered in literature and keeps you turning those pages until you reach the end. I’m still in a state of uncomprehending awe at his ability to weave together the thoughts and actions of half-a-dozen or more characters (some of them real and high-profile) into an entirely plausible narrative.
In a few weeks’ time, we will be visiting Rome for the first time. I’m very excited about it as I have heard almost exclusively good things about the city. I’ve also had an urge to visit Italy for several years and this will be the moment at which intention becomes act. I am really determined to enjoy the visit but at the same time concerned that I am building myself up for almost inevitable disappointment. Therefore it was of great interest to me that ADB had written a book on the subject of travel – why we do it, how we do it, the ways in which we get it wrong and what we might do to enjoy our travels more.
Wednesday 3rd December – Wednesday 10th December
This was a bit of treat with the rest of my leaving-present voucher. It had first caught my eye in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam back in the spring.
I don’t think I’m stumbling across anything new when I say that certain writers write a certain way. I don’t think George Pelecanos is capable of writing anything other than a crime novel that ends in a violent shoot-out (and the bad guy inevitably dies), and I don’t think Jonathan Wilson is capable of writing in a different style from this. It suffers from the same flaws as ‘Nobody Ever Says Thank You’ but has the same redeeming qualities too. As ever, the level of research that has gone into this book makes me wonder if Wilson ever sleeps (knowing as I do that he combines his time between South America, Africa, the UK, editing the Blizzard magazine and writing for any sports website/publication that will pay him) and there is lots of interesting information conveyed to the reader throughout.
This came highly recommended by Emma and she was right on the money. It very rapidly had me hooked to the point that I think I read it in about five large chunks rather than steadily over the course of the ten days. The story is not what I would usually read in some ways, but that meant it was a refreshing change rather than a strange, foreign experience. I would definitely recommend it to virtually anyone as a very good thriller.
Tuesday 18th November -Wednesday 3rd December 
Phil's Space 