Absolute Beginners - Colin MacInnes

Yes! So very, very yes. This book for me was everything I expected The Catcher in the Rye to be, and then some. I bought it without having watched the movie beforehand (luckily, judging by the reviews) but after having listened to the Bowie song hundreds of times.

The narrator is the kind of kid I'd like to think I would have been in 1958 - argumentative but caring, stupidly confused but well-meaning. The entourage of characters is of the highest of qualities, as is his rather unique relation with his dad.

And again, this was an insight into a way of writing dialogues that I had never been exposed to before. And the "benefit" of the riots at the end added an important extra layer to the novel.

If Up the Junction has been the disappointment of the year so far, Absolute Beginners is probably the pleasant unexpected surprise.

Up the Junction - Nell Dunn

Just the quickest of posts to say that I really, really, really wanted to like this book. For the Squeeze song, and for the fact that it looked so very promising from its synopsis.

And instead I really didn't. Some stories were just not interesting enough for me (I'm probably a bad person, but the shallowness and uncouthness of some of the characters really got on my nerves), and others were just too much (the abortion one, for instance).

A shame. Possibly, given the expectations, the most disappointing book of the year so far.

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

Ok, at this point I may really stop reading Graham Greene novels. I just couldn't bring myself to do it after the mediocrity of Monsignor Quixote, but The End of the Affair is the real deal, and possibly the best Graham Greene I've ever read.

The twists of the plot are surprising and intriguing, the reader can sympathize with the main character without liking him (in my case the problem wasn't the affair, but his treatment of the private investigator), and the novel makes Clapham Common come alive in a remarkable way.

Also, the book is so good that I found, for once, that the frequent shifts of focus on Catholicism added to rather than detracted from the novel (something that, for instance, I found excessive in the case of Brighton Rock).

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon

Actually I take it back - over the last month or so I've read mostly books by black authors, not just a few. And The Lonely Londoners, much like Brixton Rock, deserves to be right up there.

In all honesty, I'm not quite sure why I had never even heard of Selvon, as this book is truly magnificent. Again, it's probably an easy sell for me as I love Brixton (or at least used to, when I was a pseudo-basketball player and I went there three times a week to train) and there is plenty of it, but to me the scenes with the greatest literary significance are the ones at Waterloo station, where the hopes and dreams of the recently landed clash with the acquired wisdom and shiftiness of the "old hands".

And, much like Brixton Rock, this book opened my eyes to an entirely different use of the English language and of writing dialogue.

Brixton Rock - Alex Wheatle

Let's all just take a second to admit that Brixton Rock is one of the best London novels ever written. 

It's witty, as one can guess by the title (the author after all even wrote East of Acre Lane).

It's sexy and twisted - I mean, the main character does fall in love with his newly found half-sister.

It's rock in an Hanif Kureishi kind of way, with chapter titles being those of songs from the 1970s and 1980s.

It's deep in its discussion of racial problems.

It's young and fresh, and the dialogues between characters feel remarkably natural.

And, crucially, it's set in Brixton, which by itself should be more than enough (though it's rather strage to think that the gentrified Brockwell Park where I've ran Parkrun and where people spend a lot of money to go the Lido is the same place where Brenton spends so much of his time in the novel).

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark

My wonderful employer gives us 100£ every year to spend on books that help us do our job - I argued that for my workshops on London I need to get ideas from books set in the city. Surprisingly, this long short worked (and thanks to Amazon I now have 20 extra books or so that should see me through the summer).

The Ballad of Peckham Rye made me really happy - it's not exactly great literature, but seeing the problems caused by immigrants (Scottish and Irish) that nowadays are no longer considered immigrants was truly interesting. Disclaimer - I'm an immigrant myself, though I have British nationality now because, you know, short-sighted policies, decisions, referenda etc.

Most of all, however, the book reminded me of how I love being able to visualize the places were a novel is set, and how wackily funny life can be in South London.

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

The last in a (short) series of books by black writers that I've read at the end of the spring, and the one I liked best together with Citizen.

Having outgrown magical realism - or at least thinking I have - I was afraid that the decision to turn the underground railroad into an actual railroad would have been too much, but instead it was done in such a way as to give a scarily thrilling impression of the experience of former slaves going from station to station.

So many passages are beautifully written, and even without being a historian you can guess that until Cora gets to the North she's never going to be safe in any state no matter how stable the situation seems to be (from that point of view, South Carolina almost made me gag).

Possibly the most enjoyable chapters were the ones dedicated to the side characters that break the narrative of the main story - and I actually came to the conclusion that the only one who ever felt truly free was Mabel, Cora's mom, in those fleeting moments outside the plantation.