Two Besides - Alan Bennett

 

One always needs a bit of Alan Bennett in life. And there is nothing more useful (and simultaneously easy to read while remaining meaningful) than his talking heads. 

I read this book a few months ago, and unsurprisingly I have forgotten about the story of the two monologues, but I do remember the feelings: looking at people in their daily lives, reading about the objectionable things they do, seeing how they justify and absolve themselves, and then wondering whether I should cast some sort of judgement on them or not. 

Oddly enough, what I do remember best is the preface written by one of Bennett's longest serving collaborators (Nicholas Hytner). That was one of the most beautiful accounts of the impact of COVID-19 and how some people in the entertainment industry did their utmost best to keep on doing their jobs, in one way or another, in the face of unprecedented adversity. 

Yellow Dog - Martin Amis

 

Wow. Just wow. Not a good wow. A bad wow. This book is definitely a worthy candidate for worst book I've ever read. 

It was bought for 50p at the local farm years ago, but we definitely overpaid for it. 

It's disjointed, deeply unfunny, seriously self-absorbed and simply, quite frankly, uninteresting. Perhaps Amis was trying to be clever and put together a bunch of odd bits that he had flying around his office, or maybe he thought that his fame would allow him to publish anything, but wow (again) this book was bad. 

In the Beauty of the Lilies - John Updike

 

One of those books that had been sitting of a shelf in LSE's Shaw Library (a place where nobody goes except for taking a nap, clearly) untouched for a good 20 years until I decided to grab it. 

Having only read a couple of books by Updike, but having really enjoyed them both, I didn't hesitate to borrow this book once I saw it (also because I do love epic family histories). 

All the four sections as masterfully written (you don't say...), but not all of them are easy to approach. The initial one, frankly, was a bit of a slog. While the topic was really interesting (the loss of faith, and subsequent loss of income, of a reverend) I was finding myself lost in the depth of the theological discussions that were being presented. The second section then picked up considerably, with the story of a man who just wanted to live a serene life, followed by a third that kept my attention because of the many Hollywood references and a fourth one that felt so contemporary it could have actually been written by Jonathan Franzen. All in all, a great book that made me think also of Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 and John Williams's Stoner