Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

A 30p investment at the Barbican library worth – at the very least – every penny!

Jokes aside, Cloud Atlas was a rather enjoyable read, but also a very uneven one. Some of its chapters were brilliant (Timothy Cavendish and his misadventures in the nursing home, Massa Ewing sailing in the Pacific and facing death, Robert Frobisher writing the Cloud Atlas Sextet), while others were, well, not so brilliant.

Luisa Rey’s story reads like little more than a Tom Clancy novel (if you are looking for Californian greed and corporate aggression I think you are much better off opening a token Ellroy novel), the interview to Sonmi-451 would probably leave Vonnegut of Dick rather unimpressed, and I’m not exactly sure of where I stand on Sloosha Crossing as, despite me being a pseudo-bilingual (if not trilingual) reader, I really struggled with the imagined dialect of the future…

It is a best-seller after all, but one that I’m really glad to have read (although it’s not going to enter my list of favourite books anytime soon).

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every second-hand bookshop, book-swap shelf and charity website will throw copies of Pride and Prejudice at you for no more than 50p.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is kind of a big deal – I mean, after all she is on the 10£ note.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice is for a lot of its readers one of the greatest books ever written, that its reflections on marriage, love and class are deep and still really quite current.

For me, though, it is a truth personally acknowledged that this book has very few surprises and that is ultimately, well, fairly boring. And I apologize for this opinion of mine to all its admirers.

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon

I very rarely read bestsellers, even more rarely fairly unsuccessful second books of bestselling authors, but mom told me to read this so I did!

After not having liked The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (not the book, not the play, really nothing about it) I had extremely low expectations and, were it not for the fact that mom was insisting and that I am running out of paperbacks at home, I probably wouldn't have opened this book.

But A Spot of Bother turned out to be an extremely pleasant read, although not exactly one of particular literary significance. The story of George's family is greatly entertaining, and some passages err on the "laugh out loud" side (in particular the discovery of his wife's adultery), but others (like so many things around the wedding day) are a bit too caricatural and at the end of the book I'm honestly not sure what the reader is left with.

Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

I think I first got a copy of Angela's Ashes as a gift from one of my seniors in my Canadian high-school 12 years ago. I then handed it over to one of my juniors without reading it. And ever since I kept on finding it, unsurprisingly, in all sorts of second-hand bookshops. I think the copy I ended up reading was coming from the Stratford Books for Free, but I might be wrong. Anyway, as I am now finally running out of paperbacks so I decided it was time for me to read this.

And it was, well, alright. Some parts of it were positively interesting and entertaining, in particular when young Frank starts to find a way to make money, but the novelty of some others wore off rather quickly (I understand the author’s life was marked by his father’s alcoholism, but hundreds of pages of stories centred on various stages of drunkenness bored me a bit after a while).

I’ve read that a number of people questioned the truthfulness of the account, but I don’t really see the need for that. After all these are childhood memories, and if I think back to my own childhood I distinctly remember having tamed a lion in the mean streets of Bra, Italy, having arm-wrestled (and won) against Olympic athletes at the peak of their fitness, and having read the Odyssey in its original version when I was 5. But I might have got some of the details a bit wrong…

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

I figured that, since I’ve become British (ha! It had to happen at some point…) I might as well read some Dickens. I always imagined that I would end up starting with Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, but Great Expectations was my consolation prize from my most fruitless trip to the Amnesty International Blackheath book sale ever, and so my decision was made.

Bizarrely, it took me almost a month to read this book, but I’ll blame the 55 essays that I had to mark in that period for that (and after 7 years of teaching, they have a tendency to all mush into one gigantic essay whose overarching argument is that “yes, Germany did cause WWI, but also the other countries had their responsibilities”…).

As far as feuilletons go, this book made me rather happy (and made me want to be just like Joe – who, like my mom always says about my grandfather and his fellow peasants, looked absolutely natural and beautiful in his everyday work-clothes, and much less so in his Sunday best). As far as feuilletons go, the plot wasn’t always dreadfully banal (that said, the ease with which the characters’ lives intertwine over the years is obviously rather impressive, or perhaps perplexing). And, as far as feuilletons go, it was surprisingly funny.