[Bookpossum]

I'm being really prompt, as we have a big family celebration tomorrow, which will be a bit distracting. So here is my list - a mixture of books on my TBR list, and some I would like to revisit. I hope there are some items of interest there for you all.

Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim

Spoiler:

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.” (Goodreads)

Possession - A S Byatt

Spoiler:

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

Man Booker Prize Winner (1990) (Goodreads)

Graham Greene - Travels with my Aunt

Spoiler:

Described by Graham Greene as "the only book I have written just for the fun of it," Travels with My Aunt is the story of Hanry Pulling, a retired and complacent bank manager who meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. She soon persuades Henry to abandon his dull suburban existence to travel her way—winding through Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, and Paraguay. Through Aunt Augusta, one of Greene's greatest comic creations, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society; mixes with hippies, war criminals, and CIA men; smokes pot; and breaks all currency regulations.

Originally published in 1970, Travels with My Aunt offers intoxicating entertainment, yet also confronts some of the most perplexing human dilemmas. (Goodreads)

Andreï Makine - Le Testament Français
AKA Dreams of My Russian Summers

Spoiler:

Tells the poignant story of a boy growing up amid the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1960s and '70s, and of his extraordinary love for an elegant Frenchwoman, Charlotte Lemonnier, who is his grandmother.

Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte's narrow, flower-covered balcony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896, of the great Paris flood of 1910, of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress.

But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known, of famine and misery, of brutal injustice, of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband - his grandfather - a victim of Stalin's purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits, who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle, beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized, the boy weaves Charlotte's stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet, despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world, he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland. (Goodreads)

David Malouf - Dream Stuff

Spoiler:

Here are nine haunting stories from the award-winning author of Remembering Babylon, in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.

An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to "marry" vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word "woe." When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others.

Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, Dream Stuff reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts. (Goodreads)

Alice Munro - Friend of My Youth

Spoiler:

A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past - and instead discovering unsettling truths about a total stranger. The ten stories in this collection not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. (Goodreads)

V S Naipaul - The Mystic Masseur

Spoiler:

V S Naipaul's first novel - funny, endlessly inventive and brilliantly imagined.
The Mystic Masseur traces the story of Ganesh who, at the beginning of the novel, is a struggling masseur when 'masseurs were ten a penny in Trinidad'. From failed primary school teacher and masseur to author, revered mystic and MBE, his is a journey memorable for its hilarious and bewildering success.

Naipaul's clarity of style, humorous touch and powerful characterisation are all in evidence in this first book. This is an ideal beginning to readers new to Naipaul's writing. (Kobo)

Annie Proulx - That Old Ace in the Hole

Spoiler:

A richly textured story of one man's struggle to make good in the inhospitable ranch country of the Texas panhandle, told with razor wit and a masterly sense of place. 'An absolute corker of a novel which manages the dual feat of being a serious satire on the evils of global capitalism, and a personal comedy of Dickensian dimensions.' A N Wilson, Daily Telegraph

Some folks in the Texas panhandle do not like hog farms. But Bob Dollar, the newly-hired hog site scout for Global Pork Rind, intends to do his job. Bob must contend with tough men and women like ancient Freda Beautyrooms who controls a ranch he covets, and Ace Crouch, the windmiller who defies the hog farms. As Bob settles in at La Von Fronk's bunkhouse and lends a hand at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, he is forced to question everything. 'Proulx's own ace in the hole is her brilliance at evoking place and landscape. She sets about drawing the vast distances and parched flatlands of Texas with almost immeasurable skill.' Alex Clark, Guardian 'Amusing, intriguing and disturbing.' Mark Sanderson, Independent on Sunday 'A kind-hearted and intelligent novel.' Daily Telegraph 'Proulx has a first class eye and ear.' Adam Mars-Jones, Observer 'Brilliantly written.' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'Funny and heartfelt.' Scotsman. (Kobo)