What I Read Before My Christmas Holidays

Seeing as the Revolutionary Road post provoked some enthusiastic commenting, I thought I'd do some more book ones. A Christmas Holiday book round-up is to follow. This is "What I Read Before My Christmas Holidays, Going Back As Far As October, If This Post Is To Be Believed."

1. Michael Ondaatje 'In The Skin Of A Lion'. Read this one in Uganda and left it with Gandalady who is currently enjoying it, I think. The precursor to The English Patient, it is a beautiful, emotional read and somewhat easier to understand than that book (which I consider to be a masterpiece miserably traduced by the film, even though it is a good film, but honestly, The English Patient is such an extraordinary novel: you don't even know which of the characters the narrator is until about halfway through. Start with Lion, then read EP. Golly, what a long bracket.) It's about a young Canadian man who falls in with, and in love with, various transients, immigrants and a former nun. Rather magical.

2. Margaret Atwood 'Moral Disorder'. Weirdly marketed as short stories when in fact it's a novel made up of individual episodes, telling a woman's life story. I wouldn't query the 'short story' designation except that far more people read novels than short stories, so you do wonder why they'd choose to call it stories when they could avoid that particular sales-killer. Anyway it's the usual deal from Atwood, subtle and sly and funny in surprising places, not her best perhaps, but mid-level Atwood is better than most other things. Much better than 'The Penelopiad', which will forever inhabit that sad dark place in my mind reserved for bad books by good authors.

3. EM Forster 'Where Angels Fear To Tread'. God, Forster is good. I hadn't bothered reading him much before because it all looked a bit worthy and minor Edwardian yawn yawn, but he's intelligent and funny and knows a lot about human nature, and his style is wonderfully economical. 'Where Angels Fear To Tread' is the story of a woman who goes on holiday to Italy and falls in love with a younger Italian man, scandalising her family. It's very good, but pales in comparison to the glory of the similarly-themed 'Room With A View', which is a marvelous, "what, you haven't read Room With A View, then what the hell HAVE you been reading" type book. I am determined to read all of Forster's novels, which sounds more impressive than it is. He only wrote seven.

4. Penelope Fitzgerald 'The Blue Flower'. Started. Panicked. Stopped. Complained to the person who recommended it to me. Got told off. Tried again. And bloody hell, it only turned out to be brilliant. It's a novel based on a true story about an 18th century writer who fell in love with a twelve-year-old girl. Believe me it is so much less yucky than that makes it sound. In fact it's a stunning evocation of life for a certain class of German family in the 18th century, blissfully free of cloying period detail and yet somehow magically evocative of the time and the place. The characterisation is magnificent, there isn't a drop of sentimentality anywhere in the book, and the whole thing is underpinned by a cunning, sharp sense of humour, even where the material would seem not to be humorous at all. And good luck getting to the end of the book without falling in love with the twelve-year-old yourself.

And if you are only going to read one of these books, make it... The Blue Flower.