Holiday Reading

Just back from a fortnight in Italy and have found my holiday reading transformed by ownership of a Kindle; last holiday, Doug and I needed a small suitcase just for our books - this year we each took our Kindles and dropped our luggage weight by about 15kg.

I bought a whole slew of books from Amazon before we left, some from recommendations on other blogs, some because I like the authors' other work and some because they were cheap (lets be honest - 99p for a novel is pretty good going). It also allowed me the luxury of being selective and I was able to give up on a couple of my purchases after a few chapters (happily, the 99p ones).

Anyway, in no particular order:-

Last Train From Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Set partly in Italy in the run up to WW2 and partly in modern day Dublin, it is the tale of Bella, a rather neurotic doctor's daughter, who becomes governess in the household of an aristocratic Italian. Her charge, Alex, is a strange child with obvious mental frailties and absentee parents; his mother is a wealthy German Jew, and as Mussolini's race laws take hold of the country, it falls to Bella to help him and his baby sister escape from fascist Italy.

I liked this book despite finding Bella rather tiresome, and I found the end of the story staying with me long after I'd finished reading. I liked the fact that there was no neat ending - the characters in the modern day do not find out the truth about what happened to the characters of 1938 - so often in a book like this, the author likes to tie up the "mystery" of the past for the characters in the present.

One Day by David Nicholls

I gave into the hype and bought this and I'm glad I did. To begin with, it resonated - I graduated from college a year after the main protagonists, so the films, the music, the tv, the politics that are background to the story are all familiar. Also, I worked for BBC TV in the 90s and so the character of Dex and all the people he works with are highly reminiscent of all the utter nobbers that I encountered over that decade.

I don't really think this is the wünder book that some people have described it as - I enjoyed it on the whole, but don't feel the need to eulogise about it's greatness to others.

The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimmler

Set in the Warsaw Ghetto this has the unusual premise of being a murder mystery. I felt that I could have read this book quite happily without the mystery being part of the novel - the description of Ghetto life in the years just before the Nazis mobilise their Final Solution is fascinating and moving. This was one of my 99p purchases - I would have been happy to have paid full price for it.

The Moment by Douglas Kennedy

I'm a sucker for Douglas Kennedy novels; in his earlier books he usually creates a situation for the hero or heroine that is so breathtakingly unfair that I feel like beating the books against the wall until all the nasty characters fall out :) The last couple that I have read, however, have moved away from this type of plot structure - possibly to their detriment, as I haven't enjoyed them quite as much. This has a good story - a love story told in flashback, set in West Berlin in 1984 - but I didn't find myself caring too much about the main characters and felt almost indifferent to the outcome. I did like the setting, however - a divided Berlin, just before the fall of the Wall, and descriptions of life on both sides of it.

The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato

A tale of two halves - one of which I enjoyed much more than the other. The present day story - a descendent of a famous Venetian glassmaker returning to the city of her birth to make a fresh start - was a bit dull, a bit obvious. But the tale of the famous glassmaker who deserts his city to make the mirrors in Versailles for Louis XIV was fascinating, as were the descriptions of 17th Century Venice.

The Boticelli Secret by Marina Fiorato

A bit of a curate's egg this one - too long by half, for a start, and all a bit silly and Dan Brown-ish. Also, if you have the Kindle version and aren't able to access the internet, you don't have a copy of Primavera to refer to - I'm sure it might have helped me enjoy this a bit more.

That said, I liked the main character of the book - a young Florentine prostitute - and the pace and feel of the story up until about two thirds of the way through. But then the plot twist (introduced in order to eventually facilitate a happy ending, I guess) is just so ridiculous that it spoils the story from then on.

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe

Totally dated but utterly fascinating. I was trying to imagine how it must have felt to have read this when it was first published - fairly shocking and revolutionary, I imagine - but it's probably not completely off the mark to describe it as a 1950s version of Sex and the City. Some excellent characterisation, particularly among the minor characters, although a rather limp ending.