How do you select the books you read? For me, reviews certainly influence what I buy, especially those in the weekend edition of the Financial Times or Sunday’s New York Times.  Advertisements on bookselling websites have no sway whatsoever and I’m almost allergic to the clumsy “if you liked this, you’ll love this” trick that the likes of Amazon.com seem to think is so clever and influential.  Serendipity plays an occasional part, as does the guidance of friends, many of whom are voracious readers.  Their tastes and mine don’t seem to overlap very much but I’m always keen to hear what they recommend.  When one of those friends gave me A Town Like Alice for my birthday and said it was one of her all-time favorites, I was intrigued to read it.  Other than a vague awareness of it and its author, Nevil Shute, I knew nothing.

I can see now why my friend thinks so highly of it. The story it tells is a powerful one and its impact is all the greater because Shute’s style is so readable.  In some respects it’s clearly a product of the late 1940s, not least in its uncomfortable descriptions of the Japanese in Malaya during the Second World War and of the Australian aborigines in the years immediately after. But it’s far more than a quaint and entertaining period piece.  The character of Jean Paget, moving as she does from the drudgery of wartime London to the cruelties of detention in occupied Malaya and then to the Australian outback in the years after the conflict, is an extraordinary precursor of the strong, independent women everyone takes for granted in fiction today.

“Accidental incest. It’s a problem here”.  Quite an opening to a conversation, don’t you think?  Sitting at a bar in the center of Reykjavik, I was introduced by a business acquaintance to one of the least expected hazards of living in a country with fewer than 400,000 people and with a long history of isolation from the rest of the world.  Of course, Icelanders, an imaginative and ingenious bunch in my experience, have a solution to the tricky problem of inadvertently propositioning a close relative in a bar: a smartphone app that displays your lineage (back to the 9th century in the case of my acquaintance) and tells you if you’re related to the man or woman to whom you’re attracted.  Clever?  Yes, of course, but Icelanders seem to me like pretty resourceful and pragmatic people, so not a great surprise.

It was De Montherlant who famously wrote “Happiness writes in white ink on a white page“.  He might have said the same thing about beauty because I find it very difficult to describe Iceland. Stunning. Unique. Unforgettable. That just about does it.  Anything more tends to sound trite and unnecessary.  Of all the places I’ve visited, only New Zealand gets close for scenic beauty.  Vivid green, mossy plateaus stretching towards ice-covered mountains, beaches of black sand, stunning waterfalls, and bubbling hot springs: these are the treasures and memories of Iceland.  That app was pretty impressive, too.

Sometimes the pleasure of reading fiction is very simple: immersion in a good story skillfully told.  That was certainly true with Anne Griffin’s debut novel, an advance copy of which I was given by a publisher friend in London recently.  He warned me that the story would grab me and not let go, and he was right.  On the long flight home, I wasn’t tempted for a moment to watch movies or take a nap, engrossed as I was in a tale about family, aging, bereavement and love.

Maurice Hannigan, 84 years old, a wealthy Irish farmer and landowner, sits at a hotel bar reminiscing about his life and the five people who made it meaningful, raising a glass to each of them in turn.  Not long widowed, Maurice has set his affairs in order and it’s time for the final reckoning.  Love, loss, greed, and regret: all loom large in Maurice’s long monologue as his memory stretches back through the years.

This is a very assured first novel by an author who’s a natural storyteller.  It won’t win awards; those tend to be in the gift of judges who admire stylistic tricks or linguistic flair.  It will, however, delight readers who love a good tale about the important things in a life.

Almost thirty years have passed since I was last in Canterbury.  My memories of the city are few and fuzzy and only the magnificent cathedral stands out clearly when I try to recollect my previous visit.  A lovely late summer weekend of blue skies and warm sunshine was the perfect backdrop for my return recently.

The sheer number of buildings of outstanding historical and architectural importance in Canterbury is remarkable.  The cathedral, a World Heritage site and the mother church of Anglicanism, is, of course, a treasure and one of the most important religious buildings in the world.  I’ll be dedicating a future post to this extraordinarily beautiful and impressive work of art and faith.  It’s the appropriate and stunning starting point for anyone who loves historic buildings but the city has so much more to offer.  Medieval parish churches, ancient city walls (parts of which date to Roman times). and an extraordinary richness of vernacular architecture make Canterbury a place in which history lives and breathes very vividly.  I’m likely to visit many times in the years ahead and I’m already looking forward to what I’ll discover.

A recent visit to Dia:Beacon, one of several I’ve made in the past ten years, gave me a new appreciation of the art of the curator.  The sheer size of the space poses difficult questions: how to divide the cavernous interior and how to organize the flow between the spaces to navigate visitors around such a diverse collection.  What struck me during my most recent visit was the agility and intelligence of the curators in their management of the space and the exhibits.

The collection itself continues to be an intriguing one.  A significant number of the pieces displayed feel safe and accessible, almost decorative.  There’s an emphasis on color or its absence, for example in the selection of works by Dan Flavin, Anne Truitt, Blinky Palermo and others.  The whole thing can begin to feel like a monument to the safer end of the 20th century canon until demanding individual pieces by the likes of Bruce Nauman suddenly jolt you out of the comfortable familiarity of Richard Serra and On Kawara.

Every visit to Dia:Beacon reminds me of what a treasure it is: the galleries, the space overall, the grounds, and even the first-rate bookstore.  It’s a place with just enough surprises to never feel completely familiar.

The hordes of young people who still aspire to working in the publishing industry have dreams that look a lot like the professional life lived by Bob Gottlieb.  Over several decades working at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, Gottlieb shaped the books, careers, and occasionally the lives of many writers.  Some, such as Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien, and John Le Carré, were literary heavyweights.  Others were stars of a different kind: Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Bill Clinton, for example.

Avid Reader, Gottlieb’s autobiography, manages to avoid the gossipy character and self-satisfied tone of many memoirs of the publishing industry.  In part, that’s because he realizes how fortunate he was in his choice of career and is endearingly modest about his achievements.  His mantra, that it’s the authors and the books that matter, tends to underplay the real contribution he made to some wonderful books, a contribution most of his admiring authors were more than happy to acknowledge.

I would have liked more detail about the process of editing and Gottlieb’s approach to it.  He was (and still is) an extremely accomplished editor.  Avid Reader, entertaining and informative as it is, never quite explains the “secret sauce”.

The books I discover and buy are rarely those displayed on the table-tops of bookstores but very occasionally, among the overstocked dross, a gem catches my eye.  That happened recently in a store in Chelsea Market when I spotted The Last Interview and Other Conversations.  What a find that proved to be.

The book collects four interviews given by James Baldwin between 1961 and 1987, the last one recorded just a few months before he died in Provence. They cover the preoccupations of his life and his work: the state of America, relationships between the races there, and the condition of being an exile.  Along the way, there are some wonderful anecdotes and vignettes, of Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, and Richard Wright among others. The distinctiveness and power of Baldwin’s voice – and the fierce independence of his mind and spirit – shout down through the years in these conversations.  “I don’t see anything in American life to aspire to.  Nothing at all.  It’s all so very false. So shallow, so plastic, so morally and ethically corrupt”.

What comes across so clearly in these transcripts is how passionate, uncompromising, and eloquent a witness he was in the world.  At the end of the interview with Studs Terkel, Baldwin said “I want to be an honest man.  And I want to be a good writer“.  He was both and how lucky we are that he was.

“It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.  The daily news fills one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise …”

Philip Roth wrote these words in 1961.  They are a reminder that the ability of American reality to disgust, to appall, and to confound didn’t begin with the election of Trump. One of the great achievements of Michiko Kakutani’s new book, The Death of Truth, is to hold up to our eyes two complementary truths: politicians lying and distorting for their own purposes is nothing new (think of Bush and his cabal justifying the war in Iraq); and the Trump administration’s mendacity is at a level so unparalleled that it represents a threat to the future of American democracy itself.

The central point of the book is simple enough.  Trump’s relentless lies add up to a planned and systematic distortion of reality and a carefully constructed narrative designed to exploit the fears and prejudices of his supporters. Deploying powerful technological tools unavailable to the ideologues of the past – right and left, fascist and communist – and aided by the trolls and bots of hostile foreign actors, Trump has tapped into segregated America’s relativism and narcissism to advance an Orwellian program designed to centralize power and wealth in the hands of a small minority.  Kakutani offers few remedies to withstand the onslaught: don’t give in to cynicism and defeatism, stand up for the institutions that have served America so well and for so long (especially a free press), and commit to the pursuit and expression of truth.  That last part looks especially tricky right now …

As you would expect from someone as well-read as Kakutani, the range of sources deployed to support her arguments is wide and varied but this is no dry academic thesis. There’s no attempt here to be cool, distant, and dispassionate.  This isn’t the calm and measured analysis of the Trump presidency that will come in time.  It’s a book hot with outrage and incredulity. That might prove to be its lasting value: a passionate but coherent indictment of terrible and dangerous times written up-close while the storm is raging around us.

Warlight is only the second novel by Michael Ondaatje I’ve ever read.  Like millions of others, I loved The English Patient when it was published in 1992 and remember my appreciation of it being deepened by the Oscar-laden film adaption starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche I saw a few years later. Fulsome reviews led me to his newest book.  It’s set in London in the years immediately following the second world war and is narrated by Nathaniel, a boy who, along with his sister, is abandoned mysteriously by his parents and left in the care of a collection of strange, elusive figures.  The care provided, if care it is, is minimal.  Nathaniel abandons school for a menial job in a London hotel and shady, nighttime dealings on London’s rivers and canals, ferrying undocumented greyhounds to illegal race tracks.  A sudden and violent encounter re-unites him with his mother, now revealed as an important figure in Britain’s secret intelligence operations in post-war Europe.

It was the dreamlike atmosphere of Warlight that stayed with me in the days after I finished reading it, the eeriness of postwar London’s rivers and bombed-out streets.  Something elusive and slippery pervades and dominates and that felt right for a novel that seems to me to be about how and what we remember and how memories, the ones we choose to recall and those we try to forget or ignore, make up so much of who we are.

Fifty years ago, a little boy, uncomfortable in his new shoes and unfamiliar tie, stood in a small village churchyard in West Cork and watched while his favorite uncle posed with his new bride for their wedding pictures.  From where he stood the boy could see clearly the church in which his grandfather and father had been baptized and the school house in which both had studied. The newly-married couple, both more than six feet tall with the black hair and blue eyes common in that place, looked like glamorous giants to the little boy, who blushed and fidgeted under the attention of relatives and family friends he hardly knew.

In the passing half century, the little boy grew, as little boys tend to do.  The much-loved uncle and aunt aged, as uncles and aunts tend to do, acquiring white hair along the way but keeping the clear blue eyes. The school had been extended.  The simple church, unchanged, now the setting for the latest in a long line of family weddings that have been held there since that day fifty years ago.  The bride, tall, black-haired and beautiful – just as her mother had been.  Permanence and change, side by side as they always are.

Names matter here.  Family names – surprisingly few – that root you in a place and connect you to others, the living and the long dead.  Personal names handed down from generation to generation, some – Cornelius and Florence, for instance – surprising to outsiders.  And ancient place names, individual parishes and farms, places of sad departures and longed-for returns.  Dromkeal and Corran, Farranfadda and Derrynakilla. Places marked by no signposts and separated by old stone walls, but distinct nonetheless through centuries of comings and goings, stories and memories.

Weddings here are uncommon reunions of the far-scattered and the local, of those who wouldn’t leave and those who couldn’t return, and celebrations of something more than a couple’s love.  This is clan-gathering, memory-sharing, storytelling time in a place everyone calls home.