Books:The Good.The Bad And The Unfinished

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It's been a while since I've done a post solely about books but then again it's unusual when I finish three in one day. The literary equivalent of waiting for buses.

So let's start with the good. Sue Townsend's The Public Confessions Of A Middle Aged Woman, a collection of her columns in the Sainsburys Magazine was a joy to read. With her trademark engaging humour she writes about subjects as varied as Vodka and car boot sales though tinged with sadness towards the end with the decline in her eyesight. It's the best book I've read this year.

It occurred to me as I was reading that she is the last writer that was liked by so many readers. When I say liked I mean that you can be an academic or a gardener, male or female,work in a petrol station or a rail station, work in London or her home city of Leicester and still feel that you can relate to what she's writing. Her recent death robbed us of a person who I think we now realise was a quiet British literary institution.

Just as Sue Townsend's book is the best I've read this year then Ali Smith's The Accidental is the worst. This book won the Whitbread book of the year in 2005. Whitbread own the coffee chain Costa which is why this prize has changed to the Costa book of the year. But either way it struck me that the judges must have been high on caffeine to have awarded this first prize.

As a parent in the beginning there's an incident that upset me and I almost put the book down. I wish now I had.

If I was to say to you that some important characters are called Magnus and Astrid but it's not set in Sweden then you'll have an idea of how pretentious this piece of work is. But this is not so much a novel of pretensions but a pretend novel. For the author does not hesitate in using a hundred words where ten would do. Somewhere there might be a short story that I wouldn't bother to read screaming to be set free.

The writing style is best described as a "stream of consciousness" but is more a stream of urine. It rambles around like an intellectual tramp and in the middle there is even pages of poetry for no good reason whatsoever.

As a reader the only pleasure I had from this book was the feeling of relief when it was finished.

The trouble with The Dirty Game by Andrew Jennings is that for all the goings on in FIFA that it goes into intricate detail to explain (and it's a book that you truly need to be paying attention to or else you'll be lost in all the dealings it goes into) the investigations are still ongoing. When I finished this book I felt the phrase "TO BE CONTINUED" should have been placed at the ending.

As interesting a book as it is it really is unfinished and can only be completed once the legal and police processes are completed. Perhaps this can be best described as a first draft.

So new books now need to be picked from the great unread. The next Penguin to be picked is:

Not A Hazardous Sport - Nigel Barley

Apparently this is a book about a visit to a particular tribe in Indonesia. Hope this isn't going to be patronising. We shall see.

Unless anything unexpected happens I won't be able to visit the library until Monday week. So the non Penguin book I've picked is this one.

The American - Martin Booth

As you may remember I bought this book for a pound in Poundland but what pushed me into getting it was that it was set in Tuscany, the Rhondda of Italy.

Until the next time.

Do You Remember Harry Carpenter? (Even Great Books Can Die). Also Books Bought And Borrowed

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Let's start with the question in the title. That's for anyone living in what will probably soon be named the Disunited Kingdom. A land whose government is apparently telling people living here originally from the EU that they might not be allowed to stay post BREXIT.

No matter that you worked here, started up businesses and/or a family

With every day that has followed since the referendum this Kingdom seems to be slowly moving to a very dark place indeed. A look here,a remark there, a graffitied wall strewn with racial insults, in some cases violence.

Britain has become a very worrying place to live right now. And I say this as a white male with a British passport.

So I went today to Porthcawl mainly to go to the library. Here is the Porthcawl view of the day.

Metaphor time

That view seemed to match my mood. Calm but with a sense of foreboding.

Before I went to Poundland for a few odd groceries. Poundland sell small stocks of stuff mainly for, surprise, surprise a pound. Now they do sell books most of which deserve to stay there. Some though will surprise you. There was a Howard Jacobson. But that wasn't the book that caught my eye. It was this.

Martin Booth - The American

This attracted me because it was set in Tuscany, where my Italian relatives live. Remember starting to watch the film on TV and nodding off but liking what I saw before seductive power of the nap took over.

It's not a Penguin paperback I know. But as it was only a pound it was bought.

And so to the library. Picking the football book to read was easier than I thought.

Andrew Jennings - The Dirty Game

Well the cover says it all really.

I was about to leave when in the corner of my eye I noticed this.

Sue Townsend - The Public Confessions Of A Middle-Aged Woman

Sue Townsend wrote the Adrian Mole books (I've read when he was a teenager but not those as an adult) but she also wrote some other stuff as well (I remember a novel...though not the title... where the Royal family were moved in a Republican Britain to a council house). These are a selection of columns she wrote on various subjects. I borrowed it, pathetic as it sounds, because I thought it would make me laugh. How sad is that?

So to the question Do You Remember Harry Carpenter? If you do then I've finished my "car book", Glued To The Box by Clive James. Let me say now that the next car book is volume one of  Michael Palin's Diaries bought a couple of weeks back. I now have five books on the go. I'll never kick the habit of reading but I've got to learn to control it. Thing is I don't know how.

This was his final published collection of his TV columns for The Observer between 1979-1982. It's quite simply just as good as I remember it all those years ago. Funny yet erudite. Here is a man capable of talking about an opera and then move on to The Rockford Files (that was in an earlier book - Just lumped that in to say that The Rockford Files seem to be one of the few seventies detective shows that has stood the test of time - I liked The Rockford Files - It seemed to be written and performed by adults - Clive James liked it as well).

He is the best critic I have ever read. One of the few that I would look forward to reading (or perhaps even prefer listening to, as I mentioned when discussing the book of his radio show he used to do called A Point Of View).

But........

Do you remember Harry Carpenter? He was a BBC sports presenter in the seventies and eighties. He was mainly known for his Boxing commentary but he'd also present The British Open and Wimbledon. Clive James writes about him here. If you do then you will read the book with a wistful smile about a time long gone.

If you don't then the bulk of this book is not for you. It'll mention programmes and people long since forgotten unless you look them up on Google or Youtube. I don't know why book or literary or theatre criticism (Christopher Hitchen,Dorothy Parker, Kenneth Tynan) survives but TV doesn't, certainly not for this period anyway.

So when the last person to remember Harry Carpenter dies. This book, great as it is will die with it.

Until the next time.