Old Favourites

I’m trying to make good use of the opportunity to get a decent amount of reading done and brought over a number of books from Singapore to get stuck into. However, as a result of visits to bookshops at Times Square and KLCC last week I found myself supplementing these supplies with three essential items I could not resist purchasing: Peter Ackroyd’s most recent novel The Fall of Troy; David Lodge’s The Year of Henry James, for the most part an extended essay on the writing of Author, Author his novel about James; and Daniel J. Levitin’s rather clumsily titled This Is Your Brain On Music, an account, among other things, of what happens to us mentally when we listen to music. All three slipped down very easily indeed, which I think is a pretty good justification of the expenditure involved.

Now I come to think of it, Ackroyd and Lodge are probably my two favourite novelists, and writers on literature generally, among currently publishing writers. It’s unusual for me to be able to say I’ve read everything by a particular writer but this is almost the case with these two and I would regard First Light and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (Ackroyd) and Therapy and Small World (Lodge) as the novels I’ve read with the greatest pleasure in the last few years.

Ackroyd’s last few novels (from Milton in America onwards) have lacked the intensity of the two I cite above but, like those of Lodge, they guarantee entertainment and The Fall of Troy was no exception. Generally I’d say Lodge was much more the consistent of the two and I was surprised to find out from The Year of Henry James that sales for Author, Author were disappointing, though the clash with Colm Toibin’s The Master (which I still haven’t read and really must get round to) would seem to account for this to some degree. Whilst buying the Henry James book I noticed there was a new novel by Lodge for sale but I didn’t like the size or design of the paperback at all. So I put it on hold, for the moment at least. I think it relates to the deafness Lodge suffers from, mentioned in The Year of Henry James.