This year Liz and I have spent five weeks in sunny Lanzarote and when we had just started week three I had run out of books. One of my great holiday pleasures is spending a lot of uninterrupted time reading in the sun. My big mistake this year was not bringing enough books and also including two very slim volumes in the ones I did bring. Sometimes in a holiday villa there will be something readable in the cupboard that other holidaymakers have left behind, but in our villa the majority of previous tenants appeared to be German and unfortunately my German language expertise only amounts to counting to ten.
Anyway, this particular book bag went on for a bit so I’ve split it into two parts and next week you can read part two. So, let’s take a look at what I have been reading in Lanzarote this winter.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
I noticed this title on one of those blog posts about books you should read before you die. I knew I had a copy somewhere and after rummaging about for a while I finally came across it. It was a rather slim volume and I’d probably read it years ago but it looked interesting and so I opened it up and began to read. My big problem in reviewing this book is that I started reading it and after a few chapters put it down and began reading something else. It’s a small slim book so I popped it into my shoulder bag thinking I’d read it on the flight to Lanzarote. I couldn’t concentrate on the flight but I started reading it later by the pool but then I had to backtrack and re read some of the earlier pages so I lost the continuity. It’s about a teacher, Miss Brodie, who feels that as she is in her prime she must devote herself to a chosen group of her favourite pupils; the Brodie Set. Miss Brodie is not a conventional teacher and tells her pupils all about her visits to Italy and of her love for Mussolini and his fascists. This is done sometimes when the class should be studying mathematics and so a complicated mathematical sum is usually put up on the blackboard to fool any interlopers, like the headmistress for instance.
The Brodie Set all wonder about Miss Brodie and her love affairs and later, when Miss Brodie has lost her job, she wonders who was the traitor? Who reported her to the headmistress? Not one of the Brodie Set surely?
It’s an interesting and original book but I can’t say I was totally impressed but perhaps I should have read it properly and not put it down part way through.
Room at the Top
This was another slim volume I found in a box of old books. I first read it in 1984 according to the note I added on the back of the cover. It’s about a young man, Joe Lampton, in a rigidly class structured 1950s England, still dealing with post war rationing and his journey from a small working class village to a room at the top of a big northern town. He gets a job as an assistant treasurer at the Warley district council and he sets his sights on a young girl who also happens to be the daughter of a rich business owning councillor. A man of his background is not the sort of man the councillor wishes to see romancing his daughter so Joe gets quietly warned off. He is jealous of former RAF pilot Jack Wales who is the sort of fellow who is much more acceptable to the councillor. Jack is a WWII hero who escaped from a prison camp. Joe was an RAF rear gunner who was also in a camp but used his time not to escape but to study for his accountancy exams.
Joe joins an amateur theatre group and starts an affair with a married woman ten years older than him. He is happy and there is talk about her divorcing her husband. This though is 1950s Britain. His involvement would mean scandal and the end of his job with the council, so what should he do?
There was a film version of this starring Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton and Simone Signoret as Alice Aisgil with whom Joe has an affair. It’s slightly different to the book in a few minor ways but Laurence Harvey’s rather fake northern accent always puts me off.
Anyway, it was a fascinating read looking back to an England much different from today.
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The Kennedy Curse by James Patterson with Cynthia Fagen
This wasn’t a bad read but to be fair it only really skimmed the surface of the story of the Kennedy family. There were no great revelations about the family and to be honest, I’ve read a huge amount about the Kennedy family and this was a book I could probably have written myself, at least to a certain extent. The book really begins with Joe Kennedy and his impressive rise in business and banking. He becomes the youngest ever bank manager in the USA and with his business acumen he soon amasses a large fortune along with his famous family. He supports FDR as the democratic candidate for the presidency but he wants something in return, the ambassadorship to Great Britain. Joe becomes the ambassador taking his family over to London but when the second world war looms he decides Britain will be no match for Nazi Germany.
The big problem for Joe is that FDR thinks otherwise and soon recalls Joe who finds himself out of a job. He has designs on the presidency himself but decides a better course of action would be to make his son, Joe, junior president. When Joe is killed in the war, his next son John F Kennedy has to take on the mantle.
As we all know JFK becomes president but is tragically murdered and the same fate falls to Bobby Kennedy who runs for president in 1968. Ted Kennedy decides to follow in his brothers’ footsteps but then the Chappaquiddick incident occurs when Ted leaves poor Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his overturned car. Ted seems to ride out the ensuing scandal but it becomes clear he will never be president. The story then turns to the next generation of Kennedys who do not seem to be in the same league as their uncles and the narrative begins to turn toward drug addiction and other issues including rape charges against William Kennedy Smith, one of numerous next generation Kennedy cousins.
The story finishes with the death of John F Kennedy junior, the son of the late president, in a light aircraft crash.
A fascinating story but to be honest I’ve read better histories of the Kennedy family although this did keep me entertained for a while.
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
I’ve read a few of Grisham’s books and I’ve always been impressed with them, all except one. This one turns out to be his first novel and he says in the introduction how proud he was of finishing it as at that time, he hardly ever finished anything. It also contains some autobiographical elements as at the time, Grisham was a street lawyer, similar to the character in the book.
The book is set in America’s deep south where there is or was a great deal of racial prejudice. Two white guys decide to kidnap a young black girl, tie her to a tree and repeatedly rape her. They drive her away and dump her like garbage but she survives and the police arrest the two scumbags responsible. The next is that the young girl’s father Carl Lee Hailey decides to take a rifle and shoot the two guys. He is arrested and put on trial for murder and street lawyer Jake Brigance takes on the case.
The case ignites the small town of Clanton Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan become involved as do various other groups and the stage is set for a tense murder trial which goes on while the police and the National Guard try to keep order.
It’s a very exciting read although the ending was a little underwhelming and if you find the N word offensive then this is a book which is not for you as that particular word appears numerous times on almost every page.
I read more books on holiday in Lanzarote. Tune in next week for more books, same time, same channel, same blog.
It’s that time of the year when Liz and I depart for the substantially warmer climes of Lanzarote. I wrote a post a while ago called 
Back here in Manchester it was nice to have a few days to myself after Christmas and New Year. One thing I tend to eat a lot of when I’m alone is sandwiches. Yes, I’ve always loved the humble sandwich. As a child I took sandwiches to school, either ham, cheese or corned beef, almost always on white bread. Occasionally I’d have a salmon or salmon paste sandwich but generally salmon or any kind of fish just isn’t my cup of tea.
Tell us about your new book.
Yes, It’s that time again. As I write this there are only a couple of days left before the big event, Christmas day.
I had a huge amount of recorded music of course. By the mid-seventies my record collection was already pretty big and I was buying vinyl records, usually 45 rpm singles, every week. My tape recorder had a built-in radio so I could record my favourite tracks straight onto tape for free and I spent a lot of time taping the new top twenty which came out every Tuesday. The other thing I could do with my tape recorder was record myself with a microphone.
Friday was another cold and wet day here in the north west of England. We had planned to dine out at a nearby Italian restaurant and then walk over to the Pier Inn for a few beers and listen to the music. I wasn’t feeling at my best even though Liz and I knew our friend Ray would be performing and we do like his music. There was a 30% off deal at Allegria, the Italian restaurant in question but the catch was this: to get the 30% off, diners have to book a table 24 hours in advance. We hadn’t booked and that meant paying the full price. There was only one thing for it, I had to call for help. I quickly dialled the Northern Association of Tightwads and I was soon through to an advisor.
It’s been a little chilly this week although here in the north west we had one rather sunny day in which I was able to give the lawn and the privets a final trim before the winter.
Perhaps that’s a consequence of nearing the latter stages of my journey through life. Recently when we were travelling through France motoring along through the endless country lanes of the Loire valley, it seems as if I only became aware of the speed when I reached a new village or hamlet and had to slow down. Perhaps that’s the way it is with time too, that you only notice the passing of time with some new event, something that brings time into perspective.
I started off with a post called 
One of the places I visited this year was Compiègne in France where the armistice was signed which ended the First World War. Hitler came here in 1940 when Nazi Germany defeated France and forced the French to sign the surrender in the same railway car where the Germans had surrendered in 1918. I shot a short video at the site and wrote a post titled 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 