Which books have you taken to read on holiday? This was my selection.
Slow Days, Fast Company
I first heard about Eve Babitz from a blog I follow over on Medium. It’s written by a guy called Loren Kantor and he tells some pretty interesting stories all based in California or more specifically, Los Angeles.
I’m pretty sure Loren has a background in film making but these days he teaches wood cut printing mainly to elderly people in care homes in LA. In one home there were only a few people wanting to take up his course so he asked some other residents if they were interested and someone he tried to bring on board was a woman called Eve, the other residents though didn’t care for her at all and didn’t want her in the group.
Anyway, Kantor got talking to her and she mentioned that she used to be a writer. Later he found out her name -Eve Babitz- did a little research and found that she was a pretty serious writer, well known for documenting the social scene in LA through various semi fictional memoirs written in the 1970s.
I’m a great lover of blogs and the essay was so interesting I searched for the book he mentioned and quickly got myself a copy of Slow Days, Fast Company.
It’s a really good read, a very personal series of essays and the book is split into 10 essays or chapters, each one about a different man she was either involved with or friendly with and set in a different area around LA. I read it rather quickly and then found myself going back to it and reading parts of it again. One chapter is about a man who is a soap actor on a long running US TV series. One day he gets to look at the flimsies. What are they I hear you asking? Well the flimsies are a sort of book, detailing what the coming storylines are and sketching out roughly where the show is heading. There are no scenes or dialogue, it’s just a sort of guide for the writers. Anyway this guy takes a peek and sees that his character is heading for a plane crash that leaves him alive but surviving as a vegetable. The guy is crushed and as much as Eve tries to help him he cannot get over this news.
In another chapter Eve talks about the demolishing of the Garden of Allah, the home of a silent film star that later became a famous hotel. It was knocked down and a dull office building was erected in its place and it seemed to Eve, that it was hard to believe that Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, two of the more famous residents of the hotel, ‘even existed’.
The book is full of similar sharp observations and I found it really intriguing.
Verdict: 9/10 highly entertaining.
Red Strike by Chris Ryan
Chris Ryan is the pen name of former SAS sergeant Colin Armstrong who uses his background in the SAS to great effect in this action packed book. In fact it reminds me a little bit of the novels of Frederick Forsyth in that the author tells a lot about preparations and planning and then the action suddenly takes centre stage. This was a great little read full of exciting incidents and with a pretty good story at its core. One thing struck me about the villain of the piece, he’s a British politician, known to be on the so called right wing, a beer drinking populist and a friend of the American president. Who does that ring a bell with you? Well for me I thought immediately of Nigel Farage. I like to think that Farage has a pretty good sense of humour so I’m fairly certain he’d be the first to have a laugh although whether the character was based on or inspired by Farage only the author really knows.
Verdict 9/10: A great holiday read.
The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry
This is a follow up to his previous book, Moab is my Washpot. In the first few pages Fry mentions how obvious it was that he chose that title although for poor uneducated non university me, that went right over my head. The book continues in the same stream of consciousness way of the first book, charging on headlong into the story with various forays to the left and to the right but this time perhaps not as so intense. A lot of the book is about his life at university and he patiently explains to us non-university folk the ins and outs of life as a student and about life at Cambridge in particular. He meets soon to be famous friends like Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie although I was surprised to find that Rowan Atkinson was not a contemporary of his but from an earlier student intake and Fry and his colleagues look up to Atkinson almost as much as they look up to Peter Cook and John Cleese.
Fry wonders what he will do after university but after success in the Edinburgh Fringe he acquires an agent and is soon involved in a TV show and then goes on quickly to writing for magazines, doing the book for a musical and creating the sketch show Fry and Laurie with his friend Hugh.
A lot of autobiographies of film and TV celebs seem to end up becoming lists of films or shows that the celeb has appeared in; I did this and then I did that, but this book is so chatty and interesting with a host of fascinating little stories about TV and film making and the characters involved in those pursuits, that it never seems to become boring.
Fry was a friend of Douglas Adams who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. The two bonded over a love of computers and Fry gives a compelling portrait of Adams and his stop/start way of working. (Adams famously said he loved the sound of deadlines as they went whoosh past his head.)
Ben Elton is one of those irritating TV personalities that I have always detested and Fry talks about Elton and how his poor reputation is so apparently undeserved. Fry puts forward a very positive case for his friend but I’m afraid Elton has always come across to me as obnoxious. (Not long ago he was a guest on Saturday Kitchen, the BBC cookery show and after a few minutes I was compelled to turn over.) Full marks to Stephen though for defending his friend.
This is not only an entertaining book but very personal and gives the reader a great insight into not only what makes Fry tick as a TV personality but what makes him tick as a human being.
Verdict: 10/10 well worth reading.
The Man who Died Twice by Richard Osman
This book is the follow up to the popular Thursday Murder Club and I have to say I enjoyed it more than the original. Perhaps I’m a little more used to the characters and the author’s interesting way of presenting alternate chapters as if written by a member of the club, actually a lady named Joyce. The Thursday Murder Club is a group of retired friends who meet to discuss murder cases, aided by two of their friends who they met in the first book, a detective and a female PC. The ending was a little fantastic and not something that I could really see happening but anyway, this was a very entertaining holiday read and I enjoyed it very much.
Verdict 9/10 due to the slightly fantastic ending.
It’s Not a Rehearsal by Amanda Barrie
Amanda appeared in Coronation Street for a number of years but I’ve always known her as the girl who played Cleopatra in the Carry On film Carry on Cleo, you know, the one where Kenneth Williams says ‘Infamy, infamy; they’ve all got it in for me!’
Liz bought this book as Amanda went to school in St Annes where Liz has lived all her life and she was interested to read about that part of her life. I was running out of books to read so I was very happy when she passed it over to me.
Amanda tells us her story starting off with her life at school then becoming a dancer and performer. She explains how hard life is for dancers with rehearsals and late night performances. Amanda goes on to work in the West End as well as in film and television and I found the book very entertaining and interesting. I really do love reading about life in ‘showbusiness’.
One really interesting element was her life living in Covent Garden and the great sense of community there, especially when the market was in full swing. She tells of the early opening pubs to cater for the porters and market staff and how if you were ever short of something like an onion for an evening meal, you would always find whatever you needed out on the streets.
When the market moved away Amanda worked with local residents to preserve the area as the council just wanted to knock everything down and build houses.
The latter part of the book concerns her time in Coronation Street which was a complete contrast to her theatre days. Then she was working late at night but on Corrie, she had to start in the early morning, a complete turn around for her. Amanda found out early on in life that she was dyslexic so imagine how hard it must have been learning all that dialogue!
She cautiously tells us also about her love life and the men and women in her life and the result was a really engrossing look at the life of an actress in the theatre and TV as well as a little about her famous foray into the Carry On films.
Verdict 10/10
What’s in your holiday book bag?
Fry reveals his thoughts about homosexuality and his feelings, either obsession or lust over a boy at his school. Fry went to a public school which confusingly for our American readers is actually a private school. Actually, a private boarding school which eventually Fry was expelled from.
When I was a child I used to have, just like Stephen Fry, lots of daydreams and fantasies. One of them was that the school would be taken over by terrorists and that they would be methodically trying to find someone who was actually a secret agent. That secret agent of course would be me and after biding my time I would, just like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films, sort out the terrorists one by one. My daydream would usually be shattered by one of the teachers asking me a question like ‘how many degrees in a right-angled triangle?’ and I would suddenly be brought down to earth and desperately try to answer before revealing the inevitable truth that I had not been paying attention.
I know I’ve written about this first book already but as it’s part of this month’s holiday read, I feel I have to talk about it once again. As I mentioned in a 
I sought this book out on the internet after reading Bennett’s The Lady in the Van which was a very enjoyable although short book. This volume is a collection of various essays and diaries by the author and it begins with the title essay, Untold Stories which is a series of observations mostly about his mother and father. He describes the life of his family in Yorkshire as he saw it evolve. It is perhaps a very ordinary story of a working class family and their fairly uneventful journey through life. It is very sharply observed and the author takes us through the lives of not only his parents but also of his two aunts as well as other family members. I found this section hugely interesting and with many parallels to my own life, especially when Bennett deals with his aging parents and he has to take them to numerous hospital appointments. His mother suffered with depression and was even hospitalised on a couple of occasions. Later in life she begins to suffer with dementia.
I picked this book up in a sale ages ago, in fact actually a few years ago. I think it was one of those offers like ‘buy two and get one free’. This was my free choice and as such it’s been lying around waiting to be read. It’s a collection from the author’s radio series ‘Letters from America’ which used to be broadcast many years ago on BBC Radio 4. I can’t say I’ve ever listened to the broadcast but I do remember watching a quite exceptional TV documentary series called ‘Alistair Cooke’s America’ which detailed the history of the USA.
This is not one of Forsyth’s thrillers but an autobiography and it was a really interesting read. Forsyth spoke many languages and he puts this down to learning them with local people. He studied French and German at school of course but then spent the summer holidays in France learning from a French family and then later did the same with a German family and even later with a family in Spain. His observations in France were really interesting. The French welcomed Forsyth as an English hitchhiker with the union flag on his backpack but later when travelling in what had been Vichy, France, he felt the English were not as popular.
As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.
In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, 
I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, 
It’s cold, in fact it’s bloody cold and it’s no secret that I hate the cold. I could write about the cold I suppose but then 
In the latter part of the book Mia talks mostly about Woody Allen with whom she started a relationship with in 1980. I’m a huge fan of Woody and his films. The two met in 1979 and were introduced to each other by Michael Caine. Woody invited her to his New Year’s Eve Party and later, in April of 1980, Mia received a call from his secretary asking if Mia would like to meet Woody for lunch.
Just now we have finished our touring part of the holiday and we have come to our rented gîte where we have parked the van and are spending time in this wonderful house that we regularly rent just outside the small village of Parçay-les-Pins.
I saw the film version of this a few years ago which was pretty good, if a little odd. It was presented in a very peculiar way in that the author, Alan Bennett, is portrayed as two people, one as himself as he appears in the story and two, as himself as he writes the story. That oddity aside it was really a rather good and original film. When I heard there was a book version I quickly went to one my usual internet book stores and promptly bought it.
Liz and I always visit a village fête at the weekend, usually those with a vide grenier or brocante attached. A vide grenier is just a car boot sale which we both love. I usually pick up connecting leads for my laptop or iPad, after all, you can never have enough electrical leads. Brocantes are more like flea markets or antique fairs. Just the kind of place to pick up those old telephones that I still love, especially those Bakelite ones.
I picked this book up ages ago and thought it would be a good holiday read. I’ve always liked Roger Moore even though I absolutely hate his James Bond films. I love Moore’s self-deprecating humour, plenty of which is evident in this book. The first part of the book was really interesting and entertaining but like a lot of celebrity autobiographies, this one just gets a little tedious when Roger just seems to list the films and locations and other celebrities he seems to know. On the back of the book was a review claiming this to be the best film autobiography since David Niven’s 
Rooting around in a secondhand shop in St Annes recently I picked up a hardback copy of Winston Churchill’s book My Early Life. It’s a thoroughly wonderful book written in Churchill’s inimitable style. He says in the introduction he has written a book about a vanished age and indeed he has. Churchill was born in 1974 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill who was in turn the son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of an American businessman. She married Lord Randolph and became Lady Churchill.
Looking back, I must have seen the film version before I read the book. Young Winston was directed by Richard Attenborough and is a wonderful adaptation of the book. When Winston first attends school, which of course was boarding school, his headmaster was played by Robert Hardy and he directs Winston to learn some Latin. Winston doesn’t do very well and the headmaster glares down at him and informs him that if he misbehaves, he will be punished, which to a great extent was Churchill’s overall view of school. Later he comments about exams ‘they always contrived to question me about things I didn’t know. I would much rather they asked me about things I did know.
The charge was depicted in the film Young Winston and in his book Churchill ponders about fate and a problem with his shoulder which necessitated using his revolver rather than his sword during the charge, reflecting that if he had been using his sword he might well have been killed in the latter stages when he was surrounded by the enemy.
One of things I particularly liked about Young Winston was the music. I bought the soundtrack album in 1985. The music for the film was in the main composed by Sir Alfred Ralston. He was brought into the film by director Attenborough as the two had worked together on a previous film, ‘Oh what a Lovely War’. The soundtrack features music by Edward Elgar, notably the Pomp and Circumstance March no 4 as well as Nimrod from the Enigma Variations.
Churchill ended up in a POW camp but resolved to escape despite also claiming to the Boers that he was a correspondent and should not have been detained. With the help of a group of Lancashire miners, Winston stowed away on a goods train and made his way back to the British lines.
Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.
This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.
In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.
This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.
Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.
This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.
Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.
British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.
Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 