Spring Stack,

Middle England | Jonathan Coe

...  Not a book I would've likely picked up myself but nonetheless a book lent to me by a friend: "it's about Brexit" ... & then some. Coe's array of characters, intersecting, made for some good dynamics & interesting relationships.
Aspects I liked: Sophie's study trip; Sophie's cruise. 
The evening of the London 2012 Olympics, across the different households. 
Benjamin & Doug were perhaps my two favourites in their roles of novelist & journalist.
Aspects I could've easily taken a pass on: 
Sophie & Ian. Ian's mum. ... In fact, most of the cast list really as they were, for the most part, pretty disagreeable / selfish / presumptuous / niggling / plain bonkers...

Time's Arrow | Martin Amis 

...  A good revisit. Last time I read the novel was in my final year as an undergrad. I'd remembered its connection to Betrayal, Benjamin Button - a narrative reversed but my memory had mashed it up with its progenitor, Slaughterhouse-Five.
  It's just as smart as I'd remembered. Sometimes I found myself reading conversations forward, from the bottom up so as to gain a sense of where the backwards conversation was headed / had come from. Amis' foreshadowing of elements such as the bomb baby works to spur the reader onwards, seeking to uncover this memory of the 'future past'. 

'How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.'  [123]

In the later phase of the book, my reading slowed as the Jewish race comes into being, 'created from the air' and Amis addresses the atrocity of poisons 'extracted' through the experiments of the protagonist, who has become, by this point: Odilo Unverdorben. 

  It's harder going in the penultimate chapters because what one reads stands in a false mirror of events: creation in lieu of destruction, birth in lieu of life. I'm glad that we, as readers, also have the soul's voice as our narrator, separating off body & flesh & negative action. 

  'Into Tod's mind, of course, I cannot see. But I am the hidden sharer of his body.'  [64]

My revisit of TA has made me want to return to some of Primo Levi's texts too. 


Codename Villanelle | Luke Jennings

A good insight into the foundations of what was used & tweaked by PWB to become the BBC tv programme, Killing Eve. 
Interesting to learn - SPOILERS ALERT - more of Villanelle/Oxana’s childhood, her relationship with her father; to discover that Carolyn Martens was dreamed up as a female alternative to Eve’s inevitably male boss (thank god; the series is so much the better for having Fiona Shaw kick so much ass); discovering more of Eve & Nick’s relationship and finding, by the end, that it’s Konstantin who gets the shove and not the dangerous ex-lover.


The Next Right Thing | Emily P. Freeman

... I'm not a massive fan of self-help books & Christian life application books (the Bible aside) sometimes make me feel like I've hit a wall. Not the easiest of things to concentrate on but Freeman's book got the best out of me. It's helped by the fact that the text & her podcast series also interconnect. So thanks to audio, a sense was gained of Freeman's outreach & overall approach: not an admonishment but an encouragement. A gentle nudge to retrain oneself to think differently, respond differently & to do so out of love.


1.  Martin Amis: Time's Arrow
     Jonathan Cape, 1991.