Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
Predictable perhaps, given my adoration of Deakin's previous books, but no less delightful because of that. I'd read a pretty extensive taster in the Guardian and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was completely lovely, just as good as previous work. I feared, it being posthumous, that Penguin might have done to Deakin what they did to Sebald and well, if not ruin, then tarnish his reputation after his death by publishing half-finished work that wasn't up to the usual standard.
Fredrick Spotts' The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation
Will no doubt be a contender for most academic book read this year (it's published by Yale UP) but hopefully will be a good read too - a history what the Parisian intellectuals did under the Nazi occupation (and it wasn't all free love and the Resistance, apparently).
Graeme Fife's The Beautiful Machine: A Life in Cycling, from Tour De France to Cinder Hill
Book on bikes innit. One from me.
Stefan Zweig's Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)
This is one recommendation from librarything to do with German literature - I was checking out what fans of Sebald liked...
And finally I've been reading a proof of Everything Ravaged Everything Burned
by Wells Tower. I've a real love/hate thing with short stories. I'm a huge fan of Jorge Luis Borges and there's really no one better than he at this particular art, and I've had periods reading lots of short stories - Jay McInerney is another author who does them well who springs to mind. But Wells Tower does them differently...I'll review here properly soon.
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