Books and Media
4 May

Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few books, films, radio and TV programmes to catch up on after a four month gap.

I'm not even going to try and remember them all. I'm just going to talk about the ones which stay in the memory for whatever reason.

For Christmas, I bought for Ross the series of novels by Charlaine Harris about cocktail waitress, Sookie Stackhouse. These are the books that have been made into the television series True Blood. Like their televisual counterpart, they are sassy, stylish and easy-going. They rest somewhere between Anne Rice and Twilight with a bit of Buffy thrown in.

Ross raced through them all in January. I read a few in February and then polished the rest off whilst I was on sick leave because they were on the correct level of intellectual stimulation for my addled brain at that time.

As a series of novels, they are alright but I would not lay out any great claims for them. Like many North American popular novels, as the series progresses, each novel becomes more and more like and extended outline for a series of a television programme.

There was one quote that I did like even though I cannot remember which of the eight novels I read it is in. Two characters are discussing the rights and wrongs of a particularly situation and are trying to decide which is the morally right path to take. The first character wonders what God will think of them and says something about not being a very good theologian. The second responds that they shouldn't worry because God isn't a a very good theologian either.

I like and agree with that notion.

Ross and I do like the television series, however. Series One featured a great deal of Ryan Kwanten. Though stylish, the second series has been more disappointing in this area. Not enough filth to suit jaded palates such ours. The one high spot has been the introduction of male model and actor Mehcad Brooks as Benedict "Eggs" Talley. Very good on the eyes but it took him an awful long time to get his kit off.

However, after the first five episodes of Series Two were shown on the SFX digital channel, that stream was removed from our rental package. The idea, I guess was to tempt us to upgrade our rental package. And no doubt some people did do this.

We didn't. We reckon that we have more than enough media to be going on with. We don't need to buy more. We also reckoned that the DVDs will be along fairly soon at somewhere around £25. We can wait and pick those up and save ourselves that amount and more.

We have stayed with Flash Forward on Channel Five. The scripts have continued to move the various plot threads forward. There are continuing new revelations, twists and shocks. You just hope that they have enough ideas to keep the ball rolling through future series.

Back on the books, I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day from our local Oxfam shop.

I saw the film before I started this Journal and had thought that I should like to read the book sometime. I'm glad that I've now read it. It takes a while to get to grips with the style of writing but, as you read on, it becomes clear as to why the book is written in this fashion. As a piece of sustained technical writing, I doubt that I shall read anything of this quality for the rest of the year. It is quite excellent and packs a rare emotional punch as the various elements of the story are gradually revealed and the evasions and lies are dispelled.

Because it has recently been made into a film, I re-visited Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, which I've not read for nearly twenty years. It is very much a novel about being in your middle years and so I got it far more than I did when I was in my thirties. Stylistically, it hasn't worn very well. The false sense of objective distancing from the main character feels more and more like an extended pose as the novel progresses. And the casual slaughter of George in the final pages through a cerebral embolism or such like seems remarkably capricious.

It's a good piece of literature, of its time and containing much that can be admired. I just can't say that I liked it very much.

I also tried Giles Foden's Ladysmith. This is a good, imaginative re-telling of the history of the siege of Ladysmith in the Boer War. It weaves a number of narratives round and about including such luminaries as Winston Churchill and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Giles Foden also wrote the novel on which The Last King of Scotland is based. I've got that too and will read it some time.

A travelling book club visits us at work. Various books are left for our perusal. They are usually at a bargain price. Mostly they are coffee table books about cooking, heritage, gardening or some such. Recently, it offered up a set of fifteen paperbacks of works by Roald Dahl. The cost was £18. to buy each individually from a shop would have cost about five times that amount. I snapped it up.

I've been gradually working my way through them. So far, I have read...

• The Magic Finger
• Esio Trot
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Charlie and the Glass Elevator
• Fantastic Mr Fox
• James and the Giant Peach

Overall I like what I have read but I want to save comment until I've completed the lot.

Moving on to radio, probably the most significant item of the year so far has been the start of the series on Radio 4 entitled A History of the World in 100 Objects.

This does what it says on the can. It takes 100 objects from the collection of the British Museum in London and traces a narrative about world civilisation. We have had the first thirty programmes and are coming to the end of the first sustained break. There will be two/three more bursts before the end of the year.

I like the way that the programmes are trying to tell us about our common world humanity and not emphasising how different everyone is. I like the way that it says that war and crisis are the exception and not the norm for our long, human journey. And I like the fact that we are 30% of the way through the series and yet we are still not yet past the time of Christ. In other words, due consideration has been given to our early human story.

Another long series is drawing towards a close on Radio 4. The Classic Serial has been following all of John le Carre's novels which include the character of George Smiley. It began last year with Call For The Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. We just had The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. Simon Russell Beale has been excellent throughout.

I wouldn't have thought it possible to outclass such a fine series and yet Clarissa managed to do just that in a version dramatised by Hattie Naylor and directed by Marilyn Imrie. The two deserve plaudits of the highest order as they have achieved a major success by bringing this difficult work into wider circulation.

Published in 1747, Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady was, in its day, a European wide scandal and success for its author Samuel Richardson. It is written in an epistolary style, which means that it consists more or less wholly of letters written between the main characters. The other great example of the genre is Les Liaisons dangereuses written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and published in 1782.

When first contemplating the project, everyone concerned must have asked themselves why, in 2010, anyone should care about the seduction of Clarissa Harlowe by the rake Robert Lovelace. And yet, they managed to make me take the imaginative leap. I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which I would willingly read the original text. And yet I was hooked for a full four weeks by this radio drama.

I knew of the novel from A level studies and an English degree but I didn't know the plot at all. I did not know what Clarissa's fate would be and was shocked by what transpired. Nor did I know what would happen to Lovelace and that story too was one of blighted aspirations.

Zoe Waites and Richard Armitage were excellent in the two main roles. They were more than ably supported by the likes of Oliver Milburn, Alison Steadman, Miriam Margolyes, Adrian Scarborough and Julian Rhind-Tutt.

By the end, I was totally stunned. It was a quite superb piece of radio drama.

A number of films have passed my way but would not muster three stars each. The Men Who Stare at Goats might have been based on a true story but was just too long and too detached to hold this viewer's attention. White Out held my attention more but the plot was amazingly close to a novel by Alistair MacLean which I read as a teenager. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was a typically bonkers film by Terry Gilliam and you have to hand it to the man - he does have style.

However, the one film which does stand out from the rest is 500 Days of Summer - a quirky little romance starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It is intelligently plotted and written, treats is audience as though they have a few brain cells to spare and contains winning performances from both the two main actors and all of the supporting cast. It was a very good film which I really enjoyed.

The only other film which I had any liking for was Spread. This is a pleasantly written and reasonably well performed little morality about the corrupting effect of big cities and fast living on simple but beautiful folk. It was quite reasonable really.

But it did give Ashton Kutcher many and ample opportunities to doff his clothes.

Huzzah!!