Emma's News Archive
Book Report
'08: I started the year reading Christmas present The World of Coco Chanel: Friends, Fashion, Fame (2005) by Edmonde Charles-Roux and Notting Hell (2007) by Rachel Johnson. Next was John Le Carré's Cold War classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), followed by its Far East-set sequel The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). WOW, I HARDLY READ ANYTHING THIS YEAR....I NEVER GET THE CHANCE ANYMORE!!!
'07: After Annie Proulx's short-story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (which included Brokeback Mountain) (1999), I spent the next month or so in the company of Lauren Bacall and her star-studded autobiography By Myself...and Then Some (2005). While in England I started flicking through Victoria Beckham's fashion bible That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything In Between (2006); on my Paris trip read Joanne Harris's Blackberry Wine (2000); and on the flight back to the US began Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen (2004), partly set in 18th-century Korea, which I enjoyed. After Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), I read the Booker Prize-shortlisted Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. I especially liked Roth's alternate history The Plot Against America (2005) and Douglas Kennedy's 1940s Manhattan-set love story The Pursuit of Happiness (2002). Following on from Iain Banks' post-9/11 Dead Air (2002), I read The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), fourth in the Ripley series by Patricia Highsmith. My in-flight reading for my trip to England was French Women Don't Get Fat (2005) by Mireille Guiliano; while there I read Anita Shreve's Light on Snow (2004) and Rena Fruchter's biography of her beloved friend Dudley Moore: An Intimate Portrait (2005). Next came Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand (2001); The Ship of Brides (2006) by Jojo Moyes; Peter Mayle's Provence A-Z (2006); and The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls (2005).
'06: I enjoyed Edna Ferber's Texas epic Giant (1952); The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (1998) by Alexander McCall Smith; Kate Atkinson's Cambridge-based murder mystery Case Histories (2004); and all 1011 pages of Margaret Mitchell's American Civil War classic Gone With the Wind (1936). I learnt more history in Orange-Prize-winner Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005), about an English family banished to C18th Australia, and Hemingway's WWI-set A Farewell to Arms (1929). After White Jazz (1992), fourth in James Ellroy's LA quartet, I read Dan Brown's page-turner The Da Vinci Code (2003). Then it was back to Ellroy and the totally-engrossing American Tabloid (1995), first in his Underworld USA trilogy. After reading Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong (1993) about a man's experiences before and during WWI and Salem Falls (2001) by Jodie Picoult, I enjoyed Labyrinth (2005) by Kate Mosse, a Grail story set both in C13th France and the present day.
'05: I began the year reading Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (2001) followed by Truman Capote's 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's. Having enjoyed Jane Gardam's Old Filth (2004) (Christmas present from my grandmother), my parents lent me her previous novel Flight of the Maidens (2000), together with Justin Cartwright's The Promise of Happiness and Roger Jon Ellory's exciting mob thriller The Quiet Vendetta (both 2004). By the time beach weather arrived, I was reading my first Jane Austen novels: the thoroughly enjoyable Sense and Sensibility and my namesake Emma, both written in the early 1800s. Then I immersed myself in 1950s Los Angeles with James Ellroy's crime novels The Black Dahlia (1987), Clandestine (1982) and The Big Nowhere (1988). Next came John Berendt's true-crime murder story/travelogue from 1994 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, prompted by a visit to Savannah, and Gaston Leroux's Le Phantôme de L'Opéra (1911), a souvenir from the Montréal metro (en français, bien sûr!). Still to read on my bookshelf are Ellroy's LA Confidential and White Jazz from the early 1990s, and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1950), purchased after a trip to Key West.
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