This is extraordinarily well written novel about glass manufacture, religion, and Australia. Yet I fail to be able to drum up much enthusiasm for it. For a start, there are a lot of minor characters, who, while uniformly interesting, tend to slow down the narrative. And what narrative there is very much in a depressing direction: Oscar and Lucinda are both gambling addicts, and so from the beginning you struggle to see a happy ending. You feel sorry for them, but you also feel annoyed.

Also, they keep making terrible business decisions, such as investing huge sums in building a glass church for a tiny village in the Outback which is not served by any roads.

In summary, it’s a horrible, cruel book. The author spends 500 pages using all his great talent to get you to care about his large array of characters, and then has it all end badly for each of them, in an array of different ways. Rest assured, Oscar and Lucinda do not end up together. As an added bonus, Oscar even dies. I can only conclude that Carey was born in the First World. One shouldn’t stereotype, but you don’t lay out this kind of misery and despair in art unless your own reality is pretty freaking fantastic.

Apparently I am becoming a fan of Levin’s. I read his STEPFORD WIVES and ROSEMARY’S BABY, and now A KISS BEFORE DYING. They’re fun books – tightly plotted and hard to predict. I notice now as I write this blog and look back over the titles that they also all deal very much with gender issues. They’re about women being tricked by men. A KISS BEFORE DYING was his first novel (a massive success when he was only twenty three) and is his least sophisticated iteration on the theme. It tells the story of a man who courts a wealthy young woman in the interests of securing her inheritance. She (spoiler) becomes pregnant and so will be disinherited. When she refuses an abortion he decides to kill her so as to escape marrying her. It all goes downhill from there. A clever, twisty little story. I wish I had written it at twenty three.

I do not recommend reading a book about a flu pandemic while on a long fligh next to a woman with the snuffles. It was overnight Dallas to London, and I felt ready for the end of days when we reached Heathrow. In the book the pandemic takes just a few days to spread around the world. It’s airborne and kills in under twenty four hours. People survive if they are able to stay away from others for the first weeks, as everyone who is not immune dies very quickly.

The story follows a group of people who were all loosely connected with a production of King Lear in Toronto on what is called ‘Day 1’ of the pandemic. Mostly the story follows one of the child actors in Lear, who in the post-apocalyptic world tours with a group of performers mostly showing Shakespeare and Mozart. I struggle to believe that in those harsh times there’d be much appetite for this. I’d think there’d be more money in horrific dog fighting or gladiatorial displays or something. But perhaps I am a terrible person with insufficient respect for the human spirit.

Another strand of the story follows a group who survive because their plane is forced to land at a remote airport, where they all go on to live for the next few decades, with romances blossoming between jaded business travellers and Lufthansa cabin attendants. It’s an interesting novel, and I recommend it, though the apocalyptic setting is more engaging than the various individual plots. It certainly made the flight seem short, though it also made the snuffler terrifying.

As I am on a Nile cruise I thought it was a good idea to read a novel about someone dying on a Nile cruise. DEATH ON THE NILE was written while Christie was on a cruise, and you can exactly see what inspired her. I even visited the hotel in which she stayed. I read quite a bit of Christie as a teenager, and still admire the clockwork neatness of her plotting. But for me there’s not much beyond that; but just that alone is a big achievement.

I’m not a great reader of biographies, but I do love Anthony Trollope, so was tempted by this charity shop find. It’s a biography almost as long as one of the subject’s novels, and it needs to be, because Trollope lived a long and full life. I love him for his extraordinary energy. He wrote his many novels while working full time at the post office, and is responsible for such fine novels as SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON as well as the establishment of the postbox. It inspires me. He would wake up early in the morning and write for four hours before going to work a full day, which often included personally walking postal routes to see how they should work. He once said: “The whole success of my life I owe to early hours.” He is for me a prototypical Victorian, that couple of generations that made the industrial revolution happen and in whose long shadows we are all still standing.

Trollope’s family was among the gentility who lacked money, and his early life was fairly difficult. He was socially awkward, middling at school, and not his parents’ favourite. Interestingly, his life only really turned around in his twenties, when he got an opportunity to get away from his family and go to work in Ireland. From then on it was pretty much up, up, up. I was also interested to learn he travelled a great deal, going to America, Australia, and Africa. What a fabulous man. Pity about the horrible beard.

I am not sure if this book is a tragedy or a comedy. On the one hand it is a searing tale of the extremely poor in the South in the 1930s, on the other hand it is a hilarious tale of the extremely poor in the South in the 1930s.

Here, for example, is a man who has married a 13 year old girl because he finds her hair pretty. She refuses to speak to him.

Lov asked Pearl questions, he kicked her, he poured water over her, he threw rocks and sticks at her, and he did everything else he could think of that might make her talk to him. She cried a lot, especially when she was seriously hurt, but Lov did not consider that as conversation.

The book focuses on a single family, which is close to starving. An older preacher woman gets the 16 year old son to marry her by promising to spend all the money she has on a new car for him though this will leave them penniless. They marry and buy the car, which the teenager does not really know how to drive, and spend much of the book driving around hooting, eventually destroying the car. At the end they run over the starving old grandmother and don’t bother to check if she is alive or not. It was sort of hilarious. Now to google it and find out it is supposed to be comic or not.

I loved Shute’s ON THE BEACH as a teenager, so was excited when I found this in a second hand bookstore. It has a great premise. A man arrives back at his parents’ home in Australia after fighting in the Second World War to find that their maid has just killed herself. He regards this as mostly inconvenient – until he finds out that this woman is in fact the former fiancé of his dead brother, for whom he has been searching for years. Where is this going to go! Why was she there? Why did she kill herself?

The answers are not as interesting as the questions. After the war, the woman was overwhelmed with grief, and with guilt about her role in the war, and so wanders the world, vaguely suicidal, until she decides to go and visit her dead fiance’s family. For reasons I couldn’t follow, but seem to be mostly about embarrassment, she doesn’t introduce herself, but rather signs up to help them as a housemaid. British people are sometimes truly inscrutable. Then, when she learns that her fiance’s brother is coming back, who she knows will recognise her, she decides to kill herself rather than face a reveal she thinks will be traumatic.

I don’t know. It was hard to relate. Maybe it’s a profound story of PSTD and I’m just not following.

The title tells it all. Basically this old man drives around with his dog. Not much happens. Steinbeck has written some really great books, but this is not one of them. We are very much in late-life-crisis country, with Steinbeck banging on about what it means to be a man, and somewhat pointlessly embarking on a voyage of discovery in a homemade camper van.

He does not discover too much. He has some small talk with strangers, which he reports verbatim. His dog needs to pee a lot. He is deeply impressed by vending machines.

Suppose you want a soft drink; you pick your kind – Sugargrape or Cooly Cola – press a button, insert the coin, and stand back. A paper cup drops into place, the drink pours out and stops a quarter of an inch from the brim . . . . Coffee is even more interesting, for when the hot black fluid has ceased, a squirt of milk comes down and an envelope of sugar drops beside the cup.

It’s like going on holiday with your Grandpa. If your grandpa had written Of Mice And Men. Because some bits are quite well observed. In a café:

The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns.

Or on turkeys:

To know them is not to admire them, for they are vain and hysterical. They gather in vulnerable groups and then panic at rumours. They are subject to all the sicknesses of other fowl, together with some they have invented. Turkeys seem to be manic-depressive types, gobbling with blushing wattles, spread tails, and scraping wings in amorous bravado at one moment and huddled in craven cowardice the next.

But that’s about it. There you go, you can skip it. I’ve read it for you and picked out the best bits.

As I am in Egypt I am making an effort to read Egyptian books. Helpfully, the tour company gave a suggested reading list. Horrifyingly, not one of these was by an Egyptian. This is particularly appalling, as Egypt is one of the few African countries to have a Nobel Laureate in Literature – Naguib Mahfouz (along with Zimbabwe – thank you, Doris Lessing). I’ve read Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, so I decided to go with another Egyptian, Aswany, whose THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING was a huge best seller in the Arab world at the turn of this century.

The books centres on the inhabitants of a single building in Cairo, from the poor people who live in slum conditions on the roof to the somewhat wealthier people who live inside the building itself. I was described as Dickensian in scope, so I was all ready for a really good long read. In the end, it was hardly more than a tasty snack. A huge cast of characters was introduced, I was just getting interested in them – and then it was over. What there was I enjoyed – the hard working poor young man who becomes an extremist, the dissolute old man who surprises himself by falling in love, the businessman who gets in too deep with the military – but I wish there had been much much more.

This is a great book about something we all have to face at some point: death. It’s written from a doctor’s perspective, which is interesting, because you would expect doctors to be experts on the subject. Gawande however makes it clear that they are not. Doctors are really focused on life – on sustaining it at all costs – and really have little training on what to do about death. It’s unfortunate then that death in our culture is now very much in their hands, as the end of lives are increasingly medicalised.

And the end of our lives are getting longer and longer, with us all facing decades of frailty. Incredibly, average life expectancy in the Roman Empire was just 28, and in the US in 1900 it was still under 50, and its only recently that the 80s have been reached, so really we are very new to all this. Right now our solution is: hospital. As recently as 1945, according to Gawande, most deaths in the US occurred at home, but now they mostly happen in hospital.

The book really made me think about what I hope will be my long old age. Currently many care homes ‘protect’ the elderly to the point that they rob them of all the things that make life worth living – they are not allowed to dance, to keep pets, sometimes even to walk. For the terminally ill, there is very little understanding of how to talk about the inevitable, with many patients not entering hospice when they probably should. Amazingly, studies are now showing that those entering hospice sooner actually live longer than those who are ‘treated,’ reporting greater levels of happiness – and – get this – their relatives reportingt a more manageable level of grief after they die.

I highly recommend this book. We’re all likely to live a very long time, which means we have a lot of years to be old and ill. As Philip Roth cheerfully put it: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”