Barefoot in the Summer

Last night I watched Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in 'Barefoot in the Park' for the first time in decades. It was one of the Sunday afternoon films of my childhood. My Mam and I would watch films every weekend. Musicals like 'Gypsy', or anything with Paul Newman or Robert Redford in. This particular film is one of those that furnished my mind with indelible images of New York. It made me imagine that's what living there would be like and feel like and look like. I remembered really clearly Jane Fonda's excitement over her new appartment, painted battleship grey and at the top of five flights of stairs. I remembered the bit with Redford being snowed on through a broken skylight as a he lay on the settee in the middle of the night. And the twitchy uptight mother who gets taken out on a wild night out by the strange man upstairs and has the time of her life. It was wonderful to see this film again.

It reminded me of getting that first flat with my friend Amanda in Edinburgh in 1995. Five flights up a fire escape and painted battleship grey inside. Open plan living with a kitchen breakfast bar in the sitting room. No wonder it all seemed vaguely familiar at the time, that move to a life on the rooftops of a reasonably big city...

Anyway - today's blog was meant to be a quick review of my summer's reading. Now that it's all completely, utterly over, and term is well underway, autumn's definitely here and the season of readings at festivals and publication is upon us... I thought I'd tot up how I did over the summer, finding stuff to read, to distract me, to keep me out of mischief.

Out of thirty six books read I'd say twenty two were good. Twenty two were worth the time and some of them I would read again. (This is where I need to harden my resolve and decide to Get Rid Of the other fourteen books. The ones I hated and would never touch again. They need to go to charity. Can I do it, though? Mightn't I pick one of them up again at a later date and realise that I was dead wrong about it?)

Six of the thirty six were rereads: all of them kids' books, in preparation for my course. Twelve were things I'd meant to get round to - such as Murakami's 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle', or the books I read by Raymond Chandler, Ed MacBain, Ngaio Marsh and PG Wodehouse. Only two were complete stinkers I wish I hadn't bothered with. Interestingly, both of those were cases when I had fallen for the blandishments, hype and money-off offers in WH Smiths at Piccadilly Station. Waiting for my train I can be lured in by anything, it seems - and both 'December' by Elizabeth H. Winthrop and 'The Paris Enigma' by Pablo de Santis weren't worth my time. One was meticulous in its miserably picky details, the other sketchy and repetitive and not as exciting as a novel with lots of murders and detetctives ought to be.

What did I love? Well... My favourites of the summer...

'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows. A novel where the hype was justified. Just enough like Helene Hanff to hook me in the first place and then original, warm and clever enough to keep me enthralled.

'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' by Haruki Murakami, which I've had on my shelf for years. I loved everything about this. It has one of the most edge-of-your-seats scenes of cruelty and suspense I've ever read. But it was never gratuitous. It was surreal but always made us care for the characters at the mercy of the absurd stuff it flings at them. It has some lovely mind-bending concepts and magical set-pieces. It's like being inside a maze of silly ideas, all of which make complete sense when you're inside there. Everything adds up in the end. (Which wasn't true when I read a colection of Murakami short stories a few years ago. Without the cumulative effect they seemed a bit precious and so-whattish.)

'A Freewheelin' Time' by Suze Rotolo. Her memoir of the Sixties in Greenwich village, when Dylan was her boyfriend. I think she writes better than Dylan did in his 'Chronicles Vol One.' She's so composed and calm about it all. She gives us the atmosphere and the excitement of those times. She's generous enough to make the reader feel part of it, rather than stressing what a wonderful time and place it was to be young, but it's all over now, so hard cheese. Lots of other memoirs tend to do that. The 'lucky me and my fabulous' life genre. I love the fact she goes over to Italy for a few months to do her own thing when Dylan's having some of his most important breakthroughs. She reminds me quite a bit of the heroines of Adriana Trigiani's novels.

Similarly generous and wise was Sheila Hancock's 'The Two of Us.' It's a joint biography, and a portrait of a marriage. Amazingly touching and unsentimental. The 60s and 70s are the main focus here: and what it meant to be an actor from a working class background on stage and on the telly at that time, when the whole world seemed to be opening up. When popular drama could be radical and exciting. I love autobiographies in which you get such a fierce sense of the personality at work inside them. There's no glossing over or self-mythologizing here. Just artists working hard to find their places in the world. It's a book about growing older and finding love and it's one of the most powerful descriptions I've read of the grieving process. That makes it sound like a very sad book. I found it all very uplifting.

Yeah, I'd say they were my favourite four of the summer.