He found, though, that even reading was a special skill, not just a matter of running your eyes along the lines. . . From boyhood he had been sheltered from erroneous books and had read only those that were warranted sound, so that he had got into the habit of believing every word, of submitting without question to the author’s will. When he began to read authors who contradicted one another, his resistance was low, and he could not help surrendering to whichever of them he had read last. What he found most difficult of all was to lay down his book and think for himself.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years (the maximum allowed under NKVD policy) in Soviet prison camps for being critical of Stalin in private letters to a friend. During the course of his imprisonment he spent time in a sharashka – a prison camp made up of scientists and engineers, who had been picked out of the more brutal taiga camps, for the purpose of solving technological problems for the state. The living conditions in the sharashka were often much better than other prisons and it is in one such camp, Marfino, that In the First Circle is set. The title itself is a reference to Dante’s Inferno and the first level of hell.

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations –

The Vicar of Sorrows is the story of the decline and fall of one Francis Kreer the vicar of Ditcham, a small parish in Berkshire.  Upon the death of his beloved Mummy who, upon hearing a rumor that he was a “Ban the Bomb” clergyman, decided to leave half of her estate to a former lover, Francis is thrown into a state of depression from which he can never truly free himself.  His own grief is transformed into anger which he viciously directs at his wife Sally who turns in despair to the stuffed toys of her childhood; tidily tucked into the recesses of her wardrobe.  This is one wardrobe that fails to yield any of Narnia’s magic and with each trip Sally’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Read the rest here

In What is God? Jacob Needleman, Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University explores this timeless question. Needleman emerged from years of philosophical training at Harvard, Yale and the University of Freiburg, Germany with little more than bored distain for the classical texts of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition. However, an unsettling meeting with the venerated Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki combined with his acceptance of a position teaching those very texts to undergraduates forced Needleman to reexamine his dismissal of Jewish and Christian thinkers. Read the rest here

He steps onto the bathroom scales.  Ten stone two ounces.  Quite enough for a man only five feet five and a half inches tall.  Some say – Vic has overheard them saying it – that he tries to compensate for his short stature by aggressive manner.  Well, let them.

She was born, and christened, Roberta Anne Penrose, in Melbourne, Australia, nearly thirty-three years ago, but left that country at five . . . growing up in a pleasant unostentatious house with a view of the sea.

What do you get when you put a self-made man and a trendy feminist teacher into a bag and shake?  Nice Work.  In this his thirteenth book, David Lodge, offers a bumpy and surprisingly funny comedy . . . read the rest here

You were on the outside because you wanted to be. You’ve always preferred to hide.  It’s the colonial psychosis, the caste psychosis.  You inherited it from your father.

In the Magic Seeds V.S. Naipaul continues the saga of Willie Chandran which he began in Half a Life. Willie is born into a (almost) post-colonial world into which he find a brilliant array of options but none that are quite suitable for him.  In the final portion of Half a Life we find Willie living in Africa with his Portuguese girlfriend only to experience further alienation as the colony is plunged into Civil War. . . To read the rest please click here

The most important part of any book or article is the first sentence.  It’s the hook, the grabber and it’s what keeps you, me, or anyone else reading. My wife thinks it’s crazy but when I go to the store or the library to look for a book I zip through the shelves snatching off promising texts, reading the opening line, or lines if I’m feeling generous, and then putting them under my arm, or, as is more likely the case, back on the shelf if the first lines don’t “grab me.” When I read “by the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree” I was sufficiently grabbed.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s priceless opening to her well written The Last American Man she goes on to add that “by the time he was 10, he could hit a running squirrel at 50 ft with a bow and arrow. When he turned 12, he went out into the woods, alone and empty- handed, built himself a shelter, and survived off the land for a week. When he turned 17, he moved out of his family’s North Carolina home altogether and headed into the mountains, where he lived in a teepee of his own design . . . This move occurred in 1977, by the way”. In the following 200+ pages Gilbert tells the true and ongoing (he’s still alive and living outside) sage of Eustace Robinson Conway IV.  Motivated by a love of nature and, driven by a horribly abusive father, Conway has spent the last thirty two years living out of doors and creating a nearly 1000-acre Preserve he calls Turtle Island near Boone, North Carolina. Conway, in addition to a long list of other accomplishments, has ridden a horse across the United States and hiked the Appalachian Trail, carrying no food supplies.

Gilbert offers a wonderful, if earthy, account of Conway’s struggle to free himself (and others) through nature and explores how his relationship with his father has led Conway to label himself “damaged.”  Unfortunately, that label has proven all too true and a string of devastating break-ups and mangled friendships litter his emotional campsite.  Yet, in spite of all his difficulties people still pilgrimage to Turtle Island where Conway promises to teach them “nature’s governing truths.”

Some months ago I paid my brother an evening visit only to find him relaxing in a chair with a book, the cover of which nowhere indicated that its contents dealt with double-entry bookkeeping, external audit or any other of the concepts so dear to modern accountancy. This was indeed a surprise as my soon to be CPA sibling has for some time devoured only those texts which directly relate to his career in the “language of business” and the dreaded test one must take to speak it with authority. Yet this night, he put all thoughts of the “big four” aside and praised, with a feverish intensity, that plucky junior barrister of the Old Bailey and invention of author John Mortimer, Horace Rumpole.

Since then I too have become enamored with John Mortimer’s ability to spin stories with a wonderful sense of humor and blend the characters of Rumpole, his wife Hilda (She who must be obeyed) and host of other solicitors, barristers, QC’s, Judges, jurors and defendants that make up the rollicking menagerie of number ten Equity Court.

Rumpold and the Primrose Path is Mortimer’s latest and potentially last collection of Rumpole stories. The characters lack some of the sparkle of his earlier works yet Rumpole’s escape from the Primrose Path Home after a heart attack and his subsequent adventures are sure to delight even the most skeptical reader.