What I'm reading ...

I have started Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter - my next book club book. Here’s the blurb:

The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.
And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.
Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.

Levels of Life - by Julian Barnes

I was not quite sure what this book was about. It turns out that it is about ballooning, photography, love and grief. This sounds like an odd combination, but the author skilfully uses them to express some ideas in a novel way. Although he tells stories of ballooning and photography, he also uses that part of the book to set up metaphors for use later.
I was particularly impressed by the way he talks about thoughts and emotions that I have experienced, but was never able to express in words:

• The idea of a little voice murmuring “I’m free” after the death of a loved one.
• The fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but it doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

He also abhors the euphemism “pass” used instead of “die”.
All in all I found this to be a very enriching book, which might serve anyone who wants to understand about bereavement and grief. Somehow, it succeeds in this job without being grim or morbid. It is excellent writing, which came straight from the author’s heart.

What I'm reading ...

I have started Levels of Life by Julian Barnes. It was time for non-fiction, probably biography and this little book looks intriguing. Here's the blurb:

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed…
In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; he gives us Colonel Fred Burnaby, reluctant adorer of the extravagant Sarah Bernhardt; then, finally, he gives us the story of his own grief, unflinchingly observed.
This is a book of intense honesty and insight; it is at once a celebration of love and a profound examination of sorrow.

To Kill A Mockingbird - by Lee Harper

I always have a slight reluctance when I start out reading a book which is regarded as a "classic". It commonly seems that such books are more to do me good than provide me with enjoyment. In this case, any reluctance was misplaced, as I thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover.  The story is really quite simple, but the details and nuances were very skilfully portrayed by telling the story from the perspective of a young girl. All the characters were very clearly drawn, which brought them alive for me. Add to that a clear ending to the story, and I was well pleased.

The only remaining question is: should I now read Go Set a Watchman?