El Principe de la Niebla, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This was perfect reading for my level of Spanish and was a lovely reminder of teen-fiction books I was reading when I was a kid. It is atmospheric and it's a good story, but there are definitely bits that don't quite add up. 

Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan

I loved this, It's a really beautiful, thoughtful and entertaining look at artificial intelligence. The premise is a bit of a feckless young man, Charlie, who is interested in AI and anthropology, comes into some money and decides to splash it all on a new 'robot'. A 'living' 'breathing' machine who is almost impossible to tell apart from people. Only twelve Adams exist, and 13 Eves.  The story is how Adam and our protagonist live together, along with the young woman who lives upstairs who soon becomes Charlie's girlfriend. 

The story is set in the 80's, but in an alternative history, where the UK loses the Falklands war and Alan Turing has helped advance AI so as to make the creation of the Adam and Eves possible. I found the whole plot original and fascinating. There are so many ideas explored in a way which is deep, but not forced or laboured. The main theme being morality in many forms, and how it fits into the criminal justice system. It leaves the reader with lots to think about, and at the same time is a good read, a real mastery of writing. 

Short Stories in Spanish, Various

I have been reading this little by little since the summer. It is still a struggle for me to read in Spanish, way more than listening to something, basically because I don't do it enough. Reading in Spanish is a bit like watching something happening through fog. You can see the shapes and what is happening, but you know you're not getting the full picture. 

I think this is also why I don't do it as much as I should. Watching a film or listening to something you get so much from the images and body language. You can still understand the emotion and nuance. This is also something I love about reading, the nuance and ideas that come just through the language. I find it a bit heartbreaking and frustrating that I can't read between the lines like I can in English.

Anyway, this book I found really useful, it is short stories and the pages on the left are in Spanish, on the right in English. So I could read the Spanish and check that I had understood by looking at the English. 

The stories themselves are varied and all are very good, some are more interesting than others but all have something to say. From a woman who trains her dog to go and weep at her graveside to a study of people in a sinister waiting room. 

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

 A great, looming and tense novel, slowly building up to a crime and hardly dwelling on the crime at all. A portrait of a small, sad and angry woman and her circumstances. 

The novel is written from the point of view of Eileen as she is looking back at her youth and when and why she finally left her hometown. Moshfegh manages to convey both her personalities, that of the young, bored and rejected girl and that of the older, even elderly woman having changed her life. The older Eileen seems both a reliable narrator and untrustworthy, she is healed but sinister, there is such distance between her and the younger Eileen that we don't really have any reason not to trust her. 

The portrait of the younger Eileen is deeply saddening, she is squashed and sad and has no sense of self worth, punishing herself through not eating or washing, dressing in her dead mother's clothes and drinking with her alcoholic father. We do not root for her, neither do we want her to stay in her circumstances. We watch with a detachment, aware that she is unlikeable and difficult. 

Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, Yanis Varoufakis

I loved this, I've folded over so many pages it would have been better if I'd folded over the ones which didn't have something to remember on them. It is straight forward, left leaning and written with a passion and lightness which makes it easy to absorb the ideas and understand the way the economy works in practical terms. It is also unusual in the Varoufakis points out the problems with the economy and then provides ideas for solutions, or multiple ideas for different ways of doing things. It should be required reading in high-school maths classes all over the world. 

They Came to Baghdad, Agatha Christie

 

This was exactly what I wanted to read just before Christmas when my head was full of work and I had no room for anything else. It is completely how you would expect, some views are dated but it is a brilliantly satisfying mystery novel. 

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

I had a lot of curiosity about this book, having heard so much about it and having seen the film 'Capote', about Truman Capote researching this book. 

Capote expertly tells the stories of the murders of the Clutter family, it's impact on the town and the lives of the murders Perry Smith and Dick Hancock. 

I am not sure how much of the stories of the men's lives are true, though they seem very plausible and unromantcised. Capote seems to get to the bottom of what was a completely incomprehensible crime, the family were murdered apparently for no real reason and with no real thought by two lost, cruel and unthinking, unfeeling men. For this reason the murders were so shocking, the town and the US at the time were searching for an explanation, and it seems that the explanation there is is completely unsatisfactory. It goes against everything common sense and culture tells us.