It’s not often I’m impatient to get back to a book. This was A Good’un.
 
Unsworth’s tender hand depicts the travails of travelling players in medieval England and the loose, strange solidarity that drives them onward. Your very likeable narrator is a by no means unethical, yet scurrilous young priest. On joining the company, he changes the group dynamic, though not its soul.
 
The troupe’s guiding star is an integrity tempered by the needs of day-to-day survival. This produces such a creative tension in their acting as to conjure up (figuratively speaking) a spirit of intelligence that enlivens and spins the tale forward. Their spontaneity surprises even them.
 
The story gets truly interesting when, for reasons of necessity, the actors take a step over a line drawn by church and custom and perform a secular play about real, local events in which they themselves have become involved.
 
It made me think of the shift in painting in the same era away from religious themes towards humanist and realistic subjects. At the time, such decisions were not made for ideological motives. The artists suddenly had middle-class patrons who wanted something different. All the same, the choices both produced and portrayed a profound cultural change.

In “Morality Play”, the performances themselves turn into the real action of the tale, and the entwining of art with individual lives becomes political, provocative, subversive and real.
 
Unsworth is very skilled at visual narrative. There’s one trick I really liked that he uses on more than one occasion. By the subtle device of describing a gesture, especially during a performance, a particular meaning is conveyed to all those concerned and watching: fellow players, theatre audience and reader. And with a few deft touches, you also get a feel for period and place.
 
That’s the more academic lowdown. More to the point, the story is gently gripping, nicely paced and amusing. Perhaps my favourite book this year.

One that I never read as a kid and have quite enjoyed as an older guy. I wonder what others there are?
 
It’s the dialect that does it with Huck Finn, and boy, what a radical move by Twain! It must have been like classical music listeners hearing pop for the first time.
 
If you haven’t read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and might be interested, don’t let The Cancellers who want the book banned deter you. Worse still are The Sanitizers who sift through a book and remove or replace any word that they disapprove of. These sanctimonious butchers do the reading public a serious disservice, not least because books that contain outdated attitudes and prejudices represent rare opportunities for education.
 
Huckleberry Finn is a fundamentally anti-racist (or at least non-racist) story stock full of the n-word. In its day, 140 years ago, when the book was published, some considered it overly progressive for its portrayal of a black man, a runaway slave, as an honest, sympathetic character. If we learn where our present-day worldviews have evolved from, we will gain in understanding, and maybe even refrain from thinking of ourselves as better. Seriously, people: what do you think the generation of 2164 will say about us?

A lone voice in the literature of the dusty wilderness, a howl in the cold night under stars.
 
 McCarthy brings the reader coddling in a self-indulgent comfort zone face to face with bare facts.
 
Real courage happens when there’s no one else there to see it. Death is a stone’s fall away and we are always on our own.

My fondness for Philp K. Dick’s mainstream novels has to do with their evoking 1950s California, which I somehow feel nostalgic about, even though I am not from there and hadn’t even been born then. Although I think he would get that.
 
I have these four titles and also Mary and the Giant in mind, with Confessions of a Crap Artist being my favourite. If you enjoy odd, interesting, unworldly characters, Jack Isodore is up there with John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly.
 
I like it that Dick’s protagonists are typewriter, TV or used car salesmen and suchlike in these and his sci fi books. You can’t get more down-to-earth than these tangible, familiar, domestic items and their vendors. They are so reassuringly familiar and uncomplicated that the reader is seduced by the unthreatening technology of everyday life and the straightforwardness of the character’s job, and the stage is thus set for the weird and the wonderful twists that Dick will now introduce. It just wouldn’t work with an insurance broker, or a banker.
 
These humble occupations get the characters into other people’s homes and lives, and they are indifferently paid, which means that the character struggles, so the narrative ball is rolling and there’s a tension already.
 
Theses books evince a sympathy for and celebration of ordinary people in small town America that has a personal appeal for me. Unlike the science fiction novels, which play out brilliant ideas, these narratives are character-driven. And people, Dick finds, are naturally amusing.
 
The novels are shot through with Dick’s dry yet often gentle humour, in a world and an elegant prose that moves at the pace of a 1950s saloon. When the nutty stuff happens, we can sit back and watch and wonder.

There are pages of Le Guin when to read is to be lifted like a leaf by the wind and borne along.
 
Brantor Ogge is a depiction of a bullying male such as I haven’t come across before in her writing.  You can feel the menace.

This lively account of a young Englishman’s experiences in Japan is so much more than an entertainment. As Boon learns to decipher the codes of Japanese culture and behavioural patterns, he presents to us an eloquent and revelatory interpretation of the Japanese mind with an astuteness that matches his own personal captivation.
 
Never bookish, always vital, he sheds light on a mindset and society I have never before come close to comprehending.