Happy Mothers' Day!

Author of the Day: Kingsley Amis

Lucky Jim is a favorite of mine, ever since I read it in college. Kingsley Amis's description of a hangover being like a huge raw egg rolling around inside Jim's skull has stayed vivid with me for years.

The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize, was a great novel about friendship, fame, identity, and booze. The Green Man was entertaining, although veered alarmingly into science fiction there at the end. The Alteration, an alternate history imagining England if there had been no Protestant Reformation, was a quick read that gave a lot to ponder.

Amis wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Those I have read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. Many are out of print.

1947 Bright November (poems)

1953 A Frame of Mind (poems)

1954 Fantasy Portraits (poems)

1954 Lucky Jim

1955 That Uncertain Feeling

1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956

1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals (a Fabian Society pamphlet)

1958 I Like it Here

1960 Take A Girl Like You

1960 New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction

1960 Hemingway in Space (short story, Punch Dec. 1960)

1962 My Enemy's Enemy (short stories)

1962 The Evans County

1963 One Fat Englishman (reviewed here)

1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest)

1965 The James Bond Dossier

1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (as Lt. Col. William "Bill" Tanner)

1966 The Anti-Death League (Burgess favorite)

1968 Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (as Robert Markham)

1968 I Want It Now

1968 A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957-1967

1969 The Green Man

1970 What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions

1971 Girl, 20

1972 On Drink (reviewed here)

1973 The Riverside Villas Murders

1974 Ending Up

1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World

1975 The Crime of the Century

1976 The Alteration

1978 Jake's Thing

1979 Collected Poems 1944-78

1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek

1980 Dear Illusion: Collected Short Stories

1983 Every Day Drinking (reviewed here)

1984 How's Your Glass? (reviewed here)

1984 Stanley and the Women

1986 The Old Devils

1988 Difficulties With Girls

1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill

1990 The Amis Collection

1991 Memoirs

1991 Mr. Barrett's Secret and Other Stories

1991 We Are All Guilty

1992 The Russian Girl

1994 You Can't Do Both

1995 The Biographer's Moustache

1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

2001 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Edited by Zachary Leader

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Last updated on February 24, 2018.

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Alteration

"Hubert Anvil's voice rose above the sound of the choir and full orchestra, reaching the vertex of the loftiest dome in the Old World and the western doors of the longest nave in Christendom." -- The Alteration by Kingsley Amis In this alternate history novel, there was no Protestant Reformation and the Catholic church is the only (Christian) game in town. Church higher-ups have their eye on musical marvel, ten-year-old Hubert Anvil, as the next great castrato. Ewwww . . . where is this going?

Book Notes: Skeletons on the Zahara

It is a running joke in our house that my husband's favorite books all contain the line, "And then, we had to eat the sled dogs." Yes, he mostly reads history books and historical biographies, but his favorite favorite books involve arctic adventure, shipwrecks, exploration, cannibalism, lost treasure, and the like. So when Hubby recommends a book, I give him a long hard stare before I take him up on it. I even cross examine him: "Is it all about battles? Does anyone freeze to death? Does it involve cannibalism?" When he answered "no" to the above questions, I agreed to read Skeletons on the Zahara, his recent favorite and one he has been recommending to everyone he talks to. It sounded fascinating -- in 1815, shipwrecked New England sailors are captured in the Sahara desert and forced into slavery. An interesting slice of history from the pirate age. Now, halfway through, I am struggling to finish and I have a new question to ask before I read any book Hubby suggests: "Does anyone in the book drink urine?" I am too German to stop reading a book once I start, but this one is testing my resolve. It was bad enough to read about slaughtering a pig while adrift in a lifeboat, eating it raw and drinking its blood. But drinking urine -- human and camel, so far -- is a major theme of this book. Including a Moby Dick-like digression into the science and anecdotal history of shipwreck survivors drinking urine. Hubby owes me, big time.

Favorite Authors

Over in the right-hand column, you will see that I added a new feature -- a list of my favorite authors. The idea is to list all the authors whose works I plan to read in their entirety, eventually. Each name links to a post with either a complete bibliography, a list of novels, or at least a particular series that I am working on. So far, the list includes: Cara Black James Lee Burke Lee Child Penelope Fitzgerald Richard Ford Jim Harrison John Lescroart Martin Cruz Smith Julia Spencer-Fleming William Styron Anne Tyler John Updike Simon Winchester Right now, the list is heavy on mystery writers because if I like a particular book in a series, I want to read the entire series. But there are many authors I have to add, including Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip Roth. It it going to be a long list. Like with my award winners and Must Read lists, if anyone is working on reading the entire bibliography of a particular author on my list, please leave a comment on that author's post with a link to your progress report, and I will add the link to my post.