Best Books of the 2012 (So Far)

We're halfway through the year, so it's time to look back on 2012's reads so far and list favorites:

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene:  Loved this!  Set in London during and just after World War II, the novel examines the obsessions, jealousy and discernments within the relationships between three central characters: writer Maurice Bendrix; Sarah Miles; and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles.





The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje:  Again, set during World War II.  The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned English accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army as they live out the end of World War II in an Italian villa.



  

The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham:  Maugham is one of my favorite writers.  This is set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s and is the story of the beautiful but shallow young Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to a remote region of China ravaged by a cholera epidemic.





 
Consequences of the Heart - Peter Cunningham:  Wonderfully engaging.  A love story, a war story, a thriller, and a generational story of two Irish families.








Old School - Tobias Wolff:  Prep school, literary contests, famous writers - this is a book for book lovers and would-be writers!  Set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood, a scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity.








The Traveler - Antal Szerb: More Hungarian authors! I loved the two Dezso Kosztolanyi novels I read last year, but The Traveler tops them both. What's not to like? A honeymoon in Italy, a secret past, a missing childhood friend - I could not stop reading and cannot wait to find a copy of Szerb's Journey by Moonlight.





 
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins: My first Wilkie Collins and, so far, my favorite. This is a perfect mystery!









Lorna Doone - R. D. Blackmore: I finally read this novel after watching the 2001 film dozens of times. It's enormous and thankfully so. Blackmore managed to draw out the drama of Lorna Doone's life without once losing my interest.








The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde: It's hard to believe, but I had not read Dorian Gray before this year. That was my loss, really. I love this story (I have seen the 1945 film - featuring this painting - many, many times), and the end will never cease to surprise and shock me.







Piccadilly Jim - P. G. Wodehouse: I have previously read a few Jeeves and Wooster tales and Leave It to Psmith, but Piccadilly Jim is currently my favorite Wodehouse novel. There is Wodehouse's typical mistaken/false identity surrounding the character of Jimmy Crocker and convoluted plots for revenge. It is filled with witty scenes and a brilliant character in Ann Chester.

Christmas Holiday - W. Somerset Maugham

     While it might seem odd to read a novel titled Christmas Holiday in January, Maugham's book is as far removed from a feel good Christmas story as possible.  That said, I loved it.  Written in 1939, just before the outbreak of WWII. it was an attempt by Maugham to wake up the British to what was happening in Europe.
     Charley, a 23 year old who has completed his studies at Cambridge and a year in his father's business, is given a Christmas trip to Paris by his father.  It is his first trip alone and he sails off to have the time of his life in spite of the brewing political situation in Europe.  He plans to meet up with his childhood friend, Simon Fenimore, who has a job in Paris as a foreign correspondent and intends to get some experience in Europe before returning to England to stand for Parliament as a Labour candidate.  Simon, an orphan, has always been a surly loner but Charley finds that his has become a Communist and has no smaller goal than to take over the world.  He has become contemptuous of Charley's middle-class life.
     As an attempt to indulge Charley's desire for adventure, he takes him to a brothel where he introduces him to Princess Olga, a Russian immigrant, and proceeds to desert him.  Charley, while wanting to stay with the girl, wants to go to the Christmas eve midnight mass.  He tells her that he will be back in an hour but she begs him to take him with her.  So begins a companionship that lasts for his five days in Paris.
     He learns that she is really Lydia, a young Russian woman who was left homeless after the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution and fled the country. In France she married Robert Berger, a rake who was later sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude for murder. Having covered the trial for the press, Simon is well aware of this, and knew exactly what he was letting his friend in for. She has since had to become a prostitute but it is not primarily in order to make ends meet but as a penance for her husband's sin.  He brings her to his hotel where they live together for his stay, but the relationship is platonic.  Over the course of his stay, she tells him the story of her unhappy life which fills up the greater portion of the novel.
     Lydia's story and Simon's vehement radicalism disrupt Charley's complacent life and cause him to question the meaning of his life.  His glimpse at a world formally unknown to him make him reevaluate his beliefs and priorities.  The contrast between Charley's sheltered English life with the life of those he meets in Paris is one of the things Maugham does best.  The essence of pre-war Paris is captured perfectly.  The characters are also wonderfully well drawn.
     What happens in Paris goes back with Charley and the cozy family he left seems shallow.  The last lines of the novel are powerful and moving.  I chose this novel without knowing much at all about it and it is now one of my favorite of Maugham's works.


~ Frances