Country Driving - A Chinese Road Trip by Peter Hessler

Unlike many books I read, this one is about something I have studied for many years and can occasionally claim (often with far too little justification) some familiarity, namely China. My degree is in Chinese and I lived in China as a student in 1983/84, long before the opening up and reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping a few years earlier had really begun to bite. I have read a lot of books about China and Chinese society.

This is without doubt one of the best. Hessler is a journalist on the New Yorker and he writes with an easy, humorous style. But what really makes the book stand out for this reader is that he brings the westerner's eye to bear with humanity and empathy but also with scepticism; in other words, with exactly the mix that most intelligent observers like to think they employ. But he really does it.

I have spent the best part of 30 years learning Chinese and I am still in the foothills of the language. Hessler  clearly has an impressive grasp of the language, even allowing for the narrative requirement to interpret meaning sometimes where a precise and perfect understanding of every nuance of language is missing. But that is part of the book's appeal - he makes no pretence, as some have done, of getting 'inside the Chinese mind'. He just writes as he finds.

His account of Chinese driving law is very funny but there are two major settings for the book: the village of Sancha and the boom towns of Zhejiang province. In both cases, he is the outsider and the observer who wins the confidence and trust of people in ways that allow him to tell their stories without patronising them.

His descriptions of how property law works, how people relate to the Communist Party and to government in general, how business works and how social mobility is changing China at an unimaginable pace are succinct and measured. He does not judge China by western values but he does draw comparisons which are instructive.

There a many books about doing business in China, usually called things like 'Dancing with the Dragon' or 'Behind the Great Wall'. I have not read them all, of course, but I have read a few. None of them will give someone interested in understanding China the insights that this book gives. Nor with as much humour and sheer reading pleasure.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

A big, juicy novel, weighing in at over 1000 pages. Powerful themes, lots of melodrama and, like some of Dickens, written originally in instalments for a magazine. This latter quality is visible in the ebb and flow of  climax, description and plot.

A quick practical piece of advice: I read the Penguin version, having discarded the Oxford Classics translation as too full of typos. It seriously put me off. The Penguin translation by Robin Buss is much better.

The plot is complicated and one of the main themes is how people can change and transform themselves. I recommend paying careful attention about a quarter of the way through, when the names of those who, at the outset of the book, do the Count down, are changed as they become ennobled. This helps later on, when  Dumas uses their new titles all the time.

The book is full of drama and colour and I don't think it is pretentious to see in the Count the model for all those fictional figures we know and love, from James Bond to Jason Bourn to Sherlock Holmes, who acquire superior powers and intellect that allow them to do fantastical things. Indeed, one has to suspend one's disbelief a fair bit to enjoy the book. Characters, especially the protagonist, become protean and acceptance of disguise as a viable and practical venture is necessary. A bit like those Shakespeare plays when someone dresses up as a woman and deceives even their own family about their true identity by doing so.

The Count also has a dark side, which gives Dumas the opportunity to invoke themes of providence, fate and what the divine really means in the human setting.

The historical context is fascinating. The post-Bonaparte politics of France are well elucidated in the notes and the conflicting loyalties of the characters are very much part of the story. The France described by Dumas is on the cusp of what we can now describe as modernity; the telegraph plays a pivotal role in one sub plot and mass readership of newspapers in another. Living as we do during a financial crisis, it is also very interesting to see how Dumas paints the motivations and practices of bankers. Not flattering, as you can imagine.

All in all, this is a big, blousy, enjoyable novel. Ideal if you are going on a long journey and need some reliable diversion and entertainment.

A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism by Slavenka Drackulić

This is a great book for people, like me, who imagine Eastern Europe to be full of cynically wise, battle-scarred (politically) individuals who have acquired through suffering a deeper insight into the true nature of the human condition. That is an unreserved compliment to the author, who captures beautifully the diversity of the political experience under the Soviet system but also the bleakness that homogenised it.

The format of the book is a series of fables, told by animals, each about a different Eastern European, formerly Communist country. The language is subtle and humorous and it even crossed my mind to suggest my children read it. But I thought better of it. A fair amount of prior knowledge is needed to enjoy this book. The chapter on Jaruzelski does not even mention his name, for example.

But this is a thoroughly enjoyable read on a number of levels. It reminds you, not least, of some of the lunacies of the Communist era, like the Ceausescus' nutty approach to dogs. But it also digs deep into the banalities and oppressiveness of the system and reminds us that its legacy is very much with us today.

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

This is a lovely book. Wise, witty and restrained. It is a mixture of memoir, story and essay. The structure is based around the elements, each chapter dealing with one of them. The writer's training and career as a chemist provides the narrative flow and there is profound commentary on the nature of knowledge and science, and how they relate to human existence.

Later in the book, the writer reflects on the success of his Auschwitz memoir 'If this is a man', and how its fame affected his position as a working industrial chemist.

His style is unaffected and humane. All in all, a joy.

Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley

This is a very snappy, enjoyable read, with lots of tasty one liners. An example: "Strange how in America, in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong."

Or, "His whole life was meetings. Did they have this many meetings in the Middle Ages? In Ancient Rome and Greece? No wonder their civilisations died out, they probably figured decadence and the Visigoths were preferable to more meetings."

Essentially, it is an extended satire with libertarian leanings on the cynicism of modern American media and communications culture. The story concerns the lead spokesman for the tobacco lobby and his emotionally stunted attempts to deal with the moral ambivalence of his job and motivations.

It is great fun and Buckley has a whale of a time making the point, again and again, that everyone has their price and that, as the lead character says, we all have to pay the mortgage. I think the band Dead Kennedys, in the 1980s, had a song called 'We are all prostitutes'. Same basic point. Everyone in this book is out for what they can get.

But this is an artful and clever book, though it sometimes reads like a film screenplay. It was made into a very successful film, so maybe that was always in the author's mind.

I chose to buy it after reading in one of those 'my week' type columns in the Financial Times that Buckley was a great writer. I think it was written by Malcolm Rifkind, of all people. That is the sort of incongruity Buckley himself would love.

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

The Belle Epoque, those 20 years or so before the First World War, have long held a fascination for me. I have read Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' twice, in different translations, which must testify something, as it is set in precisely this period. This book gives a new perspective on those 'vertigo years', as Europe spiralled into madness, as well as providing a delicately-woven tapestry of how objects and lives intersect over a century.

The book's central narrative concerns a collection of Japanese carvings - netsuke - and their history within the author's family. It becomes a beautiful and elegaic meditation on the nature of physical art and its relationship with real, human lives.

The Jewish family became wealthy in Odessa and Vienna and then fragmented under the intolerable pressures of Nazism. Any account of the Jewish experience of the Nazi years brings prickling to the eyes and this is no exception. But the author is dispassionate, using objects as the foundation of his story; this is very powerful and profoundly moving.

The British (and I venture to think, the American) reader today can only marvel at the international nature of continental Europe's intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century. This awe-inspiring cosmopolitanism, when languages were not a barrier since everyone seems to have been fluent in at least three, is well described by Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, as well. Artistic sensibilities seem to have been heightened by this broad and flexible cultural legacy. Opera, music, art, poetry - all of them seem to have occupied a far greater slice of attention than they do in today's diffuse and cacophonous Anglo-American culture.

The custodian of the Japanese carvings at their time of greatest danger is virtually unknowable to the author as she was a servant. The information sources of family letters, legal documents and official records are simply not available in relation to her, as they are for her rich employers. This raises again the question that often, for this writer, emerges from accounts of the past. Is it only the rich, with the leisure and the opportunity that wealth affords, who can ever populate our history? I have often looked with astonishment at the intellectual achievements of people like, say, Charles Darwin or Bertrand Russell. But when you realise how privileged they were, you wonder what others with the same privilege might have done.

Today, it is remarkable how many famous people have famous parents. In acting, of course, it is very common. Is is simply that growing up in an environment ,where famous and brilliant people are around daily. imparts some confidence or lustre to the mind and ambition? I suspect so.

This is an utterly captivating and thoroughly enjoyable book. It is about travel, war, time, family and, most of all, the enduring nature of aesthetics for the human mind, in spite of all that the world throws against it.

The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell

To the reader of today, one of the most interesting things about this well-paced and beguiling novel is that it was written in 1973. It makes a bold and intriguing effort to get inside the minds of the colonial settlers of the 1850s, as they wrestle with the consequences of the Indian Mutiny. But the reader of today is conscious of India primarily as the rising economic giant, where software and call centres grow with astonishing pace. The world's idea of India is having to be updated constantly. So the novel is a snapshot both of the time at which it is set, 1857, and of British attitudes to India at the time of writing.

The characters of the novel are drawn almost exclusively from the British colonial class and Farrell devotes a lot of intellectual energy to portraying their thought processes as they deal with a bloody and in many ways horrific uprising. Part of this artifice requires him to describe real horrors in the most mundane and workmanlike terms, reflecting the distant and incomprehending viewpoint of his characters. This is sometimes hilarious.

The all-consuming concern of some protagonists for doctrinal disputes within the Church of England, even in the face of impending death, is both amusing and, to the modern eye, almost satirical in its description. But it serves a purpose in reminding us that such matters were of real significance. After all, what are the equivalents in today's Britain? Whether the X Factor is better than Britain's Got Talent? Whether nuclear power should be eschewed?  What would we worry about if we thought we would be either violently murdered or starve to death within the next couple of days?

The description of the Victorian sensibility for progress and its virtues is excellent. Sometimes, the portrayal of the Victorian mind can seem somewhat caricatured. But this is a book of primary colours, and the story rattles along with a lot of humour while covering essentially inhumane and desperate events.

I liked it.