How do you choose a book to read following something as epic as War and Peace? I decided that I needed something completely different in style, and subject matter. W. Somerset Maugham's Up at the Villa is a slim novel set in Italy just before WWII. His writing style seems to be very simple yet elegant--spare prose with just the right amount of dialog to convey a sophisticated story. A young British woman has come to Italy to recuperate over the recent death of her husband. An older, distinguished friend has asked her to marry him, and just as Mary Panton decides she will accept, she meets a handsome stranger. Well, this is as far as I am in the story. It could easily be read in an evening, but as I have lapsed into my bad reading habits (dragging around more books than one at a time), I will be reading it over the next couple of days. I think this will be a good introduction to Maugham, who I plan on reading more of.
I have been reading very good things about Benjamin Black's Christine Falls, and I think the praise is well earned. I'm sure I have mentioned this book and the fact that I have been enjoying what I have been reading, but have I said anything at all about the story? This is John Banville's first mystery, and as would be expected it is well written (not quite as lofty as The Sea, which I consider a good thing). Set in Dublin, it begins with a young nurse leaving with a small charge--a baby. Quirke Griffin is a pathologist who has caught his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, who is an obstetrician, making changes to the file of a dead girl called Christine Falls. Can you see a pattern forming here? I have a feeling that I know where things are leading, but I don't want to give away too much of the story. This is definitely not your usual police procedural, but it feels a bit more dark--more of a psychological drama.
The thing about reading more than one book at a time is that you can have several really good stories to choose from. It's a bit of a vicious cycle--you just want to concentrate on one book at a time, but they are all so good you want to read them all (and then how do you choose), so you end up reading a bit of all of them. Everything I have on the go (once again) is quite different than the other books. Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman is so far an excellent historical novel. This one is set in Henry VIII's England and in the household of Sir Thomas More. Told from the perspective of a young woman who was adopted by the family, she is intelligent, and learned. She has taught herself the healing arts (have you noticed young women of these times are always knowledgeable in the healing arts? But then I suppose that is one of the few areas open to them to excel). In 1527 Hans Holbein comes to paint More's and the family's portrait. He will do so twice over the course of five years, and though they will be similar, they will also be subtly different. Much will happen in these five years. England is on the brink of unrest. Bennett very evocatively tells her story against the panorama of court life and its many intrigues. Henry VIII is fishing for an excuse to get out of his marriage to Catherine, the Protestant Reformation is spreading across Europe, and heretics abound. All this in the first part of the book!
Finally I have more or less gotten back to reading my chapter a day of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. So many things to say about this one, but I don't want to give away the details of David's life. All I have to say is this kid has more bad luck than most characters I have read about in literature. I'm really enjoying the story (despite poor David's difficulties). For some reason I sort of expect this to happen in a Dickens novel, though I am not sure why. I only hope things start to look up for him.