Books

Dilbert taught me how to read. Stacked perilously high – between Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side – in my childhood home’s bathroom, Scott Adams’s cartoon provided the perfect reading material for the porcelain throne. Even before I knew what most of the words meant, I’d belly laugh at page after page of banal workplace humor. This is bizarre: why, as a preschooler, was I so tickled by these jokes about human-resources departments and fax machines? Adams, who died in the night, enjoyed more than a three-decade run as honcho of the funny pages, starting in 1989.

As Christmas approaches and we wrack our brains to find something that suits everyone, there is no present quite like a book. Whether it’s an unputdownable novel, a heart-stopping crime series, a thought-provoking biography or a collection of beautiful poetry, a book provides an escape, the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of everyday life and, above all, hours and hours of pleasure. Here are half a dozen of my favorites, previously recommended on my Queen’s Reading Room, which you might like to add to your Christmas present list… or (if preferred) keep for yourself! The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard This is a series of books that I return to again and again, to reacquaint myself with the irresistibly charming Cazalet family.

First lady is a strange role. Even when your husband is the first black president, and you’re a Princeton and Harvard-educated former corporate lawyer, America still projects its most regressive ideas about gender onto you. So I understand that Michelle Obama, like Hillary Clinton before her (skipping Laura Bush, a more classical first lady, along with, more recently, Jill Biden and Melania Trump), might have felt constrained, faced with expectations she could never satisfy. I don’t doubt that being black added enormously to that burden. Yet there is nothing more irritating than the person of Michelle Obama complaining. And she is always complaining.

Charismatic, handsome and with a great white shark’s feral cool, Anthony Bourdain was someone that everyone wanted to be. The chef, writer and TV presenter described the premise of his award-winning shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown, as “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” They cemented his image as a gadabouting, kamikaze gourmand. Bourdain scarfed down andouillette and warthog anus, drank sun-bear bile and polished off the still-beating heart of a cobra, plonked into a shooter of Vietnamese firewater. He showed Barack Obama the correct way to slurp bún chả noodles on a steamy Hanoi side street, and he and his team watched from their hotel pool as Israeli jets strafed downtown Beirut during the 2006 invasion.

 The epigraph to this novel is from Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, one of the French author’s Arthurian romances. It is fitting because The Last Westerner is a medieval romance, as well as an epic set in the American Southwest in the closing years of the 20th century. The dedication is to the author’s wife and to the late Edward Abbey, a personal friend. It is equally fitting because The Last Westerner is a western novel in setting and theme and will bring to mind other western novels such as Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992). Abbey’s book is subtitled, An Old Tale in a New Time. That could be the subtitle for The Last Westerner too, and as for pretty horses, Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s novel is full of them.

The problem with the contemporary literary life, most of its observers usually agree, is that nobody at large in it does anything much except write. A century ago, your specimen male novelist could be found fighting in wars or traveling to places from which the reportage he brought back had genuine novelty. These days, alas, our man just sits at a desk and every so often looks out of the window at the teeming world beyond. The trajectory of the 21st-century novelist is as familiar – and as unavoidable – as a portrait of Taylor Swift. You grow up, you show an aptitude for literature, you start writing books and, unless something very unusual happens, you go on writing them.