Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

Read on the Kindle, after seeing the stage show at the cinema featuring James Franco and Chris O'Dowd.

How come you haven't read it before? Well, in my day, the English Literature O'Level focussed on British Writers, like Charles Dickens, so I suppose I never got round to it.

Two things surprised me.

1. The stage play stuck almost word for word and scene for scene to the book.

2. The book is very short, which in fact lent very well to it becoming a stage play.

Obviously a classic like this needs no introduction, and no review, but just as a summary.  George and Lennie are manual workers; they travel together taking agricultural jobs. Their dream is to one day have a farm of their own.  George is the pragmatic one, and Lennie is childlike in his mental capacity and character, but tall, broad and strong physically.  Arriving at a ranch, George and Lennie settle in, and meet the inhabitants, including the one handed Candy, the pugnacious Curly, and Curly's flirtatious wife.  Needless to say, this book does not end happily.

Skipping Christmas, John Grisham

Read on Kindle - Jo B's choice for our Christmas Book Club.

Luther and Nora Krank wave goodbye to Blair, their daughter and only child just after Thanksgiving.  She is going abroad to work with the Peace Corps in Peru.

Luther realises that they will be on their own for Christmas for the first time in years.  As an accountant he adds up what they spent on Christmas the year before, and is shocked at the result.  He decides that this year he and Nora will skip Christmas.

The novel unfolds with the reactions of Luther and Nora's friends and neighbours to their decision not to participate in the madness of the holiday season.

I probably wouldn't have read this book, if it hadn't been a Book Club book, but I did enjoy it very much, especially the fun it pokes at those holiday traditions that simply get out of hand.

More Fool Me, Stephen Fry

Read on the Kindle, after Amazon recommendation.

Note to self: Never read another Stephen Fry book on the Kindle - he uses so many footnotes that it just gets annoying switching back and forth, especially since my Kindle is the old style without a touch screen.

This book should have taken up where the last one left off, but does in fact start with a precis of his first two books of memoirs, which is OK if you read them a long while ago, like I did, but I can see it would annoy someone who had come directly from the previous book.

He then proceeds to talk about his cocaine addiction, opening up about a subject he hasn't discussed before, and the last third of the book is extracts from a diary Stephen kept in 1993, while he was writing his novel, The Hippopotamus.

I came to the conclusion that you have to be a real Stephen Fry fan to enjoy this book, the confessional is a bit contrived and the diary entries eventually get repetitive.  Luckily there were just enough celebrity anecdotes included to keep me reading to the end.