Snowdrops

The oddest books seem to make the Booker Shortlist lately. Snowdrops by A.D. Miller is no exception. It is a lightweight 'thriller' but with heavy weight reviews " a chilling first novel about the slide from relative innocence into amorality." "a nuanced character study". 

It's the classic tale of a  self-deluding fairly innocent man being duped by Russian girls. A British banker who is living in Moscow slowly gets entangled with two very lovely Russian girls who are obviously scheming. The tension I suppose is in the con---you're not sure what they're up to but you know it's something. The conceit of the story is that it is supposedly written later when this man is back in London and as a way of confessing his past to his future wife. That premise is unnecessary and weakens the whole book. What idiot would tell this whole sorry story to his future wife? 

And what idiot would put this book on the Shortlist?

Solar

I didn't read this when it came out because it got poor reviews but it actually was quite fun. It's the story of a rather unlikeable academic who won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in his youth and has been coasting along on his laurels ever since. He is now trying to make money out of the energy crisis. He's been married 5 times and is generally a huge failure. The book pushes him from crisis to crisis until he is spiraling out of control. The tone and action is reminiscent of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, that book by Michael Frayn, Headlong, or something by David Lodge. Considering that Ian McEwan lives in loftier literary circles than these writers maybe this isn't such a great book, but other than a bit of a drag at the end, I really enjoyed it.

D. E. Stevenson

This is chick-lit before there were even Chicks. These are very cozy 1930's novels about young women who can always be perked up by buying a new hat and frock. These are books where women tell their fiancee's they have to leave them to nurse dying uncles in the wilds of Scotland or else they wouldn't be "Christian". These are novels where everyone has servants and dresses for dinner. No one sleeps together and one heroine is appalled that she let someone kiss her that she wasn't really serious about. These are novels where the mentally challenged are still called Congenital Idiots. These are books that you get gravy stained from the library with multiple copies in large print. No one checks them out anymore and I have a feeling they will end up at the knackers pretty soon so am reading them all at a great rate, gravy stains and all.