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Last week I finished My Dark Places and Far Eastern Tales:

My Dark Places is a great book for those who are already fans of Ellroy’s writing, or are fans of true crime writing in general. It’s very weird to have true crime mixed in with memoir, but Ellroy is definitely a special case. If my mother had been murdered when I was ten and my father had spent all his time talking shite about her (constantly referring to her as an alcoholic whore, I recall), I’d grow up pretty fucked up, too.

I got Far Eastern Tales out from the library. I remember my mother being a fan of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, but she’s also into chick lit and self-help, so I was a bit wary. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would — it’s really interesting to see the society of early expats to Southeast Asia through this medium, and how Singapore, briefly mentioned here and there, has changed in (what must amount to) a century or so.

I’ve just started Country Driving, a proof of a book being published in January 2010. Given the time I spent in China, I’m pretty keen to see what the author has to say.

(I thought this had been published, but it hadn’t. Ah well. Imagine it’s 23 November, you can do it.)

Can I just say what an unexpected delight The House of the Mosque was. I do feel I’m at one remove from the author’s intentions in a translation, so I hope that the novel in its original Dutch has as light a touch yet as evocative a storytelling style. Stories that outline the horrors of a particular period in history are important but they get a bit same-y after a while. This novel tells the story of the Iranian Revolution and its effects through the eyes of one extended family. The earlier sections did read like a magical fable of sorts, and it’s only when you get to the second half that things get serious. Highly recommended.

Then I remembered that The Yellow Wallpaper was due back at the library this week, so I sped through it. That’s not hard because it’s only 30 pages or so long. It’s essentially a first-person short story of a woman losing it. I’m not sure it’s the literary or feminist masterpiece, but it was pretty good and the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman sounded like quite the woman. What I found most interesting (in the afterword) was how Gilman attributed her ‘inherited’ personality traits — the emotional ones from her mother, the logical and intellectual from her father. Perhaps she was more a product of her times than she (or her fans) would like to admit!

Now I’m about halfway through my gifted copy of My Dark Places (James Ellroy). It’s pretty riveting reading.

I am now more than halfway through The House of the Mosque. It’s a real page-turner, a couple of nights ago I had to tell myself to stop reading because it was really getting late.

Yesterday I went to Waterstone’s to get Makers by Cory Doctorow, and I also ended picking up Flash Forward by Robert J Sawyer and The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson (non-fiction literary crush right here, baby). I should not be allowed near any bookshops. Seriously.

I’m making less-than-stellar progress with The House of the Mosque so far — we spent more time walking around outdoors and then watching DVDs over the weekend. So I’m only about a third of the way through.

But we just bought four more books from Fopp on Rose Street and they were all steeply discounted (remainder stock, I imagine) and two of those are by T.C. Boyle — squee!