The Carpenter's Pencil - Manuel Rivas

"The most widely translated work in the history of Galician literature", this story of love surviving during the Spanish civil war is intensely poetic, in the sense that what stood out most for me was not particular phrases or incidents that I am able to describe coherently here, but a lingering "aftertaste" of profound beauty. Although the book starts with a cynical journalist going to interview Dr Da Barca, an old Republican exile who we are told miraculously escaped death in 1936, most of the story is told through the memories of a former prison guard, who now works as a bouncer at a brothel, where the journalist reappears briefly at the end of the book - perhaps the purpose of this is simply to remind us that the essential meaning of a life is best expressed not in a simple narrative as told to a stranger, but through observing the influence it has had on others.

Herbal the guard initially followed & watched Da Barca not only because of his official orders but also through a bitter, jealous hatred, fuelled partly by his obsession with Da Barca's beautiful girlfriend Marisa, and their lives remain entwined throughout the book. The "carpenter's pencil" of the title refers to a souvenir kept by Herbal following his killing of a painter who was a fellow-prisoner and friend of Da Barca. This violent murder strangely stands out as a kind act in the brutal guard's life, since it was carried out to save the painter from a prolonged and painful death, and from that point onwards the painter's voice appears to encourage him to act as a protector to the doctor and his love, and he repeatedly intervenes positively (although discreetly) protecting the doctor from death several times and colluding in allowing the couple a "wedding night" in a hotel during a prison transfer.

I liked the complexity of the guard's character, as he struggles with the competing influences of the dead painter and another internal voice who encourages him to gain power through bullying and cruelty, and we see his relationships with family members (particularly his sister's husband) which show him in a different light. A few brief passages describing prison life at that time also stuck in my mind, such as a "meal" conjured by hypnotism as a favour to another prisoner, culminating in chestnuts as served by his mother, and a moment of subtle resistance as a hall-full of men cough quietly in unison in response to an announcement about a victory for Franco's Spain.

Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

I enjoyed this book on two levels. The main plot - a thriller about a rogue state security agent on the trail of a serial killer - kept me gripped and made me want to devour it in large chunks until I reached the end, but I ultimately found the resolution a little too neat to provide more than a one-off burst of satisfying escapism. The window that the story provided into life in Russia under Stalin, however, was totally compelling and raised challenging questions that were still going around in my head weeks later. The transformation of the lead character is fascinating, as he gradually changes from a loyal believer, able to ignore obvious inconsistencies in an official report in order to uphold the principle that "there is no crime" in the perfect new communist society, to a rebel on the run in search of the truth, learning how false the foundations of his life have been and starting to experience a genuine relationship between equals for the first time. My favourite parts of this book were its exploration of the distorting effects of an environment of fear and unequal power on everyday relationships, and the believable way that it showed the capacity of ordinary people to make devastating choices when their own or their families' survival depended on it.

The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles

I picked this up without knowing much about it other than that it was "a classic" with a famous film based on it. I think I enjoyed it all the more for not even knowing when it was written, as it took me a while to understand that the all-knowing Victorian narrator was not what he seemed. In fact this read as a swinging sixties take on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, with an unsettlingly uncertain ending. Fascinating stuff, with a lot of good material about Victorian ideas on science, progress, Darwinism, religion, sex, class, & the role of women - I found it impossible to put down, and read it in a day.

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - Karen Russell

This is one I borrowed from the library solely on the basis of the intriguing title. I didn't have particularly high hopes of it, as I thought I might find the magical aspects a little alienating. However, in most cases the fantastic touches (such as the children of werewolves sent away to be rehabilitated in the title story, or the determined minotaur bravely pulling his family's wagon westward) lived up to the suggestion of the review on the back that they would "jog something in the childhood memory department" - in fact the mythical elements served as helpful metaphors making the characters easier to relate to (rather than harder, as I often find with magic realism). In the stories that worked best for me, I think this was because although the scenarios and characters described drew on an altered reality, once the situations had been introduced they played out entirely according to the rules of our own world.

I also liked one or two of the tales that were entirely unmagical - a lonely old man encouraging his (community service) "buddy" to visit by leaving out medication for her to steal, and a young astronomer drawn into stealing baby turtles by his desire for social status (a story which did a great job of capturing the destructive momentum of a joke gone sour). The fragment that sticks with me is the horrifically plausible story of a boy whose adoptive father boasts proudly that the first thing they ever did together as father and son was to bury the bear cub that was the boy's only friend (which had of course been shot the day he was collected from the children's home).

Eating - Peter Singer & Jim Mason

Subtitled "what we eat and why it matters", this book focuses on three US families - one whose food choices are based largely on cost & convenience, one family of "conscientious omnivores", and one of vegans - and investigates the impact of their food choices on animal welfare, the people involved in its production, and the environment. Having read Singer's earlier "Animal Liberation", I did not expect to be shocked by any of this, but was almost reduced to tears by one passage describing the casual cruelty of slaughterhouse workers observed jumping up and down on live chickens or ripping them apart for entertainment. The authors attribute this sort of behaviour to the desensitizing effects of fast-paced, monotonous, bloody work, in environments where supervisors routinely refuse to stop the processing line when mechanical failures lead to conscious animals being killed in slow and painful ways. Many large companies - bizarrely, led by McDonalds - have introduced audits to improve this situation, but critics claim that there is evidence from some slaughterhouses that the lines are simply run slower when an auditor is on site. Although the information about regulations and production practices in the US was interesting - for example the disturbing fact that most states' anti-cruelty laws contain exemptions for "common farming practices" - and the general principles were obviously universal, I would be interested in a UK-specific version of this book that went into more depth about UK suppliers.

As well as focusing on animal welfare, the book also includes a lot of material about environmental impacts, such as the vast quantities of feces and urine produced by large pig farms. In one incident in 1995, 25 million gallons of liquid waste were released into a river in North Carolina when a "lagoon" burst due to heavy rain, and even under normal conditions these farms can have such an impact on human health that the American Public Health Association passed a resolution in 2003 calling for a moratorium on the construction of new factory farms ("CAFOs"). The book also describes the inefficiency of meat production in terms of land use and water consumption - concluding, for example, that it takes 13 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of boneless beef.

The chapter on "the ethics of eating meat" includes my own reason for becoming vegetarian rather than attempting to apply welfare standards when purchasing meat - that "since we are all often tempted to take the easy way out, drawing a clear line against eating animal products may be the best way to ensure that one eats ethically - and sticks to it". (Although whenever I read anything like this I realise that my own position is inconsistent, and veganism would be a more rational place to draw that line, given the number of male chicks & calves that are killed by the egg & dairy industries...) It applies a similar argument to producers, pointing out that "as long as animals are commodities, raised for sale on a large scale in a competitive market situation, there will be conflicts between their interests and the economic interests of the producer" - and corners will be cut. I was particularly struck by the inclusion of a quote from Roger Scruton - the philosopher whose opposition to the concept of "animal rights" led him to name a pig "Singer" and then personally turn it into sausages: his assessment of modern large-scale factory farming is that "a true morality of animal welfare ought to begin from the premise that this way of treating animals is wrong".

Time to be in Earnest - P. D. James

This "fragment of autobiography" caught my attention for several reasons, and lived up to expectations on all counts. P.D. James herself has interested me since I saw her give an excellent talk on detective fiction as social history last year, and since then I have read several of her novels and found them much more complex (and a lot darker!) than the "genre fiction" I had previously dismissed them as. This was not a conventional autobiography, as it explicitly excludes detailed discussion of painful subjects such as her husband's long-term mental illness, choosing instead to take the form of a diary which mingles records of current doings with reminiscences from a lifetime and more general reflections. One of its main strengths is the insights it gives into the experiences of her generation - for example her memories of working in the NHS in its early years, at a time when MPs were assuming that the annual costs of the service would decrease as long-standing conditions were treated and the health of the nation gradually increased as a result!

One rather self-indulgent reason for my interest in this book was that there are several points of overlap between her life and mine in terms of locations, and I find it oddly satisfying to read about familiar places through unfamiliar eyes, particularly casual mentions to obscure train stations and pubs that I haven't thought about for years. I found that this had the strange effect of making it feel rather shocking whenever she expressed strong opinions that I do not share, as she occasionally did - for example her vehement outrage at the "injustice" of the intrusion into the lives of those persuaded to take part in family therapy sessions.

However, my main reason for picking this up was to see what she had to say about the writing process and about crime fiction. For her, the fascination of detective fiction lies in

"the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of a murder enquiry. Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and of the dead. If forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being."

I was also struck by her observation, in a discussion of the contrasts between modern detective novels and their 1930s counterparts, that although they have become so much more realistic in many ways, they still contain an element of fantasy in that so many modern fictional detectives are curiously childless and able to devote their lives to their work...

On the writing process itself, she offers four pieces of advice: read widely; practise writing ("the craft is learned by practising it, not by talking about it"); increase your vocabulary; and finally, welcome experience:

"This means going through life with all senses open: observing, feeling, relating to other people. Nothing that happens to a writer need ever be lost."

The Poem and the Journey - Ruth Padel

This book is in two parts - a very interesting introductory section on the composition and reading of poetry in general, and a selection of 60 poems along with notes on their construction and how they might be read. I bought it after hearing the author speak at the Oxford Literary Festival - although I must confess to having briefly dozed off at one point, since I was sitting near the back and could not see her at all, so found it difficult to keep my eyes open... What I did hear of the talk was interesting enough to persuade me to buy the book (despite the fact that the audience size vastly exceeded the number of handouts prepared, and it was difficult to follow the examples without seeing the texts of the featured poems).

This feels like a book I will return to repeatedly - it impressed me but I don't think that I got as much out of it on a first reading as I could do if I gave it more time and attention. I enjoyed reading many of the poems, but I skimmed over some of the notes on structure and the effects of repeated sounds in the poems - I am sure these must play a large part in generating the reader's response to a poem, but I don't tend to be consciously aware of them. I intend to read this again at some point, taking the time to follow the explanations more closely and explore the mechanics of the poems rather than just their surface meanings.