Here at Chez H we have embarked on a new set of reading adventures, having completed Sarah Bakewell’s hard act to follow of At The Existentialist Cafe.
On my own, I am reading Bakewell’s earlier (2010) How To Live, a piece of non-fiction on 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne. And loving it.
But we have also been searching for a good read-aloud book (following our success in that mode with Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel). Now we think we have found it in Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, fiction about a postwar retired English barrister and judge who was once a British Empire civil servant in Hong Kong.
A melancholy sort of comedy, I’d say, Old Filth might be worth a movie or series of BBC or Masterpiece Theatre ilk. This thing is the first in a trilogy, which we will happily move on to if it continues at this rate. You can hear an audio excerpt on this page, btw.