Travels with a Tangerine - Tim Mackintosh-Smith

A writer sets out to follow in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah - this should be a very interesting book.  Unfortunately, I just can't seem to get into it. I keep asking myself why...  I think for me, there is too much of Mackintosh-Smith and not enough history, culture, flavour of the land.  The author recounts details, but I sense this filter of judgment, attitude, wry amusement.  The subtext is a bit offensive to me - a journey to distant lands to marvel that it is not like home and to poke gentle fun at the outlandish ways.  I will keep trying for a bit, but I don't think I'll be able to finish this one...

The Childhood of Jesus - J. M. Coetzee

A compelling read but very difficult to figure out the threads of the book.  It centres around the story of what seem to be two refugees arriving somewhere in a country that seems northern or Scandinavian in culture - a rather bloodless, unemotional but equitable society.  There is a thread of conflict between natural versus modern sanitized man; between the moral complaisance of bureaucratized social assistance and true human need.   There is another thread around the nature of work - the dock workers' view vs the new man's view.  There is the deconstruction of sex and sexual desire.  Centred around the child, there is a conflict of the development of the individual child vs socialization to societal norms.  Around the child there is even a certain deconstruction of the common language of reality when the man reflects on the child's unorthodox views of reality.  This nature of reality theme is also reflected in the discussion of the "new arrival's" state of being wiped clean, of starting anew, of the wiping of memory needed to accept and fit into the new society.  This could also be a reflection on the west's modern society of forgetting, of disappearance of history and the past.  All of this of course also ties to modern social issues around refugees, population displacement and cultural conflict, especially as seen in Europe.
Worth rereading at some future date.

To find:

Waiting for the Barbarians

The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin

Another great detective read. Malcolm Fox Complaints series.  Yet again, it keeps you hanging till the last two or three pages.  Less of a sense of critique of the modern world of bureaucracy, posers and ladder climbers but still a good read in itself.

The Bed of Procrustes - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An entertaining and insightful collection of aphorisms.  Satirical, cutting but accurate - reminds me of The Devil's Dictionary.
A good combination with his other book, "Antifragility" - explores many of the same ideas but in a more succinct form, or in a form applied to different domains of life.

"An idea starts to be interesting when ou get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."

Civil War Land in Bad Decline - George Saunders

A collection of shorter stories and a novella.  Fits into the genre of darker, gothic american literature.  Stories filled with sad cases lost in bizarre, improbable situations.  Undertones of politics of disenfranchisement, dystopia, the corporate behemoth, the social background of violence.  Satirical rather than pathetic.  Life, not at the bottom, but trapped low down on the social totem pole.
Some original ideas in his characters' situations and social universes.  Definitely worth a read.

To find:

In Persuasion Nation

Tenth of December: Stories