What's left: the death of social democracy, by Clive Hamilton

I didn’t enjoy Affluenza all that much; it seemed pretty obvious. But this is a very considered essay that is well worth the look in.

In it, Clive Hamilton tries to find a new politics beyond the tired old conservative/Howard mantra. He also points to what’s wrong with traditional left wing politics, and where the Labor Party is going wrong with its endeavors to get itself elected.

In short, Labor should stop trying to be a sort of soft pro-market party with a few tokenistic social democracy concerns.

The new politics that Hamilton espouses needs to point towards welfare for the poor, and stop spruiking for a full steam ahead economy. People on $50,000 a year are not ‘battlers’.

Politics, he also says, has been purged of its idealism. Potential political contenders will join whatever party suits best their career.

Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons is a comic author in the style of Nancy Mitford. Writers like Gibbons and Mitford are not in that upper echelon of authors, those who we are likely to be told to study at school or read for our own improvement. But how much fun they are to read!

They say writers should stick to writing about what they know. Gibbons obviously does that, and it gives her novel a refreshing feel. All the people she writes about you get the sense she has met in one guise or another.

The novel details Flora Poste’s arrival at Cold Comfort Farm and her fixing up of everyone’s (what she perceives to be at least) problems. If you met Flora Poste in person you’d probably find her a bit overbearing and up herself. But in print you just love her witticisms and snobbery. I wanted to be her friend.

My favourite character was Mr Mybug, an author who is working on a biography of Branwell Bronte. His theory is that it was the sisters who were drunks, and not Branwell. (There was a theory popular at the time that Emily could not possibly have written Wuthering Heights.)

This is the sort of book you look forward to reading.

State of War : The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration, by James Risen

James Risen broke the story on the Bush administration’s off-the-books spying program on American citizens.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably read far too many of these sorts of books. Someone should stop me. It's all so depressing.

The book is sourced from loads of anonymous CIA sources, so you have to really make up your own mind if what you’re reading is kosher. Lots of meetings and phone conversations, and overheard phone conversations, are relayed. Some have their shock value.

Over all this is a pretty well written and put together book, which is slanted against Bush. Sometimes it makes you wince. Like the chapter lauding the ill used Colonel Powell to the skies. Yet didn’t he help cover up the My Lai massacre? Not everyone has a perfect record.

I don’t think I’ll read any more books on Bush and Iraq. It seems like a horrible waiting game with Iraq now, to see what finally pans out. In the television age, we all know how miserable, ugly and atrocious war is. Innocent children and good people are killed daily and we have it so easy in life here in the West.

The Culture of the New Capitalism, by Richard Sennett

This is a thoughtful and ponderous book on the way the ‘new’ economy is travelling. Reading it, you get the feeling we will all soon be eclipsed by globalisation, that machines and money will take over. The book gives alarming statistics on how many jobs have been shed by new sophisticated technologies.

Money and its pursuit is like a force of nature, red in both tooth and claw as the saying goes, whereas politics tries to civilise money. In this book of lectures, we see how money is more and more encroaching on politics. Soon politics (if it hasn’t already happened) will be run by money. The scales are being further and further tipped. Soon politics will provide next to no protections for its citizens.

People in the West, you also get the impression will soon be eclipsed by the new economy. The combined populations of the two rising economies – China and India – come to about two and a half billion people. Call centre workers in India, we are told, have far superior educations to their Western counterparts. How can we compete against such well educated people, all willing to work for less than us? Globalisation will only hasten this competition for work in Western countries.

This is a pretty depressing read. The new economic superpowers are going to be India and China (I don’t mean to say I’m depressed because those countries are going to prosper. Good on them. They have huge poverty problems, and if globalisation can put more food in mouths, then that’s a good thing.)

One wonders how the economies of the world will look in twenty years. Where will power lie? What will world politics be like?

Elizabeth Gaskell, by Winifred Gerin

Winifred Gerin has written biographies on all four Brontes. The biography of Emily Bronte I have read and remember it being excellent. Winifred Gerin has the writing style of someone born to write. You imagine her beginning her reading life from a very early age, thus creating a mind to which words and writing comes most naturally. For this reason she is a delightfully accessible author.

Elizabeth Gaskell never wanted a biography written of her. Winifred Gerin has gone through the author's letters and pieced together this life. It mostly covers her marriage, children and novels. It has a bit of a 'potted' feel, like there are large gaps missing.

Anyone who has read Gaskell's work will recognise her as a wise and humane author. So I was a bit surprised to find her a bit of an eccentric crank. On the one hand, she is a good natured, sympathetic, civic minded woman. Then she can be quite peculiar and irritatble. This probably comes through most clearly in her dealings with Dickens. Stupid me, I thought everyone would love Dickens. She did not.

They developed a bit of a professional relationship after Gaskell published her first novel, Mary Barton, which Dickens was a fan of. Dickens asked Gaskell to write for some of his publications. Friction developed, it seems, because Dickens was the professional writer, concerned with deadlines being met, whereas Gaskell saw herself as a wife and mother first. When Gaskell had one of her characters read from The Pickwick Papers, Dickens changed this to another novel because he didn't want to be seen as a self promoter. She flipped her wig and made her displeasure known.

The biography reprints some of the correspondence between the two, and I'm more sympathetic to Dickens. He really does try to placate her and keep on her good side. Things would not improve in their relationship: when Dickens left his wife, that was the last straw with Gaskell.

This is a decent enough biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, from a sympathetic biographer. Her chapter on Gaskell's best novel, Wives and Daughters, shows the mind of an incisive literary critic. Winifred Gerin basically says that the best books, especially their characters, write themselves. In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell writes in the most effortless style (ironic, seeing she wrote against ill health and did a lot of complaining about the actual writing of the book). This is a novel that constantly delights. You never want the book to end. Unfortunately, Mrs Gaskell died before finishing the last installment. But we must be glad she lasted as long as she did.

Elizabeth Gaskell doesn't have as big a name as the other literary lions of the age, like Dickens and Eliot and Trollope. Lots of people who read don't seem to know that she exists. That saddens me. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote two utterly wonderful books. Firstly, her haunting Life of Charlotte Bronte, which exemplifies her humane side, sympathetic to those in pain and suffering. Then there is her witty masterpiece, Wives and Daughters. Late in life she discovered herself a natural comedy writer, despite writing in a grumpy mood and bitching about being paid.

How ironic, that Elizabeth Gaskell saw herself primarily as a wife and mother, with her books written as a side venture, yet how they live on.

The Liar's Tale, by Jeremy Campbell

The title of this book is a bit of a novelty. You imagine a bunch of publisher's thinking, This will surely titillate the public, or we can shift a lot of these as gift ideas at Christmas. Oh, I know that sounds terribly cynical, but it's the impression I get. This book is not really a history of lieing - it would probably be a more interesting book if it truly were. How fascinating it might be to see history's greatest and most successful liars ply their trade.

Instead, this book is more of a summary of various philosophers and their ideas and meditations on the notion of truth. It's well written, and the author clearly has a good understanding of the writers he discusses. Yet for all that, these digests of famous writers leave you with an incomplete feeling. You always feel like you're cheating on Nietzche and Aristotle by not reading their actual works. You shouldn't be relying on someone else's scholarhip.

Holiday readers might find this book of some use; serious readers should steer clear...