NabakovBy rigorously setting aside a set period every day I managed to get a good few books under my belt this summer. Funniest read: Clive James’s Falling to England (takes up where Unreliable Memoirs laid off). Most disappointing read: Kazuo Ishiguru’s Nocturnes. Best children’s book: The Dark Flight Down (all right; I only read one children’s book). Most irritating read: Struck by Lightning – not so much a thin article screaming to get out of a fat book – see 27 July post – as a series of loosely-related articles stapled together and pretending to be a book (to be fair, I learnt one thing from this book; if you know how to use it, randomness can be a strategy). A Thousand Splendid Suns I have mentioned in another post. Together with The Reluctant Fundamentalist these books did much to broaden my geopolitical knowledge (and made me realise how much I didn’t know about contemporary events). But most exquisite read of the year: Vladimir Nabakov’s Speak, Memory – quite simply, a masterpiece.