It doesn’t matter what I’m reading now, (Violet to Vita if anyone’s interested) but without question my immediate plan is to re-visit to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet to remind myself of the pleasure that it gave me when I first discovered it. I can’t be alone in being horrified to discover that the house in which Durrell wrote it in Alexandria is to be pulled down. It’s as if a bit of my own past is being taken away from me.

My writing and his bear no resemblance to each other, but it was reading TAQ and being carried away on the magic carpet of his wonderful imagination that switched me from writing plays to writing novels. It underlined what I think I already knew that whether a book is a thriller or a comedy, it’s not just what happens to characters that matters but the life they live in their heads.

Durrell’s book is the very best form of literary escapism in that it takes us to the sort of multicultural café society that so many of us miss even if we have not lived it ourselves, and in the dark world of consumerism and dubious celebrity in which we now live that is even more appealing. Profit is important but when that house goes it will take with it a lot more than bricks and mortar.

I've just finished Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and I loved every single second of it.

It's a real rollercoaster - you fall in love with the characters and you're exhausted and traumatised by what happens to them over and over and then relieved each time the timeline is reset.

A brilliant book - Atkinson at her very best. Would probably put this in my top ten.

I'm also enjoying Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. Shades of Angela Carter - magical, dark, enchanting, sinister.

Two great holiday reads.

Finally finished reading NW by Zadie Smith. I think it is a very clever piece of writing but it didn't touch me at all. I found very little about the protagonists that I could warm to, but at the same time I was very much aware of the writing techniques used to tell the story.

The opening was very Joycean, using stream of consciousness, words arranged on the page to look like the cherry tree that was being described and so on. The second section was straight narrative, but again, I really couldn't work out why this story was being told until the end of the section where the main character is murdered. The third section, in numbered paragraphs, was staccato and quick in its delivery, which served to objectify the story and remove any sense of warmth between Zadie Smith and the people whose lives she is describing.

I will put this on my to-read-again-should-my-life-be-so-long list. Perhaps I was in the wrong frame of mind, but if the author had so little sympathy with her subjects perhaps she could have written about a different group of people surviving in NW, or for that matter elsewhere in the UK, which really does exist although one could be forgiven for thinking that it didn't.

I love it when this happens. I'm reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and came across this phrase: "...smile that smile of complicity that debases what it admires". Camus is reflecting on Don Juan.

I thought I recognised it. A few moments consideration led me to recall the same lyric from Joni Mitchell's song Come in From the Cold.

Considering Joni has brilliant songs based on the Book of Job and WB Yeats's poem The Second Coming it's hardly surprising to find her nicking lines from Camus.