Travels With My Aunt

Another thing you shouldn't do if you've already got far too many books to read is to sign up to a mailing list like the ones run by Suzanne at dearreader.com

I got an email from her yesterday with a sample of this month's Penguin classic:



Travels With My Aunt
by
Graham Greene


It's another book I have never gotten round to reading, despite Graham Greene being one of my favourite authors. An incredibly laconic writer, he could create an ominous atmosphere with almost no words at all. He was also a master of all genres - as well as all those gripping thrillers like Brighton Rock, Stamboul Train, A Gun For Saleand, my favourite, The Ministry of Fear- with its bizarrely sinister opening at a church fête; he also wrote comedy, most notably Our Man In Havana- his story of a vacuum cleaner turned spy, as well as one of the best tear-jerkers ever in The End of the Affair.

Better still he took his readers all round the world, to:

Argentina - The Honorary Consul
Austria - The Third Man
Congo - A Burnt-out Case
Cuba - Our Man In Havana
Germany - No Man's Land
Haiti - The Comedians
Mexico - The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory
Panama - The Captain and the Enemy
Sierra Leone - The Heart of the Matter
South Africa - The Human Factor
Spain - Monsignor Quixote
Switzerland - Dr. Fischer of Geneva
and Vietnam - The Quiet American

and probably a few more besides. I don't know where he travelled with his aunt though - because that's one of the few Greene books I haven't read...yet.