Day 1 - Best book you read last year.

As always, I can’t play favourites with books. However, there were a few stand-out examples of writing last year.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre
Made famous with the younger generation by the motion picture that screened everywhere else in the world last year (and opens this week in Australia), this is a novel to be reckoned with. Set during the Cold War, this story is centred around George Smiley, an unassuming middle-aged man with an unfaithful wife, who happens to be a spy. His mission is to uncover the mole in ‘the Circus’, the spy name for MI-6. Along with his faithful henchman, Peter Guillam, they recruit a secret team and quietly lure the spy out from his hiding place. While it could be seen as slow, the sedate pace of the novel actually makes it much more believable than your typical spy novel. At first, Smiley seems an unlikely hero - a slightly chubby and grey (in both colour and manner) old-fashioned British gent with a silly wife, it is his intelligence and his dogged persistence which endear him to the reader, as well as the way in which he quietly commands the loyalty of his team.It’s hard to say anything more about it without giving the plot away, so I’ll finish with saying if you like spy novels but are sick of the new ones where things seem to happen for no reason at all - try this book!

Soulless, Changeless and Blameless by Gail Carriger
I know, I know, technically this is a series (the fourth part of which is sitting on my bedside table, waiting to be read). Nevertheless, this is one very close to my heart. Described as having the wit of both Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse (both of whom I adore), this is a comedy of manners with a difference. Set in steampunked Victorian London, this is the story of Alexia Tarabotti, a half-Italian spinster with a difference - she has no soul. Luckily for her, this comes in handy when (in the opening of the first novel) she is attacked by a young vampire and when she touches him, he becomes mortal. I’m usually not into sci-fi or vampires and werewolves, but who could resist an irritable Scottish lord who is also the Alpha werewolf and works in the government, or a flamboyant vampire rogue who insists on terms of endearment such as ‘my buttercup’ and ‘my sweet’, and who is the epitome of Victorian fashion? I can’t regret taking a chance on these books, and I’m only sorry that it ends with book 5, due out in March.