The Woman Destroyed (Simone De Beauvoir)

The Mandarins was my first foray into Simone de Beauvoir's writings - a thwarted foray, as it turned out, because my charity shop copy was already worse for wear, and was worsened yet further by its own forays in a steamy bathroom, which is often the most serene place to devour a book but not an atmosphere much beloved of paper!

Yet, I knew from my meagre sampling of The Mandarins that I wanted to delve further into de Beauvoir's literary contributions. I was to wait some years before the opportunity presented itself... in one of those non-coincidental happenings, I came upon the second volume of her autobiography, and was settling down to learn about her early life with Sartre in Paris, only to then find a copy of The Woman Destroyed some weeks later.

Comprising three short stories, of which the opening and closing ones are the most accessible, The Woman Destroyed opens a dystopic window onto the lives of middle-aged women. That at least seems to be its intention. Certainly, the stories are moving: charting the desperation to cling on to past life, love and vigour, they bring to mind a sympathetic image of fingernails clinging on to a crumbling cliff side that is inexorably falling into the yawning abyss of post-menopausal life.

Goodness, the stories are sad. But "woman destroyed"? No, not really. Ultimately, the significant others of these women come off no better, no less destroyed by the loss of past certainties, the loss of youth. Here then, is a version of how some of us may face advancing age.

And in fact, this tracing of a particular milieu, this fictionalised spotlight on the observed realities of her times - fictionalised ethnography, if you like - is ultimately what makes Simone de Beauvoir so accessible and so very worth reading.

What's going on? The meanderings of a comic mind in confusion (Mark Steel)

Steel's comedy comes from a place that only fellow socialists have visited. But it's nice to know that staunch Thatcherites like Bob Monkhouse found it engaging, raging political gulf notwithstanding.

I came to Steel's "Reasons To Be Cheerful" in my late twenties, by way of an inspiring socialist mentor who, to my great chagrin and inconsolable disillusionment, was exposed as a champagne socialist... luckily only after they also turned me on to Dylan and Gramsci.

RTBC felt like speaking with an old friend - the best friend who knows your heart and your mind, and can finish off your sentences with pleasing accuracy while saying much more than you were even able to formulate in your own head. I think that I owe my ability to look back with wryness on my Thatcher-infested youth to...well, Mark Steel.

And with "What's Going On?" he releases the same genius: managing to make a very astute social and political point, while giving it depth through irrefutable argument and fact, and drawing you to tearful laughter. But what really blew me away is how once again Steel managed to restore that sense of conversing with an old friend, and tapped into precisely the confusion assailing me as a socialist.

After a very Citizen Smith-like youth - carried through with probably more gaucheness and less panache than Robert Lindsey - Steel is ensconced in life as a Middle Englander approaching a mid-life crisis. And he begins to question his relationship with socialism. It's a truism that we become more conservative s we get older, and while I read the book willing Steel not to adhere to this trite cliche, somehow I knew it was coming.

Steel closes with a scene in which he's on the phone to the bank to cancel his subscription to the Socialist Worker, following which end to life as he's known it, his daughter reminds him of a promised shopping trip, and he dutifully takes her to Woolworth's to buy colouring pens. As I write this, I have to pause for a moment - just as I did when I first came to the passage in the book.

Why should one man's waning relationship with socialism - if that is in fact what it is - touch me so fiercely? Precisely because he seems to be telling me his story as an old friend might; precisely because he enunciates every twist and turn I've experienced in my relationship with socialism.

I had just come to the end of "What's Going On?" when an old friend - real, rather than imagined - sent me a facebook message detailing the inspiration they'd found in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". He'd long promised to write at length about the book, and suddenly here it was, the deliverance of his promise. I felt betrayed. I felt that this old friend's sense of social justice should have been beyond corruption, yet here he was spouting about the beauty of capitalism.

I was less understanding perhaps than I should have been, more intransigent to be sure to the sudden streak of capitalism. But Steel does this to you; he digs deep into the well of your socialist belief and brings it rippling out to the surface, like a splash of cold invigorating water. I wouldn't have it any other way. Nor, I think, would Mark Steel.

The Human Stain (Philip Roth)

It's difficult to argue unequivocally either for or against reading an author's series of books in order: the implication of doing so is that you 'get' the whole story, are able to contextualise and approach a fuller appreciation of the characters, and can maybe even fulfil an inner emotional imperative to form attachment to characters through being able to read them through the course of their lives. Certainly, familiarity with a character across each instalment of a trilogy triggers precisely the safe yet somehow real depersonalisation between reader and read that a lot of book lovers thrive upon. The trilogy is the equivalent of the unwieldy 600 page plus novel that is some readers' idea of heaven.

If you don't come to The Human Stain with knowledge of its predecessors - or indeed of Roth's writing -  however, the loss of context and character familiarisation are minor things to bear compared with the richness of writing and Roth's unflinching determination to scratch away at issues of identity in modern America. Set against the rise in public consciousness about race and ethnicity which have dominated the rights and identity politics agenda since the waning years of European colonialism, Roth gives us Professor Coleman Silk - a man whose identity is shaped and determined through the activity of the self, as embodied in the American dream.

In Coleman Silk we have a black man who 'passes' (for white), who abjures his racial identity in order to avail himself of the fruits of the American dream. It is a simple enough literary premise that discourses cuttingly on the existential self versus groupism and that retains an almost uncomfortable focus on how pivotal are secrets to sustaining the fiction of the self. Should Professor Silk have been 'true' to the cause of Blacks in America? Or was he right to shed those aspects of identity that would have hindered the attainment of his own goals?

The irony of a black man who has successfully passed as white for the last six decades of his life referring to a couple of absent (and never seen) students - black students it turns out - as 'spooks' and being labelled racist as a result won't help make up your mind one way or the other.. you will already have done that. What such irony does help elucidate is how crucial are secrets in the ongoing creation of the fiction of self.

A change of climate (Hilary Mantel)

You'll be deafened by the cacophany of politely repressed emotions in this book: all the more so because it is enveloped in writing of such lightness, such deftness of touch, that on one hand Mantel's style reinforces the injunction not to explore or feel too deeply while on the other hand it provides such a stark contrast to issues of injustice, family, faith and loss that you can't help getting out of your depth.