As ever, my Christmas presents included a couple of books, and I bought more on my trip to London over the New Year. And, as ever, the choices are eclectic, not limited to a single genre – the perils of a butteffly mind, probably, flitting from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason. A glance at my unread pile (built up over the past year or so) reveals it includes a Nevile Shute classic (A Town like Alice);three Orwells in a collection of all his long fiction that I bought years ago but haven’t got around to finishing yet; Moby Dick; David Copperfield; a history book about the break up of Eastern Europe, how and why it came about and its aftermath; and a thousand-odd pages of Olga Tokarczuk’s epic The Books of Jacob (again, bought a year ago but still not started). So plenty to keep me going for the rest of this year, I think – and my Three Reads in a Month achieved in January – the first time for years I’ve managed that! – unlikely to be repeated any time soon.
So without further ado, let’s review my January read. Three different books, and all highly enjoyable (at least to me) and thoroughly recomended. Of course, that’s all subjective, but what the hell.
—————————————————————
First up: A History of Britain in Ten Enemies by Terry Deary. I’ve seen his stuff in bookshops before but passed them by: primarily, he’s a writer of history with a target audience of teenage schoolkids – his Horrible Histories series is very popular. I actually enjoyed it very much: there were few things I hadn’t come across before, except for some particularly unpleasant Viking torture and execution practices, but the book is very well written with plenty of humour. The usual suspects are included in the list of enemies – the Vikings, the Romans, The Spanish Arrmada, the French and of course the Germans – as well as the Irish, who I had never really thought of as enemies (despite The Troubles), and the Americans, who are supposed to enjoy a Special Realtionship with us. The Epilogue, how the past has led to the present British character, is in itself worth the book’s cost in my view. A fun read.
Salman Rushdie is a bit of a Marmite writer – love him or hate him, with no middle ground, an acquired taste – and one that thankfully I’ve acquired. I’ve read his Booker Prize and Booker of Bookers winning Midnight’s Children (well deserved on both counts) and the controversial Satanic Verses that left him in fear of his life and under protection for a decade – and I still can’t understand quite why it upset the Muslim community as much as it clearly did. They are extraordinary books, mixing satire and fantasy, life and love and laughter, both Eastern and Western cultures. His short stories are similar. I also read a collection of essays and speeches he has made about his craft, called Languages of Truth: 2001 – 2020 that was a fascinating glimpse into his inspirations and his beliefs. So when Victory City came out a couple of years ago it went straight onto my Must Buy list. It was well worth the wait. It’s another fantastical story, set in India in the Middle Ages, and chronicles the magical founding of a city and empire, its rise, stagnation and eventual collapse, through a mythical epic poem written by the city’s founder: a young girl acquired (for want of a better term) by a goddess who inhabits her body, leading to two hundred and fifty years of life. It sounds weird, and it is, but Rushdie’s quite extraordinary imagination and use of language brings it to life with a mix of humour and brutality. Best book I’ve read for ages and I thorougly recommend it.
And last but not least, LBC journalist and presenter James O’Brien’s critique of all things Brexit, How They Broke Britain. I freely admit I am biased, and nothing will ever convince me that the Referendum was a Good Idea and its result anything but a catastrophic error of judgement. But the book is not only about that. It details how a surprisingly small number of people, press barons, journalists and politicians, over an extended period of time used the tools of their trades to change (even pollute) the entire media and political landscape to satisfy their own beliefs and designs, largely for personal political and financial ends, with the entire electorate no more than pawns (or, in the Russian expression, “useful idiots”) to achieve it. The usual suspects are there, the likes of Cameron and Farage, Johnson and Murdoch, and the conclusion in each case, meticulously researched and presented with apparently unrelated incidents and stories linked together to present a coherent picture, perhaps for the first time, explains the mess Britain now finds itself in. I expected to come away from the book angry and disgusted but I didn’t: I was simply saddened that the system (I can’t think of a better word) has been so devalued and broken by these individuals that it will take a generation or more to clean up the mess, while the perpetrators will get away, by and large, unpunished, their bank accounts both on and offshore swollen obscenely, while the NHS crumbles and the food banks proliferate as the economy crumbles and stagnates. It is nothing less than a national tragedy. Read the book and weep.
—————————————————————
And on that cheery note, I shall make myself a cup of coffee, and get back to this month’s first read, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – a more readable and accessible book than most of his stuff in my view.
Happy days.