Book recently acquired

What: Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries
Where: Kick-ass second-hand bookshop just round the corner fron Notting Hill Station
Expected vibe: blacky humourous existential angst

We'll see...

Some top reads of 2008

Estates by Lynsey Hanley (see photo)

Surprising, touching personal history of social housing in Britain. Manages to be polemic and sweet at the same time.

Fire and Steam: How the Railways Transformed Britain by Christain Wolmar

Brilliant, page-turning history of the railways. Just don’t tell anyone that it was what I was reading most at Glastonbury this year.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

Have wanted to read this for ages. Just the sort of meandering, part-travel, part-history, part-memoir that I love and my wife thinks is just silly. It just makes me pine for holidays…

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

When I heard that the author researched much of his epic, monumental but very human history of France en velo, is was there in a flash. I read it in France, of course.

Utopian Dreams by Tobias Jones

Jones’ The Dark Heart of Italy is one of my very favourite books of the last few years so I was always ken to read this. It has its moments but it’s just not Jones’ thing, really, the soul-searching travel in the mind kind of thing. Was thought-provoking, though and I’m in full argreement with his dislike of excessive material comforts. Where did I put my smartphone?

Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson

Beguiling, utterly bewitching beautiful hymn to birds. Deserves a fuller mention on this blog, which it'll get soon.

My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru

Fiction, whaa? Yup, but of the agitprop, political sort. The other (and much less embarrassing and fitting) book that I read at Glastonbury. Fight the power.

Current read: Most Secret War by R.V. Jones
Where / how acquired: Second hand, after mention on uber-nerd site www.subbrit.org.uk
Vibe: Bit snobby and self-congratulatory but nonetheless gripping

My current read is this by ex-WW2 British scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones – a detailed account of his work during the second world war to defeat the dastardly hun through quick wits, schoolboy gumption and the firm, steadying hand of science. It is actually very good, both a fascinating insight and a pacey narrative. It’s just that you firstly have to get over the Daily Mail-esque ‘if people in this country now worked like we did in the war we wouldn’t be in this mess’ (the book was published in 1979) and the general sense that the English-German bit of WW2 was a conker fight with slightly higher odds. The excellent Behind Closed Doors docu on BBC 2 at the moment, focusing so far at least on Stalin, reminds me that the vast majority of the war was won not by English grit and stiff upper lips but by the blood of many, many millions of Russians in particular. They starved and ate cats at Stalingrad, but held out, and then raped and pillaged their way back to Berlin, winning the most Pyrrhic of all victories. There’s very little that’s glamorous or worth celebrating about that – you don’t see a Russian Band of Brothers, do you?

As mentioned, the edition of this book that I’m reading was published in 1979. One of two things, mostly of tone, seem a bit dated but really not much. Why then is their such an industry in new books about the second world war – surely it’s all been said before? But it’s a massively popular and successful area of publishing at the moment. I was at a meeting recently where a new book by Giles Foden, author of the book-then-film The Last King of Scotland, was mentioned – and it’s set around Dunkirk (or D-Day, one of the two). A very audible gasp of ‘christ, that’s an immediate massive seller’ went up, and I’m sure it’s true. Is it that we’re at the point when the grandchildren of the people who fought in the war (like me) are at the sort of age to be interested in this history? Is it that the supposed black-and-white of the second world war makes such a contrast to the innumerable shades of grey of the many conflicts in the world today? Or is it just that WW2 is such a mine for good stories – because it really is. Whatever, I’m in no position to criticise – I’ll be at Andrew Roberts’ Masters and Commanders, Richard Evans’ The Third Reich at War, Nichols Rankin’s Churchill’s Wizards at the rest as soon as they’re in paperback… Just as soon as I’ve finished Most Secret War, and devoured today’s Sunday Telegraph…

Current read: The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
Where / how acquired: Xmas present from my wife
Vibe: Quietly radical

I’ve been waiting to start this book since Xmas day – and it doesn’t disappoint: just the sort of meandering intellectual mixture of travelogue and history / geology / ecology and probably countless other areas that I haven’t reached yet that I like. That the author lives in Cambridge I appreciate too, as I do the fact that the below-mentioned Roger Deakin gets a few walk-on (or hike-on, maybe) cameos.

I sympathise strongly with the author’s deep-felt attachment to all things natural and wild but I also like that he’s not too holier-than-thou about it – he likes warm soft beds and nights in watching the telly too.

I couldn’t get into the book first of all though but I realised afterwards that that was part of where I was trying to read it – on a busy bus I think. And that made me muse upon where’s best to read what sort of books (and where it isn’t right). I can remember reading particular books in particular places and my memories of both the book and the time are inextricably linked. When I was in Prague on a holiday quite a few years ago now I was reading Gunter Grass’ My Century, his collection of 100 interlinked short stories, one for every year of the 20th century, and I especially remember reading it sitting next to the huge metronome that gently ticks away in a park above the city, installed in Prague by the Soviets. Where more suitably in the heart of tumultuous Europe could you read Grass’ book, its narratives personal and yet deeply political, the politics being those of battle-scarred central Europe? Andrew Hussey’s Paris was my literary companion throughout the south-of-France stay part of our honeymoon last year, before we later stayed in that brilliant city itself – the perfect combination. Reading The Wild Places in a pretty raucous east London pub this Saturday night strangely seemed to fit, although much more pleasing was continuing the read at Brick Lane’s Hookah Lounge over their generic beers and very un-generic teas and cocktails. Trains suit reading, buses and cars don’t. What to drink? Fine ales and beers are probably my preferred reading tipple, but then I’ve very fond memories of Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs washed down with some excellent whisky in a pub in Northumberland in the dead of winter too … drinking booze and reading are the best of friends in general, of course. Beer for non-fiction and wine for fiction? No, that’s silly…

The weather just teasingly showing some pre-springtime sunshine has inspired more extra reading of a favourite genre of books – maps, wherein I can plan bike rides for when it’s a bit more clement. Robert Macfarlane’s book purports to be a map, of those places that on regular maps are just white or pretty-much unmarked space. Maps are dead good reads so he has a lot of live up to…

A Digression

Books and topics I'd like to read about this year:

- more on cycling. I'm increasingly a cycling fan / nerd / fanatic / wierdo (delete as you feel appropriate) and as you might expect have a similar penchant for cycling literature. Previous great cycling reads include Matt Seaton's extremely touching The Escape Artist, and the intially strange but soon enchanting One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers by Tim Hilton. On holiday over Xmas I found a copy of Will Fotheringham's biography of almost-mythic British cyclist Tom Simpson (whose dying words, at the summit of Mont Ventoux on the Tour de France in 1967 were 'put me back on my bike' and then 'the straps, Harry, the straps') and that will be devoured soon enough. I'm also mid way through a other-worldly, spellbinding short and highly illustrated work of modern British cycling literature (or, perhaps, pornography), the Condor Cycles 60 year catalogue...I'm thinking of investing, you see...

- crime. Getting older is all about discarding prejudices, from anal sex to genre fiction, and in that spirit I'm keen to feel my way through some classics of crime writing - Dashiel Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, um...I need some more help though...

- Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places - a Xmas present from my wife. Can't wait for that.

- WG Sebald's newly-discovered posthumous masterwork...which doesn't yet exist, sadly. I'm a big fan of Sebald's meandering, multi-disciplinary hallucinogenic uber-prose and have read a few of his books, especially The Rings of Saturn, quite a few times. It makes me sound very learned and discerning, but I think the translations of his books published by Harvill is better than Anthea Bell's for Austerlitz, his first published by Penguin...but I don't know what I'm basing that on... The bits and pieces published by Penguin since his death have been a bit disappointing - On the Natural History of Destruction, his exculpation of the guilt-ridden lack of German moral reaction towards the British for the mass fire-bombing of WW2 exemplified in Dresden, was excellent - but is only a part of that book. Actually, Campo Santo I haven't read yet but will do.

So much to read, so little time. I suppose I could stop this blog and read instead...hmm...

Back to the front

Current read: Armageddon by Max Hastings
Where / how acquired: From Amazon, bought amidst Xmas presents for others
Vibe: Bellicose

I'm a member of CND, a big fan of and donator to groups like Campaign Against the Arms Trade and generally a most un-war admiring sort of person. Nonetheless, I read quite a bit of miitary history. I'm also a boringly predictable Guardian / Independent reading, New Statesman subscribing lefty - and yet I like Max Hastings, former editor of the Evening Standard and the Telegraph. Does that add up? Dunno...

Another read last year was Hastings' Nemisis, his grand history of the last months of the Second World War against the Japanese. It's painstaking, in every sense, but it was gripping. And so I've started the book which was the precursor, similarly exploring the end of the war in Europe. It's desparately unfashionable I know and reading it in the ICA cafe over a latte as i was this morning doesn't seem right. But, well, who cares.

Another recent read worthy of mention on these pages was Graham Swift's Shuttlecock, borrowed from my mother-in-law over the Xmas holiday. It's not unrelated to the above book, actually, featuring a protagnist haunted and daunted by what his decorated spy father did in the war. I've read Swift's Waterland (well, most of it - I confess I bailed out towards the end) and his much more friendly Last Orders. And I heard him talk, most sonorously, at last year's Cambridge Wordfest about his latest. I think his new book has a female protagonist but that aside his books share a theme of exploring masculinity in all it's weakness and failings - which isn't to say he is any sort of feminist or doesn't have anything good to say about men. Any thoughtful person born with the non-default one X chromosome ought to read him to get a particularly insightful, albeit complex, view of their sex. Shuttlecock, an earlier work, isn't perhaps his best, but I love it's unprentiousness way of disturbing in your mind all sorts of big issues (particularly, like i say, about being a man) without ever mentioning them explictly. There's lots in there about the dramas of work, too - often a subject that, despite it taking the bulk of most people's time on earth, not considered fit for fiction - and the seething passions and worries and motivations nestled under the surface of the most average and seemingly banal lives. I'll come to back to reading more Swift shortly I'm sure.

Oh, and I've finished Wildwood now - thanks to more than 10 hours spent on trains to and from Glasgow this week. it improves towards the end but it isn't a patch on Waterlog. Still definiately worth a read though.

What I'm reading - January 2008

Current read: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
Where / how acquired: Christmas present from brother-in-law
Vibe: Woody

Roger Deakin's Waterlog was one of my reading highlights of 2007. I worked in the Cambridge branch of Waterstones when the book was originally published in 1999 and Deakin came in to talk about it. The book is his diary of a year swimming everywhere and anywhere in the British Isles, mostly in the wild. I remember talking to him about swimming in the Cam, and although I didn't read the book at the time it was on a must-read list in the back of my mind since.

This new book, finished just before he died in 2006, was published last year and it was, I think, Will Self's review of it that reminded me about Waterlog. That book is just brilliant - a humble, personal but beautiful, delicate mixture of autobiography, travel writing and ecology - and all based in the UK, much of it in east Anglia which is where I'm from.

I'm about two thirds of the way through Wildwood now. It does feel as is Deakin's death meant the editorial process has been stymied a little – the part in Australia seems to meander on just a bit too long, for instance, but that may just be that it’s writing about the UK that I like about Deakin’s books. But much of the book is just a joy - I loved the part where he joins a moth-hunting society for the evening in a local wood; the section on cricket-bat willow (I'm hoping there's a bit later on about guitar wood, we'll see); his tales of being a youthful ecologist in 1950s Hampshire; and the current section, set in the incredible-sounding walnut forests of Central Asia, where wood is simply a way of life.