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...
Saturday 19 January 2008
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.
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.
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.
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