Bibliography, April 2024

BOTM: P. Sands, East West Street (2016)

F. Bengtsson, The long ships (1941)
A. Berkeley, The silk stocking murders (1928)
R. Blanc, The lost orchard (2019)
N. Crane, Clear water rising (1996)
D. Duncan, Index, a history of (2021)
R. Easterway, Maths on the back of an envelope (2019)
J. Marais, All Souls (1992)
D. Mitchell, Unruly (2023) [Audiobook]
K. Rundell, Why you should read children’s books, even though you are so old and wise (2019)

Momentous month, where I include an audiobook in my reading, even though I think it's usually cheating. I listened to David Mitchell when I was ill, and in full while not doing anything else, so I'm counting it. No precedents. It was good too, with a healthy scepticism about feelings and trade, and strong support for the fun violent bits. Nicholas Crane's work was also nice, especially the sections east of Vienna, Raymond Blanc's book on his orchard was supremely self-indulgent, but thoroughly enjoyable for it. And I also liked The long ships, which does I think a good job about trying to think itself back into the Viking world c.1000 AD. 

Nice though they were, Sands was a cut above. I foolishly hesitated before reading this as when it was recommended to me two years ago because I'd just read another Jewish family memoir. This is a solid family memoir, and I think the stories of refugee Jewish families should be told, but it's much wider than that. I found the story of the evolution of legal thinking at Nuremberg fascinating, and it's a great primer on why the legal distinctions matter. Until this month, I had given no thought to the differences between crimes against humanity and genocide. I think it's probably important that we do have a view on this. This was great on that, without ever losing sight of the human stories behind it all.

Bibliography, March 2024

BOTM: M. Condé, Crossing the Mangrove (1989)

I. Ahmed, The Pakistan Garrison State (2013)
K.J. Anderson, (ed.), War of the worlds: global dispatches (1997)

C. Arseneault & B. Pierson (eds.), Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology (2017)

M. Ba, So long a letter (1980)

K. Cashore, Graceling (2008)

M. Cavendish, The blazing world (1666)
A. Christie, The clocks (1963)
M. Freedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

C. Fremlin, Uncle Paul (1959)
F. Herbert, Dune Messiah (1969)*
M.W. Montagu, Embassy Letters (1763)
P.G. Wodehouse, The code of the Woosters (1938)*

I read a lot of relatively short books this month. A lot that wasn't brilliant - I should stop picking up random books in the library, and I should remember that random science fiction is often bad. Dune Messiah is not bad, but it is a) mad, and b) not as good as I remember. Very pleased with a late Agatha Christie, which is nicely done, if not as tightly plotted as some. Freedman was surprisingly readable - though I think built on sand. And - the best of the trio of books written about 1960, I very much liked Uncle Paul. Wodehouse too was exemplary - it's one of his masterpieces - but I have read it before.

However, the best of them all was Condé. Again. A couple of years ago I read a terrible book about decolonising the canon. As an intellectual exercise, it wasn't serious, Or good. But the recommendations were sound, and best of all so far has been Maryse Condé. This isn't Segu, but it's still excellent. She has a real talent for the imagining of world's distant from ours, and these are ones where we lack the underpinning of the the core western narrative, and making them immediate. Crossing the Mangrove writes on a small scale what Segu did on the vast stage. She's a marvel. Or rather, was. She died in between me reading her last month and writing about it, though she'd have been BOTM anyway. There's a long list of further reading to follow up on.

Bibliography, February 2024

BOTM: R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004)

A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1998)

E. Crispin, Swan song (1947)
G. Dyer, The last days of Roger Federer (2022)
M. Evans, Who let the Gods out (2017)
A. Light, Common people: this history of an English family (2014)

A. Tinniswood, The Verneys (2007)

After an exceptionally good month in January, this was poor. The BOTM is probably the only one I'd recommend, and you do need to have read a lot of Wodehouse to get the value (which I have). It's a good biography, and marshals everything well. I find the chronological analysis of writing deeply fascinating. And in this case, it's particularly interesting given that Wodehouse wrote into his 90s, and the fault line in his life happened at 58. It means that the corpus for which he is best known is almost entirely from the latter part of his life. Like Elizabeth I, we wonder what his reputation would be if he died at an average age. Also, I loved the attention paid to his oft-neglected Broadway musical period. 

Bibliography, January 2024

BOTM: K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023)

J. Brotton, Sale of the late King's goods (2006)
E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948)

S. Dercon, Gambling on Development (2023)
R. Harris, Act of Oblivion (2022)

A. Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (2022)

P. Lawrence, Needle (2022)

T. Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth (3rd ed. 2005)

B. Stanley, Let's do it! (2022)

Apart from months where I just read the Booker shortlist, I think this may be my most modern month of reading ever. Two thirds published in the last two years. It's also been a fantastic month. I have things to say on almost all of them

Stanley's prequel to his exceptional history of modern pop is not as good, but it's still very very good. And, while I still don't really like jazz, it's made me more appreciative, as well as extended my love of mid century musicals. It's very good too on the technology of music listening, which I think is more important that we think now. I read several seventeenth century histories in honour of the martyr this month, and the best was Keay's on the Interregnum. It won everything, and it's a very well done piece of writing: it doesn't drag, but really brings through the narrative of the 1650s. Strong recommendations too for Dercon (though it would have been a better book were it shorter) and Edmund Crispin (one of the best of the minor golden age crime novelists, and short).

My favourite of all was Rundell's absolute jewel of a book. I'm increasingly infatuated with her as a writer, though I'm not convinced we agree on anything else. I am delighted that someone took their All Souls fellowship, and their doctorate in Donne, and wrote for children. I liked her Donne book, but I loved this. She's read deeply of the well of children's (and wider) fantasy literature in its widest sense. It's beautifully written, and it's clever, inventive, funny, and well embedded in that weave of older fantasy lit and legend. It's notionally for children. It's worth everyone reading it.  

As an aside, there's a very mean spirited Private Eye review of it that basically complains that all fantasy tropes have been done before. I don't think that's accurate (there are plenty of fun new bits in this, in content and form - I thoroughly enjoyed the opening bestiary), but it also misses the point twice over. Firstly, this particular novel is explicitly in part about 'real' legends, so it's deliberately playing on this. The sphinx section is a case in point. Secondly, all fantasy does that; that's the point. Part of the enjoyment is how people reassemble the deck as well as what new cards they play. Shippey's formidable, but illuminating book on Tolkein's sources is magisterial on how he did it, though hard to read in parts.

Bibliography, 2023

A triumph! For the first time since the children, I read over ten books a month. Six of them were graphic novels (comics), so it's not quite the unambiguous result I was hoping for, but I will take it.

The breakdown is atypical. Lots of fiction (70 books) and lots of 'hard' non-fiction. History alone was 28 books. But much less cultural output than usual (only 19). It's a split comparable to my nadir-year of 2017, though the volumes were almost twice that. Books of the Month were even more extreme. Seven were non-fiction, all history, with only five fiction. Interestingly, though 80% of my fiction reading was of white authors - as usual - three of those five were by black writers.

Two of those vied for my favourite fiction of the year. I thought Segu was a marvellous book, but I think A grain of wheat is a great one. It brings real immediacy to a time that is unfamiliar, but is nuanced and thoughtful around it. It's striking to me how good the plot is too. This is not a cipher for a story of colonialism, this is a great story.

Non-fiction was much much harder. Several of these were outstanding. Townsend was brilliantly illuminating; Hoschchild ruthlessly compelling. I almost gave BOTY to Shapiro's masterpiece about Shakespeare, and I do think it is a masterpiece. The concept alone is worth a lot. It's an original and effective way into well known texts, and really sets up a much richer and real engagement with them. I loved it. I would recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in the topic. I would not recommend Peter Wilson's book on the Holy Roman Empire on the same basis. It is much denser and more technical, and requires a decent working knowledge of a lot of German history. But I loved it, and it is brilliant, and bold, and has transformed how I think about the Empire. I suspect I will come back again and again to it.

Jan: P. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire (2016)
Feb: M. Ormrod, Edward III (1990)
Mar: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A grain of wheat (1967)
Apr: A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998)
May: O. Butler, Kindred (1979)
Jun: C. Townsend, Fifth sun (2019)
Jul: C. Powers, In the memory of the forest (1997)
Aug: J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005)
Sep: S. Alexievich, Second hand time (2013)
Oct: P. Lynch, Prophet Song (2023)
Nov: M. Mazower, The Greek revolution (2021)
Dec: M. Conde, Segu (1984)

Bibliography, December 2023

BOTM: M.Conde, Segu (1984)

B. Duffy, The generation divide (2021)
B. McClellan, Promise of Blood (2013)
H.P. Lovecraft, Selected stories (2018) [all stories pre-1935]
P. Oborne, Wounded tiger (2014)

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987)

M. Wallis, Wines of the Rhone (2021)

M. Williams, The chalet girls grow up (1997)

I really liked Segu, though some reviewers have pointed out the problematic parts of it. It's particularly striking I think if you're used to an Anglophone sense of African literature, where Islam features so much less heavily than French Africa. Anyway, it's big, and bold, and well done. The narrative is very good at imagining the world that the characters inhabit, and it's chosen very well to show the gradations within that West African society as well as a specific slice of European encounters. And it was good to see the European narrative carry weight without taking centre stage.

A placeholder note for a provocative imagining of the future for the Chalet School triplets. I have lots of thoughts on this, which I don't have time to write down, but I am also glad I read that. Almost everyone else, good and bad, would have benefitted from making their books shorter.

Bibliography, November 2023

BOTM: M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021)

J. Crace, eden (2022)
E. Crispin, Holy Disorders (1945)
J. Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca (2004)
R. Heinlein, Farmer in the sky (1950)
A. Martine, A desolation called peace (2021)
E. Mittelholzer, My bones and my flute (1951)
R. Sepetys, I must betray you (2022)
C. Spencer, Killers of the King (2014)

Almost all the novels I read were pretty good, though I think eden isn't up to Jim Crace's normal standards. Best of them was probably Mittelholzer, in part because of the distinctiveness of the background. Slightly unfairly, because I think this is a pattern, they all came second to a very done summary on a historical issue I'm interested in to read a full account of, but not enough to read several. I do wonder if I'd have put Mazower top if I'd read lots about the Greek revolution. As I haven't, this was a great book. I think he's a great historian. I would say he's undervalued, but this did win major prizes. Either way, it does a very good job of disentangling the complex background of the Greek revolution, and making clear the contingent nature of its success as well as the complexity of Balkan politics at the time. I'm very glad I read it before the Elgin marbles controversy blew up again.