Bibliography, February 2014

BOTM: L. Hughes - Hallet, The Pike

A. Christie, Death in the clouds
A. Christie, The Hollow
W. Dalrymple, Return of a King

Unlike the Booker, the Samuel Johnson prize seems to have been awarded right. Excellent though Dalrymple's is, The Pike is astounding. Wonderful subject, wonderful period, wonderfully told. Importantly, looked at sympathetically, though without sentiment. It's a marvel.

The hammer of justice

Pete Seeger would have been a terrible hammer-wielder. Though an admirer, almost to the end, of Stalin (I'll come back to that), he was no dominator of men. When he spoke of the hammer of justice in his famous , and prosaically named, 'Hammer song' for at least part of the song, it's being used to hammer out a warning, rather than to fight. The only possible instance of him wielding weapons outside a military service is when he tried to take an axe to Bob Dylan's electric cables at Newport (allegedly).

I say this not to belittle him: he was tough, and exceptionally stubborn. Among the many obituaries, I discovered in one that he is the only member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be convicted of contempt of Congress. He spent much of his prime years under the shadow of prosecution and indeed spent time in prison for it. This was no accident of course - he was a communist; and a proud one; a Stalinist long after most follow travelers had fallen away. We should be grateful that, by his lights, his activity was almost entirely unsuccessful. The image repeated in his obituaries is that he was 'America's tuning fork.' It's a hopeless metaphor: if America is using Pete Seeger as a tuning fork, then it's tone deaf. It's also woefully shortselling his potency - Seeger wasn't a tuner, he was a prophet - an Old Testament prophet. Like those men who came from the wild places (some having gone into them from rather more comfortable billets in the city, as Seeger did) and excoriated the people for failing to act justly. They placed themselves outside order, in opposition to authority, and preached righteousness. You wouldn't have put them in charge of government either: I love the writings of the prophet Amos, but I'm reading him for what he says about the poor, not the administration. 

And that's how I think we should think about Seeger. Of course he was wrong about the remedy, but the sniping from the right misses the point. His songs and speeches weren't exam answers, but pricks of conscience. Just as we would be fools to import his doctrine into the exchequer, we'd be even more foolish to explain away his ideals or his criticism. They represent a bright vision of America and of humanity, and he sang proper protest songs for the right reasons. Along the way he helped inspire an extraordinary flowering of popular song. We won't see his like again.

Bibliography, January 2014

BOTM: J. Crace, Harvest (2013)

E. Catton, The Luminaries (2013)
S. Delany, Babel 17 (1966)*
Levitt, S.D., and Dubner, S.J.,  Superfreakonomics (2009)
R. MacFarlane, The old ways (2012)
N . Mitford, The Sun King (1966)*
G. Orwell, Essays (ed. 1984)

I've added date of publication to the book lists. I've been meaning to do so for ages, but now I look at it, it may not last - consider it a bit of an experiment. In short, a great month: Orwell, Mitford and Catton all excellent. Indeed, I can see why the Booker jury gave Catton the prize. They were however wrong (and biased towards its structural conceit); it should have gone to Jim Crace's swansong. Harvest isn't perfect: the plot is a bit weak, and the isolation slightly inconsistent. However, the work overall is a masterpiece of evocation and pitch perfect in its description of the village in question as well as the rhythms of country life. Given most people find the era before the war a bit of a stretch, this reaching back - to a period before modernity had even begun to be thought of - is timely as well as outstanding.

Bibliography, 2013

For handy reference, here were my books of the month:

January - D. Athill, Instead of a letter
February - M. Atwood, The Blind Assassin
March - G. Orwell, Burmese Days
April - J. Crace, The Devil's Larder
May - M. Gellhorn, The Weather in Africa
June - R. Young, Electric Eden
July - G. Orwell, Coming up for air
August - J. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
September - A. Patchett, Run
October - A. Munro, Runaway
November - A. Sisman, Hugh Trevor - Roper
December - W. Dalrymple, Nine Lives

First, the numbers. Only a very slight improvement on last year's volumes. 90 books overall, against 85 in 2012. Both well down on the long term average (125), though I think we know who to blame for that. Next, the ratios: seven fiction BOTMs, and only one history. That's broadly reflective of the overall numbers, exactly two thirds of the reading was fiction and I only read five history books this year. That's obscene; and it's changing from now.

Despite all these novels, there was no real contest over fiction book of the year. Atwood's Booker prize winner was outstanding. Certainly the best I've ever read of hers. Suspenseful, clever, and enchanting. It makes me want to go back to some of her works I've rejected in the past. Even the ones about Women.

Non-fiction was harder, but came down to two: McPherson and Sisman. They were both monumental works, though of varying subjects. Even here though, while part of me would love to say the biography of don was better than the one of a war, it is impossible. Battle Cry of Freedom was magisterial. Though long, it rattled by, brilliantly anatomising the Civil War and especially the long term causes. I'd recommend it for reading to anyone save for two things. Firstly, anyone who is interested has probably read it, I'm not the first to point to its brilliance. Secondly, it may make Marxist determinists of young historians reading it. Consider how good it must be to trump that caveat.

Bibliography, December 2013

BOTM: W. Dalrymple, Nine lives

S. Brook, Liquid Gold: dessert wines of the world
M. Kundera, The farewell party*
Montesquieu, Persian Letters*
W.S. Maugham, Liza of Lambeth

I almost gave this to Kundera (who is overdue a reread. I bought and reread this without remembering I'd read it before; and indeed own it), but Dalrymple's was consistently excellent, and engrossing. Basically, I can't really be bothered to read up on India properly, so I'm grateful for him and a selected handful of others for being effective and entertaining guides. He has never disappointed me. In other news, Maugham's celebrated debut is rubbish.

MPs' pay: the other metric

MPs and their pay, again. Boring boring.

And I say boring because the debate is so rubbish (though as an issue it is also intrinsically a bit boring). I don't really know where the right compromise is between enough and too much for MPs, but I find our summary of IPSA's logic pretty clear and it looks like they've got it about right, particularly as the overall cost of paying MPs will be flat. I could be persuaded otherwise.

However, what I'm struck by is how the debate totally ignores the rules for how MPs' pay will go up in future - in line with average earnings. This obviously does two things. Firstly it risks their pay getting out of sync again (their benchmarks may go up more or less than average earnings), secondly it gives them an incentive to support changes in the economy that improve average earnings, for which we should be grateful, I suppose.

But it doesn't go far enough. The average here is a median, so what this means is MPs will be judged on how much the person is in the exact middle of the list of earners does. But that's not how I would judge them; and that's not what the rhetoric of both sides is based on. They should be judged on how the worst off do (inter alia, I think making sure the average does up is the best solution to that too). So I would link MPs' pay to the mean average incomes of the poorest (10%; maybe 25%). That's what their real job is; they should be encouraged to do it.

Bibliography, November 2013

BOTM: A. Sisman, Hugh Trevor - Roper

J. Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
T. Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword
M. MacCambridge, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
J. Major, My Old Man: a personal history of Music Halls
G. Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four*

What a month! Four of the six books here could have been BOTM in almost any other month. Honestly, by the time I got to Orwell's masterpiece I felt I was on a downward spiral (it would still have comfortably taken prizes in previous months). Honourable mention to MacCambridge's history of American Football, which is essentially perfect, though as a subject not quite up there with Sisman. That wasn't perfect - I felt the seventies were undercooked - but it was brilliant.^ Peter Brown once described PhDs in Late Antiquity as choosing your bishop. Perhaps more modern biographers should choose their academic. In both cases, it's a fantastic way to hang a history of a period and a world, especially if, like HTR, they knew everybody. It's also a great triumph of taking a world which now feels very remote, though with familiar contours, and making it immediate. Finally, of course, it immaculately allows us into HTR's own head - and that's compelling. Sisman also writes excellently, with some lovely barbs hidden in the text. This was a favourite.^^ 

^I should of course disclose a more personal reason for finding this all fascinating: as well as being a Christ Church man, HTR was also my MSt supervisor's stepfather. He makes the odd appearance, very sympathetically too.

^^I did in fact have lots of markers of wonderful gobbets to quote, but the child took them all out, despite being supervised by A at the time.