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Reading in 2024

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I have managed fifty books this year. That’s a result. Interestingly, the fiftieth book, Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s epic history of the world, took me more than a year – I started this work in December 2023. It was an excellent read, stretching my vocabulary in many respects. All the major swear words were present in plain text along with graphic sex and stomach-churning violence, but the “N word” was beyond him or his editors, which is an interesting comment on modern liberal social mores.

I started the year reading Dan Simmons’ gripping historical fantasy drama “The Terror” about the loss of the Franklin expedition in Arctic Canada. By complete contrast I very much enjoyed W.G Hoskins’s classic “The making of the English landscape”. I do tend to fall back on historical non-fiction, and a recommendation from earlier reading was Charles Spencer’s “The last Cavalier”, a biography of Charles I’s son Prince Rupert. This, in turn, led to something of a season of reading about 17th century England. I followed Prince Rupert in February with Christopher Hill’s biography of Cromwell – “God’s Englishman” and later, in December, by Anna Keay’s delightful “The Restless Republic”, which covered aspects of England in the republican years as seen through the lives of various protagonists. Fairfax the politician; John Bradshaw the lawyer; Marchamont Nedham the journalist; Lady Derby the royalist; Anna Trapnel the prophetess, amongst others. A brilliant and humane piece of work from which I learned much. Cromwell not quite the villain, nor the hero, he has been painted. Successive military coups, army juntas running the country…so much of our past is just not taught in school. At the time, George Monck, the general who engineered the return of King Charles II, wrote: “the army should serve the civilian government, not the reverse.” Amen!!

All of that reading on the 17th century, flowed from reading Peter Newman’s book on the Hudson’s Bay company, which in turn came from recommendations in Bernard de Voto, which in turn was recommended to me by Robert Kaplan. Recommendations are everything. Let your reading go where it will!

I read A. L Poole’s “From Domesday Book to Magna Carta”. Over months I worked my way through Geogina Howell’s biography of Gertrude Bell, the “Queen of the Desert”. My continued interest in American history saw me reading the final instalment of Bernard DeVoto’s masterly trilogy on the westward expansion in America: “The course of Empire”. Also, in that vein, Ray Allen Billington on “The Westward expansion in America”. Railways and America were combined in Dee Brown’s unsettling book on the displeasing and deeply venal American railroad barons, “Hear that lonesome whistle blow”. Also on railways I enjoyed the delightful and prolix O.S Nock on “Railway archaeology”. Very few people can write like that these days. I had a canter through the war at sea with David Fairbank-White’s “Bitter Ocean” and Roskill’s “The Navy at war: 1939-1945”. In that context I also re-read Alistair Maclean’s “HMS Ulysses”, and then I lent a copy of it to a close friend. A book perhaps to save for a time when your mental health is at it’s best. Not for the faint-hearted.  

I did some re-reading – it is always good to go over old ground. Old ground like Keith Laumer’s short stories, which I first read as a schoolboy in the mid 1970’s. One of them is “Special placement test” about the guy who can’t get a job in a massively overpopulated future America, and is faced with submitting himself for a lobotomy. How does he escape? It would make a great film. Or Frank Herbert’s “Hellstrom’s Hive” for which I would love to write a sequel. Also, in light of the new Dune films, I re-read “Dune” and “Dune Messiah”.

I started reading some of Neal Asher’s space operas, getting through three or four of them, but laid off them as they were quite hard on my mental health, being full of quite astonishing levels of violence and nastiness. I read – and this was a good deal more positive – Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The winds Twelve Quarters” and “The Compass Rose”, more encouraging and uplifting space opera set in her “Hainish” universe. Equally uplifting was Anne Leckie’s “Ancillary Sword” although the latter’s refusal to use male pronouns confused me somewhat. I suppose the point is, it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. Except it does… Other sci-fi included work by Ken Macleod and Alistair Reynolds, and vintage pulp fiction by Poul Anderson (“Flandry of Terra” – “Bond, James Bond” out amongst the stars, written about the same time as Fleming was writing the 007 tales) and E.E Smith (“Lord Tedric: Alien Realms” – pure pulp read in less than a day). I re-read C.S Lewis’ epic “Perelandra”, something I try to do every few years. This retelling of the legend of the Fall, the story of the unfallen planet Venus threatened by evil – but delivered by the actions of one brave person – never fails to grip me. I found time for an “omnibus” trip to Darrowby, with James Herriot – leading my wife into a season of reading him as well. “Agent running in the field” and “A Legacy of spies” were my fix of John le Carre’s work for this year. Must have read most of his stuff by now? Also, Jonathan Nicholas’ “Vermisst” about a German WWII aviator lost in the Soviet Union. Also, two technical books on the Vulcan bomber, and a book by Raymond White on the use of Harriers in the Falklands War.

An outstanding read was Sandra Newman’s “Julia”, being the story of Winston Smith’s eponymous lover in Orwell’s 1984. Very graphic and quite violent in places, she manages to fill in some interesting social detail that would have quite eluded a man like George Orwell. Also, towards the end, she conveys some of the hope that is entirely absent in 1984. I gave the book to my daughter and sent a copy to one of my sisters, so impressed was I. In the context of dystopia I also read Sinclair Lewis’ “It can’t happen here”, a story of America under a dictatorship, written decades before Orwell wrote 1984, and eerily prophetic…I will say no more.

I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s very humane “Riverman”, an account of travels by canoe through the great rivers and backwaters of the continental United States – not really about rivers, but about people. Also about people but not really about ships or the sea, was Horatio Clare’s “Down to the sea in ships”. A man whose writing I love, but who I find can get a bit pompous, is Clive James. I read another of his now quite hard to find memoirs, “Falling towards England”. I can cope with someone with such a high opinion of himself as Clive James, only in small doses. I also read a couple of books on cosmology I’d been recommended to: Brian Clegg’s “The Quantum Age” and Piers Bizony’s “Atom”.

There’s more! The untimely death of Michael Mosley saw me reading my wife’s copy of his “Just one thing” – leading to a few small but positive changes to my lifestyle, which of course is all he would have wanted. Terry Haye, a respected screenwriter, wrote “I am Pilgrim”. His second book “The year of the locust” was not quite as good, and had an odd sci-fi component in the middle, but was eminently readable. I read Christopher Tolkien’s expansion of his late father’s mythos with “The fall of Gondolin”. I confess that the three or so different versions of this story now available do lead me to getting a little confused. Gondolin was a legendary city in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The beautiful White City of Gondor, as seen in The Lord of the Rings, is held up as a pale reflection of Gondolin’s beauty. As with all of Tolkien, and indeed this is true to a degree of all great writing, the epic tale of the city’s fall is both just story, and yet also a profound lesson for all our lives.

Reading in 2023

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This year we’ve been a little busier, perhaps. “The judges’s scores are in”, as they say on Strictly; I have read fewer books in 2023 than I did in 2022. At the start of this year I was reading two books. One was Nick Hayes’ excellent and inspiring “The Book of Trespass”, an ostensibly scurrilous and subversive work about the countryside and how much if it is not accessible because of the draconian property laws in England. The fact that it is in print at all, and was widely and positively reviewed by various national newspapers representing the Establishment (whatever you conceive that to be) indicates that it is perhaps not quite as subversive as some readers might like to think. The other was “Life in the Far West” by G. F Ruxton. I am a student of the westward expansion of Europeans into the north American continent, and this book is a 19th century travelogue of an Englishman who travelled extensively in the lands that became the western United States.

My wife bought me a copy of W. Heaton Cooper’s “Lakeland Portraits”, completing my set of W. Heaton Cooper’s books. I love his paintings. His writing is delightful, spare and concise, as it must be from someone brought up in more spacious times than ours. There was a time when learning to write good English still mattered in schools. I’m no conservative when I say that that time is long past. To be fair this is not the best of his books – for that I’d look at “The Tarns of Lakeland”.

As noted elsewhere on this blog – reviewed here – I found Alexander Maitland’s “The Life of Wilfred Thesiger” very readable in February. At this point my wife and I moved to the edge of the Peak District. Visiting the local library saw me reading Mark Patterson’s “Roman Derbyshire”, Catherine James “Derbyshire – where writers walked” and Stephen Bailey’s excellent “The old roads of Derbyshire”. Local knowledge – every time. I followed these with Lewis Dartnell’s “Origins” about the origin of humankind, and Ryzard Kapucinsky’s work about travels in Africa, “The Shadow of the sun”. Very entertaining. Of Addis Ababa, he writes, “Bullets were the most valuable commodity in that market place, even more valuable than dollars.” He writes about the fundamental differences in the understanding of time, between Africans and westerners. Years ago working in Nigeria, someone once told me “there is no word in any Nigerian language that conveys the urgency of the Spanish word “Manana“... I also read Kapucinsky’s “The Emperor”, a very informative and warts-and-all account of the reign and fall of the otherwise pretty much untouchable Haile Selassie. Everyone has feet of clay, particularly despots and military dictators.

I had a bumper year indulging my interest in the history of the westward expansion of the United States. I started with two works on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Bernard de Voto’s eponymous history of that trip, and “These tremendous mountains” by David Freeman Hawke. I went on to read “Wondrous times on the frontier” by Dee Brown, which covered aspects of social history overlooked elsewhere – saloons and bars, what people wore, what they had for supper etc. Later on in the year I read the second book of Bernard de Voto’s three-part series on the westward expansion, “Across the wide Missouri”. This deals solely with the fur trade, with beaver trappers – the “mountain men” of legend. Also I found time for biographies of Kit Carson – “Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes” by Thelma Guild and Harvey Lewis Carter, and “Daniel Boone: The Long Hunter” by Lawrence Elliot. Finally, Alan Taylor’s “American Colonies”, another book that is part of a well-received trilogy of historical textbooks.

Janusz Bardach’s “Man is wolf to man”, recommended by Jacek Hugo-Bader, was quite a difficult read. Well written – just rather hard on the mental health to read of such terrible goings on. Another book difficult for similar reasons was my first Neal Asher sci-fi novel, “The voyage of the Sable Keech”. Asher is a prolific science-fiction writer and this work has immortals, viruses, some very dangerous animals, and is full of violence. Nearly as violent as Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” trilogy about Takeshi Kovacs, and that’s saying something! I found Neal Asher’s crab-like aliens, the Prador, with their taste for eating living humans, particularly unpleasant. 

I read an obscure work called “Earthbound Astronauts” by Beirne Lay Jr. This was a singing of the praises of all the engineers, scientists and so forth that helped to build the Saturn V rocket that put man on the moon in 1969. Max Hastings’ account of Operation “Overlord – the story of the Normandy landings” came in August. I review elsewhere Peter C. Newman’s book “The company of Adventurers”, being the early history of the Hudson’s Bay Company (still extant in Canada today as a minor department store chain) from even before its inception, through, if not to the present, then certainly well into the late 19th century.

Then there was a clump of railway reading – the every delightful prose of O.S Nock (see above on the writers of old having such delicacy and skill in written English) firstly “British Locomotives of the 20th C, volume 3” and secondly, a really good historical read, “Steam Locomotive”. This book highlights the fact that we’ve had trains in the UK for nearly two hundred years. Christian Woolmar, a worthy successor to O.S Nock in my view, wrote “Broken rails” about how and why the privatisation of British Rail under the Major government was such a disaster. His work on the London underground, “The subterranean railway”, was also instructive. In all that reading one became aware that the heyday of the railway in Britain was not “before Beeching”, but before the Great War – the railways were at the best in Edwardian England and have been in decline ever since. Other rail-related reading included several of Brian Radford’s works including “Midland through the Peak”.

Stephen Alford’s “The Watchers” about spying in Elizabethan England, went down well, as did Monty Don’s autobiography “Down to earth”. John Lydon’s “Anger is an energy” is reviewed here.

Fiction? I also found time for some re-reads; Heinlein’s “Glory Road” – always a pleasure, Richard Morgan’s violent “Broken Angels”, my very favourite book, Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion”, and Iain M. Banks’ “Surface Detail”. New reading included Le Carre’s “Silverview”, Erin Morgenstern’s “The Starless Sea” and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of ruin” – all mentioned here. I read my friend Mrs Ruth D’Alessandro’s second very engaging historical police procedural “Calling Detective Crockford”, being a fictionalised account of her mother’s work as the the first female detective in Berkshire. Amor Towles’ top work on the aristocrat in the hotel in Moscow – “A gentleman in Moscow” – is reviewed here.

Also amongst that lot, a short and informative popular science book on graphene, “The graphene revolution” by Brian Clegg. A textbook “Do safety differently” on human and organisational performance (a new way forward in safety) by gurus Sidney Dekker and Todd Conklin. I finished the year with Peter Fleming’s rather weak and largely cribbed account of the never-was Operation Sealion, the German invasion of England in 1940. His other writing is excellent: this is is poor and though interesting and informative in places, it is not his best work.