A baker’s dozen of books

1) Oper­a­tion Mince­meat– Ben Macintyre
2) The Pyram­id– Ismail Kadare
3) The Mirror Maker– Primo Levi
4) The Third Miss Symons– F.M. Mayor
5) The Making of the Brit­ish Land­scape– Fran­cis Pryor
6) The Years of Rice and Salt– Kim Stan­ley Robin­son
7) The Moving Toyshop– Edmund Crispin
8) Travels with a Type­writer– Michael Frayn
9) Mail Order Myster­ies: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads– Kirk Demarais
10) How to Build a Girl– Caitlin Moran
11) Fannie’s Last Supper– Chris Kimball
12) The Gallery of Regret­table Food– James Lileks

13) A Winter Book– Tove Jans­son

1) Oper­a­tion Mince­meat– Ben Macintyre
An account of the WWII spy oper­a­tion to fool the Germans into think­ing the Allies would invade via Greece rather than the obvi­ous Sicily by plant­ing fake docu­ments on the body of a man, thought up by Ian Flem­ing and put into oper­a­tion by a team of eccent­rics. It was a very intric­ate plan which could go wrong at any minute, and the book keeps up the suspense well, even when you know from the outset that the plan worked.

The first prob­lem was the very iffy ethics of getting hold of a body. In the end they went for a home­less man called Glyndwr Michael whose family hadn’t claimed the body, but had to keep it very quiet. The idea was to give him a paper trail of a fake milit­ary iden­tity (along with fake love letters writ­ten by the office staff), and leave him in the water as drowned, with import­ant papers fastened to a case around his wrist. The body would be left off the coast of Spain, which was offi­cially neut­ral and so would have to give the body to the Brit­ish embassy, but was unof­fi­cially allied with Germany. It was obvi­ous that someone along the line would open the case and look at the papers. The whole plan relied on the case look­ing unopened when handed in, but actu­ally having been opened, and the intel­li­gence being believed by the Germans. There are a lot of twists and turns along the way too though with too honest Span­ish Navy command­ers who won’t open the box, a German spy chief in Madrid desper­ate to get great results so no one mentions his Jewish grand­moth­er, a head of intel­li­gence in Berlin who is secretly an anti-Nazi saboteur, Joan Pujol Garcia who inven­ted a whole gang of imagin­ary spies to fool the Germans and was believed (and paid for years) and an epic submar­ine jour­ney to plant the body. It was a really inter­est­ing history book.

There was the inter­est­ing point too that the Germans actu­ally found it quite diffi­cult to get decent spies. The Russi­ans could get dedic­ated Commun­ists, the other Allies a wide selec­tion of people who were against Fascism, but the Germans had to rely on either dedic­ated Fascists, who were too often known to the author­it­ies or in jail, or brib­able people, who are not the most reli­able of agents. The writer clearly has a big crush on Ewen Montagu, the head of the oper­a­tion as well, which was quite cute.

2) The Pyram­id– Ismail Kadare
I think this is the first book by an Albani­an author I’ve ever read. I first heard his name in a book about trans­la­tion a while back, and his work soun­ded really inter­est­ing. The book is simil­ar in style to Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges, using a story about the build­ing of the Great Pyram­id at Giza told in a flat, folk­tale like way to create a portrait of state para­noia and oppres­sion. It was a really good read, and the real history of Enver Hoxha’s regime in Albania is also very inter­est­ing in itself.

3) The Mirror Maker- Primo Levi
A collec­tion of short stor­ies and news­pa­per columns. I had to make a stab at If This is a Man in Itali­an at univer­sity. It was a weird exper­i­ence read­ing a book in a language I barely knew yet could under­stand without trying too hard (I was on a sort of Itali­an boot­camp course for French or Span­ish speak­ers). I ploughed through it though, and then read the rest of Primo Levi’s harrow­ing books in English. This collec­tion is much light­er, mostly not cover­ing the topic of his time in Auschwitz. I really enjoyed the inter­views with vari­ous anim­als in partic­u­lar, although I didn’t get much out of the old news­pa­per columns, (for much the same reas­on I mostly don’t enjoy collec­tions of old columns) because detached from their origin­al news context and time they don’t feel very relev­ant.

4) The Third Miss Symons– F.M. Mayor
A novella follow­ing the life of a drab Brit­ish spin­ster in the High Victori­an peri­od, explor­ing the suffoc­at­ing iner­tia forced on respect­able women of the time. I really enjoyed this, and the author’s sharp prose and commit­ment to portray­ing the main char­ac­ter warts and all.

5) The Making of the Brit­ish Land­scape– Fran­cis Pryor
Does what it says on the tin. A history of how the Brit­ish land­scape has affected soci­ety, and how people have changed the land­scape. Even the wild look­ing parts of the coun­try are shaped by millen­nia of farm­ing and settle­ment. With these grand survey books, you can always tell what peri­od is the historian’s person­al favour­ite. In this case it was the Neolith­ic and Bronze Ages. In fact I found the chapters about ritu­al land­scape, people using the barrows and henges as their story and history in the absence of writ­ing, I took myself off to the Brit­ish Museum to sketch some of the arte­facts from the peri­od (also some of the few arte­facts there without very dodgy histor­ies of acquis­i­tion).

6) The Years of Rice and Salt– Kim Stan­ley Robin­son
I found out about this book from the excel­lent art history site People of Colour in Medi­ev­al Art, which has grown outwards from the origin­al brief to cover every time peri­od, using pieces of artwork to combat the idea that Europe was mono­lith­ic­ally white in the past and that diversity is only a modern thing, and also show­ing portray­als of Europeans from other civil­isa­tions. As well as art, every so often they recom­mend inter­est­ing books.

This is an altern­at­ive history novel, using the premise of the Black Death being much more viru­lent than was the case in real­ity, virtu­ally wiping out large swathes of Europe, and leav­ing the Otto­mans and China (and later India) to become the domin­ant powers. The story starts out in the 1400s and contin­ues to the present day, with the history becom­ing more and more differ­ent as time goes along. There is a group of char­ac­ters who rein­carn­ate again and again in differ­ent lives. K’s first two lives are terrible, so they are determ­ined to change things for the better and smash injustice. B wants every­one to be at peace but always prepared to back K up, and I is curi­ous, always a scient­ist or invent­or or explorer. From rein­carn­a­tion to rein­carn­a­tion their gender, nation­al­ity and social status vary enorm­ously, but in every life they are always friends, some­times relat­ives or couples in differ­ent combin­a­tions.

In this version of history, only West Coast of North Amer­ica and the Inca empire are colon­ised (by China), leav­ing the Iroquois League ruling the inland areas after having picked up small­pox inocu­la­tion off Chinese traders. The Recon­quista never happens, leav­ing al-Andalus to expand further into a sparsely popu­lated post-plague Europe, absorb­ing the surviv­ors. The main area of inter­na­tion­al fric­tion is in Cent­ral Asia, where the Islam­ic coun­tries border China. The equi­val­ent of the First World War drags on for a couple of decades and results in the tip of Mt Everest getting blown up.

It’s a really enjoy­able book, although if you don’t have a good grasp of history or don’t like asides into philo­sophy, or are one of those weird people who get so offen­ded at some­thing not being centred on Europe (like the people who send abus­ive emails to the woman who runs POCIMA because she showed a statue of St Maurice from 15th century Prague or some­thing) then this isn’t the book for you. I really enjoyed it though. I think my favour­ite bits were when the main char­ac­ters were a group of alchem­ists in Samarkand in the 1600s, and when they’re Surplus Women scient­ists living in a board­ing house in the equi­val­ent of the 1920s in St Nazaire.

7) The Moving Toyshop– Edmund Crispin
A 1930s murder mystery set in Oxford, (but not obnox­iously so). It’s one of those detect­ive stor­ies which are enorm­ous fun even if the char­ac­ters and mystery are actu­ally a bit thin. It’s the qual­ity of the writ­ing, and the surprise elements like the dolor­ous D.H. Lawrence loving lorry driver who keeps crop­ping up that make it so much fun. I’ll read the others in the series too.

8) Travels with a Type­writer– Michael Frayn
This is a collec­tion of Michael Frayn’s travel journ­al­ism from Guard­i­an in the 60s and 70s. Rather than being outdated like anoth­er collec­tion of pieces from the time might be, these are finely writ­ten articles which give a real picture of those places as they were at the time. He travels to Cuba, Israel, Japan, Notting Hill, Moscow, France, Sweden and Austria. I really enjoyed this book.

9) Mail Order Myster­ies: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads- Kirk Demarais
This is basic­ally a collec­tion of the mail order novel­ties like x-ray specs and sea monkeys that used to be advert­ised in the back of children’s comics. The author’s dad could always see through the mislead­ing market­ing spiel, and wouldn’t let his son waste his pock­et money send­ing off for the things, increas­ing their glam­our in his mind. As an adult he came across some of the old ads and wondered what the toys had actu­ally been like, and if his young­er self would have been disap­poin­ted with them, so he set out to find out. The book has the origin­al ads, and photo­graphs of the (usually disap­point­ing) real toy bought from ebay or found in toy museums with a funny review of the toy. Lots of fun.

10) How to Build a Girl– Caitlin Moran
I always want to like Caitlin Moran, but her tend­ency to constantly put her foot in it by saying ignor­ant things and refus­ing to back down or learn stops me. She’s about 8 or 9 years older than me, and when I was in my early teens way back in the Trias­sic age/​the mid 90s my school friend Ester­ina gave me a copy of the book Caitlin Moran had writ­ten when she was about our age. I really enjoyed it at the time. It was also auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al, but played the large homeschooled family in Wolver­hamp­ton setting purely for laughs. From read­ing her other writ­ing I knew the real­ity was a bit dark­er, so I was inter­ested to read her adult auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al novel. It just doesn’t really work though, she keeps push­ing the “oh Johanna is so cute and obli­vi­ous and barely knows anything about music” angle while at the same time having a nation­al music magazine be happy to pay her for writ­ing and not get complaints from their read­ers, and the John Kite musi­cian char­ac­ter she falls for just comes off as a flaky creep rather than the fascin­at­ing yet flawed man I think she was aiming for (??). It comes across as some­thing the irrit­at­ing imma­ture 19 year old Caitlin Moran featured in this news­pa­per article would think was moving and clev­er, rather than the current 40ish edition, who perhaps should have learnt some­thing. I actu­ally stopped both­er­ing to read it about 70% through, which I almost never do with books. There was a tv show version of the same idea she wrote with her sister, Raised by Wolves, which I enjoyed much more.

11) Fannie’s Last Supper– Chris Kimball
The writer recre­ates recipes from a Victori­an cook­book using histor­ic­al equip­ment and talks about the history of food in Boston. It was good for a casu­al read when I had the flu, but the author is basic­ally Niles Crane without the jokes.

12) The Gallery of Regret­table Food- James Lileks
No fant­ast­ic aris­to­crat­ic confec­tions here. Lots of horrible jello mayo salads from the 50s and weird advert­ising cook­books trying to persuade you to use their product in all kinds of dubi­ous places and James Lileks’ acid­ic comment­ary. When I first got inter­net at home, prob­ably around 98 or 99, I was trying to find things to look at. Search­ing for “funny stuff” didn’t get me very far, although I did some­how find the Lileks website, (possibly from those categor­ies Yahoo used to have?) where the stuff for this book lived. The website is still around, and still full of all kinds of weird vintage book and magazine scans.

13) A Winter Book– Tove Jans­son
I was disap­poin­ted with this book. Tove Jans­son is one of my favour­ites, but this was a hast­ily put togeth­er collec­tion of less­er known stor­ies and extracts from the Sculptor’s Daugh­ter that don’t really go togeth­er, slapped into a cover and title designed to make you think it was some­thing to do with her clas­sic novel the Summer Book. The stor­ies are mostly not even set in Winter. The main bit I enjoyed was the story based on the moun­tain of reader’s letters she received. Better off stick­ing with her many other books.