Books, books and more books

At one point I was writ­ing brief reviews on here with my thoughts about vari­ous books I’d been read­ing. I’ve got out of the habit of doing that, and meant to get back in to it. I’ve been keep­ing track of my read­ing on Goodreads for years, but a list­ing and a star rating doesn’t feel like enough. I thought it would be too much to do the whole of this year’s read­ing, so here’s the last few months of books.

1) Post­war: A History of Europe Since 1945– Tony Judt
2) The Possessed: Adven­tures With Russi­an Books and the People Who Read Them– Elif Batuman
3) My Life in Orange– Tim Guest
4) Fiction Ruined My Family– Jeanne Darst
5) The Phantom Toll­booth– Norton Juster
6) Going Dutch: How England Pludered Holland’s Glory– Lisa Jardine
7) Produc­tion for Print– Mark Gatter
8) The Clocks– Agatha Christie
9) 4.50 From Padding­ton– Agatha Christie
10) The Body in the Library– Agatha Christie
11) The Changeover– Margaret Mahy
12) Afflu­enza– Oliv­er James
13) Oryx and Crake– Margaret Atwood
14) The Year of the Flood– Margaret Atwood
15) MaddAd­dam– Margaret Atwood
16) The Iron King­dom: The Rise and Down­fall of Prus­sia 1600-1947– Chris­toph­er Munro Clark
16) The Secret Lives of INTPs– Anna Moss
17) Thank You For the Days: A Boy’s Own Adven­tures in Radio and Beyond– Mark Radcliffe
18) The Pagan House– David Flusfed­er

1) Post­war: A History of Europe Since 1945– Tony Judt

A compre­hens­ive and read­able history of the polit­ics and econom­ics of the post­war peri­od, mostly focus­ing on France, Italy, Germany and the Soviet Bloc. I read most of this in France, and it felt quite fitting. It also amused me how much the author despises punk music.

2) The Possessed: Adven­tures With Russi­an Books and the People Who Read Them– Elif Batuman

A funny book about academia and Russi­an liter­at­ure. There’s not many of them! Elif Batuman is a univer­sity profess­or of Russi­an liter­at­ure, and the book is her anec­dotes of pecu­li­ar people and situ­ations her work has brought her into contact with, like the Babel conven­tion where the organ­isers decided to invite some of his relat­ives, who turn out to be incred­ibly diffi­cult char­ac­ters, and the summer the univer­sity sent her to Samarkand to learn Uzbek, which would be easy for her as a Turk­ish speak­er, where she was bilet­ted with a very bizarre land­lady, and inflic­ted as a student on vari­ous unsus­pect­ing faculty members who were a bit taken aback that anyone had come to learn Uzbek, but did their best to oblige with details of how their poetry has one hundred differ­ent words for crying. I haven’t done a very good job here of show­ing how fun the book is, but it just is, ok?

3) My Life in Orange– Tim Guest

I’ve always been fascin­ated by books about lives inside cults, mainly because I was lucky enough to not grow up in one. Tim Guest’s moth­er joined the follow­ers of the Bhag­wan Rajneesh, and he grew up in communes in India, the UK and the US in the 70s follow­ing his mum around, dressed head to toe in orange, and usually feel­ing lost, isol­ated and insec­ure. The cult follows the typic­al story of the 60s and 70s where the ideal­ist­ic initial converts find them­selves caught up in more and more bizarre rules and command­ments, while the lead­er­ship becomes more and more corrupt and para­noid, and then the whole thing implodes. Tim and his moth­er were then thrown back into main­stream soci­ety in London. The whole book was well writ­ten and enga­ging, and well worth a read.

4) Fiction Ruined My Family– Jeanne Darst

A memoir about life as part of a rack­ety family with preten­sions to grandeur and liter­ary star­dom. It star­ted out well, but then Jeanne Darst star­ted portray­ing her adult self as an insuf­fer­able brat, and I lost interest.

5) The Phantom Toll­booth– Norton Juster

I down­loaded a lovely docu­ment­ary about the writ­ing of this favour­ite children’s book, so I thought I would re-read it first before watch­ing. My thoughts are here.

6) Going Dutch: How England Pludered Holland’s Glory– Lisa Jardine

Plundered in the title makes it sound more dramat­ic than it is in this book. It mainly focuses on histor­ic­al connec­tions between the UK and the Neth­er­lands, of which there are many (I always find it strange how simil­ar Brit­ish and Dutch houses look, when French or Belgian ones are so differ­ent). I got more inter­ested in Willi­am of Orange when I was work­ing at Hamp­ton Court, as that  peri­od of history gets a bit ignored at school, and it was good to find out more about him and the Huygens family, but most of the book was quite dry.

7) Produc­tion for Print– Mark Gatter

If you need to know about tech­nic­al details about offset print­ing and the like, this book is very useful and inform­at­ive. If you don’t, it will bore you sense­less.

8) The Clocks– Agatha Christie
9) 4.50 From Padding­ton– Agatha Christie
10) The Body in the Library– Agatha Christie

Whenev­er I feel ill I read some nice, unchal­len­ging, mind­less Agatha Christie myster­ies. There are so many of them I can re-read them, and because it’s been a few years since I last read that one, I’ve forgot­ten who the murder­er is. The modern editions do a good job of edit­ing out the worst of the casu­al racism of the time (they can’t do a lot with most of the character’s snob­bish, racist, sexist and anti-semit­ic atti­tudes, but that’s most books from the peri­od, really). You can argue either way that preserving them would stand as a monu­ment to how things were in the past, but in the case of Agatha Christie myster­ies it’s mostly in terms of char­ac­ters using throwaway idioms or phrases that are considered completely unac­cept­able these days but which are totally unre­lated to the plot. I made the mistake once of buying a 50s edition from a char­ity shop, because it had a really nice cover, but I couldn’t bear to read it after a few chapters.

When I lived in Hungary, I came down with pneu­mo­nia. The doctor sent me home with a big bag of vari­ous prescrip­tions with strict orders to stay in bed for at least 3 days. On the way home I stopped off at the super­mar­ket and bought anoth­er big bag of low-effort food, includ­ing a whole armful of pack­ets of jaffa cakes because they were on special offer. In the same shop­ping centre as the super­mar­ket there was a book­shop, and they had a load of Agatha Christie books in English for very cheap (Hungari­an book­shops often tend to have lots of books in other languages, because not everything gets trans­lated into Hungari­an). I had never heard of most of them, which surprised me, because I thought I’d read most of them over the years from the library, but they were very cheap, so I grabbed a hand­ful. I didn’t really pay much atten­tion to either purchase, because I was feel­ing ill and faint and fever­ish and just wanted to go home. When I got home I discovered I had some­how bought peach flavoured jaffa cakes in bulk by mistake rather than the stand­ard orange, and when I read the books I discovered they were myster­ies that Agatha Christie had writ­ten when she was really old and senile in the 60s and 70s, and should have retired, and which made no sense what­so­ever (and involved a lot of sabre-rattling at Young People These Days). Which explained why I had never heard of them. Some comfort food and read­ing! I later saw one of the books adap­ted for the Poirot tv show. Usually they pretty much leave the stor­ies as they are, but they had to radic­ally change it for tv to make it make any kind of sense.

11) The Changeover– Margaret Mahy

I some­times go off to work on resid­en­tial courses for teen­agers. The company that runs them used to hire a site that was a girl’s school until the mid 90s. They don’t use that build­ing any more, but they some­how ended up being given stock from the school library. Last time I was there, I ended up having a classroom that had book­shelves full of these inher­ited books. Whole book­shelves of paper­backs from the late 80s and early 90s bought to appeal to 13 year old girls of the time. They’re mostly not of much interest to the current day 15-16 year olds from South Amer­ica who I teach (who tend to want either modern teen­age books or prop­er liter­at­ure to prac­tice their English with), so they stayed unread on the shelves. I had a look at the books one after­noon when the students were on a field trip, and I had the day off. Most of them didn’t interest me either, a lot of them I remembered read­ing myself in the early 90s and didn’t enjoy that much then. Point Horror and the like are not known for their enthralling writ­ing. I saw the Changeover though, and I remembered it being really atmo­spher­ic and well writ­ten, so I decided to read it again, sat in the sunshine on the lawn. The plot is a pretty stand­ard modern fairy tale type thing, Laura’s little broth­er is possessed by a creepy old man who runs a junk shop that suddenly appears in her town, and he slowly starts dying. She teams up with a strange, aloof boy from school and becomes a witch to save her broth­er. The inter­est­ing thing though is the setting, 80s New Zeal­and (contem­por­ary New Zeal­and at the time of writ­ing) and the high qual­ity of the writ­ing and the explor­ing of the psycho­logy of Laura hitting puberty and deal­ing with her parent’s divorce and new rela­tion­ships.

12) Afflu­enza– Oliv­er James

I really hated this book. In fact I gave up on it two or three chapters from the end, which is unheard of for me. It was supposed to be about how how modern afflu­ence is making people sick in the soul using (pop) social science and stat­ist­ics. The author was an irrit­at­ing ex-public school boy (ie stereo­typ­ic­al priv­ileged board­ing school kid for those outside the UK) with a very narrow exper­i­ence of life, and the evid­ence for everything he proposed was very thin and badly presen­ted. He also goes off on a creepy tangent about how Russi­an women are beau­ti­ful because they are denied equal­ity in Russi­an soci­ety, and makes spite­ful person­al remarks about the appear­ance of a lot of the people he inter­views and also goes off on other weird tangents about how work­ing moth­ers ruin their chil­dren for life and how every­one in Denmark is a creepy suppressed clone because they all went to daycare. I already knew that money doesn’t make you happy, all I gained from this book is aston­ish­ment that this man got a book published and is allowed to regu­larly write for news­pa­pers. The one thing that inter­ested me was the descrip­tion of the “market­ing char­ac­ter” which I felt hit a certain nail on the head, (and whose origin­al work was not Oliv­er James’ but Erich Fromm’s) but I already knew I disliked people like that.

13) Oryx and Crake– Margaret Atwood
14) The Year of the Flood– Margaret Atwood
15) MaddAd­dam– Margaret Atwood

I’d read Oryx and Crake years ago, but never got round to The Year of the Flood, so when I saw the new sequel had come out, I decided to read the first two before­hand. The first two books tell the same story, but from differ­ent perspect­ives. The setting is a super-capit­al­ist near future, where giant bioen­gin­eer­ing corpor­a­tions domin­ate soci­ety, and everything is commod­it­ised. The priv­ileged employ­ees of the corpor­a­tions live in locked compounds, like an exag­ger­ated version of the current work­places compan­ies like Google provide, and every­one else lives in slums in quickly deteri­or­at­ing ecolo­gic­al condi­tions. The stor­ies are split between a post-apoca­lyptic setting where a virus has wiped out most humans, and the events lead­ing up to the disaster. Oryx and Crake tells the story from the perspect­ive of Jimmy, who grows up in a company bubble with his ambi­tious friend Glenn (aka Crake), and who tends to be present at all the import­ant moments, but due to his funda­ment­ally weak person­al­ity usually manages to get things wrong or miss import­ant clues. The Year of the Flood tells the story from the perspect­ive of Toby and Ren, female members of an ecolo­gic­al resist­ance group. MaddAd­dam contin­ues the story of what the surviv­ors do after the disaster, and also tells the story of one of the character’s past, which shows how the soci­ety ended up taking the path it did. I was mildly disap­poin­ted by MaddAd­dam, mainly because it wasn’t as grip­ping as the other two books, but Margaret Atwood is always worth a read.

16) The Iron King­dom: The Rise and Down­fall of Prus­sia 1600-1947– Chris­toph­er Munro Clark

Prus­sia as in the NE German king­dom. The book star­ted really well, describ­ing how the Hohen­zollern family star­ted out with the flat farm­land surround­ing Berlin, and gradu­ally accu­mu­lated other bits of land over Germany and Poland through canny marriages, ending up being one of the biggest and most influ­en­tial king­doms making up the Holy Roman Empire. I’d also never really thought about why princes of some of the regions of Germany were called Elect­ors (because they were the ones who elec­ted which prince was going to be Emper­or), and also about how pre-modern ideas of state­hood were often more like a Venn diagram than the concrete idea that we have now that one coun­try is one coun­try. For instance I hadn’t real­ised before that Austria was in both the Habs­burg and Holy Roman Empires (but the other constitu­ents of the Austro-Hungari­an Empire like Hungary or the modern Czech Repub­lic were only in the one empire). The author seemed to lose interest in the whole thing though once he’d got past Fred­er­ick the Great and into the 1800s, and didn’t really explain very well how Prus­sia came to be the Sparta of Germany. There were some inter­est­ing details about how the Nazis delib­er­ately claimed parts of the herit­age of North­ern Germany and cour­ted the conser­vat­ive local aris­to­cracy to expand their power from mostly being in Bavaria, but the book petered out really and glossed over import­ant things like the Napo­leon­ic Wars, Reuni­fic­a­tion of Germany and the First World War in a really odd way. Which is gener­ally not what you want from a history survey.

16) The Secret Lives of INTPs– Anna Moss

This was a quick and easy read. I come out as an INTP on the MBTI test (here is an unne­ces­sar­ily flat­ter­ing profile). I’m skep­tic­al about the valid­ity of the actu­al test/​personality system, but it’s fun to see what types your friends come out as, and some of the liter­at­ure about the person­al­ity types and func­tions can be useful in under­stand­ing how people who are very differ­ent from you see the world and react how they do. This book was ok. There was some inter­est­ing info though, like a study giving people who had joined cults MBTI tests close to their join­ing, and later on once they were fully absorbed in the cult, find­ing that their test results became much closer to the lead­er of their cult’s (surprise, surprise), and funny bits, like a study find­ing that INTPs were one of the most likely types to smoke, so perhaps cigar­ette manu­fac­tur­ers should cut down on the rugged Marl­boro man type ads and market them­selves as the “Philosopher’s Choice”. Over­all though, it wasn’t really that useful to me, I felt a lot of the descrip­tions about things like not being inter­ested in clothes didn’t really apply to me, and mostly it made me feel glad that I hadn’t gone through the US educa­tion system, based on the testi­mon­ies of the author and other people she inter­viewed.

17) Thank You For the Days: A Boy’s Own Adven­tures in Radio and Beyond– Mark Radcliffe

A collec­tion of essays about music and life by radio presenter Mark Radcliffe. They’re fluffy, unchal­len­ging and gener­ally enter­tain­ing. I couldn’t help myself read­ing them out in my head in his very pleas­ant and geni­al voice.

18) The Pagan House– David Flusfed­er

Edgar visits his grandmother’s house in the summer of 1995, and is caught up in the inher­it­ance fight between his vari­ous unpleas­ant relat­ives, discov­ers girls, and invest­ig­ates his family’s past as part of a free-love Biblic­al Commun­ism group in the 1840s based strongly on the real life Oneida sect. It was a decent read, but I felt strongly all the way through that it was a pale knock-off of some­thing else I’d read, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.