I ask this every summer and always get great responses. Please recommend some reading:
1. History (not fictionalised)
2. Politics
3. Music
4. Page turner
5. Wild card/something else
Many thanks!
Holiday reading
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4. True Patriots – Russell Fralich, I confess he is a friend of mine but a page turning thriller.
4. Just read on holiday the first PD James Inspector Dalgleish – Cover Her Face. Fabulous riff on the country house murder.
1. East West Street Philippe Sands a quite extraordinary extended family memoir about Central Europe, Ww2, the Nuremberg trials and the origins of the international justice system. It sounds heavy it is anything but.
4 – The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker
I read it, my wife the read it, she bought it for people for birthdays and almost everyone loved it.
Multi-layered story centred around the death of a teenage girl.
1 Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
This is the best and most readable book about the Northern Ireland Troubles I have ever read. It’s about the disappearance of a middle aged Belfast mother in 1972. Keefe tries to get to the bottom of what happened and talks to many of those involved, using it to explain the wider context of Northern Ireland at that time. It’s a grim story but brilliantly told – I could equally have put this in the page- turner category
2. Ernest Bevin:Labour’s Churchill by Andrew Adonis
Yes, it’s by that Andrew Adonis but I wouldn’t let that out you off. Bevin, about whom I knew almost nothing before I read this, is a fascinating figure in British politics of the mid 20th Century and if that period rocks your boat it’s a good read.
3. When Words Fail by Ed Vulliamy
Vulliamy is a journalist who has written a lot about both classical and rock music, and has also reported from many of the worst war zones of our times, most famously Bosnia. This book is a kind of memoir through music – he writes about concerts, events and music that have moved him, from Shostakovich to Hendrix and mixes it in with accounts of some of his travels. So it’s actually a little bit of history and politics as well as music.
4. Have you read any Andrew Miller? I think he’s a terrific novelist, usually setting his books in historic settings. I loved his most recent book, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, set at the time of the Napoleonic wars
5. The unwomanly face of war by Svetlana Alexievich
This certainly isn’t going to be for everyone, and it isn’t exactly a light beach read, but it blew me away. Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, writes books painstakingly built up from first person interviews she gathers – she just lets the voices of the people involved tell the story. In this one she gathers accounts of Soviet women who fought in the Second World War. It was as heartbreaking, and harrowing as you might expect, but also moving, funny, and even uplifting. She has also written one on Chernobyl- it was one of the key source materials for the tv series, and I definitely what to read that too.
Ye Gods – I’ve just read that back and it all makes me sound like the Grim Reaper. I don’t just read books about death and conflict, honest. I mean, I love PG Wodehouse too…..
5. Twelve Patients/Eric Manheimer: If not for you the boy might like it. The book that became new US medic/hospital drama series “New Amsterdam”. As the title suggests, 12 sprawling essays around the state of US free health care, as provided in/via the E.R. of big hospitals, and which is subsidised by those who pay. An astonishingly un-American view of the unassailable right of human beings to health care, such as we (used to?) have here. How the US TV giants ran with the goddam pinko lefty views put forward beats me, but, if the TV show is good, if a tad soapy, the book is terrific.
1. History (not fictionalised) – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Diamuid McCulloch’s Thomas More; anything by Nathaniel Philbrick; if you’re especially nerdy, and like having David Starkey skewered, Lipscomb’s book on Henry VIII’s will is a good read
2. Politics – the last politics book I read and enjoyed was William Waldegrave’s autobiography.
3. Music – the Kate Bush biography Under the Ivy by Thomson.
4. Page turner
5. Wild card/something else – if you like sci fi, the Motie series by Niven and Pournelle, starting with The Mote in God’s Eye; or A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller; or The Tomorrow War by Haldeman.
Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘Mayflies’ starts out with a mad musical weekend in Manchester in the 80’s and becomes a beautifully written novel about friendship. Pure AW fodder.
True Crime Story by Jonathan Knox is a clever, engrossing thriller. Best reviews of the year and lives up to them.
Broken Greek – Pete Paphides
Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
Dara McAnulty’s ‘Diary of a Young Naturalist’ introduces a fresh, astonishingly assured individual young voice.
3. My Rock and Roll Friend – Tracey Thorn
Just started this and it’s very good. About her 30 year friendship with Lindy Morrison out of the Go-Betweens. I very much enjoyed Bedsit Disco Queen and first impressions are that this will be just as good
4.The Memory Police – Yoko Ogawa
Not a new novel at all but a real page turner from the early 90s. It’s an existential dystopian Japanese sci-fi story set in what seems to be the present. Will appear very vague to begin with too many plot holes, but stick with it and things start to make sense (and not make sense). A really gripping read
5.Scarred For Life Volume One – Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Lawrence
A deep dive into the darker side of seventies pop culture with some very well written pieces on tv series, public information films, comics, horror related sweets and board games etc. The sort of thing that once you start dipping into, you won’t be able to stop. There is a second volume as well covering the eighties.
And I’ll throw in a quick podcast as well which was recommended on here I think, Jim Irvin’s You’re not on the list. A brilliant listen with journalists and musicians ask to select their favourite album and talk about it. They’re avoiding the usual “classics” and going for things I’ve mostly never heard of. Even if the musical style of the albums chosen isn’t to my taste, the level of discussion is brilliant and makes for a fascinating hour or so. If you’ve got a very open mind musically and enjoy well written articles this is for you.
Thanks loads to whoever recommended this
3. Grant and Me by Robert Forster about their life in the Go-betweens
5 A couple of books about adventure –
Into the silence by Wade Davies – incredibly detailed and absorbing account of the Mallory attempts on Everest.
Moondust by Andrew Smith. Interviews with astronauts.
I’ve bought a copy of Grant and Me. Haven’t started it yet
Is that Ross Kemp’s autobiography?
Bit late to this,but here are a few recent reads that fit the classifications;
(1) Astral Weeks by Ryan Walsh – a trawl through late 1960s Boston, that provides a sideways look at how Van Morrison’s classic album was born and the milieu that gave birth to it. Takes in everything from an English academic who ended up being a local TV hippy David Frost, The Velvet Underground, and a sinister Family-type cult led by a ex-folkie self-proclaimed God.
(2) Why I am No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. Steve McQueen’s recent TV series Small Axe and Uprising almost supply a companion piece to this sharp analysis of UK black history.
(3) Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden: A Girl’s Life in the Incredible String Band – Rose Simpson. As reviewed by Bargepole here
(4) Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell. The latest chapter in Mitchell’s loosely linked meta-novel, is the story of a fictional 1960s psychedelia-era group, lots of usual narrative tricks, including walk ons for real people (eg Rick Wakeman gets a non-speaking part on page 1)
(5) Divine Rascal – Andy Roberts. The biography of Michael Hollingshead, who is kinda the Zelig figure of 1960s counterculture. By turns charming, manipulative and menacing, he was the guy with the famous mayonnaise jar full of Sandoz acid; turned on Timothy Leary, passed himself off as an upper class Oxbridge type (which was a complete fiction), was maybe a spy, got involved with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, flitted about from New York, California, Kathmandu, Norway, headed up a christian commune in Scotland, ended up in Bolivia. There is a film in there.