September 2026 Reads

September 2026 Reads

 Movements

(Only two books for September! Ah, back to school. 

This post completed in November 2026, in the interests of timeline repair.)

The Books

Cocaine Nights - J.G. Ballard 

Lean Fall Stand - Jon McGregor 

 Cocaine Nights - J.G. Ballard

 Our narrator finds themself drawn into a world of semi-gated communities of expatriates on the south coast of Spain, who are, it emerges, being stirred from SSRI-induced torpors by a messianic sociopath. That figure is fixated on a theory that crime stimulates the arts and keeps people alive. Ever more damaging thrills sought, what are the sacrifices that might be made to sustain a dream of engagement? 

Given that premise, Cocaine Nights frequently came across somewhat disappointingly coy. J.G. Ballard is one of the great untouchables of modern literature. Man's got an adjective. However, given the gap between concept and execution, the lavish praise on the blurbs seem to be trying to talk themselves into it. 

I think mainly Cocaine Nights has not aged well. Dialogue is often horribly lumpy and unconvincing. Characters talk ideas at each other in a kind of clipped public school tone. Our unreliable narrator is an ageing lothario whose points of reference are obvious politics, sex, international travel and alcoholism... kind of a post-war throwback. Maybe all that was intentional? It just came across as awkward. All the apparent debauching is wafted at, described stiffly by the would-be detective and white knight, perpetually baffled and hopeless, and increasingly seeking complicity. 

That kind of obvious character arc, and a 1990s self-consciousness, marred any effect the book might have had. Maybe Ballard wasn't actually taking any of it seriously. I was trying to think if it would have seemed to be saying something profound about society when it came out, but found myself instead continually interrupted by myself going "Oh come ON", at unlikely scenarios of theatre companies, sport and and arts springing up thanks to a campaign of graffiti and robberies, or the implausible business machinations of monied criminals, or yet another conversation in which cardboard cut-out characters articulate perfectly various notions of social constructs and contracts. There was one section towards the finale of the novel that was just preposterous:  

"But Paula was no longer listening to me. She stepped to the window as the last of the floats arrived, bearing a mock-sunset of pink roses on which was superimposed 'The End'. A boisterous party was in progress on the float, and a dozen younger residents of the Costasol complex performed a dance medley to music played by a three-piece band. Knees and elbows scissored through a few bars of the Charleston, arms whirled in a forties jitterbug, hips gyrated through the twist." 

Ballard dancing along behind, waving a straw boater and cane. The-ah-The-ah-That's all, folks! I had already given up on trying to actually believe any of the book, but this bit at least made me giggle.

Significantly, it did not have nearly enough cocaine in it to justify the cover art.

  Lean Fall Stand - Jon McGregor 

Following on from Ballard, this was altogether more convincing and human. McGregor deals with ice actual and metaphorical in this account of the relationship between veteran Antarctic researcher "Doc" and Anna, also a researcher, who finds herself in the unexpected position of having to become Doc's carer after he has a cataclysmic stroke while at the South Pole.

The opening scenes in and around the research station on the icecap set the story up in a way that anticipates something quite action packed, almost thriller-ish. However, the next part of the book shifts perspective to Anna and her experience, then shifts again to the claustrophobic return home for the couple, and their adult children. Through all of this the text moves gradually away from notions of a simple narrative of personal recovery, until we recognise that McGregor is uncovering the workings of relationships, and the complexes of ways people subsume themselves.  

It is a hopeful book, in an understated way, and has great moments of pathos and humour in the scenes of rehabilitation that form the final part of the book. This has definitely put Jon McGregor on to the "Find more of this writer" list.

Next time

October 2026 had more books in it. But did that post get finished before the end of November? Find out by clicking through!

August 2026 Reads

August 2026 Reads

(Writing this in October of 2026. As noted in the July edition, Things Kept Happening, and, well, yeah, here we are. Presented in the name of timeline repair.)

 The Preamble

Taking a leisurely time over house move was a privilege and, in some key respects, a planning error. It allowed time creep to occur, with what could have been done and dusted quickly expanding to fit all the time available, with the going up and down the motorway taking on a repetitive, compulsive, liminal aspect. 

Then we went straight into a long-overdue short holiday, which had all the more pleasurable aspects of liminal spaces: airport terminals, hotels, and the destination, which had a pool, by the side of which one might read vintage crime novels, eventually.

The Books

What Have I Done? - Ben Elton

The Hunted - Elmore Leonard

Black Betty - Walter Mosley

 

 What Have I Done? - Ben Elton 

Started reading Benj before going away, and had a few chapters remaining when we got back, so really he bookended the summer. 

When I was younger I loved Blackadder, and retrospectively The Young Ones, and I saw him perform stand-up live on the tour that eventually morphed into The Man from Auntie... I even recall Happy Families and Filthy Rich and Catflap. So, a lot of my interpretation of Ben Elton is based on his having been such a large part of my life growing up, and I recognise now how much of an influence he was in terms of comic worldview and writing styles.  

 

This autobiography is honest, and mostly not over-written. Elton's clearly sincere in a lot of ways, and one gets a sense of a tremendous work ethic, a writing compulsion that has brought him success through lucky timing, determination and an ability to riff off other's ideas, qualities I found myself admiring. 

However, I remember also quite vividly how disappointed I was watching the first episode of The Thin Blue Line, and with most of the novels I've attempted to read. 

 

There's something of the school swot about him that - as he acknowledges - just seems to rile some people. Why is Jonathan Ross (as personification of this tendency) so mean to him? Perhaps it's the relentless, Benjy's Funhouse Hall of Mirrors, overdone social reflection? Perhaps the ego massaging of the should-have-called-it-a-day-when-Freddie-passed band Queen, with the incomprehensible and unnecessary We Will Rock You musical? Maybe it was the shiny-faced band introductions at the Queen's Golden Jubilee? "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please give it up for The Spice Girls?!" 

 

While writing with a great deal of self-awareness, Elton seems throughout to be nursing a grievance about never really having garnished the respect, or perhaps acknowledgement, that he might reasonably expect, indeed, quite the opposite. It's the book's tendencies to fall into querulous self-justification that hamper it. While seen as a "sellout" in some respects, he has never done an advert; as someone who seems to see life in terms of gigs, and getting to do what he wants to pay the bills, that's actually pretty cool. Then he drops in another anecdote about how much of a pal George Harrison of The Beatles became, and you just want to chuck the book on the floor.

The Hunted - Elmore Leonard

This was me going into full holiday reads mode, and if you're going to read a holiday thriller it should be by Elmore Leonard. Astonishingly hard to find in second hand shops, Leonard's books are clearly highly prized, never finding their way into the charity box. Finding this one for £1, I leaped on it. 

It's got the usual Leonard hallmarks: a mixed cast, relaxed dialogue, spare prose, a tricksy set up, a well-handled climactic showdown. Set in Israel in the 1970s, it has a fascination with new-build hotel glamour and recent brutal conflict, and it was interesting to see how well some of that had aged like labneh in Mediterranean sunshine. It's not one of the best Elmores I've read, but even second division Elmore Leonard is better than most writers, and it was Just The Thing. 

 

  

 

Black Betty - Walter Mosley 

Found this at the same place I found the Elmore Leonard, and it's occurred to me that I should be trying harder to recall where that was on the grounds that I might have hit a rich seam. 

This was another excellent bit of crime fiction, from 1994, set in 1961. It brings LA and California to life like Chandler or Hammett do, and Rawlins is an engagingly complex narrator, simultaneously self-assured and vulnerable, angry and hopeful.

I'd not read any of the Easy Rawlins books, and I discovered with some interest that Mosley is still making them happen. Worth a deep dive, I think, based on this happenstance find.   

 

Concludals

That was it for August. The rest of the time it was mostly Private Eye, The Week, and attempts to read Le Canard Enchaine.  Et vive les vacances! Coming up in September... oh no, back to work.

July 2026 Reads

July 2026 Reads

Movements

(Given that I'm writing this in October of 2026 will I hope give the reader some idea of the state of Being Occupied that has endured since July 2026... the draft below was mostly done in July, but then Things Kept Happening, and here we are. Presented in the name of timeline repair.)

The List

Suggestions for Thought - Florence Nightingale (Ed...)

The End of Everything - M. John Harrison

Four Novellas - Samuel Beckett 

Paradise Lost (intro & bk1) - John Milton, Alastair Fowler

 The Books

 The End of Everything - M. John Harrison 

At time of writing (July and now October), MJH was on tour giving this book the hard sell, a kind of Rolling Thunder revue for literary publicity. His blog seemed a succession of snapshots of him looking equal parts slightly nonplussed and extremely pleased.

And rightly so - maximising a moment of momentum, following on the tidal surge of The Sunken Lands Begin To Rise Again (TSL), which caught lots of attentions and which I loved, and then his anti-memoir Wish I Was Here (still on my wish list), and a long career preceding as a sci-fi/weird fiction stylist that has seen him take on a position of venerated elder. 

All of which is great. As a new fan I have the evangelical zeal of the convert to sustain me, of course, but TSL really knocked me sideways as an idea, and as a piece of writing, and I am glad he's getting a moment of recognition. 

Looking back to Sunken Lands, I had been surprised to read reviews that critiqued an apparent lack of clarity in the ideas. I haven't a clue where I found these, and I haven't bookmarked them owing to them being incorrect. What made the book great was that it didn't hold the reader's hand so much as leave it in a bucket, with other limbs washed up on the shore. 

If you read and didn't like TSL then you'll probably have the same issue with TEOE, which sifts similar sands. In places it seems to be offering suggestions of an allegory of Brexit, but only as notes in a much more complicated brew that refuses to be obvious. There is a strangeness to it that speaks of the bewilderment of cultural shifts. For me, it is particularly strong on the mysteries of aging and generational change, along with personal redundancies, and a lifelong quest for artistic meaning and an expression of self. Get this book.

 

First Love and Other Novellas - Samuel Beckett

Also dealing with the mysteries of old age - senility, redundancy, helplessness, narrators unreliable and unrelatable - are these four stories from Becket. Novella seems to overstate their heft a bit, but like Malone Dies (see February 2026 Reads), the dark reveries of the narrators have the capacity to leave a reader deep in thoughts crepuscular of their own for some time subsequent. As well as giggling at phrases that seem to arrive out of nowhere in the middle of a line, a warm undercurrent through a cold tide, with an old fellow standing slightly further out up to their neck in the waves looking furtively towards the shore.

In some ways there is a similarity in theme to the stories here (old fellows in ruins) that lessens their impact. They might be read better stumbled over in a magazine or amid some other collection than all in a oner. However, Beckett's style is remarkable. Hopefully will find some on a forthcoming trip to France. 

Paradise Lost - John Milton, Ed. Alastair Fowler

Well,  at £2 or something in the charity shop, I was never not going to pick this up. 

Having studied the text a couple of times when at Uni. doing Eng. Lit. it was a bit like encountering an old pal who is miraculously and delightfully unchanged. This is the sort of edition that has considerably more in the way of footnotes on a page than the text (see the image below), which is just great. One finds out such a lot about not just the text but the presentation of the text, and I love to lavish hours on a well-tuned intro. 

 Couple that with Milton's enormous poetic vision, and that was me over at the till getting the cash out. I only had time to read Book 1 this July, but will make a point of getting through the rest of it again at some point this year. 

Let the Holidays Commence

That was it for July, boxed books for a house move and attendant logistics limiting my time... hopefully August will bring a bit more opportunity for leafing. 

June 2026 Reads

June 2026 Reads

Movements

We have June's post arriving late after a hot, tiring month scampered past like a panting hound. Hot - damned hot - and an awful lot of day job marking end-of-year assessment scripts took up an infuriating amount more time than I might have liked. Wimbledon and the World Cup are also welcome distractions - oh! and we're moving house, so most of the book collection currently looks like this:

So yeah, despite all that - and seriously, 'tis a churl who might grumble about fine weather, a steady job doing something worthwhile, wall-to-wall sport, and a life largely untroubled in the grand scheme of things - I made time to dig into a few choice volumes as well, although mainly before the busyness of packing etc all kicked off back end of the month. 

Thusly, without much further late-June round-up ado...

The List

A Time To Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor

Notes to John - Joan Didion

How's Your Dad? - Mick Channon Junior

Puckoon - Spike Milligan 

 The Books

 A Time To Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor

 I was prompted to get a copy of this by reading someone mentioning it somewhere in May, I think. Although I'd read it before, it was a long time back - nearly 30 years since - so I couldn't recall much of it, although what I could remember was that it had been a work that struck a quiet chord. 

Whatever called me to bring it back into the mix, I'm grateful. Fermor writes directly and doesn't stint on self-awareness, and in discussing his sojourns in different monasteries in Europe (on what we might now term "spiritual retreats"), has a canny recognition that at the very idea of a secular citizen decamping to a monastery for quiet time readers may likely be engaged in some sort of facial expression involving an arched brow, or a pursed lip, perhaps even a grimace. 

He writes about monastic life in a way that recognises also that an outsider's experience might not be able to avoid missing something essential about the drive to pursue a monastic life. This is kind of his point; it represents an attempt to explore that drive, and to see the value in seclusion and reflection. In a contemporary milieu of digital detoxes, etc, of course it remains pertinent. Its engagingly-constructed descriptions of the history and continuing practices of the various orders he visits, the Trappist regime in particular, are fascinating. It's a short book, but well worth your time. 

 

Notes to John - Joan Didion

 Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the only other thing I've read by Didion, and that too was a long while since. I found this in a charity shop and it looked intriguing: posthumous discovery of a personal journal, addressed to her husband, tracking nearly a decade of analysis appointments, specifically related to their adopted daughter and her ongoing health issues, as well as Didion's own. 

The notes were discovered typed up and in a file near her desk, which provoked a recurring sense of being invited to peek through someone's private diary. While frequently "questioning, courageous, and clear" (ye blurbe) in tone, there were multiple moments where I felt less like an admirer of someone's lucid prose style and more an intruder on some private family discussion that should not have been brought to the light. 

That said, there were also frequent moments I recognised and valued immensely for Didion's insight, which is of course probably why the publishers felt the need. While edifying, though, not an easy read.  

How's Your Dad? - Mick Channon Junior

While seemingly an abrupt shift in style from the metropolitan aloofness of Joan Didion, much swearier and English sporting bloke-ish, this also had a lot of well-articulated family dynamic struggles, and packed an emotional kick as well. 

I picked it up from the library,  where there was a pile of them, available for a donation in the charity box - a North Yorkshire tourism aside: the city of Ripon ("Stay awhile amid its ancient charms") is a sometimes-overlooked gem of happenings. It's packed with pubs, has a regular market, an impressive cathedral, and a well-appointed library. It also counts a racecourse among the ancient charms, which may account for the job lot of volumes bearing a Racing Post imprimatur... - and I hadn't anticipated a great deal from it. However, being a son of a particular age with a dad of a particular age, the main idea looked interesting, and about half a chapter in, recognising a kindred "fucked-up in the 90s" spirit, I warmed to it immediately. 

Channon Senior was a celebrated footballer, who took up training racehorses. Channon Junior attempted to play footie professionally but was not at the same level, went into journalism but struggled with that, and then took up with the horses as well, one gets the impression principally as a means of keeping an eye on an increasingly-cantankerous dad. 

There are tales of friendship, family events, a framing device of the flat season, and it darts back and forth across the turf before cantering home for a satisfactory finish. Highly appropriately, I finished it on Father's Day. Then I rang my dad. 

Puckoon - Spike Milligan 

 Back to some Spike Milligan to end the month. Puckoon is short novel from the early 1960s, and it's deceptively lightweight. Moments of it seem extended sketches or riffs, as you might expect from a writer of radio comedy, but it's got some terrific set-pieces, and the sort of recurring intrusive narrator that I quite enjoy when it's done well (a few parts had me thinking of B.S. Johnson, mordant asides done dry). 

The main plot line is a lazy bureaucratic oversight that leads the border commission in Ireland to draw a line straight through the village of Puckoon: separating church from graveyard, leaving a small corner of the pub in the lower-tax rate north, that sort of reductio ad absurdism. As social commentary, it works perhaps especially well because of the cartoonery and moments recalling Goon Show radio audio gags [FX: gigantic explosion]. Sometimes, what we call reality is more preposterous.

The main character upbraiding the writer for having better-written legs is also worth the cover price alone. 

Next month

We take on the tenancy at the new place at the end of July, so I'm hoping to be unpacked by some point in early August? Hurrah for summer hols. Of the limited numbers of books still to hand, there'll definitely be Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale, First Love by Samuel Beckett... if I get through them, knowing my methods, I'll either be in the library or buying a stack of second-hand volumes to place lovingly on top of a pile of moving boxes. Not at all infuriating.

 

 

May 2026 Reads

May 2026 Reads

New books coming in from various sources clashed with half term holidays and various other tasks intruding, though I managed to keep an eye on stack reduction with a a dip into an old favourite... 

The list

The New Abnormal - Kek-W

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuściński

The New Abnormal - Kek-W

A short story collection offering weird tales influenced by post-war sci-fi and weird horror. It was from Kek's bandcamp, where artwork and music also appear. I first heard about -W as a writer of stories for 2000 AD, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, and the standalone Cap'n Dinosaur, written with Shaky Kane, is one of my favourite things ever. The stories in The New Abnormal are interesting, with a couple of them really hitting the spot. Cone Zero was fun, and I would be interested to discuss the uneasy horrors and false memories in Blue Raspberries and Moa Crowhide alongside Quentin S. Crisp's Hamster Dam as indicative of something or other. 
While some of the stories seemed to have ideas that fizzed off (as opposed to fizzled out - like, non sequitur fireworks? Seemingly not part of the same display, rather than damp squibs?), anyway, I like Kek-W, and this work, and it was a good start to the month.

 

 

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Revisiting this several hundred years after I first read it, Good Omens book goes beyond a parody of The Omen, and has some genuinely moving moments in among the Pratchett-driven footnotes and word-play, and Gaiman-inflected moments of darkness. 
Adam is the Antichrist, but owing to an error is brought up as a normal young lad in rural Britain. Meanwhile, an angel (Aziraphale) and a devil (Crowley) lurk on the planet as kind of celestial/infernal sleeper agents, as an associated cast attempt to wrangle prophecy and actualisation of the Final Battle between Heaven and Hell... 

Sort of ubiquitous during the 1990s, this volume was not my original copy but a reprint, where they took out the funny author pic and legendary blurb about banana daiquiris and inserted fore and afterwords about the widespread success the book enjoyed, which seemed to have taken them by surprise a bit. 

These notes of self-congratulation rang slightly feedbacky given the further years of success for both writers, and then life happening while other plans were made. Some of the jokes haven't aged brilliantly. It seems unfair however that with Terry Pratchett now deceased, and Neil Gaiman's career currently likewise owing to a "difficult, complicated" context (Michael Sheen, who played Aziraphale in the truncated Netflix adaptation of the book), the book itself may become a footnote. I re-read it in a few quick sittings before 'moving it on with love', but if you like a humane and thoughtful style seasoned with jokes, and you missed out on this because of history, it's well worth your end times.     

 

The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuściński

A friend loaned me this, a propos of us having heard about Kapuściński via some book podcast with Henry Rollins on it. Rollins' excited recommendation was enough for both of us, but he bought it first so I asked for a lend. 

What a writer. One gets the impression that of his several decades' experience as a correspondent in Africa, Kapuściński is barely communicating a fraction of the events, people, places he has seen. Some of those episodes seem unbearable in terms of the human cost - the chapters on Uganda, Rwanda and Liberia are particularly harrowing. However, others highlight a sense of true connection and love for what is to many people in the west still a single country (where there won't be snow at Christmas time) - this despite, as RK points out, even the 54 countries of arbitrary European division being inapt to encompass the 10,000 civilisations ranged across the continent. 

Definitely a "more by this guy directly, please" moment.

 

 Coming up next month:

 Have just started a long-overdue re-read of A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor; was hoping to include it this month, but it wouldn't do justice to rush it.

There will also be some Joan Didion and Cosey Fanni Tutti. 

 

April 2026 Reads

April 2026 Reads

April came she did, but for all the excited talk of a book frenzy in last month's post, it turned out to be quite quiet in terms of actual reading. Book intake was reduced significantly by various excuses factors, such as an early Easter holiday, along with literal piles of marking at school, and Spring messing with the daylight settings. All of which made for scant opportunities to get my nose into a volume. 

However, there was the much-anticipated pleasure of a trip to Alnwick, where Barter Books was quite the experience, and multiple charity shops yielding some great finds... and I did get one or two things read.

The List

The Hero of This Book - Elizabeth McCracken

Listen, Little Man! - Wilhelm Reich 

The Hero of This Book - Elizabeth McCracken

Another book that enjoys tampering with the lines between fiction and true story (if they're even still things) - uncertainty lurking behind every travelogue sequence or autobiographical recollection. It's a sort of fictional sort of memoir, dealing with grief and celebration, mapping closely processes of distancing and dislocation. 

I say "sort of": from the playful title and the dedication page facsimile image of an inscribed volume by the author, and prefatory quotation from a different Elizabeth, The Hero of This Book places itself in sometimes awkwardly self-conscious positions of assertion and denial about reality, the nebulous truths and self-serving nature of autobiography, relationships between humans, our understanding of ourselves and our closest relatives in times of loss, grief and mourning, our situations and associations, the acts of writing. 

Which makes it all "true" in some of the deepest senses of that concept, while also being an avowedly fictional construction. So, sort of; feather of lead and all that. 

We (your book-reading narrator, and their spouse) recently experienced the death of a mother — December 2025 — and this book popped up on an endcap in the library with uncanny timing. It resonated strongly because it didn't pander to traditional tropes of loss and recall, a text spikily independent, like "the mother" (Natalie), in a way of which the mother (Johanna) might have approved.

  

Listen, Little Man! - Wilhelm Reich

Having read The Mass Psychology of Fascism some time back and got a lot out of it, I was pleased to pick up this curio in the splendidly-appointed vintage shop and haunt for antiquaries The Beehive in Alnwick. 

Reich was a fascinating and complex character, an outlier in science, often stereotyped as a crank, although one with the kinds of ideas that seem wayward but influential in various fields. 

This book-length essay sees the former psychoanalyst frequently bitter in tone. It was written just after World War Two and essentially is Reich saying "Look, I tried to help you guys out but, I dunno, I'm not sure I have it in me." The idea is that the Little Man, the mass of humanity, is in the shit because they keep doing stuff like saying they deplore fascism but then diving in to the next flavour of oppression without a qualm. 

"Every once in a while you stick your head out of the morass to yell, Heil!" 

Reich uses the book to air some personal-sounding grievances as well, which makes it less effective in places than it might have been. According to the blurb, the essay is "pungent" and was "not intended for general publication". There is much that makes one say, "Well, quite so" to this info. There's a lot in the book that has weight, though, and chimes quite stridently with world politics in the big '26. Like a lot of wayward, "difficult" thinkers, if one can filter the foibles, the grains of truth are often worth the wade through the morass.   

 

What We Did On Our Morning Out At Barter Books 

Barter Books was a delight in many respects - housed in an old railway station, we arrived like passengers alighting in a land of wonder (etc etc), enjoying the model railway, idiosyncratic shelving, tasty coffee, and even the supremely impatient member of staff that patronised me through the "barter" aspect, much to the amusement of my teenage daughter. Still, indifferent customer service is an essential component of all true book shops, and I was asking kind of excitably dim questions in my urgency to establish a lifelong friendship with the place. 

I don't know if I quite managed that, but it was pretty good. Once my happy place surge of enthusiasm had abated, we managed to get fairly fair prices for the 10 volumes we brought in, which gave us some money to spend on refreshing the reading piles, then we wandered the aisles for a couple of contented hours nosing through the spines. 

Ye swag^

Next day, I had a solo wander round the charity shops and found this Peter Ackroyd biog of Old Toilets in (I think) the RSPCA shop - for £1! Awesome.  I also felt a genuine old-school second-hand bookshop connection with the Lions Bookshop down the road, where everything was alphabetised properly, in clearly defined sections, and also about £1 for everything as well. My kind of town, Alnwick! 

Next month - "Whatever Happened to the Stack Reduction Plan?"   

 

 

March 2026 Reads

 March 2026 Reads

For March I started out with a mind to read a couple of novels and something political, which I nearly managed... but The Difference Engine slowed me down a bit more than anticipated, and then I had most of a week away without many opportunities to read, and then the next thing you know the clocks have gone forward, spring is sprung and April knocks on the door once more. 

Still, an interesting selection... 

The List

The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

The Spike Milligan Letters (ed. Norma Farnes) 

The Agricola and The Germania - Tacitus

The Way I See It - Cliff Richard 

What is Anarchism?- Donald Rooum and Others

The Books 

The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

 From 1990, this is considered a foundational text of steampunk, based in a world where we see the earlier adoption of computation devices, particularly by France and the UK.  

There is an unwieldy globetrotting plot involving various characters in search of a McGuffinish set of data cards, coveted by "clackers" (hip retro-lingo for hackers) for bringing Babbage machines (ye "difference engine") grinding to a halt... in much the same way as a lengthy Untouchables-inflected middle section where a gang of four Imperial likely lads takes on a band of anarchists in an East London dockside warehouse (an idea surprisingly untouched by Guy Ritchie at time of writing) does for the novel. 

 Although touching on details of equipment (the "camphorated cellulose" data cards, steam powered racing cars, kinotype devices for projecting images, etc) Gibson and Sterling don't lavish attention on machine-gun wielding Zeppelins piloted by people with flying goggles and leather kit, as later iterations of the genre tend to; they do seem to enjoy getting into period costume and romping about a mostly-convincingly-rendered London, and the focus is the people and their intrigues within a world that is being shaped by an emerging technology, which is of course far more interesting in many respects. Still, though, with a closing section rammed with excellent but tangential riffs, I felt more a sense of loose endings and hinted-at story lines wafted past.  

The Spike Milligan Letters (ed. Norma Farnes) 

 Dear Mark

It has come to my attention beyond the grave that you found a slightly water-damaged copy of a small collection of my correspondence, on a supermarket charity table. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Yes, yes - some of them are funny, some haven't aged well, some seem to be barely-disguised cries for help that should have stayed in Norma Farnes’ filing cabinets… but that's not why I'm writing. 

Listen, chum: I know you can't resist a bit of Milligan, classing me among the absurdist geniuses from the 1950s - and rightly fucking so,  I might add - but it's precisely this sort of whim-driven impulse purchasing that’s maintaining yer Endless Piles of Books. You're never going to get through them if you carry on snapping up any old shit - even if you do read it in about half an hour. 

Focus!

Love, light, and peace 

Spike 

 Tacitus - The Agricola and The Germania

In advance of a trip to Rome I thought I'd tackle one of the "classics" on the shelf and read two pieces of Imperial Roman propaganda, one a biography of the Governor of Britain (Agricola), and one a study of the peoples of Germany. A timely reminder that history is written by the winners. Our tour guide at the Colosseum later noted that the continent-spanning frenzy of slaughter witnessed by thousands of spectators was predicated on Roman superiority and hierarchy. As actual history, The Agricola in particular is short on detail that would be useful (locations in the British Isles are frustratingly vague), but written (translated) with a certain kind of dry understatement that has likely led to the enduring appeal nearly a couple of thousand years after.      

 The Way I See It - Cliff Richard

From 1968, another impulse pick-up from the local charity shelves in the supermarket. Here's Sir Harry Webb aka Cliff Richard at age 28 offering his thoughts as a high-profile Christian on various issues. He's quite keen to deploy a kind of folksy non-judgmental casual tone (e.g. the chapter on drugs is called "Not For Me!") while also being quite low-key dogmatic in matters Christian, which comes across as insightful and annoying as you might expect. 

 

It was also interesting to note that his hankering to play Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights in some capacity had already taken firm root at this point. 

What is Anarchism? (Donald Rooum and others)

Finally shifting away from definite articles to this slender volume, which I enjoyed as the political something earlier identified. 

The first part is a general introduction to one of the still-most-misrepresented political philosophies... most of which material was familiar, but was explained with clarity. This book is from 1992 - it'd be interesting to see how a more recent interpretation would read.

Of the various anarchist heavyweights excerpted in the second half of the book, I got on particularly with Malatesta, though this was perhaps because I'd just come back from Italy and was surfing an infatuation with all such things. He just seemed to write with directness, without a suffusion of jargon, that appealed. Perhaps this is what is needed to help people get behind the ideas. 

 

 Coming Up In April

Thoughts turn to Home and Away (writing about football by Knausgaard and Ekelund), Notes To John by Joan Didion, and a pile of Italo Calvino. And the month begins with a much-anticipated trip to Barter Books in Alnwick. Oh dear, what was they a-thinking of?! Sometimes it snows BOOKS in April.