I am an unrepentant bookworm and have been since childhood. I learned to read early, and there is a family story of how my mum signed me up to the local library very young because of this. Then my little sister came along, and she, too, was immediately signed up to the library, mainly so I could get the extra books on ‘her’ ticket while she was still a baby. When she reached the age of wanting to read for herself, I had to return said ticket – much to my absolute disgust!
I grew up in a house full of books. I now live in a flat full of books. For me books have always been a comfort, a support, a light in the darkness, a source of pleasure, an escape from the world. Much like music, books have never let me down.
There’s usually a book in my bag whenever I leave the house, and I’ve learned to tune the world out and read in what I call ‘dead time’ (in the post office queue, waiting for a bus or at the doctor’s surgery, on the tube etc.). I recommend it. It makes real life bearable.
As someone with both chronic ill health and a physical disability, a good book is a retreat from the pain, exhaustion and frustration I battle through every day. I couldn’t live without them. Indeed, the mere thought of that makes me shudder. Perhaps this is why I have no desire to own a Kindle.
These days, I read a lot of books that I would like to recommend to various people, so I decided to post a list of my recent reading every once in a while for you all to check out, so I can recommend them all at once. Here are some of my favourites of this latest batch:
Dave Grohl’s memoir The Storyteller is unsurprisingly lovely. Warm, chatty and occasionally laugh out loud funny, this is the kind of music book I like. What comes across very clearly is that he is still as much a fan of rock music and rock musicians as any of us mere mortals, a fact that made me smile. And it’s very obvious that he still misses Kurt Cobain terribly. Absolutely essential reading if you, like me, were a 1990s grunge kid.
Another music volume that is very much worth a read is Dave Haslam’s Life After Dark, which covers the history of British nightclubs and music venues from Victorian music halls and gin palaces to the superclubs of modern times. A DJ (at places like Manchester’s infamous Haçienda) turned writer, Haslam’s style is readable and gossipy (in a good way!) while still imparting a great deal of knowledge on every page.
Blood & Roses, Helen Castor’s wonderful recreation of the lives of the Paston family through her survey of their surviving letters (if you’ve ever studied Medieval English history, you’ll know of the Pastons!) gives some much-needed human context to a story more often consumed as snippets of text in academic books; extracts that don’t always tell the full story of these individuals and their relationships with each other.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Caroline Shenton’s The Day Parliament Burned Down, an impeccably researched and beautifully written account of the fire that destroyed much of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, and A Very British Strike, Anne Perkins’ fascinating take on the 1926 General Strike – both of which show just how disorganised and chaotic British government is (and has always been)!
I don’t often read many novels, but I received a subscription to the excellent Rare Birds Book Club (which focuses on female authors) last Christmas, so I had some carefully chosen fiction dropping through my letterbox for several months this year! Defne Suman’s The Silence of Scheherazade was one treasure turned up by the Rare Birds team, a book I absolutely loved.
This vivid and intense novel, set during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, is a real treat for the senses that lingers long in the memory, with a delicious undercurrent of magical realism that lifts it above and beyond the usual historical fiction. I still find myself thinking about the characters and events it portrays months later, a sign of the quality of the writing.
The Books:
ALLPORT, Alan – Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941 (USA; Alfred A. Knopf, 2020)
BROWN, Pete – Shakespeare’s Local: Six Centuries of Everyday Life Seen Through One Extraordinary Pub (London; Pan Books, 2013)
CASTOR, Helen – Blood & Roses: The Paston Family & the Wars of the Roses (London; Faber & Faber Ltd, 2005)
FISHER, Carrie – Wishful Drinking (Pocket Books; London, 2009)
GROHL, Dave – The Storyteller: Tales of Life & Music (London; Simon & Schuster, 2022)
HASLAM, Dave – Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues (Simon & Schuster UK; London, 2016)
HIGGS, John – The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Quid (Weidenfield & Nicholson; London, 2013)
HOLDEN, Wendy – Born Survivors (London; Sphere, 2020 edn.)
METCALF, John – London A to Z (London, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2016. Originally published by Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1953)
PERKINS, Anne – A Very British Strike: 3 May – 12 May 1926 (London; Pan Books, 2007)
PILE, Stephen – The Not Terribly Good Book of Heroic Failures (Faber & Faber; London, 2019)
SAINT, Jennifer – Ariadne* (London; Wildfire (Headline Publishing Group), 2021)
SHENTON, Caroline – The Day Parliament Burned Down (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2013)
STATIONERY OFFICE, The – The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: Selected Foreign Policy Documents from the Administration of John F. Kennedy, January 1961- November 1962 (London; The Stationery Office, 2001)
SUMAN, Defne – The Silence of Scheherazade* (London, Head of Zeus Ltd, 2021)
SUTHERLAND, John – The Brontesaurus: An A-Z of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Bronte (& Branwell) (London; Icon Books Ltd, 2017)
THOMAS, Scarlett – Pop Co* (Edinburgh; Canongate Books, 2009 edn.)
THOMPSON, Julian – Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory (London; Pan Books, 2017 edn.)
WHITNEY, Karl – Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop (Weidenfield & Nicholson; London, 2020)
Titles marked with * are fiction
Another Kind Of Mind 