Category: Books

Lucky Jim (1954): Kingsley Amis

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★★★

It’s 1950 and Jim Dixon is fed up. Having served in the Second World War, he has returned to academia in lieu of anything better to do and is now at the end of his first year teaching Medieval History at an unnamed provincial university. It’s a subject for which he feels no particular affection or aptitude; indeed, he has developed a particular loathing for it. His discontent radiates outwards, encompassing the insular and petty world of the university, those of his students intelligent enough to risk exposing him for the fraud he is, and virtually all his colleagues.

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962): Shirley Jackson

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★★★★

I first heard about this thanks to Simon at Stuck in a Book, who has mentioned Shirley Jackson a few times over the last couple of years, always with great affection. The post that particularly caught my eye covered Simon’s thoughts on her first volume of memoirs, Life Among the Savages, which he described enticingly as the ‘Provincial Lady transferred to America’. I filed her under ‘authors to read one day’ and then, quite unexpectedly, stumbled across a copy of her most famous novella, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in my local charity shop. Without any idea of what to expect, I bought it. Indeed, because Simon had spoken highly of it and I know his fondness for Persephone Books, and because the title sounded vaguely like I Capture the Castle, I assumed (with no justification whatsoever) that it was going to be a rather heart-warming, languid tale of a well-to-do childhood in a crumbling big house. Not so.

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Pompeii (2003): Robert Harris

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★★★½

Attilius is an aquarius: a specialist engineer who constructs and maintains the great aqueducts that feed the Roman Empire. His first significant posting is to Misenum, the great naval base at the tip of the Bay of Naples and the terminus of the immense aqueduct, the Aqua Augusta, which waters the resorts and towns around the bay. Attilius’ predecessor, the aquarius Exomnius, has vanished in mysterious circumstances; but nobody admits to knowing where he’s gone. And anyway Attilius has more pressing matters on his hands: his gang of recalcitrant workmen don’t take him seriously; his foreman Corax does all he can to undermine his authority; and the waters of the Aqua Augusta have begun to fail.

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The Diviner (2011): Melanie Rawn

6 Comments

★★★

As you may remember from my recent post, The Golden Key was one of my favourite books of my teenage years and I could hardly believe my luck when I stumbled upon Melanie Rawn’s recently-published prequel, The Diviner, in a local charity shop last weekend. You might recall that The Golden Key was a remarkably successful collaborative work between Rawn and two other writers, Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliot. I read somewhere that the authors had planned to write a prequel trilogy, taking one book each (that was probably on Wikipedia: let’s be honest about the standard of my sources).

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The Lessons (2011): Naomi Alderman

13 Comments

★★★★

Last time I went to the library, this book was one of the spoils that I carried off: in retrospect, it’s odd that  I hadn’t read it before. Perhaps it’s simply that I wasn’t familiar with Alderman’s writing. Her first novel Disobedience had very good reviews but I’ve never got round to reading it; and I remember having picked up The Lessons somewhere before, but only for long enough to read the prologue, which didn’t do much for me. I wish I’d persevered.

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Vikings: A History (2012): Neil Oliver

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★★★★★

This post comes with a warning for overbubbling enthusiasm; but I just can’t help myself. I didn’t watch Neil Oliver’s BBC series on the Vikings, but when I spotted this companion volume, on the Book People’s stall during a Christmas fair at work, it was difficult to resist. The Vikings, like the Romans, are a shadowy but constant presence in British history and yet I don’t know as much about them as I would like.

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Baudolino (2000): Umberto Eco

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★★★½

This was a reread, but it might as well have been a first encounter: I’d read Baudolino back in spring 2004 and remembered virtually nothing of the plot, beyond my delight that Niketas Choniates was one of the main characters. Yes, I probably do need to explain that. By sheer chance, I’d begun to read this novel after a term spent studying medieval European history, during which one of my essays had required me to spend a week getting my head around the mechanics of the Byzantine court. I didn’t really manage it, but it sparked off my fascination with Byzantium and, even better, it introduced me to Niketas. His Annals include what has become one of my favourite historian quotes: ‘There can be no one so mad as to believe there is anything more pleasurable than history.’ Bravo that man.

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Scaramouche (1921): Rafael Sabatini

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 ★★★½

Sometimes, on opening a book for the first time, you find a phrase that makes you sigh contentedly, settle down and think, ‘Oh, yes.’ I had never read anything by Sabatini before and yet, when I read this novel’s opening line – ‘He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad‘ – I knew instinctively that we’d get along well. With an avowed weakness for adventure, derring-do and the buckling of swashes, I’m amazed that I didn’t stumble across Scaramouche years ago. It was only when Helen mentioned it, in her post on The Prisoner of Zenda, that I realised it was something I’d enjoy.

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HHhH (2010): Laurent Binet

3 Comments

★★★★

By any standards, this was an unusual choice for me. The story of the assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and one of the most terrifying figures in the Third Reich, is not the natural successor to Dorothy Dunnett’s Gemini. It is certainly not the kind of book I would pick out for myself. But it was persuasively and persistently recommended to me by someone whose opinion I respect a great deal and so I decided to give it a whirl. It was the right decision.

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Cinderella Ate My Daughter (2011): Peggy Orenstein

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★★★½

Dispatches from the front lines of the new girlie-girl culture

Although it was only published in 2011, Peggy Orenstein’s book has already acquired legendary status in certain circles. Her focus is primarily on girls aged between about three and ten. Her mission is to draw attention to the fact that these modern girls grow up surrounded by increasingly gender-stereotyped marketing, which offers a dismally restricted range of role models and aspirations. Orenstein argues that the apparently innocuous ‘princessification’ of little girls gives them a limited sense of their own potential and that a generation is growing up which has learned to value itself not on its brains or its courage but on how pretty it is.

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