Its not been easy to keep up with the reading this week what with grand-parent duties (looking after our pleasingly book-obsessed Iris) and also visiting relatives. The most recent family visit involved a day on the River Thames in my brother in law’s boat – great fun, and appropriate for my current [...]
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The Easter holiday has passed now and I’ve got several books ready for review, and having had to relax more than usual because of my recent knee operation I seem to be ploughing through even more. I’ve nearly finished moving all the book reviews from the previous version of A Common Reader on to this WordPress version. Its taken me a long time, as I’ve checked each of the 170 or so reviews for style, consistency and typos, and re-tagged and categorised everything, quite apart from building new author and title indexes with the new links (book blogging can get a bit obsessive!). I’m pleased to say that I’ve more or less managed to retain the same level of hits, largely through redirecting the old address to the new one. The new Book Depository links seem to work well so should anyone want to buy a book which I’ve reviewed they can click through and get what I’m sure is about the cheapest price on the net with free delivery. Continue reading Bits and pieces
A Common Reader has moved today from its old address at www.acommonreader.org.uk to its new one here at www.acommonreader.org However the old address still works fine as I’ve done something called “domain forwarding” to point the old address at the new one. However, it would be best if any regular readers could update their [...]
This skilfully written novel, Beside the Sea, tells the story of a troubled single mother, who takes her two young sons for a visit to the seaside. She describes the long bus journey through the rain to the unnamed coastal town, arriving at night, to book into a dismal hotel where she is assigned a tiny room on the sixth floor. This is going to be no holiday, for despite the woman’s desire to give her boys a treat, shortage of money and a mother’s trouble mind dog their days, plus of course the unremitting rain. I was quickly drawn in to this tragic tale, and finishing the book this morning, I found myself full of pity for this little family. If only someone had noticed. If only those men in the café had been more helpful. If only the hotel owner had called social services. But then no doubt they would have met with an uncomprehending response – they aren’t my patch, they’re just visiting, they’ll be all right. Alas, they aren’t all right, and we privileged readers see all the clues, the references to social workers, the neglect of essentials . . . . . .I hadn’t taken my medicine, but no one sat on me that night. I was like everyone else that night . . . I slept like I do during the day. Continue reading Review: Beside the Sea – Véronique Olmi
Peter Millar, a Sunday Times journalist, was present as these historic events happened around him, and his long years of living in East Germany and Russia have equipped him to write a vibrant and involved account of 1989 and the preceding years leading up to the year of liberation. I enjoyed reading 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall as much as anything I have read this year. Millar’s eye-witness accounts of his time in Berlin provide a ground-level view of events and serve as a useful counterpoint to the other, more scholarly books on the period which have been recently published such as Victor Sebestyen’s Revolution 1989. Despite being a “serious” journalist (Foreign Correspondent of the Year, 1989 etc), Millar has adopted an almost Bryson-esque approach to his description of his life, first as a young Reuter’s correspondent and then as a journalist on national newspapers. While his newspaper articles were serious and weighty pieces, there is obviously a humorist in his psyche too. Continue reading Review: 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall
Despite his subject matter, Gordon Burn was never prurient or out to shock, but wanted to get behind the person to the reasons for their actions and the meaning of what they did. He came to his topics dispassionately but shone a torch into murky corners to show the complicit systems in media and politics that supported the lives of outcasts and celebrities alike. Burn was not a run of the mill author. His friend the artist Damien Hurst wrote in an article in the Guardian, “I really do think he was the greatest writer, the best writer of our generation on art. It was because he was a novelist that he was so good: he brought something else to the table. There is so much bullshit and art-speak in the art world, it drives me nuts. Gordon cut through all of that”. His last book, Born Yesterday is about as good a tribute to Gordon Burn as you could get. It is a strange book, for at first glance it does not appear to be fiction at all, more like a rolling news review of 2007. Burn covers many of the major news events of the year, including the abduction of Madeleine McCann, terror attacks at Glasgow airport, Gordon Brown’s succession from Tony Blair, the catastrophic flooding that affected great areas of the country. All these stories are interleaved throughout the book, but as you read them you realise that this is not journalism at all. Continue reading Review: Born Yesterday – Gordon Burn
The book is both travelogue and also music research, and Will is at pains to find out what happened to the old songs form the 19th century and before, but also what moves people today. He has ended up with a highly eclectic book in which in one chapter he dances at night with gypsies in a Sussex wood and then, in another chapter, travels to Richmond to conduct an extended interview with Pete Townsend of The Who (Will is an established musical journalist and is able to pull in a few favours from time to time!). I particularly enjoyed the vast range of music covered in this book. Its easy to forget that music is like a flowing stream – new things don’t just arrive, but rather build on or diverge from what went before. Will is particularly good at bringing out the links between Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams who went around Britain collecting folk songs over 100 years ago, and modern song writers and bands who draw on more recent traditions. Will visits the Brit School, the part music-industry-funded comprehensive school in South East London which concentrates on the performing arts and has churned out massively successful artistes like Katie Melua, Leona Lewis, Adele, Amy Winehouse and The Kooks. The students all seem to work hard and put in long hours, but Will finds that its common for now-famous students to distance themselves from the schoool, “Once you’ve left, it might not be cool to say you went to the Brit – its much more rock and roll to say you dropped out of school and never had a music lesson in your life”. Continue reading Review: The Ballad of Britain – Will Hodgkinson
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