A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England (to read more about me see my About page). It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and currently receives over 10,000 unique visitors each month. So far 290 book reviews have been published.
My currently-reading shelf:
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On this 1 January 2012, I wish a happy and prosperous New Year to all my readers.
I’m starting this year with a book which isn’t available in the book stores until April. However, I wanted to publish the review while the subject is so topical following the death last month of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
 I started to read The Orphan Master’s Son just before Christmas not realising that our television screens would feature so many images of North Korea following the death of Kim Il Sung and his replacement as supreme leader by his young son Kim Il Un. As I watched the news reports of weeping crowds and saw the podgy face of the new “supreme leader”, I found myself reading grim passages in Adam Johnson’s book about the pitiful state of the the bulk of the North Korean population as they face forced labour and near-starvation.
It is rare to find a book set in North Korea, that vast prison-house of a nation which seems to be a giant personality-cult backed-up by the fourth largest army in the world. North Korea is such a closed-off land with such difficult access for Western people that very few books about North Korea have been published – one notable exception in recent years being Barbara Demick’s excellent Nothing to Envy which documents the accounts of six real-life citizens of the city of Chongin.
In order to write this highly detailed account of a life in North Korea, Adam Johnson immersed himself in whatever information was available about the country including defectors’ oral histories and any other material he could get his hands on. The first few pages of his book are the product of “a year’s investigation into North Korean orphanages, the floods of 1995 and the resulting famine, the city of Chongin, Soviet factories, Songun policy, military vehicles and so on”. He has also travelled in North Korea (under the watchful eye of State-employed minders of course) and this has filled in some of the gaps left by eye-witness accounts and the written literature.
Click here to continue reading Review: The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson
 In Far North, we read of a world in which the inevitable results of consumerism, global warming and the environmental exploitation of poorer nations has come full cycle. The disaster has long been and gone.
Before the disaster, numbers of the concerned emigrated to Siberia, a blank canvas of a land, where environmentalists, Quakers and free-thinkers could build Ark-like communities where they would be safe from the worst awaiting mankind.
Alas, their isolation was not enough to protect them, for when the world fell apart, other, more mean-spirited groups came into their communities and sowed dissension and brought back the old ways of competitiveness and greed. An adult “Lord of the Flies” was enacted and only a few survived.
One of the survivors tells the story of what happened next. Named “Makepeace” by her Quaker father, she suffered terrible abuse from the rougher incomers and now presents herself as a man. Never a very feminine woman, she finds safety in her new persona. Her struggle for survival has in any case given her the full range of skills of any mountain survivalist. Makepeace’s family are long-gone, the victims of terrible times which leached their idealism away from them and left them prey to evil.
Click here to continue reading Review: Far North – Marcel Theroux
 La Flotte - Ile de Ré 2011 was an eventful year for our family, with the birth of Florence, a new grand-daughter in February and the marriage of our son in September. We now have two little girls to look after on Wednesdays while our daughter works and I have spent many afternoons doing Sudoku puzzles with half an eye on the girls in the soft-play area of our local leisure centre.
We travelled into the Eurozone in summer with a Rhine Cruise in June and a week in the Ile de Ré in September (which my wife and I will remember forever as the holiday in which I filled my diesel car with unleaded petrol on the journey home). Will I need Deutschmarks and Francs to do the same travels next year?
Well, it seems to be the thing for book bloggers to produce “best of” lists at the end of the year. I’ve been through my list of books this year and the results are below. I’ve written 53000 words in 2011 and reviewed 49 books (with one more to come on Thursday). I reviewed 70 books last year, but this year I had a break from book-blogging during July to September.
My best books in various catergories are as follows:
Click here to continue reading 2011 Round-up including best books
 In The Hunger Trace Edward Hogan has produced a characteristically English novel set among the hills of Derbyshire. Hogan’s elegant prose makes the English county of Derbyshire a main feature of the book with its remote villages and sodden countryside. He has an obvious love of his home county and writes eloquently of its rugged charms:
The walls of the gritstone gorge rose high above Detton village. In the soft light, the cliff-face looked tooth-marked and bruised, like half a discarded apple. Above the face lay a green scalp of land patched with enclosures . . . autumn’s gravity created movement and noises everywhere. Clouds diffused the sun like lampshades, giving all objects an internal luminescence, their shadows falling at strange angles.
The book’s four solitary and variously damaged characters try to find a solace in each other which ultimately none of them can provide. Hogan shows a rare talent for getting into the heads of isolated people who find more satisfaction in their relationships with wild creatures than with friends and neighbours.
The events in the book take place after the death of David Bryant, the creator of a wild-life park. He has bequeathed the park to his wife Maggie who bravely continues to run the park with the help of a few dedicated staff. The book opens with a phone call telling Maggie that her herd of ibex has escaped and is running freely on the main road through the village. Maggie quickly asks her neighbour Louisa to hook a trailer to her old Transit van and to help her locate the animals and bring them back to the park.
Click here to continue reading Review: The Hunger Trace – Edward Hogan
Norwegian writer Per Petterson writes in a sparse, restrained style which somehow mirrors the bleak Scandinavian towns and landscapes he describes in his novels. In I Curse the River of Time, we meet Arvid Janse, a character who features in other Petterson novels, a tired man who has failed to fulfil his potential and has a propensity to cheap whisky and memories of better times.
Arvid is going through a divorce, and his mother is dying of stomach cancer. We join the story with his mother leaving Oslo on a ferry to sail small town in Jutland where she grew up, and where the family have a beach house near a remote village.
Petterson plays tricks with his readers straight-away as we read Arvid’s detailed description of his mother’s voyage complete with her thoughts and actions, down to the way she twisted the top off a bottle of whisky and filled her glass half-full – actions which her son, the first person narrator could not possibly have seen. However, it all creates atmosphere: the cold sea and the bleak landscape of North Jutland with it marram grass, pine trees and sea-mist.
Click here to continue reading Review: I Curse The River of Time – Per Petterson
 Parrish recently reviewed The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems and wrote that “as an introduction to a poetry that can hold it’s head high on the world stage, this book will take some beating”. I was inspired me to take a look at it and agree that its pretty good. I’m not a great poetry lover, but sometimes a poem speaks to me and makes me wish I could commit to memory without all the hard work that would take me.
This book comes with various covers but I liked the one to the left, a photograph of the Berlin Wall (which also gives the book a slightly different title).
The book covers a very troubled century of course, and we start with the classicism of Rilke and move on through First and Second World Wars, to East/West partition and beyond. Gunter Grass is included an many others including Bertolt Brecht, Inge Muller (“After the Rubble” – “When I went to fetch water, ths house collapsed on top of me . . “).
Michael Hoffman has expertly translated many of the poems but others too seem to have done a fine job – I particularly liked Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke which is translated by C F MacIntyre:
Click here to continue reading The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems
 Bruges As a lover of European literature I have developed a sense of being “European”, sharing in the culture of Thomas Mann, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Gunther Grass, Magda Szabo and many others. My wife and I love visiting Europe and every year we drive through France, Germany and other countries, appreciating the differences in culture that we find and enjoying the sense of being part of this great continent.
It is not for a book blogger to offer too much in the way of political commentary, but I am very upset that it now looks as though the British government has been most influenced by a cohort of 80 to 90 Members of Parliament who have such a hatred of European federalism that they are prepared to make our nation an outsider in Europe, excluded from important decision-making processes and isolated from those who should be our natural partners and allies.
Click here to continue reading A Europhile weeps . . .
 I’ve always enjoyed Peter James series of police procedural novels set in Brighton. Peter has a close relationship with the Sussex Police, even to the extent of sponsoring a police car. He has been able to go out with them on their investigations and his books have an air of authenticity about them. His latest book, Perfect People, departs from his usual genre to focus on the topic of genetic engineering and designer babies. The book has apparently been ten years in the making, suggesting that Peter James has a deep interest in this topic. I regret to say that I found no evidence that the author’s ten years of investment in this project has paid off.
The story opens with John Naomi, a couple who lost their first child to a congenital disease cause by an unfortunate combination of genes from both of them, planning to visit Dr Leo Dettore in his off shore clinic to seek help in conceiving their next child without this unfortunate genetic make-up. Dettore’s clinic is located on a huge yacht in the Atlantic Ocean – his work is so cutting-edge that it lies outside the boundaries of what is permissible in any Western country.
Click here to continue reading The ridiculous and the sublime
I write a lot of reviews and while I only usually only write about books I enjoy, sometimes I have the pleasure of writing about something really special. Andrew Miller’s Pure is in this category of “five-star plus”, a book which I hope will be nominated for a prize, being both literary and readable – two qualities which don’t always go together.
Andrew Miller was a new writer to me when I read his last book, One Morning Like a Bird. I was impressed by the author’s ability to get under the skin of a young Japanese writer in 1940′s Tokyo and it was no surprise to me to learn that an earlier book, Oxygen, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Evidently a writer to watch.
I was therefore very pleased to have the opportunity to read his new book Pure last week. Miller is obviously someone who likes to cover completely different eras and locations in his books, for we now find ourselves in pre-Revolutionary Paris in the company of a young engineer, Jean-Baptiste Barratte, who has been commissioned by a government minister to clear a graveyard.
The church, Les Innocents was closed by Louis XVI leaving behind an overflowing burial ground, the stink from which infests the whole neighbourhood with vile odours, even tainting the food and clothing of those who live nearby. Barratte is told in his commissioning interview that “during a single outbreak of the plague fifty thousand corpses were buried at Les Innocents . . . corpse upon corpse, the death-carts queuing along the rue Sain-Denis”. Barratte is told by the Minister that he has to clear, “every last knuckle-bone. It will require a man unafraid of a little unpleasantness. Someone not afraid of the barking of priests. Not given to superstitions”.
Click here to continue reading Review: Andrew Miller – Pure
 Like many people I am mildly interested in where words come from and I’ve occasionally read and reviewed books like David Crystal’s By Hook or By Crook which looks at where English place-names come from. Unless books like these are skilfully written they can quickly become tedious and its usually best to get this sort of information in small chunks – for example, Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words is a great online resource for occasional browsing.
Mark Forsyth publishes the Inky Fool blog in which he looks at the derivation of words, but links one to another in a humorous ramble through the English language. Mark is one of those lucky bloggers whose blog has now become a book, The Etymologicon, and I have to say, it makes for a very good read which I’ve been dipping into over the last week.
Its probably better to illustrate Mark’s methods with an example than to describe them so here’s an article headed A Game of Chicken:
Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn’t need friends – you could do this with your enemies – but the pot and the chicken were essential.
First, each person puts an equal amount of money in the pot. Nobody should on any account make a joke about a poultry sum. Shoo the chicken away to a reasonable distance. What’s a reasonable distance? About a stone’s throw.
Next, pick up a stone. Now, you all take turns hurling stones at that poor bird, which will squawk and flap and run about. The first person to hit the chicken wins all the money in the pot. You then agree never to mention any of this to an animal rights campaigner.
That’s how the French played a game of chicken. The French, though, being French, called it a game of poule, which is French for chicken. And the chap who had won all the money had therefore won the jeu de poule.
The term got transferred to other things. At card games, the pot of money in the middle of the table came to be known as the poule. English gamblers picked the term up and brought it back with them in the seventeenth century. They changed the spelling to pool, but they still had a pool of money in the middle of the table.
We read on to learn the forward connections to the game of pool and then to pooling money, and resources and then onto typing pools and car pools and ends with pointing gout that we have all become part of the gene pool “which, etymologically, means that we are all little bits of chicken”.
I was surprised how in order to get his connections Mark has to link words from all the European languages. I’d heard before that most of our languages spring from a root called Proto Indo European but it never struck me how much of the English language is derived from this source.
This is a nicely produced book which would be a perfect Christmas gift for anyone who might be interested in where our words come from.
Incidentally, Mark is appearing on BBC Radio 4′s Loose Ends programme tomorrow (Saturday 3 December 2011)
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