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    Originally posted by Tony C View Post
    In what is now a twelve year old, 97 page thread I think I may have previously mentioned my admiration for the social history writing of Stuart Maconie. I've just begun 'The Nanny State Made Me' and I'm very much enjoying it. For someone like me Maconie's work is an unchallenging, 'easy' read, in as much I think in very much the same way that he does so it's essentially a case of my worldview being validated. That's not always a healthy thing, of course, but I'm not really looking for confrontation these days.
    I saw him at a book festival the other year, when he was promoting the Jarrow book - I went with my mum who is a big fan. I have only read The Long Road to Jarrow but I agree entirely with your comments about the readability of Maconie and the fact that he clearly shares many interests and opinions as I do. (Although I also agree with Jobi about the Wetherspoons comment, which I don't specifically remember from the book but I can imagine it would be something he'd say). In fact, I thought of that very book today, as I was listening to a Radio 4 play based on a novel written by Ellen Wilkinson (MP for Jarrow during the 1930s).

    Two highlights of the book for me but probably not for many others: As he reached the Northampton stage of his Jarrow march, my mind immediately turned to Alan Moore, as it usually does when Northampton is mentioned. Lo and behold, a few pages later he bumps into him in the Northampton branch of Waterstones - he's doing a signing. Later on, in Luton, he wanders into a pub where they are having a wake for Steve Dillon, the artist on Preacher and Punisher.

    Here is a previous thread about him.

    https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...e-jarrow-march
    Last edited by Jon; 15-11-2020, 22:00.

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      Yesterday I finished a newly published novel: Escapes by Daniel Tunnard, who like me is an Englishman living in Argentina. It's set in an alternative timeline where competitive Spanish-language Scrabble became one of the biggest televised sports in the world during the 1990s even as its strings were being pulled behind the scenes by a group of elderly ladies from Buenos Aires who'd fix tournaments on a huge scale and weren't shy about having anyone who didn't play along bumped off. The following is sincerely meant in spite of the fact that the author is a mate of mine: it's really good fun. I say that as someone with no interest whatsoever in Scrabble. I would recommend it even if I didn't know him well enough to have cat sat for him on a couple of occasions. And it's published by a small press in Los Angeles, so our US posters can definitely enjoy it as well (I'm almost certain the UK edition is already out, because I got it on Kindle from Amazon UK).

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        I am now about to start Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud. This one apparently had Marlon James sobbing like an idiot, so I'm not expecting it to be quite such an easy read.

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          The Birth of the Pill by Jonathon Eig. Highly informative and entertaining so far.

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            Finished Katie Mack's "The End of Everything" yesterday. Luckily the universe didn't finish before I'd finished it - one of the theories posited in the book was the possibility that the universe could actually finish at any second now - and we wouldn't know anything about. We'd just blink out of existence along with everything else...bit like Thanos clicking his fingers in Infinity War...Luckily, it looks like we are heading for Heat Death. Where heat doesn't mean warm - simply particles moving extremely randomly, such that everything dissipates and the universe becomes a cold empty void...

            Have to say there was a lot of the quantum physics that went passed me. But it's written in a conversational way that keeps you...if you like this sort of subject matter.

            Next up is Hallie Rubenhold's "The Five". Rather apropos given the death recently of S*tcliffe, albeit it's nothing to do with his reign of horror.

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              Has anyone read Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain, which just won the Booker? It's been on my to-read list all year but haven't quite got round to it yet...

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                Can't speak for myself but La Signora really enjoyed it.

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                  I’ve had to read two books about housing. I enjoyed and felt fired-up by John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing.
                  He reminds us how council housing didn’t always spell failure, or substandard housing, and for most of the 20th century, all parties supported it. Until Thatcher. It’s less dry than it might sound. It starts with Grenfell, as a tragic symbol, and looks at the historical background, the 19th century slums and the social reformers, then the idealism of the heydays of social building, the interwar and post-WW2 periods (especially interesting for those of us who like council estate architecture). Then, the deliberate undermining of the public sector after 79.
                  Quite like Anna Minton’s Big Capital, too, which looks at the way London property has become all about investment portfolios rather than homes. No great surprises but it’s well-researched and argued.

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                    60% of Scotland lived in social/council housing till right to buy, a higher proportion than Warsaw Pact era Hungary. And being Scotland, all very stratified, the nicest houses and estates being for engineers, middle management and the like. My grandparents sold their house in 1957 to become council tenants in a shiny new block of flats with a sea view.

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                      Ms F has been working through WG Sebald so I have started following where she led.
                      We went to an exhibition of his photos/about his work at UEA and I was intrigued but the effect of reading The Emigrants is different - quiet, apparently banal stories which develop a cumulative power.

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                        I loved all WG Sebald's books when I read them. I might start reading them all again. His photos are an intriguing feature of the books of course, but I'd have liked to see that exhibition.

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                          I find him to be among the most re-readable of authors

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                            Picked up a couple of books mentioned upthread.

                            Maconie’s Nanny State book was a trip down memory lane for me, as it looked at all the various State services that have been much diminished in the neoliberal era. A mixture of fact, anecdote and polemic, I found myself wistfully agreeing with the author about the things we’ve lost/sold off. A bit too Blue Labour for me, but a decent read nonetheless.

                            King Leopold’s Ghost, highlighting the horrors of the Congo Free State, was an eye-opener. I was vaguely aware of this episode as the nadir of colonial rape and pillage, and had read Heart of Darkness many years ago, but knew next to nothing about the details or the sickening human cost of the whole ugly enterprise. Extremely depressing, but absolutely essential reading.

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                              Just finished Graham Swift's Waterland. Really enjoyable but squirmingly intense at times. Not always a fan of literary gimmicks or tricks and turns but they really worked in this case, the drifting between time periods and chapter titles being continuations of the final sentence of the preceding chapter giving an unsettling yet engaging feeling.

                              This was part of a double edition with Last Orders which I picked up from a basket outside a neighbour's house earlier this year (offering up free books outside your house became a bit of a thing round my way during lockdown). Think I'll read a couple of other things first before I come back to that.

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                                I just finished "The Scottish Clearances - a history of the dispossessed" by Tom Devine. After making a number of trips to Mull and a few other jaunts up to Argyll, I was always interested in what I understood to be "the Highland clearances" and had been looking for a book that would give me a deeper understanding of the subject without being too dry and academic (I don't really have the patience for anything like that).

                                This book succeeds on both counts. Not only does it contrast the clearances in the highland region with those in the lowlands (which historically have never had the same coverage or profile) and examine the many different reasons for depopulation (not merely greedy landlords wanting to expand their sheep grazing capability) but it's tremendously readable as well. The levels of research that have gone into this are impressive, and the author has an authoritative but balanced voice as he explores the complex and changing situation across Scotland between 1600 - 1900. Highly recommended, especially if you have any interest in Scottish history.

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                                  It's interesting the way the lowland clearances have almost completely disappeared from folk memory. Much of Burn's life was spent gallivanting among the "ferm touns" (more like a huddle of buildings housing multiple families, surrounded by unenclosed fields) of Ayrshire, within a generation there was barely a trace of this society left, though most folk are familiar with the empty valleys and ruined crofts of the Gaeltacht.

                                  But then the Scottish collective memory seems to have two settings- lachrymose tartanry or overstated Red Clydeside urban radicalism (glossing over the Sectarian Unionist and "Progressive" parties hegemony in the two big cities till well after WW2).
                                  Last edited by Lang Spoon; 15-12-2020, 14:13.

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                                    I finished Love After Love last week – it's very good indeed – and am now reading Oreo by Fran Ross. About halfway through and I'm at a loss as to why I hadn't heard of this book before this year. Well, I'm not; it's because it was written by a Black woman rather than a white man. It's brilliant.

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                                      Re-reading "Exterminate All The Brutes" despite having tons of books I've not read yet.

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                                        I'd run out of books to read, so decided to finally read "Naked Lunch" which I bought in a charity shop 3 years ago. Christ, it's monotonous, I started skipping large chunks of it as the umpteenth description of drug injection, buggery or murder began which was no different to the last. As a travelogue, it held some interest, but overall it was a drug-addict repeating the same tired story over and over again. Saying that, the pace of the writing must have been revolutionary and exciting at the time, I can see how it must have influenced Hubert Selby Jr and he must have been lucid enough to take Burroughs's style and shape it into stories with characters you actually care for.

                                        After the struggle of reading Burroughs, I decided I needed something easier and more satisfying, so I've bought "IT" by Stephen King. First time I've read a King since I was 15, when I went through a major phase reading his novels. I'm 100 pages in and he's as good a storyteller as I remember, enjoying it a lot.

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                                          Oreo is an absolutely outstanding book. If you like mythology, or post-modern stuff, or humour, or if you want to read more diversely, or if you just like reading, to be honest, you really really must read it. I'm so glad I stumbled across it.

                                          Next read is one I've had sitting on my Kindle since it was published, pretty much. Among my Facebook acquaintances (this dates the purchase to at least two and a half years ago, because I've not been on Facebook in that time) is a girl from my village who was in my year in primary and secondary schools, whose little brother has been best mates with my little brother since they were about three years old, and who now lives somewhere in north-east England. She put up a status update one day asking her friends to support a local writer she knew by buying a copy of his new book. Anyway over the last few months I've started following a few literary podcasts and crime writing accounts on Twitter and have seen lots of people raving about the latest installment in this series of books called Six Stories by Matt Wesolowski. Name rings a bell for some reason, I think. And sure enough, the first book in said series (which is itself called Six Stories) is the book I'd bought on a whim because my old friend had recommended it. I started it today and it's certainly got the gripping sense of mystery and tension down. Interesting structure, too.

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                                            I find it hard to warm to e-books, largely because it's hard to transfer the appearance/pagination of a physical book to the digital format, but one gem I discovered on BorrowBox was Stories of the Sahara by a Taiwanese author called Sanmao - she lived with her Spanish army husband in the then Spanish Sahara in the years immediately before that colonial regime collapsed, with the emphasis on the desert and the lifestyle of the Sahrawis, but she doesn't over-romanticise them, detailing the poverty of the region, and the conflict between tradition and modernity, particularly for women.

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                                              Six Stories was a very enjoyable page turner (and, if you've got an overactive imagination like me, terrifying). I shall be checking out others in the series.

                                              I'm now reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, which is about how the internet is shaping and changing the way we use language (fans of Tom Scott's YouTube channel might recognise the author's name because he's namechecked her, and indeed this book, in some of his language videos).

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                                                I am reading Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth, which was recommended to me by someone on instagram. It starts with a discovery of an old diary and is really a study of the mundane and trivial. I'm finding it tough going to be honest.

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                                                  Originally posted by RobW View Post
                                                  I am reading Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth, which was recommended to me by someone on instagram. It starts with a discovery of an old diary and is really a study of the mundane and trivial. I'm finding it tough going to be honest.
                                                  Finished it tonight. Not really my cup of tea, but that's likely my negative outlook. There were one or two moments of genuine interest but I found it rather drab and devoid of any light relief. Will start Ian Kershaw's Roller-Coaster tomorrow.

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                                                    I've started Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem which Ms Felicity couldn't finish

                                                    Fortress of Solitude is one of my favourite books of recent years and I buy copies of it and force others to read it. I also liked his essays and short stuff but there are Tom Wolfe-lite aspects to this so far, I'll have to see where it goes

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