Reading the 80s - 1983

 The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett

This is the first of Pratchett’s Discworld books, almost all of which I read in the 80s and 90s but completely out of order. It breaks off where the first one I actually read starts (The Light Fantastic) and begins a little more slowly, introducing two characters we never see again as spectators of a fire in the famous city of Ankh-Morpork. Times are hard, and they hope to catch a rich merchant fleeing the city. Instead they catch Rincewind, a gutter wizard who only knows one spell, and Twoflower, the Discworld’s first tourist.

If I had a complaint it would be that slow start and then the rapid succession of people and lands Rincewind and Twoflower pass through. There’s an element of ‘tick every fantasy box’ that calms down in later books and allows the characters to breathe. That said the whole story is wrapped around Twoflower’s role as the world’s first tourist and his inflexible belief that he is not involved and therefore somehow safe from any of the mayhem around him. He wants to see things, and the more things he sees the happier he is. Poor Rincewind is only along for the ride.

 

Third Helpings – Calvin Trillin

Third Helpings is a series of essays (or articles) about food with an unmistakably 70s flavour about them. I have three of these: American Fried, Alice, let’s eat! and this one.   

I find it difficult to explain the appeal of these books to me – Trillin goes to find the real home of ribs, for example, with a certain sort of humour where he bigs up how important these things are but knows they aren’t really.  There’s also a smattering of social awareness – for example where he notes that it was someone’s wife who invented a particular dish, not the man whose name was over the door - but Trillin keeps it light.   

Most of all there’s an abundance of food here, an enjoyment of being able (as his daughters say) to ‘pig out’ on food in local restaurants not chains, or at local events and markets, and a celebration of different places and the exploration of different cultures through food, which is still very appealing. 

In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens – Alice Walker

This is also a series of essays and suffered a lot (far more than the last book) by my forced reading of them at pace.

It would have been much better to read one or two, the way they were written, and give full thought to each and the questions raised about (to give just a few examples) what it meant that people still believed, when Walker was a young woman, in something called the Curse of Ham. What it meant that someone could write a book on women authors with not one single black writer or hold an exhibition on women’s art with art created only by white artists, and not even realise they’d made an omission (and I’m not sure this has really changed much). Or that Walker could be told, in public and by another woman, that black women should support black men no matter what they do, which is of course telling someone to shut up and put up and not think for themselves, which Walker clearly couldn’t do if she tried, but rightly wasn’t going to try.

Other essays are about visiting Cuba, or interviews, or her own childhood, or writers she admires. There is also (I always enjoy these) an essay on writing a work of fiction - in this case The Color Purple, which is the only one of her books I had previously read. 

I could go on - the topics range widely. It's a rich, dense book, and deserves revisiting even though it slightly depressed me to think that Alice Walker was writing these between 40 or 50 years ago and although some things have changed, many of these battles are still being fought.