Reading the 80s - 1988

They Have a Word for It - Howard Rheingold

I was surprised at how this book has dated - you wouldn't think a book about 'untranslatable' words from other languages than English would, but it has. This actual edition is from 2000, so it's dated in two ways - making reference to things like personal computers and how the vision of them being in every home never quite came off (give it five years Howard, give it five years) and then there's also something around gender. For example it's a given here that women are inherently interested in beauty, and that's treated as just the way the world works, but when men care what they look like it's considered narcissism.

In fact there's a whole section on male/female relationships, called 'Dance of the Sexes' which I'll borrow just one more of quite a few examples from: 'Everybody wants to know what the opposite sex thinks of him or her' - well actually, quite a lot of straight people aren't that bothered, and I should think those who don't consider themselves straight are even less so. 

I don't think it's meant to be offensive, and I'm sure it's not deliberate, but it feels like a whole group of people are just.. not here. Not even in the back of the author's mind. But that's how it was in 1988 I guess. If I cast my mind back to my 15 year old self, would I have noticed this then? Honestly? I suspect not. 

Which I suppose strengthens the premise of the book - that words are what build our picture of the world - the differing language we use around people of different gender doing similar things changes our perception of it (in fact the usual phrase 'opposite gender' is particularly odd, when you think about it. Not complementary, not different, 'opposite', like we're all on a chess board lined up) and the  linguistic gaps and things not discussed leave cultural and conceptual gaps. 

Hence Rheingold's suggestion that we look at words from elsewhere, and see what new to us concepts they can introduce us to. 

I don't have another book for 1988. I started to read Winston Churchill's Afternoon Nap by Jeremy Campbell, which I bought more or less when it was published in one of those bookshops that popped up in the late 80s and early 90s which had books in metal bins and white walls and seemed to sell a lot of design type books at a fraction of the normal price (Taschen, remember them? They're still online). 

I loved it then - it was my gateway drug into popular science, and my poor foxed copy is horribly highlighted in red pen and I suspect has been dropped in the bath at some point. Even starting it though I'm sure some of it must be out of date, and things like circadian rhythms and spacetime were new to me then, and aren't now, and so it doesn't have the same power. I think I need to Kondo it, be grateful for what it meant at the time, and let it go. 

Reading the 80s - 1987

Jan Morris - Manhattan '45

Can you write travel books to the past? I'm not sure you can. Writing in 1987 Jan Morris obviously couldn't actually go back to '45 and have drinks at McSorley's and provide us with local colour that way, so this short history-slash-snapshot is lacking some of what makes her writing so enjoyable for me. Sometimes it comes alive anyway, and you get a feel for a real place and real people, and sometimes there would be a mention of something I'd seen previously (in Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff, largely) and my ears would perk up, but sometimes it wades into facts and figures in a way Morris usually avoids, and my interest drifted in those spots. 

Witchcraft - Nigel Williams

This is a dark and unnerving tale. Scriptwriter Jamie Mathieson stumbles across something in the British Library catalogue and believes he's becoming slowly possessed by the witchfinder who wrote it.  But is the ghost really there, or is Jamie losing control to something else? And why does the witchfinder's own account, which was written before his execution and is interlaced with the main text (although as far as we know Jamie doesn't see it) stand so at odds with the cruelty of his actions? 

The 1987 colour is strong in this one. The cars, the old British Library Reading Room in the museum, the politics, the language, the nutters who write physical letters, the unhappy marriages that people cling to (I was sitting on the sidelines muttering 'divorce people, you're not doing your kids any favours making them watch this'), the casual misogyny and racism, the tension between choosing academia and choosing to sell out and write screenplays. 

Ezekiel's account was surprisingly interesting too. I'm not sure about the dialect (Williams seems to be compromising between actual 17th century English and what a modern reader can follow without losing the will to live) but as a portrait of a time when people really did believe witches existed - truly and without question - and were hopeful Cromwell would free them and bitterly disappointed after, it's very well done. 

And - a creepy postscript - I didn't notice the greyscale face of Ezekiel floating above Jamie's on the cover until I'd finished, and had a look over my shoulder moment when for one irrational second, I thought it had just appeared. 

Reading the 80s - 1986

An Artist of The Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro

It’s 1948. America has occupied Japan and an elderly artist is worried about his younger daughter’s marriage prospects since her engagement fell through the year before. Much celebrated for his previous work, he has to learn that things have changed, and that it might be best for his family and friends if he kept his opinions to himself.

This is first person narration – we see everything through the eyes of Ono, the artist, as he comes to terms with the fact he may have made mistakes and tries to understand the past, not aided by the way that some of the people around him are understandably anxious to forget, and that at base, he’s actually quite naïve and self-absorbed.   

Santorini – Alistair MacLean

Before I write anymore about this book I think I should explain I may not be doing it justice simply because it's not the sort of book I like to read. The whole point of this challenge is partly to stretch myself though, so I'm glad I did give it a go. 

It's a thriller which begins with a downed plane and a sinking yacht, all very dramatic, and later there’s obviously meant to be a slowly ratcheting tension, but unfortunately I can't get excited about different sorts of aeroplane or ships or winching devices to get bombs off the seabed, and when they’re discussed at any length I tend to switch off a bit. 

Also all the naval chaps and private experts involved are so brave and modest and nice to each other I’m struggling to believe in them (not one person says ‘what do you mean we’re anchored over a ticking bomb! Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before you brought me out here?’, or even has a sleepless night about it) but again, if it were a murder mystery with an unbelievable hero I'd be more tolerant of that. 

The gender politics is a bit dated – no surprise there. It was written 35 years ago and was Maclean’s last book according to Wikipedia so we can forgive him for being old fashioned as well. The politics politics is what you expect in the 80s. Younger readers might be especially astonished at the idea of an American president willing to take responsibility for something and having to be talked into hushing it up, or traitors ‘falling on their swords’ rather than trying to brazen things out. All I can say is it was less of a stretch of the imagination in the 80s that it is now. 

Reading the 80s - 1985

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) is a disturbing book. Like the landscape itself - beautiful, fragrant, lush, but poisonous with swamps and open sewers - everything in it is slightly infected, everything slightly rotten. Including love. Perhaps especially love. 

Most of all the fever-dream fanatic love of Fernando Ariza for a girl who married someone else – a life-time obsession which forms the backbone of this novel – but also a myriad other relationships in this book, sprouting like beautiful fungi on the rotten material of coercion, desperation, and madness. 

Perhaps the most disturbing thing is the way Marquez’s fine words make the facts of this story so much more palatable. He has the unsettling knack of making his main protagonist sympathetic whilst also making him ridiculous, manipulative, and worse, his heroine appealing while being foolish and bad tempered, and his descriptions of poverty and decay lyrical. 

Makes rainbows in fact, out of dead and dynamited fish. 

I first read the first 100 or so pages of The Vampire Lestat (Anne Rice) back in the 90s - I think I probably borrowed it from Archway Library, but bailed out and returned it not long after he got bit. From what I remember Lestat himself rather got on my nerves, killing eight wolves and having great successes on the stage even before he becomes a vampire, and I was more squeamish about descriptions of blood and rats and bodily functions than perhaps I am now. 

Only this time around has it occurred to me that he's probably meant to be an unreliable narrator. For example the vampire who turns him - did he relinquish his undeath in a fit of ennui as Lestat insists, or did Lestat kill him, steal his stuff, slaughter his servant? Did he really fight as hard to hold onto his humanity as he claims? 

And can there really have been quite so many murderers and cutthroats wandering the streets in Paris back in the late 1700s that Lestat could be as picky as he says about only feeding from killers? I mean three or four a night for a year would be over a thousand people, and the whole population of Paris was about 600, 000.  

Improbability mathematics aside, I have to admit it's just not gripping me. I can stretch my suspension of belief quite far as a rule, but I can't believe in Lestat. I didn't think he made a realistic human, and I don't care that he's become a vampire. I'd like to have my questions answered, but I don't actually want to go through the process of reading another 300-plus pages to get there. 

Perhaps at the end of the year (or more likely February now) I'll revisit it and see if I do better when I'm not reading to a (rough) deadline. Or perhaps I should simply start from 1980 again. I have The Heart of a Woman (Maya Angelou, 1981) and Lace (Shirley Conran, 1982) on my list already.  

In other reading news the 1976 Club, run by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings | "Vivre le livre!" (wordpress.com) starts tomorrow. Anyone can join in - just read a book from 1976 by the end of the week, write something about it (usually on your own blog) and let them know on theirs. 

Reading the 80s - 1984

Money, A Suicide Note (Martin Amis)

John Self, our possibly not that reliable narrator (believe me he’s lying to himself even more blatantly than he’s lying to us) is probably, apart from his humour, one of the least likable people imaginable. He’s offensive, he’s a bully. He drives drunk. 

Sometimes he even wakes up and realises he’s been in a fight he doesn’t remember.

The weird thing is, he's not even enjoying it that much. He’s got problems with his teeth, he’s got problems with his hair and his face and possibly his heart. As well as the drink there’s the food and the women and the cigarettes. There’s the threatening phone calls he ignores and the trips back and forth over the Atlantic.

But to him that’s all ok. He’s about to hit the big time with a movie loosely based on the story of his life and the money is going to fix everything..  

What Amis has captured here is how, in a way I don’t think was true of earlier decades, money had a personality of its own – and not a nice one. In the eighties it wasn’t just about having money to consume (although everyone in the book does plenty of that) it was about consuming to show you’ve got money. To show yourself you’ve got money. To show yourself you’re a have, and not a have-not.

It’s a merry go round. It’s a hysteria captured incredibly vividly. As John Self says – if we all stopped believing in money tomorrow it wouldn’t exist. But we won’t.

 

Deathtrap Dungeon – Ian Livingstone

This is one of the Fighting Fantasy books. All of which were incredibly popular when I was a child, part of a wider zeitgeist where I would also put Dungeons and Dragons and Indiana Jones and the monster Top Trump cards. 

I also remember a book series aimed at younger readers with a main protagonist called Pip, in which you (or Pip) got sent to page 14 when you (they) died and a semi comforting ‘ho hum, back to the drawing board’ type narrator wished you better luck next time. 

Fighting Fantasy doesn’t pull it’s punches quite so much. If you are crushed to death or dragged into a monster’s slime pit to be predigested and eaten later at their leisure you are told. The pictures are also wonderfully gruesome in a way I think would appeal to children. Skulls and monsters and swords.  

I don’t remember the other books well, so can’t be sure if they all involve such an array of monsters, or if it’s because of the set up. Baron Sukimvit has created his Deathtrap Dungeon as the ultimate challenge, with beasts and traps of all descriptions, maintained (as we find out) by not always willing servants. Being an adult now I’m intrigued – given that the challenge is only open once a year – about what the rest of the year is like for these servants. Filling the slime pit, resetting the traps, feeding the giant insects. Is there a library and refectory somewhere? Do they look forward to the challenge as a change or see it as a disruption (oh for pity's sake, someone’s set off the giant rolling ball again. I suppose I should give Fred a hand to put that back).  

As a book - the narrative works as well as something written as a game could feasibly do. Stopping to do battle every few minutes is always going to break up the flow. I remember trying to create similar games myself using index cards and it is incredibly difficult to keep track and not give people too many or too few options. 

As a game - well despite my resolve to play fairly I did all the things I did as a child. I started off drawing a map the way they recommend and working out the ‘battles’ honestly, but by the time I’d died a few times I got bored and just took the highest roll as the winner (I’m convinced the whole thing with the dice rolls is a covert way of getting children to do subtraction). I never did find the three jewels you need to finish the quest and read through the book to find out where the missing one was (a ninja has it, so there’s obviously a section I missed. There’s an iron key I don’t know how to get to too, and a dinosaur, so maybe I’ll go round again and actually draw the map properly this time. Or more likely, maybe I'll give up).

It was fun - I can see why they were so popular - but I can also see why video games came in and filled that niche. Fewer sums for a start.

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.

In the Bookmooch Bag (part 2)

This bit of the bag reflects my plan to take books off my shelves to read rather than buy more (something that I haven’t totally succeeded in), and if possible discard after reading (ditto).

The first two books - The Status Seekers by Vance Packard and The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith - were both read about the same time and have got mashed together in my head to the point where I can’t confidently state which book which of the things I remember came from, and since they’re both quite dense with material I can’t find those bits again.

Both have the obvious theme of money and socio-economics, and my interest was part historic – both books were originally published in the 50s and have things to say about advertising and perceptions of other social groups.

They’re both Pelicans – Penguin’s nonfiction imprint that seems semi-redundant now, as more recent non-fiction books in the bag are not only branded as Penguin but have the distinctive orange spine that used to be for fiction only. (They’re also a good 3cm taller and wider than the earlier books, with larger print. This seems to have happened across all the major publishers in the last 20 years. It makes them slightly less portable, but perhaps I’ll be grateful for the larger print when my close sight starts going.) 

One recent orange Penguin I am getting rid of is The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent, which follows on from the earlier theme of economics only more up to date (I read Affluenza about the same time, but that was a library read).  

The other is Respectable by Lynsey Hanley, which is (amongst other things) about working class respectability, what happens when you cross a class divide, the difference in education (and difference children from different backgrounds are sometimes taught to meet it with) and the language used in newspapers about the working class or the underclass. I might actually hold onto this one. I’d like to read it again.  

Swing Brother Swing was part of my Ngaio Marsh reread and was reviewed here. While Life on Earth by David Attenborough was part of my 1980s read and is here. It’s a solid rather stocky hardback with no cover.

Jaguars and Electric Eels by Alexander von Humboldt is a very slim book (Penguin again), taken from the larger work Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent which is taken from a work larger still and titles Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, which was probably madly exciting as well as an important piece of work in 1800. This sliver of a sliver of it translated into English left me cold.  It’s part of the Great Journeys series, which I once had all of but am working my way through and discarding.

The Women who got Away - John Updike. Another small Penguin, this time part of the ‘Great Loves’ series. I’ve dipped into it but what I’ve read didn’t attract me - a group of short stories all apparently from the point of view of a not particularly likeable man involved with a woman, all vaguely unsatisfying. I wondered if they were more shocking when he wrote them, or perhaps suffer from being grouped together like this.  

The Red Notebook, Antoin Laurain. Glanced into. I liked the premise but it wasn’t grabbing me.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which I read for the 80s and reviewed along with the Attenborough here.

Maps of Utopia, Simon J James. This is really one for H G Wells scholars I think. It asks what H G Wells thought his writing was for. It’s a solid reference work, not too long. The sort someone writing an essay wouldn’t usually read in full but cherry pick for the relevant bits (one of the most frustrating things about doing any sort of English qualification is the amount of books you dip into and never get to read in full).

Triple Fugue – Osbert Sitwell. This was a series of pleasantly melancholy long short stories (If that makes sense). First published in 1924, but they felt old fashioned for the time to me. It’s another Penguin – this time an old orange one – and it’s falling apart.

Business As Usual. Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford. I’ve a feeling I reviewed this, if not here then on the Guardian TLS before it closed. It’s a very amusing epistolatory novel, but also a little annoying in the way it glosses over the advantage the heroine (who is a joy, don’t get me wrong) has by not really needing her job, and not having to fret about losing it.

Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe. This is a paperback Oxford Classics edition. It’s a great edition of the book but not a book I need to own.

I haven’t put these all up on Bookmooch yet as I don’t want a flood of requests. Also the interface is playing up and it’s not recognising ISBN numbers, so I’ll need to do them all manually. If anyone wants one just let me know.

Reading the 80s - 1982

As far as I can remember the only books from 1982 I read at the time were both science fiction: the movie tie in for ET and Douglas Hill's Young Legionary, which I felt wasn't up to the standard of the books it prequeled. Mind you prequels weren't a thing then, so it may just have been my irritation at the whole concept. Of course there must have been children's books (I was nine) and even a child would have had to walk around with earplugs in and blinkers on not to at least be aware of Jeffrey Archer, Shirley Conran, Stephen King and V for Vendetta, but I was a little too young yet. 

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, published in Portuguese in 1982, would have been so utterly off my radar and so far out of my range as to exist on another plane of reality . 

Published posthumously (Pessoa died in 1935) the book consists of fragments - diary entries of a character called Bernardo Soares who seems poised somewhere between fictional creation and Pessoa's own self: philosophical, introspective, mildly nihilistic, occasionally contradictory, convinced that the world of the mind is more important than the real world (or perhaps trying to convince himself of that) these diary entries follow no order, detail very little of day to day life -  and it's never clear why Soares feels compelled to write these snippets, how important he really believes them. 

The other thing about the work being written in almost entirely undated fragments is that the grouping of them is obviously fairly arbitrary. Pessoa never got the chance to edit and organise into a coherent whole, and perhaps never meant them to be published as a coherent whole at all. They would almost make more sense as a box of cards, which the reader could shuffle to read in any order they chose. 

It's a melancholy book, as I read it. A Book of Disquiet, in fact. 

My other 1982 book was The Man from St Petersburg by Ken Follett. A thriller set before the first world war, with Winston Churchill as a young man (thankfully appearing only sporadically, as I find picturing Churchill as a young man near impossible) and Germany arming themselves. Britain must ally with Russia before the storm breaks, and The Earl of Walden is detailed to persuade Aleks Orlov, an old friend, to sign the treaty. 

The Man from St Petersburg is Feliks, who follows Aleks to London to kill him and hopefully save thousands of Russian lives - after all what do the peasants owe the nobility that they should die in a war to support their British cousins? 

Outlining the plot like this makes it sound very dramatic and implausible and typically thrilleresque, and I admit there are coincidences and I spotted at least one twist before time, but it really, really doesn't matter. It's all written so well - every single character has a character. Feliks believes himself to have no fear, no feelings, and yet you can see how he got that way and that perhaps it isn't true. He's just numb. The Earl of Walden is a little stuffy but generous, his wife has been painted into a corner not of her own making, and even minor characters like Feliks' Irish landlady shine on the page (for example when he goes to get a cooking bowl to make nitroglycerin and she asks him if he's baking a cake, advises him not to blow them up, and strategically makes sure she's out for the day).  

It also raises the question, very pertinent in 1982, of who actually is the bad guy, or if maybe no-ones is and it's really just a matter of taking sides. 

The next year for this challenge is of course 1983, and my current plan is to reread Pratchett and Calvin Trillin and for the first time read Alice Walker's In Our Mother's Gardens, but now that shops are opening I also hope to incorporate more of a random element. Something that's made the challenge particularly difficult this time around is that I haven't been able to browse and pick up things that just happen to be published in a particular year, of which there are many, many more than appear in the Wikipedia and Goodreads lists top 200 or whatever, and so it's not really widening out my understanding of the time.  

Either way I should be back with those reviews on the 10th June.  

Reading the 80s - 1981

Yes Minister by Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn never struck me, when I was a child, as a story of white, male, upper-middle class privilege, despite the fact I was living on a council estate myself. I suppose I just accepted that the people in charge mostly looked like that and talked like that, in the same way I accepted many of the characters in Golden Age Crime fiction went to parties in country houses, and even sympathised with their desire to maintain the status quo. 

Not that any one of the three main characters in Yes Minister is actually malicious, Hacker is even quite idealistic in spots, with his belief in collective responsibility and the caring society, and it helped, of course, that I had seen the TV programmes first and the three main actors - Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds - played their parts so beautifully. 

It's still their voices and expressions I hear and see when reading the book and it's still very funny, with a rich vein of cynicism woven in that passed me by originally, as well as some valid points about how much competence can be expected from a Minister who is suddenly in charge of a government department about something he knows nothing about, with officials who have been specialists for years, while still having one eye to pleasing the party and the PM rather than his conscience or the people who voted for him.  

So does Yes Minister still stand up now? I think it does, actually. Even when it came out it existed in a kind of alternative universe where Thatcher never existed, so actual relevance is an irrelevance really, and although the books are set out as Hacker's memoirs, written many years later, interspersed with Woolley's point of view (in conversation with the authors), the occasional letter, and other bits of biographies that have 'come out' since, which sounds like a dreary format, it actually works really well. My version is a three book compendium, and I was tempted just to carry on. 

Muriel Spark: Loitering With Intent. 

Although published in 1981 Loitering with Intent is set in the late 40s, although it's clear throughout that the narrator, Fleur, is writing at a later date - looking back on a particular time of her life when she was young and carefree and writing her first novel Warrender Chase while also making a precarious living providing occasional articles and reviews for magazines and doing short secretarial stints. 

She takes a job at something called the Autobiographical Association, which organisation at first seems rather pathetic, then possibly a scam to obtain blackmail material, before moving into more sinister territory still - unless Fleur's obsession with Warrender Chase is causing her to see things that aren't there.. 

Like all of Spark's books that I've read this is short but packs a lot in. The characters and Fleur's cold, clear thoughts on them (she is described as 'unnatural' by one of the friends who has read her book) are particularly entertaining. Spark has a gift for making the reader like people who aren't actually that likable, and the descriptions of Fleur's life are just enough - down to the intricacies of shared telephones and utility clothing - to make the whole mad mess feel completely real. 

Reading the 80s - 1980

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (trans by William Weaver) is quite the tour de force. Taking the form of a mystery novel, it actually has more to do with the political and philosophical issues around the Catholic church in the fourteenth century. The reader looks through the eyes of Adso, a novice monk, whose master William of Baskerville (a clear nod to Conan Doyle) is acting as mediator between certain factions,  giving Adso lots of opportunity to try and puzzle out the politics and religious debates both from what he hears of the world and from the spats and the forms of justice he witnesses in the smaller world of the abbey. 

It's a big book - especially for something in the shape of crime fiction - weighing in at 500 pages, partly because Adso is lyrical in descriptions and inclined to provide great lists of everything he sees, and partly because of the sheer amount of work Eco is putting in to make us comprehend a world where heresy and witchcraft are considered far worse crimes than the string of murders the abbot has asked William to investigate.

Is it good? Yes. Would I have finished it if I weren't reading it for this challenge? I'm not sure. 

Life on Earth - David Attenborough. This is the one I already had on my shelves although I never read it before. It's unsurprisingly dated now - not because of the language (like a lot of people in 1980 Attenborough uses the word 'man' rather than 'human being' and also writes in the singular, as if we're talking about one man, not a group of people of different ages and genders, but that was how people wrote then and he doesn't do it now) - mostly because of the format. Almost every second or third page is a full colour picture, like an encyclopaedia, which is of course because there was no internet and not that many TV channels, so pictures had to be shown beside the text, because the reader wouldn't have seen these things before. 

The other thing that dates it is the lack of focus on DNA. It is mentioned, described - but not used. Animal relationships and lineage are inferred through skeletons, teeth, production of milk. I wondered as I read it how much we might know to be wrong or have confirmed right by now. It's been 41 years, and science has obviously moved on. 

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams. This is also from my own shelves and has been read multiple times, as well as listened to in the form of the radio play and (back in the day) watched on the TV. Perhaps too much, because I can now see the jokes coming a mile off, which obviously weakens them. Another factor in my not enjoying it as much this time is that because Douglas Adams was so good at noticing things that were happening around us all (digital watches, the proliferation of shoe shops) and weaving them into stories, inventing fantastical explanations, now the time of those things has passed, the stories no longer resonate as they did. 

Disaster Area, for example, the rock band so loud their fans listen in a concrete bunker, whose climax of the show is to have a stunt ship dive into the sun. The host at Milliways, reminiscent of every slightly unnerving TV show compere still floating around when I was a child.  That world has gone. It would be twitter now, and motorised scooters. It's a shame - more than a shame - that we'll never have the fantastical theories that could have been woven around those. 

Ngaio Marsh - Light Thickens

This is the last of Marsh's books, published in 1982, and we're back in the Dolphin Theatre where Peregrine Jay is producing Macbeth. 

I've never actually seen Macbeth, but it's one of those cultural phenomena that it's impossible not to pick up a lot of information about from other sources. In my case that was primarily from Blackadder - both the ghost and the three witches are referenced in the first program of the first series (in 1983, when I was ten) - and later, in the 90s, when Pratchett inverted it for Wyrd Sisters. 

Off the top of my head Agatha Christie also mentions Macbeth at least three times:

In Sparkling Cyanide when Tony is speaking to Race: 'Ah but what Macbeth saw really was a ghost! It wasn't a ham actor wearing Banquo's duds! I'm prepared to admit that a real ghost might bring it's own atmosphere from another world.'

In By the Pricking of my Thumbs (which title is taken from the play) when Tuppence quotes it and then goes on to propound her theory that Lady Macbeth egged Macbeth on because she was bored, and incidentally (I paraphrase) particularly bored of Macbeth.  

And again in The Pale Horse when the three witches are discussed and someone (I forget who) suggests that more effective casting than the usual prancing around and in your face evil would be to have three old women just looking slyly at one another. That the very banality of evil somehow makes it more disturbing. 

I don't know if theatrical fashion ever swung that way - The Pale Horse was written in 1961 - but if it did I think it must have swung back again by the time Marsh is writing. Her witches are every inch in your face. Choreographed to leap off gibbets and leer malevolently. 

In fact sometimes in this book it seems as if this whole play is not being so much acted as danced. The fight scene in particular is laboriously choreographed, but many other scenes are rehearsed so often and Jay's vision for the whole thing explained so thoroughly that the reader (this reader anyway) is left with a real hope that all this dreary repetition is relevant.   

Not that there aren't moments of tension. Someone starts leaving the most frightening props - the false severed heads - in places designed to startle and scare. Macbeth and Macduff don't get on, which is particularly concerning given that fight scene. Certain members of the cast have secrets and others are strong believers in the Macbeth curse (which again I think I first learnt of via Blackadder. This time in series 3, in 1987). But these interesting details seem lost in a sea of stage direction and visits to the pub and drives up and down the Embankment (something very much of the time I think. Twenty years before when we first met Jay, even quite well off people walked, and if it was dark or the weather was bad they took taxis. By 82 they drive everywhere.)

Anyway, after the murder, things click into place. The pace either accelerates or appears to. Alleyn investigates. Fox turns up. Secrets are revealed. Jay's sons, who seemed an irrelevance on first appearance, become more rounded - yet without turning into tiresome miniature adults. Emily, Jay's wife, shows signs of still having a personality beyond feeding him, and we are reminded she is also of the theatre.

Macbeth will close of course, but the Dolphin (under the bequest of the late Mr Conducis) carries on, as immortal as Alleyn. 

Which wraps up this challenge. I'm not going to end with an analysis of whether Marsh deserved her title of one of the Queens of Golden Age Detective Fiction. It seems obvious to me she did. People went on reading her books through five decades, and it's not hard to see why. 

I am tempted to start a Margery Allingham or Gladys Mitchell challenge next, but not until I get the 80s out of the way..

Eighties Reading Challenge

The first time I decided to do this challenge I set up the rules for myself as follows:

1) To read a few books from each year, including rereads, in order. So 1980 runs from January to February, 1981 from February to March and so on.

2) Each month to contain at least one book I haven't read before. 

3) All books read for this challenge must be reviewed. At least a paragraph per book. 

4) Go through my own shelves first.

Which back the first time round brought up four unread books, three of which I did read and one (Life on Earth by David Attenborough) I didn't. I've also ordered The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which I've never read either, and which is historical fiction, not normally my thing, but which I remember being huge. 

And as before, if anyone stumbles across this and wants to read along or link their own reviews for the appropriate year you're very welcome to. Just leave it as a comment here or on the relevant post. 

1980 will wrap up on the 23rd February 2021. 

Reading the 80s - 1989

Peter Mayle - A Year in Provence

I've said elsewhere that I get why this caught the imagination in late 80s Britain. The proper field to plate, hand reared, hand killed food, the buildings built to last, the wine bought straight from the vineyard, must have seemed a welcome contrast to all the synthetic colours and tastes - shell suits, funny face lollies, food pinged in the microwave, dayglo socks - that the 80s made mainstream.

That said there's really not much to the book. It's just a light, entertaining, well but not brilliantly written journal. Mayle does have a knack for focussing in on the things that make people interesting, and if I were a gourmet I think the food descriptions would be getting the juices flowing, but it's written very simply, a chapter a month, and there's nothing too deep, nothing too analytical.

It's a read once and pass on book, and there's nothing wrong with that. I enjoyed it.


The Disinformer - Peter Ustinov

This is actually a book with two short stories in it.

In the first a retired ex-spy who never cared much about his job while he was in it but is now bored and perhaps quite bitter invents a fake terrorist cell in order to entrap another cell, all at arm's length until it goes wrong..

In the second a young woman rebels against the intellectual and traditional life her parents are bringing her up in.

Both stories left me a bit cold. The spy playing God, wanting to watch the finale without considering that people might die, the young woman understandably rebellious but also quite unpleasantly ruthless in her pursuit of being who she wants to be - and yet I didn't dislike these people actively enough to want things to go wrong for them either.

Also in the second one I could see the 'twist' coming a mile off. Maybe I was meant to?


Bill Bryson - The Lost Continent

This is the one I've read before - not that long after it came out. Not as young as 16 I don't think, but not a great deal older. 

One thing that dates it enormously - that really struck me and didn't last time - is his sporadic comments about fat women, or nubile young women. It's the most old-fashioned thing in the book, this assumption that just because he's a man (who, to be fair to him admits he's no Adonis himself) his opinion on women's looks has some sort of authority or validity.

I wondered as well that Bryson never seems to consciously connect it with something else he notices about many of the places he goes to on his drive around America. That there are so many drive-thru and drive to places, none of which you can travel between on foot, and that often the downtown is dying or dead. 

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and that lightbulb didn't go off for me either - and yet it seems so obvious now (nearly 30 years on) that the reason Bill is noticing how large women in America are getting in '89 is because they have constant access to fast food, and often nowhere pleasant to walk. You can talk about personal responsibility until you're blue in the face, but the dice have already been loaded.

Moving on from those issues -  as a travel book Bryson does a nice job of taking in the various States, describing the places he visited and giving you small snippets of history, neither sugarcoating or judging too harshly. If I used to find him funnier than I do now - well times change and I've changed, that's all. I probably will hang onto this one, and I will probably read it again in a decade or three.

So.. a bit of a fizzle out for 1989 to be honest. Maybe I should have given Booker winning Ishiguro a go.

This has nothing to do with the above, but I was in Liverpool recently

and this rather attractive plaque is in the library.

Reading the 80s - 1988

Utz - Bruce Chatwin

After enjoying The Songlines so much I was pleased to find something else by Chatwin for 1988. This one is fiction, although I still don't think Chatwin draws a particularly hard line between fiction and non fiction.

Utz - possibly Baron Von Utz, although our narrator isn't entirely sure Utz is entitled to call himself a Baron - lives in Prague beyond the Iron Curtain, and a central theme that makes it a book of it's time is the cold war and the difficulty getting from east to west and back, although Utz manages it (possibly not purely for his health as he claims) every year.

He is also an obsessive collector with a fine collection of porcelain figurines all on shelves in his living room which he's been collecting since he was a boy. As long as he has agreed to leave them to the nation he is allowed to keep them, and as long as he has them he will always return to Prague.

But it's the humour in the story, and Chatwin's ability to share large amounts of information in a narrative - all the discussions about porcelain - without making it seem forced, that really shine out.

The Swimming Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst

This one is why I'm three days late. I expected it to be a much quicker read. Instead what started as a story of promiscuity and privilege turned out to be far more layered.

Will, our narrator, is a young man leading a charmed and largely decorative life on family money. He has a younger less well off black boyfriend, a nice flat in London, and a pretty face. In addition almost every bloke he makes a pass at says yes, and being young and confident and somewhat spoilt, he's not at all shy of making passes.

He also has a fantastically detailed eye, not just for other pretty boys and their anatomical perfections but for the different nuances of London districts, places, pictures. He is also strangely likable and often empathetic, even slightly Woosterish in his willingness to be pulled into other people's troubles, although in other ways jaded, selfish and sometimes unthinkingly cruel.

When Will gives the kiss of life to an older man who collapses in the gents in Kensington Gardens, and then meets him again in the swimming pool of his gymnasium, the old man asks him to write his biography. He knows Will can write, because he's read something by him before - Will has dabbled with work, although more to please other people that because he needs or wants to, but is currently unemployed.

I have to say although I 'believed' in Will - far more than Utz - and would be curious to read about what happened to him next I didn't really enjoy the book all that much. Perhaps if I had read it when it was first published the historical background and the comparison between that and Will's life would have hit me harder and made more of a story. Most of the information would have been new to me at that time, and the effect would be more striking.

Something of that contrast has been lost now we've moved on again. As a gay man in the 80s Will is undoubtedly better off than Charles was in the 50s, but from a modern perspective he's nowhere near parity. It occurred to me for example that the nice long term couple he meets from time to time in clubs could get married now if they wanted to, and expect the family to come along and throw confetti, and that the narrative is still heavy in places with the things Will can't admit to other people.

The book also made me feel uncomfortably prurient in spots -  I don't know if my 15 year old self would have been shocked or would have gobbled it down much more easily in the same way she did The Stud and the Victorian erotica I discovered at the time, but my 45 year old self kept thinking  'come on Will, you don't even fancy this guy all that much and you've got a nice bloke at home..'

I did wonder as well if there was a nostalgia in all the bonking. Although published in 1988 the book is set in '83, and there is one bit right at the start where Will says '..it was my time, my belle epoque - but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye'.

Hollinghurst dedicated the book to Nicholas Blake, an early AIDS victim, and - a completely unintentional coincidence between the two books chosen for this year - Bruce Chatwin was to die of the same thing in 1989.

We come then to the darker side of the '80s in these two books. The ongoing standoff between East and West, and the AIDS epidemic, and a reminder to me that nostalgia aside, things actually have got better.

Reading the 80s - 1987

The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin

Most of this I loved - and I think even the parts I was less keen on while reading to a deadline (where he's arranging or spilling his moleskine notes on nomadic peoples for page after page after page) would have appealed more if I'd been able to take them at a more leisurely pace. A walking pace, as though they were poetry.

I actually started the book thinking it was fiction, and I've a sneaking suspicion that some editing and exaggerating and putting of things in an order that makes them more of a story than they might have been otherwise has probably happened, but I don't have any issues with that. 

I do like a book that makes me think - why is wandering seen as such a strange thing? What assumptions are we making now about the fossils we find or the people who live lives very different from ours? And are they based on their reality or our own? 

But that makes it sound preachy and it's not at all. It's hilarious, and just when it gets a bit too lofty it brings you down to Earth with a bump. I can't believe I've never read it before. 

Landscapes After the Battle -  Juan Goytisolo

Actually this is the English translation of a book originally published a few years earlier. 

To be honest it's the sort of book where you can't forget that you are reading a book (in fact Goytisolo breaks the fourth wall, so clearly you're not meant to forget) and you find yourself trying to work out what the author is trying to do, and unless it's done incredibly well it just becomes a distraction and you switch off. 

In fact, disconcertingly, it felt to me like that was what he was trying to do - to be so objectionable and somehow so dreary I'd stop reading completely, whereas instead I just got bored.  Somehow I could see it should be shocking or funny in parts, but it just.. wasn't. Not for me anyway.  

It centres about a man who lives in Paris, fantasises about little girls, spies on his wife, is possibly a revolutionary or counter revolutionary of some sort, or perhaps a failed revolutionary who now prefers to go to dirty movies. He's an unreliable narrator, he has a white mouse. 

I kind of felt like I wasn't understanding a lot of the references, or that there must be references in there that I wasn't spotting. There are some apocalyptic bits -  a massacre that's not actually happening now but centuries ago but also in some sense happening or un-happening now, or echoed now perhaps by contemporary events. There's a plague of mice. They dig up the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. 

It's unclear how much of this is in the narrator's head or the writer's head or if they're the same person. It flips between first, second and third person. Sometimes it's quite stream of consciousness, sometimes it reverts to dialogue..  

Probably better in the original Spanish. 

And on to 1988..

Reading the 80s - 1986

I’m a day later than I meant to be with this post, for Stephen King related reasons, but better late than never. 

In 1986 I hit 13, and was much more aware of world news than in previous years. The Challenger explosion, the fire at Hampton Court Palace, and the Chernobyl disaster are all stand out events in my mind, although I’m indebted to t’internet for confirming the year for me. 

It was also the year Fergie and Andrew got married, which despite the media saturation seems to have made little to no impression on me at all – just a vague conceptual picture of a parallel world of Sloanes and Filofaxes and Perrier water and expense account lunches, from which Sarah Ferguson had sprung forth. 

Which leads me – sort of – to my first book:

  

The Theory and Practice of Lunch – Keith Waterhouse

I’ve had this book on my shelves a little while now, with no memory of how I picked it up or why, although of course I knew I recognised Waterhouse’s name from somewhere. There seemed to be a lot of this in the media when I was a teenager – white middle aged chaps that you knew were probably genuinely famous for something, but who were at the comfy expense account stage by the 80s and mostly fronting bland documentaries about unusual buildings or writing semi-amusing newspaper articles about wine or the South of France.

To the teenage me they were all completely interchangeable, but sometimes I would bother to ask Dad what such and such a one was famous for, and usually he seemed to know. 

So if I had asked about Keith Waterhouse I am pretty certain that Dad would have told me he wrote Billy Liar. And these days, again thanks to Wikipedia, I can see that he also wrote That Was The Week That Was and the film of Whistle Down The Wind.

So perhaps I’m missing something, because The Theory and Practice of Lunch seems popular online, but to me his other cultural credits only strengthen my suspicion that Mr Waterhouse dialled this one in.

I admit there’s a certain nostalgia value - a lost world of three hour lunches, cigars and brandy and cheese board, comments on steak and black forest gateau, amusing asides about one’s lunch companion and other diners, but in the end it all adds up to not very much at all. 

A stocking filler of a book.

The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins

This, on the other hand, is one of the books everyone should read – whether you agree with it, or part of it, or not, it is important to know what the argument is for evolution (or more specifically for Natural Selection) and you’re not likely to find a better written and more accessible version.

It does have its clunkier moments though, and sometimes my attention wandered and I had to go back a few pages to make sure I’d really absorbed what Dawkins is saying - in particular he lost me somewhere in the bit about crystals, and I suspect that’s when I gave up on the book the first time I tried to read it (or more likely put it down and didn’t pick it up again.) All I can say if that happens to anyone else is persist – it is relevant, honest. He does loop back and show you how. 

It would also be a good idea to pick up a more recent, revised copy. I am certain we know more about DNA now than we did in 1986, or even in 1991 when mine was published. 

As a book of ’86 – there are hints. References to RAM and floppy discs, but even more than that there is something else that I'd forgotten about the recent past, something less tangible: 

First let's note that Richard Dawkins was 45 when he wrote this book, which means he was a very young man indeed in the 60s - and yet he writes about 'pop' music with apostrophes round the word pop, and the Top 20 and Space Invaders almost as though these are artefacts from an alien culture - and the really strange thing is that thinking back, this this was quite normal for university fellows (and wine buffs and art critics in fact). They tended to write as if they were sitting in a bubble apart from mainstream culture rather than a subset within it. 

Funny how I'd forgotten that. 

On a completely unrelated note this is the view towards London 

from the top of the pagoda at Kew, which has now reopened. 

In theory you can also see Windsor through the window almost opposite - 

and maybe we did, but too far away to recognise

Reading the 80s - 1985

Well I had every intention to read Eve's Story by Penelope Farmer, but that went west. In fact I'm collecting a tidy pile of books that I intended to read for this challenge and didn't, and am considering some sort of amnesty period at the end of the year.

In the meantime here are the two books I did read:

Death of a Gossip - M C Beaton

This was Beaton's first book and it's a cosy little murder mystery starring her original series detective Hamish Macbeth, the local constable in the small fictional town of Lochdubh, where a couple of the English run fishing holidays. Unfortunately one of their guests first makes herself thoroughly obnoxious to all and sundry, and then gets herself killed.

As I say, it's cosy. The victim is so horrible there's no distress about her death, the setting is idyllic, and the resolution improbable. It also has a scene at the end where Macbeth (who is not even supposed to be on the case but leaving it to the more senior lot who've been drafted in) gets all the possible murderers in the same room and.. well you know the drill, surely?

There's also a kind of unromantic romance bubbling away which reminded me of other books I've read in this experiment, specifically the way one of the younger female characters whose point of view we spend a lot of time with is defining herself by her relationships with men, more focused on pleasing or impressing them, or what everyone else will think if she makes a good match, than figuring out what she wants.

Beaton even says at one point something like: 'Women's lib has a long way to go before it gets into the heads of girls like X' well yes, clearly it did. Macbeth as well, although a gentle and lazy charmer, has his moments of M C Piggery.

But despite being reminded (again) that the 80s are further away than we sometimes think, I did thoroughly enjoy the book and would seek out the next. It's a gentle comedy as well as a murder mystery, and the setting of Lochdubh is beautifully described.


B is for Burglar - Sue Grafton

More crime, of a different pace. I'm not sure what age I was when I started reading Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series but would make a guess at 13 or 14. At that time they were new and it was easy to read them in order.

In B is for Burglar Kinsey is hired to try to track down a missing sister. Not because her family care or are worried, but because they need her to sign a legal document and she's not answering calls. Kinsey ferrets in a tidy sort of way - contacts the apartment building, checks that out, contacts the other apartment the woman had, checks through bills, talks to neighbours.. and finally turns up a very nasty crime indeed.

The main thing that held my attention though - both when I first read it and again now - are the details. She describes clothes and hair and houses and restaurants and she goes jogging and does her laundry and keeps a gun alternately in her glove compartment and filing cabinet (which doesn't seem sufficiently secure to me, to be honest) and listens to other people's marital insanities (squabbles is not a strong enough word for at least two of the couples in this book) and shrugs and concludes she's better off alone in the tiny apartment she likes exactly because it is tiny. The unravelling of what happens is what keeps the book moving, but the real interest is Kinsey herself, just walking round noticing things.


Anyway - on to 1986. I have no clear plans for '86, so will have to think.

The ones that got away.

Reading the 80s - 1984

I've only read one book for this self-imposed challenge this time:

The Camomile Lawn - Mary Wesley

Although I didn't watch it, I remember the TV series of this book coming out - in the early 90s I think. There seemed to be a lot of noise about it at the time and 2 very different things stick in my head.

The first is The Mary Whitehouse Experience drawing attention to all the sex in it and asking who could sit through all that, and Hugh Dennis in his character of dodgy overcoat and sour milk loving man Mr Strange saying it was his favourite show.

The other was a gardening program (possibly Gardeners' World, but I wouldn't want to take bets) explaining the (im)practicalities of trying to grow a Camomile Lawn, which the series had clearly made people want to do.

Having now read the book I'm not sure how it translated onto the screen. It works very much because the situation that all the cousins and aunts and uncles and friends and other protagonists are in, from their first definite knowledge that war is coming on that hot summer night out on the Camomile Lawn, is slowly explained, through people's thoughts, and the frank but slightly oblique conversations the family all have - believable conversations, where often things aren't so much spelt out as acknowledged between people who have known each other all their lives and grown up together, and which make less sense without having the thoughts as well.

There are reasons behind the sex - none of which is explicit or detailed (which again the show must have struggled with) - that is so large a part of this book, but the book is not about sex. If anything I think it's more about relationships, and how they shift and restructure, and how family units expand
and hold together and members trust and interpret one another when under attack from outside.

Wesley also, after the first few pages, has a wonderful knack of making you care about the characters, and keeping them all distinct. Even moving back and forth between the past and the present, using the device of a funeral to explain these stirred up memories and why the family is converging again, the same people are the same - or still enough the same - that you don't get muddled.

(Although I did stop trying to work out who had slept with who after a bit).


Onwards to 1985..

Reading the 80s - 1983

Second person singular (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino).

First published in English in 1983 (Italian 1980), this book is so experimental it should, by rights, be annoying. That it isn’t is a tribute to both Italo Calvino and William Weaver, who has translated the text into English. 

A very large amount of it is written in second person singular, and the bits that aren’t are mostly first chapters  - fifteen or ten, or six or seven pages – of different books that the ‘You’ that Calvino is addressing gets to read before something goes awry and reading gets interrupted and in searching for a complete version of his lost book 'You' find another book and the process begins again.

There are also a number of characters – other readers – who pop up from time to time to describe what they want from a book, or how they read, or various shenanigans around censorship and so on, and although these are all supposedly different people that forms a kind of dialogue which holds the many different stories that you get to start (but not finish) together.    

In less talented hands this would all be quite unbearable. With Calvino there’s a feeling that he isn’t just doing it to be difficult. That there is a reason, and that he can hold your interest even with such an complicated and unpromising premise. 

It is the loosest of holds though. I said in an earlier post that I put this book down about halfway through before and just didn’t pick it up again, not because I didn’t enjoy it but because it’s an easy book to do that with. There are any number of stopping places, and I found the ‘what happens next’ drive didn’t kick in for me until very near the end.

As a book from the 80s? I don't think it is particularly, although perhaps I'd need a better knowledge of the literature of Cuba (where Calvino was born) or Italy (where he grew up and wrote) before I could judge. The main ‘You’ is a man, which was occasionally disorientating, but there is also a parallel and balancing female reader, and often I got the sense it was her that the author was really writing for – frustrated that he could not read her mind well enough to understand what it is she really wanted to read. Perhaps because she doesn’t know herself until she picks a book up. That’s just the kind of reader she is. 

Susan Hill – The Woman in Black

I don't feel like I gave this book a fair chance. Reading it in the sunshine in the park, and then on public transport, was not at all conducive to letting a ghost story give me the appropriate chills.

Pluses include; that it's very well written and paced and held my attention, and the attitude and internal dialogue of the central character is entirely believable. The other characters are at least as fleshed out as needed for such a short story.

But I didn't believe in the ghost and I predicted the end. So although I could appreciate the book as a lovely piece of craft, and thoroughly enjoyed it as such, it didn't quite deliver for me.  

Next year up is 1984, about which I said 'Anything but The Wasp Factory' and still haven't made up my mind. To get a real flavour of the year it should probably be Jeffrey Archer, who I have never actually read, Deathtrap Dungeon, which I have, Brother in the Land (which I haven't read since I was 11 or 12 and don't really want to read again because it's depressing) and The One Minute Manager.  

Or perhaps I should stop thinking about what I remember the flavour of 1984 being (mostly findus crispy pancakes and blue slush puppies, if memory serves), and go completely random, pulling books off the shelves of second hand bookshops and libraries until I find something I never knew I wanted to read. 

Calvino would approve, I think.

As ever if any of the very small amount of people who read this want to join in, please feel free to link/post your own reviews below. I will be back in 1984 on the 15th of next month. 

Reading the 80s - 1982

I only managed two books for this challenge this month - but the first wasn't something I'd usually read, so I'm quite pleased about that.

Stephen King - The Dark Tower I (The Gunslinger).

To be honest I was surprised how much I enjoyed this.

It starts, or seems to start, with the good guy chasing the bad guy across the desert. Predictably enough the good guy is the guy with the gun (or rather, two guns) and the bad guy is in black and does evil magics. We also learn that the world has moved on - for which read falling apart - and the gunslinger is on a quest which may have something to do with fixing it, or finding out what's going on.

All of which would normally make me balk a bit - I have a healthy dose of cynicism about quests and heroes that bludgeon their way through the world leaving destruction behind them because their mission and their honour and their pride is the all important thing; and the Gunslinger certainly fits into that mould.

But somehow King gets away with it. I think because he isn't actually romanticising what's happening. We hear about the qualities the Gunslinger lacks as much as those he possesses. The man in black is there to mock him, and from a certain point there is a companion, Jake, to be shocked by him and make him doubt himself.

King does a good job of world building, with the differences from our own world kept subtle at first, and monsters referred to in passing instead of lumbering across the page absurdly. That said readers who really can't bear fantasy worlds will probably struggle.

Did it want to make me read the other 7 books? (I think it's 7) To be honest no, but considering this isn't something I would normally have tried, that's not a reflection on the book itself. 


Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams

This is the third of the Hitchhikers Guide Trilogy of five and reading it I remembered that it was never really my favourite. I think I felt cheated because Trillian solves a puzzle on the basis that anything else would be a ludicrously improbable coincidence - and yet their whole lives up to this point have been one ludicrous coincidence after another. They own a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive for goodness' sake, the ultimate plot device to explain away improbable coincidences.

Trillian annoys me quite as lot a character actually. At the beginning where she's trying to cheer Zaphod up by going to delightful planets and he's not interested - well why not go herself and leave him to it? Then when we see her next she is being chatted up by a thunder god but she just lets Arthur drag her off again. Then she addresses the elders of Krikkit. She seems to have a stunning lack of agency in her own life but be able to advocate just fine on behalf of the universe.

That almost certainly is something to do with it being written in 1982 - her storyline is after all that she's skipped the planet with Zaphod as a kind of adjunct, then seems to fall into a caretaker role, and although she starts to break out later I never feel she really coheres into one person. In fact in the last book she literally is two people, one of which went with Zaphod and one of which didn't, and both are wistfully wondering about that other person they might have been. Is it just me or is there something a bit Anita Brookner about this?


The next year up is 1983. Hopefully I'll manage a few more this time. I already know I want to read The Woman in Black.