WHAT I'M READING (PART III)

 

It's been a while since I last posted about the books I've been reading, so thought it was time to do a wee update, let you know

Lately I've started to slow down with my reading. Just a little bit. Having read five books since we last spoke, with a sixth about to be started. It's not all down to laziness, though. I've been trying to get my head into the writing zone again (I've got a number of projects on the go and trying to keep them all in the air), plus I've just had a wee bout of Covid (given to me by the mother-in-law during an Easter meal) – nothing major, just a bit of a tickly throat, a cough, a croaky voice and the loss of taste – so me and the wife have been isolating for the past few weeks and doing very little other than watch TV programmes^*1 . But we're over it now and back in the land of the living. I've also been rewatching a lot of classic TV, such as Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Harry's Game and Wolcott, while also making my way through every episode of old Coronation Street from April 1976 all the way up to December 1999^*2.

To kick off with, I've been delving into my ever-expanding TV and film novelisations. I thought it was about time as it's been a while and I do love a good novelisation. This time I read a couple of TV tie-ins – Open All Hours by Christine Sparks, which is a novelisation of the 6 episodes of the first series, minus the pilot, and Porridge by Jonanthan Marshall (though it's credited to scriptwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais on the cover), which is a novelisation of the first six episodes of the first series plus the pilot. Christine Sparks did a wonderful job with Open All Hours, adding nice little bits to the beginning of each chapter so that the stories appeared to flow from one to the other, seemingly occurring over the course of a few weeks, rather than being disconnected adventures. Porridge, on the other hand, kept the timeline deliberately vague. Told in first person, the novel reads like a handful of stories and anecdotes told to us by Norman Stanley Fletcher from his time in prison. There are five books in the Porridge series – three books each novelising the three series, a novelisation of the 1978 sequel series Going Straight and a novelisation of the 1979 Porridge movie – and it was my original intention to read all five together, but I had a sudden change of plan...

I'm not a fan of crime, and have read very little crime fiction, but I've always wanted to give Agatha Christie a go. My wife has an extensive collection of Christie novels in the facsimile first edition hardbacks that Harper Collins released a little while ago, so I thought I'd give a them a try, see what I thought, so I read two in rapid succession: one Miss Marple (The Body in the Library) and one Poirot (Murder on the Orient Express). I was pleasantly surprised. Actually, I was more than pleasantly surprised, I absolutely loved them. Particularly Murder on the Orient Express. And now I fully intend on reading more, although I want to scatter them through my future reading material, reading a book every now and then.

The fifth book is Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler, one of the darkest, most disturbing, most creepy, and most hilarious books I've ever read. To be honest, you really have to be both British and a child of the 1970s and early 1980s to fully appreciate this story of a man who, on his way to moving himself and his two children into a new home, he stops off at a petrol station in the strange and creepy town of Scarfolk where it is perpetually the 1970s. When he exits the petrol station he discovers that his children are missing and he has become trapped inside the town. He soon finds himself doubting both his own sanity and whether his children really existed. The book is part novel, part satire on 1970s British culture and social identity. Its demented and twisted pastiches of 70s Public Information Films, Government information posters, television and literature is an absolute joy – not to mention uncomfortably accurate. Arguably the best book published so far in the twenty-first century, and definitely the funniest book I have ever read.

OK, so up next for me is the first of a trio of books by journalist, historian and presenter Dominic Sandbrook, documenting the social shifts and political upheavals of Britain, its people and its culture from 1970 up to 1982. In truth, its an ongoing series which actually begins in 1956, but I'm not really that fussed about the first two books which cover 1956 up to 1969, and I'm actually starting with book 3: State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974. These are followed by Season in the Sun: The Battle for Britain: 1974-1979 and Who Dares Wins: Britain 1979-1982. Sandbrook intends to write more, although personally I'll only be staying on for the ride up to 1989. 


Oh...and I'm still reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 

NOTES:

*1 - Not 2020s TV programmes of course, because as we all know 2020s British TV is absolutely god-awful. I'm talking about classic TV programmes from the 1960s, 70s and 80s on DVD.

*2 - If you're interested, at the time of writing this the classic Coronation Street viewing has been going for 2 years, and I'm now at April 1997. We have no intention of watching it after December 1999, after that the rot really set in, until now modern Coronation Street is practically impossible to watch it's so bad. To be honest, the rot starts to set in some time between mid-1996 and early-1997. And it's only going to get worse - we're only 3 months away from the Battersby family arriving on the street.