Recent Book Buys / What I'm Reading (Part 4)

 

Do I need to say ‘It’s been a while since I last blogged about books’? No. Let’s just take it as read that that’s how this blog post begins, and we’ll just move on.

The last time I blogged I mentioned that I was about to start State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook – the first of a trilogy of his books, which documents the social shifts and political upheavals of Britain, its people and its culture from 1970 up to 1982. Well, immediately after writing that blog I dived right in to Sandbrook’s 700 page tome, finishing the book in a handful of sittings over a couple of weeks. It is a remarkably detailed and meticulously researched book, and Sandbrook’s intelligent prose style makes it a pleasure to read. Definitely one I’d recommend to anyone who is interested in that era of Britain, or particularly if you lived through those opening years of the 1970s.

I also continued my journey through the Ian Fleming James Bond novels. This is my first time reading these classic novels (I know, I know. It’s shocking) and I’m reading the novels in original publication order. Since we last spoke, I’ve read Live and Let Die (1954), Octopussy & The Living Daylights (1966) and Moonraker (1955). Up next is Diamonds Are Forever (1956), which I’ve scheduled for some time in the next couple of months.

Incidentally, I have the full uncut 2012 Vintage reprints of these books, so I don’t have to deal with all the Orwellian Ministry of Information re-writing and re-editing that’s going on in the publication world right now. I completely understand that attitudes have changed, and I have the intelligence and perspicacity to cope just fine with opinions written in the mid-1950s that differ drastically from my own, or read words and phrases that are outdated without getting upset, distressed or outraged

And talking of opinions that differ drastically from my own (see what I did there?) – another book I’ve read recently is historian Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography of Adolf Hitler. At 1,000 pages,  Hitler is the last word on the subject of Hitler and the Third Reich. If you’re thinking of reading it, don’t be put off by its page count. Although it’s a hefty tome (brick-like, would be an apt description) and its text is quite small (if it were normal sized font, the book would be pushing 2,000 pages), it is fascinating and completely absorbing. Kershaw’s prose is clear, concise and reads like a historical thriller. Like Sandbrook’s book, Hitler is just as meticulously researched and is absolutely crammed with historical detail, sometimes the detail is so rich you can almost smell the smoke that drifts from the fires as they burn the books that they consider to be harmful to their culture and their people.*¹ This has to be one of the greatest works of non-fiction I’ve read, not just in the last year or so, but in my life. But it’s not the only one.

Another truly great work of non-fiction I have read recently is The Second World War by military historian Anthony Beevor. It is, arguably, one of the best single-tome works*² on the entire Second World War written. Another 1,000 page epic, for my money Beevor has to be the best writer of books on the subject of the Second World War alive and writing today. His prose is crisp and clear, cutting to the very bone with scalpel-sharp precision, not a word wasted, not a fact over-blown or unnecessary. The Second World War is genuinely unputdownable, taking me only a handful of days to zip through its 1,000 pages. I took this book away with me on holiday, and I found myself sitting up in bed in the wee small hours, reading this book as my wife slept beside me, literally the only reasn I had to put the book down was the inability to keep my eyes open any longer. A truly great book.

But what about novels, I hear you cry?

There’s been plenty of those read, since we last spoke. As well as the aforementioned Bond books, there were also a few re-reads, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which I hadn’t read for 30 years, and is now one of my Top 10 novels of all Time*³), J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (which I’ve now read about half-a-dozen times, or more), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (which I read every single Christmas), as well as some first time reads, such as Harry’s Game by Gerald Seymour, and a scattering of other non-fiction such as Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, and The Spade as Mighty as the Sword by Daniel Smith (an in-depth examination into Britain’s Dig For Victory campaign, during the World War II).

My To Read Pile is growing ever taller, ever more Tower of Pisa-like.

Here is just a small sample of some of the books I’ve bought or received as gifts in the last 12 months alone…

Some classic SF:

Hothouse by Brain Aldiss
Rift by Stephen Baxter
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
Ringworld by Larry Niven
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Three John Wyndham books – The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes

Some classic literature

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Six Charles Dickens Novels – Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Shogun by James Clavell


Some new Non-Fiction:

Attack Warning Red – How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall
All Hell Let Loose – The World at War 1939-1945 by Max Hastings
Blood and Ruins – The Great Imperial War 1931-1945 by Richard Overy
Goebbels – a Biography by Peter Longerich
Berlin – The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor
D-Day by Antony Beevor
A War of Empires – Japan, India, Burma and Britain 1941-45 by Robert Lyman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES

1 – Slippery slope, people. It’s just a few short steps from the Stalin-esque ‘re-writing of the past’ that’s happening now with books and television shows, to the banning of certain books altogether, or people being whipped up into such a hysteria that they will gladly see literature destroyed because it contains subject matters that they don’t agree with. You may think this sounds like an over-reaction, but right now we’re letting people edit and re-write our books and our television shows *just because* 50 years ago people didn’t think *exactly* like we do now! And we’re letting them. Whole episodes of television sitcoms are missing from streaming platforms purely because they have attitudes that some people don’t agree with. As I said - slippery slope, people.

2 - I say "one of the best" as, although I think it is the best one I've read, I still have several single-volume books about WWII to read.

3 - My full Top 10 Novels of All Time will be revealed in a post coming up over the next few days!