Sunday, March 11, 2018

march 2018 books…

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (Alexander McCall Smith): I think I started reading this book about ten years ago, but didn’t get very far with it at the time. (As you probably already knew) Precious Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in a small Botswanan town (the only lady private detective in the country) with the proceeds of the sale of her father’s cattle and duly enters the mysterious world of wayward daughters, missing husbands, curious conmen and the like. Miss Marple she is not… but I found it all delightfully different: gentle and even joyful in Ramotswe’s attitudes and her approach to life, people and circumstances. Beautifully written and a rare pleasure.
Six Weeks (John Lewis-Stempel): This is a brilliantly-researched, powerful book about young officers in WW1 who, as the book’s title suggests, had an average six-week life expectancy on the front line. These very young officers were invariably public school-educated (or occasionally from grammar schools). I found myself feeling quite prejudiced against this world of privilege and class whilst reading the book… but ultimately had to acknowledge that, with a need to form a huge army from scratch, this was probably the only practical option. Nevertheless, comments such as these from Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Hamilton (written in 1874) still rankled: “The soldier in his hour of need and danger will ever be more ready to follow the officer and gentleman whom education, position in life, and accident of birth point out to be his natural leader… than the man who, by dint of study and brain work, has raised himself (much to his own credit, certainly) from the plough or anvil”. But, having said this, Lewis-Stepel’s book is quite brilliant – containing, as it does, numerous, poignant extracts from letters written from the Western Front (often, they proved to have been the last words written by these soldiers before their deaths) - and skilfully conveys some of the harrowing, unimaginable reality of life in the trenches and all its horror and its dignity (and sometimes its humour, despite everything). A memorable book which provided further insight into the bleak experiences my grandfather Frank went through on the Somme and elsewhere.   
note: Somewhat strangely, the book also reminded me of my own experience as a working class, grammar school boy in the early 1960s. The school had its own Service Corps - complete with shooting bunker/mini-firing range(?) and armoury - which was taken VERY seriously (I well remember one of the ‘old’ teachers dressed in his full Army uniform riding a white horse on the Corps Annual Parade day!). I was in the ‘Remove’ stream at school - fast-tracking boys to sit O-Levels in 4 years instead of 5 - and the school clearly saw us as potential officers of the Corps. Given this background, you can imagine their utter disbelief when only a couple of boys out of the entire class indicated that they wanted to join the Corps. The school hierarchy was horrified by our actions (but, hey man, this was the swinging 60s!)… the powers-that-be even came to lecture us about our ‘duty and obligation to the school’. Even so, we dug in our heels and resisted!
The Full Cupboard Of Life (Alexander McCall Smith): Another book about the life of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency… and, once again, I found reading it a hugely pleasurable experience – gentle, kind, funny and beautifully written.
Inside The Wave (Helen Dunmore): Helen Dunmore died last year, aged 65. This book of poems is her final collection… they’re concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead. They relate to her interest in landscape and the sea but, crucially, about her personal experience of dying (she knew she was dying of cancer)… “To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone”. I found them both eloquent and moving (there’s something rather powerful about poets writing in the knowledge that there life is coming to an end – although he’s still alive, but ailing, Clive James’s “Sentenced To Life” comes to mind). A lovely book that I’ll re-visit on a regular basis. Dunmore and I shared two connections: living in Bristol and loving St Ives. This short interview with her children is rather nice.   
Weather: A Very Short Introduction (Storm Dunlop): I originally thought that any book that describes itself as a “very short introduction” to a subject implied that it would brief, but also relatively straightforward. I was wrong… this book is FULL of complex information! I ended up feeling hugely inadequate intellectually. Typically, I’d read a page full of complicated terminology (which I didn’t really understand), only to be told that “obviously, this is just a very simplified explanation”! And all this coming from an author by the name of Storm Dunlop – anyone called “Storm” who writes a book about the weather doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously! Having said that, I feel sure that I’ll be consulting the book at various times over the coming years (Dunlop obviously knows his stuff!) and, maybe, it’ll all start to make complete sense?

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