Where have I been?

Oh dear! The last post on this blog was posted over six months ago. What happened? Did I stop reading books? 


Not quite, though I have been through a patch of downbeat, disjointed, nervy and slightly uncertain reading, corresponding perhaps to a downbeat, disjointed, nervy and slightly uncertain period in general. Unusually for me, afflicted as I am by some sort of protestant book-ethic, I have not always even finished the books I started. And after those that did get finished, for many and varied reasons, I didn't feel like writing about or sharing them. Life has been more and more busy, for sure, and it takes a little time to write these reviews, but that isn't more than a small part of the reason. Perhaps my heart just went out of it, or perhaps it was just the books that didn't want to be written about.

Now, though, on holiday in Italy, with work banished at least from waking hours and suddenly with time to read in long stretches, the blog calls. I want to talk about the book I finished yesterday, and I know I will want to do the same for the one I am now in the midst of. But they are the next posts. Here a quick round up of the unlauded books (well, the ones I can remember, which is definitely not all of them) from the last few months...

"Soldaten" by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer

Utterly engrossing and one of the most fundamentally shocking books I have ever read. Though I am sometimes a bit queasy about reading yet another book about the Third Reich, this one is undoubtedly a bit different and hooked me in the course of a brief flick-through at the shelves of Nottingham Waterstones last month. 

The authors, the first a historian, the second a social psychologist, have taken a new source of information about the Second World War and turned it into a game-changing study of how normal people behave - and can behave - in conditions of war. The source consists of secretly taped conversations between (mainly) German prisoners-of-war held in the UK and the USA between 1940 and 1945. The British and American intelligence services hoped these would yield useful information for the conduct of the war.

They were right; useful intelligence was obtained, but from our perspective, the value of these recordings, only recently declassified, is completely different. They reveal the extent to which regular guys can accept and commit the most barbarous of acts when their "terms of reference" (to use the oft-repeated socio-psychlogical expression the authors employ) are modified. I cannot emphasise too much the normality of the conversations in which the utterly abnormal is related. It is this which makes this book so shocking. It is hard to read this without reflecting on how thin a veneer our normal peacetime morality in fact represents, and therefore how vital it is to maintain that veneer. The fact that I read this book in the same period when working life revolved around the (by some) much-derided Nobel Peace Prize for the EU was in this sense very fortuitous. There is no time for taking peace for granted.

Read it, but expect to be horrified and disturbed.

"The Anglo Files" by Sarah Lyall

This book, subtitled "a field guide to the British", picked up as anticipated light reading in Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue during our summer holiday last summer, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. 

I am a sucker for wryly observed books about the British (or English) and their eccentricities, but found in this case that my patience ran out a bit. Yes, there were funny parts, and some nice observations, but, in the end, it seemed to me the Ms Lyall, who is married to a Brit and lives in London, doesn't actually like the Brits very much and was indulging herself in a rather prolonged and ultimately unattractive gripe about the failings of her adopted home. This makes for slightly tedious reading in the end. So far, so subjective, of course. But it also struck me that she was peddling a rather distorted view. An alarming number of British traits and characteristics were attributed to educational and child-raising practices which, at best, will be experienced by a very limited number of people. Pace, Ms Lyall, but public schools, nannies and 6.00 am cold showers are as unknown to the majority of Brits as they are to New York suburbanites. You move, methinks, in rather select circles if you still attribute the British character to such things...

"When I Die" by Philip Gould

Perhaps if you are looking for the best of British character, indeed of any kind of character (Philip Gould is actually a New Zealander, I think NB Correction in comment below), this is more like it. A terribly sad, yet also uplifting book, in which Philip Gould - who was, as a non-elected but highly influential political staffer, at the heart of the New Labour project of the 1990s - describes the course of his terminal cancer. 

There are small surprises in this book, for example, mentions of profound care and kindness from well-known politicians (who we would sometimes do well to remember are also human beings), but it is not for its political or biographical insights that anyone reads this book. It has to be, and is, for the deeply personal story of how one man faces up to the fact of his own impending death, and the release and meaning he finds in that fact. Counterintuitively, Gould rejoices in the fact that his days are, as they say, numbered, saying it lends his life an intensity and meaning that others should surely envy. 

Not an easy read, not least because of the clarity and honesty with which Gould describes the progress of his disease, but one, if you feel any sort of need to read about this sort of subject, which is not to be foregone.

"The Spanish Holocaust" by Paul Preston

An unfinished one, this one. Conscious of a big gap in my knowledge of twentieth century history and having read very positive reviews of this work by a leading scholar of the Spanish Civil War, I started on this. And made it about half-way through. 

Why the reading failure? Not any lack of authority on the part of its author, for sure. The research and scholarship behind this book is frankly immense. Maybe that was the problem. It felt like reading an endless litany of atrocity. Village by village, in excruciating detail, mainly by Franco's forces, but also by republicans, brutality is heaped on brutality. If nothing else, it left me in no doubt about why Spain's civil war has been so hard to forget. But shame on me, after a while I just lost the heart to carry on.

Others?

No, I didn't read just four books in six months (three and a half, I suppose), there were others. Bits and pieces, books on the side, some work related stuff (some of it quite cool on branding, advertising and so on), and, maddeningly, for sure a couple I cannot recall. Did I really not read a novel in six months??? If, when returning home, I spot something on the shelves I forgot to mention, I hope I will find the time and inclination to add it to this list. 

Meanwhile, all being well, it's back to normal service, starting with the next post.