Summer picks: don’t listen to them
The Guardian has a summer reading recommendations by various literary figures such as William Gibson, Ian McEwen and the imprisoned Jeffrey Archer, as well as media types and scientists. Nowadays I read these less out of a wish to find new books to read as to see if my prejudices are confirmed or confounded. For example, they were confirmed when I read Steven Pinker urging us to read that classic of English philistinism The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey. It shows us “how many 20th-century literary intellectuals had a contempt for ordinary people comparable to Hitler’s. Though a decade old, it is worth reading for the chastening continuity it shows with today’s ’social critics’, down to their despising fast food and popular entertainment.” Fucking jerk I muttered, and moved on. To be fair, however, one wouldn’t expect him to have a clue about art; he’s a scientist.
Elsewhere, Monica Ali and Hilary Mantel praise each other’s books (and, surprise surprise, Ali’s is the foremost photograph!) while AS Byatt wants us to read the book whose title I cringed at the other day. Mmm �
A few of them mention books reminding us of the evils of Stalin’s reign. Not one, however, mentions Mark Curtis’ recent work Web of Deceit about Britain’s crimes around the world. Funny that. Not uncoincidentally, “Sir” Trevor Macdonald tells us that “when, anchoring the ITV news in Kuwait, I managed to tear myself away from the shock and awe of what was going on in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, I lost myself in Michael Bloch’s brilliant biography Ribbentrop, Hitler’s infamous foreign minister and one-time ambassador to London.” What an irony. One wonders how William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, lost himself when not reporting glorious Nazi “liberations” all those years ago?
If there’s one book I might want to recommend for this summer (and I don’t), it would be In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Proust. It’s set on the Normandy coast in summertime, and if, like me, you can’t afford a holiday, then this is the nearest you’ll get.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Summer reading: a book is a mirror …
- The Big Sleep ..er, Read.
- The art of publishing novellas
- Life is elsewhere
- Synchroni City
