Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah is an epic tome that spans three continents, across 55 chapters in seven parts. I read the 10th anniversary reissue, which has an interesting introduction by the author reflecting on what America means to her and how living there made her aware that it is possible to be judged above all else for the colour of your skin.

The Scheme for Full Employment

In The Scheme for Full Employment, Magnus Mills imagines a world where everyone is employed. You might think everyone would be happy in such a world, given the security of a regular income, the routine of daily work, community with colleagues and the like. But not everyone wants the kind of job that is so routine that it doesn’t allow for individuality. And such a set up inevitably becomes an inefficient, unwieldy way of doing things.

The Mirror and the Light

It is nine years since I wolfed down the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. I read those two books in quick succession, coming to them late thanks to the television dramatisation of 2015. It is four years since The Mirror and the Light was published and it has been languishing on my e-reader all that time. I decided that I wanted something familiar to read, so finally picked it up.

Reading Mantel’s prose is like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. I had loved her writing style in Wolf Hall and the way it took me into Cromwell’s mind, and The Mirror and the Light did the same. It opens in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, with Henry VIII already betrothed to her replacement, Jane Seymour, and Cromwell steering the ship of state through the wake of the scandal, drawing on his network to keep tabs on those jockeying for position, both in favour of the king and against. He is rewarded by the king for ridding him of his unwanted second wife, elevated to a Lord, holder of the Privy Seal.

Hometown Tales: Highlands and Hebrides

Hometown Tales is a book series from the Orion Books imprint of Weidenfield & Nicolson. There are eight books in the series, each pairing a new writer with someone more established from the same region.

I bought the Highlands and Hebrides volume at a Mull Historical Society gig in 2018, because one of the two stories it contains is by Colin MacIntyre, the musician and writer who records under the MHS moniker. I’d read his novel The Letters of Ivor Punch not long before and enjoyed his fictionalised rendition of his home.

Safely Gathered In

Safely Gathered In is the first collection of short stories by Sarah Schofield, an author and lecturer in creative writing based in the north west of England. The stories have an edge to them, presenting a skewed perspective on the mundanities of life, the things unspoken in relationships, the way we assimilate grief and fear rather than confront it head on. It is a largely female perspective, the women in the stories and their survival mechanisms the focal point. The men depicted in these tales are fools, the women looking to them for something they can’t give.

Cold Fish Soup

Cold Fish Soup is a collection of essays about life on the slowly eroding East Yorkshire coast. It’s a memoir about being transplanted to somewhere new, about family and about the isolation of depression.

Delicacy: A Memoir About Cake and Death

Delicacy is an examination of what it’s like to grow up as a tall, clever, quiet, funny woman in the UK. Katy Wix shares moments of trauma from her adolescence and adulthood and explains how cake has become associated in her mind with the awfulness of life. Cake is ever present, as a treat, a comfort, a distraction. It’s often eaten in stressful circumstances. Possibly more often than it’s eaten simply for pleasure.

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism is an examination of why capitalism in its current form works for the few, not the many and how it might be possible to change that around.

As mentioned in my review of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, I recently listened to Mariana Mazzucato talk about her book on the Adam Buxton podcast. I was captivated by her intelligence and articulate expression of her economic theory and reserved the book at the library. It was a good decision.

Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: A Graphic Novel

Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a socialist classic and, despite studying Economic and Social History as an undergraduate on the subject matter it draws from and the fact that I was convinced that I owned a copy until I couldn’t find it, I haven’t read it. So when I saw the graphic novel adaptation of it by the Rickard Sisters in my local independent bookshop, I bought it.

The Manchester branch of Blackwell’s bookshop is running a reading challenge this year. I’d initially thought that I’d read The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett towards January’s theme of a classic I’d never read before, but it struck me that this graphic novel version of a classic would be a twist on that. So here we have it.

The Forager’s Calendar: A Seasonal Guide to Nature’s Wild Harvests

Happy New Year! (It’s not too late to say that yet, despite being almost halfway through the first month of the year.) My first read of the year is John Wright’s book The Forager’s Calendar, a Christmas present from Mr Hicks. Last autumn, I took Mr H on a walk along our local canal to see how many of the blackberries I’d seen in their pre-ripened state during my solo summer walks we could pick for a pie. Sadly, the extreme summer heat had shrivelled most of the berries I’d seen. We gathered just enough for a pie. The flip side, though, was that in peering into the canalside hedgerows, we saw other things, including mushrooms and blackthorn. We came home with more sloes than blackberries, which we froze until we could pass them on to our friends who like gin.

As we walked, we talked about how, as children, we’d both been on family trips to forage for berries. I remember gathering wimberries (vaccinium myrtillus, also known as bilberries, whortleberries and blaeberries) on moorland around the Snake Pass between Glossop and Sheffield, and staining my fingers with their juices until I learnt not to squeeze when taking them from the plant. I loved those wimberrying trips, and the crumbles that resulted from them.

Wright opens this guide to gathering wild food and the things you can make from it with his own childhood memory of blackberrying which is very similar to mine. He also talks about something that I think about a lot, and more now than I did before the pandemic: the way in which we are losing touch with our natural selves.