Good Reads 2018

2018 was generally a bleak year for reading rescued only by a couple of books over 50 years old and several about the malfunctioning of politics in the UK and USA.

I eventually got round to reading Nan Shepherd's inspirational book The Living Mountain. Its description of the constituent elements of air, light, water, rock, plant and animal life in the Cairngorms is a love letter to the Mountains where she spent her time walking and being spellbound by the magic of the elements. The language is very unusual in the way she captures the mood and the feelings of those open to being inspired by nature's fickle ways, as can be seen in the following abstract. "The sustained rhythm of movement in a long climb has also its part in inducing the sense of physical well-being. This bodily lightness, then, in rarefied air, combines with the liberation of space to give mountain feyness to those who are susceptible to such a malady. For it is a malady, subverting the will and superseding the judgement: but a malady of which the afflicted will never ask to be cured." So that explains why I have spent so much time pursuing my mountain habit!

On moving house in May I discovered an Upton Sinclair book that had languished in a box of old books since I cleared my parent's house ten years ago. No Pasaran! is the story of an American German Jew who went to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Upton Sinclair wrote this novel with the dual purpose of informing American readers about the events on the Spanish battlefields, as well as warning the rest of the world about the danger that fascism's triumph in Spain would stimulate across Europe. Sinclair's writing is distinguished by that rare characteristic, American Socialism, it references the main political events in the USA including the New Deal.

This book inspired me to dig out Upton Sinclair's World's End series of books and to begin rereading them. There are 11 books that include over 7000 pages to digest. They are less wooden than No Pasaran and I have so far revisited the first two books. They were instrumental in shaping my views as an impressionable teenager. During the year that I was to take my 'O' grade exams, I read the books as an interesting alternative to revising. The black covered hardbacks with red titles had been gifted to my father during the war by an army major. They were always shelved prominently in the living room. The World's End series embraces the period from the outbreak of the Great War to the rise of Hitler through the eyes of  Lanny Budd, a wealthy young American. He spends much of his childhood and youth in Europe before becoming a geographer and art dealer. His contacts include many of the key political actors of the period including President Woodrow Wilson, whom he works for during the negotiations to establish the League of Nations. The books provide a fascinating account of the outbreak of the Great War, the machinations of the munitions industry, the 1929 crash, the New Deal and the rise of fascism in Europe. The books must have had quite an effect on me and even my 'O' grades did not suffer as a consequence. I hope my second reading inspires similar outcomes.

More fun was John O'Farrell's Things Can Only Get Worse, his latest epistle on the awful effects of the Cameron years. It also contains a pithy critique of Blair's Education policy on the introduction of academies. As a Labour Party activist, he dissembles Blair's obsession with academies with the practical experience of being the chair of school governors. Never have I read such an elegant defence of local education authorities.

I was pleasantly surprised by Jon Sopel, the BBC American correspondent's account of the descent of the American dream. If Only They Didn't Speak English sets out to answer questions about "a country that once stood for the grandest of dreams, but which is now mired in a storm of political extremism, racial division and increasingly perverse beliefs" as the Trump years began to take their toll. It is about time that more BBC correspondents started writing like this. They are obviously under threat of showing no bias in their 'on air' reporting. This strips their reporting of the larger truth and devalues the BBC as an informative source of news. You could never accuse the Channel 4 news of not allowing their journalists to call out injustices when they discover them.