Mid-Year Reading Lists 2 – Non-Fiction & Memoir/Autobiography

Posted: June 26th, 2012 | 1 Comment »

And here’s some non-fiction and biography worth the effort…

The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels – Matthew Sweet – every so often a book comes along that you really, really wish you’d had the idea for and gone and done. This is one such. The sheer delight that Sweet must have had in digging up these stories of spies, intrigue, strikes, characters, scandals, con-men, con-women, deposed royals, odd foreigners and debauched all sorts comes shining through. A great read.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love and Terror in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson – Larson rarely disappoints to be honest and this is a great story of the American Embassy in Berlin, the Ambasador and his family during Hitler’s rise to power. How we misread the Nazis too often, how Hitler and his cohorts could hide, dissemble and cajole, how the power and strength of the Nazis could, in 1933, still win over people with its brazenness and seeming renewal of an old and corrupt Europe. We read from hindsight of course, a gift denied the inhabitants of the tale, but still we are thrilled by their realisation of the wonderland cum nightmare they have wandered into. Larson’s now standards ability to bounce around the story and the milieu, the macro and the micro is always enjoyable an page turning.

Darkmarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You – Misha Glenny – the follow up to the great McMafia. But see the thing is geeks and keyboards is only thrilling to geek who like keyboards – the sort of people who like video games and movies like The Net. Normal people find this stuff functional but boring. So Glenny breaks the story down into bite sized chunks and turns it into a Mission Impossible thriller (without the little American bloke with the weird beliefs)B flying around from Silicon Valley to Washington, Mi6 to the FBI, Odessa to, eerr, Scunthorpe! And then it works because just as your eyes start to glaze over with the techie details (which are important and scary for all of us who online bank, ATM etc etc) you’re back in a dingy Odessa basement or a Scotland Yard briefing and pumped again.

Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945 – Neill Lochery – few cities (with the exception of Shanghai) are more fascinating in WW2 than Lisbon (see Robert Wilson’s great Lisbon spy thrillers) – even Casablanca. Lochery’s book is a good overview of how Salazar maintained neutrality, the spy wars between the British and Nazis, the plight of the refugees crowding into the city, the deals fone over the strategically crucial Azores and the ethical problems Salazar and Portugal faced over the Wolfram for Nazi gold deals. Lochery is a serious historian so he doesn’t play up the espionage side of things as much as some others, eerr like me, might.

Colour Me English – Caryl Phillips – Enjoyed the essays that were actually about England but there’s way too much of not that informed, not that original English in New York balls sadly. Basically anyone expecting an analysis of English, Englishness, multiracial Britain should ask for their money back. Better to go back and read Philips’s Foreigners, a set of three superb biographies of Black Britons that was great.

Blood on the Altar – Tobias Jones – Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy is really the book to read if you’re at all interesting in Italy – going there on summer holiday? Definitely read it. Blood on the Altar is the true story of the Elisa Claps murder in Potenza that ended up unsolved and uncovering the links and scandals in the church, government, big families and pretty much all Italian institutions. That it was eventually solved after a bizarre murder in, of all places, Bournemouth once again shows how truth is stranger than fiction.  I spoke at an event at the Hay Festival this year with Tobias and he was great – that’s the enthusiasm and depth of knowledge on Italy you get in this book too.

Venetian Navigators: The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North – Andrea di Robilant – an interesting tale of an obscure map, Venetian explorers and the north country. We’re used to Venetians going east (Mr Polo) but up north is a bit different. Interesting ruminations and observations on the Scottish Islands, the Faroes, Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland, the colonisation of Canada and America and the search for the North West Passage north to Cathay (more my area that).

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World – John Baxter – A gentle flaneur though the streets of Paris in the company of Baxter who’s interests range form literature to art and les apaches to decadent nightclubs. Baxter also likes food and I am a resolute non-foodie but still enjoyed this. Not much deft but a lot of meandering wistful style. I’ll read three of four books a year on Paris and this was a nice starter for 2012.

Memoir/Autobiography

The Man Within My Head – Pico Iyer – a marvellously weaving and snaking book that looks at Iyer’s motivations and travels but always in the shadow of his hero and historical interlocutor Graham Greene who has dogged the writer through his life. Those, like me, who find life without Greene impossible to imagine and view the world as a giant Greeneland will find this an absorbing read that ends too soon.

Yesterday Morning – Diana Athill – Athill’s memoir of her rather privileged childhood in the English countryside in the interwar years is as lyrically delightful yet insightful as her other works. Her musings on first loves, infatuations and affairs are particularly good to read.

West End Girls – Barbara Tate – not the greatest piece of autobiographical literature ever but Tate’s memoir of being a prostitute’s maid in Soho in the late 1940s and 1950s. If she’s telling the truth then the sheer number of clients her girls used to get through were amazing. One book in which the Maltese appear as pimps and ponces – a bit of a minor theme at the moment with all the post-war set novels coming out.

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