Reading matter - and reflecting on reading in confinement

One of the points of this blog is to share things with friends and family who do not have My friend Caroline in Notts challenged me to nominate my top 10 books - she suggested the past couple of years, but I have stretched this a bit and stretched the number too!   Most of these I’ve read more than once and simply getting them out to photograph them has prompted me to go back to some soon.  I should ass that, although I've photographed all the books for this post, they are not in the order in which I've written about them.  That would have been too difficult, sorry!  

Starting with Dickens, Little Dorrit has a grand and complex plot which starts near us, in Marseille.  Like many of these books it has spawned good tv films, in this case two very different ones  Then  one of a huge series of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels covering the Napoleonic war period and the rise of the Duke of Wellington. Not high art but a great read, and Cornwell is an enthusiast who does his research well.   My second Dickens and probably my favourite, a wonderful romantic tale, David Copperfield.  It’s maybe a bit autobiographical. Then I chose one of Dorothy Dunnett’s series of 9 superb Niccolo books, 15th century fiction across the world and again based on amazingly thorough historical research.  Niccolo started as a dyer's apprentice, but he married the boss and became a grand merchant.

My next group includes 2 non-fiction books: Robert Winder’s study of immigration in Britain, Bloody Foreigners.  This is brilliant, and so current in its theme I just come back to it time and again.  Alongside that, Jan Morris’s classic Pax Britannica, part of a trilogy of the same title, which is cut from the same cloth as the Winder, and just good history, pulling no punches in describing our chequered imperial past, again something to return to often. Trollope’s septet of Barsetshire novels takes us back to the 19th century - the first two made one of our all-time favourite tv series with Nigel Hawthorne as the Archdeacon, and the slithery Alan Rickman as Mr Slope. And one of another series of books, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet which blends fiction into the imperial theme. Such riches.

The next 2 include one of Camilleri’s splendid Montalbano series, equally excellently translated from the Italian, and another indication of our love of detective stories (this also often on tv with Luca Zingaretti, subtitled but we never mind hearing the Italian language!) ; and as a gesture to one of my other enthusiasms, Patricia Atkinson’s autobiography about becoming a winemaker. We visited her near Bergerac and bought some of her delicious (if expensive) Saussignac wine, but the admirable thing about this book is the honest description of the hard work involved in wine making. Mind you, having met her we realised she’d have advantages as an attractive woman in getting the help she needed from her traditionally minded male neighbours!

The final two books I posted on Facebook in response to Caroline’s challenge again represent many more volumes since, like most of the others, each is part of a series - Swallows and Amazons takes me back to my childhood and the simpler world of children, Arthur Ransome’s series of tales of derring do on boats: most set in the Lake District though later we find ourselves in East Anglia, the Norfolk Broads I think. Then another much more grown-up series, Sara Paretsky’s stories of the Chicago private eye V.I.Warshawski. A lot of deep themes around social justice and race equality here tangled with crime and privilege. Sara Paretsky is still alive and a regular Facebook presence, a deeply interesting person in her own right with Jewish and other backgrounds and experiences that inform her writing.

As I was finishing these posts, seeing press stories of cramped unhealthy conditions and restrictions on farm workers supplying supermarkets I was struck by the contrasting images of small-scale self-sufficiency, sometimes romantic, sometimes as with our friend Luc and his garden near Aigues Mortes a practical passion tied to an old family plot on the one hand; and the tough reality and slog of growing things on farms at prices big organisations are willing to pay. Work that only poorly-paid workers from Eastern Europe used to do, but now who knows? Anyway, just now with challenges to name favourite books, and since the best I find often chime with current themes, here’s another one, Marina Lewycka’s Two caravans which  we much enjoyed a few years back.  Her better-known A brief history of tractors in Ukranian is equally entertaining.