Right, this page is going to be a proper mess of various later books with not much linking them.
First a weird mention, something I read in the years I mentioned in the CF page (so I DID read books now I realise, advised by a few friends).
Yeah, those days, I read a bit of Philippe Sollers, Cioran, fairly high-brow. Probably too intellectual for me, but I was hanging around with rather clever people.
But I will just mention the following:
Guy Debord: La Société du Spectacle. I think the title is explicit enough about the society we live in, mostly. But the mention is because as I was about to start my ‘professional’ life, during one of the interviews for a big company with HR I was being asked what I was reading, and I mentioned this. Needless to say, it was hard to explain that I was basically applying for a regular job in a world I felt I was not sure to be willing to be fully part of. Well it’s a little more subtle than that, but basically when having to explain what the book was about, I felt I was tripping over myself. Needless to say I didn’t get that job, and one of the accompanying thoughts at the time was that I couldn’t see how I could get a job based on interviews with HR people. In the end (but maybe I’ll do a specific page about working as some kind of blog in what I’m planning to be the second phase of this website once the main ‘pages’ are populated), I did get a job in a very small company (but as consultant in a big company), because the human rapport was easier and I didn’t feel I had to justify my existence or my private thinking. Still amazed I got employed without a break all these years now when I truly could not see me holding a job before I started.
Anyway, the rest of the books below are from later. Not all necessary in any particular order.
JK Rowling. Actually, yes, I might get slaughtered for that but I do/did enjoy Harry Potter. My very kind and lovely niece brought me the first book one day when I was recovering in hospital (so I did read it in French first, and mind you it was still only five years after I’d started working so….), and it was the kind of apparently easy read, no big existential meaning that I needed. As you progress through the books (also I think I saw one or two of the films, hell I saw all of them in the end when I got the DVDs), it all gets rather darker and darker. I am still not convinced that these are truly ‘books for Children’. Never mind wizards, spells and shit, it goes a bit cosmic, and it’s the whole increasing darkness and fight between light and dark that I find appealing. A few years later, I bough the books in English, re-read them all and still very much enjoyed them. So there.
Stephen King. I started with The Shining (I enjoyed the film very much, the book is different but still excellent), and got advised by a people or two on other books. I haven’t got that many of his (maybe five or six?) but The Stand is the other that truly stood out, epic as it is.
Alexander McCall Smith :The 44 Scotland Street series. This is a series of book, kind of tales of a group of people (some come and go) all initially living at that address in Edinburgh. Plenty of interesting character studies, and it’s all full of good atmosphere, it’s the kind of read that can bring a smile on your face in the happy moments, while making you love some characters, loathe others, or pity a few.
Armistead Maupin : Tales of the City series. This in fact actually inspired the former, so in the same vein, but this time based in San Francisco. The context due to the location, environment and culture are obviously very different but it’s also kind of linked to an address (on Barbary Lane) and various colourful characters coming and going, interacting, loving, hating, finding themselves, etc. Entertaining.
Now for a few other books read more recently, and less literature, but more autobiographies or political.
OK I won’t mention Ten Imaginary Years (oh now I have), the Cure story of their first ten years. Yes despite promises, an actual true follow-up never materialised, but it’s obviously a must-own/read book for any respectable Cure fan.
There’s plenty of Cure books, and I haven’t really bothered with them, but I was offered Lol Tolhurst‘s Cured, and it is a very good an enlightening read about the early days of the bands, Lol’s life and struggles with the Cure, and some kind of redemption in the end.
While I’m with musicians’ autobiographies, I read two late last year(2022), from artists I like a lot (or their bands), and their completely different nature makes them interesting.
Stuart Braithwaite‘s Spaceships over Glasgow is an easy read of his journey into music. It really is a lot about drugs excesses, going to concerts, meeting a lot of musicans, and being very often misguided but ultimately kind of living the dream (and sometimes the nightmare). Looks like practically every Scottish band I know gets namechecked somehow. It’s a small world over there. What’s interesting though (from my point of view of trying to understand people’s psychological profiles, in light of recent experiences, other books I’ve read and in fact in light of the book I will mention just below….and read first because I felt it would appeal to me more from the abstracts I’d read) is that it feels like it’s being written by a ‘normal’ person who just had an extraordinary life compared to most of us, gets through some highs and lows, nothing is ever that easy, but does not appear to be truly beset by ‘mental’ issues (again, we all do have some issues at one level or another, but it’s my (possibly wrong and warped) perception sometimes of someone normal going through shit, vs someone with deeper mental issues going through life. Or maybe it’s because men express themselves in other ways. I don’t know. Anyway so, to…)
Miki Berenyi‘s Fingers Crossed. I love Lush (and went to buy my missing records from them after reading this book), but this book really is about so much more than just telling about life in a band. It’s so much more personal, about mental struggles, various forms of abuse, warped relationships, and getting to understand oneself. I can’t relate to everything in it obviously, but somehow, there are bits or aspects that touched me, and it was one of the most endearing books I have ever read (to the point I was led to tweet about it to thank Miki on twitter (and I normally avoid doing that kind of things)), and it finishes nicely. I can’t sum it up now, my tweet itself was probably better, but I did cry at a point or two reading this book (but then I was kind of finishing healing from stuff in a way, the second half of 2022 was kind of joyously emotional in many ways) and at the end. Just a wonderful touching autobiography, not just for fans of Lush.
I could mention many Arsenal-related books and (auto)biographies, but will only do one: Darren Berry‘s Clickbait – Life as a Modern Arsenal fan. Now I do know Darren and have met him a few times (though never really had a proper chat) in pubs around the stadium, and had the odd interaction or two with him on twitter (he is very funny and makes some excellent points), which is obviously why I got hold of this book (and the very good follow-up too). But that would not be enough in itself to justify the inclusion. But this diary of an Arsenal football season is just very well written and endearing. It’s written by a passionate fan, but it’s also written by a man who has his own struggles, sometimes correlated with the Arsenal results, sometimes not. This book has just got the right level of serious, the right level of fun and jokes, the right level of self-awareness (and that’s where the big prowess lies). It’s obviously much easier to follow as an Arsenal fan (no idea if a non-Arsenal fan could actually enjoy this, I would like to hope so), but really, and once more, it’s the psychological/mental aspect that makes a whole part of the attraction, the true struggles and fights within, there’s something very human there, and again, Darren takes just the right distance with himself to make this book neither a piece detached from the personal emotional rollercoaster that is entirely his, nor (at all ) a self-centred book about himself. Just beautiful.
I will finish with a bit more of a political book. Winter is Coming by Garry Kasparov. Not sure exactly how I came to this book (the timing was obviously just a few months after the invasion of Ukraine), I think probably an advert somewhere. But what is striking is that this book was written in 2014, so after the invasion of Crimea, and you can see Kasparov saw it all coming. Reading this in 2022, you can tell this was visionary….although he probably would tell you that if you were IN Russia and involved in politics at the time, it was all rather obvious. This triggered a lot of thoughts in me about political manipulations and in fact, more widely the manipulations of opinions, control, tactics of abuse. Abuse in many guises either personal, political, of narcissistic nature or else, seem to have a lot of common factors if you know where to look. But yeah, whatever else, I found this book quite striking in its predictive accuracy of the events that would unfold eight years later. Plenty of stuff, aims and ideas I found myself nodding to, so I was very impressed.
Jackie Malton : The Real Prime Suspect.
I briefly hesitated whether to put this book in the ‘Crime Fiction’ section or here. Obviously, it is not crime fiction but the link is here, in one of the subtitles : ‘The real-life inspiration for Jane Tennison’. Now, I must admit, as of today, I have not yet watched the Prime Suspect series. I probably should, and I possibly will. Still, in the middle of continuing with the DCI Banks series (and interestingly a few things related in this here book do tally), I decided it was time to read this one. I knew of Jackie through a mutual acquaintance (again, it’s kind of complicated but not really, given who), I heard a lot of good, but as usual with me, I see through my own observations and interactions with people and confront these. And through this and tweets I had seen through the years, I always got the impression that Jackie was a deeply humane person, and that not just through her job, but all she did through the AA, and helping men in prison (only had a vague idea, but the book brought it home), there was an interesting and genuinely kind and positive person there. There are several aspects to this book. Obviously the whole police career, how it came about, the challenge it posed to her, especially in the conctext of the time, the sexism, etc, which makes reading about her experience as a female police officer going up the ranks very interesting. The challenge of her being gay in that context as well. There’s a lot to unpack in this book on that topic, but also the often repeated idea one must never forget (as a fan of crime fiction on television and in books), that in real-life, a lot (most?) of the cases remain unsolved, and that these (‘failures’ or not) are often the ones that mark a police officer the most, the frustration, the regrets, things that clearly affect someone with a deep desire of justice and fairness. But beyond this, it’s actually the couple of chapters at the end, and the epilogue (that is really a chapter on its own), life after retirement, that makes this book so inspiring. The fight against alcoholism, and beyond that, the incredible job Jackie does of helping men in prison, who would not naturally trust her as ex-police officer, try to help fix themselves to some extent. There’s not much point in me trying to talk about this, you only have to read the book to realise the deeply humanist ideas driving Jackie Malton there. Through all her own travails, you can seen the incredible human being in construction, someone who believes in the capacity of humans to voluntarily become better persons, whatever their past. It’s not something everyone believes in (and I believe our mutual acquaintance actually struggles with that idea a lot, and I know how Jackie tried to help her at times, but AA for people with other troubles may not be something that works, for instance), but it’s always something that touches me. And it seems to be at the very core of Jackie’s lifetime work. She doesn’t appear as the supercop, but as as very very human person who got to understand a lot about herself, and eventually believe in what she is bringing to the world. I’m probably not expressing this well enough, but read the book, it’s an easy and interesting read, and you will get it.