Summer Reading
Ash before Oak - Jeremy Cooper
After July heatwave, August meh.
Ventile Jackets and boots at the ready.
The weather is unpredictably, exactly as would have been expected if I’d actually thought about it.
Forget the week between Christmas and new year, this, this faux hibernated August lull, is the weirdest time of year.
When life, sort of stops and is replaced by periods of forced jollity, forced moments doing things you spend all year trying to avoid midweek, your good habits disappearing in a cloud of fire pitted smoke.
All the while, thinking, isn’t this bliss, why can’t we live like this all the time? Because it’s boring, stop kidding yourself, deep down you can’t wait for September 1st.
So before some long since dead relative reaches out from the other side to state that boredom is a sign of a lack of intelligence - nonsense – I’ll attempt to lose myself in a book.
Books are my weakness, I mean I have a problem.
But, August is the perfect time to indulge and feel less guilty.
So below is a list, of the things I’ve read this summer, perhaps potential suggestions if you’ve escaped or are stuck here on this damp isle.
Some I’ve read for the first time, others are ones I come back to at this time of year. Most fall under our Purposeful Activity British criteria, a couple don’t but are either works of genius or in part mention the ‘British’ condition. All are available from that wonder, London’s own, Heywood Hill.
The Return - Hisham Matar
The Piranhas - Roberto Saviano
All That Is - James Salter
The Gallows Pole - Benjamin Myers
The Best Of - A. A. Gill
Soho In The Eighties - Christopher House
Some Hope - Edward St. Aubyn
Man with a Blue Scarf - Martin Gayford
Wrote For Luck - Shaun Ryder
Appeasing Hitler - Tim Bouverie
Joe Country - Mick Herron
The Sleepwalker - Joseph Knox
The Map and the Territory - Michel Houellebecq
Barbarian Days - William Finnegan