Tower and Town, June 2020 (view the full edition)A Good Read'What can you do with a man who says he “has read” [books], meaning he has read them once and thinks that this settles the matter?' C S Lewis said this, and I'm glad he did as I guess that this month most of us are having to trawl our bookshelves for old favourites. I'm a big re-reader anyway, and in this strange and scary time I'm happy not to be surprised by clever plot twists. Fear of the real unknown is quite enough at the moment, I'm happy to know what's coming in the book I'm reading. For long sweeping narratives I've gone back to Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy, which I regularly recommend to customers. I've also dusted off Paul Scott's masterly Raj Quartet, equally huge, a complex and sophisticated, yet still very readable account of the end of Empire. I've just realised that these two, and another old favourite, I Claudius by Robert Graves, have all been adapted into highly successful TV series, probably because they are such great, immersive stories. For 'real' life I've been dipping in and out of Horace Walpole's letters, always good company, and I'd forgotten I had two volumes of Dorothy L Sayers' letters, a very clever (and didn't she know it?) woman, lively and opinionated. The latent romantic adolescent in me remains a sucker for anything Arthurian, so after (yikes!) 40 years, I'm re-reading Susan Cooper's children's series The Dark is Rising. They've worn very well indeed, I'm thoroughly enjoying them. And every few years I go back to T H White's The Once and Future King – learned, funny, tragic in the true sense of the word, a vision of the middle ages as they never really were. Of course in difficult times people feel they want to (or should?) return to the classics, or get some Great Works under their belts for the first time. I'm thinking about re-visiting Tristram Shandy, which I remember loving, and which, for narrative whackiness knocks some of today's bright young novelists into a cocked hat. However, when I went through a low period some years ago, I'm not ashamed to admit that Georgette Heyer saw me through. (Also Tin Tin.) So read whatever will keep you entertained and uplifted. The other stuff will wait for you. What won't wait for me are the six shortlisted books for the Richard Jefferies/WHBookshop Prize for Nature Writing – so I must get on..... .....and the short-listed books for this prize are: Debby Guest |