Tower and Town, June 2024 (view the full edition)A Good ReadAll Eng. Lit. graduates are used to being asked 'what job does that equip you for'? (Answer: absolutely anything and also absolutely nothing.) When I did A Level, we sneered at Mr Gradgrind's purely transactional and capitalist view of the value of education, but now we seem to have come full circle. Certainly, Carol Atherton's pupils ask her why she's 'just a teacher', when her qualifications would seem to fit her for a much better paid career. In Reading Lessons she sets out to demonstrate the value in studying literature, requiring as it does that readers engage imaginatively with other lives and concerns, pushing beyond the confines of one's own experience. In other words, to develop the eminently valuable transferable skill of empathy. Devoting chapters to the standard GCSE set texts and drawing on her experience as a teacher, the author 'unpacks' novels, plays and poetry, illustrating what we can learn from the classics and their relevance to current issues. Robert Browning on coercive control? Harper Lee on Brexit? Of course, with a really Good Read you don't, at least initially, notice or want to analyse themes and narrative structures and meditations on whatever. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is packed with ideas of identity and race, colonialism, power and bureaucracy, but it's no way polemical. It's a time-travel thriller romance - I know, but trust me - it's the best book I've read so far this year. The main premise is that the British Government has developed time-travel and is experimentally importing figures from the past. To what end is only gradually revealed, as we meet the characters who are assigned a civil service 'bridge' to support their adjustment to the C21st. It's written with springing, insouciant, fizzing energy, dramatic and gripping, very funny and absolutely heart-breaking. I won't be the only person who spends this summer painfully in love with a 177-years dead Arctic explorer. I really am coming over all Ancient Mariner about this book; I may not have a long beard, but consider yourselves fixed by my glittering eye. It's a terrific novel and will quite possibly be one of the books of 2024. You heard it here first. Just enough room to urge you to read Liu Hong's first novel for a while, The Good Women of Fudi. Friendship, love and tensions between modern ideas and traditional values in Manchu dynasty China. Lovely understated and confident writing. Debby Guest |