In this ‘Bookshelfie’ blog, we are delighted to feature book recommendations from Mr Andrew Dodd, a St Mary’s Calne current parent who read English at Hertford College, Oxford, and now works as Worldwide Communications Manager for one of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s storage divisions. Although his job is very IT focused, he still has a love of books and reading!
So many books, so little time in which to read them. Here are just a few of the ones that stuck out as I prepared my Bookshelfie!
Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch by George Eliot ‘one of the few novels written for grownup people‘ but I think she could also have written ‘growing people‘ and her comment would have been no less true.
That’s because Middlemarch is a novel that seems to change as we become older. My recent experience of reading it again, in middle age, was very different to reading it for the first time at seventeen. I encourage younger readers not to be deterred by this but to dive in; it will be a gift for life, a way of measuring your own growth, as indelible as the rings of a tree. Seen through older, and hopefully wiser, eyes, the dreams, fears, expectations and disappointments of its characters affected me very differently. But what also surprised me on re-reading were the jokes! Middlemarch is rightly praised for its psychological realism but few critics talk about how funny it is or how George Eliot, in her own elegant way, can be as merciless with self-deception and human weakness as more renowned satirists like Balzac or Dickens.
I really enjoyed the clever Everland by Rebecca Hunt, one of those novels that unfolds its secrets with satisfying precision. It’s a dark, elliptical story describing the fates of two expeditions to the Antarctic, separated by a mystery that spans a hundred years. The echoes of the past colliding with the present in such a wild and unforgiving place provide the perfect setting to reveal a great deal about human character and vulnerability. And as that sense of vulnerability increases, so, inexorably, does the tension. Is Nature as impersonal as we think she is?
The terrible death of George Floyd, and many other Black Americans, has been a violent challenge to many people’s assumptions about race and racism. The extent to which we have been here before is sadly evident from reading Tom Wolfe’s great American masterpiece, Bonfire of the Vanities. Written and set at the pinnacle of the financial boom of the 1980’s, where stratospheric wealth and begrudging poverty collide, it’s a dazzling and still deeply relevant exposé of attitudes towards money, race, class, power and privilege, in which nothing, nor anyone, is as straightforward or obvious as they may seem. Wolfe’s novel is often compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby since both describe East Coast society at the end of different eras, but in my opinion nobody captured the voice of a city and its people better than Tom Wolfe. The energy of his writing, and in particular, his wonderful dialogue, fizzes like a Tarantino movie. Too bad that the actual film of the novel was such a turkey!
I hesitated to add another Victorian novel to my Bookshelfie but Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s great tragic novel, will always be special to me because of the passion of Hardy’s poetic language. And arguably, Tess is not really a nineteenth-century novel at all; its sympathies are far too modern and progressive for its era. And finally, running out of space, and to neatly close the loop, I would recommend a recent mystery novel, The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry precisely because it so beautifully evokes the Victorian period and contains some of the most profound descriptions of feeling, expressed through nature, I have encountered in a long time. It’s a wonderful holiday read.
