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A lot of stuff that gets nominated for the Booker is so far up its own arse, you need a torch to read it. Why do people feel the need to describe everything in minute detail? Just get on with the story and leave the artistry to the poets, who’ll achieve a greater effect with far fewer words. I shouldn’t be too disparaging. It’s all subjective, of course. But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and ‘Middlemarch’ damn near killed me.
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I have such a strange memory of my childhood and teenage years – I seem to have simply blocked out great chunks of it. I do remember feeling terribly inadequate during my teenage years. Everyone else seemed to know what they wanted out of life, and which direction they were going to go. I just felt…adrift. I was at my happiest when I had my head stuck in a book. Looking back on it now, that may not have been a bad thing.
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Without doubt I have been at my happiest in the small hours after a comedy gig, the audience gone, laughs still echoing from the walls, enjoying a drink with the other comics, mind still buzzing into the night.
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Most of my friends aren’t interested in sport. This doesn’t mean that I don’t talk about sport to them, but it does mean that, if I am in a pub and I’m talking about sport I have to try and make sport interesting to people who don’t like it. Also I talk about other things. Like tuna ranching, mermaids and the mysterious deaths of Earls.
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Its feels somewhat banal to say ‘I love history’ – but I do. Yet like most history readers, there are eras and topics I avoid or have no interest in whatsoever. For me, Russia is one such topic, so being asked to review Conspirator: Lenin in Exile I almost said no. I changed my mind when I realised Helen Rappaport was the author.
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Toska. It’s the Russian word for longing – a particular kind of longing, of nostalgia for home and country and one’s own. It’s what all Russian exiles suffered from.
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