Today in The Sunday Times, I discuss the books that define Britain. Also I interview Monica Ali.My list of Britain-defining books doesn't seem to be included on the web page. They were:
Various Authors, The Ikea 2008 Catalogue; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth; Katie Price, Being Jordan; Gordon Ramsay Makes it East (With DVD); Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp, How to Buy and House; Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex.
Thought Experimenters suggestions welcome.
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
My first thought is, impossible task - books that define Britain? Looking at your list Bryan I feel you feel the same. Just off to walk the dogs over the rain washed hills and to ponder.
ReplyDeleteHa! Glad you managed to slip Marilynne in to the Ali interview.
ReplyDeleteBill Bryson's Notes from a small island was reasonably well read, and does actually define Britain in a literal sense. Published in 1996, though, so looks like it may have been slightly forgotten.
ReplyDeleteGranted we colonials are usually a generation behind in recognizing the reality of Britain, but shouldn't the list include at least one whimsical celebration of that English eccentricity that has no parallel anywhere? Something from Wodehouse or perhaps Love in a Cold Climate? Or did Blair abolish eccentricity too?
ReplyDeleteA list we could argue about all night, I guess. Nothing on nature and the English landscape (as distinct from natural science and Pevsner on buildings); nothing on the sea, one of the greatest influences of all; nothing on sturdy independence of the Rural Rides kind or even Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle kind; and nothing on the bawdy, vulgar colours of English humour unless one counts Jordan as a stand-in for the Wife of Bath. But I'll admit that much of this looks to the past.
ReplyDeleteI'd wager that the Ikea catalogue is by far the more aspirational and influential but I wonder whether in practice and market size it isn't best by the Argos catalogue. Oh, and to reflect the state's present obsession with cowering behind regulation as a substitute for responsibility, one might, alas, have to include Tolley's Tax Guide.
Thanks for this. A great way to make Sunday a little more lively.
don't do anymore ''essential'' lists. ;oP
ReplyDeleteI was wondering about the choice of Ikea. Why not Conran? Not that I really know much about either. I visited an Ikea store once. Looked at a Conran catalog once many years ago, too.
ReplyDelete1984 really does seem appallingly prescient.
ReplyDeleteJohn le Carre's novels chart the disparity between an idealised sense of English heroism, and the actual grubbiness & betrayal, e.g. The Looking Glass War.
i find it depressing that the only living novelists i really like are American or Canadian, though i did enjoy Amis' Money (but that's a generation ago now).
I'd suggest that anyone who looks at modern Britain and thinks that such horrors as Nectar Cards and High Street CCTV prove that 1984 was 'appallingly prescient' needs to go for a nice lie down.
ReplyDeleteI'd nominate:
1066 And All That
Delia Smith's How to Cook Vol 1
'Because Britain Deserves Better' - New Labour's 1997 General Election Manifesto
Diary of a Nobody
The God Delusion
The Wind in the Willows
The Complete Shakespeare
"Totally Frank: The Autobiography of Frank Lampard" (but only if the foreword is Joey Barton's immortal: "We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like s***. Here's my book.")
Hey Brit, it isn't 1984 yet, but it's heading there. You'll no doubt be dead of cricket-related injuries by the time it's on us, lucky sod.
ReplyDeleteI think you do a slight disservice to Monica Ali in that interview by characterising Brick Lane as a book that offers a 'piercing' look at British Islam. It's so reductionist to represent this novel as being a kind of tract with an agenda, treating it as an 'expose of hidden lives', as if it was first and foremost a sociological primer. It's far more complex and manifold than that.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you ask about why it was named 'Brick Lane'. Apparently, Monica Ali's choice of title was a quotation from a Rabindranath Tagore poem. The publishers suggested that she change it to Brick Lane, more snappy, more hip, more 'gritty', and so on. Thus the 'sociological' imperative is pushed onto another Asian or Black writer, even one as subtle and nuanced as Ali. I think the novel has been misread by many people.
~Pali~
You appear to have read a different article, Pali
ReplyDeleteCheck the headline and introduction to the article Bryan.
ReplyDelete~Pali~
Quite right, Pali, but I don't write headlines and standfirsts
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean you had misunderstood the novel or treated it like a piece of sociology or anthropology Bryan, I was speaking generally. It is quite incredible that a tiny number of pompous 'protestors' could have cast such a long shadow over this novel, film and most of all over Monica Ali, and I think that the media places writers like her in an invidious position, as being in some way a 'cultural mediator'. I just feel sorry for her at the end of the day. Any public figure with an Asian heritage, is somehow expected to be either representative of something or somebody beyond themselves, as explicators or explainers of 'multiculturalism'. It's invidious.
ReplyDelete~Pali~
I don't know if you read this article by Sarfraz Manzoor, Bryan. He says what I'm trying to say much better.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sarfrazmanzoor.co.uk/articles/index.php?id=5
~Pali~
What about Hutton's The State We're In? A great analysis - and almost recent - and very British ...
ReplyDelete