Off The Shelf

These are a few recent good reads I've enjoyed during January, in case anyone is suffering shortage of reading matter during the dark winter months. 

"Ooh! It's a new Shardlake..." 

C J Sansom – The Shardlake Series

(Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation, Heartstone)

The research which has gone into these satisfying historical crime novels puts them way ahead of the rest of the genre. The mysteries are set thoroughly into the historical and political context of Henry VIII’s reign, with a wealth of detail that even Philippa Gregory would struggle to match – although arguably Sansom’s love of detail gets somewhat overwhelming in his most recent novel, Heartstone. The books are sequential, featuring the same main characters, but are sufficiently self-contained that you could start anywhere in the series quite happily. The first three – Dissolution, Dark Fire and Sovereign – are the best of the bunch, with standards slipping slightly with Revelation (good, but drawing a little too obviously on Eco’s The Name of the Rose) and Heartstone (where the increasingly-tiresome Shardlake survives the sinking of the Mary Rose), although not enough to make you wish he’d stopped after three. Read it if you like historical fiction, crime fiction, combinations of the two, the medieval period, or history in general. Worth a try even if you don’t.     

Did you see...?

Douglas Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

For anyone who saw the BBC adaptation over the Christmas period – no, the book is almost nothing like it. However, this follows in the fine tradition of most Douglas Adams’ adaptations, including ones done by the man himself, and thus is almost permissible. The book is less well-known than the Hitchhiker’s series, but is quite my favourite of the Douglas Adams canon. In typical Adams style, it features a plot based on an unmade Doctor Who story, several highly-eccentric Cambridge dons, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a dodo, and the beginning of life on earth, as well as the marvellous line: “There is no such word as “impossible” in my dictionary. In fact, everything between “herring” and “marmalade” appears to be missing.” Worth reading if only for the beauty of lines like that.  

Christian reading

Julian Hardyman - Glory Days in the Bible

Somewhat against my will, I’ve found myself rather liking this book. Written by the pastor of a Baptist church in Cambridge which is a hang-out for a third of Cambridge’s CU, it’s an engaging exploration of how Christians can apply their faith to their “non-religious” jobs. Many of us have the sense that we can somehow do our ordinary work to the glory of God – this book articulates this nicely and backs it up with plenty of Bible quotes. The Bible studies at the end of each chapter are probably helpful, if you like that sort of thing; and the chapter on creativity and the arts is worthwhile and written with real feeling. For a relatively easy read, it provides plenty of food for thought.     

Further Off The Shelf recommendations to follow on an irregular basis... If you would like to continue keeping up, please follow my blog (cer52.blogspot.com) 

Fifteen in Fifteen: JK Rowling

10. JK Rowling

Of all the authors in my fifteen, JK Rowling must count as the most successful. Her name, of course, is synonymous with that of Harry Potter. I recently re-read the full series of seven books under the auspices of “research for my blog”, and they remain a masterpiece – cleverly and grippingly-written, with an overarching story strand sustained through all the books, engaging and well-rounded characters and a very believable setting. The threads which make up the books and the characters are sufficiently complex that even now, I can still have in-depth discussions with friends about topics such as the tensions in the Dursley household and why Petunia agreed to take Harry in. None of these things are particularly unusual, but they are a mark of good writing nevertheless.

  However, the Harry Potter series is more than this. I count myself as extremely fortunate that I am one of the generation who grew up with Harry Potter. I read the first book at age 11, before starting secondary school; the seventh book was published in the summer of my first year at university, by which time I was nineteen, two years older than Harry. Nearly everybody of my age that I knew had read and was to some degree obsessed by the books. We all had theories as to what would happen in the next book, and got over-excited with the release of its title or the least snippet of information. We knew someone would die in the Goblet of Fire, and there was a great feeling of let-down when we discovered on reading it it was only Cedric Diggory. We grumbled about Ginny’s relationship with Harry and were somewhat saddened by Sirius’s death. A month before the Deathly Hallows came out, my university friends and I sat round one evening and discussed what might happen in the seventh book – whether Harry would die, whether Snape was evil, what the Horcruxes were – with an intensity usually reserved for our conversations about religion. It was common practice to pre-order the books, and you would have the release date written in your diary months in advance. I never queued overnight to collect my copy at the midnight openings, but my friend and I would race one another to finish the book (she won. Every time), and normal life was suspended until you did. I read the Half-Blood Prince over my friend’s shoulder between opening acts at an REM concert in Hyde Park, and the Deathly Hallows with my cousins when they were visiting. I’m often surprised when people tell me they haven’t read the Harry Potter books, or on attempting to engage them in a discussion about the underlying themes of the books I discover they don’t know them well at all. If you are one of these people, then I’m sorry. This is why.

The Harry Potter books are more than just a well-written series of novels which have since been turned into some very disappointing films. For me, Harry Potter is a cultural context, a common language, an experience shared with the majority of my peers. Whether it’s Facebook quizzes to determine your Harry Potter boyfriend, or a friend providing chocolate to cheer a lot of miserable students up “because chocolate keeps the Dementors away”, we all know what these things mean. A friend who was struggling with practical work was even relieved to be told he was “a bit of a Hermione”. For anyone who hasn’t read the books… well, it’s a reasonably good series of fantasy stories about a schoolboy wizard, with an interesting undercurrent about the nature of good and evil. If it’s not your thing, fair enough. But for anyone who grew up with Harry Potter, these books will always hold a certain magic – a remembrance of an experience that none of us will ever quite get again.

And if there is anyone remaining out there who hasn’t seen Potter Puppet Pals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4