Mark Hodkinson - No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review:

Thoughtful and enjoyable

 

I liked No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy a lot. Mark Hodkinson writes very engagingly throughout and I found the whole thing very enjoyable.

The book - and its title especially – presents itself as a reading memoir, which to an extent it is, although there is much more here. Hodkinson grew up in an unliterary, and often anti-literary, working class family in Rochdale. From an early age he loved to read, which was viewed with great suspicion by most of his family and friends. The early section on his discovery of the joy of reading and of the books which brought him that joy is excellent. It is honest, straightforward and down-to-earth, and captures the excitement of books and – crucially – the sheer pleasure of time alone with a book without external demands, which chimed closely with my own experience.

Hodkinson manages to discuss books with no element of showing off or of demonstrating how well read he is, which is a relief. Indeed, later he has some trenchant and, I think, accurate criticisms of the way that a privileged elite still determine what is meant by “well read” and of how that same privileged elite dominates the publishing industry and the “literary” world.

I like Hodkinson’s assessments of many of the books he’s read, too. I don’t agree with all of them, of course – that’s just how it is with books – but he is insightful, thoughtful and independent. He refuses to be cowed by orthodoxy, so when he writes of The Catcher In The Rye (which had a tremendous effect on him when young, as it did on so many of us) he resists the “agenda of cultural revisionism” which deems Holden to be “too male, too white, too privileged, too American, too heterosexual...flagrantly misogynistic…” Hodkinson says, “..social mores drawn predominantly from the 1940sare bound to jar in a modern context; it’s one of the reasons why we read: to understand and interpret the present through the past, how we got here.” Spot on, Mark!

There is a good deal more here, including Hodkinson’s training and career as a journalist, then freelance writer, amateur musician, publisher and editor, with reflections on the state of newspapers, publishing and related matters and a good deal of personal history, most notably the story of his grandfather’s decline into mental illness after a head injury and its effect on the whole family. This is intercut throughout the book and, once I got used to switching in and out of the story, I found it touching and humane.

So, not just a book memoir, but a fine, enjoyable and informative read all round. Warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)