The scent of lemons in the air, 

a trace of blood in the soil

Helena Atlee's 'The Land Where Lemons Grow' is beautifully evocative of an ancient Italy steeped in citrus groves and soaked in late evening Mediterranean Sun. I defy anyone not to reach for a 'tart in a citroen' as I like to call the 'tarte au citron' or a sugary lemon cake (ideally drizzled with refreshing limoncello liquer and topped with a zesty blob of gelato limone) during this read. And that's before you get to the oranges soaked in sunsets and the sublime lime.

On the face of it a book about different types of lemon and how they have been grown through history, with a few recipes thrown in, isn't an obvious choice for a right riveting read; so the answer is it's also a well written travelogue, fascinating in anecdote and resonating on a straightforward human level. Take, for example, the reality of lemon growing in Sicily and Southern Italy which was so important and so lucrative that it gave rise to the Mafiosi. They were not, as American ex-pat urban myth would have it, the product of grinding poverty amongst the agricultural peasants but protection rackets set up by a few aristocratic and wealthy landowners.

My favourite though is the bonkers Orange fight in Ivrea. If you ever go please don't forget your red elf hat, otherwise it could end badly.

A week and a bit of reading dangerously

If you felt I was a little mean criticising Mark Radcliffe's perfectly entertaining book below then I guess it's because I wanted a 'list of betterment'; a list of music to listen to from the obvious (Beatles' Sgt Pepper or Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks to the more challenging like John Cage's  4'33" or Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge) to illuminate an era and educate the mind. Andy Miller's The Year of Reading Dangerously is such a book. It is a book about reading - reading for edification, amusement and enrichment. Reading, like travel, broadens the mind. Perhaps even more so because it enables us to learn from someone else's imagination, or experience, things which might be quite dangerous were it not from the distant safety of our sofa, bed or train seat. Spoiler alert: these experiences can still sometimes be quite powerful, even life changing.

Despite being mildly obsessive compulsive I've never suffered from the trainspotter or twitcher's top ten or top 100 list syndrome. If you asked me what my favourite painting, piece of music or novel was I would really struggle because there are so many, they change and it would be rude to leave anyone out. In any case there is always an invidious self-consciousness that leads us to suggest things we don't really like but feel we ought to like or would be more comfortable other people thinking we like. That dilemma is at the heart of this book. It features a list of books put forward by a literature graduate who confesses to having pretended for years that he had read a certain book, or would purchase them because he felt he ought to, without really wanting to read them. Instead he went for the quick fix - the newspaper, the puzzle or the magazine review that allows us to feel educated by second or third hand knowledge. With an increasingly short attention span related to internet browsing the long form book is certainly being challenged - in the same way that blogging challenges traditional journalism.

Well, fear not faithful reader, this book will cure you. It isn't even important whether you go off and read 'War and Peace' or any other of the so-called classics which get a rave review. So does Julian Cope and Douglas Adams. This book works simply on the level of autobiography, social comment, nostalgia (for childhood reading) and life-affirming self-deprecating feel good humour. It will also increase your appetite for reading, for living and maybe even for writing - in whatever form the music of words takes you.

Can't Buy a Thrill

Money can't buy a thrill of excitement and pleasure of re-hearing a long forgotten favourite piece of music that instantly puts you back in the time and place with the people when you first heard it.

According to Wikipedia 'Reelin' In The Years' is a song by jazz-rock band Steely Dan from the album Can't Buy A Thrill. How we love to categorise and how we get it wrong. Personally I wouldn't describe Steely Dan as a band never mind jazz-rock. The combined musical output of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker that went under the name of Steely Dan was performed by a revolving cast of session musicians, some of whom may have also done some jazz-rock. Mark Radcliffe hates jazz-rock but he likes Steely Dan and 'Reelin' In The Years' seemed an appropriate title for a musical memoir covering every year of his life (up to 2009/2010 anyway).

This book is an easy and nostalgic read for music fans of a certain age. I didn't even mind him taking the mickey out of jazz-rock combos like Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra and a few other sacred cows like the Stylistics because I reckon they can look after themselves and I'd rather hear an amusing savaging than bland sycophantic praise any day.

Radcliffe's radio style sometimes suffers from a stuttering rambling delivery but with the written word it all comes out with a flourishing aplomb. Nonetheless there is something lazy about this book (and I don't just mean his inexplicable praise, as a drummer, for 4/4). It is just a list. A top ten. This is what happened in Year X, this is what happened in Year Y and so on. I'd really have liked a bit more of a free-wheeling approach to building up some themes about growing up in the North, the social and political landscape and, crucially, greater depth of musical analysis. This isn't that book. It's a book everyone could, and possibly should, write about their lives and music. Better still make a mixtape/playlist.

Afterword

For fans of trivia, and I don't think you would have got this far unless you were, he berates the specialist music show. Ironic then that he should end up taking over the Folk Show but if someone is going to pay him to do it or to write/buy/read this book then why not? He is a lucky, lucky man. Shame about the hat though.

Bear Sax in the City

Sometimes great things come from unlikely combinations - Sweet and Sour, Laurel and Hardy, Lennon and McCartney, Beauty and the Beast, Sax and the Bear...sorry, run that last one past me again. The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor is a book about a bear that plays the sax? You're kidding, right?

It shouldn't work. It damn near doesn't work sometimes. There are very occasionally some highly creative phrases and spellings but all are clear and perfectly understandable and that is surely the point of language. I just think it's written in jazz by which I mean the writing is in the same style as the music - sometimes slightly bonkers but full of energy and a sense of fun. It reads like a kind of brilliant improvisation between the characters where you are pushed to the edge of disbelief but everything is so realistically and thoroughly narrated that the fact that the basic premise is complete nonsense doesn't matter. It has a surreal and magical quality but is by no means a fairy tale about a cute cuddly type of child's anthropomorphism. The bear feels its wildness and that sense of power and menace is part of his character which makes him a misunderstood slightly grumpy outsider. A bit like a jazz musician then? Yes exactly. It captures what it is like to have a burning sense of an almost spiritual vision of his own nature and music and a fragile sense of being able to interpret it in live performance. 

By the way its' a long book and has a number of fairly detailed musical expositions but don't let that put you off because it doesn't drag; it fizzes along and veers from semi-tragedy to joyous and exuberant humour.

Personally it led me to listening to a lot of referenced material by Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and others, some of which I knew but much of which I could now listen to with a much greater empathy and appreciate the combination of restraint and wildness in it - the way that a tune would be taken and bent out of recognition. This is a fictional biography of a character that is so human and yet bent out of all recognition as a bear to come back and throw fresh light on what it is to be truly human. That's totally cool and that's Jazz.

Good Girl Not Gone

Like any avid reader I tend to let random choices take me to unexpected places. In this case it is Grand Marais, Minnesota and a straightforward kidnap caper called The Good Girl by Mary Kubica. The press seem to equate this novel with Gone Girl which I saw part of the film of recently and am looking forward to reading as I missed the ending. It's thankfully part of a big pile on the bedside table. But this is not Gone Girl and doesn't pretend to be. The similarity is just for lazy journalists and marketers who haven't read either. Sure it's a psychological thriller and it involves a central female character. That's your similarity for you.

I found the style of The Good Girl both fascinating and irritating. The chapters are mostly 2 to 3 pages long. It clearly signposts which character you're reading and where it is on the timeline. There is a fair bit of repetition and making sure you know what's going on. It results in a story that reads like a TV script, which is not helped by the "even Jessica Fletcher could work it out" twist at the end. Nonetheless the shifting moral standpoint, the common humanity and the claustrophobic relationships all make this an efficiently compelling read and the threat of violence is refreshingly restrained rather than graphic and explicit.

Oh boys - read the news but don't dwell on it

The unseen story behind the music is a good read for anyone that appreciates the music of the Beatles - and don't ever trust anyone who doesn't like the Beatles, especially those that say they were more of Rolling Stones sort of a person. 

Hunter Davies' analysis of the Beatles lyrics in 'I read the news today, oh boy' shouldn't work and in many ways it doesn't. Hunter warns us not to over-analyse the Beatles lyrics and this is self-evident. It's the music that counts and without it the book is starved of it's real oxygen. Fortunately I had pretty much every song in my head and by reading the lyrics could hear it play in my memory. Then there's the lyrics. Most of the early stuff is pretty much 'I love you baby - yeah, yeah, yeah'. There's nothing wrong with that because, like early Motown, the music is great and the lyrics incidental.

Then John goes and gets all poetical on us. It's no good blaming LSD. They were always fond of puns, wordplay and visual imagery. Some of the later lyrics are really interesting and I don't just mean the surreal ones but both John and Paul's take on everyday characters. But they were all put together pretty hastily and if the words scanned into the overall rhymes and rhythm then they didn't bother to polish it or dwell on it. George wrote some of the best Beatles tracks but his lyrics tended to be more devotional and emotional than the others. I don't count Ringo. He was my favourite character from the films but his artistic contribution brings back one of John's throwaway comments that he wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. Some say that's apocryphal. Welcome to the world of urban mythology.

What's great about this book is that Hunter was there, hanging out with the Beatles when many of these songs were created. So his memory of things that triggered ideas and songs is priceless. But his insight into events is not matched by his literary analysis. Simple things like going into the deep psychological meaning of INTO written on the beginning of a lyric sheet when it is obvious that it is just a lazy writing of INTRO or just refers to a musical link. Other interpretations are ambiguous to say the least. One of the fun things about song lyrics is being able to interpret them at a personal level in ways that the artist didn't originally intend. I've even heard Paul McCartney do this with his own lyrics where he has enhanced the meaning in interviews beyond what was originally there. So long live the Beatles - in music and cultural history. If you want pop inspired poetry of the time and place try Adrian Henri, Brian Patten or Roger McGough. 

Height and Depth - the drowning of Dendale

Apologies to Tom Blackwell for lightly modifying his excellent photograph of Thruscross Reservoir under license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Reginald Hill wrote the Dalziel and Pascoe novel 'On Beulah Height' in 1998 and it follows the mores and tropes of detective fiction of the time in dealing with the agony of murdered children in a fairly superficial, even entertaining, way. The Depth of this story is not so much in the detection (or having well rounded and flawed detectives which has subsequently become standard in the genre) as having a small glimpse into the child's eye view. This comes in two art forms. The folk tale monster hiding under a stone in Nina and the Nix and Mahler's songs for dead children Kindertotenlieder which (spoiler alert) the abused child wields as a weapon of revenge. Added to this is a sense of the isolated rural North England landscape drowned so that the masses of Manchester (or wherever) can pour it down the sink. As in Thruscross bodies, headstones and a sense of historical continuity are disrupted in the drowning of the fictional Dendale. So much is inevitable to enable the living to go on dying. Just a shame that Reginald Hill is now amongst them. 

PS. If you want to enjoy Hill without feeling the novel is overshadowed by the late great Warren Clarke's TV portrayal of Dalziel then I heartily recommend The Woodcutter of 2010. It will surprise you.

The Last Hundred Days of a Fictional Poet

Patrick McGuinness is an extraordinary man worthy of his own parade of big black cars and well-behaved bystanders waving flags and cheering. In this case it is Ceaușescu's regime and the fall of Communism in Romania that provide the emperor's new clothes and form the background to this well written and entertaining fact based fiction (if you'll forgive that description because it does read like a factual memoir). The writing is delicious in it's own right because of it's precision and grim faced humour. That's because McGuinness is really a poet. But you can't make a living as a poet. So by profession he is an academic. He presumably does this fiction lark as a semi-lucrative diversion. That's really annoying - that he can invade other people's memories, other people's countries and other people's professions and be so exquisitely expressive in all of them.

The old maths teacher tortoise drawling, stretching and fainting in coils

There's a lot of nonsense written about Lewis Carroll's Alice stories so I don't intend to add to it here. I recently re-read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the extended version in Alice's Adventures under Ground and Through the Looking Glass and probably enjoyed them less than you'd think so I have only a few simple observations.

There's a tendency to see Charles Dodgson's life through a contemporary looking glass whether that's unhealthy relationships with children or sixties drug induced psychedelia. This is, as I say, complete nonsense. 

What comes through most strongly in my reading is a profound other worldly imagination that is wild and wonderful and also curiously Victorian and moral in its outlook. Don't look here for deep characterisation - you won't find the inner turmoil of a modern psychological fantasy. So it is difficult to identify strongly with the characters, even, or especially, Alice. Dodgson's note about the stories is steeped in very conventional Christian feeling and sentiment. What he wanted to do was entertain and amaze small children. This he does mesmerically in concept and comes up with great images and some really natty one liners in dialogue which continue to amuse adults. In this regard these books contain strong visual imagery and some poetry. The facsimile edition show his own original illustrations which are just as good as the brilliant John Tenniel illustrations that we all know and love (and that I have attempted to match with the Duchess above).  But they ain't novels. They're just not.

Heroes and villains

Is your view of early flight a series of comical errors, as naive experiments that more often than not went wrong or as as a bunch of courageous and incredibly skilled individuals to whom we owe the fact that modern air travel is still a statistically safe way to swallow up huge distances quickly and efficiently?

Bill Bryson's One Summer America 1927 captures all aspects of this story from the downright stupid to the breathtakingly adventurous to the scandalously eye boggling. Did you have the American government down as committing mass murder on their own population - never mind others? Thought not. Read the section on prohibition. Al Capone and the bootleggers come out looking like public servants. I must admit the sexual exploits of Babe Ruth (or was it rounders, sorry baseball) got a little dull during the score reporting but that's a homage to Bill's Dad who was a sports journalist in Des Moines (after all someone had to be).

Star of the book is undoubtedly Charles Lindbergh. I can't say I got to understand him in any meaningful way because he is an extremely enigmatic figure who endured extreme fame, personal tragedy and political error of judgement in equal measure. But what a pilot. It's wrong, of course, to ascribe celebrity status to one individual amongst so many who tamed the skies and pushed flight into the twentieth and twenty first century. But then again this is what this book is about: an extraordinary moment in time with a whole cast of characters you really couldn't invent.

Unspeakable experiments

Yesterday I visited Uppark, the house where the young HG Wells' mother was Housekeeper and father was Gardener. This was no idyllic Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey environment and Sarah was eventually dismissed for gossiping about the Featherstonhaugh family. Standing below ground level in the servants quarters with little windows above head height where you can occasionally glimpse the ankles of the rest of humanity you really get a sense of the unseen workers scurrying around in the tunnels to support a few lucky to be born into a different life. Read the young Bertie's Tono Bungay for more direct commentary on Uppark. But what interests me is how that social and moral conflict between two very different views of society is expressed in other contexts like the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine and the men and beasts in this little horror show.

In some ways this story has dated less well than some (and he really was prolific) because it contains elements of Victorian style melodrama and fear of exotic unknown places where Johnny Foreigner got up to unspeakable things with the natives. But, of course, in other ways it is enormously prescient and raises all those issues of scientific, medical and biological advances and the balance of motivation and benefits. For those of you who haven't read it I won't add any spoilers here but it's a fun little potboiler and acts as an invitation to read some of his more obscure and less known stories many of which are out of copyright and freely available on the web.

The Invisible Man reads in parts like a penny dreadful Victorian newspaper report but there is no doubting Wells' ability to explore fantasy in an engaging realistic way by setting it in contemporary society. He captures the foibles of crowd behaviour but also the corrupting nature of power rested in a single individual.

The Time Machine is probably the best story of this set I read (I'll get around to War of the Worlds shortly). Although it is based around a single individual narrative voice again it contains enough room for a more episodic development and a look at different types of society in different times - both Victorian and fantasy future. There is even space for some post-apocalyptic descriptive dream-like passages. Whereas some of Wells' stories a bit slight, and you can see why they have the novella depth that appeals for film adaptations, the Time Machine is fully rounded in both forms. Which brings me back to Uppark. It is frightening to stand underground there, in the servants' quarters, and think of the people that devoted their working lives so that a lucky few could pass the time in vacuous indolence.

A seed contained within

I picked up Christian Cantrell's debut novel free on Kindle so I didn't have any great expectations but it was sci-fi. I love sci-fi. Don't I? Do you?

Initially I struggled with this book and it reminded me that good writing is highly readable in any genre and you should base your choices on that. I'm not really a great fan of genres anyway and would much rather bookshops were simply arranged alphabetically so that you could come across delightfully weird surprises in sci-fi and fantasy sandwiched between the ghostwritten 'autobiography' of a footballer and a guide to making chocolate crepes.

One reason I struggled until nearly half way through this book (and I always finish a book I've started) was some wilful description of technology for technology's sake (and I speak as a fellow geek). There was also too much focus on a smart ass male lead (and I speak as a fellow smart ass male) who was difficult to care about and consequently excluded the rounded development of other family members and group characters. Then there was the claustrophobia of the setting - a colony struggling to survive in a harsh alien environment which is fine as long as you introduce a dash of gallows humour and you can then feel comfortable in their company. 

But this book deceives on a number of levels and you have to take it in the context of it being a fairly short novel by a writer just starting out with further adventures of the "Children of Occam" already written which address pretty much all of the shortcomings of this debut. If you accept that, and you have a natural predilection for the genre, then this is definitely worth a look. Now many of us are living digitally you get to see the evolution of a writer online and that can be a satisfying progress to follow from the beginning. Also check out his Star Wars toy comics - it will help you in not taking it too seriously as high literature and to enjoy it for what it is - a fascinating idea imperfectly told.

Pride comes before and after a fall

The boys from Turin march out in some natty 1949 shorts. 

In this country the Busby Babes were famous for keeping Manchester United on the world football stage after an horrific plane crash robbed them of most of their talent. Outside of Italy fame has not been as kind to Il Grande Torino, the tactical pioneers of the beautiful game, who were tragically killed on their way back from playing a testimonial in Portugal. 

Amongst the fallen was their manager and coach Erno Egri Erbstein who survived the persecution of European Jews with outstanding courage and some nifty footwork of his own. This biography by Dominic Bliss goes under the slightly cumbersome title of "Erbstein: The triumph and tragedy of football's forgotten pioneer" and brings this era of football to life in a way that is just as relevant to sport, war and politics today. Plus... despite the blow by blow sequence of football scores... it's a rattling good yarn about community teamwork and the galvanising role of individual leadership, determination and flair.

The publisher is Blizzard Books who have a quarterly digital/print magazine specialising in football commentary and esoterica that amply shows football fans can be as erudite and interesting as any pub companion and probably have better jokes than most. The only thing that lets this publication down is the dreadful lack of proofreading that has led to so many typos and words running into each which can be distracting to pedants like me. I know one or two copy editors that are very reasonable cheap if you're interested.

From Rock Bottom to a Knight at the Comicopera

Authorised biographies are compromises - between the writer and the subject, between image and perception, between falsehood and reality. Fortunately Robert Wyatt has been found, and had his beans spilled by, a sympathetic but unsentimental fan (Grasscut man Marcus O'Dair) who is equally interested in the musician, the political observer and the human being. 

It is Robert's pure mischievous childlike originality and his melancholic vulnerability that come across so strongly in this book and, perhaps overdue, the creative symbiosis he has enjoyed with his partner Alfreda Benge. In some ways I would have liked the book to be have named after both of them and included Alfie's childhood and more of her work. Robert is a collaborator who gives generously and it is the musical 'Guest Spot' obscurities in the discography that delight over and above the phenomenal solo work and his key role in Soft Machine and Matching Mole - go stream!

That this unique productive life could have been prematurely interrupted many times is a salutary lesson to us all to value the people who dare to do different. I'm not going to use the phrase national treasure because Wyatt is completely international and stubbornly flawed ...and that is what makes his singular voice so authentic and precious.