***I’m starting a Backstory non-fiction book group in August. We’ll read a book a month, then join the author for a Zoom Q&A. Sign up here for more information***
Our picks this week
Big Apple, bigger secrets: Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber. In this wry collection of interconnecting stories, everyone in New York has a secret, and all of their secrets are connected to each other - pull on the thread of one, and everything else unravels. While some characters’ accounts of themselves are more engaging than others, it’s still satisfying to untangle the web. - Tara
Muse alert: Alison by Lizzy Stewart. “I had always worried - all my life perhaps - that I had no personality.” In the hopes of “fast-tracking” to an ordinary life, Dorset girl Alison Porter marries young, but quickly feels bored and isolated by domesticity. After an encounter with Patrick Kerr - a charismatic artist - at her local library, Alison leaves for London to be his lover, muse and pupil. There she finds friendship and her own artistic style – but must also navigate her fraught relationship with Patrick. “I can never quite condemn him; he gave me my entire life.” It’s refreshing to read a graphic novel, and this is one I savoured because the illustrations are lovely. – Dani
When life gives you Limon: The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon. Limon’s robust, unselfconscious poetry sticks a pin in her moments of realisation about relationships and the natural world, and cultivates them into a deeper understanding of herself, and us. Even if you don’t like poetry, you might like its clear-eyed exploration of sensitivity and vulnerability. - Tara
Yesterday’s stall bestsellers (excluding newspapers!)
House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries by Alan Bennett
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland
The Trio by Johanna Hedman a gorgeous-looking new novel I’m going to take on my own holiday
This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes new in paperback
Red Sauce, Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey by Felicity Cloake
Earlier this week, on the Night of the Long Resignation Letters (heavy heart, profound regret, proud to serve, soul-searching, national interest etc etc), one of my new customers replied to a tweet of mine, asking if I was missing the newsroom on what the tabloids would call a day of high drama. Thinking about it, I suppose I was, a little. There is nothing like a bunch of cynical hacks hushed as they crowd round the office telly to watch a moment of history before going off to file its first draft.
But the odd thing was, I hadn’t thought about it. The question really hadn’t occurred to me until his tweet. In part, that might be because the kind of journalism I loved most - seeing big events through small lenses - usually meant I was nowhere near the office TV when something momentous happened. I’d be in a town hall in Grimsby, as I was the night the red wall crumbled. Or in a swimming pool cafe in Belgium retracing the steps of a Syrian refugee training for the Olympics, as I was when I heard that Jo Cox had been shot. The morning the Brexit result came through, I was in a town in deepest Devon, ready to write a piece about how staunch Leavers were taking their loss. A 5.30am call from the news desk - “when can you be in Northern Ireland?” - meant I spent that particular day of high drama in a taxi, two trains, a plane, a train and then, surreally, having a pint with the son of an IRA man in a pub by the Foyle.
It’s bigger than that, though. It wasn’t as if I had a sudden urge to crash the nearest garden party to canvass support for various runners and riders, as I did during the last Tory leadership contest. In fact, this is the best example so far of something that has really surprised me over the past four months: how easy I have found it to leave behind what I had thought of as not merely a job but a vocation.
None of my friends or family were ever surprised that I became a journalist. Some of my earliest memories are of watching TV bulletins with Pop, who died when I was seven, and, later, with my granddad Brian, who I can still remember took the Independent on weekdays but the Telegraph at weekends. I set up a school magazine, proudly trawling the Charity Commission accounts in order to reveal the headmaster’s salary, and edited a student newspaper. (Perhaps an early clue that this was not my only calling, though, is that as an eight-year-old I used to buy The Sunday Times from the garage and sell the supplements to my parents.)
So of course I loved the real thing. The moment, early in my career, I sent my editor a long and involved pitch for a story involving lots of travel and she just replied “Do it”, leaving (trusting!) the logistics to me. Turning up at a Texas jail and being ushered inside as “the man from the Washington Post”. And of course the thrill of seeing your copy in print the next morning (let’s be honest: online never felt the same).
But the longer I did it and the better I got at it, the more I began to think writing was not a thing I could do but the thing. In retrospect, I think this is probably why a foreign posting that didn’t work out a few years back affected me so much: it was not just that I doubted that I could do that particular job, but the job in general. And if I couldn’t do the job, who was I?
There are little things I have found freeing about the last few months. Deleting the BBC News app from my phone and therefore no longer rushing when I hear it ping. Engaging with the news on my terms rather than its (which means being old-school and reading papers again, rather than refreshing Twitter every five minutes).
The biggest thing, though, is both simple and profound: the fact of doing something else means that I can do something else. It’s fun waking up every morning and doing a task for the very first time, whether it is figuring out how to run a market stall or persuade a publicist that you can be entrusted with their big-shot author. It’s also liberating, knowing that after 11 years on one track, you can be purposefully engaged on another just four months later.
People sometimes ask if I might go back to journalism. And I might. But I think it’s just as likely that if this didn’t work out, I would do something else entirely. And, oddly, knowing that that is possible makes it much easier to throw everything at this.
Gosh, that got serious. Buy a book, maybe?
Tom
Your recommendations so far
Lots of you responded to the call to stock my bookshop! Thanks so much. Here are a handful of your recommendations so far. If you haven’t already, please do recommend a few here - they can be any category of book, you just have to have loved them and want to recommend them to a friend. 150 or so down, 4,950 to go!
The Hunters by James Salter. An exceptionally good young-man-goes-to-war story. Cold, clear writing - Hamish
The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice by Judith Mackrell. All the romance, hedonism and crumbling majesty of 20th century Venice packed into one book. Mackrell follows the lives of the 3 residents of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni as they make their respective marks on one of the city’s most iconic buildings. - Sarah
A Legacy by Sybille Bedford. The book is a girl's coming of age - in a sense. And the girl is Bedford, also in a sense, because this walks the tightrope between fiction and memoir. But it is southern France between the wars and it is extraordinarily well written. - Nina
Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid. Such a fun read, seriously. Tackles identity, racism and love by a first-time Black American author. - Sakhr
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. A story of love, identity and purpose set during the Spanish Civil War. The Old Man and the Sea may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but in my opinion this is Hemingway’s true masterpiece. - Cal
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk is famous for his more political books that create controversy, but this one's quite different and his best. My Name is Red is a murder mystery in 16th-century Istanbul. The prevailing themes are loyalty, love, the meaning of art and craftsmanship. As usual, there are a lot of thoughts about the east-west and the blending of the two. I enjoyed the fact that each chapter is narrated by someone (something) else, a corpse, a colour (red), a coin and (one of the best) a dog. Pamuk is a craftsman as much as an artist and this book is a great example of what I mean by that. - Emin
Hi Tom,
As someone who only ever wanted to be a journalist, became one, then left it after 13 years, I know how you feel.
The thing is, you might have left the paper, but you’ll never leave writing - as your excellent newsletter shows. And to be honest, writing without HAVING to write is a very freeing thing.
Dead chuffed to see Orhan Pamuk in your recommendations but your correspondent is wrong - The Museum of Innocence is Pamuk’s masterpiece.
However, I’d hope both books will be represented in what should be a section in your bookshop of translated fiction: I’m thinking Roberto Bolaño, Mario Vegas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Valery Grossman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Proust… I could go on!
All the best,
Howard
This made me smile, like - a lot:) I was a radio journalist for 25 years, I adored it, I thought myself lucky for finding a vocation when I was very young, and thought I'd never leave. And then, I left. it's been 8 years this month, and I never looked back. So many new things happened to me (including leaving journalism in general), and also, I learnt that not because I quit it means it never happened, it's a part of me and no one can take it away. Also, I would like to open a bookshop, but that's for another time :) :) wish you all the best :)