The Librarians Are Reading (Part II)...

My personal reading has its own ebbs and flows -- some days I only want to read to escape, other times its heavy on the non-fiction, sometimes its nothing but biography. As it turns out, my recent reading list has been strongly Anglo-centric. All three of the latest books that I have read were written by English authors with English settings.

Enigma by Robert Harris
When a law librarian colleague needed some brain candy to read during a trip to England she picked up this paperback. Upon her return she suggested I might enjoy it. It turned out to be a quick, enjoyable read. The protagonist is a rather weedy mathematician who at the beginning of the novel is recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by a combination of amphetamines and the stress of cracking the Nazi military codes. As with any good mystery things and people are not as they seem and there are a fair share of twists and turns along the way. There is a love interest, technology (quaint by today's standards) and war-time English atmosphere. The bulk of the story takes place at Bletchley Park, the headquarters for British efforts to master the German's Enigma code. When the Nazis alter their standard operating procedures the team of cryptographers race to save three convoys that are sailing towards a wolf-pack. After finishing it I learned that the novel was made into a film of the same name in 2001. I missed it when it came out and I doubt I'll be seeing it any time soon because Netflix doesn't carry it.

Leopards and Lilies by Alfred Duggan
One of the dangers of wandering through the stacks of Gleeson (the main library on the USF campus) is that a book title might catch your eye and you end up with another book on your bedside table. I had never heard of Alfred Duggan before reading this book but he turns out to have been a best-selling purveyor of historical fiction in the 50's and 60's. This particular novel tells the story of a not entirely sympathetic protagonist who tries to stay on the winning side of English politics in the era of King John. It has all the grime and squalor you would expect of the era along with castle sieges, plots both political and ecclesiastical and a rigid class stratification that remains a part of England to this day. The noblewoman telling the story was married and a mother at 14, widowed soon after, and both a cat's-paw and an instigator in ongoing court intrigues. This is the sort of story that you can read and enjoy in a couple of evenings and learn a little history in the process.

The Book of Dave by Will Self
This is the sort of book some readers will find totally unreadable for many different reasons. First, there is the fact that it jumps from the present to a dystopian future seemingly at random, then there is the impenetrable dialect used in the future setting (a combination of cockney and post-apocalyptic slang), but hardest to take is the unremitting anger and bitterness of the the protagonist, Dave Rudman. Dave is a London cab driver living in present-day England and making a general mess of his life. His decline is both physical and mental; brought on to a large extent by his divorce and loss of contact with his only son. At his lowest emotional ebb he decides to distill all his anger and frustration into the Book of Dave and then ensures that his rantings will be preserved in a form that will outlive most contemporary paper and digital works. The future is set in an England that has been reduced to an archipelago of smaller islands by rising global oceans. The inhabitants of this future England have discovered Dave's toxic screed and have elevated it to the level of scripture. Some of the story is silly (the priests of the future wear rear-view mirrors affixed to their foreheads and view the world as if they were driving a cab) while some of it is chilling (the treatment of children and women in a deeply misogynistic future.) In the end Dave is redeemed in the present but his kinder/gentler second work does not survive to the future and there is no reformation for the followers of the Book of Dave.