TPQ: What are you currently reading?
JÓN: I usually have a couple of books on the go at once - I've started Stephen Fry's Heroes (about Greek mythology) but not really got into it yet. I'm also re-reading Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946-54. I think he first published it in 1961 but then brought out a 1964 edition, which is what I have. He updated it to reflect on how the early American experience in South-East Asia appeared to have taken no notice of the strategic and tactical failings of the French. Fall was born in Austria (but his nationality is usually given as French-American), he fought in the French resistance in WW2 and later went on to combine lecturing in International Relations with working as a combat journalist. In that role he observed events in Vietnam, Laos and elsewhere in south-east Asia from 1953 onwards. He was killed by a landmine while accompanying a US marine patrol in 1967 and was literally dictating notes into a tape recorder when the land mine exploded. His other books on Vietnam and south-east Asia are great - Fall immersed himself in his subject like Hemingway did and kind of pre-figures the New Journalism style of later American writers on Vietnam like Michael Herr (who almost all cite Fall as an influence at some point).
TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?
JÓN: Suppose it depends on what you mean by best and worst. Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation is a phenomenal work but completely depressing so you could call it both. For some reason (and I know this is an entirely masculine perspective on literature/value) the impact of the experiences and contradictions of modern warfare has prompted some great writing - such as books that came out of the American war in Vietnam as memoirs, New Journalism etc - Chickenhawk 🔖Dispatches 🔖 If I Die in a Combat Zone 🔖 Bright Shining Lie etc. But in terms of books that do achieve something, to me the best is Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness about Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor. It's a horrific subject, but Sereny probes the why and how people participated in the Nazi extermination programmes (around the same time as historian Raul Hilberg was describing the where and when - Hilberg features a lot in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah). Sereny's book is an exploration of control, power, injustice and brutality that seems driven by a need to create an understanding that we can draw lessons from for the future rather than the polemic it could easily have become.
JÓN: I usually have a couple of books on the go at once - I've started Stephen Fry's Heroes (about Greek mythology) but not really got into it yet. I'm also re-reading Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946-54. I think he first published it in 1961 but then brought out a 1964 edition, which is what I have. He updated it to reflect on how the early American experience in South-East Asia appeared to have taken no notice of the strategic and tactical failings of the French. Fall was born in Austria (but his nationality is usually given as French-American), he fought in the French resistance in WW2 and later went on to combine lecturing in International Relations with working as a combat journalist. In that role he observed events in Vietnam, Laos and elsewhere in south-east Asia from 1953 onwards. He was killed by a landmine while accompanying a US marine patrol in 1967 and was literally dictating notes into a tape recorder when the land mine exploded. His other books on Vietnam and south-east Asia are great - Fall immersed himself in his subject like Hemingway did and kind of pre-figures the New Journalism style of later American writers on Vietnam like Michael Herr (who almost all cite Fall as an influence at some point).
TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?
JÓN: Suppose it depends on what you mean by best and worst. Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation is a phenomenal work but completely depressing so you could call it both. For some reason (and I know this is an entirely masculine perspective on literature/value) the impact of the experiences and contradictions of modern warfare has prompted some great writing - such as books that came out of the American war in Vietnam as memoirs, New Journalism etc - Chickenhawk 🔖Dispatches 🔖 If I Die in a Combat Zone 🔖 Bright Shining Lie etc. But in terms of books that do achieve something, to me the best is Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness about Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor. It's a horrific subject, but Sereny probes the why and how people participated in the Nazi extermination programmes (around the same time as historian Raul Hilberg was describing the where and when - Hilberg features a lot in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah). Sereny's book is an exploration of control, power, injustice and brutality that seems driven by a need to create an understanding that we can draw lessons from for the future rather than the polemic it could easily have become.
Worst book - Ulysses. Sorry. A hugely technical reading exercise. There was a copy lying on a bookshelf at home that I tried reading two or three times and I never got past a bus ticket stuck about 60-70 pages in (turned out that was as far my mother had got too). I eventually did read it, though. A whole subculture of academic and literary elitism has built up around it as a form of classist intellectual and cultural gate-keeping that just completely underwhelms me (Flann O'Brien has a great short story pre-empting all that and ridiculing Joyce - A Bash in a Tunnel).
TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?
JÓN: Probably a Science Fiction anthology book that I got for my 11th birthday (I only remember that as I still have it and the date is on it). It includes entry level introductions to a range of authors like Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Mack Reynolds, Harry Harrison, Stainless Steel Rat, Murray Leinster's Enemies in Space, Valentina Zhuravlyova and Katherine MacLean. I'm not a big sci-fi reader and never really read comics/graphic novels but I read a good bit of sci-fi as novels when I was younger. I think it's a bit like travelling - it broadens your horizons, expectations and encourages creativity. And I think if you were reading it in your teens in the late eighties/early nineties, there is now something familiar in the kind of dystopian world created by the rapid socio-technological changes since the 1990s.
TPQ: Favourite childhood author?
JÓN: Pre-teens I don't really remember. In my early teens I liked Asimov's Foundation books and read Tolkien, Douglas Adams and that sort of thing. I was lucky to have had parents and a lot of great teachers and other adults around who instilled a great love of books and reading. We lived close enough to Chichester Library (off the Antrim Road), so I read a lot of whatever history books it happened to have and pulp fiction (war novels, like the GI Joe novels pitched at kids and that sort of thing). I don't really remember being a devotee of any particular author - I went through phases of reading books by likes of PG Wodehouse, Tom Sharpe, Terry Pratchett and Irish short story writers (Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, Seán Ó Faoláin etc), largely dictated by what the local library had.
TPQ: First book to really own you?
JÓN: There's a few books that I remember reading and thinking how great they were (I'm not self-aware enough to say if they really 'owned me') - like Bulgakov's, Heart of Dog, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing, Primo Levi's If This Is A Man, Liam O'Flaherty's Return of the Brute and Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris. Funnily, I think Orwell is much more of a public school dilettante and a lot less of a intellectual heavyweight than people usually credit him for - but the observational story-telling in Down and Out about people living in poverty is, I think, more eye-opening than the likes of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (it largely plagiarises Huxley's Brave New World which was itself a rip-off of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We). However, I'm not really sure I enjoyed any book as much as when I first read At-Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien). O'Brien's books are hilarious and can flit from mimicking a black and white western movie, to dialogue in Latin or Irish, to Irish mythology and jokes that rely on knowing an eclectic mixture of these and more (not knowing these isn't a problem as most editions include annotations).
TPQ: Favourite male and female author?
JÓN: Didn't realise this until I went to answer the question - Ryszard Kapuściński (he wrote some phenomenal books like Imperium 🔖 The Shadow on the Sun 🔖 The Emperor) and Gitta Sereny.
JÓN: Didn't realise this until I went to answer the question - Ryszard Kapuściński (he wrote some phenomenal books like Imperium 🔖 The Shadow on the Sun 🔖 The Emperor) and Gitta Sereny.
TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?
JÓN: I read way more non-fiction than fiction (when I do go for fiction recently it's the likes of Kurt Vonnegut but I do usually get around to what everyone else is reading too, like Stieg Larsson or Dan Brown or whatever).
TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?
JÓN: Primo Levi's books on his experience of the holocaust are eye-opening - If This Is A Man. In recent years, though, the one that came to mind first as a great read was Peter Hook's autobiographies covering his time in Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures. The follow-up, Substance is great too. It's a working class voice wryly observing a journey through Thatcherite Britain, Reagan's America, post-punk music, electronica and sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Hook is a great storyteller and doesn't shy from presenting his own behaviours in a bad light. And it's couched in a sort of Situationist political sensibility.
TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?
JÓN: The American historian, anarchist and activist Howard Zinn. His audiobooks mean you get to hear his work in his own voice too, which is even better, so reading them is less enjoyable. His acceptance speech for Le prix des Amis du Monde diplomatique in 2003 encapsulates what I like about his work:
I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win... I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.
TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?
JÓN: Jesus, why anyone would be doing that? Ok, for the sake of it, if I'd to pick a book - it'd be Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran. Tim died with Covid last year - he was an English cartographer, artist and writer, also a Gaeilgeoir. Stones of Aran comes in two volumes - Labyrinth and Pilgrimage. It's a journey around Inis Mor in the Aran Islands that fuses great storytelling with natural history, geology, archaeology, history, folklore, the sea and the land, social history, politics, ideology and art. What's not to like.
Book Benches In Bulgaria |
JÓN: Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings, 1700-2000 by Claudia Kinmonth.
TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?
JÓN: Baz Luhrmann was supposedly making a film of Mikhail Bulghakov's The Master and Margarita. There are various film versions but not a full film in English. It's a great novel, as is Heart of a Dog - which is the gateway drug for reading The Master and Margarita. I don't know what it is about Russian literature but there is something very familiar (maybe it's just universal) in the themes all the way through 19th/20th century, like Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov - and the forms - novel, short story, plays etc.
TPQ: A "must read" you intend getting to before you die?
JÓN: The First 100 Years: An Autobiography' by John Ó Néill! I've not read Anna Burns' Milkman yet. I probably need to read more fiction again, and reading back through those answers - more female writers.
Good to see a few books on the American War in Vietnam mentioned. I have read all those above, except Fall's which I have here. I have heard many good things about it so will need to bump it up the list.
ReplyDeleteI will also have to get round to reading Primo Levi.
John has a frighteningly similar taste to mine. The only exceptions being books like Dan Brown's or Larsson's. I tend to steer clear of popular fiction, although I do make exceptions. Attempting Dan Brown's Angels and Demons was one of the catalysts which drove me away.
"Orwell is much more of a public school dilettante and a lot less of a intellectual heavyweight than people usually credit him for"
ReplyDeleteAnd I thought it was just me that thought that . . .
Thanks for a thought-provoking list.
Some people need to get out more
ReplyDeleteYou've certainly got my number there.
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