What are you reading now?

[teamsaint]

Voices from the Explosion by Valerie Hardy.

I have a special interest in this as the explosion in question took place a few miles from here and my late parents remembered it vividly.

On November 27 1944 an RAF ammunition dump near Burton on Trent accidentally exploded killing 70 people. 4000 tons of bombs exploded and the resulting blast could be heard as far away as Coventry and Northampton and was registered as an earthquake in Casablanca. It remains, to this day, the biggest non-nuclear explosion in the world - yet hardly anyone has heard of it. Wartime secrecy and censorship shrouded the whole thing in mystery and the official story was released only in 1974.

I've been to the village of Hanbury, where it took place, many times but knew nothing of the full story until I read this astonishing book. The people of the village tell their stories of the horrors of that day 70 years ago and it's a gripping read, one of the best I've had for a long time.

For anyone interested here are more details of the disaster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fauld_explosion

And here is the book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Voices-Explo...+the+explosion

I had never heard of this disaster Pet, so thanks for your post. The book sounds excellent.

[cloughie]

Pete Townshend Who I am.

[DracoM]

An Officer and a Spy / Robert Harris.
Spellbinding.

[Petrushka]

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin.

I've read a few Dickens biographies over the years but this is head and shoulders above the rest. A brilliant read.

[Jonathan]

Tom Holt - Doughnut. Very silly and clever!

[Richard Tarleton]

An Officer and a Spy / Robert Harris.
Spellbinding.

At last RH is getting back to finishing his Cicero trilogy - out next year hopefully. He's allowed himself to get a bit sidetracked!

[clive heath]

On a recent visit to Tuscany to pick olives (our labour was not needed because of the fly that has attacked olive trees Europe-wide as you may have read in the papers recently) we spent one of our free days visiting "La Foce", a residence with gardens designed by Cecil Pinsent. We bought there a book "War in Val d'Orcia" which is a diary of the events in and around the villa during 1943/4. As regular visitors to this part of Tuscany (between Montalcino and Montepulciano roughly) it was salutary to read of the deprivations caused by the bombing by the Allies, the Italian political chicanery, the Germans who were turned from allies to occupiers and culminating, after the British had arrived and the Germans were retreating north, in the appalling behaviour of the Goums. Maybe nothing compared to the Blitz but the fortitude and cunning of the owners of the house in giving aid to refugee children from Genoa and Turin, to escaped prisoners of any and all nationalities, and to the farmers on their estate makes for "a gripping read".

I'm also reading on line "Paul Ferroll" by Catherine Clive which was quite notorious in its day. Published in 1855, it could be described as an early sensation novel with a strong element of psychological drama. Muscular damage meant that the authoress had to use a stick to get about from an early age and she was also not a looker. By a Hardy-esque set of circumstances she ended as "Lady of the Manor", the property being Whitfield in Herefordshire, home of descendants of Clive of India. She produced a considerable amount of verse published under a pseudonym ("V") some of which was well received .

[Stanfordian]

I'm reading the most stunningly amazing endurance story I could ever imagine. It's a true WW2 story about Jan Baalsrud a British trained Norwegian soldier escaping from the Germans. It's titled 'Escape Alone' (a perfectly fine children's edition) or 'We Die Alone' by David Howarth.

[Petrushka]

I'm reading the most stunningly amazing endurance story I could ever imagine. It's a true WW2 story about Jan Baalsrud a British trained Norwegian soldier escaping from the Germans. It's titled 'Escape Alone' (a perfectly fine children's edition) or 'We Die Alone' by David Howarth.

My goodness, I read this as long ago as June 1968 possibly in the children's edition you name. I re-read it in the adult version last year and it is indeed the most incredible escape/endurance story imaginable.

[aeolium]

I'm currently reading Nairn's London, a book of impressions about London and its buildings derived from Ian Nairn's travels through it in the 1960s. It reads like a piece of cultural history now, with so many of the places he describes having undergone complete transformation, but is still interesting for the picture it paints of that city and that time and also for Nairn's idiosyncratic approach, intensely interested in the unusual, the characterful, the personal, the communal life of buildings and places (including not a few pubs). Nairn was a sort of early forerunner of Jonathan Meades in his approach (and Meades is a great admirer of his work), though his prose style is more earthy and punchy than Meades', with unpredictable insights and arresting phrases. I recommend this, especially to those who knew and lived through the London of that period as I did not:

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/ian+nairn/nairn27s+london/10849505/

[Pabmusic]

I read Joseph Conrad's Typhoon after our recent typhoon. I'd read it in my teens, but not since. I've just finished Outcast of the Islands.

[Anna]

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin.
I've read a few Dickens biographies over the years but this is head and shoulders above the rest. A brilliant read.

It was serialised by R4 a couple of years ago and, this may be of interest to some, it's to be repeated from December 29th on R4Xtra. Have you also read the Peter Ackroyd biography? I ask because I dithered about buying it and decided against..

[Globaltruth]

Paracelsus, Selected Writings, edited by Jolande Jacobi.
First time it's been out of the library since 1951.
I can't imagine why.

[Petrushka]

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin.

I've read a few Dickens biographies over the years but this is head and shoulders above the rest. A brilliant read.

Finished this a couple of days ago. Great read but she does give some of the novels a bit of a critical pasting. I came away admiring the life but not that enthused about picking up the novels if truth be told.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Finished this a couple of days ago. Great read but she does give some of the novels a bit of a critical pasting. I came away admiring the life but not that enthused about picking up the novels if truth be told.

That has to be the wrong way round, Pet - quite apart from being a fantastic writer, Dickens' life had some extremely un-admirable aspects to it: the way he treated his wife (and women generally) and his attitude towards the Indian "mutineers", for example.

By coincidence, I've just finished A Christmas Carol - it's been about twenty years since I last read it, and there are so many details that I'd forgotten, including (unbelievably) this gem:

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches.