大象传媒

13 November 2023

This week on Between the Covers, Sara Cox’s guests recommend a satire on academic power struggles in the definitive campus novel, a collection of testimonies from behind the Berlin Wall, an uplifting tale of community longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, and a taut, page-turning thriller.

In this week's episode of Between the Covers, Adrian Edmondson, Angela Barnes, Annie Macmanus and Chris McCausland each reveal one of their favourite reads.

Episode two - Favourite books from our guests

Adrian says: The History Man is what's called a “campus novel”. It's about universities in the early ’70s, and it's the book I’ve read more than any other. I’ve read it seven times now, and I read it again last week in preparation for this. What always surprises me is how relevant it is.

So there’s a huge strand in it about no-platforming someone, and it’s basically about cancelling without using the word “cancelling”. And there’s another strand about the ethics and morality of men in their 30s sleeping with teenagers, which seems shockingly relevant today as well.

It’s about the Kirks, Howard and Barbara. They start off as rather staid, “small C” christian, “small C” conservative students living in Leeds. He’s studying sociology and he’s becoming a sociology lecturer. And she sleeps with one of his students.

And in order to sort of comprehend what’s happened to him, he becomes radical. He radicalises himself and becomes one of those kind of archetypal sociology mumbo jumbo people. He calls himself “a theoretician of sociability”. And starts writing a load of books and living a life trying to stir things up, principally in order to be able to sleep with young women.

It’s not laugh out loud, but it’s deeply, warmingly funny, because it’s true. Everything in it is true. He’s a masterful writer.

I was doing a book festival in Adelaide in Australia and I was in a lift in the hotel and he got in. I said, “You're Malcolm Bradbury, I really love your book.” And then he got out.

Angela says: I’m so fascinated with East Germany anyway. The Berlin Wall came down on my 13th birthday, November the 9th, 1989.

Anna Funder is an Australian journalist and she lived in Berlin in the ’90s, just after reunification of East and West Berlin. And while she was there, she was really fascinated cos she was working mostly in West Berlin, but she met ‘Ossis’, as they called people from the East, and was really interested in their stories of living in that totalitarian state.

In the book, she meets ordinary people that were resisting the regime. So there’s a woman called Miriam Weber who goes all the way through the book, and she was first arrested when she was 16 for handing out pamphlets. Her and her husband were repeatedly arrested and then he died in prison. They said he hanged himself, but there’s doubt over that. But then you meet ex-Stasi men, the Stasi being the secret police of the regime.

That’s what I find makes history accessible... not just the dates and the places, but the people. People just trying to live their real life.

Annie says: This book How To Build A Boat is really new. It is by a woman called Elaine Feeney, who used to be a poet. So her style of writing is very lyrical, which I'm into, but it's not overly flowery. It's quite economical with how she writes.

It's about a young lad called Jamie and he's 13 and you're in his head, so you really have his stream of consciousness from the start. He is neurodiverse. She doesn't give any labels, which I like, as to what his situation is, but he definitely is a very hyper intelligent young boy who's very kind of obsessive and focused on things.

And the thing that he's focused on is building a perpetual motion machine because his mam died in childbirth. And the only thing he has of her is this video of her swimming, winning a swimming competition. So he has this kind of vision in his head of this woman swimming. And he wants to try and find a way to link to her by building this machine that will make him... It's the way his brain works. It's like his way of trying to connect with her.

The whole thing is so absorbing and beautiful, and, again, not sentimental at all. And then as well as his story, you have a narrative from two of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and you see how their lives are changed as a result of helping him build this boat, which happens to be, because we're in the west of Ireland, a currach, which is a traditional Irish wooden boat made by hand.

So the whole book is leading towards the building of this currach. But in the background you have all these subplots and you have Jamie just trying to navigate secondary school, which is very hard for him, and how he gets through it.

But essentially, it's a book about community and how people can help each other. And it's so gorgeous.

Chris says: Mark Dawson is an independent publisher and I got on to this series of books about his character called John Milton, who’s a government assassin. He works for Group 15, which is the government department that deals with the problems that they want solving, without anyone knowing that they're solving them.

Then it’s what happens when a government assassin decides he’s had enough. You can’t just walk away, and he ends up the number one wanted man by the department he used to work for.

There's a whole series of these books, 20-odd now. This one is set in London and what he does, this character, is he wants to make amends for all the horrible things he's done through his work in the past. He kind of helps people in each story, and in this one he’s helping a kid who’s getting in with a gang…

And because I listen to the audio books, you know, rather than me just sat there on the couch, listening and being accused of... doing nothing. I'll be like, "I'll do the dishes!" I'm constantly doing the dishes, you know, looking for excuses to stick the earphones in and listen to more. I think, when I read these books, I’m living this Action Man lifestyle!