Tag: Reviews

#BlogTour #BookReview Villager by Tom Cox

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Villager BT PosterWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Villager by Tom Cox. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Unbound for my digital review copy.

Villager Cover ImageAbout the Book

There’s so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place.

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into its history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life.

In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill where he writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a group of obsessive fans and a cult following. Two decades later, a couple of teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling and neglected home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and superfast train corridors and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor.

Format: Hardcover (448 pages) Publisher: Unbound
Publication date: 28 April 2022 Genre: Literary Fiction

Find Villager on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

This is the first book I’ve read by Tom Cox so, unlike some other reviewers, I’m not familiar with his nonfiction writing and as I usually scroll past images of dogs or cats on Instagram or Twitter I’ve not come across him on social media either. Therefore I didn’t know quite what to expect, a sensation that remained throughout the time I was reading the book.

Villager is a book which almost defies description due to its idiosyncratic style and non-linear structure. The novel ranges over a vast period from the dawn of time to the end of this century. It’s a cocktail of different narratives, in a variety of styles, all of which are connected to the village of Underhill and to an American musician, RJ McKendree who visited the area in the late 1960s and composed music inspired by local folksongs. Some meet him, others inhabit places he did, observe the same views as him or are inspired by his music.

One of the most inventive elements of the book is that Underhill and the surrounding area is presided over by an omniscient narrator, referred to as ‘Me’, whom I took to be the landscape itself. (Have a peek at the cover and you might spot ‘Me’.) ‘Me’ observes the goings-on of the inhabitants, knows all their secrets and reflects on the changes that have been wrought on the landscape by mankind, changes which have often caused it something akin to physical pain. ‘The countryside looks on, bemused at the way it’s been outgrown, bludgeoned, smoothed over, suppressed, raped, waiting for the revenge it will surely enjoy when we are gone.’ At times the landscape fights back. For example, the final nine holes of the golf course that has reduced many a player to swearing at sheep or hurling their golf clubs in the river.  It works the other way as well. As ‘Me’ ruefully observes, ‘I don’t feel great today, and my not-greatness influences those around me. I made a buddleia visibly ill at ease this morning’.

An appreciation of nature and concern for the environment flow through the book. There are wonderful descriptions of the local landscape and wildlife. ‘The last purple streaks of the sun toasted the hilltops and owls made lewd suggestions to one another down in the woods by the river.’  On the subject of flowing, I especially enjoyed the way the author gives the rivers a personality, at times rebellious – ‘One is being a thug out back of the Coop, hissing and swearing at the locals’ – at other times, placid – ‘Today, though, the river was a pussycat. It purred around the boulders beneath his feet’.

The author employs a number of different narrative formats including journals, interactions with a search engine which has developed an unnerving ability to empathise and, most memorably for me, a community message board. The latter allows the author to give full rein to his wicked sense of humour in the often inconsequential chatter of the locals, the acerbic comments of one resident or the contributions of the mysterious Megan Beaker.

My favourite section was the one entitled ‘Papps Wedge’ which features couple, Sally and Bob (not Bob and Sally) whom we first in middle-age and then much later in 2043. It provides a glimpse of a future in which profit and human convenience is prioritised over environmental protection so a new train line ‘smashes through ancient woodland, f**ks over a couple of Elizabethan farmhouses, rapes and pillages the homesteads of hares, otters, stoats and badgers’.  In addition, immersive technology has replaced direct experience for many people. Only Bob and a few like-minded people have rejected its use leaving them isolated in some ways but more in touch with the natural environment.

I’ll confess I found some parts of the book more challenging than others. For instance, many of the musical references in the section ‘Report of Debris’ went over my head. Alternatively if they were pure invention, I couldn’t tell.

Villager is endlessly inventive and jam-packed with thought-provoking ideas. I think it’s the kind of book that would repay re-reading.

In three words: Lyrical, original, stimulating

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Tom Cox Author PicAbout the Author

Tom Cox lives in Devon. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, the Bad and the Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia. 21st-Century Yokel was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and the titular story of Help the Witch won a Shirley Jackson Award.

He is also the man behind the enormously popular Why My Cat Is Sad account.

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Villager Graphic 2

#BookReview Portable Magic by Emma Smith

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Portable MagicAbout the Book

Most of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic’. Here, Emma Smith shows us why.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over humankind. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.

Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a ‘classic’ – and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.

Format: Hardback (352 pages)      Publisher: Allen Lane
Publication date: 28th April 2022 Genre: Nonfiction

Find Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Portable Magic is a fascinating, in-depth examination of books as physical objects, from their earliest incarnation as collections of scrolls or wax tablets to modern paperbacks and, yes, ebooks.  The blurb gives you an idea of the breadth of the book’s subject matter and this review would itself be as long as a book if I mentioned everything of interest I found within its pages. Therefore, I’ve confined myself to picking out a few things that caught my eye in various chapters.

  • Precursors to the paperback were softback editions designed especially for the armed forces that would fit neatly into the pocket of a uniform
  • Annuals and highly decorated gift books were the first commercial products designed to be given away by the purchaser
  • Book tokens emerged to alleviate the ‘stress’ of choosing books as gifts
  • ‘Shelfies’ have a long history with figures such as Madame de Pompadour being depicted holding books or with books in the background. Marilyn Monroe was famously photographed holding a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses that it looks like she’s a fair way through.
  • There is ‘a gestural vocabulary’ associated with handling books, e.g. turning pages from the corner far edge, using a finger or marker to refer to different points, flexing a spine to make it stay open.
  • Book burning has taken place for purposes other than censorship including as part of waste management, at the hands of a book’s author, for publicity or as part of a ritual.
  • As the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover showed, efforts to ban books are often good for sales.
  • Books can have a talismanic quality. During the First World War, steel covered Bibles designed to be carried in the breast pocket were widely advertised as gifts for servicemen.
  • Bibliomancy is the act of opening a book at random for prophetic wisdom.
  • When we read a book, thousands of microscopic particles of our DNA rub off on its pages. ‘Inside each book, there is a miniscule, uncatalogued but carefully preserved library of its human handlers.’
  • E-readers, the author argues, want to be books. ‘Text is presented in vertical orientation (an e-reader is portrait, rather than landscape, in format), pages are flipped from right to left to move sequentially through the text and there is a facility to bookmark or underline particular passages.’

Those of us for whom books play a significant part in our lives will surely identify with the following passage. ‘We are all made up of the books we have loved and, more, of the books we have owned, gifted, studied, revered, lived by, lost, thrown aside, dusted, argued over, learned by heart, borrowed and never returned, failed to finish and used as doorstops or to raise a computer monitor.’

The fact that nearly fifty pages are taken up with notes and index demonstrates that Portable Magic is the product of extensive research. Although there were one or two points where there was perhaps a little too much detail, I found Portable Magic an absolutely fascinating read.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Allen Lane via Readers First.

In three words: Informative, erudite, expansive

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About the Author

Emma Smith was born and brought up in Leeds, went unexpectedly to university in Oxford, and never really left. She is now Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College and the author of the Sunday Times bestseller This Is Shakespeare. She enjoys silent films, birdwatching, and fast cars.

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