Not sure if here or the architecture thread.
We have two definite trips to Manchester this year, so it’s serendipitous that the guide to the modern architecture of the city has just been published.
This is very well designed IMO.
1911 to 2006.
Two pages per building with just a small photo, short description, postcode (because phone maps) and a status e.g. “doing fine”, “abandoned and awaiting demolition”.
I’m currently reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays. I’m reading it because I found a waterstained-but-intact copy - with a pleasant part-gilded buckram binding - in a local roadside flytip when I was out walking the dogs, and being a male ‘of a certain age’, I abhor the wanton destruction of books…
Having had the sort of childhood that would have made it about as accessible and comprehensible as hieroglyphics, it went unread. As an adult (E&OE), I can at least contextualise it as what it is - an author’s nostalgic and selective account of his own childhood in a highly privileged child-farm nearly 200 years ago.
For all its faults, it’s astounding the influence this tale had in so many diverse directions. It’s not especially well-written, or at least not ambitious in a literary sense because obviously it was aimed at a juvenile audience, but, for its day, it tells its story well. In doing so it influenced several generation of Imperial go-getters - the type of people, who in the language of the time “Whipped the natives into shape!” and built the biggest Empire humanity’s yet seen. Approval of this outcome has gone from adulation to abhorrence in the 177 years that have passed since it was first published. Nonetheless, for good or ill the World we live in was shaped in part by people inspired by this buoyant piece of semi-autobiography.
It’s also a matter for reflection that its least-likeable antagonist - ‘Flashman’, inspired a quite different author to write an entire slew of novels (The Flashman Papers), which followed this abject coward’s undeserved good-fortunes through deathly calamity, after deathly calamity - usually brought about by his ineradicable yellow streak. Hughes thus - accidentally and indirectly - established the very notion of the antihero, with acknowledged inspirations as diverse as the caddish (if not cowardly) James Bond, Warhammer 40,000, DC’s ‘Captain Kangaroo’ and more than one Terry Pratchett character!
…And then there’s the popularisation of the game of ‘Rugby Football’, which the huge and long-lived popularity of this book, with its accurate portrayal of the barely-recognisable mêlée form of the game as it existed in the 1830s, helped to inspire its adoption in schools and universities more widely through the nineteenth century and beyond.
Its contemporary popularity must presumably have lain in its ‘morally-improving’ bent - it sets out very plainly for all to see what upright and manly qualities are expected of a ‘young gentlemen’. It unfolds a series of expositions of the perils and pitfalls of youthful unruliness, and the benfits of decency, as understood at the time. Vast numbers of copies will have been gifted to offspring, nephews, godchildren and the like in the hope of nudging their tillers toward a truer course through life… We’d probably call something similar now ‘blatant propaganda’, but it’s a more mixed bag than that.
Anachronisitc, undoubtedly, but it’s certainly proving to be a learning-experience!
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Times have changed, that would have been a Fiesta or a Razzle in my youth 
Blimey, didn’t you even have the underwear pages of the Freemans catalogue?
Standard night out in Croydon.
Had a bit of a splurge at Fuel Publishing.
Admittedly Modernist Council Housing is probably a bit niche
but I thought that Audio Erotica might raise a few eyebrows here
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Jonny Trunk’s books are usually top notch (as are his esoteric album releases). I’ll get round to buying that at some point. 
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Also, just picked up from the local bookshop.
I’ve been meaning to order this for ages and finally remembered yesterday.
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Picked an old paperback off the shelf a few days ago, as I not only don’t recall reading it, I also have no idea how I came to have it! “The Cook”, by Harry Kressing was first published in 1965, and reeks of its era. It tells a tightly written story of how an ambiguous, Methuselan chef uses food - laced with a little violence - to control a privileged old-money family in an insular US community.
It’s an easy and rewarding read, but not lightweight. It’s interesting, too for the ultimate obscurity of its author - “Harry Kressing” is a nom-de-plume of a sometime lawyer and economist about whom little is known, even though he died as recently as 1990. He wrote only one novel - this, plus a brace of short-stories. He doesn’t even have a Wiki page. This despite the fact the book was well-reviewed and sold well in Britain AND was turned into a movie by Hollywood.
The movie itself, “Something for Everyone”, is notable only for two outstanding characteristics - it was hated by critics and public alike for lacking so much as a single likeable or relateable character, and also for the fact it preserves only one single very minor detail from the book: the protagonist’s name, and even that has its spelling amended! Every other aspect of the book is discarded entirely, and the film in nowise resembles it.
If a copy “The Cook” shows-up in your local charity shop, grab it, it’s worth it for the curiosity value as well as its content.
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I like the illustration too
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I have a signed copy of this from the launch party , meeting up with my pal next week to collect , can’t wait to read it
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This arrived yesterday.
The sheer quantity of his musical output overwhelmed me around the time of The Buff Medways, but I never tire of his poetry, I actually think it’s his strongest work.
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Gonna snaffle a copy of that too
I recently read One Day in the Life and ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word but it was very good. It sounds like many of his other books are similar though, so I don’t feel the need to read much more of him, at least for now.
Have you read any Dovlatov? A bit different but I enjoyed The Suitcase.
I’ve recently been on a bit of a Joan Didion binge, her having been one of those authors I’ve intended to read for a long time. I have to say that in large quantities, she makes for quite depressing reading - her detached, often elegiac tone can get a bit much after a while. I really enjoyed her though - she makes many great observations, vividly depicted, and her dry, laconic humour is nice. What I found most interesting is that she seems to be quite a conservative figure - which stands in stark contrast to all the counterculture authors of the period I’ve read (Thompson, Wolfe, Pynchon, et al.). Very interesting to hear a different take on those times. And a lot of what she said seems to be very relevant, with the nonsense going on in US college campuses currently.
I also found The Year of Magical Thinking to be moving and recommended it to a friend who recently lost her father.
