Virginity: the sum of a girl's worth

In the early 1970s Mum's American pen friend and family paid us a visit on their way home from Iran; the husband was something in US diplomacy. We wore our best clothes and had to be on our best behaviour. Our visitors had straight teeth and spoke with movie-star accents. They brought with them a small souvenir for each of us from the faraway, fairytale country about which I knew nothing. I still have my gift, a little mirror mounted behind small doors in a hand-made, hand-painted frame. I'd never owned anything so exotic, and for many years this was my only image of Iran. So when I picked up Jasmin Darznik's Song Of A Captive Bird I thought it might give me some insight into the country.

Now, I realize that accounts differ... My account you can trust

Did you know that Macbeth was a real Scottish king who died nine years before William the Conqueror fought the battle of Hastings? Shakespeare put his own spin on the real man to big-up the ancestry of James Sixth of Scotland (and First of England). The playwright relied on an English chronicle, but there are at least four alternative Scottish histories. And have you seen Braveheart, Mel Gibson's kilt-clad, woad-faced portrayal of the 13th century struggle for Scottish independence? One historian said of the movie that it was "one of the most historically inaccurate films I have ever seen. It bears almost no relation to historical fact". Now I'm not suggesting that everything we think we know about Scotland might be made-up for some nefarious purpose, but maybe we should take a step back and reconsider what we've been told, especially if it's based on the work of a couple of blokes in the entertainment industry, both of whom had businesses to run.

Pussy Riot. - That's just middle age. It'll sort itself ou'.

I started to read Roddy Doyle's Two Pints a few years ago, when an Irish friend gave me a copy and told me it was "feckin' brilliant". Well, I didn't get far with it. I couldn't get to grips with the dialogue, written to try and capture the Dublin accent. So the book lurked at the back of the shelf, forgotten.

It wouldn't be long before people lost interest.

I was intrigued by the premise of Yun Ko-eun's The Disaster Tourist. It's about a South Korean woman named Yona, who works for a travel company called Jungle that organizes holidays based around disaster zones. After being assaulted by her boss, and knowing that if she makes a fuss she'll lose her job, Yona accepts the offer of a business trip to assess one of Jungle's destinations: the fictional island of Mui.

Fish, felines, and fowl

In the run up to Christmas I read three more of the books that have been sitting on my shelf for years. They're all novella length and each one features a creature alongside a human. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) recounts a lone man's struggle to land a fish, George Mikes's Tsi-Tsa (1978) charts the writer's relationship with a cat, and Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) relates how a bird of prey lifts a boy out of misery.

Oh, poppycock! Who wrote this rubbish?

If I hadn't just read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I wouldn't have got much further than the first couple of chapters of Automated Alice. But then I wouldn't have got much further than the first couple of chapters of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland if a pristine copy of Jeff Noon's book weren't sitting on my shelf, unopened since buying it twenty years ago. The two were inextricably linked, just like Alice and her 'twin twister' Celia.

Mis-sold by the marketers

In 2019 there was a lot of buzz around Candice Carty-Williams's debut novel Queenie. The marketing bods, of which Carty-Williams is one herself, did a sterling job. I was sold on the idea of a "smart and breezy comic debut", "astutely political, an essential commentary on everyday racism" in Black British life.

It starts when Queenie's boyfriend of three years, Tom, has just told her he wants a break. She interprets this to mean and then we'll get back together. However what he really means is that he wants to break up permanently.

I'm rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?

I once knew a man who was an alcoholic. He was intellectually brilliant, literally a rocket scientist. When sober and not hungover he was charming, but under the influence of booze he became nasty, unreasonable and incapable of work. Why do I mention this? Well, I've just finished reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye in which there are at least three alcoholic characters.

Drinking and drunkenness pervade the book. Right at the beginning, Philip Marlowe meets Terry Lennox when the latter is "drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith." Lennox is an ex-soldier, the unhappy husband of a wealthy wife; "I’m rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?".

A load of old nonsense

"Why are you reading a children's story, Cabbie?" Well, I'll tell you. I've found yet another unopened book on my shelf, bought over 20 years ago in an airport shop; Jeff Noonan's Automated Alice. The Wikipedia page says it "tells of the character of Alice from Lewis Carroll's books in a future version of Manchester, England". I've never read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, so research is my motive.

There can't be many who don't know the story. Disney's 1951 movie Alice in Wonderland introduced it to a wide audience, but I've never seen that either. If you're as ignorant as me then, here's a brief outline.

Waiting, interminably waiting, and then...

Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe is one of those books where it pays to read something about it before you start. It's the sort of book they study in literature courses, the sort of book that you have to work at.

Fortunately the edition I have contains an introduction written by Tim Parks, but you could also check out the Wikipedia page before you buy. Buzzati originally titled it The Fortress, which is a better title. Most of us can visualise a fortress in reality as well as metaphorically, whereas The Tartar Steppe invokes a sauce I like to eat with fried fish. When the introduction tells you, "for an Italian, the northern mountains are the locus par excellence of military glory" it gives the title some meaning.

Developing your sixth sense

In 2018 Stuart Heritage wrote a review for the Guardian of Tristan Gooley's Wild Signs And Star Paths and I immediately added the book to my "to be read" list. This year I finally got round to it.

Gooley explains what he's going to do in his Introduction: "I will show you how to sense direction from stars and plants, forecast weather from woodland sounds, and predict the next action of an animal from its body language–instantly."

Abominable addiction

I'm always on the lookout for fiction that's set on the French Riviera and came across a reference to Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman in a local newspaper. The article said it's a story about loose women and gambling, and best of all, some of the scenes take place in Monte Carlo Casino. What's not to like?

A joke of the first water

Sometimes you just want to read a page-turner, and you can't beat Agatha Christie for that. I've been working through John Curran's 2009 list of the best 10 Christie mysteries, and have reached number four: The ABC Murders.

One of the pleasures in reading Agatha Christie is that of getting reacquainted with old friends. In this case it's Hercule Poirot, the indomitable Belgian detective, installed "in one of the newest type of service flats in London" and exercising his "little grey cells" in investigating "only the cream of crime."

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't

Three books have coloured my view of French literature, all set texts for study. They each feature a miserable woman, living a depressing life and turning to adultery as an escape: Marguerite Duras's Moderato Cantabile and its metaphorical magnolia flowers is a book I never, ever want to read again; Emile Zola's seedy Thérèse Raquin, saved only by its Parisian setting; and worst of all, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and its intensely annoying eponymous protagonist.

Not my idea of fun

Will Self's My Idea of Fun had been sitting on my shelf for about 20 years. I'd started it, didn't warm to the first few pages, so set it aside for another few years and tried again.

Reader, I finished it, but it wasn't my idea of fun.

A remarkable escape from slavery

I was surprised to discover within one branch of my family's history, a chemist-druggist who travelled to America in 1862, leaving his wife behind, to join the Unionists of the American Civil War. He remained in the USA after the war ended and became a naturalised citizen. What on earth drove him to do that? Here's an hypothesis: perhaps he'd come across Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, the remarkable story of how two slaves escaped their bondage and gained their freedom.

Vimto, Gonks, and Wayfinders. I remember them

I opened Mean Time, Carol Ann Duffy's 1993 collection of poetry, and poured myself a glass of wine. My cheeks started to glow, my head became lighter, my shoulders dropped, and everything in the world was fine. I began to feel sentimental at the thought of happy times past. Was it the wine or the poetry?

Nostalgia suffuses Mean Time, especially the first poem in the collection, The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team. It speaks directly to baby boomers, those who were at school in the 60s and 70s. The references tap on your heart with a hoppety beat; pop music, general knowledge, Vimto, Gonks, and Tuf Wayfinders shoes. What a great start to a great collection.

Definitely, absolutely and without a doubt, 'my sort of book'

Some of the books I read for Book Club are really not my sort of thing. I like to think I read them with good grace, and I really do try to find the best in them whilst admitting that I'm not the target readership for that sort of thing. Well, Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These is definitely, absolutely and without a doubt, my sort of book.

A historic record of xenophobia

I was drawn to Heart of Darkness by the praise of a few academic fans. The book often appears in the English literary canon and I can see why it continues to be set reading for literature courses; it doubtless provokes much discussion.

The story concerns Charles Marlow, who relates his experiences in the African Congo, where imperialist traders sent "manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire... into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory". The depths of darkness relate not only to the unknown, unexplored lands beyond the sea shore, but also to the inhumanity that late 19th century traders expected to find there, as well as that of the traders themselves.

As Marlow journeys upriver he hears of a Mr Kurtz, a trader who is both respected and despised, and about whom he says, "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz". In order to reach this enigmatic man, Marlow suffers much misfortune, adventure and horror. For all the vivid descriptions of the journey, the most memorable scene takes place in England, near the end of the book, when Marlow visits Kurtz's fiancee.

Modern-day readers might find Conrad's language in relation to indigenous people shocking and problematic. The book plays on a stereotypical view of foreign cultures and races as primitive and barbaric, and while the author portrays white traders as savages too, they don't quite balance out. It stands as a historic record of the xenophobia that existed at the time of its writing.

The text is dense, and the language lush. Amazingly, Conrad was not a natural-born English speaker, and I dare say this is another reason his work continues to be read and analysed. TS Eliot was inspired by Heart of Darkness, and Francis Ford Coppola adapted it for his film Apocalypse Now. For myself, I was left with only my own thoughts and a few online critical reviews with which to compare them.

A book that starts with the ending

It's not often I read a book that starts at the end, tells the story, and then ends at the beginning, but this is exactly what VS Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas does. The opening reads, "Ten weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time". No need to worry about revealing any spoilers then.