No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader

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Finally, I had one moment of unexpected joy and nostalgia, when it turned out, that the one book his parents had and kept on top of the wardrobe, my parents had as well.

Where middle-class children are decorated with self-worth and confidence, and encouraged to rise from the crowd and celebrate themselves, the working class are taught to kowtow, defer, and view talent or individuality as a vanity rather than an accolade.uk) has published titles by Simon Armitage, Bob Stanley, Barry Hines, Ian McMillan, Hunter Davies, Ray Gosling, David Gedge, Stuart Murdoch (of Belle and Sebastian) and many more. I count myself as working class but despite living on a council estate as a child it was hardly the industrial North in the shire counties. Even if you recognise you probably won’t have time to read them all, you are already forming a relationship with mortality which we all must do at some point in our lives.

I was amassing rather a "collection" of books too, but soon realised that some books I had kept purely for the sake of it, as opposed to them bringing me real joy, hence my recent and ongoing book culling!The love of and consequent hoarding of books eventually drives Hodgkinson to seek some answers from Lisa, a psychiatrist. social mores drawn predominantly from the 1940sare bound to jar in a modern context; it’s one of the reasons why we read: to understand and interpret the present through the past, how we got here. Life, much as we try to keep it at arm’s length or delude ourselves that it falls under our dominion, often ‘blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday’. He describes Billy Casper, urchin-like hero of A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (a late kitchen sink work), as “half-boy, half-pigeon”.