Books

Headed to the hospital recently for a rather unpleasant surgical procedure, I figured I’d bring a book to pass the down time. I was about to grab Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, the novel I’d been reading about a nearly 20th-century Catholic postulant who may or may not have seen a vision of Christ and suffered stigmata on her hands and feet. But the thought of nurses and order-lies glancing at the title, thinking ‘pervert’ and perhaps surmising that my demise really wouldn’t be all that great a loss for human-kind dissuaded me. Instead I brought along the Buffalo News sports section. I told a Kentucky woman about this titular discretion.

Until the mid 19th Century, most of us believed that we had a soul. It was what separated us from the animals. This belief could be modified to accommodate slavery, Malthusian economics and to allow dogs into Heaven, but the principle was pretty stable. A hundred years later, thanks largely to Darwin, and innovations such as quantum mechanics and Auschwitz, such a view seemed childlike, romantic, or in the case of the Clergy, downright dogged. The 'soul' became just another invention of the under-informed, over-excited primitive imagination, like faeries, Valhalla and insidious whispering serpents. We have Science now.

'May you live in interesting times’. So the Chinese curse goes, and we undeniably live in interesting times, alas. But that doesn't mean the past has lost any of its allure; indeed, quite the opposite. Right now, it's just the tonic we need. If you found history dull at school, being merely an endless parade of facts and heavy-handed analysis, then you are the perfect potential reader for these superb examinations of past eras by some of Britain's best popular historians.  Here are half a dozen of our favourite page-turning history books, guaranteed to have you rapt and astonished at the revelations therein. Dan Jones – The Plantagenets (William Collins, £10.99) Perhaps the most popular new historian of our generation is the medieval writer Dan Jones.

There will be many great new novels published this year, but, sadly, even in lockdown, not enough time to read them all. Here are just a few that might be worth adding to the reading pile:  Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander  This is the novel I’m most looking forward to this year. Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, telling the story of a frazzled family man living in a rural US town whose life is made even more stressful when he discovers an elderly Anne Frank hiding in his attic. The premise for this long-awaited new novel, which comes just the nine years after Hope: A Tragedy, is equally as delicious - or perhaps not, as it’s about a man whose mother’s dying wish is for him to eat her.

If nothing else, the nation's latest online book club will be its poshest. The Duchess of Cornwall has thrown her feathered fascinator into the ring with Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Richard and Judy to found — as she announced on her Instagram feed — an online book club called The Reading Room, in which she’ll be sharing personal recommendations, author interviews and kits of suggested questions for exploring the texts.  There’s every reason to welcome this as a serious project. Camilla has been closely involved with the Booker Prize for many years, is a patron of seven literacy charities, and is known to read widely and intelligently.