A non-fiction title as the starting point to this month’s 6 Degrees of Separation run by the lovely Kate.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point has become part of the modern business and sociological vocabulary, although I suspect that more people have read reviews about it rather than actually read it. Perhaps more have read another book of his, Outliers, which became notorious for bursting the myth about creative genius. Success is not just about innate ability, but a combination of hard work (those oft-quoted 10,000 hours to gain mastery), your cultural legacy (what you are born into) and sheer dumb luck.
My second book in the link is also non-fiction, but also relies on sweeping generalisations, although it also includes some close anthropological observation. This is Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox and it is full of very funny observations. Here is something that I notice at the train station every single morning.
There is something quintessentially English about ‘Typical!’ It manages simultaneously to convey huffy indignation and a sense of passive, resigned acceptance, an acknowledgement that things will invariably go wrong, that life is full of little frustrations and difficulties (and wars and terrorists) and that one must simply put up with it… a sort of grumpy, cynical stoicism.
The idealised image of the English and their countryside is the link for the next book, one in the popular Miss Read series: Thrush Green. Set in the Cotswolds in the 1950s, before the influx of commuters and second homers, this is the Little Britain that Brexiters perhaps believe they can revert to, but charming nevertheless.
Of course, only a small proportion of people ever lived in this rural bliss and for much more realistic and horrifying look at the rape of the countryside you only need to read Fiona Mozley’s Elmet. The harshness of life on the land, albeit a hundred years or so ago and in a different country, is also very much present in Romanian author Liviu Rebreanu’s Răscoala (The Revolt), which describes the circumstances leading to the Peasants’ Revolts of 1907 in Romania and its aftermath.
Finally, and this is a bit of weird side-jump, but the word ‘răscoala’ reminds me of Raskolnikov, so my last link is to Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, one of the books that got me hooked on the kind of writing that comfortably straddles the border between crime and literary genres, and which shows that labelling really doesn’t matter.
So from what is essentially a self-help book for businesses and marketers to urban poverty and despair, via a detour in the countryside… I really do know how to keep things cheery and relaxed, don’t I? Where will your six links take you?
findingtimetowrite 