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Title:
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy
Series:
Memoir
Author: Mark Hodkinson
Rating:
1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Memoir
Pages:
307
Words: 107K
Publish: 2022
First
book of 2026 and I end up with this stinker. My goodness, it’s like
it is November and December of 2025 all over again! Ahhhhhhhhh….
I went into this “Memoir” (oh, how I am coming to hate this particular kind of non-fiction) expecting it to, you know, be about BOOKS that had shaped the author’s life as he’d grown up in an environment where reading wasn’t prevalent and in some cases, was actually discouraged. Instead, he wrote more about the music that influenced him as a pre-teen and teen and then 20something.
The whole attitude of this book was “I deserved better than I got and it was always everyone else’s fault”. His parents provided him a roof, food, schooling and they never stopped him from reading the books he wanted or listening to the music he wanted. But his disdain for his parents is almost palpable and his snooty attitude about the working class is like a slap in the face on every page. The entire sub-story about his grandpa getting hit in the head as a young man and his decline into dementia and eventually death from wandering out in the elements, while supposed to be loving, felt more like the author was airing his family’s dirty laundry to generate sympathy so he could say “Look at how bad I had it, pity me”. It also had nothing to do with books.
The
last chapter in the book details his times visiting a psychologist
and a life coach. When talking to the
shrink he has this to write at one point:
“I
was hoping she would pick up on this last bit so I could waterfall my
life story, how I felt I was a weird cuckoo kid placed with the wrong
parents and had been failed by the education system and how I’d
missed out. Basically, all my self-pitying stuff, laid on good and
thick.”
And that is the summation of this book. It is a gigantic whinefest by the author about how hard doneby he was and how he deserved our pity and wasn’t he so great for turning out so “normal” coming from such a horrid background. It filled me with disgust instead.
I asked for some help for the final sentence of this review, because the author is from the UK and I figured some American insult would just roll off his shoulders should he ever read this (very unlikely, but stranger things have happened with me and authors, sadly), so I asked what a really good insult would be. I came up with “ Mark Hodkinson is a wankering twat!” and that really shows how low esteem I hold for him and this book.
★✬☆☆☆
From the Publisher:
Mark
Hodkinson grew up among dark satanic mills in a house with just one
book: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. His dad kept it on
top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth - wedding
photographs and Mark's National Cycling Proficiency certificate. If
Mark wanted to read it, he was warned not to crease the pages or slam
shut the covers.
Fast forward to today, and Mark still lives in
Rochdale snugly ensconced (or is that buried?) in a 'book cave'
surrounded by 3,500 titles - at the last count. He is an author,
journalist and publisher.
So this is his story of growing up a
working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s. It's about schools
(bad), music (good) and the people (some mad, a few sane), and
pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors (some bad, mostly
good) that led the way, shaped a life. If only coincidentally, it
relates how writing and reading has changed, as the Manor House novel
gave way to the kitchen sink drama and working-class writers found
the spotlight (if only briefly).
Mark also writes movingly about
his troubled grandad who, much the same as books, taught him to
wander, and wonder.
