Reading round-up.

Just a quick one about this week's reading.

1. Finished Richard Adams's Maia. Dreadful in almost every way, and for 1000+ pages. I finished it because I paid £1.99 for it. There were a few interesting disquisitions on the economics of slave empires but not enough to justify the other 997 pages of sexist – and ultimately deeply conservative – junk. The kind of book written one-handed, to be crude about it. However, if you're looking for something to read one-handed, this isn't it because Adams hasn't the courage to write straight-up porn. Weirdly, the narrative works hard to build a non-technological world that could be on another planet, or in the near-East at any point between Alexander and the fall of Byzantium, apart from a single reference to the Victorians.

2. Nick Hubble's The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Hubble suggests that the Modernist Question is essentially 'Who Am I', particularly in the context of twentieth-century masses:  the Proletarian response, he says, is 'who are we?' and what is the relationship between I and we. High modernist texts, to reduce Hubble's argument appallingly, is to worry about the fuzziness of the I amidst the encroachment of the we, and to retreat into style. The proletarian authors (and he redefines the term interestingly) take modernist techniques and use them to promote new ways of living based on intersubjective experience, i.e. encountering others and being changed by these understandings. He writes about Lewis Grassic Gibbons' complex A Scots Quair series and John Sommerfield's May Day at length, plus a good number of the classics of the proletarian genre, including Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live in passing. The close readings are superb, and not a jot of published critical material has escaped him. I did feel that some authors are missing however: Gwyn Thomas's early work just squeezes into the period in question and is strongly modernist and proletarian, but he seems to have escaped Hubble's otherwise panoramic gaze. There's also a lot of very interesting discussion of Empson's characterisation of proletarian literature as pastoral, in which middle class characters or readers learn about themselves through reading about industrial versions of the rude mechanicals – I wondered whether some consideration of proletarian literature about communities that just didn't have a middle-class perspective available – such as Lewis Jones's and Gwyn Thomas's Rhondda might have been a useful comparison. Anyway, it's a seriously impressive book that shines a new light on the field and unlike many good critical books, there's a paperback at £20.

3. Sarah Maria Griffin's Spare and Found Parts. A very interesting Irish feminist post-apocalypse homage to Frankenstein. There isn't enough attention paid to Irish SF, but perhaps this and Sarah Davis-Goff's forthcoming Last Ones Left Alive will help. I liked Spare and Found Parts a lot. Using Frankenstein as the basis of a teenage Bildungsroman isn't exactly subtle but it really works well. Ruined Dublin is evoked very well: anyone who knows the city will enjoy spotting what the plot does to their favourite bits.

4. Chris Mullin, The Friends of Harry Perkins. Less a novel, more an opportunity to make some fair points about Brexit and the Labour Party by a veteran ex-MP. The plot is perfunctory, the sub-plot (the death of a child) mawkish and lazy and the narrative expository. I read it as part of my politicians' fictions project. It's not the worst, but anyone hoping for a worthy sequel to his A Very British Coup will be disappointed.

I'm off for a few days' holiday ('from what?') I hear you cry. I'm taking the manuscript of a collection of essays on a Welsh author that I'm reviewing for UWP. Apart from that, I'm taking Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, James Bradley's eco-apocalypse Clade and Anna Burns's now-famous Milkman.

Finally, a quick thank-you to author and academic Donna Freitas: I put her teen techno-fear novel Unplugged on a course alongside Dave Eggers' interesting-but-dreadful The Circle and two of my students contacted her to ask some questions. She was generous enough to record a short video of her thoughts, which I thought was above-and-beyond. Restores one's faith in human nature.

Happy Easter to you all.