In which absolutely nothing happens

Pretty much nothing to say this week. I've just marked re-submitted essays and attempted to wrestle with the fresh new tortures added to our virtual learning environments and electronic course management tools. The students, many of whom need to confirm their timetables to plan work commitments, keep contacting me to ask when classes will run. I have no idea, and no idea when either party will know. All I hear is that one faculty identified 12,000 timetable clashes thanks to the whizzy new system that promised personalised timetables for all staff and students, with no clashes. God alone knows what happens when staff with caring responsibilities and flexible working requirements start asking for their legal rights to be recognised. So as far as next year goes, I mostly know what I'll be teaching, just not when or with whom. Situation normal, AFU.

Outside, of course, the world still burns and the New Idiocracy is about to take over, but we're all just passengers on this flaming jetliner of doom, so there's not much point rehearsing the usual anxieties. I've distracted myself by refereeing the Much Wenlock Olympian Games fencing competition last weekend (it went very well: no complaints about my decisions and no technical failures) and by turning 44. My bikes came back from repair with mixed results: the Moulton is running like a dream but the boring Forme road bike is still playing up. I've read a book or two, but not as much as I'd like: Wodehouse's Uncle Fred In The Springtime was like a greatest hits of his top-dimwits-in-trouble plots, and I'm currently halfway through Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, which is a funny satire about Brexit with quite a lot of thinly-disguised contemporary figures prominently featured. It's a bit like JG Ballard's later novels with more gags. I particularly liked the Theory Dudes, a bunch of bros who prefer to uncover the hidden fascism in iced buns etc. than address violence on the streets.

I do seem to have acquired a lot more books than I've read this week - all the pent-up orders from my week away. They include Geraint Goodwin's The White Farm and Other Stories; Andrew Tolson's slim The Limits of Masculinity; Kath Filmer-Davies's Fantasy Fiction and Welsh Myth; Crawling Through Thorns, Welsh Boys Too and Fishboys of Vernazza by John Sam Jones (in all my years attending Welsh Lit conferences, I don't recall anyone discussing these intriguing novels and short stories about gay Welsh life, and he seems to have no online presence); Lucie McKnight Hardie's disturbing Welsh coming-of-age novel Water Shall Refuse Them; Red Love and Love of Worker Bees by Soviet commissar and ambassador Alexandra Kollontai; the new collection of Malory Towers stories by Lucy Mangan, Narinder Dhami, Patrice Lawrence and Rebecca Westcott; some excellent old Penguin editions from a colleague, including James Thurber's Is Sex Necessary?, and Armistead Maupin's Babycakes, the fourth of the Tales of the City series. I've taught earlier ones, but wanted to teach the volume that covers the early years of the AIDS crisis. Turns out I'm not teaching American Lit after all, so I'll just read it for fun.

In the absence of any opinions with which to detain you, enjoy your weekend and tune in for another exciting episode of Lists of Books and Minor Complaints.

A few book non-recommendations

It's been a hectic week or so since my last substantial post. Two unexpected days in Ireland for a wake/funeral, and all the admin associated with the end of term: sample scripts, moderation, moderation forms, module statistics, module statistics pre-board response forms, organising resits, the formal boards, appraisal planning, workload planning: it all mounts up and much of it is necessary, if not efficient.

Next year promises to be efficient without necessarily being progressive: the move to compulsory online marking means I won't be chasing people for scripts, photocopying them, filling padded envelopes and posting them to external examiners to puzzle over gnomic crabbed comments: everything will be instantly visible in some low-rent typeface on a computer screen. I know there are a lot of arguments (starting with the environmental) for online marking, but I think my department's current compromise (handwritten marginal comments, typed substantial feedback on a coversheet) strike a happy medium between organic artisanal response and ease of comprehension. It bodes ill for me too: having decided not to have an internet connection at home so that I don't live on my favourite sites 24 hours a day (Moulton Bikes, Librarything, Jobs.ac.uk – and The Guardian, obviously, because I'm a stereotypical bleeding-heart liberal) and because I wanted a complete separation between work and home, I'll now have to stare at a screen, in the office, for even longer. I think this means I'm old.

Anyway, it wasn't all work last week: I managed to read a couple of books at least. One of them was Zadie Smith's Swing Time. Having left it on the shelf for a couple of years, I took my second-hand copy on the flight to Ireland with me. Thoroughly engrossed, I read it there and back, finishing it in the air on the return leg. Or rather, not finishing it. Some absolute rotter had removed the last page! It's not exactly a murder mystery, and there's no whodunnit to be revealed in the closing lines, but it left me utterly bereft and helpless. Thank heavens for Twitter and the numerous kind people who sent me photos of the missing paragraphs while I was on the train home: closure was achieved. Though not for the central protagonist. I heartily recommend it. Can't believe Madonna didn't sue though.

I also read and enjoyed Alison Plowden's zippy In A Free Republic: Life in Cromwell's England - lots of good detail and useful quotations from letters and diaries (mostly Royalist) but weirdly unedited: chapter titles had little to do with the content, and pages could swing between examinations of the Rump Parliament to details of common dietary or skin complaints. After that I read Gary Shteyngart's  Lake Success, which I thought was much less successful than his Super Sad Love Story: it tried to be a Travels With Charley/Tom Sawyer/On The Road encountering-the-real-America, plus The Big Short and Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho all at once, while simultaneously signalling its author's and protagonist's hyper-awareness of this literary tradition (the central character, an awful hedge-fund trader who has a mid-life crisis and travels across the US seeking his lost love, his spiritual progress measured in the number of women prepared to give him a redemptive shag, recalls his university creative writing class assignment, which featured a banker seeking redemption through rediscovering his lost love). It pulls its punches: you can't critique the damage caused by and inner emptiness of the 0.1% and make sure that your hero lives happily ever after without changing his fundamental views or behaviours at all, despite having gone on a literal and metaphorical journey. He ends up with $100 million in the bank and a strong relationship with his ex-wife and autistic son. The son - convincingly on the extreme end of the spectrum for most of the novel – miraculously turns out to be highly-functioning, loving and intellectually-gifted by the end. It's almost as if Shteyngart is deliberately parodying bad writing. But he isn't, unless I've completely missed the point, which is always possible.

(As a side-note, I automatically don't read anything described as The Great American Novel: size and significance don't correlate, and any attempt to represent a large and complex polity is pretty much bound to be a form of cultural imperialism, usually of the macho variety. I'd far rather read a lot of short novels covering less ground with less confidence written by people who aren't rich white men who went to Harvard and think that gives them a panoramic view of the country).

I'm obviously alone in this view though: my paperback copy is stuffed with august reviewers' declarations that Lake Success is a work of satirical and comic genius. I thought it was fatally wounded by sentiment and smugness. Not sure what I'll read next. Probably a Course Specification Template or two.

The weekly blah

There's almost been too much news to cope with this week, at least for a nerd like me. Attorney-General Barr's Congressional hearings (one evasive, one absented) were a treat, the local elections have given everyone something to be unhappy about bar the Greens and the Lib Dems, environmental apocalypse is upon us and it's the week before the dissertations are due in, which means I've seen students in every spiritual state from serene to shellshocked.

I would like to take a moment to thank a small group of students for their almost suicidal honesty: the third year who didn't realise there would be an assessment for his modules, the one who apologised for not being able to attend due to being on holiday, and the one who needed advice about which essay title to choose because he 'hadn't read the books'. The vast majority of my students are mature and responsible people who get all the help we can give. A small majority aren't, but pretend to be, and they get help too. What do with those who can't even fake engagement is the topic of my next pedagogical research article* but in the meantime I think I've earned the right to be amused even while I administer the necessary advice and support.

It's actually been a good week in the academic sphere: I've had really good consultations with students and I'm actually looking forward to reading their dissertations. My colleagues are back from the holidays and none of them have been hit by a car for almost 3 weeks, and we had our union AGM, during which someone volunteered to share my secretarial duties at last. Next week isn't going to be so enjoyable: despite the prospect of marking, we've been told to expect 'an announcement'. I don't imagine it will involve massages, research grants, candy-floss or brown paper parcels tied up with string. However, despite my institution's many faults, it isn't as bad as the British Library (which has temporarily withdrawn the 'post-doctoral studentship' I mentioned last week, or Edinburgh University, which advertised an 11 month part-time job featuring a two-month unpaid bit in the middle. How they imagine anyone can live in one of the world's most expensive cities for two months with no salary is beyond me. Neither can they have ever encountered the British unemployment benefit system, nor a landlord. They will, I strongly suspect, have reacted badly if the poor chump in post declined to answer emails, attend meetings or prepare classes during the two-month layoff. After some social media pressure yesterday the post was altered so that the salary was spread over the 11 months, but I still consider £13,000 very poor reward for teaching students at a prestigious, rich and selective university (or for doing any other kind of job in any field).

I watched Newsnight the other day (too paralytic to change channel) and a Daniel Hannan MP expostulated (from about 28 minutes) that the world had changed. 'I don't think [our kids] are ever going to have "a job" as we understood that word in the twentieth century. I think they're going to be constantly retraining, constantly reskilling, constantly freelancing'. The question I desperately wanted to hear asked in response is a simple one: why is that a good idea, either for society or for individuals? I don't really want my nuclear power plant staffed by people who drove trains or milked cows last year. Come to think of it, I don't want my cows milked by last year's nuclear physicists. I don't want students taught by people who've never had the chance to develop their teaching or research abilities because every contract has been a six-month, minimum wage one. I can see who it benefits: shareholders in industries which have automated skills out of the door and have no intention of investing in their workforces. For everybody else, it just helps the quality of life get that little bit worse. The model depends on the assumption that no jobs (other than CEO and perhaps hedge fund trader) really require any deep, evolving skill or security - they're just gigs, performed by walking fungible assets, as a friend was described by his boss at a very big investment bank, hastening his departure to a better employer, who have to fake competence for a brief period before moving on (this is known as the Cabinet Minister model).

Anyway, enough of this - you've heard it all from me before. In book news, I read Milkman and found it every bit as good as everyone said, and not nearly as 'difficult' as the chair of the Booker panel claimed. Burns removes proper nouns to defamiliarise the Northern Irish political/cultural landscape and stress the communal experience, but other than that it's a fairly straightforward anti-Bildungsroman about the psychological and social damage inflicted by generations of conflict. With some jokes, I should add. I also enjoyed Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure - it felt Ballardian in its isolated setting and clinical narration of horror. My bank holiday reading is The Seasoning, the English translation (presumably by her) of Manon Steffan Ros's novel Blasu. On a side note: various newspapers and magazine do round-ups of translated books, and they never, ever, look to Wales or Ireland despite the wealth of novels either being translated or crying out for an international audience. They'll pick up Irish novels in English, but anything in Welsh or Irish may as well not exist, whereas books in continental European languages automatically attract a degree of cool. Grrr…

The other books I got this week were:

• Matthew Taunton, Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture which seems highly highly persuasive but is fixated on England, even when discussing proletarian novels of the 1930s, many of which emerged from the mining and steel communities of Scotland and Wales - even the postwar critic and novelist Raymond Williams is treated as an honorary Englishman. 
• Francis Barker, ed, 1936: The Sociology of Literature. Two thick volumes of conference proceedings from Essex University, 1978, packed with excellent material on literature and politics in the mid-1930s. 
• Mark Schmitt, British White Trash: Figurations of Tainted Whiteness in the novels of Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King. I've never heard of King, but I'm friendly with Niall and rate his books highly. I've taught some of them and it's high time more was written about them. 
• Nigel West, The Blue List and Cuban Bluff: two more politician's novels. West (real name: Rupert Allason) was a particularly reactionary MP in the 80s and 90s who imagined himself as a spymaster and historian. His novels aren't very convincing, but then again a judge described him in court as 'profoundly and cynically dishonest…one of the most dishonest witnesses I have ever seen', a quote that doesn't make it into his Wikipedia page.. He's now flogging DVDs of his speeches as 'The Nigel West Lectures' at $24.95 a pop. Caveat emptor…

So that's my bank holiday sorted…


*I'm never going to write a pedagogical research article.

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.

Welcome to the Land of Do-As-You-Please

Well, it took me until Tuesday night to submit 17 amended Course Specification Templates (see last weeks's despairing rant), laboriously typed out because the Quality Control Unit could only send me locked PDF documents. You can probably imagine my joy when I discovered that said locked PDFs were actually so out of date that quite a lot of the work I did turned out to be all for naught. Reader, my stress dreams were replaced that night with delightful visions of certain bureaucrats being roasted to a crisp by a grinning demon.

Thankfully, there have been compensations for the relentless grinding misery of such duties, though sadly cold hard cash is not amongst them: subject leadership does not attract an increment despite it being the exact opposite of what anybody gets into academia for. However, the compensations include spending time with actual students. There are stresses and strains within and between groups of the little darlings: hard-working v. slackers, mature v. young, local v incomers and various others divisions, and the pressure of heading towards the finishing line is showing amongst the final-year ones, but after a couple of weeks of tension during which my tissues box needed replenishing more than once, peace appears to have broken out and my own classes have been a delight. This week I taught Book 9 of Paradise Lost to the second years, who once again amazed and impressed me with their willingness to engage with tough material without the benefit of any secondary-level literary or cultural context. A-level English and History seem to ignore what was once called the English Civil War and its causes and effects almost entirely. That said, this week's class showed me what acute and subtle critics reside in the ranks, aided by a barnstorming lecture from one of my esteemed colleagues. I have to say that despite everything Milton's friends did to Ireland and my residual Catholicism, I fall harder for Paradise Lost's literary qualities and philosophical underpinning's with every passing year.



The other text I taught this year was Moore and Lloyd's V for Vendetta, the graphic novel of a dystopian, fascist Britain which appeared fitfully throughout the 80s and was badly filmed a few years ago, spawning the fashion for Guy Fawkes masks amongst junior demonstrators indifferent to the irony of doing something plastic made by Chinese near-slaves for the profit of Warner Brothers (there's a whole module available on the legal complexities of comic book rights and Moore's ongoing war with Marvel and/or DC at any given time.



It's not a total leap from Milton to Moore: the older text informs V for Vendetta on several levels, from a protagonist's name to Moore's anti-patriarchal politics: where Milton's text mourns the Expulsion while guiltily celebrating the knowledge acquired by original sin, the graphic novel is a militant celebration of intellectual rebellion (and actual violent rebellion too, just like Milton). It's a superb text partly because it's seriously revolutionary: while the woke fanboys have picked up on the text's aesthetics, it's an intelligent argument for anarchy – the ideology, not just chaos. Part of Moore's continuous attempt to knock the hero off his pedestal, V behaves unspeakably cruelly towards his protegée Evey in order, he says, to release her from 'happiness…the most insidious prison'. His view is essentially a mix of Morris, Kropotkin and Gramsci. The book details his disillusionment with the contiguity of Law and Justice, and with the instruments of hegemony: the Church, sit-coms and soaps, the news, political institutions and the 'justice' system. The novel starts with V killing a group of rapist police officers; he then gleefully blows up the Houses of Parliament and the Old Bailey, but the core of the novel is his treatment of Evey, the teenage girl he rescues from the police. Gently rejecting her sexual advances, he breaks her Freudian conditioning, educates her in film, books, music and art (all banned under the new regime), before expelling her then subjecting her to physical and psychological torture until she is 'free' of all illusions about the nature of society. V violently brings down the tyranny, deliberately allowing himself to die in the process, insisting that while violence is necessary to bring about change, the perpetrators should have no place in the post-revolutionary society to come: people like Evey should take their places. It's also a lot of fun: Moore has a rich, dark sense of humour and is astonishingly well-read: you could spend hours tracking down every reference, from Enid Blyton (The Land of Do-As-You-Please comes from The Faraway Tree), Thomas Pynchon to The Road to Morocco, and he even got one of Bauhaus to write a cabaret song for it, incorporating the notation into the text. I've put together clips of all the music and songs reference in the novel: there are also loads of books and plays quoted or referred to).



Amongst all the militant, provocative texts I've taught recently, it's the most shocking to many of my students, more so every year. While many of them hail from societies which have had revolutions or civil wars within living memory, most (including me) have had no direct experience of such things, and have never had to address the philosophical justifications for violence – we've educated a generation to assume both that bombing wedding parties from a cubicle somewhere in Oxfordshire doesn't matter (or doesn't happen), and that affluent white societies are the primary victims of violence. Where I differ from most of my students though is that I remember a time when 'terrorism' wasn't a word applied by bureaucrats to any radical impulse (though extreme capitalism and state violence are still exempt), that got int he way of realpolitik, especially those espoused by brown people. I can remember decent English people recognising that there were indeed two (or more!) sides to the Troubles, and Western governments proudly supporting Islamist jihadis in Afghanistan…when convenient. My students are subject to so much silent surveillance, from the CCTV cameras that infest the university campus to the 'Prevent' training all academics undergo to equip them to Spot A Bad'Un And Dob Them In (they phrase it differently but it doesn't take a Foucauldian to spot what they're up to).

V for Vendetta works really well for getting this kind of discussion going because it's accessible without being simplistic or morally evasive. Moore and Lloyd are interested in the role of culture in hegemonic systems, and they care about emotion and the unquantifiable qualities of life: love, joy, autonomy: underneath the cold-eyed espousal of violent methods is a utopian impulse that I've long felt has been lacking on the left in particular. The Labour Party's infamous Controls On Immigration mug sounded the death knell for faith in a confident, altruistic socialism.



Where Morris and a range of other 19th-century socialists believed that The People were capable of cultural, artistic and communal fulfilment (though the Perfectibility of Man is what conservatives say led communism to build gulags), New Labour and its acolytes adopted the classic conservative perspective which held that people were brutes, having rarely actually met any. Conservatives believe in Big Government to restrain our brutish impulses: the true cynicism of New Labour was to go one step further by harnessing those impulses by directing their imagined people's ire at immigrants, the fabled benefits cheats and the like. For Moore, Lloyd and other inheritors of Victorian anarchism, the moral was that all governments, even the well-meaning socialist ones, are based on distrust of the people's empathetic and organisational capabilities. Socialist governments justified their existence by claiming to be the practical expression of the people's determination to distribute goods and services equally, a view I generally adhere to, but the anarchist view holds that governments at best outsource our moral duty to each other and at worst end up arrogating all power and authority to themselves in the name of unjustified self-perpetuation. The difference between anarchism and libertarianism is that anarchists think we're innately good and will care for and respect each other once the initial shock of freedom has worn off and the bonds of surly obedience have been loosed; libertarians reject the idea of mutuality in toto and believe in every man or woman for his or herself.

I don't know. I'm hugely attracted to the principle of humanity's innate goodness, but the daily news suggests that we are selfish brutes: the way we're polluting ourselves and multiple other species to death suggests that we're incapable of behaving responsibly at all even when doom is staring us in the face. Then again, no current form of political organisation has found a way to address it either. I still believe in humanity's general altruism, though perhaps it's only manifested under particular and rare conditions, but I also think that an effective collective decision-making structure with the ability to get things done is necessary, and we may as well call that a government.

Well, this has taken a gloomier turn than I expected when I started mashing the keyboard. Good things have been happening. We hosted a talk by Jessica George on Weird Fiction the other night – she's an expert on Lovecraft and Machen, whose understanding of humanity's cosmic insignificance is, depending on how you look at it, even more depressing than my musings, or paradoxically liberating. It doesn't matter what we do to ourselves and our planet, HPL would feel: the universe is entirely indifferent. Which certainly puts my wrestling with Course Specification Templates in perspective.

I've done 12-hour days at work every day this week, so little time for relaxation - I've been cycling home, eating bad food out of the pan then going straight to bed, so the only leisure has been the Lego Masters final (good creations, bad judges) and a total literary anecdote to the struggle: E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia stories. Inconsequential, lightweight, snide and deliciously witty, they were just what I needed. A real contrast to next week's text: Fight Club.

Dead Cats and Good Books

Good afternoon all. I'm sitting in the office wondering if anything's happened this week and realising that actually, quite a lot has been going on.

The best bit was a trip to London: two days in Gilbert Scott's resurrected, excessive and amazing St. Pancras Hotel where the Victorian Gothic splendour comes with cocktails containing croissants (yes, really and by the way the Spice Girls' 'Wannabe' video was filmed there too, pop-pickers).

This was to go to the ornate, plush Edwardian Noel Coward theatre to see, incongruously, Martin McDonagh's scabrous Irish terrorism comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore starring one Aidan Turner, whose pectorals you may recall from Poldark (or indeed the dreadful Hobbit films). Never having seen Poldark I wasn't that bothered about his thorax but the play was wonderful – really tightly scripted, packed with the darkest of jokes and ending with a feline and human bloodbath.



One or two of the specific historical references weren't quite as offensive as they would have been when the play was first performed 20 years ago, but there was still plenty to make the audience gasp. There was also a distinct difference between the English and Irish audience members' reactions to some of the darker gags, which reminded me of seeing Hunger a few years ago.

Otherwise this week I've been seeing students as they prepare for the next academic year, trying and failing to get the right access to our VLE so I can set up the courses I'm teaching, catching up with some colleagues and saying goodbye to those being shelled out of the place by the vicious know-nothings who run it, reviewing a book proposal for a university press, writing up my video games conference paper for a magazine, failing to find out how many – if any – students we've recruited this year and generally just getting into the swing of things once more. I've found yet another politician novelist and poet: the 3rd Baron Gorell. Is is stuff any good? No idea…yet. Talking of which, I got hold of the new British Library Crime Classic edition of Ellen Wilkinson's The Division Bell Mystery: she was the crusading Labour MP famous for her part in the Jarrow Hunger March, and who died in sad and mysterious circumstances. She wrote two novels, Clash and this one: Clash is seriously good, while The Division Bell Mystery is hugely interesting for its even-handed politics and its use of the detective genre to explore the political social structure. The British Library have done a lovely job with the reprint, and the introductions by Rachel Reeves MP and Martin Edwards are very good indeed. I'm just annoyed I paid £90 for my slightly tatty first edition because I didn't know a new one was coming!

I've been reading a few things for pleasure too - I whipped through Hugh Howey's feted but actually quite hackneyed Shift the other day. It's the second in his post-apocalyptic Silo trilogy (the City of Ember kids' series does a similar concept more entertainingly). Decent idea, written in a very pedestrian style: mildly diverting, and hampered by an inability to write women at all. I enjoyed Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley an awful lot more – it's a novel about the social and political condition of the English countryside in the interwar period, narrated retrospectively by a teenage girl undergoing a psychotic episode. I did wonder whether interweaving the adolescent mental health and puberty issues with ominous political developments and a family saga, plus a huge amount of farming and nature material was a bit too much to do justice to each aspect. There's a considerable amount of purple prose and a profusion of strands meant that the ending felt a bit facile, but it's a meaty, intelligent and thoughtful book that will definitely withstand re-reading. Now I'm back to Muriel Spark's slight but entertaining Territorial Rights which I temporarily mislaid when I started it last month, and Gillian Darley's Villages of Vision. A couple of years ago we sponsored her relaunch of this overlooked classic at Birmingham Literature Festival, and I bought it then. It's essentially a gazetteer of the 400+ model, utopian, company, communal and experimental villages scattered across the UK, some of which maintain some vestiges of their founders' purposes. I'm really keen on fostering some awareness of Britain's radical and contested history, partly because my students have been so badly failed by an education system that teaches only English aristocratic triumphalism. Two who came to see me this morning were stunned to discover that Ireland, Scotland and Wales have their own languages, and were shocked by my revelation that they were suppressed by the British state. Peterloo, Toldpuddle, the General Strike, Suffrage, Invergordon, the Civil Wars, 1916… if mentioned at all, they're presented as uncouth ingratitude on the part of the oiks. I'd like to persuade them that the peoples of Britain have a proud history of resistance, independence and progressiveness that can be unearthed without too much effort, and Villages of Vision is a dream for that purpose.

And with that, I'm off. Setting up the Shropshire Open fencing competition tonight, and offering myself up as easy pickings to the youngsters who've entered the foil event tomorrow. I know I'm going to regret this…

Midsummer madness

Bit of an odd week.
Firstly, let's talk about the weather.
I hate it. I evolved, as far as the genealogy suggests, a waterproof skin perfectly adapted to digging peat from a bog in the rain. I have worked hard to avoid adding to climate change: no car, no children, almost no flights ever (currently averaging one every 6 years, solely for work) and yet people with SUVs, air conditioners, holidays and commuting are burning me to a crisp. As I cycle to and from work I sometimes wonder why even that altruistic act qualifies me for a faceful of poisonous exhaust and abuse simply to make more room for flatulent drivers of flatulent cars.

On the up side of this week, I spent two days in Swansea acting as external examiner for their MA in Welsh Writing in English. It's a good course taught by inspirational people at a university in a park opposite the beach. If there's a league table of Universities With Beaches, Swansea must be near the top, alongside Bangor, Aberystwyth, Bournemouth and (in a few years' time) Cambridge.

On the down side, my colleagues and I all got letters telling us whether or not our jobs are in danger. It's not the declining applications that get to us. Nor do we think that any course has a god-given right to exist. It's being sent inaccurate letters by incompetent people based on untrue calculations by people with no understanding of our subjects, little or (in some cases) no experience of teaching and who have no concern for teaching quality, workload, sustainability, student experience or research. Having failed on a spectacular level to keep the ship afloat, they're throwing us off the side while clinging to the topmost mast, still collecting the bonuses and bellowing orders down at those of us in the water.

Despite my letter congratulating me on moving from a job I haven't had in four years to the job I've been doing for four years (not a surprise: they're also telling me that they haven't lost my pension, only the records relating to my pension), I'm as angry and despondent as my targeted colleagues – what does one say to those in the firing line that's at all meaningful? All the ideologically loaded, statistically-meaningless things we've been bullied into doing – TEF ratings NSS satisfaction, REF outputs that distort actual research – have suddenly and conveniently been dumped in pursuit of short-term gains to protect those in private offices who won't pay any kind of price for their failure. I run a big course and a couple of associated ones. We're down to the bare bones: a small group of utterly brilliant colleagues with no duplication of specialism. Lose some, and we lose not just bodies in classrooms but swathes of expertise needed to meet the subject benchmarks.

Needless to say, when my colleagues are fired, the survivors' workloads will (as usual) be way above the contractual maximum. There is a culture of overwork in all universities, but this time it's serious. Redundancy is a legal term used by employers when specific work no longer exists. If my employers fire people and still overload others' workloads and/or employ teaching cover, it's tacit recognition that the work does still need doing, and that the redundancies are bogus. So this time I'm declining anything that breaches my contract because to do otherwise is to connive with managers to get rid of my colleagues.

There's plenty more where that came from, but I'll save it for the next instalment. Instead: books. I seem to be on an accidental Manchester kick at the moment, which is fine because it's one of my favourite cities. Having re-read Jeff Noon's Pollen, I'm most of the way through Stevie Davies's Impassioned Clay, an intriguing mix of academic, historical and sexual identities set in the previously under-appreciated south-of-Manchester towns and villages (the title is from Keats and also the title of a Llewelyn Cowper Powys long essay). Very highly recommended. After that, it's on to Hugh Lupton's loose and interesting-looking new Mabinogi translation, The Assembly of the Severed Head, Nicholas Daly's Literature, Technology and Modernity 1860-2000 and Huw Osborne's much-lauded Queer Wales.

But tonight, as my reward for writing the programme notes (successfully avoiding being sacked for glossing last year's The Tempest as a piece of Brexit madness), I'm off to see Macbeth performed in the shadow of Stafford Castle, prefaced by a Gala glass of warm white wine!

Vole's Christmas Crackers

OK, seeing as all the posh newspapers do it, here's a semi-comprehensive list of all the books I've bought this year (in reverse order as that's how my Librarything page does it), with an opinion if I can remember them. I've read other things too: these are just the year's purchases. 

It's taken so long that I haven't time to add links, but I will on Monday. 

1. After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun - Nigerian SF. Sounds good, haven't read it yet. 
2. The Rift by Nina Allan - quirky-looking SF, as yet unread.
3. The Arden Guide to Renaissance Drama by Brinda Charry – excellent introductory text for undergrad students. Engages with primary texts very well. 
4. John Scaggs, Crime Fiction - short, snappy and thoughtful.
5. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I've taught Tales of the City, 'Howl' and Little Brother recently, so thought I should add some more San Fran/Beat/Hippy stuff. JD's essays are wonderful. Highly recommended. 
6. Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. As you'll shortly see, I've been reading a lot of 1920s-1950s crime fiction and am contemplating writing an MA module. This will help. 
7. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: see above. Breezy, comprehensive overview despite being rather old now. 
8. Acadie by Dave Hutchinson. I liked his Europe series but haven't read this yet. 
9. Kit Habianic, Until Our Blood Is Dry. I bought this because it was the only Welsh mining novel covered in a PhD dissertation I was examining. On the first read I thought it was a little simplistic but the dissertation made me really reconsider it, and I'm now impressed by a lot of the subtle characterisation. 
10. JG Ballard, Running Wild. I'm teaching an all-JG Ballard module at the moment and hadn't come across this one. It's in the 'Read Soon' room. 
11. The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes. Bought it because I was shocked to discover I didn't own it. A real gem - wise and precise. 
12. High-Rise, JG Ballard. Someone nicked my copy of this a few years ago: teaching it was a good reason to buy another. Rather misogynistic, stylistically compelling. I liked the recent film. 
13. Chris Riddell, Goth Girl and the Wuthering Fright and Goth Girl and the Sinister Symphony. Got a slightly twisted, clever 8-year old in your life? These are perfect. 
14. Concrete Island and Rushing to Paradise by JG Ballard: Concrete… is ur-Ballard, as Ballardian as you like. Haven't read Rushing to Paradise yet.
15. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Herland Trilogy. Herland (the middle book) is famously a representation of a man-free Utopia. I only recently discovered it was part of a trilogy, but I haven't read the others yet. 
16. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic – acquiring a medievalist colleague who teaches on the Shakespeare and the English Renaissance module with me reminded me that I really should read this classic work on late-medieval/early-modern spiritual landscapes. 
17. Lisa See, Shanghai Girls: recommended by a student doing a dissertation on female immigration narratives. It sounded good: haven't read it yet. 
18. Paris by Wiliam Owen Roberts: I liked Petrograd, the first one in this series (translated: my Welsh isn't up to literary fiction yet) but haven't had time to read this one so far. 
19. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature – another book I'd read in years past. There's an entirely justifiable Williams revival going on and I want in!
20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. I'm fascinated by the Wars of the Four Kingdoms or whatever the English Civil War is now known as, and the cultures that led to and stemmed from it. This is a key work of philosophy informing the spirit of the age. I don't agree with his worldview but you know you're in the presence of enormous intellect. 
21. Tony Really Loves Me: short stories by and based on the life of now-dead MP Stuart Bell. Occasionally funny, largely dreadful. Part of my politicians' fictions research. 
22. The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman. Started off deceptively simple, became morally more complex as it went on. Good driving narrative too. 
23. Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders: an SF locked-room whodunnit with a philosophical twist. I love AR's stuff very much, and this is up there with the best. 
24. Softly in the Dusk by Stuart Bell MP. Dreadful. 
25. Binkie's Revolution – Stuart Bell again. See above. 
26. The Ice-Cream Man and Other Stories. Yes, it's Stuart Bell. Self-published, like all the others. The trees thirst for vengeance. 
27. Days That Used To Be – Stuart Bell. How I wish they hadn't been. 
28. Robert Knopf, Script Analysis for Theatre. I have a semi-practical theatre module trying to bridge the gap between literary analysis and performance. This will help. 
29. Hywel Dix, Postmodern Fiction and the Break-up of Britain. I held a conference on Four Nations Literature recently, and liked Hywel's book so much that I invited him along to speak. It was a good move. 
30. Bentley, Hubble, Wilson and Tew (Eds): The 2000s; The 1990s; The 1980s; The 1970s – 4 anthologies of critical work on British Fiction in these decades. I'd leafed through one at a conference and was impressed. When Routledge offered my cash or books to a greater value for peer-reviewing a book proposal, I went for these plus a couple of others. 
31. Reginald Hill, An Advancement of Learning. I don't really go for contemporary crime, but I'd enjoyed his Austen pastiche The Price of Butcher's Meat, and a Twitter friend recommended this Dalziel and Pascoe police-procedural/campus novel. I liked the plot but hated the characterisation. The first thing you learn about every single female character is the shape of their breasts. I may return to this one in another blog-post. 
32. Colleen McCullough, The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet. An Austen-loving student eggs me on to buy every homage/pastiche/sequel to Austen's novels. She tells me that this one, by the author of The Thorn Birds, is awful. I haven't read it yet, but I trust her judgement. You just shouldn't make Mary a Romantic heroine. It's just a stupid and disrespectful idea. Leave Mary alone!
33. Nicholas Blake, A Penknife in My Heart. I'm working my way through C Day Lewis's alter ego detective thrillers. They're very inconsistent and occasionally offensive. This one was…OK.
34. Lord Lymington, Spring Song of Iscariot. The most expensive book I've ever bought. Published by the Black Sun Press in an edition of 60. Lymington was a Tory MP before becoming one of the most committed fascists in Britain in the 30s-40s. This is a stunningly beautiful book of mediocre imagist poetry. 
35. Ian Bell, Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. A collection of very good essays, including Tony Bianchi's classic 'Aztecs in Troedrhiwgair'. 
36. James Birch and Barry Miles, The British Underground Press of the Sixties. Some of my colleagues are experts on this and persuaded me I need to know more. This is a sumptuous record of counterculture media, though I didn't learn a lot. 
37. Nicholas Blake, Thou Shell of Death (rather good); A Tangled Web (can't remember much about it); The Worm of Death (darkly psychological and compelling); The Widow's Cruise (made little impression); The Deadly Joker (haven't read it yet, came in different edition to all the others, which is annoying); The Whisper in the Gloom - very good. 
38. Stuart Bell, Paris Sixty-Nine. It's that man again. This is the semi-pornographic novel Bell tried to suppress once he became a Church of England Commissioner. It's not just sexist, sad-old-man fantasy: it's unbelievable badly written. He doesn't just hate women: he hates English. 
39. Guy N. Smith, The Druid Connection: silly horror by the author of Night of the Crabs and many, many more. Very interesting take on Wales (he's mostly against). 
40. The Complete Stories of JG Ballard – easily hefty enough to commit murder with. Very comprehensive and lets you trace his development from SF pulp to author of misanthropic inner-space literature. 
41. Nicholas Blake, The Case of the Abominable Snowman. Lovely cheap 1950s edition, and a chilly, wintery, WW2-set country house thriller. 
42. Ken MacLeod, Emergence. Haven't read it yet but I like Ken's Trot-libertarian politics and beautifully-crafted way round a paragraph. Bound to be good. 
43. Aramaki Yoshio, The Sacred Era. Apparently a classic of Japanese SF. I'll let you know. 
44. Nicholas Blake, The Sad Variety. Can't remember much about this one. 
45. Guy N Smith, The Knighton Vampires. I think this is the one in which Cardiff University's English department are murdered en masse. Lots of them are my friends, so I'm looking forward to that scene.
46. Nicholas Blake, End of Chapter (not read it yet); Minute for Murder (very good indeed: set in the ministry for propaganda in the dull bit between VE and VJ day. Attempts a homosexual character but can't quite go through with it. The Dreadful Horror: I'm almost at the end of this one. Poison-pen plot is OK, and Blake's happier to get his hands socially dirty unlike some of his contemporaries. Malice in Wonderland: this one's really good: set in a holiday camp, ideal for enclosing people from different walks of life. 
47. Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City and More Tales of the City. I'm teaching the first one. I loved these: soapy, warm, sexy, deeply interested in the richness of everybody's life. 
48. James Bradley, Clade. Much-lauded SF which I haven't read yet. 
49. Isabela Fairclough, Political Discourse Analysis. I have reservations about PDA/CDA but this was useful for a journal article I contributed to. 
50. Jo Walton, Necessity: I really like Jo Walton's subtly spiky, twisty novels. This closed a series considering Platonic philosophy's strengths and shortcomings. It wasn't as good as the others but still made me think and occasionally laugh. Great characterisation. 
51. Mitchum Huehls (ed), Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. I've just co-written a paper on neoliberalism and erotic fan fiction. This helped understand the cultural operation of a much-discussed concept. 
52. John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies. I like Le Carré and wasn't going to be too picky about his return to the world of Smiley et al. A good read but not his best. 
53. Myfanwy Alexander, Bloody Eisteddfod. A police-procedural comedy drama set at the Eisteddfod: it appeals. Haven't read it yet though. 
54. Ann Widdecombe, An Act of Treachery: yet to read this contribution to my politicians' novels project. Apparently so good I managed to buy it three times. 
55. Darach O'Séaghdha, Motherfócloir - a highly entertaining account of one man's return to Irish despite the havoc wreaked by the educational methods of his youth. Gave this one as presents to a few people. 
56. Jo Walton, The Philosopher Kings - one of the above-mentioned trilogy. Clever idea, knows her Plato, movingly plotted. 
57. Sheila Wingfield, Collected Poems. Recommended to me by an august Canon, for which I am grateful. She had a fascinating life of the kind that is no longer possible, and the poetry is quietly wondrous. 
58. Tom Gauld, Baking With Kafka. I love Gauld's wit and drawing style, and his literary cartoons can often be found adorning my walls and my lecture slides. 
59. Sandra Alland, Protest: Stories of Resistance. Patchy collection of historical events and creative responses to them. 
60. Caryl Philips, A Distant Shore – wonderful, emotional post-colonial classic. 
61. Louise Welsh, A Lovely Way To Burn. I keep an eye on the YA Dystopian sub-genre, which is fully into eco-dystopias at the moment. Haven't read this one so far. 
62. Anna, by Niccolo Ammantini. Another YA dystopia: well-reviewed, but I haven't got round to it as yet. 
63. Stanley Johnson, Kompromat. A quick and dirty Trump/Putin/Brexit novel from the former MEP and father of Boris. He's written a lot of novels. He needn't have, but he has. 
64. Vince Cable, Open Arms. Another for the politicians' novels project. Not awful, but not needed either. 
65. Cory Doctorow, Homeland. I taught his Little Brother only last week. It did not go down well. I like his techno-utopian politics though they're highly redolent of white male middle-class privilege, but at least he's trying and is genuinely radical. He can't write a sentence or a character to save his life though. Talk about over-determined…
66. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Politically admirable, but you'll wish the Department for Homeland Security had tortured its hero to death before very long. Pages of advice on hacks to keep the government out of your email: fine. Teenage hero going on and on about how we're all making coffee wrong with exactly the same fervour and urgency: beyond irritating. 
67. Brick Lane, Monica Ali. A return to teaching this. Rich, subtle, beautiful. 
68. Red Ellen: the Life of Ellen Wilkinson by Laura Beers. Wilkinson was a radical, inspiring 1930s-50s Labour MP who also wrote a couple of very interesting novels. Beers' biography does a very good job on her life, less so on her literary output. 
69. Gillian Cross, The Demon Headmaster: Total Control. The original books in this teen series were subversively anti-authoritarian. Cross returns to the school because she has things to say about contemporary society and politics. Good things. 
70. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Another text I taught this year. Fierce, intelligent, necessary. 
71. Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto. I tied this together with Woolf's long essay Three Guineas which worked very well: Solanas as provocateur, Woolf as middle-class, privileged but devastatingly intelligent feminist. 
72. Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems. I knew some of Ginsberg's work but somehow didn't own much. It reminded me how much I like his actual poetry, and not just his life. 
73. Diana Henry, Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavours: a birthday present. Visually seductive, but I haven't yet tried anything in it yet, being at work until 9.30 most nights. 
74. The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on The Tempest – an extension of Auden's lectures on The Tempest. Occasionally obscure, but really changed my thinking on this play. As did Marina Warner's retelling of it, Indigo. 
75. Guilty Thing: a life of Thomas De Quincey by Frances Wilson. I don't have any knowledge of De Quincey beyond a vague sense of where he fits in with the Romantics, so I'm looking forward to reading this birthday present - a gift from my boss, whose name curiously enough is Francis Wilson. No relation, he tells me. 
76. Peter Cossin, Alpe d'Huez: the story of pro cycling's greatest climb. I'm a cyclist of sorts and love the Tour (despite everything): this was very enjoyable. 
77. Alys Conran, Pijin and Pigeon. We asked Alice to read from and talk about this prize-winning novel in our bit of Shared Futures, which slipped and slid between Welsh and English in fascinating ways. One of the best novels of the year. 
78. Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings At Large. I read some of the Jennings series as a kid and liked them well enough. I recently read that despite the boarding school setting, Buckeridge was a good socialist, and this particular novel reflects that. I'll let you know when I get round to it. 
79. Sarah Caudwell, The Sybil In Her Grave. My wonderful colleague Gaby recommended Caudwell's four comic legal thrillers and I'm hugely grateful. Some clever stuff (you never find out whether the protagonist, Hilary, is male or female), a lot of very funny characterisation and dialogue, and satisfying legally-accurate plots. I gave a couple of these as presents to lawyer friends and family. Via their Cayman Islands brass-plate addresses, naturally. 
80. Joan Aiken, Black Hearts in Battersea. I'm saving this one for Christmas, and look forward to my nephews and nieces being old enough to get these as birthday presents: this is a sequel to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. 
81. Catherine Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic: I'm supervising a very brilliant PhD on gothic urban romance (yes, it's a thing): Spooner's book is an excellent primer. 
82. Andrew Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction. A very slim book about a very large genre. Highly readable but no defence against mutant cannibal werewolves.
83. Ian Sansom, Westmorland Alone. Not sure about this one. Being almost a 1930s specialist I like his detective version of those populist, didactic, polymathic authors of the period, but I'm not sure joke can be sustained over several novels. 
84. China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris. One of my very favourite authors: formally radical, always thought-provoking. Haven't read it yet. 
85. The Power, Naomi Alderman. I liked this a lot until the end, which didn't feel fully-formed. Morally complex, but perhaps too in thrall to Atwood. 
86. Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Sirens Sang of Murder, and The Shortest Way To Hades - the rest of Caudwell's series: I gobbled them up. 
87. Realms of Memory vol. 3 by Pierre Nora: one of the multi-volume, seminal analyses of place, space and cultural meaning: about France but applicable to anywhere. I can't find affordable copies of the other volumes (this was £50 second-hand) so I haven't read them. 
88. Lucy Boston, The Children of Green-Knowe: another recommendation from Gaby, our children's lit. expert. Somehow this classic had passed me by. I intend to read it this Christmas. 
89. David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood. An angry, passionate, detailed, novelistic, human examination of the culture, economy and social structures of crack-ridden West Baltimore. It stayed with me for weeks afterwards, and I found myself Googling the central characters in the hope they'd survived. Mostly, they hadn't. A searing attack on the hypocrisies of governments, politicians and corporations. 
90. Laurel Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures – horrific urban gothic recommended by my PhD student. Not my usual thing at all, but very well-written with plenty to think about. Great opening line I won't ruin. 
91. John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan (eds): A History of British Working-Class Literature. I'm in it, but the rest of it is excellent. 
92. Jeremy Gilbert, Neoliberal Culture. He gave the keynote at a conference I presented at. He was ill and had just had bad news. It was still better than most lectures I've ever been too. What a brain. 
93. Letzler, The Cruft of Fiction. Haven't read this yet, but it sounded like a really interesting take on how we read great big novels. 
94. Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: She's particularly interested in Jewish modernists, and finds some fascinating texts, but this will help my Zelda Fitzgerald PhD student (and me) as well think about modernists on the edge. 
95. Mike Parker, Real Powys. Mike imported psychogeography to Wales, and gave an amazing lecture at AWWE a few years ago – an original, thought-provoking and combative re-evaluation of Welsh topography and space. 
96. A.L. Kennedy, Serious Sweet. I've heard good things about this but haven't read it yet. 
97. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and On Reading. I love Thoreau and Walden changed my life at 17. This tiny book (a Penguin 60) is a joy. 
98. Nicholas Blake, There's Trouble Brewing. One of his better detective novels. A Question of Proof – can't remember much of this one. 
99. M Wynn Thomas – All That Is Wales: The Collected Essays of M Wynn Thomas. Wynn is one of the most learned and wide-ranging intellectuals in Europe at the moment. Absolutely nobody outside Welsh-language and Welsh Writing in English gives a damn. Shameful. 
100. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. It's brief. I still haven't read it. 
101. Laurent Binet, The 7th Function of Language. Haven't got round to this one yet but it sounds like a hoot with its cast of French literary theorists. 
102. Leonora Brito, Dat's Love and Other Stories. Another in the Library of Wales series. Yet to be read. 
103. Sally Roberts Jones, Painting in the Open Air: an Annotated Bibliography of the Anglo-Welsh Short Story to 2000. Sally is an unsung hero of Welsh writing in English, a publisher and a fine poet. She is also astonishingly generous scholar and colleague. 
104. Bethan Jenkins, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth-Century. Bethan is almost comically modest about this major achievement. I'm no 18th-centuryist but I ripped through this one in double-quick time. 
105. Baron Philip Noel-Baker, The Private Manufacture of Armaments. This, along with the following couple of books, are Left Book Club editions, which I collect. These came from Ystwyth Books, where I spent the fee paid for examining Jamie Harris's excellent PhD on Welsh psychogeography and devolution. 
106. John Strachey, The Theory and Practice of Socialism. LBC. 
107. Hewlett Johnson, The Socialist Sixth of the World. LBC.
108. Bang! You're Dead by Henry Treece. Leftwing children's literature from decades ago. Very good stuff. 
109. Gwyn Thomas, The Love Man. My PhD had a chapter on another GT novel. The Love Man is a little too comic for my taste but he's a wonderful writer. 
110. Lewis Davies (ed.), Urban Welsh Fiction. Haven't read it yet, but a good addition to my Welsh collection. 
111. The Trial of Mussolini by Cassius – one of Gollancz's urgently political WW2 rush jobs. 
112. The Heyday in the Blood. Don't yet know whether it's any good but I can't resist a title lifted from Hamlet (cf. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). 
113. Margery Allingham, Traitor's Purse – as you'll soon see, before Nicholas Blake I read my way through all of Allingham's eccentric, funny, dark detective novels. Most of them are wonderful – especially the post-war, London ones that deal with a changed society. The last couple are a bit weak but I'd heartily recommend her novels. 
114. Jan Morris, A Machynlleth Triad – another book I read to examine a PhD. Very conflicted by this one: beautifully written but somewhat disturbing politically. 
115. Cory Doctorow, Walkaway. Another novel of ideas: utopian but rather evasive around some questions. He still can't write. 
116. C. Silvester Horne, Pulpit, Platform and Parliament: a memoir by cleric-MP and father-of-Kenneth Silvester Horne: interesting by-product of the politicians' novels project. 
117. Down Station by Simon Morden. I like Morden's earlier SF novels. This felt like a scene-setter for a new series, with some intriguing twists on the fantasy-world genre. 
118. John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: excellent history of one of my favourite Utopian sects. 
119. Victoria Coren: Once More With Feeling: How We Tried To Make the Greatest Porn Film Ever. Very very funny. 
120. Jem Roberts, The Fully Authorised History of 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue' – niche, obviously. 
121. A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood. Sad, moving and lovely. 
122. Jan Morris, Hav - beautiful writing occasionally taking you in directions you don't want to go 
123. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: master at work. 
124. PG Wodehouse, The World of Blandings - not as good as Jeeves and Wooster but very charming. 
125. Jeffrey Archer, Willy Visits The Square World. Perjuring ex-con and Tory Lord turns his hand to children's books. Any child would have done better. 
126. Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon: I like what I've read about Lamb, but haven't got round to this yet. 
127. Dancers in Mourning, Margaret Allingham. One of her very best. 
128. Emma Webster, Lost In Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure. Hilarious for the first few goes. I usually ended up marrying the vicar. 
129. Sean Carney, The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy. Currently on the to-read pile. 
130. Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost. Can't remember much about this other than liking it. 
131. Rob Latham, Science Fiction Criticism – another one I haven't started yet but Latham's other work is very useful. 
132. Robert Dickinson, The Tourist. I actually can't remember whether I've read this one. 
133. Allingham, The Fashion In Shrouds (brilliant, funny, scathing); Cargo of Eagles (awful); The Mind Readers (aging novelist hears about esoteric science with dreadful results); More Work for the Undertaker: really excellent. 
134. Stanislavski, Creating A Role, Building A Character and An Actor Prepares. I now know what my motivation is – and can talk about it in my drama module.
135. Margery Allingham, Look to the Lady. Good creepy country-house mystery. 
136. Anthony Cartwright, Iron Towns: he's such a good writer about working-class lives. 
137. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. I slightly dread re-tellings (this one's of The Tempest) but she's really pulled it off. 
138. Max Stafford-Clark, Letters to George. Fascinating way of communicating how a director thinks him or herself into making a play. He's since been revealed as a serious molester of women. 
139. Alistair Reynolds, Chasm City – I've a soft spot for AR's superior space operas. He can do character. 
140. Ann Widdecombe, Father Figure. Yet another politician's novel for the project. 
141. Maria Fyfe, A Problem Like Maria: A Woman's-Eye View of Life as an MP. Not yet read, but apparently rather good. 
142. The Attention Merchants: Timothy Wu's excellent exposé of the people mining your data as you read this very blog. 
143. Arthur Miller, A View From The Bridge: replacing another stray book. Taught this for the first time, and got a lot more out of it this time. 
144. Simon Shepherd, Drama, Theatre, Performance – a useful primer. 
145. Robert Leach, Theatre Studies: The Basics. Again, very useful but slightly limited from a literary perspective. 
146. Michael Mangan, The Drama, Theatre and Performance Companion. Really sharpened my approach to teaching the drama module.
147. Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama. Scope fell outside my module but really thought-provoking. 
148. Beckett, Three Novels: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. So good that everything else I read this year felt insubstantial. And he's so funny. 
149. Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library. A romp. 
150. Margaret Sullivan, Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Book Covers. I used to do a lecture on book covers: this is pretty but essentially a coffee-table book.