What I'm reading ...

I have started Family Planning by Tim Parks.

This is the first fiction book I have read by Tim Parks. He is an English guy with an Italian wife and lives in Italy. He used to appear quite often on the Home Truths radio program, talking about the oddities of life in Italy. I read a couple of books by him on the same topic. This one is about a family - an oldish couple and four grown-up children, one of whom has some mental difficulties and still lives with his parents. I have the impression that a key issue is what happens to him in the longer term.

A Wayne in a Manger - by Gervase Phinn

I wanted some easy reading, after the last book, and this fitted the bill, as I read it in two sittings. I have always enjoyed Gervase Phinn's books - his keenly observant style has always appealed to me, as he described his days as a school inspector in the Yorkshire Dales. This book is a collection of pieces around the theme of Christmas. I bought it at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where I attended Phinn's talk and had him sign my copy. If I were being cynical [me?], I'd say that a successful author is pretty smart to get away with repackaging some work that had been published before, charge a good price for just over a hundred pages of large type and get it on the market in good time for Christmas. Fortunately, I enjoyed it, so I won't be cynical ...

The Gunpowder Plot - by Antonia Fraser

This book was, I admit, a bit of a struggle. Maybe just too serious for bedtime reading - not badly written, just detailed and heavy going. But I got through it and learned quite a lot.

My preconceptions are probably the same as anyone who has grown up with the standard Guy Fawkes mythology. I thought that Guy was the ring leader of a small band of terrorists, who burrowed under the Houses of Parliament in order to blow up the government. I had no real idea what their motivations were. I was wrong on numerous counts:

• Guy Fawkes's first name - regardless of our "Penny for the Guy" habit - was Guido.
• He was not the ring leader - that was Robert ["Robin"] Catesby - Fawkes was just one of the team, who happened to be caught.
• They didn't dig underground. The explosives were simply in a ground floor room under the chamber.
• They were planning on killing most of the royal family, not just the government.

Although there are some other theories, it seems that the plotters were Catholic fundamentalists, who wanted to overcome the government to ease their oppression. 400 years later and only the names have changed ...

It seems likely that the plot would actually have failed, as reports indicated that the gunpowder had "decayed" [as it will do if not stored correctly], but that may have been propaganda.

I was taken with a phrase used to indicate that something was unlikely to happen: "We shall see Tottenham turn French".

Tomorrow I will listen to the Bookclub programme and maybe pick up some more insights. But now on to some lighter reading ...