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Books on the state of the nation - readers asked to choose the book which best sums up their region... the shortlists are quite interesting, though I'm not exactly sure that Aberystwyth Mon Amour is a very flattering choice for Wales...
I think I'd go for Captive State for England, but that's probably because I read Private Eye too much.
Interesting to look at it from a more local level too - is there a book which sums up your particular area for you? I was trying to think of the book which summed up Oxford for me, adn went through the usual suspects - Gaudy Night, Zuleika Dobson, Brideshead Revisisted - before I remembered reading a book called The Noonday Devil by Alan Judd, which is the perfect choice. It's about a couple of students (actually at this very college, there are a number of pointers in the text for those in the know) in their final term and it captures the terrible sense of wasted time that you often get here - the sense of time spent doing something other than that which you should be doing, if you see what I mean, which characterised a great deal of my time here. It's also pretty accurate about the city itself... a shame that Judd's other stuff is, by all accounts, dire, and moreover he once wrote the motoring column for the Spectator...
Your choice? |
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