What PGS Staff Are Reading This Summer

Louisa Burton

I’m currently half way through The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah which is about a teenage girl who moves with her parents to Alaska following the Vietnam War. Her father returned from the war with what we would now call PTSD, and the story uses the highs and lows of living in Alaska as a metaphor for mental health (I think!), really drawing on how isolating it can be. I really rate Kristin Hannah as an author; her novels are based around female leads who develop strength through their difficult circumstances, and the geography is always very colourfully described. I wouldn’t say that her writing style is sophisticated (sorry if you’re reading this, Kristin!) but they are fairly easy reading and hard to put down. If you enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, I think you’d like Kristin Hannah books.

 The incredible Dr Webb also recommended Longbourne by Jo Baker for me to read. I don’t know much about it yet, other than it is about inequality in a grand manor house during the Georgina era told from the perspective of the servants rather than the nobility. I enjoy historical fiction which challenge perceptions and hopefully this will tick that box.

 I’ll also use the summer to read around current Geography, including the Russia/ Ukraine War, climate change and immigration. These topics are fast-evolving, controversial and complex and often need some time and a variety of sources to get your head around. Although I’m a big fan of the BBC News, I try and gather my understanding from a variety of sources to consider a variety of perspectives.

Jock Peebles

Last autumn I erroneously choose, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, to read over the holiday. I have to admit it had been on my 'to do' list for about 40 years and I was pulled in by its gorgeously designed anniversary cover (a huge modernist orange disc sat inside an empty off-white rectangle). It was a revered classic and therefore what had I to lose? Blimey, it was dark. Not the kind of thing to read after the death of a close friend or family member. 

Each half term since has had a death in our family and so I'm finally venturing into the world of words again, hoping to get a break from all that family emotion for a wee while. 

So, this summer (and waiting on the book stand for me since October) has been Nina Simone's Gum, by Warren Ellis. It promises a much lighter and fun time.  Just what I need after a long, emotional year. 

Tom Fairman

I am currently in the middle of a six book series: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. I am about to embark on The Alloy of Law having finished the original trilogy recently. 

I came across the series having finished The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, who had died before he finished writing the books and Brandon Sanderson was selected to complete them using Jordan’s notes. Not sure if this is a pattern that Game of Thrones will follow, but Sanderson did an excellent job of staying true to Jordan’s narrative style and I was intrigued to see what he had written. 

I have not been disappointed and would recommend the Mistborn series to those of a fantasy saga persuasion.

 

James Burkinshaw

The way in which Artificial Intelligence is transforming our sense of what it is to be human is explored by Kazuo Ishiguro in his acclaimed novel, Klara and the Sun, which I am looking forward to reading this summer. The narrator is an 'Artificial Friend' designed to be an empathetic companion for isolated and lonely human beings. 

I am also planning to read Power and Progress, in which economists Darren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that AI can become an empowering and democratising tool, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few unaccountable tech leaders. The authors use a series of historical examples, from the medieval invention of the heavy-wheeled plough to the eighteenth-century steam revolution, to show that technology has only brought progress and prosperity when ordinary citizens have forced those in power to share gains from technical improvements more equitably. 

Karl Marx would almost certainly have agreed. However, in his youth he was more interested in being a poet than an economist. A voracious reader, Marx venerated writers from the Brontës to Shakespeare. Always suspicious of abstraction, he continued to believe, throughout his career, that literature revealed more truths than theory. In Marx's Literary Style (which is on my reading list), Ludovico Silva presents Marx's own novelistic writing style as "cognitive rather than ornamental, a tool of discovery rather than a verbal adornment."