3. What PGS Staff Are Reading This Summer

 David Wickes

I am looking forward to a summer of reading a varied assortment of books. I very much enjoyed reading Persians: The Age of Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones at Christmas, so I hope that a dive into Assyria: The Rise and Fall of The World’s First Empire by Eckhart Frahm will prove equally as rewarding. I have always liked going to The British Museum to see relics from these older civilizations and to be reminded of our own place in time and space. After looking at civilizations that existed well before the birth of Christ, I will turn my attention to an important religious topic which is often underplayed in Western media, namely the differences between different branches of Islam. Barnaby Rogerson’s The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East has been well reviewed and I hope that it will increase my own understanding.

Each year I always try to read The Booker Prize winner, so I am hoping to read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch to see why the judges rated it so favourably. And finally, one of my guilty pleasures is reading the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell. After an absence of some years. He has returned to writing them and I have already purchased Sharpe’s Command to see how our erstwhile hero fares in another encounter in The Peninsular War.

Tom Fairman

I am planning on reading the following trilogies which I have already started (done book 1 in both as I quite enjoy interweaving series so as not to overdo being in one world!): The Three-Body Problem Trilogy by Cixin Liu and The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. A good story can struggle to be told within one book, so I always enjoy getting stuck into a trilogy or more over the summer. 

The Three-Body Problem Trilogy is a science-fiction set where the science takes the centre stage in driving the narrative. Filled with aliens and conspiracies, it is a riveting read so far and it also has a fascinating insight into Chinese cultural history, although the Netflix adaptation removes a lot of this by Westernising a lot of the characters. 

The Farseer Trilogy is part of a long series of fantasy books set in a world that contains the Skill, an ability for people to communicate, influence and control others in a sort of telepathic way. The country is fragilely united, on the brink of war with political factions in constant scheming and the story follows a King's illegitimate child who is training to be an assassin. Essentially, it has a bit of everything and is told in a beautifully descriptive way, with past, present and future interwoven through. 

James Burkinshaw

I am looking forward to reading two books recently recommended by pupils. Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is seen by many as the greatest science-fiction novel of all time, in which Le Guin, in her own words, "eliminated gender to find out what was left."  Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost, published last year, is set around a production of Hamlet in the West Bank, exploring memory and identity in the context of political and cultural oppression, reflecting on the limits, as well as the possibilities, of art. 

  

I have been enjoying Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski series for nearly 40 years. Set in Chicago and the Mid-West, Paretsky's novels not only helped pioneer feminist crime fiction but offer an incisive social history of America: from the devastating consequences of de-industrialisation in the 1980s to the aftermath of 9/11 and the rise of MAGA. Her latest, Pay Dirt (#22 in the series), is set amidst an opioid crisis that has, to date, claimed nearly a million lives in North America. Patricia Highsmith is another writer who identified a psychological darkness at the heart of the American experience. I have meant to read Highsmith for a very long time and have chosen three classics from the 1950s: Strangers on a Train (which inspired a great Alfred Hitchcock film), The Talented Mr Ripley (recently dramatised on Netflix) and The Blunderer.  

Another writer I have neglected is Henry Green. I am not alone in this. His books never achieved much commercial success - perhaps because "nothing much happens, and the characters are all more or less appalling" (and this is from one of his fans!). However, for nearly a century, his virtuosity has been revered by other writers, from Virginia Woolf to Sebastian Faulks; Green has been described as "the writer's writer's writer." So finally, this summer, I plan to dive in: Living (1929), Party Going (1939) and Loving (1945).