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This week, I’ve hooked up with Mark Hodkinson - author of one of my favourite books of the year, titled No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy (there’s an amazon link right there) - to be honest it was hard to resist. There are so many talking points, we probably could have gone on holiday together for a week and still not covered everything I wanted to dig around in.
As you’ll come to see, the main drag of the book is that of a working class man who somewhat unwittingly collected thousands of books throughout the course of his life, but more than that, it’s the story of how he got there when nobody in his family read - which for want of a better mirror to hold up, is a marked difference from my life.
Digging into some highlights, we mostly talk books and music (natch), growing up in the north across the 70s and 80s, name-checking many of the greats along the way: Salinger, Bukowski, Henry Rollins, Sillitoe and er… Catherine Cookson for some reason (hey, it might be good for the algorithms - I don’t recall ever seeing a podcast that mentions her) before diving a little into what it takes to publish a book and some of the differences between going it alone and having a publisher drive the car. We even get to touch on lofty subjects such as whether there even is a class system anymore.
Hand on heart, I hope you enjoy this one but probably most important of all is this:
You can find Mark’s homepage here where you can find his books and links to other projects. He also does this (which we never talked about) and is responsible for this (which is the best thing Charlie Chaplin has done in decades):
Thanks for tuning in.
Be cool to each other.
Starfish and Coffee: Episode 21 • Mark Hodkinson • Writer • Publisher • Author of No One Round Her Reads Tolstoy