Kings and queens, memorisation of dates without analysis and tales of British heroism against Johnny Foreigner – it wasn’t what you’d call balanced. At the age of 14, I made up my mind that history was dull.
Later in life, I discovered the past in a completely new light – through reading stories about people. Some of these characters were fictional, but their experiences brought history to life in such vivid colour, the impact was as if I’d been right at their sides.
More important than my own personal entertainment, I understood how one could and should learn from the past, to develop as a person and as a civilisation.
Here are a few of the books that drew me into their time and stayed with me long after I’d finished. It’s a tour around the world, in rough order of reading.
Wild Swans, By Jung Chang.
This memoir was a phenomenon in the 1990s and an eye-opener into the lives of Chinese women in the 20th century.
Told through three generations, we see and feel the horrors of foot-binding, competing for status between wives and concubines, the violence of the Kuomintang and the failure of hope brought about by the Cultural Revolution. It’s been 40 years since I read this book and its impact remains.
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Part of my childhood was spent in Nigeria so I read this book to understand more about the country and was forcefully reminded of the ‘history is written by the victors’ quote.
The Biafran war was brutal, bloody and merciless, killing 1 million people, many through starvation.
Through her characters, Adichie looks at the tangled forces that erased a nascent nation.
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie.
This novel won the Booker of Bookers and it’s no surprise.
An epic depiction of India given form in the character of Saleem, born on the stroke of midnight when India gained it independence.
His story and those of the other midnight children reflect that of the country in as it grows in complexity, magic, self-awareness and caprice.
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.
Two stories intersect and eventually entwine in the build-up to World War II.
Nature, nurture, propaganda, science and a balanced perspective show how minds (both young and old) can be conditioned, damaged and trained.
What happens to these characters is human, enlightening, painful and touching. A vital reminder of the futility and destruction wreaked by war.
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver.
From Mexico to McCarthy’s America, we are swept into a personal history which includes such luminaries as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leo Trotsky, and J Edgar Hoover.
It offers the reader an element of interpretation in that parts of the book are told through notes, articles, court records and personal letters, leaving us with a feeling of privilege and insight.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles.
Some people, like this author, would find confinement to a luxury hotel on pain of death insufferable. Not so Count Rostov.
In 1922, the Bolsheviks sentence him to ‘house arrest’. Or in this case, Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, directly opposite the Kremlin.
Rostov has such a wealth of imagination and curiosity, he enjoys a rich and fulfilling life in a microcosm of the wider world.
