100 books like Misadventures

I found this new memoir riveting partly because it was so different from my own life experiences. My favourite sections were about the author's childhood in Northern Rhodesia [which became Zambia on independence]. Rod Madocks's childhood years seemed to structure his life for better and worse: leaving Zambia at the age of thirteen to be sent to boarding school in England has an increasingly negative effect for years to come but there are some humorous aspects. I was also deeply drawn to the portraits of the author’s parents as elderly people which was poignant after I as the reader had got to know them so well in the descriptions of his childhood. Rod Madocks is a wordsmith supreme—I hope this book becomes a classic.

After graduating, the narrator's family set him up with a job on Wall Street but it just isn't for him despite his upbringing preparing him for this kind of route. A few months later, he sets off on a round-the-world trip. The book features the first eighteen months of this journey spent in Australasia scraping a living in any way he can with occasionally outlandish casual jobs including beekeeping, running a youth hostel, and working on a production line in a cardboard box factory. He comes across a young woman, another traveller, sleeping beneath a table of honey pots and they begin a passionate yet fraught love affair.

Not only is this a great story, it is also punctuated with Bloom's vivid descriptions of landscapes and people he encounters along the way. There are meditations on the quirky details of life and reminiscing on an unusual childhood.

I've chosen this one not only because it's about growing up in Cairo, where I spent five years of my adult life as a teacher in an international school, but also for its astute analysis of how and why the memories we form in childhood differ fundamentally from those we acquire as adults. Another reason for its inclusion on my list is that it belongs to two childhood memoir subgenres for which I have a particular penchant, those by authors raised by people who were neither their biological nor adoptive parents and those by under-appreciated women novelists.

Like so many people of my generation, I have the writing of Roald Dahl in my blood. I learned to read with his children’s classics then, as an older child, watched his disturbing yet rivetingly spooky Tales of the Unexpected on television. The stories from his life in these two volumes are often more incredible than his fiction, and certainly equally outlandish. The people he encountered can certainly be traced to the characters he created in his career as an author. This is one of the few books I can re-read. 

If I’d been a London teenager at the outbreak of WW2, Joan is who I’d choose to have as my best friend. Joan’s memoirs, taken from her actual diaries, which were written secretly during bombing raids, reveal a conflicted, hormonally charged, humorous woman. This snippet gives you an idea: “Well here I sit in the air-raid shelter with screaming bombs falling right and left…I can’t help feeling that each moment may be my last, and as the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.” Written with great wit, and full of joie de vivre, Love Lessons is a wonderful read.

Maybe it’s because of my working-class roots, but Mary Saunders, an obscure but very real historical figure, is the sort of woman I wanted to root for. After all, it takes initiative, ingenuity, and not a small dose of impetuosity to rise from a lower-class schoolgirl to, well, some higher station. I was saddened to see how Mary’s yearnings to free herself from the shackles of her class forced her into prostitution at a young age. But when she made a dangerous misstep that set her on the run and landed her a position of a household seamstress, I couldn’t help but fear the worst for her. I was glued to the page in Emma Donoghue’s rich and provocative tale of this young girl’s quest for a better life.

I picked up this book because I loved the cover (who says we don’t choose books by their covers?) and shortly thereafter found myself completely immersed in a 17th-century English Restoration mystery. I would visit that era in my time machine provided it’s fully stocked with soap and hand sanitizer (this time period being the one during which the Great Plague took place). 

Main character Lucy Campion is a chambermaid in the home of a London magistrate. Her days are filled with the drudgery of servant duties—that is, until a murder claims the life of a servant in the household and someone Lucy holds dear is accused of the crime. Knowing that person can’t possibly be the killer, Lucy sets out to find out whodunit. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, so I’ll stop there. 

I learned more about 1660s England reading this book than I ever did… show more.

Huw Davies takes a long look at the tactics and training of the British army over a long period, culminating in the victories and defeats in this war. And there were extraordinary highs and lows in these twelve years.

He identifies the innovators, brilliant, hardworking men who changed the way cavalry and infantry worked, and the important decisions made in the Horse Guards in London. A new, well-written analysis.

Helen Marquard’s search for a piano teacher led her to Hedwig Stein who had fled Berlin in 1933 with her Russian Jewish husband, both concert pianists, to start again from nothing. A large, vivid woman, Hedwig freely shared her ideas on music, art, philosophy, literature. Later, Marquard discovered Hedwig had written a diary, and determined to bring us this story that would otherwise have been lost, enabling Hedwig and her husband to take their rightful place in the roll-call of émigrés who have contributed so much to UK cultural life. Hedwig put her husband’s career and her children first, yet she never gave up on her own career, which continued its own quiet flourishing after her husband’s sudden death. 

New Perspectives shows us that Black British history is a complex field of historiography. No longer should we look at it as a sketchy, speculative, politically correct apologia for historical investigation. But rather see, that for more than three generations scholars have worked very hard to establish a vigorous pedagogy. It is a pedagogy that supports wider British histories, but subverts the traditional trajectories of those narratives. This book introduces us to some of the major developments in Black British history and it is an excellent place to start for a reader who knows very little about this subject.