It’s an autobiography with parallel sections talking about his grandfather and his life and how it effected the author and his Mum.

Life, much as we try to keep it at arm’s length or delude ourselves that it falls under our dominion, often ‘blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday’. This is an impassioned hymn of praise and declaration of love for that complex cultural object, the book. He also describes well the difference between obsession and hoarding versus collection and curation (and, like him, I’m sure I’m a collector not a hoarder, honest.frozen February mornings in flimsy nylon shorts and shirts, shivering, skin turning red, turning blue. It is honest, straightforward and down-to-earth, and captures the excitement of books and – crucially – the sheer pleasure of time alone with a book without external demands, which chimed closely with my own experience. The police brought her back to my bewildered granddad on many occasion, before she had to go into a nursing home. Even if you recognise you probably won’t have time to read them all, you are already forming a relationship with mortality which we all must do at some point in our lives.

Mark Hodkinson grew up among dark satanic mills in a house with just one book: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. I lived in Manchester around the same time for a while and there's so much more I wanted to know (a sequel on football would be nice! It's an article of faith to me to read books sequentially (even though nobody would ever know if I didn't! It’s easily done if you acquire books on a regular basis, seldom discard any and are lucky enough to live into your mid-fifties…. A resounding defence of the physical book and the thankless enthusiasts who bring it into existence .It’s about the schools, the music, the people – but pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors that led the way and shaped his life. uk) has published titles by Simon Armitage, Bob Stanley, Barry Hines, Ian McMillan, Hunter Davies, Ray Gosling, David Gedge, Stuart Murdoch (of Belle and Sebastian) and many more. If you are a person who likes to read and considers yourself “well-read,” I would venture to say this book is for you. However, be aware this is a book-biography not a personal biography, so if you were interested in Mark Hodkinson’s life, beyond his childhood, its almost completely absent.

In No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy I saw reflected my own experience of growing up in an almost bookless household. His theory that you shouldn't read anything you don't immediately like (and in fact should judge a book only on its first page) would never see anyone challenged and would just be boring (I certainly wouldn't have got very far with his book). Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed the way he talks about literature, some negative remarks about one of my own works excepted. By the latter part of the book however id lost real interest and when the author is disparaging of modern libraries, he completely lost me!

At one point his lists all the book subjects in the various rooms of his house; front room, living room, kitchen, top of the stairs, landing, bedrooms, office, loft and garage. Part autobiography, part confessions of a book addict, part social history, and part recent publishing trends. This is a book about the north; it is also about publishing, writing and music, but it transcends its subjects and meets the criterion Hodkinson sets out in his preface: “The best books, the same as the best days, skitter on the breeze. It touched one of my own reasons for loving books, which is their materiality, their acting as palimpsests of human meaning and desiring.

More than this sense of place, there was a deeper geography at work in the short, sharp sentences and the rhythm of ordinary acts of living expressed until it became hypnotic. I was amassing rather a "collection" of books too, but soon realised that some books I had kept purely for the sake of it, as opposed to them bringing me real joy, hence my recent and ongoing book culling! Hodkinson manages to discuss books with no element of showing off or of demonstrating how well read he is, which is a relief. All in all, Hodkinson's book is hugely enjoyable to me as I see something of myself in there (albeit swap punk music for dance, and my opinion on libraries differs to Mark's. I feel that this book really ran some parallels with my own upbringing, although there are some years between us.Sometimes self-pitying, sometimes self-aggrandising, moments of self-deprecation rang false, and the humour was pretty mild stuff. But his love of books was apparently innate and irrepressible; it didn't seem like he had to sacrifice for it. Also, while as a bookish girl I was often derided or treated with suspicion, the author also struggled with those who saw it as a less manly passtime and, like me, he was told to get out more or informed reading so much would leave him needing glasses. Around that time, in my thirties, was probably when I began to accumulate books at a rate considerably greater than my capacity to read them. The love of and consequent hoarding of books eventually drives Hodgkinson to seek some answers from Lisa, a psychiatrist.