Review of "No one round here reads Tolstoy" by Mark Hodgkinson

Occasionally interesting but mainly rambling and self-indulgent book about a man's love of books and what they meant to him through his life. He's slightly younger than me, but there are some things from his life that I recognise, even though he grew up in a poor working class family in the north and I grew up in a comfortably lower-middle class family in the north London suburbs...the Essex ones, mind, not the posh and cultured ones in the north-west. I enjoyed a lot of his reading choices, but didn't really share his love of punk and new wave...even then I knew it wasn't that good, though I was less interested in music then.

There are bits of life story, bits about the publishing industry (he creates his own publishing company), and lots about bookshops, but it doesn't add up to anything that was really enjoyable to read. I think I may have had it with white male autobiographies.