''One Good Turn'', Kate Atkinson

Like most people, I expect, I’ve gone through phases in my life when it comes to reading. Following a fairly eager childhood diet of ‘’The Secret Garden’’ and ‘’Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’’ I got reading malaise, brought on by the school curriculum which mostly consisted of books I didn’t relate to. One of my strongest memories of the final year at school was finishing the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poetry module and going back to the Prefects’ Room to jump up and down on the book, attack it with a pair of compasses and finally fling it out of the window (literally). But even once that forcible reading list had gone and I went to University, I still struggled.

The main reason was, how on earth do you find out which books you would like? It seems like a stupid question but I had a fairly narrow-minded Scottish education which didn’t introduce you to a large variety of literature, nor to an approach that would help you navigate forbidding libraries or bookshops. In fact, based on what I’d done at school I had pretty much decided that I didn’t like books, as they all seemed to be stuffy classics full of frilly language & dense description (which I don’t like to this day).

To shock all high-browed better-educated people out there, what actually introduced me back into the idea of reading for fun was Waterstones 2-for-1 table. I’m more than aware that many people find this type of bookselling repellant, but what it did for me was take away the intimidation of walking around rooms of floor-to-ceiling spines, and instead offer a smaller selection of books lots of people enjoy. And indirectly, it introduced me to Modern Fiction, which I’m honestly not sure I knew existed before. Much as I admire (and frankly feel inferior to) friends who read Madame Bovary on the bus, it’s not me. Becoming part of a Book Club in Geneva and starting one in Athens also made me realize maybe it’s not me that’s so unusual but the fact I spent my teenage years in a debating society at a university where people walk around in 18th century clothing for fun.

And hence (by a long detour) we come to ‘’One Good Turn’’ by Kate Atkinson which, as you might have guessed, I bought on the Waterstones 2-for-1 table (at Heathrow, as it happens). This was the type of book I suspect my English teachers would have loathed, but serves its purpose: to keep you entertained. The book is driven by a fairly compelling detective / murder-investigation plot, and the prose is what I’d call ‘’relaxing’’ – it doesn’t add much, it conveys the story, but at the same time it doesn’t really challenge you (which incidentally makes it fall in my category of Bedtime Reading unlike some others which I grudgingly accept I have to read during the day if I’m to stand any chance of following them). This may seem faint praise, but I’m glad there are books out there that play this role – some, like ‘’The Da Vinci Code’’ become unreadable as it’s so obvious they were written for a 6-year-old reading level – but I don’t always want to be challenged by the text itself. The first book for my Book Club in Geneva was ‘’Everything is Illuminated’’ by Jonathon Safran Foer which is excellent & highly recommended but needs to be taken one word at a time to even follow what’s going on. Which is OK sometimes, if you’re in the mood, but there are times I want to be entertained rather than study. Hopefully this all explains why I’m not going to talk about the content of this book – it’s fairly fluffy, and didn’t trigger any profound thoughts apart from a slight homesickness for Edinburgh which is a little strange as I’m not from Edinburgh but from a town nearer the Arctic Circle that looks up to Edinburgh as The Big Smoke. And talking of home, I’m now off to the Athens Caldeonian Society St Andrew’s Ball to showcase my well-honed pas-de-bas and have fun with Roddy the Piper. No, really.