No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy

Mark Hodkinson Canongate £16.99

Mark Hodkinson was born in Rochdale in the early 1960s into a working-class family. His future was mapped out, an assumed path through a pointless education, leaving secondary-modern school to take up his dad’s trade and become an electrician. Nearly 50 years on from being written off by the system when he failed the 11-plus, these days he runs a publishing house and is an accomplished author.

And there is one thing he says altered his trajectory. Not parental ambition or an encouraging teacher: the drug that propelled his advancement was books. It was between the covers of a novel that he found another world. Stories, tales, words provided him with a new way to think of himself.

Reading this memoir is to realise there is no better tool for social mobility than a book. Which is why J.K. Rowling deserves society’s eternal gratitude: no one has encouraged more children to read than her. She is thus responsible for far more growth and development than any government initiative. And the reward for writers like her is that if you get a kid reading, one day they might write a book as charming as this one.

For Hodkinson’s story of a life in thrall to books is a delight. Growing up in the 1970s, in a place where the very idea of reading was so far from the norm he was reckoned a little odd, he paints a wonderful picture of an era of phone boxes, mills and only three TV channels.

Hodkinson was part of a punk band at school. He couldn’t play the guitar, he just made what he calls ‘manicured noises’. But despite having no obvious talent, the band recorded an album within two weeks of forming. And by album, he means a cassette recorded in one of their bedrooms.

There is a lovely sequence about Hodkinson spending the long, hot summer of 1976 not eyeing up the local girls at the Rochdale swimming baths but scouring second-hand bookshops.

Born long before Harry Potter, his hero was Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher In The

Rye. And like so many of us, he thought J.D. Salinger had written it just for him; the observations were so personal and individual, he must have done.

As Hodkinson so astutely notes, that is what books can do: not just alter a reader’s world view, but change their life. They certainly changed his.