I feel that this book really ran some parallels with my own upbringing, although there are some years between us. I can’t be bothered giving much more time to this self-centred monologue, so I’ll just say that that “awful school” inspired me - three post-graduate degrees, a life of working with disadvantaged communities, shelves (and a Kindle) full of books (including Tolstoy); and never did it let down either my brother or my sister- or anyone else I knew. Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed the way he talks about literature, some negative remarks about one of my own works excepted.

The author discusses his life, including his education and various obsessions which mirrored my own - including football and music. It’s an autobiography with parallel sections talking about his grandfather and his life and how it effected the author and his Mum. Educated in a brutal comprehensive school where any sign of braininess had to be carefully concealed. The final endnotes are great fun with examples of books he owns with inscriptions and bookplates and descriptions off what the numerous TBR piles contain in his house. Photograph: Mark Hodkinson View image in fullscreen ‘A dreamer’: Mark Hodkinson and family at Hollingworth Lake, Rochdale, in the 1970s.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. All of these feed into No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy and the result is a book that isn't quite sure what it wants to be. Much as I enjoyed the book and the muffled echoes of my own youthful (and lifelong) love of reading, my engagement with it began to weaken in the last quarter as the author moved into a rather woeful account of his struggles in running an (admirable) small publishing house. Like all memoirs, Mark Hodkinson’s account of growing up in Rochdale in the 1970s and 80s, is a partial, ‘curated’, telling of a life; viewed largely, as the subtitle suggests, through the prism of the author’s life as an unlikely reader and collector of books (the book starts and ends with a house move that leads him to wonder if the 3,500 books he needs to box up are an indication that his relationship with books has gone beyond a lifelong passion and is perhaps verging on the unhealthy). If you are a person who likes to read and considers yourself “well-read,” I would venture to say this book is for you.

There is also anti-intellectualism at work, as if they are afraid of you becoming clever in case you walk away, leave them behind. 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’. The book starts off very much a biography of Mark's reading then suddenly around page 200 football is mentioned. If community hub is the branding required to keep libraries in existence, then feel free to hub away! He is the author of Blue Moon: Down Among the Dead Men with Manchester City, which is regularly cited as a football classic, and Believe in the Sign, which was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy (2022) is initially concerned with Mark’s childhood in the mid 1970s. Ultimately, however, there are too many elements and the novel-memoir-cultural-history-becomes confused. On one hand, by having such a collection and planning to read all these books, you are making a fantastic statement of hope and revealing an investment in future self,’ she said.

This one took forever, because despite or because it being an “easy” read, and conversational in style nearly, every other book was more tempting. To be clear… I don’t know the author, but it took no time at all to work out that I grew up poor ( we couldn’t afford the school trips he went on) within walking distance of him. Interspersed with this are accounts of family life; his mentally ill grandad and friendships made and lost. This is a funny, charming and delight to soak up, an unashamed celebration of a working class life/childhood and all of the simple and profound pleasures it brings along with it. This is an impassioned hymn of praise and declaration of love for that complex cultural object, the book.All this would have been bearable if the subject of the memoir was actually someone you've heard of. Hodkinson also weaves a tale of family tragedy throughout his text; these passages are beautifully and movingly written.

We see the young Hodkinson lying in bed “with books fanned out around me like numbers on a giant clock”. Growing up a working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s was for most of his peers a book free experience. A recent house move involved 100 boxes of books and so I could relate completely to the opening scene where the author is moving house and friends and family helping with the move ask him why he has so many books and how many he has.

I loved this altered state of thinking induced by a book, how it transcended mere story or characters, to become elemental. Hodkinson outlines his dilemma with an opening story about a recent house move and the need to transport all those books. 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. Books have always been a refuge and, as Hodkinson points out, they will wait when life is a little crazy, always being there for you when you are ready. He was turned in on himself, as if he’d swallowed a thunderstorm and it was pressing against his skin.