- “Dishonesty Is The Second-Best Policy and Other Rules to Live By” by David Mitchell
- “Michael Palin In Venezuela” by Michael Palin
- “Happiness: Lessons From A New Science” by Richard Layard
- “The People on Platform 5” by Clare Pooley
- “Encyclopaedia of Narrow Gauge Railways of Great Britain and Ireland” by Thomas Middlemiss
- “Moscow Coup: The Death of the Soviet System” by Martin Sixsmith
- “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three-Quarters” by Sue Townsend
- “The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole” by Sue Townsend
- “Adrian Mole: The Collected Poems” by Sue Townsend
- “How To Live Like A Stoic” by Tom Hodgkinson
- “The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37 3/4” by Adrian Plass
- “This Present Darkness” by Frank Peretti
- “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett
- “Brutal Scotland” by Simon Phipps
- “Idler XXX: Thirty Years of The Idler, A Visual History” by Tom Hodgkinson
- “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- “British Railways Mark 1 Coaches” by Keith Parkin
- “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
- “The Story of Railways” by Richard Bowood, illustrated by Robert Ayton (Ladybird)
- “Riders” by Jilly Cooper
- “The Dark Half” by Stephen King
- “Everything In Color” by Stephanie Stalvey
- “Final Destination: Riding Britain’s Trains to the End of the Line” by Nige Tassell
- “Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee” by Charlie Higson
- “Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to Happiness” by Bill Bailey
- “West Highland Landscape” by Colin Baxter
- “How God Becomes Real: Kindling The Presence of Invisible Others” by T.M. Luhrmann
- “On The Slow Train Again” by Michael Williams
- “A Writer At War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army” by Vasily Grossman, Antony Beevor (editor) and Luba Vinogradova (translator)
Date Started: 4th October 2026
Date Finished: 3rd November 2026
4/5 stars
I picked this up in a book exchange, and thought it looked very interesting. Vasily Grossman was an eyewitness on the Eastern Front throughout much of the Second World War, and his accounts of battles and everyday life make fascinating and moving reading.
Much of what he wrote was very short, concise descriptions of what he observed, that were almost technical in their nature, and sometimes these aren’t the easiest things to read or piece together, but the book contains several longer pieces, including a vivid description of the horrors of Treblinka. This is a very disturbing and uncomfortable read, even for those of us who know a lot about the Holocaust, and it was used as a key piece of evidence in the trials of camp staff after the war.
Despite his bravery and amazing skill as a writer, Grossman was treated appallingly badly by the Soviet authorities and much of his writing was censored, with his work only becoming known posthumously in the West. Moving and informative, it really made me realise how extraordinarily brutal the world can be sometimes.