It seems bizarre to me that book shopping at this time of year should be about negotiating your way through mountainous piles of ‘Things You Never Knew About…’ or ‘The Book of Absolutely Useless…’ -type miscellanies. Surely Christmas, with its long, lazy afternoons and that strange week of limbo between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, is the perfect opportunity to get stuck into those weighty tomes you’d normally only have time to read on a long summer holiday? By the time you’ve shelled out a tenner for some flimsy collation of trivia to go in your beloved’s stocking (absolutely useless, indeed), you may as well have spent the extra few quid and bought one of the many genuine titles gasping for attention underneath the Truss and Schott ziggurats out there.
This season, when even the fiercely agnostic may find themselves subconsciously singing along to familiar biblical passages in the form of Christmas carols, I highly recommend Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography (Atlantic Books, £16.99). This is a fascinating exploration of the origins of the most widely circulated and influential book in history. Revised, interpreted, re-interpreted, then revised again so frequently that its meanings mutate in every slight shift of historical circumstance, the Good Book still has the potential to do such bad. By asking the question ‘if religion preaches compassion, why is there so much hatred in sacred texts?’ Armstrong, a former nun and prolific religious historian, unpicks one of the vital questions of our time.
Martin Meredith’s Gold, Diamonds and War: The Making of South Africa (Simon & Schuster, £25) is an equally riveting read. In this follow up to his monumental The State of Africa, Meredith argues that what characterises much of the modern country we call South Africa was shaped by the events of the nineteenth century; not least the rise of its fortunes from gold and diamonds, the steady dispossession of African land, and the enforcement of segregationist measures that eventually culminated in apartheid.
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