Margaret MacMillan reading in the library of St. Antony's College at Oxford University.The Globe and Mail
I think it may be a bad habit, but, as I get older, I usually have several books on the go at once: some that I ought to be reading and some that I read for sheer pleasure.
In the second category is the new Nick Hornby novel, Juliet, Naked, which I have just finished. I have loved everything of his I have read, from High Fidelity to A Long Way Down and his latest is equally wonderful. It's funny and unexpected and quite moving. Juliet, Naked is not what the title might suggest. Rather than a racy erotic novel, it is about a minor rock star from the 1980s who suddenly disappeared from view. His memory is kept alive by a small eccentric band of enthusiasts on the Internet. When an early demo tape surfaces, they go mad with excitement. I won't spoil the story, but the rock star resurfaces and there is a happy ending - sort of.
The other novel that I am partway through is one I am ashamed I have never read before - Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version. It is Richler at his very best, irreverent, wicked and beautifully observed. I wanted to read it before I saw the new movie to fix the characters - and what a bunch they are - in my mind. I needn't have worried because they are all memorable.
Since I am researching a book on the First World War, I have been trying to read a lot about the world that was destroyed by that terrible conflict. Stefan Zweig's wonderful memoir Years of Yesterday summons up that lost world of Mitteleuropa, the complacent bourgeoisie and the apparently stable Austro-Hungarian Empire - what he called the Golden Age of Security. It is fascinating and awful because we know what is going to happen. Zweig lived to see the catastrophe of the war and the chaos that followed. As a Jew, he had to flee when the Nazis took over Austria. He finished his memoir in 1942 and, apparently unable to bear the destruction of Europe any longer, committed suicide.
My final book in progress is Adam Sisman's new biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the famous historian whose reputation was stained when he pronounced the fake Hitler diaries to be real. Very clever, snobbish, bitchy and brave, he was a great Oxford figure. I am learning quite a bit about the Oxford of his days and it makes me glad that what was an insular world has changed. As a Canadian historian and a woman, I am happy that it has.
Margaret MacMillan is warden of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. Her Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for the best book of non-fiction published in the United Kingdom as well as the 2003 Governor-General's Award. Her most recent book is The Uses and Abuses of History.