The article below is taken from Vernon Coleman’s first book `The Medicine Men’ which was first published in 1975 and which has now been republished as a paperback.
From The Medicine Men
Even under comparatively constant medical supervision there are dangers involved in taking medicines. Dr Hurwitz and Dr Wade, writing in the British Medical Journal in 1969 after intensive hospital monitoring of adverse reactions to drugs, found that of 1,268 patients who were observed 10.2 per cent had drug reactions, most of them severe. Surveys at a university hospital in Ontario had previously shown reactions of between 11 and 15 per cent in medical wards even when only documented reactions were counted. In another survey it was shown that the hospital stay of every fifth patient going into a university hospital was complicated by some disease of medical progress, most of these disorders involving the use of drugs. Naturally some of the patients involved died.
A study at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore showed that in patients in the hospital received an average of fifteen drugs. The minimum number of drugs received was six, the greatest number taken was thirty-two. The use of so many drugs makes interactions more likely. According to Professor Girdwood, Professor of Therapeutics at the University of Edinburgh: 'It is not uncommon to find in hospital that something like 15 per cent of patients have been admitted either suffering from an adverse drug reaction or develop one in hospital.' Other experts believe that up to one-third of hospital patients suffer drug reactions. It has been reported according to an American Food and Drug Administration expert that up to one seventh of all hospital days are devoted to the care of patients suffering from drug toxicity. It has even been said that in almost all illnesses in hospital it should be considered likely that at least some of the features are drug-induced – until proved otherwise.
One of the problems is that the dangers involved in prescribing and taking drugs have not yet been fully realised. Some self-poisoning and some adverse reactions are inevitable but most experts believe that with greater awareness some disasters could be prevented. Awareness, however, is growing. In one spring time issue of the British Medical Journal in 1974 the following headings appeared on the correspondence page; 'Other systemic effects of eye drops', 'Amitryptiline and Imipramine Poisoning in Children', 'Anticoagulants and treatment for chilblains', 'Enteric coated potassium chloride – a continuing hazard', 'Analgesics and the Kidney', 'Brain damage after lithium and phenytoin', 'Sensitivity to intravenous anaesthetics'.
Even though there may be growing awareness of the dangers, drugs are still misused in an alarming fashion. For example, two paediatricians from Glasgow reporting on amitryptiline and imipramine poisoning in children, wrote: '.Medicine for a trivial complaint is unlikely to be regarded by parents as potentially dangerous and practitioners should therefore warn them accordingly; if, indeed, the transient effect of these potentially dangerous drugs upon the average case of bed-wetting in childhood can be justified.' The drugs are prescribed for many children for bed-wetting; and poisoning from these powerful drugs is becoming increasingly' common. It is difficult to see why doctors should prescribe a drug, which can kill, for a condition such as bed-wetting, however upset the parent may be and whatever pressures may be exerted.
In practice what should happen is that doctors should try to assess a drug's usefulness and compare it with its dangers. If the drug is being used to save a life, then a few side-effects are nothing to worry about. If, however, it is being used for some simple and never threatening disorder, then it should not be used if it has bad side-effects. So chloramphenicol, which can cause a fatal type of anaemia, should be used for patients with typhoid, which can also kill, but not for patients with tonsillitis which rarely kills.
It is the problem of drug interactions which is likely to cause most controversy in the future. There are many possibilities. Metabolism of one drug may affect another. Drugs may react chemically together within the body and excretory rates may be modified with devastating results. Patent medicines and even foodstuffs may react. For example, calcium, which is found in milk, inhibits the absorption of tetracycline; blood-clotting drugs are often affected by substances containing vitamin K, some drugs can kill if taken with cheese or wine.
Drug reactions were once fairly simple to assess. This is no longer the case. Harvey and Read writing in the 1973 Medical Annual, wrote: 'The reactions reported have recently tended to be of a more subtle and insidious nature, and it is becoming clear that a great many long-term drugs, even those like the barbiturates which have been assumed for many years to be extremely safe in use, have complex and potentially hazardous interactions with metabolic processes in the body.'
NOTE
This extract is taken from `The Medicine Men’ by Vernon Coleman, first published in 1975. `The Medicine Men’ has been republished and is now available again as a paperback. To purchase a copy please go to the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
My monthly SS is below average by $300. Very blessed the house and car are paid for. But Car, House, Earthquake ins. Property taxes, Car Tags, and up keep can wipe it out in a hurry. New lenses for my glasses are the next goal. I don't want the lesser quality on the market today. I've always used ZIEZ lenses. My old Optician recommended as the best. Some clothes need replacing with the 30 lb weight loss. Jeans don't have to be new. Just my T's. And my back is feeling less pain with the weight loss. Hand has 1 more PT session. Then home PT. AI making decisions on what test, or treatments I need SCARES ME TO DEATH.
Here is the Introduction from my book `My Favourite Books’, which is subtitled `Non-fiction books I’ve read more than once and hope to read again.’
Introduction
I am getting old (it’s something that’s been coming on for a while) and as I hunted through my study, our office, the drawing room, our bedroom and the rest of the house where books are kept, for a book I knew I had, but couldn’t find, I kept discovering books I’d forgotten that I had, but that I realised had affected me in some way when I’d first read them – sometimes because I’d learned something important, sometimes because I had been particularly amused or sometimes both. I put these books on one side to read again, for the optimist in me always hopes that there will be time to read just a few more dozen books.
It then slowly occurred to me (at my age it takes time for ideas to germinate) that many of the books I’d picked out are now pretty well forgotten, drowned in a tsunami of new and fashionable books, mostly written by or ghosted for, television celebrities and retired politicians.
It then also occurred to me that some of those who have been kind enough to read my books in the past might enjoy reading the old, often out of print non-fiction books which had often shaped my thinking and my outlook on life, and which they might have missed.
It occurred to me too that short descriptions of the contents of my top non-fiction books might be both entertaining and informative.
When I began the book I thought the books would choose themselves. How naïve a thought that turned out to be! It ended up being infinitely more difficult than I’d expected.
I decided that although there would inevitably be some books on the list which are classics I wanted there to be a good mix of unusual books – books which most readers might have missed. And if the authors of those books had written a number of other readable books, that would be a bonus. Although some of the books on my list are uncommon they should all be possible to find in one form or another. The one beauty of the internet is that it often makes it possible to find old books within minutes, instead of years. Throughout my life I’ve always enjoyed hunting around in second hand book shops but although I always found that second-hand bookshops were wonderful for finding books I didn’t know I was looking for, I found that hunting for a specific book often involved visits to several dozen bookshops and a hunt extending over several years. The internet has obviously changed that. So, for example, it took me many months to find all the volumes of James Agate’s ‘Ego’ diaries on the internet, but I doubt if I would have ever found them all if I had relied upon scrabbling around the dusty shelves of second-hand book shops.
This has been a surprisingly dangerous book to write.
I have over the years bought tens of thousands of books (and received many thousands of books sent for review). Sadly, and regrettably, I have over the years donated thousands of books to charity shops (and I’ve given many boxfuls to second-hand bookshops which were struggling to survive) but there are still many thousands left. (I haven’t counted them and I don’t intend to do so.)
The result is that our home in Bilbury is full of books (only the boiler room, the boot room, the butler’s pantry and the bathrooms are largely free of books – though I confess I did have two book shelves put up in my bathroom) and we ran out of shelf space a long time ago. The result is that books sit in precarious piles and, having absolutely no patience at all, I repeatedly tried pulling a selected volume out from the middle, or more likely near the bottom, of a teetering four or five foot high stack of books. If my foot work wasn’t nifty enough most of the books, and quite possibly an adjacent pile, would come crashing down on parts of me that weren’t created for being attacked by battalions of books.
Still, in the end I got there: I found my non-fiction books.
It is, of course, a very personal selection, and I don’t expect anyone to be captivated by every book in this selection (it would be strange if they were) but if you are anything like me you will be delighted to find news of half a dozen books you hadn’t previously discovered and, in crude footballing parlance, be over the moon to find a dozen. This isn’t offered as the definitive list of non-fiction books. It is merely a list of non-fiction books which I found captivating, informative and delightful. I hope you will find my notes encouraging and invigorating. The only criterion was that the books on the list had to be available in an English language edition. Some are definitely not available in paperback but hardback editions should not be too hard to find.
I have always been a voracious reader (perhaps because I was an only child who quickly found companionship in books and almost as quickly discovered the joy of finding that an author I liked had written many books). Over the years, I have found that some of the most rewarding volumes are those which were written years ago and which are now out of print and largely forgotten – but often still available on the internet, of course.
William Morris advised us to have nothing in our homes which is not beautiful or useful and the same thought can be applied, in a slightly modified form, to books. ‘Read nothing which is not entertaining or informative’, might be a useful guiding principle. The books in this selection have been picked because they are either enormously entertaining or exceptionally illuminating or, preferably, both.
Finally, I apologise to those books which didn’t make the hundred. (Most of the authors concerned are no longer with us so I feel I should offer my apologies to the books, which are.)
I had to stop somewhere but I could have easily made this list ‘My 200 Favourite Non-Fiction books’.
I didn’t include any books from the excellent King Penguin series or the Britain in Pictures series though I have complete sets of both series and almost all the books in both series are well worth finding and reading. And I haven’t included any dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopaedias or reference books. Somehow, I missed out both Hans Selye’s classic books on stress, the first of which was published in 1955, and W.B.Cannon’s book on physiology entitled ‘The Wisdom of the Body’ which was published in 1932. Those two didn’t make the cut because although they’re important to me, and played a big part in guiding my thinking about medicine, I suspect they might be of less interest to the general reader. Shamefully I didn’t find room for H.M.Stanley’s massive books about Livingstone and the Dark Continent, and nor did Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ make my list of books. I now have no idea how they came to be left out. ‘The Worst Journey in the World’, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic book about the Captain Scott expedition to the South Pole, didn’t make my list because I found it just too endlessly depressing for me to want to read again (one of the criteria for selection). Clifford Irving’s book ‘Project Octavio’ (about how he pretended to be Howard Hughes and sold his autobiography to a publisher) nearly made the cut, but didn’t, nor did William Donaldson’s large, unusual dictionary ‘Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics’. (At one point I wrote an entry for the ‘Henry Root’ letters, written under the Henry Root pseudonym but authored by Donaldson, but the entry, like numerous others was eventually squeezed out.) I decided against Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ for no good reason that I can think of other than that it’s just too darned gloomy and manipulative and didn’t satisfy either of my two criteria. I decided that Vance Packard’s ‘Hidden Persuaders’ (a masterpiece about the advertising industry) is rather dated and not fascinating enough to merit re-reading (but still well worth reading if you haven’t read it and want to know more about how advertisers use psychology to sell products) and Alvin Toffler’s huge bestseller ‘Future Shock’ missed my list for the same reason. John Buchan wrote a number of good history books, particularly one about ‘The Massacre of Glencoe’, which is especially revealing, but they’re rather specialised so they didn’t get in either. (I did, however, include a book which he edited – ‘A History of English Literature’.) I thought for a while about Rachel Carson, whose book ‘Silent Spring’ triggered people to be concerned about the environment, but decided that none of her books pass the ‘do I want to re-read this book’ test. Henry Fielding’s marvellous and incredibly readable small book ‘Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon’ was squeezed out at the last minute when I decided that I really couldn’t leave Mark Twain out of my selection since his travel books and his massive autobiography are essential non-fiction reading and valuable parts of his canon. And then I remembered Preston Sturges and decided that Mr Twain is well enough known, and that his books could manage quite well without a boost from me (though, ludicrously and sadly, even Twain is now subject to bans and censorship). So out went Twain and in came Sturges. My selection took me twice as long to write as it should have done because I was continually writing pieces about books I liked and then replacing those pieces with essays about books I found on my shelves and realised I liked even more or which I thought were, for some reason, more relevant to the book. Several times I remembered books I liked and then, when I couldn’t find them, bought new copies to write about.
I could have messed around with my list for another decade. I realised, as I wrote this, that I didn’t have anything by or about W.S.Gilbert – the co-author of the Savoy Operas. But with all books of this type there comes a time when the author has to say: ‘Enough! This is the best I can do today – though if I remade this list tomorrow it would probably be different. The books I selected aren’t necessarily the most beautifully written, but they are, I think, books which can now be read or re-read with advantage.
Finally, finally I should point out that my collection of books is not listed in any particular order. I could, I suppose, have put them in an A to Z list. But should they be in A to Z order according to title or in an A to Z list according to author’s name? I could have put them in date order, according to when they were published – but why? And I didn’t want to put them in a list like a hit parade, because since I’ve selected every one of them they’d all be at number one. So the books are listed entirely at random – as I picked them off the shelves and wrote about them.
These are, I hope, books which you may have missed but which you will be glad I told you about.
Vernon Coleman
Bilbury 2022
NOTE
Vernon Coleman’s book `My Favourite Books’ is available from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Prescription Drug Dangers – a Warning from 1975
Dr Vernon Coleman
The article below is taken from Vernon Coleman’s first book `The Medicine Men’ which was first published in 1975 and which has now been republished as a paperback.
From The Medicine Men
Even under comparatively constant medical supervision there are dangers involved in taking medicines. Dr Hurwitz and Dr Wade, writing in the British Medical Journal in 1969 after intensive hospital monitoring of adverse reactions to drugs, found that of 1,268 patients who were observed 10.2 per cent had drug reactions, most of them severe. Surveys at a university hospital in Ontario had previously shown reactions of between 11 and 15 per cent in medical wards even when only documented reactions were counted. In another survey it was shown that the hospital stay of every fifth patient going into a university hospital was complicated by some disease of medical progress, most of these disorders involving the use of drugs. Naturally some of the patients involved died.
A study at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore showed that in patients in the hospital received an average of fifteen drugs. The minimum number of drugs received was six, the greatest number taken was thirty-two. The use of so many drugs makes interactions more likely. According to Professor Girdwood, Professor of Therapeutics at the University of Edinburgh: 'It is not uncommon to find in hospital that something like 15 per cent of patients have been admitted either suffering from an adverse drug reaction or develop one in hospital.' Other experts believe that up to one-third of hospital patients suffer drug reactions. It has been reported according to an American Food and Drug Administration expert that up to one seventh of all hospital days are devoted to the care of patients suffering from drug toxicity. It has even been said that in almost all illnesses in hospital it should be considered likely that at least some of the features are drug-induced – until proved otherwise.
One of the problems is that the dangers involved in prescribing and taking drugs have not yet been fully realised. Some self-poisoning and some adverse reactions are inevitable but most experts believe that with greater awareness some disasters could be prevented. Awareness, however, is growing. In one spring time issue of the British Medical Journal in 1974 the following headings appeared on the correspondence page; 'Other systemic effects of eye drops', 'Amitryptiline and Imipramine Poisoning in Children', 'Anticoagulants and treatment for chilblains', 'Enteric coated potassium chloride – a continuing hazard', 'Analgesics and the Kidney', 'Brain damage after lithium and phenytoin', 'Sensitivity to intravenous anaesthetics'.
Even though there may be growing awareness of the dangers, drugs are still misused in an alarming fashion. For example, two paediatricians from Glasgow reporting on amitryptiline and imipramine poisoning in children, wrote: '.Medicine for a trivial complaint is unlikely to be regarded by parents as potentially dangerous and practitioners should therefore warn them accordingly; if, indeed, the transient effect of these potentially dangerous drugs upon the average case of bed-wetting in childhood can be justified.' The drugs are prescribed for many children for bed-wetting; and poisoning from these powerful drugs is becoming increasingly' common. It is difficult to see why doctors should prescribe a drug, which can kill, for a condition such as bed-wetting, however upset the parent may be and whatever pressures may be exerted.
In practice what should happen is that doctors should try to assess a drug's usefulness and compare it with its dangers. If the drug is being used to save a life, then a few side-effects are nothing to worry about. If, however, it is being used for some simple and never threatening disorder, then it should not be used if it has bad side-effects. So chloramphenicol, which can cause a fatal type of anaemia, should be used for patients with typhoid, which can also kill, but not for patients with tonsillitis which rarely kills.
It is the problem of drug interactions which is likely to cause most controversy in the future. There are many possibilities. Metabolism of one drug may affect another. Drugs may react chemically together within the body and excretory rates may be modified with devastating results. Patent medicines and even foodstuffs may react. For example, calcium, which is found in milk, inhibits the absorption of tetracycline; blood-clotting drugs are often affected by substances containing vitamin K, some drugs can kill if taken with cheese or wine.
Drug reactions were once fairly simple to assess. This is no longer the case. Harvey and Read writing in the 1973 Medical Annual, wrote: 'The reactions reported have recently tended to be of a more subtle and insidious nature, and it is becoming clear that a great many long-term drugs, even those like the barbiturates which have been assumed for many years to be extremely safe in use, have complex and potentially hazardous interactions with metabolic processes in the body.'
NOTE
This extract is taken from `The Medicine Men’ by Vernon Coleman, first published in 1975. `The Medicine Men’ has been republished and is now available again as a paperback. To purchase a copy please go to the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Copyright Vernon Coleman November 2024
My monthly SS is below average by $300. Very blessed the house and car are paid for. But Car, House, Earthquake ins. Property taxes, Car Tags, and up keep can wipe it out in a hurry. New lenses for my glasses are the next goal. I don't want the lesser quality on the market today. I've always used ZIEZ lenses. My old Optician recommended as the best. Some clothes need replacing with the 30 lb weight loss. Jeans don't have to be new. Just my T's. And my back is feeling less pain with the weight loss. Hand has 1 more PT session. Then home PT. AI making decisions on what test, or treatments I need SCARES ME TO DEATH.
How does the British Government expect anyone to live on 169 pounds a week?
I'm sure housing is more than 400 pounds a month.
Why do the British people keep electing morons like these, and why are Lords (Starmer is a member of the HoL right?) out to kill citizens?
My Favourite Books
Dr Vernon Coleman
Here is the Introduction from my book `My Favourite Books’, which is subtitled `Non-fiction books I’ve read more than once and hope to read again.’
Introduction
I am getting old (it’s something that’s been coming on for a while) and as I hunted through my study, our office, the drawing room, our bedroom and the rest of the house where books are kept, for a book I knew I had, but couldn’t find, I kept discovering books I’d forgotten that I had, but that I realised had affected me in some way when I’d first read them – sometimes because I’d learned something important, sometimes because I had been particularly amused or sometimes both. I put these books on one side to read again, for the optimist in me always hopes that there will be time to read just a few more dozen books.
It then slowly occurred to me (at my age it takes time for ideas to germinate) that many of the books I’d picked out are now pretty well forgotten, drowned in a tsunami of new and fashionable books, mostly written by or ghosted for, television celebrities and retired politicians.
It then also occurred to me that some of those who have been kind enough to read my books in the past might enjoy reading the old, often out of print non-fiction books which had often shaped my thinking and my outlook on life, and which they might have missed.
It occurred to me too that short descriptions of the contents of my top non-fiction books might be both entertaining and informative.
When I began the book I thought the books would choose themselves. How naïve a thought that turned out to be! It ended up being infinitely more difficult than I’d expected.
I decided that although there would inevitably be some books on the list which are classics I wanted there to be a good mix of unusual books – books which most readers might have missed. And if the authors of those books had written a number of other readable books, that would be a bonus. Although some of the books on my list are uncommon they should all be possible to find in one form or another. The one beauty of the internet is that it often makes it possible to find old books within minutes, instead of years. Throughout my life I’ve always enjoyed hunting around in second hand book shops but although I always found that second-hand bookshops were wonderful for finding books I didn’t know I was looking for, I found that hunting for a specific book often involved visits to several dozen bookshops and a hunt extending over several years. The internet has obviously changed that. So, for example, it took me many months to find all the volumes of James Agate’s ‘Ego’ diaries on the internet, but I doubt if I would have ever found them all if I had relied upon scrabbling around the dusty shelves of second-hand book shops.
This has been a surprisingly dangerous book to write.
I have over the years bought tens of thousands of books (and received many thousands of books sent for review). Sadly, and regrettably, I have over the years donated thousands of books to charity shops (and I’ve given many boxfuls to second-hand bookshops which were struggling to survive) but there are still many thousands left. (I haven’t counted them and I don’t intend to do so.)
The result is that our home in Bilbury is full of books (only the boiler room, the boot room, the butler’s pantry and the bathrooms are largely free of books – though I confess I did have two book shelves put up in my bathroom) and we ran out of shelf space a long time ago. The result is that books sit in precarious piles and, having absolutely no patience at all, I repeatedly tried pulling a selected volume out from the middle, or more likely near the bottom, of a teetering four or five foot high stack of books. If my foot work wasn’t nifty enough most of the books, and quite possibly an adjacent pile, would come crashing down on parts of me that weren’t created for being attacked by battalions of books.
Still, in the end I got there: I found my non-fiction books.
It is, of course, a very personal selection, and I don’t expect anyone to be captivated by every book in this selection (it would be strange if they were) but if you are anything like me you will be delighted to find news of half a dozen books you hadn’t previously discovered and, in crude footballing parlance, be over the moon to find a dozen. This isn’t offered as the definitive list of non-fiction books. It is merely a list of non-fiction books which I found captivating, informative and delightful. I hope you will find my notes encouraging and invigorating. The only criterion was that the books on the list had to be available in an English language edition. Some are definitely not available in paperback but hardback editions should not be too hard to find.
I have always been a voracious reader (perhaps because I was an only child who quickly found companionship in books and almost as quickly discovered the joy of finding that an author I liked had written many books). Over the years, I have found that some of the most rewarding volumes are those which were written years ago and which are now out of print and largely forgotten – but often still available on the internet, of course.
William Morris advised us to have nothing in our homes which is not beautiful or useful and the same thought can be applied, in a slightly modified form, to books. ‘Read nothing which is not entertaining or informative’, might be a useful guiding principle. The books in this selection have been picked because they are either enormously entertaining or exceptionally illuminating or, preferably, both.
Finally, I apologise to those books which didn’t make the hundred. (Most of the authors concerned are no longer with us so I feel I should offer my apologies to the books, which are.)
I had to stop somewhere but I could have easily made this list ‘My 200 Favourite Non-Fiction books’.
I didn’t include any books from the excellent King Penguin series or the Britain in Pictures series though I have complete sets of both series and almost all the books in both series are well worth finding and reading. And I haven’t included any dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopaedias or reference books. Somehow, I missed out both Hans Selye’s classic books on stress, the first of which was published in 1955, and W.B.Cannon’s book on physiology entitled ‘The Wisdom of the Body’ which was published in 1932. Those two didn’t make the cut because although they’re important to me, and played a big part in guiding my thinking about medicine, I suspect they might be of less interest to the general reader. Shamefully I didn’t find room for H.M.Stanley’s massive books about Livingstone and the Dark Continent, and nor did Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ make my list of books. I now have no idea how they came to be left out. ‘The Worst Journey in the World’, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic book about the Captain Scott expedition to the South Pole, didn’t make my list because I found it just too endlessly depressing for me to want to read again (one of the criteria for selection). Clifford Irving’s book ‘Project Octavio’ (about how he pretended to be Howard Hughes and sold his autobiography to a publisher) nearly made the cut, but didn’t, nor did William Donaldson’s large, unusual dictionary ‘Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics’. (At one point I wrote an entry for the ‘Henry Root’ letters, written under the Henry Root pseudonym but authored by Donaldson, but the entry, like numerous others was eventually squeezed out.) I decided against Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ for no good reason that I can think of other than that it’s just too darned gloomy and manipulative and didn’t satisfy either of my two criteria. I decided that Vance Packard’s ‘Hidden Persuaders’ (a masterpiece about the advertising industry) is rather dated and not fascinating enough to merit re-reading (but still well worth reading if you haven’t read it and want to know more about how advertisers use psychology to sell products) and Alvin Toffler’s huge bestseller ‘Future Shock’ missed my list for the same reason. John Buchan wrote a number of good history books, particularly one about ‘The Massacre of Glencoe’, which is especially revealing, but they’re rather specialised so they didn’t get in either. (I did, however, include a book which he edited – ‘A History of English Literature’.) I thought for a while about Rachel Carson, whose book ‘Silent Spring’ triggered people to be concerned about the environment, but decided that none of her books pass the ‘do I want to re-read this book’ test. Henry Fielding’s marvellous and incredibly readable small book ‘Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon’ was squeezed out at the last minute when I decided that I really couldn’t leave Mark Twain out of my selection since his travel books and his massive autobiography are essential non-fiction reading and valuable parts of his canon. And then I remembered Preston Sturges and decided that Mr Twain is well enough known, and that his books could manage quite well without a boost from me (though, ludicrously and sadly, even Twain is now subject to bans and censorship). So out went Twain and in came Sturges. My selection took me twice as long to write as it should have done because I was continually writing pieces about books I liked and then replacing those pieces with essays about books I found on my shelves and realised I liked even more or which I thought were, for some reason, more relevant to the book. Several times I remembered books I liked and then, when I couldn’t find them, bought new copies to write about.
I could have messed around with my list for another decade. I realised, as I wrote this, that I didn’t have anything by or about W.S.Gilbert – the co-author of the Savoy Operas. But with all books of this type there comes a time when the author has to say: ‘Enough! This is the best I can do today – though if I remade this list tomorrow it would probably be different. The books I selected aren’t necessarily the most beautifully written, but they are, I think, books which can now be read or re-read with advantage.
Finally, finally I should point out that my collection of books is not listed in any particular order. I could, I suppose, have put them in an A to Z list. But should they be in A to Z order according to title or in an A to Z list according to author’s name? I could have put them in date order, according to when they were published – but why? And I didn’t want to put them in a list like a hit parade, because since I’ve selected every one of them they’d all be at number one. So the books are listed entirely at random – as I picked them off the shelves and wrote about them.
These are, I hope, books which you may have missed but which you will be glad I told you about.
Vernon Coleman
Bilbury 2022
NOTE
Vernon Coleman’s book `My Favourite Books’ is available from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Copyright Vernon Coleman October 2024