So this is a weird one to review because I genuinely don't really think I'd recommend it to anyone who actually hangs out on OBC? Or like anyone under the age of...40? Or anyone kind of generally even if it wasn't really that bad? I don't even really know how I came to read it - I put a hold on for it when I saw it on the newly added section of Libby because that is a cool cover and I quite like a memoir, particularly for the time period that the book is about; add in that I'm trying hard to up my nonfiction numbers this year and it came down to a resolving 'sure whatever'. And a 'sure whatever' is kind of my general consensus about this book.
My favourite author is Stephen King, the yapper supreme so this isn't too much of a shocker. Given the time period this was actually kind of nice because it was very reminiscent of the kind of stories my parents told me about their childhoods/teenage years. There's a lot of nice asides about the British class system, the original formation of the NHS and how it changed his parent's (post-war) outlook on medicine and where the common person saw themselves compared to doctors, memory in general as he uses photographs to work out a more detailed chronology on his teenage years by looking at posters in his room... there's a lot of charm to the things that Geoff Dyer takes the time to extrapolate on. There's also a pretty poignant end to the book as he details the decline and death of his parents; whom it's pretty easy for the reader to get attached to.
That being said for every charming anecdote, this dudes yaps and I mean "my eyes are actively glazing over and I'm really not taking this in" level of yapping. By the end of this book, I was glad to be finished because there is just so much extra unnecessary detail, it really the embodies the 'stuck in a conversation with an older relative and you're too polite to excuse yourself' energy. It's both self indulgent but also a necessary documentation of the normal which makes it hard for me to be hard on it; me complaining about these things feels like I'm being harsh on the point of the book. The problem is, I don't give a shit about bikes or scuba diving for example which he rambles on about for multiple pages.
I think a big reason I had a mostly benign if monotonous time with this book is my own personal interest in British history. I think unless you've got genuine nostalgia for this time it's a hard-sell for it being anything more than a just OK time. His ruminations on literature and music is kinda worth the ticket price, I don't think that I would pick up any of his other work though.
