The book - and its title especially – presents itself as a reading memoir, which to an extent it is, although there is much more here. The young Hodkinson read those books but found the protagonists too earthbound, too fixed in their northern locales. His dad kept it on top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth - wedding photographs and Mark's National Cycling Proficiency certificate.

This particular example functions as part biography, part memoir and part explanation of how a working-class boy from a poor area of northern England came to love books so much. This is a wonderful book that resonates so much with me, time and again I am nodding my head as Mark makes a point that I agree with. This is the starting point for a wonderful tale which embraces lots of inspirational and classic books, punk rock, Mark’s career, how he started his own publishing house Ponoma, the books he has written, journalism, and which ends with his musing on 21st century reading and publishing trends. I feel that this book really ran some parallels with my own upbringing, although there are some years between us.

Then the memoir element begins, a running thread that describes Hodkinson's relation to his schizophrenic grandfather. All of these feed into No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy and the result is a book that isn't quite sure what it wants to be. He was turned in on himself, as if he’d swallowed a thunderstorm and it was pressing against his skin.

The final endnotes are great fun with examples of books he owns with inscriptions and bookplates and descriptions off what the numerous TBR piles contain in his house. To be clear… I don’t know the author, but it took no time at all to work out that I grew up poor ( we couldn’t afford the school trips he went on) within walking distance of him.Its a shame the book doesn't contain anymore pictures though- either of the author, his family or the books he loves- but maybe the printed word is the thing and he didn't want the reader just skipping to the pictures and colour plates in the middle! The early section on his discovery of the joy of reading and of the books which brought him that joy is excellent.

His novels include The Last Mad Surge of Youth, which was nominated as Q’s Novel of the Year, and That Summer Feeling. I couldn’t find the book about Man City, but there was another title available from Mark Hodkinson, and the title struck me immediately; “No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy.frozen February mornings in flimsy nylon shorts and shirts, shivering, skin turning red, turning blue. I count myself as working class but despite living on a council estate as a child it was hardly the industrial North in the shire counties. At that point, the books shifts into a slightly different perspective, more about Mark's career and how it intertwines his reading, and his reading drives his career. His writing is clear and moving, especially the descriptions of his family and Grandad in particular.

Sometimes self-pitying, sometimes self-aggrandising, moments of self-deprecation rang false, and the humour was pretty mild stuff. On one hand, by having such a collection and planning to read all these books, you are making a fantastic statement of hope and revealing an investment in future self,’ she said.I can’t be bothered giving much more time to this self-centred monologue, so I’ll just say that that “awful school” inspired me - three post-graduate degrees, a life of working with disadvantaged communities, shelves (and a Kindle) full of books (including Tolstoy); and never did it let down either my brother or my sister- or anyone else I knew. In No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy I saw reflected my own experience of growing up in an almost bookless household. This was a thoroughly enjoyable and highly readable overview of another lifelong bibliophile’s development. I work in a library and we are fighting to stay open with a diminishing readership as Kindles and e readers take over, and ‘real’ books fall by the wayside. Camus wrote exquisitely of the fig trees, the red sky, the old men sitting on chairs outside the tobacconist’s and the trip to a nearby beach where the sea sent ‘long, lazy’ waves across the sand.