This book provides an interesting point of view of someone who is both a reader and a publisher. An interesting and insightful read.

This is a great memoir that tells an interesting and new story well. I have bought this book to finish, as I did not manage to finish this in time - but it is in line with my interests, and I have recommended it widely.

. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his book. I’ve never heard of the author prior to picking it up but will definitely go and look at their back catalogue. Wonderfully written with some fantastic stories this was a heartwarming I thoroughly enjoyed reading his book. I’ve never heard of the author prior to picking it up but will definitely go and look at their back catalogue. Wonderfully written with some fantastic stories this was a heartwarming and biography suitable for all.

I loved the title of this book and the front cover took me back to the years when I was growing up.........not in the Midlands but Scotland.

I am also a bibliophile, cannot walk past book shops, be they 2nd hand or new! Back then books were only purchased by a select few and then kept in immaculate condition!!! I can just picture the piles of literature taking up space!!

His poor Grandfather's mental capacity was slipping and one could sympathise with the author and his feelings regarding this decline.

A good book but found it a little hard to get through to the end but managed eventually. For this reason I can only give 3 stars. Many thanks to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for allowing me to read and review this book.

What a brilliant book this is.Told by Mark Hodkinson himself it’s the story of him growing up in 70’s and 80’s in Rochdale in a working class family, the stories about his grandad are very funny although sad also.And the friends he made along his life journey are also funny and poignant and the stories he tells about his love of books which leads to him owning 3500 books lead to him opening a publishing company is somehow inevitable.I can’t recommend this book highly enough, it is sad,funny,poignant all at the same time and if you’re looking to escape your humdrum life for a few hours as Mark did on many occasions then this is the book for you,sit back and enjoy the ride you won’t regret it A brilliant 5 star read from Mark Hopkinson.

The title alone is a stunner! And anyone who thinks, what do I care about the reading biography of little Mark Hodkinson, hasn't understood a thing. Cause it is much more than that. It is the story of a social rise through literature. And it provides proof that literature and music can do so much more than just entertain.
As a "bonus track", Hodkinson gives a very touching account of his grandfather, whose mental capacity continues to dwindle while the author gains knowledge through literature.

As a working class boy who grew up in the North midlands, I was immediately drawn to this book- and I absolutely loved it. Clever, touching, funny, and filled with a clear love and passion for reading and just how life-changing it can be, this is an absolute joy of a book

An interesting biography about how a working class boy became a bibliophile, a piece of social history, and a love letter to books.
I must admit it was the first book I read by this author but I was fascinated by the storytelling and the sharp social remarks.
Upper class still defines what is culture and what is considered a good read. Working class is disappearing or becoming invisible, books are a sort of foreign object.
The love letter to books is great and love reading what the author thought.
It was an excellent read, highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is a very good memoir, light language, balance between good moments and the dark ones, a lot of books and honesty. I would recommend this book as a pill against prolonged melancholy and dark mood.

This book starts so well. I really enjoyed reading about the author's school years and his self discovery of books. The second half of the book is a bit ploddy at times and didn't really keep me interested. A good read nevertheless.

This is one of those books I know I will read again and again: a memoir linked to the books the author has read (or at least bought!) I have great empathy. My home is also full of books. There are many layers in this text, not just the love of books. There's the whole growing up experience, and Rochdale and Middleton (where I used to own the cinema) in the 1970s and 1980s are captured with more accuracy than any photo album could convey. There's also the interludes of a young boy coping with his grandfather's failing mental health. And the trials and tribulations of getting published and being a publisher. I absolutely love this book. No bibliophile should be without it

As a working class reader who hails from a town not far from the author, I found this title to be massively appealing .especially as we grew up around the same time period and indeed much of this book felt familiar. It was nostalgic to be able to spend time back in the North of my youth and childhood in a setting that I feel at my most comfortable in. I recognised the relationship he has with his books; they are a place of refuge and safety away from a complicated world.

However Mark Hodkinson is a gentleman who has many strings to his bow. He is an investigative journalist, an author, a biographer, a publisher, and a musician. And it is this I feel that leads to the rather disjointed and chaotic nature of this title as if the author himself couldn't quite decide what he wanted this book to be. Part memoir, part reflection on the state of Journalism and publishing industry, part documentation of his grandfathers decline into mental illness. Ultimately It couldn't hold my attention and it took a surprisingly long time to finish. I can't help but feel if the author had chosen any one of these aspects to focus on I would have found it a much more engaging read.

I was drawn to this book firstly because I am a bibliophile and secondly because I have always been a great fan of Mark Hodkinson's writing - particularly his memories of supporting Rochdale - as I too support a lower division team.

This book certainly ticked all the boxes, It is partly an autobiography with a detailed account of drawing up in the North West of England in household where reading books was certainly treated with suspicion.

The accounts of the books he read and his impressions of them also captured my attention.

All in all this was an original and exemplary book which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Many readers will doubtless relate to Mark Hodkinson's memoir of growing up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Today, he is a journalist, publisher and author. He has always loved books and has a vast collection. But as a child his voracious book-reading habit was treated with suspicion by his working-class parents. His parents worried that there was something unwholesome or antisocial about always "having your nose in a book." His mother even treated his teenaged visit to an optician's to get a pair of glasses with outright scepticism, even though this development probably had nothing to do with his reading habit anyway.
At home, his family owned just one book, Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, which they kept on top of a wardrobe. Oddly, although I grew up in a very different household in the 1980s and 90s, in a family which was no more interested in the occult than Hodkinson's was, my family owned this physically striking tome too (along with many other books)..
This is more than a book about books. It is a memoir and amongst other things provides many disturbing insights into the mental health of Hodkinson's grandfather.
There are, indeed, many, many books in the world already, perhaps too many. Despite this, No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy, is undeniably a worthy addition to their number..

This is a tremendous book. A gem. Part autobiography, part confessions of a book addict, part social history, and part recent publishing trends.

I was already a fan of Mark Hodkinson, having loved his novel The Last Mad Surge Of Youth (2009). Off the back of that I bought a few more of his books but have yet to read them yet. This is something Mark could readily identify with as he now realises he owns more unread books than time left in his life to read them.

No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy (2022) is initially concerned with Mark’s childhood in the mid 1970s. Educated in a brutal comprehensive school where any sign of braininess had to be carefully concealed. No one in his family read books (excepting the one book in the house, Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain) and so it was a surprise when he became obsessively drawn to books. 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.

Mark Hodkinson's publishing company Pomona Books has published titles by Simon Armitage, Bob Stanley, Barry Hines, Ian McMillan, Hunter Davies, Ray Gosling, David Gedge, Stuart Murdoch (of Belle and Sebastian) and many more.

I liked No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy a lot. Mark Hodkinson writes very engagingly throughout and I found the whole thing very enjoyable.

The book - and its title especially – presents itself as a reading memoir, which to an extent it is, although there is much more here. Hodkinson grew up in an unliterary, and often anti-literary, working class family in Rochdale. From an early age he loved to read, which was viewed with great suspicion by most of his family and friends. The early section on his discovery of the joy of reading and of the books which brought him that joy is excellent. It is honest, straightforward and down-to-earth, and captures the excitement of books and – crucially – the sheer pleasure of time alone with a book without external demands, which chimed closely with my own experience.

Hodkinson manages to discuss books with no element of showing off or of demonstrating how well read he is, which is a relief. Indeed, later he has some trenchant and, I think, accurate criticisms of the way that a privileged elite still determine what is meant by “well read” and of how that same privileged elite dominates the publishing industry and the “literary” world.

I like Hodkinson’s assessments of many of the books he’s read, too. I don’t agree with all of them, of course – that’s just how it is with books – but he is insightful, thoughtful and independent. He refuses to be cowed by orthodoxy, so when he writes of The Catcher In The Rye (which had a tremendous effect on him when young, as it did on so many of us) he resists the “agenda of cultural revisionism” which deems Holden to be “too male, too white, too privileged, too American, too heterosexual...flagrantly misogynistic…” Hodkinson says, “..social mores drawn predominantly from the 1940sare bound to jar in a modern context; it’s one of the reasons why we read: to understand and interpret the present through the past, how we got here.” Spot on, Mark!

There is a good deal more here, including Hodkinson’s training and career as a journalist, then freelance writer, amateur musician, publisher and editor, with reflections on the state of newspapers, publishing and related matters and a good deal of personal history, most notably the story of his grandfather’s decline into mental illness after a head injury and its effect on the whole family. This is intercut throughout the book and, once I got used to switching in and out of the story, I found it touching and humane.

So, not just a book memoir, but a fine, enjoyable and informative read all round. Warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)