Scene: Me reading a book, sitting on an overstuffed leather chair near an electric fireplace.

Oh my! I didn’t hear you come in. How are you? [takes bubble pipe out of mouth, places bookmark in the middle of The Idiot’s Guide to Masturbation] Does this smoking jacket go with these Giants pajama bottoms? Oh listen to me. I’m so vain at times! Anyway, welcome to The Book Thug. Thug almost kinds sounds like club, doesn’t it? I think so.

So. What the heck are book clusters? I think of them as books centred around an event, a period of time, perhaps even a unique author or set of authors, a political or cultural movement or my own tenuous definition of something. Whatever. I’ll throw some books together, you’ll tell me about the glaring omissions on my list(thus falling into my trap of getting ideas for more books to read on said subject du jour) and we’ll go from there.

The first book up is Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin. I came across Mr. Goodwin by reading his mystery series starring the detective eunuch Yashim. The author is an historian of the Byzantine era so the novels (as far as I knew) were wonderful with respect to descriptions of everyday life in the Constantinople of the 1830’s. Lords was a great run down of an empire that runs down. After 600 years of extraordinary dominance in Africa and Eastern Europe things fell apart over the course of another 300 years culminating in its disintegration post World War One. This led to the formation of, I don’t know, dozens of countries.

Next up is Lawrence In Arabia:War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson. Don’t be fooled by the title -it’s not a rehash of all the wonderful things that a brave Englishman did to force the lazy and unorganized Arabic people into a fighting force. Anderson posits that this area, being a secondary or even tertiary area of concern for the major European powers was, during the First World War, greatly influenced by the actions of a Jewish agronomist, a German diplomat and an American oil man as well as King Faisal and Lawrence.

Well, here we are. It’s the end of The War To End All Wars and the winners, led by David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, meet to divvy up the goodies/decide on spheres of influence. Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan illuminates the breath-taking arrogance and lack of knowledge that the ‘powers that be’ possessed whilst creating new countries from scratch. (“This river seems to be a good place for a border. Done!”) Poor Lawrence makes a pathetic cameo in this book, his opinions count for nothing when the big boys are sitting at the table. Read this book and dozens of wars/uprisings/coups d’etat/genocides etc. that have occurred in the twentieth century and beyond will make a whole lot more “sense” to you.

[puts pince-nez back on, opens book, leans over on one cheek, farts] Oh yes. That was a long time coming! Well folks, I hope you’ve enjoyed me bringing the bookshizzle to you. I had a good time. And remember what MC Sarah Mclachlan always says, “Teach Your Pets To Read, Mother fuckers!”.