39 Books: 1987

From two books in the first year of reading and twenty-four in the second, I read eighty-six in the third, including a lot more non-fiction. This was due to cycling to libraries in adjacent towns where the selection was wider. One of them had my first non-novel choice: this edition of Chomsky's Turning the Tide.

Chomsky's name came to my attention when, in an interview with the NME, Robert Wyatt said he was reading him, which links back to my 1985 entry. The book helped me to become sensitive to how language is used by news media not only to set the agenda but to control thought and elicit particular responses. This was long before the Internet of course and nowadays it's easier to see: for example, Alan MacLeod uses his Instagram account in part to document the use of the passive voice in headlines, more common now as corporate media tries to play down overt war crimes in Gaza. I remember one example in particular: the BBC's evening news account of the Haditha massacre, carried out by the US Army: Nicholas Witchell said soldiers "entered a house ... and people died", pronouncing the final words as if an elderly dog had been put to sleep. This is what makes censorship from above unnecessary.

When I found Chomsky's book in the library, it was alongside a huge hardback entitled Peace of the Dead: The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers, an attack on CND, a prominent movement in those days. Plus ça change: nowadays my town library has three books by Chomsky alongside multiple copies of the same two books by those intellectual titans Jordan Peterson and David Baddiel.