"Starter for Ten" by David Nicholls

 Nicholls is the author of the hugely successful One Day. This is his first book. It is very entertaining and has a great plot which was very easy to read and kept me turning the pages, the sort of characters in whom you not only believe but also root for, and some laugh aloud moments.

Brian, an immature general knowledge geek with very few social skills (if he can make a faux pas, he will), joins the University Challenge quiz team in his first term at university, partly because it was the favourite TV programme of his late father and partly because he is besotted with the beautiful Alice. The book chronicles his toe-curlingly embarrassing attempts to 'pull' Alice and the even more embarrassing tension between his middle class values, his working class roots and his upper class university friends.

I went to uni ten years before the protagonist and almost every word rang true. 

Outing myself as an ubergeek, I think there is an error: George III is cited in Chapter 2 as the last British monarch to see active military combat [presumably while king]; I think it was George II.

Selected quotes:

• "Spencer's so cool he even likes jazz ... proper jazz, the irritating, boring stuff." (Ch 1)
• "I can swim, but only in the same way that any drowning animal can swim." (Ch 3)
• "I'd like to wake up in the morning and be handed a transcript of everything I'm about to say during the day, so that I could go through it and rewrite my dialogue, cutting the fatuous remarks and the crass, idiotic jokes." (Ch 9)
• "I suppose great physical beauty must be some kind of burden, but as burdens go it surely has to be one of the lighter ones." (Ch 14) 
• "There's only so long you can stand at the edge of a group like that before you start to feel as if you should be clearing the empties off the table." (Ch 17)
• "I have nothing but contempt for cool, self-satisfied, privileged cliques ... but unfortunately not quite enough contempt to not want to be part of it." (Ch 17)
• "A great deal of heavy mascara that makes her look intimidating and glamorous at the same time, like the Hollywood branch of the Baader-Meinhof gang." (Ch 22)
• "A little strange and unsettling, like seeing Stalin on a skateboard." (Ch 29)
• "People are clinging to the furniture like it's The Raft of the Medusa by the French nineteenth century realist painter Gericault." (Ch 29)
• "'Independence' is the luxury of all those people who are too confident, and busy, and popular, and attractive to be just plain old 'lonely'. ... Being lonely is just so banal, so shaming, so plain and dull and ugly." (Ch 31)
• "Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing 'Non, je ne regrette rien' - which is more often than I'd like, now that I'm at university - I can't help thinking 'what the hell is she talking about?' I regret pretty much everything." (Ch 37)" (Ch 37)
• "The kind of good-looking bastard who looks as if he rows everywhere." (Ch 39)

Great fun to read.

July 2022; 469 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God