This book was recommended by lots of bookish writers so often that I bought it without really knowing much about it. The blurb gave me a signpost:

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

From this, I expected a slightly twee inspirational story linking this esoteric moment of scientific discovery to Miller’s own challenges, and to conclude with a sweet reflection on the nature of resilience.

I think it’s best to go into this blind, so I won’t say too much, other than: blimey, I underestimated this. This is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before: part biography, part memoir, part biology, part philosophy. It is beautifully written, with Miller’s passion and curiosity dripping from every page. She clearly poured her heart into this—and it feels like this is the perfect cultural moment for it.

This was so good that I ended up photographing quotations and sending them to Wendy on WhatsApp as I read—I can’t remember doing that before.

It’s less than 200 pages, and I think it is well worth anyone’s time.

I highlighted lots in this book; here are some good bits that hopefully don’t spoil anything:

Imagine seeing thirty years of your life undone in one instant. Imagine whatever it is you do all day, whatever it is you care about, whatever you foolishly pick and prod at each day, hoping, against all signs that suggest otherwise, that it matters. Imagine finding all the progress you’ve made on that endeavour smashed and eviscerated at your feet.

The “soul-ache … vanishes,” he writes, “with active out-of-door life and the consequent flow of good health.” He claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savour the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colours of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.”

To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

And so it must be with humans, with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one’s darkest years.

One day, while riding bikes along the Potomac River, she started racing me, and I couldn’t catch her. I ran five miles most days. And I couldn’t catch her. I liked that feeling. Her mind was faster than mine, too. She could drum up dazzling rants about tentative drivers, about scrambled eggs, about people who sign their emails with only one initial. “Are you that busy?!” she groaned. “Are you that beholden to the cult of overwork that you need to communicate that you do not even have those four milliseconds to spare?” She had a way with words.

The best way of ensuring that you don’t miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt. Is this storm a bummer? Maybe it’s a chance to get the streets to yourself, to be licked by raindrops, to reset. Is this party as boring as I assume it will be? Maybe there will be a friend waiting, with a cigarette in her mouth, by the back door of the dance floor, who will laugh with you for years to come, who will transmute your shame to belonging.

My wife stirs in bed next to me. She slaps my shoulder. “Pipe down, Flipper,” she mumbles. Referring to the fact that I am flipping, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. She wants me only to join her in peace, in slumber, in the soft cotton waves of our powder-blue sheets. I clutch the brimming warmth of her thigh and think about the fact that even at its most hopeful, my measly brain could have never dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her.

If I told you that a man stole billions of pounds worth of historical art purely for the love of it, doing nothing with it but hanging it in his bedroom in his mum’s attic, you’d surely want to read more. I certainly did, and Michael Finkel’s non-fiction account of Stéphane Breitwieser’s crimes did not disappoint.

Finkel weaves a propulsive tale, reaching from the fine detail of how Breitwieser stole individual pieces to asking questions about the nature of museums, crime, culpability and even art itself. It’s also a love story, exploring Brietwieser’s intense but complex relationships with his girlfriend, his mother and his father.

This was enormous, astonishing fun. I’d have liked a dash more of the reflection, philosophy and doubt, but this short is still worth your time.

Here are some passages that struck a chord with me:

He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline.

---

Instead of an art thief, Breitwieser prefers to be thought of as an art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. Or, if you will, he’d like to be called an art liberator.

---

Before working art crime, Darties had spent a decade in antiterrorism. He sees parallels between art thieves and terrorists—crimes that destabilize society, with psychological fallout.

---

When you wear your heart on your sleeve, it’s exposed to the elements.

Sometimes in life, familial and societal expectations can feel constraining to the point of crushing, like an ever-tightening corset. Fighting against the restriction can lead us to rebel more than we otherwise would, in ways that might be harmful or increase the discomfort: over-eating to resist the pressure to fit into the corset, for example. And that’s the central metaphor of this book.

I’m a bit uncomfortable with that metaphor. Food in this book is all about indulgence, resistance is about self-control, and there’s an inextricable link between food and size. I think that’s a bit lacking in nuance—and this is a book full of close observation, ambiguity, and life’s grey areas. In essence, I think Hazell’s novel is better than its central idea.

The plot takes us from a few weeks before Piglet’s wedding to Kit, through the ceremony, and to the immediate aftermath. ‘Piglet’ is a family nickname, stemming from a childhood occasion on which she ate the lion’s share of her sister’s birthday cake—an event with more behind it than first appears (or than her parents realise). Piglet and Kit are in their early 30s.

Piglet works as an editor of cookbooks at a publishing house, which provides much interesting background and colour in the first half of the novel but oddly evaporates in the second.

Piglet is from a working-class household, Kit is from a wealthy family, and there are some closely observed class dynamics bubbling away as the wedding preparations continue. These didn’t always ring true—much like in the film Saltburn, it sometimes felt like a projection of what wealthy people imagine working-class people think of them, rather than something grounded in essential truth. The novel also felt like it too often pulled its punches, especially with a rather limp, polite ending.

Yet, all things considered, I enjoyed this. I was absorbed and entertained by it, and I liked many of Hazell’s turns of phrase and observations. It’s a flawed novel, but one that I nevertheless relished spending time with. I’ll certainly look out for Hazell’s next novel.

The first posts on this blog were written when I was 18 years old. When Françoise Sagan was 18, her novel was published. It is impossible to imagine what it must be like to have Sagan’s wisdom and insight at such a young age: the proof that I had none of it is abundant on this very website.

Bonjour Tristesse, which I read in Heather Lloyd’s translation, opens with a seventeen-year-old girl, Cécile, living with her widowed father, Raymond. They live a carefree, perhaps mildly hedonistic life together in the French Riviera. Raymond is a bit of a playboy, and Cécile enjoys the freewheeling nature of their existence.

This is challenged when one of Raymond’s former lovers, Anne, turns up. As Raymond and strait-laced Anne become closer, Cécile fears that a degree of predictable rigidity is entering their lives. She seeks to fight against it by engineering the end of Raymond and Anne’s relationship.

Cécile’s meddling has consequences foreseen and unforeseen, which she is then forced to come to terms with—and that jolting realisation catapults her into adulthood.

This was published and set in 1954, but certainly stands the test of time. It’s an entertaining read with real depth below the surface, and no shortage of humour. It may only be a short book—perhaps more a novella than a novel—but there is a lot packed into it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here are some passages I highlighted:

‘You don’t realize how pleased with herself she is,’ I cried. ‘She congratulates herself on the life she has had because she feels she has done her duty and …’

‘But it’s true,’ said Anne. ‘She has fulfilled her duties as a wife and mother, as the saying goes …’

‘And what about her duty as a whore?’ I said.

‘I dislike coarseness,’ said Anne, ‘even when it’s meant to be clever.’

‘But it’s not meant to be clever. She got married just as everyone gets married, either because they want to or because it’s the done thing. She had a child. Do you know how children come about?’

‘I’m probably less well informed than you,’ said Anne sarcastically, ‘but I do have some idea.’

‘So she brought the child up. She probably spared herself the anguish and upheaval of committing adultery. She has led the life of thousands of other women and she thinks that’s something to be proud of, you understand. She found herself in the position of being a young middle-class wife and mother and she did nothing to get out of that situation. She pats herself on the back for not having done this or that, rather than for actually having accomplished something.’

‘I detest that kind of remark,’ said Anne. ‘At your age it’s worse than stupid, it’s tiresome.’

I normally avoided university students, whom I considered to be coarse and preoccupied with themselves and, above all, preoccupied with their own youth: to them just being young was a drama in itself, or an excuse for being bored.

I was greatly attracted to the concept of love affairs that were rapidly embarked upon, intensely experienced and quickly over. At the age I was, fidelity held no attraction. I knew little of love, apart from its trysts, its kisses and its lethargies.

I did not want to marry him. I liked him but I did not want to marry him. I did not want to marry anyone. I was tired.

We met Charles Webb and his wife at the Bar du Soleil. He specialized in theatre advertising and his wife specialized in spending the money he made, which she did at an incredible rate by lavishing it on young men.

How difficult she made life for us, with her sense of dignity and her self-esteem!

This short 1994 novel has been on my ‘to read’ list for a very long time. I think the ‘quirky’ title slightly put me off; I perhaps expected something consciously ‘different’ and ‘off beat’ that I was never quite in the mood for. I’m not sure why I made that assumption, especially given that I previously enjoyed Lorrie Moore’s Terrific Mother.

This is a much quieter, simpler and brilliant story than I had imagined. This is a novel, like many novels, about how memory is a complicated thing and how we change throughout the course of our lives. It also has some interesting observations on life in small town America, where the narrator grew up, and city life, which particularly comes across in a section featuring a school reunion.

The narrator of this book is a grown woman, Berie, looking back on her teenage childhood and, in particular, her relationship with her best friend Sils. The majority of the novel is set in childhood in the early 1970s, but there are some sections in the narrator’s present day.

Berie and Sils both have part time jobs at a local amusement park, which provides the backdrop to a good portion of the novel. Without spoiling too much of the plot, both the adult narrator, and the child of her recollection, seem a little lost—as though they are searching for meaning and purpose. There’s a sardonic humour throughout which reminded me of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

The blurb says that this ‘is a poignant and evocative novel that will transport readers back to the carefree summers of their own girlhood.’ I obviously don’t have a girlhood to be transported back to, but I’m not sure that nostalgia for childhood is really a gendered issue. I very much enjoyed this beautifully written novel, and think that there’s a lot to like here, regardless of the gender identity of the reader.

Some passages I highlighted:

In his iconic way our father remained very much ours. And in the long shadows of his neglect, we fashioned our own selves, quietly improvised our own rules, as kids did in America, in the fatherless fifties and sixties. Which was probably why children of that time, when they grew up, turned out to be such a shock to their parents.

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.

There were three cellos in the house; one had belonged to my grandfather. The other two belonged to my grandmother, who often gave lessons in town, and whenever we visited she got out one of the cellos and played a piece for us, while we sat on one of the davenports, squirming and pinching each other when she couldn’t see. Later, when I was older, I realized how beautifully she played. But when I was little most of the interest such an event held for me was in watching such a formal woman – ‘a true Victorian lady,’ as my father worshipfully described her – place this large woman-shaped object between her legs and hold it there with her knees, her finger vibrating along the neck in an insectlike movement up and down, the bow in a slow saw across the strings, angling this way or that, gently, to find the note. My grandmother always gazed down upon her cello, like the Holy Mother upon the Holy Child, or perhaps like one woman beholding another at her knees.

For a while I was still telling my flat-chested jokes. But as my own breasts grew larger, so did the disjunction between my body and my jokes, and when I would tell them to people they would look at me funny. I was in a time warp. My breasts had become larger – they were large! – and I was still referring to them as mosquito bites. For a semester, an embarrassing, amphibious semester when I didn’t know who I was, what I looked like, what jokes to tell, moving from water to land, I tried to stop telling any jokes at all. I waited until I’d accumulated enough amusing lines about having big breasts, armed myself with enough invented descriptions, amassed enough self-deprecating remarks about top-heaviness – knockers, blimps, hooters, bazooms – to get me through a party, and then I told those. Getting stuck in elevators, toppling forward, not being able to see the forest for the cleavage.

Now, returning to Horsehearts, I realized, I no longer knew what sweetness was. By comparison to what I found there, I had become sour, mean, sophisticated. I no longer knew niceness, was no longer on a daily basis with it. I no longer met nice people, I met witty, hard, capable, successful, dramatic. Some vulnerable. Some insecure. But not nice, the way Sils was nice. She was nice the way I had long imagined I still was, but then on seeing her again – strangely shy before me but illumined and grinning, as ever, her voice in gentle girlish tones I never heard anymore – instantly knew I was no longer.

We sat in lawn chairs, drying in the sun, and smoked quietly, with Randi, who seemed just the same as always except that, recovered from her Mary Kay days, she had changed her named to Travis, which she’d written on her name tag, with Randi in parentheses underneath. (Could one do that? Could one put one’s whole past, the fact of its boring turbulence, in parentheses like that?)

To go from turmoil to tranquility is excellent for music. To go from an iniquitous den to a practice room is a respite given to us by God.

I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, but it was a great recommendation. Published in 2021, it is a modern American novel written in a similar style to, say, Eliza Clark’s British novels: of its time, snarky, funny, and with quite a lot of sex—but also with a beautiful clarity of expression and a lot of relevant things to say about the modern world.

Border is better-known for her five poetry collections. I haven’t read any of them, but the poetic style of writing, where every word is weighed and considered, seems to me to feed through to this novel.

The central character is a young woman who works for a Hollywood talent agency, though does not enjoy the work, and does stand-up comedy on the side. She obsessively counts calories in an attempt to maintain a slender figure. She is from a Jewish family, though has strained family relationships, especially with her mother—who was a major driver of her disordered relationship with food.

The main thrust of the plot is in this character falling for another female character, with a closeknit family who places no weight on maintaining a figure or watching what she eats— but, like us all, has her own psychological demons.

Broder makes this an enormously engaging tale, suffused with humour, and which I both raced through and didn’t want to end. It is certainly one of my favourite novels of the year so far, and the characters will live long in my memory.

Some passages which I noted down:

My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.

At least two days a week, I was forced to join my boss—Brett Ofer—for lunch with clients, agents, and other industry people. I didn’t like eating with others. Lunch was the crown jewel of the day, and I preferred to savour it solo, not waste it on foods I hadn’t chosen. Ofer always made us go to the same restaurant, Last Crush, which shared a parking garage with our office. He insisted we get a brunch of small plates and split everything, “family style,” as though sharing a meatball made our clients feel like brethren. Who wanted Ofer as a relative? He acted like family was a good thing.

“Setting boundaries doesn’t always feel good,” said Dr. Mahjoub. “Just because it feels bad doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

I would not have called Jace a star. A glow-in-the-dark sticker, maybe.

Above all, she was fat: undeniably fat, irrefutably fat. She wasn’t thick, curvy, or chubby. She surpassed plump, eclipsed heavy. She was fat, and she exceeded my worst fears for my own body.

But it was as though she didn’t know or care that she was fat. If she were concerned with hiding her body, she could have worn something baggy and black. Instead, she’d stuffed herself into a straight-cut, pale blue cotton dress, modest in its long sleeves and ankle-length skirt, but otherwise revealing every stomach roll, side bulge, and back fold of her body. The soft fabric stretched and sheered as it detoured her hips and ass. Her breasts were enormous—an F cup? a G cup?—but the dress did nothing to flatter them. The dress was there and the breasts were there, and neither was cooperating with the other.

As a child, I’d seen a wide range of nonterminal illnesses amongst my young friends, as well as the delicious food cures their mothers provided. I’d prayed that I would contract tonsillitis (ice cream), a stomach virus (ginger ale), chicken pox (oatmeal bath), the flu (chicken noodle soup), swollen glands (lollipops), tooth pain (Popsicles), the common cold (more chicken noodle soup), strep throat (raw honey). But I was cursed with perfect health.

People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irrestistable whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I’d lie and say I’d already seen the thing: just so I didn’t have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.

My apartment was newly renovated, painted white, and existed in a timeless vacuum of nothingness. I had only my white Ikea bed, my white Ikea night table, my black Ikea sofa, and that was it. I’d thought about getting a rug, but I couldn’t commit. I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.

From a technical standpoint, Jace was a good kisser. But making out with him in my living room felt like being under slow siege. He moved gently and caringly and that was the problem. I couldn’t tell what disgusted me more: him feigning tenderness, or the possibility that it might be real.

This book, which was a birthday present from my parents, does an outstanding job of answering the question: what went wrong with the Boeing 737-MAX?

Robison takes a longitudinal view, giving a fast-paced account of the history of Boeing. The book notes how cost-cutting and the side-lining of expert engineers in favour of project managers led to a toxic workplace and, ultimately, a failure to prioritise safety over other considerations.

Robison, in concert with the inquiries into the plane crashes, makes the point that the failures in the design of the 737-MAX were not complex. The plane was loaded with software which brought the nose down, intended to avoid a stall by stopping the plane from climbing too steeply. However, this system relied on a single sensor to work out the angle of the climb. If the single sensor failed, the computer would put the plane into a dive. This system, which was new to the 787-MAX, was not described in the flight manual, and pilots were not made aware of its existence through training—so the plane would dive, and the pilots would have no way to understand what was going on, let alone avoid a crash.

Robison’s unemotional, journalistic style of writing sets all of this out plainly. The horror of the book comes from the sheer familiarity of the processes he describes: the prioritisation of delivering things ‘on time’ rather than making sure they were safe, the way that problems were obscured through corporate jargon, the siloed working that hindered cooperation and communication between teams, the inability of those with expert knowledge to influence decisions. You could draw endless parallels between the problems identified in this book and the problems identified in Module 1 of the UK COVID Inquiry.

There was one nugget that particularly stood out. During the implementation of a particular decision, regular ‘go / no go’ meetings were renamed ‘go / go’ meetings, as ‘not going’ was no longer an option, whatever the safety considerations. I recently heard of another organisation (not in aviation) rebranding equivalent meetings in exactly the same way with exactly the same rationale.

This kind of corporate failure is pervasive: this book is essential reading to understand and challenge it.

This book was a birthday present. Structural engineer Roma Agrawal, who has worked on huge buildings like The Shard, uses it to give an overview of her profession. I understand she has also presented programmes for the BBC, but this is the first time I have seen her work.

This book won me over very quickly. Agrawal’s first engineering project, and the first she discusses in the book, was a footbridge over Newcastle’s central motorway, which I traverse frequently. She writes with humour and humanity. I found her style engaging and endearing, and her passion for her topic shines through on every page.

Some reviews have described the book’s technical content as pitched at a high-school level, but most of it was new to me—maybe I’m just undereducated in the field!

I particularly enjoyed Agrawal’s discussion of engineering water supply and sanitation infrastructure in Singapore, which she used to illustrate how engineering will be important if we are to adapt to climate change. I also found her reflections on thriving as a woman in a heavily male-dominated profession insightful.

If I permit myself one gripe, it is that Agrawal’s contributions to the structures she discusses are not always clear. It would be easy to come away from this book with the assumption that the complete design of everything from the bridge to The Shard was Agrawal’s work alone, but that seems unlikely.

I wouldn’t necessarily expect a book about structural engineering to feel warm, but this one did: it was a really delightful read which kept me interested from the first page to the last.

First published in 1954, this is a story of the end of a marriage. Evelyn, a distinguished barrister, has a beautiful wife 15 years his junior called Imogen. She is submissive and passive to the point that she almost has no character of her own, and becomes more so the longer the novel goes on.

Their plain neighbour, Blanche, is two years older than Evelyn. She’s presented as unremarkable in every respect, but becomes an object of fascination for Evelyn, and also an 11-year-old boy, in a weird narrative choice. The fascination is attributable to the fact that she actually has a character of her own, some opinions, and can converse reasonably.

Evelyn and Blanche start an affair; it takes forever for Imogen to realise what’s going on, and she just sort of subserviently leaves.

I did not enjoy this. The characters are all thoroughly unlikable, and are living in unthinkable social straitjackets. Almost everything they did or said made me want to fling the book across the room—though I didn’t because it was a rather lovely original from the London Library.

But mostly, this book is slow. It’s not slow in the sense of contemplative and reflective, it’s just stuffed with loquacious description and scene-setting.

This was absolutely not for me.

Published in 1967, McPhee’s book on oranges was recently recommended in The Economist as a particularly good bit of non-fiction writing. In its first form, it was a much shorter article in The New Yorker, but the author felt that he had too much fascinating material to keep to a single article, and so the book grew out of it.

Oranges is an esoteric and lightly humorous history of the relationship between humans and oranges. It focuses in particular on the development of orange juice made from pasteurised concentrate, which was a huge shift the industry was undergoing at the time the book was published.

I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about oranges before I read this book. They are berries. They are not ‘true from seed’, so if you plant the seeds from an orange, you might get a tree that bears lemons or limes or grapefruit or any other citrus: most Florida oranges are grown via grafts onto lemon trees. There’s a whole weird history about women and oranges, with a remarkably persistent belief that if a woman touched an orange tree, it would die.

This is a book that is strange and charming, clearly crafted with love by someone who just wanted to share information that he found fascinating. The enthusiasm shines through on every page. And, more than that, it’s easy to see how the modern work of non-fiction authors like Jon Ronson and Will Storr flows directly from the innovative style McPhee adopted in his early work.

If I could summarise in only one word, then I’d describe this book as ‘delightful’.