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’.

Last month, I enjoyed a series of reflections on silence by the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge. Walking is the follow-up, published in 2020, in which Kagge shares reflections and observations about putting one foot in front of the other. He draws on all kinds of sources, from ancient philosophy, to his father’s death, to cutting-edge cockroach research.

Kagge’s overall message is that walking makes us human: the more one walks, the more human one becomes, and the more knowledge one absorbs about oneself and the world. He argues convincingly that if people walked more, the world would be a better place. And he suggests that walking is the ‘best medicine’, in terms of both physical and mental health.

Kagge also quotes an astonishing statistic, which I’ve since found comes from a 2016 survey, which says that 75% of 5-12 year olds in the UK spend less time outside each day than the average UK prisoner (one hour). I’m amazed that I’ve never come across that statistic before in my public health work.

I’m predisposed to like this book because I agree with most of its arguments. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Kagge discusses how our perception of time changes according to the speed of travel:

When you move fast to save time, time moves fast, too. I’m always struck by how little time you actually save by driving. When you walk, time stretches.

This rings true. I’m lucky enough to be able to walk to work each day, but on the rare occasions when my 45-minute stroll is compressed into a shorter bus or car journey, I feel like I have lost rather than gained time. The walk really does seem to stretch my experience of time. I think this applies beyond walking: Wendy and I recently reflected that a recent holiday was hampered by arriving too fast on a direct flight, rather than us having the luxury of slower travel.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short set of reflections, and I will recommend it to others.

Earth is the second (and latest) book in Boyne’s promised quartet of novels themed around the elements. I read the first in the series, Water, last month.

You may recall that Water focused on Willow Hale, a woman who moves to a remote Irish island as she spends time coming to terms with the collapse of her family life. Earth picks up a few years later, and is narrated by Evan Keogh, a young island resident who was a relatively minor character in Water.

At the start of Earth, Keogh is a professional footballer, on trial as an accessory to the rape of a young woman allegedly committed by one of his teammates. As with Water, we gradually come to learn more about Keogh’s life story and the abuse he has suffered in his past, including while coming to terms with his sexuality. We also, of course, follow the progress of the trial while learning about the truth of the events the trial considers. Many of the revelations about Keogh’s background hark back to events described in Water, in a way that makes me look forward to re-reading the whole of the quartet at some point in the future.

As is Boyne’s usual style, his characters are all damaged, complete and emotionally complex. Often, Boyne’s plots are ridiculously implausible (and that’s certainly the case here), but he’s an author for whom that doesn’t matter. In Boyne’s novels, the plot merely serves as a background to character development, it is not the focus of the work. It is a little like opera in that sense.

Earth felt like a more direct novel than Water. In Water, most of the abuse is at one remove from the main characters who are reacting to it. In Earth, the narrator himself is both a victim and a perpetrator. This makes it a slightly harder read in some senses, but overall, I found that I enjoyed it slightly more than the first novel in the series.

The themes explored in Water and Earth were very similar: the long-term effects of abuse, pricking consciences, and the difficulty of reconciling public perception with reality. Boyne’s storytelling ability made the stories feel completely different, but I’m nervous as to whether he can pull that off twice more.

I look forward to finding out: Fire, the next in the series, is due to be released in November.

My sister bought this memoir for me, commenting that the tales of camping holidays in the UK and France in the 1970s would remind me of our childhood—though I must immediately clarify that, as the youngest sibling, the 1970s predate my arrival!

The book did, however, bring back memories. It was funny: there were anecdotes that made me laugh out loud, and also reminded me of situations in which we’d found ourselves.

Kennedy spins a good yarn: there aren’t many writers who can eke out pages of humour and tension from getting lost when driving in France, for example. She has real storytelling skill.

By the end, though, I began to struggle: it did feel a little strung out and perhaps a touch repetitive to me. To sustain its length, I would have preferred it to be a little more grounded in growth or self-reflection, or perhaps to have a little more variety of mood or depth of characterisation.

But I nevertheless enjoyed this. It was very nostalgic, and I would never have come across this book by other means, so that makes it a great present.

As you can see, I bought this book by renowned actor Obioma Ugoala when it was first released; it has since been re-released with the much better title The Making of a Man. It is a memoir focusing on Ugoala’s experiences of racism and sexism in his life and career, along with reflections on the complexities of masculinity. It’s also an argument for change, and a challenge to us all to improve society.

There was much in Ugoala’s account that I found shocking. For example, we’re of a broadly similar age, and it is astonishing to me that someone growing up at the same time as me could have been the victim of openly racist remarks from his teachers. It opened my eyes, as did many of the experiences that followed. His account of being told, as part of his upbringing, that ‘racism is not your fault, but it’s going to be your challenge’ was deeply moving—and to hear that having this sort of conversation is a ‘standard’ part of childhood for black children in the UK is heartbreaking.

And yet, the thing that struck me most about this book was Ugoala’s capacity for forgiveness. He talks about forgiving his teachers, for example, and explains repeatedly how he does not blame many of those who have demonstrated terrible behaviour towards him. His deep-rooted belief in the need to improve society, to tackle problems systemically and at a population level, results in an inspiring and superhuman ability to avoid pouring opprobrium on individuals. I found it extraordinary, and I can only aspire to his capacity.

This was an inspiring and insightful read, perhaps even uplifting, albeit one that reveals some deep-seated problems in our society.