This is the much-lauded 2019 memoir. It follows Al-Kadhi’s journey from being a child of a conservative Iraqi Muslim family, growing up in an enormous economic privilege in Britain, attending Eton and Cambridge, and ultimately finding solace in an identity as Glamrou, a exuberant gay drag queen.

Their story is unique and provides interesting insight into multiple facets of society. It is told with humour and warmth, though the tone is a little too informally conversational for my preference.

There were bits of the book that I didn’t really follow. This may well be due to my own ignorance of the modern understanding of personal identity. For example, I don’t really know what is meant in practice by “working tirelessly to make my identity political”—which is not to dismiss its importance.

There were more bits which made me long for a little more empathy from the author, and reflection on how their views and actions may make others feel. This particularly stood out to me when Al-Khadi described a relationship as making them “feel like I’d won a piece of the institution, by getting him to desire me”, within pages of disparaging broadly similar prejudices in the sexual preferences of others.

Maybe I’m being unfair in that expectation, but the narrative felt one-sided and Al-Khadi doesn’t seem to take responsibility for much. I suppose that’s the prerogative of an autobiographer.

I don’t mean to sound too hard on this book: I’m glad I read it and it gave me plenty of food for thought. However, I wonder if some of the rave reviews are perhaps more reflective of the remarkable bravery and force of will that Al-Khadi has shown in life than of the book itself.

Thanks to Newcastle University Library for lending me a copy.

I know it’s a cheap shot, but this 1993 novel brought me neither comfort nor joy nor glad tidings thereof. I found it a bit of a slog.

The main characters are a rich young doctor and less wealthy hospital administrator. They fall in love, but their relationship is strained by their own and others’ expectations. It’s unremarkably quotidian. Grimsley repeatedly telegraphs that the theme he wants to consider is why couples stay together—but his consideration seems to consist mostly of repeating the question.

I can’t help but think that, when this was published, having two male characters in a normal, everyday relationship was daring on its own terms, but it feels inconsequential thirty years on. That’s progress, and Grimsley and others probably deserve credit and respect for contributing to that progress, but this novel just seemed terribly dull to me.

I was inspired to read this short memoir, published last April, after seeing a positive review in The TLS. It is a short account, mostly extracted from Freddy’s journal, of his experience as the 21-year-old son of a man diagnosed with, and ultimately dying from, glioblastoma.

While Freddy’s experience is singular and recounted with both wit and tenderness, I found that it didn’t really resonate with me. It struck me that Freddy seemed a very “young” 21-year-old, and it made me reflect on our very different paths in life. At the same age as he was struggling to deal with awful news, I was being trained to deliver it. Death was unfamiliar to him at 21, while I’d spent years with cadavers. Some of the conversations that struck Freddy as beautifully expressed struck me as medical cliché.

There was just, somehow, too much medicine in here for me to really separate off that part of my brain and allow myself to feel the humanity. I think that’s more my failing than Freddy’s.

This will be the last of these posts, at least for a little while. In 2023, I’m going to go back to posting about books individually, rather than in a compiled end-of-the-month post.

But for now, I’ve five books to tell you about.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

This Booker-shortlisted 2015 novel is one of those books that has been recommended to me by many people over the last few years, but that I’ve never quite found time for. This is partly because it is long, and starting a long book always feels a bit like taking on a big commitment. But mostly, it’s because the premise didn’t attract me.

This is often described as a story about four male college classmates, following them and their ever-changing relationships over the course of their lives. And yes, that is a part of this book, but it’s not how I’d describe it. I would call it a fictional biography of a brilliant lawyer with a traumatic childhood.

In my premise, this is a book which looks at the lifelong effects of trauma on both the person who suffers it and those around them. There’s a second thread about fatherhood, and the father-son relationship in particular, explored through an adult adoption process. The stuff about modern male friendship is interesting and under-explored in modern fiction, but I didn’t think it was really the focus of the book.

One thing those who recommended this book didn’t get wrong: it is very moving, harrowing even. It was a little over-written, and it took a while to find its focus and get going, but all of that is outweighed—for me, at least—by the complex layers of emotion that the book explores. This is definitely one of my favourite books of 2022.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

This latest collection of funny observational essays covers the COVID-19 pandemic and, movingly, the death of Sedaris’s father.

As documented in his previous books, Sedaris had always had a strained relationship with his father. In this book. Sedaris describes how his father’s late-in-life cognitive decline brought them closer together. He also talks about the complex emotional reaction to his death, given the history between the two of them.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, as I have Sedaris’s previous books… but if you’re new to his essays, you’re probably better off starting with the earlier volumes.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Emergency State by Adam Wagner

I was a bit reluctant to dive into this newly published book reviewing the legal framework governing the COVID-19 pandemic in England. I wasn’t convinced that I was ready to relive earlier parts of the pandemic we’re living through, especially considering the impact it had on my professional life.

However, the reviews seemed strong, and I couldn’t resist at least making a start—and then ended up racing through the whole thing.

I was struck by the extensive similarities in the ‘chat’ Wagner reports among legal professionals and the ‘chat’ I participated in as a public health professional. Like Wagner, I was surprised that the Government chose to underpin so much of its guidance with law, in a way that is most unusual for public health practice, rather than concentrating on outlawing only the most egregious behaviour. Like Wagner, I was frustrated that the law and guidance rarely aligned. And, like Wagner, I was confounded by late publication of crucial documents, which often came hours or even days after Government announcements, leaving us all guessing in the meantime.

Wagner’s central argument is that the ‘emergency state’ needs clearer boundaries within the English constitution. His argument won me round.

With thanks to Newcastle University’s library for lending me a copy.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Written in the early part of the pandemic, this is Smith’s short collect of short essays which reflect on her experiences and her relationship with Marcus Aurelius. The final essay is a version of the opening section of Aurelius’s Meditations.

Despite its short length, I describe this as “patchy” and “uneven”. There were sentences that produced that vertiginous effect of totally changing my perspective on something:

Writing is routinely described as ‘creative’ – this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

but also passages which seemed inconsequential. I suppose, to some degree, that was the pandemic experience for many—so perhaps the form is more considered than I took it to be.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

I was inspired to read this bestselling 1984 French classic translated by Barbara Bray after seeing a short piece about it in The Atlantic. It is an autobiographical novel set in what is now Vietnam in 1929, and concerns the poor 15-year-old narrator falling into an affair with a rich 27-year-old man. Duras wrote this when she was 70 years old, so had considerable distance and perspective on the events it describes.

The novel is short, a little over 100 pages, and is written in a fragmentary style which is not always strictly linear. I found it difficult to get into, and didn’t take much from it. It’s possibly a book that would close study more than my casual read, though I’m aware that Duras herself described it as “a load of shit” that was written “when I was drunk”.

Basically, this just wasn’t up my street.

With thanks to Northumbria University’s library for lending me a copy.

I’ve nine books to tell you about for November, some of which were better than others.

Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan

Before picking up this book, I’d never heard of Richard Brautigan, the American author who died the year before I was born. I decided to read this 1976 novel of his after an acquaintance told me that this was the book they used to judge the quality of a bookshop: only shops stocking Sombrero Fallout were worth visiting. I’ve since learned that this is something Jarvis Cocker says in the introduction to the recent Canongate edition, so not quite as quirky and original as I’d imagined.

Yet quirky and original this short novel certainly is, one of the most singular and enjoyable books I’ve read this year. The eccentric plot concerns an American humorist who has recently split up from his Japanese girlfriend. He starts a new absurd story about a sombrero falling from the sky in a small American town, but discards it after a few paragraphs. However, the story takes on an increasingly preposterous life of its own within the waste paper basket. The book interleaves this developing story with chapters about the humorist and chapters about the Japanese girlfriend. The chapters are rarely longer than a couple of pages, and frequently much shorter.

The writing is surreal and very funny. Brautigan makes some quotable and yet delicate observations about the nature of life, love, longing, and loss. The overall effect is utterly beguiling.

There is something about Brautigan’s writing in this book that reminds me of Italo Calvino, whose worked I loved. I’ll be seeking more.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

My sole reason for picking this up was the Booker prize long-listing. Being nominated for a Booker doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll enjoy a book. But, with a book as short as this, and one with themes of ‘compassion’ and a ‘stern rebuke of sins committed in the name of religion’—the sort of thing that’s right up my street—it seemed worth giving it a go. I’m glad I did.

This short book was brilliant. It’s about morality, and in particular the contrast between the morality of the ordinary person contrasted with the morality of the Catholic Church. It excoriates the latter for its treatment of unmarried women.

The novel is mostly set at Christmas, in 1986, in Ireland. The central character is a coal merchant with a wife and five daughters. He knows that he could have expected much less as the son of an unmarried servant, especially one whose mother died young. His own experiences and moral attitudes are brought into sharp contrast with those of the local convent and Magdalen laundry after an experience while making a coal delivery.

The style of writing is beautifully concise and precise, and the novel as a whole packs a punch far beyond that which its page-count would suggest.

I will definitely be seeking more of Keegan’s work.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn

This much-recommended book by the Scottish investigative journalist, published in 2021, examines areas of the world which have been abandoned by humans for a wide variety of reasons. From this, she tries to imagine the future of Earth post-humanity (or as Flyn sometimes proposes, after the ‘mammalian era’), and also tries to understand how the end of humanity might arrive.

This sounds terribly depressing, but this is actually a book rooted in hope and beauty, celebrating the power of nature to rebound and adapt. There’s also a fair about of interesting public health stuff in Flyn’s discussion: I was particularly struck by her understanding that after the Chernobyl disaster,

Overall, poverty-linked ‘lifestyle diseases’ and poor mental health pose a far greater threat to affected communities than radiation exposure.

I also especially liked this line from her conclusion, which crystallised many vague thoughts I’d had while reading:

Faith, in the end, is what environmentalism boils down to. Faith in the possibility of change, the prospect of a better future – for green shoots from the rubble, fresh water in the desert. And our faith is often tested.

This was beautifully written, hopeful, and taught me a lot that I didn’t previously know on a whole gamut of topics, from supervolcanoes to how feral cows behave. It was superb.

Foster by Claire Keegan

I picked this up as a result of enjoying Small Things Like These by the same author. It’s another very slim, single-sitting novel set in Ireland which explores societal themes. In this case, the main theme is family.

A young girl is sent from her large, struggling family to stay with foster parents for a few months. We see, through the eyes of the child, the differences between the two family settings, and watch as—over the course of a few short months—she grows and matures.

Like the other novel, this is beautifully written with precise language, the author clearly having weighed every word. The plot here is simple and unremarkable, but Keegan’s eye for detail and realism turn it into something extraordinary.

I think I enjoyed Small Things Like These a dash more, but perhaps that’s only because I read it first and so Keegan’s remarkable style was new to me. Foster is definitely to be recommended, too.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Under Pressure by Richard Humphreys

This 2019 memoir of serving onboard a Polaris nuclear submarine has been on my ‘to read’ list since it was published. It was pure prejudice that meant that it languished on the list: I imagined it was going to be an interesting account of an unusual occupation, but probably written from the exhausting point of view of a navy-lifer with a proselytising view of military service. I was wrong.

Humphreys’s account of his training and subsequent service was illuminating and insightful. His reflections on his mental health, and that of fellow servicemen, particularly in the context of unacceptable bullying and humiliating behaviour from those higher up the chain of command are arresting.

Humphreys also writes elegantly about the philosophical aspects of serving on a nuclear submarine, and the duty to carry out actions which would almost certainly lead to the end of humanity. These are fascinating debates in the abstract, but Humphreys personal experience offers a unique, novel perspective.

I never imagined I’d race through any memoir of military service, but this had me hooked.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

I chose to read this short novel, published in 2020, because I previously enjoyed Moss’s Ghost Wall. Summerwater is a similarly atmospheric novel, and I think perhaps I enjoyed it slightly more.

The novel is set on a single rainy day on a Scottish caravan park, near a loch. Each chapter follows a different character staying on the park. While each narrative occasionally mentions the other characters and groups, the whole ‘population’ doesn’t come together until the final section. Between each of the chapters is a short section of writing about the surrounding natural world.

Moss’s crisp writing evokes a claustrophobic, oppressive, tense atmosphere, that somehow also felt entirely relatable.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the final five words, as ordinary as they are, sent chills down my spine and will stay with me for a long time.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

The Prison Doctor by Amanda Brown and Ruth Kelly

This memoir of a GP’s decision to leave her village surgery and pursue a career in prison medicine has been on my ‘to read’ list since it was published. I put off reading it for a few years because too much of my health protection day job had come to involve prison outbreaks, so I thought it might be too close to home. Two sequels have been published in the meantime, which gives some idea of the book’s commercial success.

The book has three parts: the first covers Brown’s decision to leave general practice, and—in some ways—I found this the most interesting section. Although the change was different, the process and feelings Brown described reminded me of my experiences of moving from hospital medicine into public health. The second section discusses Brown’s early prison career in young offender institutes and men’s prisons, including clinical stories of some prisoners alongside her training and career development. The last section concentrates on her time working in a women’s prison, and concentrates almost exclusively on the clinical vignettes.

I was left with mixed feelings. The book had a certain ‘fictive sheen’, with events and stories feeling neatly contained and complete in a way that’s rarely true in medicine. I’m convinced this is a consequence of changing details to anonymise cases and perhaps creating compound characters, but it just felt a little false. The dialogue also felt awkwardly written, without any ring of authenticity.

On the other hand, this neatness of story and writing made this an effortless read, and Brown and Kelly still gave interesting illustrated insights into the lives of prison medics and their patients… so maybe the slightly ‘glossy’ writing is worth it.

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain

This 2014 French novel was translated by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken, two of the three translators of Laurain’s The President’s Hat, which I previously enjoyed.

This novel is in the long tradition of blind love stories. A woman is mugged and left in a coma. A man finds her discarded handbag and, using its contents, tracks her down and falls in love with her, without ever having met her.

I found this a bit inauthentic and twee. It has the warm tome of The President’s Hat, but is a little too humdrum and unimaginative to have the same charm. The plot was too predictable to be truly engaging, and the behaviour of the central character seemed to me to cross the line into being creepy rather than romantic.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

Bittersweet by Susan Cain

I have long had a theory that melancholy is under-appreciated in modern British society. I feel especially strongly about this in connection with Christmas. I think Christmas is naturally a time which combines happiness and melancholy, but increasingly, the infantilisation of British society sees it treated exclusively with childlike chirpiness.

All of this led me to believe that I’d find much to enjoy in Bittersweet, Susan Cain’s recent book on the place of sorrow and longing in society, especially as I’d enjoyed her previous book, Quiet.

However, I was a bit disappointed. This felt too focused specifically on American cultural norms for me as a British reader, and it felt focused on a particularly narrow slice even of that society. It felt like there was a certain credulity in the author’s quoting of messages shared on retreats and at narrowly focused conferences.

Bittersweet felt like a memoir of a personal journey into understanding various broadly New Age concepts, presented as popular science—and as a result, it just wasn’t up my street.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

I’ve five books to mention for October, all by authors I’ve never read before.

Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan

I picked this up after seeing a positive review in the TLS. It is a 200-page first novel, a comedic middle-class family drama set in the Indian city of Trivandrum. The older brother of the narrator has been covertly filmed engaging in “sex-adjacent activities” with an acquaintance / girlfriend, and the video quickly spreads online. Our narrator is left to arbitrate between his brother and his parents as their relationship essentially breaks down. At heart, the book seemed to be about the collision between the modern world and traditional social values.

I found it easy to read, but the melodramatic aspect of focusing almost entirely on the relationships within one family was a little wearing after a while. Given the grandeur of the theme, I think I would have enjoyed seeing it explored on a larger canvas. Jayan’s exploration of the personal, family effects had its impact lessened for me by the humour which ran throughout.

Yet, I still enjoyed this novel, and I found it interesting to see the similarities in family values and relationships between India and the UK.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

I picked up this recently published novel after seeing a review in the TLS. The opening line is, “I had hundreds of nudes stored in my phone, but I’d never sent them to anyone.”

I have no nudes in my phone, and no desire whatsoever to set about changing that; I knew immediately I was in for an intriguing journey into the life and mind of a character with an entirely different outlook on life. This book is the story of an extraordinarily complex web of sexual and/or romantic relationships. Girl 1 is in a relationship with girl 2, seeks a bit on the side with girl 3, who invites her into a threesome with her boyfriend and boss, boy 1, girl 1 leaves girl 2 for boy 1 (or possibly for girl 3 or possibly for both or neither). And that’s only about the first quarter of the book.

There’s a lot in this book about power and consent and gender dynamics, but really, at its heart, this is a book about belonging, understanding, and the different qualities and needs that develop when we spend time with different people. Fishman has wise and interesting things to say on these subjects, which make this first novel worth reading, though I wonder if her plots might become a little less complicated over time and allow the main themes a bit more space to breathe.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

This is a 2019 collection of nine essays rooted in the author’s personal experiences and loosely connected by the theme of self-delusion. Tolentino is a Canadian-born writer who lives in America. She is in her thirties and contributes to a variety of periodicals, including The New Yorker and websites such as Jezebel. I picked up this book because the Amazon algorithm pushed it at me, and because I saw it had been so widely praised in the press (as both a Times and Guardian ‘Book of the Year’).

I enjoyed most of the essays in this collection, but especially enjoyed Tolentino’s essay on marriage (“I Thee Dread”), probably because her views roughly align with my own. I was particularly struck by her observation about how traditional gender-segregated celebrations of engagement remain common in modern Western society: I’d never viewed hen/stag parties in that light.

I also especially enjoyed Tolentino’s reflections on the interaction between social media and self-delusion (“The I in the Internet”). Her account of how her own memory of participating in a reality television show differed from the filmed, documented reality (“Reality TV Me”) was a novel twenty-first century take on the much-explored difference between reality and recollection.

I think these essays are best enjoyed as standalone pieces: I’m not convinced that they coalesce into a particularly coherent whole. Some of the cultural references were also beyond me (I couldn’t pick Gwyneth Paltrow or Winona Ryder out of a line-up, let alone understand what it meant by being “a Winona in a Gwyneth world”) but that’s hardly the author’s fault.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

Published in January 2021, this is an account of the history of the British Empire, with a particular focus on how that history continues to influence the country today. I know Sanghera best from his writing in The Times.

This book introduced me to a lot of history, and Sanghera’s reflections on how little of this is taught in schools resonated with me… though as I stopped studying history somewhere around the age of 13, my knowledge of all things historical is a bit sketchy.

Sanghera’s discussion of the ways in which Empire continues to influence our political classes echoed other books I’ve enjoyed lately, such as Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men, and there were a few references to Fintan O’Toole’s excellent Heroic Failure.

I particularly liked Sanghera’s rejection of simplistic narratives of whether the Empire was good or bad:

It is puerile to reduce imperial history to a matter of ‘good’ and ‘bad’: trying to weigh up the positive and negative in this way is like defending the morality of kicking a random old man in the shins one afternoon because you helped an old lady across the road in the morning.

Sanghera’s tone often seems to me to be one of justifiable (and justified) personal anger at our failure to reconcile or even recall the ‘bad bits’ of British history. The last section of the book, though, is surprisingly uplifting and optimistic: in this part, I particularly enjoyed the reflection that expanding history curricula to include more Imperial history is basically arguing for more complete history, not something special or siloed from everything else.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran

This is a novel about loneliness and death. I decided to read it after seeing a positive review in the TLS.

You may know that Andrew Holleran is a much-celebrated American author, credited with several classic works of American gay literature. I haven’t read any of them, and wasn’t previously aware of the author.

The Kingdom of Sand concentrates on an American man described as being in the later part of his life, though given no specific age. He has moved from New York to Florida, and tries to come to terms with his own loneliness and mortality. He finds connections in slightly seedy locations, like pornographic video stores. He ultimately befriends another gay man, twenty years his senior, with whom he spends time watching old movies.

Holleran’s novel has been well-received, and I can understand that it is an unusual portrait of a character and situation not often discussed in literature. However, I didn’t really enjoy it. I found the narrator’s sarcastic tone a bit off-putting. The narrator has very different perceptions and preferences to my own (redolent of his very different life experience) which meant that I struggled to see the generality in some of the broader observations Holleran made, particularly around universal themes such as death and dying.

I’m glad this book exists, but I don’t think it will live long in my memory, and I wouldn’t particularly fancy re-reading it.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

I’ve eight books to tell you about this month.

The President’s Hat by Antoine Laurain

I decided to read this 2013 French novel after hearing political journalist Charlotte Ivers, on her fourth or fifth read, describe it as “the most charming book”. It’s translated into English by Jane Aitken, Emily Boyce and Louise Rogers Lalaurie.

I can’t disagree with Charlotte: this is an utterly charming book which is just brimming with a pleasant, gentle optimism. Set in the 1980s, the plot begins with a man finding François Mitterrand’s hat. It seems to bring him a small amount of good fortune. After he misplaces the hat, it ends up in the hands of another Parisian character, and so the book continues with four small vignettes of ordinary Parisian lives enhanced by temporary possession of a hat.

It sounds irritatingly twee, but Laurain manages to spin a comforting and engaging tale of it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Some translation decisions were unusual: for examplesommelier, a term frequently used in England, is routinely translated as ‘wine waiter’ yet motoscafo, an unfamiliar term, was left in French. But these are minor niggles, and this book is well worth 200 pages of your attention.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

A Month in the Country by JL Carr

This novel, first published in 1980, has been much-recommended as a book which is perfect summer reading. It is a rather gentle tale set in Yorkshire in the summer of 1920. Thomas Birkin, the central character, is an ex-serviceman who accepts a job in Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to get out of London for something approximating a period of convalescence. His task is to uncover a Medieval painting which has been whitewashed in the local church.

Birkin becomes drawn into village life, becoming especially close to another ex-serviceman who is digging for a lost grave, a young girl from the village, and the parson’s wife. He develops especially strong feelings for the latter.

There is a lot of gentle hinting in the book at religious themes of damnation, redemption, and forgiveness. It’s a short book, under 100 pages, but is rich in atmosphere and description while maintaining an underlying gentleness. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer

I’ve previously read and enjoyed Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It and so was tempted by this new book when I noticed that the library had acquired a copy. Much like the earlier book, it’s an extended and somewhat rambling essay recounting the author’s personal experiences and a wide range of cultural touchstones. This volume concentrates on ‘endings’ and draws on a lot of literature, jazz, art, classical music and other references.

Many of the references are beyond me, but Dyer’s engaging and funny style of writing and the pace of the ’conversation’ keeps things moving on. And there are occasional passages which speak directly to me, or make me see things from a wholly new perspective.

In all, a bit like the earlier book, I’m not really sure why I liked this, especially given that so many of the references were unfamiliar… but I very much did.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

I had two reasons for picking this up. Firstly, there has been a lot of recent discussion of the Elkhart of Vidal as the tenth anniversary of his death has just passed, and I thought it would be good to read some of his work. Secondly, I recently read A Ladder to the Sky which features Vidal as a character and includes a few mentions of this specific book, with which it turns out to share some minor themes.

The City and the Pillar caused considerable controversy on its 1948 publication for its portrayal of an ordinary, somewhat sympathetic gay man who served in the military. Clearly, this is much less shocking to modern sensibilities, but the story still holds up as a tale of longing, and as a criticism of prejudice. The writing is in that plain, precise style of the great American writers, which I enjoyed.

I’m glad I read this because it gave me a bit of historical perspective. However, I wouldn’t rush to re-read it; I wasn’t really moved by it, and I’m not really sure that I’ll remember the finer details of the plot six months hence.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

I picked up this novel having previously enjoyed Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

Lahiri’s previous novels were written in English, while she was living in the USA. She has since relocated to Rome, and wrote and published Whereabouts in Italian in 2018, as Dove Me Trovo. It was translated by the author and re-published in English in 2021.

Whereabouts is a subtle novel. It takes the form of short essays or reflections on the life and inner thoughts of a single woman in her 40s, living alone and working as an academic. It explores the fascinating intersection between solitude and loneliness. This relationship is something which has played on my mind in recent years in connection with older people, but I hadn’t really considered it in younger people who live alone. There isn’t much plot to speak of, but then it’s not that sort of novel.

While I didn’t feel I took quite as much from this book as I did from Interpreter of Maladies, I will certainly be seeking more of Lahiri’s books.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Weather by Jenny Offill

I picked this up because I recently enjoyed Offill’s previous novel, Dept. of Speculation. Weather was published in 2020, and shares the same fragmentary structure of short paragraphs sharing the protagonist’s tangentially connected thoughts and observations. The later novel is even lighter on plot than the earlier one.

Weather contains plenty of thoughts about the turbulent times in which we live: about populism and climate change and ‘the end times’. But it is also about marriage, family, parenthood and addiction, all of which loom large in the university librarian narrator’s life.

I felt like I got a little less from this book than from the earlier novel, but perhaps that is in part because the structure wasn’t so arrestingly novel. The references to the difficult times in which we are living also served to make it a little less escapist. But I’m still glad I read it.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Two of my friends on Goodreads gave this short 1911 novel good reviews, which led me to seek a copy. It’s a thoroughly bleak tale of the despair of forbidden love, and of being trapped by circumstance and duty.

In all, this was thoroughly depressing. I appreciate Wharton’s brilliance in creating a complete world which evokes strong emotions in so few pages… but this isn’t the sort of thing I could stand to read regularly!

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

I picked this short 2013 Booker shortlisted novel on a complete whim, based on nothing more than the author and the title. It’s a narrative of the last days of Jesus from the perspective of his mother.

Despite this being a very short book, I had a bit of a variable relationship with it. I very nearly gave up on it about halfway through, finding the narrator unlikable and the writing very much in a single, maudlin key. When I picked it up again, I liked it more, though it still felt as though the “strings” were visible, as if this were an essay for a school project, and I wasn’t really emotionally affected by it. The writing felt much clunkier than I expected. I suspect I’ll barely remember that I’ve read this book a year hence.

However, this is a book which has received glowing reviews elsewhere, from people who know much more about these things than me. Don’t set too much store by my negative review. It’s less than 100 pages, so probably just worth reading and making up your own mind.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

I’ve six books to tell you about this month, most of which were really excellent.

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

This 2018 novel follows the complicated life of novelist from his early 20s onwards. It is divided into three longer sections and two interludes, each of which has a different narrator, with the central character himself narrating the final section.

I’ve previously read three of Boyne’s novels (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Echo Chamber and The Second Child) and while I’ve enjoyed them all, the latter two didn’t quite live up to The Heart’s Invisible Furies, which I thought was truly exceptional. This book had a broadly similar biographical structure to The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and similar threads of humour and literary chatter, and even a mention of Maude Avery—a favourite character.

I enjoyed A Ladder to the Sky enormously, but it too didn’t quite live up to its predecessor.

Its recurring themes of ‘ownership’ of stories and differing interpretations of events depending on perspective were pointed out repeatedly and a little heavy-handedly for my liking. There was a lack of subtlety throughout, in a way that reminded me of some of Jeffrey Archer’s fiction. I haven’t quite untangled in my own mind whether that was an authorial choice meant to reflect unsubtle aspects of the protagonist’s character, or something less considered, but I found it a bit wearing at times.

But really, this is nit-picking. Even where plot points were unsubtly telegraphed way in advance, I still raced through the book anticipating each dénouement. I wouldn’t hesitate to read more of Boyne’s novels.

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

This recently published novel concerns a relationship between an English professor and her recently appointed younger colleague. This is also the story of her troubled relationship with her husband, also a professor, who is under investigation for several historical relationships with his female students, conducted with her knowledge.

Vladimir is beautifully written, dark and exhilarating. It explores many contemporary questions, especially around shame, power and sexual consent. It has a bleak, cynical wit to it, and has a page-turning thriller-ish aspect to it.

I devoured it.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

This 2014 novel has been on my “to read” list for years. It is a short novel (179 pages) which provides a portrait of a marriage: there is some plot, but not a huge amount of it, and it is very much in the background.

Reading the blurb, I had completely misunderstood that this was an epistolary novel consisting of letters between a husband and wife. It isn’t. It is written in an unusual form, consisting of short thoughts and ruminations from the point of view of the unnamed “wife” character. In the second half of the book, the narration shifts to be apparently third-person, though I think this is intended to reflect a shift in how the character sees herself, rather than a genuine change in narrative perspective.

I found this structure interesting, insightful and enjoyable. Experimental forms are sometimes a bit of a slog, but that certainly wasn’t the case here.

This has left me keen to explore more of Offill’s work.

Turbulence by David Szalay

I read Szalay’s Booker-nominated All That Man Is back in 2018, and didn’t really think much of it: it seemed to be nine well-written, thematically connected stories, but it didn’t live up to being anything more than that.

Perhaps because I went into Turbulence, published in 2019, with a more open mind, I enjoyed it much more. It is a similar concept: twelve short stories about people going through “turbulent” times in their lives, their stories interconnected through aeroplane flights. Each of the short stories was immediately evocative of its setting and mood. The ways the stories interacted with one another pulled off that wonderful narrative trick of convincing the reader that the characters’ lives extend before and after the story we’re told.

I didn’t get any wider, grander theme from this book, but unlike All That Man Is, I wasn’t expecting to find one, so didn’t find the absence jarring. I really enjoyed reading this short book, and it makes me wonder whether I should reread the earlier book with different expectations.

Serious Money by Caroline Knowles

This book, based on a sociological research study, was published in May. Knowles walked around the wealthier parts of London and interviewed people who are found there. It was recommended in Tom Rowley’s newsletter as being “packed with sharply-observed insights into how the super-rich make their money and how they spend it. Gently written, with warmth and real curiosity.”

I’d agree with all of that. Knowles went well beyond simply describing the enormous privilege in which the super-rich are surrounded, and tried to genuinely understand the people and their world. One is left with the unavoidable impression that many of the super-rich are simply unaware of the real world, and most of them don’t seem especially kind nor friendly.

I expected the gaping inequality, and so was perhaps a little less shocked by that than the tone suggests I might be. What really depressed me about this book is the lack of imagination, the sheer mundanity of the everyday life of the people described. The sense of “keeping up with the Joneses” and the divisions between the “haves and have yachts” feels essentially grounded in the same envy as at other income levels. So much of the behaviour seemed to be driven by a sense of societal norms—we simply must have a swimming pool / country house / yacht because that’s what people would expect of those with our income.

I suppose I like to think—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that if I had effectively unlimited means, then I’d spend my life trying to do something demonstrably worthwhile and leave the world a better place. I see that, to massive swathes of the world’s population, I do have effectively unlimited means, and yet, here I am, writing fairly shoddy and mostly unread book reviews rather than volunteering at the local soup kitchen. I suppose this book pierced my fantasy that my life would be different if I just had a little more money.

A Class of Their Own by Matt Knott

It was interesting to read this memoir, published in February, at the same time as Serious Money, as the two discuss broadly similar themes in entirely different ways. This book is the less successful of the two.

Matthew Hammett Knott is a Cambridge graduate, and this is his story of spending much of three academic years post-graduation as a private tutor to wealthy clients. The facts are a bit opaque: the blurb talks about “over a decade” spent tutoring—but while the events of the book take place over a decade ago, they cover only three years, and the end of the book leaves the impression of being the end of his tutoring career. The cover calls the author ‘Matt Knott’, while the book’s listing calls him ‘Matthew Hammett Knott’, which might just be a design thing, but—in the context of everything else—feels a bit like an attempt to draw a stronger dividing line between the hardly under-privileged author and his very upper-class clients.

The content is also a little odd. For a book which is notionally about tutoring children, references to sex are surprisingly frequent and occasionally jarring, and there is a surprising amount about the author’s early career as a writer.

The combination of the time that has passed since the events this describes, the strange content decisions and the opaque descriptions in the blurb make me wonder if this was originally written as a broader memoir. It may have been gradually beaten into a marketable shape by committee over many years, not wholly successfully.

This was easy to read, and occasionally very funny, but the overall sense I’m left with is a combination of puzzlement and suspicion, which is not really what I was looking for.

I’ve five books to mention this month, all of which—by sheer fluke—are by women. Considering all the inequalities and biases at every step of the journey from conception to being in front of my eyeballs, it’s pretty remarkable that this would happen by chance, and yet it has.

This made me wonder: when was the last month when I read only books by men? This series of posts allows me to answer straightforwardly: February 2019.

We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

Originally published in Dutch in 2021, I read Emma Rault’s English translation of this novella in a single sitting. The narrator is a new employee of an unnamed social network, where her role is to review content reported as ‘inappropriate’ to determine whether it ought to be removed from the platform.

Through a focus on the lives of the narrator and a small group of fellow employees, Bervoets explores the impact of being continually and routinely exposed to ‘inappropriate’ material. It also explores subjectivity, and how even in ‘real life’ people’s perceptions of events can vary—and in ‘real life,’ there isn’t a codified and detailed set of rules as to how things ought to be interpreted.

I thought this was an excellent novella: it’s timely reflective, and effective. It made me think a little differently about the human cost of content moderation. In particular, while there has been much written about the psychological trauma of continued occupational exposure to violent or sexual material, I’ve never really given much consideration to the impact of constant exposure to material espousing conspiracy theories. The consequences are fairy obvious, but the ethics of the whole thing remain dubious. The novella was also a perfect length, with just enough space to make its point.

I think this is the only one of Bervoets novels to be translated into English so far, but this was more than good enough to keep me on the lookout for more.

Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith

This collection of short stories, interspersed by various writers’ reflections on the importance of public libraries, was published in 2015. It is a collection written in support of the UK’s public libraries, which are closing in large numbers as they are starved of public funding. I discovered Ali Smith’s writing through her incomparable Seasonal Quartet and so thought I’d probably enjoy this collection… and I did.

As in her other work, Smith interrogates and plays with language in intriguing ways, while also driving forward interesting and unexpected plots, where it is sometimes difficult to untangle the “real” from the “imagined”. This combination seemed to me to be especially well-matched with the theme of public libraries.

As a rule, I tend to prefer longer pieces over short stories, and so I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the novels of Smith’s I’ve read. It was, nevertheless, a pleasure to spend time with her extraordinary prose.

The Seaplane on Final Approach by Rebecca Rukeyser

I picked up this recently published novel after it was featured in Tom Rowley’s newsletter with the suggestion that it was as “if Sally Rooney’s characters went to Alaska and actually did something interesting with all their yearning.”

The novel is narrated by Mira, an 18-year-old Californian who goes to work in an Alaskan wilderness lodge staffed by a small cast of compelling and comedic characters, and visited by amusingly stereotypical tourists. She chooses to work in Alaska after developing a crush on her slightly older step-cousin Ed, who lives a few towns away, who she, either optimistically or naively, thinks she will suddenly bump into again.

This book is thin on plot (at least until the final section) but has lots of reflection, longing, and humour. A thread through the novel is Mira’s obsession with developing a taxonomy of ‘sleaze,’ a subject she enjoys but recognises as difficult to pin down. To my mind, the Sally Rooney comparison is not unreasonable (and perhaps inevitable), but I much preferred Rukeyser’s writing.

Idol by Louise O’Neill

This is a recently published thriller with a promising premise. The main character is a successful ‘influencer’ in her 40s who has built a global Goop-like brand (Shakti) around wellness and empowerment of women is accused of having sexually assaulted another woman earlier in life. There could be a lot to unpack here: the fallibility of memory, the challenge of reconciling different perceptions, the emotional weight of building a brand on a personality, and more besides.

O’Neill does touch on these themes, but the novel becomes weighed down. Despite being in their 40s, the central characters are mostly motivated by, and frankly obsessed with, their friendships and relationships from their time at high school. I found this difficult to relate to or empathise with, and I found it difficult to maintain interest as a result.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

This short novel was first published in Swedish in 1972. I read the fiftieth anniversary edition, the 1974 English translation by Thomas Teal. This is a much-loved book by a much-revered author, so please don’t be put off by the fact that I didn’t enjoy it.

The book comprises 22 short stories set during a summer that an elderly artist spends with her six-year-old granddaughter on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. It draws upon Jansson’s experiences on a similar island with her niece, who has written an afterword in the edition I read.

Others describe the book as magical, as capturing something unique about the relationship between the very old and very young, and of reflecting the unique mood of summer. I’m afraid I got none of that: I found it dull, I found the characters as two-dimensional as those in children’s books, and the occasional brushes with philosophy as superficial as can be.

Given the acclaim this book has received over the decades, there is clearly much more to it than I appreciated, but this just really didn’t seem to be the right book for me right now.

I’ve five books to mention this month, four of which were published recently.

The Union of Synchronised Swimmers by Cristina Sandu

This slim Finnish novel was translated by the author and published in English in 2019. The main characters are six young women on a Soviet but stateless piece of land between two rivers and working in a cigarette factory. They discover that they have a talent for synchronised swimming, and enter an international competition.

The novel interleaves their joint story up to the competition with individual chapters focused on each of the swimmers after the competition. The whole thing is written in a very sparing, subtle style, which really only hints at a theme of multiculturalism and the difficulty of leaving behind our formative experiences.

At just over 100 pages, this was a quick but very worthwhile read. I didn’t read the blurb until I’d read the book, and this is one of those times when I was especially glad: I think it gives far too much away.

Chums by Simon Kuper

In his 2019 diary, following the election of the current Prime Minister, Alan Bennett wrote “It’s a gang, not a government.”

Kuper’s book serves to demonstrate the surprising degree of accuracy in the caricature of the current Government as a gang of privileged university friends playing political games. It also explores the degree to which this has been true in the past, and highlights the unhealthy degree to which our political classes have been drawn from a narrow background. His particular focus is on Oxford University, and specifically the arts and humanities degrees at that University. (I didn’t previously know that, traditionally, the upper classes look down upon science degrees as too ‘practically useful’.)

It was genuinely remarkable to realise that of the fifteen post-war Prime Ministers, only one (Gordon Brown) exclusively attended a university besides Oxford. Though admittedly, three didn’t attend university at all.

It’s not long since I read Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men, an angry account of the damage inflicted by private boarding schools, which skirts around similar territory. The tones of the two books are notably different: while Beard is viscerally angry, Kuper feels more inquisitive. He also comes up with some interesting suggestions on how to address the problems he identifies.

I’m glad I read this.

The Palace Papers by Tina Brown

This is absolutely not my usual kind of thing, but the combination of an unavoidable recent press launch of the book and the royal fervour surrounding the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee meant that it caught my eye. Tom Rowley’s recommendation in his weekly newsletters was the final push to click through and buy it.

The book focuses mostly on the relationships between Charles and Camilla, William and Catherine, and Harry and Meghan. Brown also covers Andrew in some detail.

The tone is waspish and gossipy, and the near-600 pages flew by. It’s clear that Brown has her favourites among her subjects, and I spent much of the time wondering how much of what I was reading could possibly be true, but I still found that I rather enjoyed it.

There were some pop culture references that were beyond me (“It was like Sean Penn in the old Madonna days”) and some strange commentary (“her hair never presented any unsettling surprises”), but this added to the gossipy charm. But I could have done without the hypocritical reporting in gruesome detail on events that had unsettled the family, followed by seeming chastisement of the press for the very reports the book repeated.

It’s not my usual cup of tea, but I downed it pretty quickly regardless.

Nothing But The Truth by The Secret Barrister

This is The Secret Barrister’s recently published third book. This volume focuses on an anonymised account of the barrister’s training at law school and through post-graduate training and their first few years at the bar. It is written in a similarly ironic, amusing style to the earlier books.

I enjoyed this, but less than the earlier books. The themes, especially of the under-funding of the justice system, are worthy. Reminding us of them is probably a valuable service, but it is also repetitious. I don’t think this book had anything new to say on the subject.

The discussion of the social makeup of the legal profession was more interesting: it reminded me countless similar discussions about the medical profession. It seemed as though the barriers to social diversity and inclusion remain even higher in the law than in medicine.

I’d still recommend The Secret Barrister’s books, but I’d recommend reading the earlier volumes first.

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

I bought this on publication because I’ve enjoyed a number of Barnes’s previous novels. This slim story is about memory, perspective, and the need to constantly re-examine history to truly understand it… or rather to continually misunderstand it, as Barnes might have it. A theme he returns to several times is that history must be misunderstood.

The titular character is an idiosyncratic lecturer in ‘culture and civilisation’, and our narrator is an adult learner who attends one of her courses. He strikes up a relationship—a friendship, perhaps—and ultimately becomes her biographer. A large section of the book is taken up by the narrator’s student essay on Julian the Apostate, which I found to be a slightly odd choice that took the wind out of the narrative sails.

I also struggled a bit with the eponymous Finch: at the start of the novel, we’re told that searching the internet for information about her life would be fruitless and would turn up no more than two out of print books. She was ‘not in any way a public figure.’

Yet later in the narrative, we’re told that she has written for the London Review of Books and been widely criticised in the media for a talk she gave at one of their events. This is surely contradictory: but I didn’t get the sense that we were supposed to judge our narrator as unreliable on basic facts. So, this confounded me, and really I wonder if I’ve completely misunderstood some key point about this book.

Barnes’s writing is as beautiful as ever, and I particularly the first part of the book, but by the end I felt more mystified than satisfied.