This is a well-researched reflection on the relationship between humans and computers, published in 2018. Bridle’s central point, I think, is that we often don’t have a great understanding of how technology we rely upon undertakes its work, and the development of new technologies like artificial intelligence clouds this further. In turn, this reflects back on us, clouding our own understanding of the world around us.
There were two specific points in this book which challenged some pre-existing conceptions I had held.
The chapter on YouTube transformed my understanding of the site. I had no idea that, for example, violent parodies of Peppa Pig are on there, and can be served to children by YouTube’s algorithm (which continually plays back to back videos if left—I hadn’t even clocked that!) I also hadn’t realised how much bizarre autogenerated content existed on the platform. I had thought that there was some reasonable content moderation, possibly because I hadn’t understood the true quantity of uploaded material.
I also had no idea that the NSA had cracked some prime number factors commonly used in encryption, nor that mathematical developments like this are routinely kept out of scientific journals—harming the development of the science—effectively as a cyber warfare strategy. I was a bit bowled over by that revelation, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been so naive.
Throughout, Bridle writes with real perception and clarity. This book has changed and better informed my view of technology as an adjunct to human thought. There was a lot to ponder in here.
This is a slim selection of diary entries from March 2020 to March 2021, capturing Bennett’s experience of lockdown and the pandemic, including the re-making of his Talking Heads TV series. As always, Bennett also shares gossipy anecdotes from earlier in life and reflects with horror on the state of modern politics.
This is a very short book, but brought half an hour or so of the unique joyful warmth that always runs through Bennett’s diaries.
I picked this up after seeing it featured in a New York Times piece which called it “a turning point for the genre” which had sold more than 1.3 million print copies. It’s also won numerous awards. I was disappointed.
The plot concerns a romance between the twenty-something son of a female President of the United States and a similarly aged Prince of the United Kingdom, younger brother of the third in line to the throne. There are many interesting questions to dissect in this scenario, but none of them are addressed in this frothy romance.
I found this superficial and poorly researched: there was a section where I struggled to follow the geography until I realised that the author thought that Buckingham Palace was in Buckingham, which was a part of London. Somehow, there is a lot of discussion of the political impact of religious objections to the relationship in the States, but no mention of the monarch’s role as Head of the Church of England. The writing is also unforgivably clunky in parts.
I think, at heart, this just wasn’t the book I expected it to be. From a “turning point for the genre” I think I expected something more considered, grounded in reality and exploratory, but instead this just seemed like a ten-a-penny by-numbers romance.
Published this month, this is another quick-turnaround book from Ali Smith in the mold of her incomparable Seasonal Quartet—referenced not just by the matching cover art but also by the main character, Sandy, saying early on “I didn’t care what season it was.”
I loved that series, and I loved this addition. There is something therapeutic about reading Smith’s take on the world’s chaos. The insight and connection she brings fees like it brings closure and clarity.
In this volume, set mostly during the pandemic, Smith blends social commentary with characters having detailed discussions about the analysis of poetry, and with a series of fantastical visitors which we are never quite sure exist.
I would characterise the main theme of this volume as being human connection and companionship (the clue is in one of the title’s meanings). It reflects on the changes wrought by pandemic living, but also the continuity of so many aspects of non-physical human connection, like connection through poetry or ideas or ancestry. It’s also about how it’s nice to be alone sometimes.
Like the whole of the Seasonal Quartet, this was a cut above almost everything else I read, and I’m already sure it will be one of my favourite books of the year.
This recently published debut novel set in present-day New York focuses on two characters: Cleo, a British artist in her early 20s who is struggling to find her painting form and whose student visa is running out, and Frank, an advertising executive twenty years her senior. Cleo meets Frank in a lift while fleeing a party. The two enjoy a whirlwind romance resulting in a quick, impulsive marriage. Most of the novel deals with the fall-out from their romance, as its consequences ripple through their friendship groups and families. The characters—Cleo especially—mature through the novel, albeit with some profoundly challenging but sensitively portrayed mental illness along the way.
None of the characters in this book are especially likeable, and yet I found myself rooting for all of them. I was immersed in the novel’s world and didn’t want to leave it.
Mellors has a beguilingly rich style of writing, full of imagery and metaphor, which feels like it has fallen out of fashion in recent times. The characters speak sparklingly witty dialogue. It’s hard to believe that this is a literary debut.
This is a 2021 novel about two brothers growing up in modern working-class Dublin: a twelve-year-old call Finn and a seventeen-year-old called Joe. The novel is narrated by the brothers in alternating chapters, though on different timelines (Joe’s story takes place after Finn’s)—this was less confusing than I’ve made it sound.
Joe has secured a scholarship to a prestigious private school, but finds himself teased for being from a different social class, and there is a constant theme of the gravity of his background constantly pulling him down. Society’s expectations of him are not high.
Finn looks up to Joe, and with the naivety of his youth doesn’t fully understand everything that is going on around him, in particular his father’s role as kingpin of a local drug gang.
Both Joe and Finn are very realistically drawn: Joe’s complexity and life challenges in particular drew me into this book, and Finn’s narration always rang true.
Mostly, though, this is a book with real emotional punch, diving deep into themes of teenagers developing their moral frameworks, the struggle to define oneself independently of one’s background, coming to terms with mortality and dealing with grief. It’s heavy stuff—but lightly written enough to be moving rather than maudlin, and with some real wit weaved through the whole book.
This was 238 pages long—I raced through it, but by the end, struggled to understand how Scarlett could possibly have built such a complete world in so few pages. These are characters that will stay with me for some time.
This is Murakami’s popular account of training for running the New York Marathon in 2005, which I read in Philip Gabriel’s translation. For me to say “I’m not a runner” seems to me to be as accurate and yet absurd as saying “I’m not a pair of trainers.” Yet, this is only in one sense a book about running: there is a lot in this short book for non-runners like me.
This is really a thoughtful and reflective memoir about life in general. I was particularly drawn to Murakami’s frequent comparisons between running and writing: both fundamentally solitary activities, and both requiring total commitment driven by self-motivation. Like Murakami, I’m a person who enjoys time by myself, and “doesn’t find it painful to be alone,” so I felt a bit like a kindred spirit.
Really, this was a book that allowed me to spend time in the mind of a brilliant writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It didn’t make me want to start running… thank goodness.
Published in 2020, this is a novel inspired in part by the book of the same name by Roland Barthes, which it references a few times. Like the Barthes book, this is split into very short titled chapters. Each begins with a piece of dialogue extracted from that chapter, which I felt provided a slightly hypnotic quality.
The plot is, of course, a love story told largely through dialogue. The narrator is a woman who moves from China to the UK (or “Brexit Britain”) to study for a PhD in visual anthropology, and falls for a man of a similar age who specialises in landscape architecture. Despite the slightly unusual structure, I found this effortless to read. It has interesting themes around loneliness, even within a relationship, and the limitations of language: both of the central characters speak more than one language.
This was intriguing, enjoyable, and captured more themes than I imagined it would be.
This 2008 novella, published as part of a series for “emerging adult readers” was a fun, single-sitting affair for me. The plot follows an estranged Irish daughter visiting her parents with her partner—a successful Hollywood actor—while pregnant. As well as being very funny, it captures the complexity of familial relationships and the conflict which can emerge from clashing social expectations of different generations.
This isn’t ground-breaking, but I don’t think it set out to be. It’s just a well-written, very brief story which captures complex and conflicting emotions which can emerge in fairly universal relationships. I often find short stories unsatisfying, but I enjoyed this.
This is a recently published book about doctors’ mental health, edited by the former Chair and current President of the Royal College of GPs and founder of the Practitioner Health Programme. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Clare Gerada a couple of times and found her to be inspirational, and have also met or worked with an almost frightening proportion of the chapter authors at one point or another!
I read this book and was surprised by how much of myself I recognised in the descriptions of doctors’ personalities, and the aspects of their work they find particularly challenging. I found the practical content on “surviving and thriving in medicine” insightful and helpful. The chapter on burnout in doctors, and how most doctors have periods of burnout in their career, was particularly relevant to me right now, after two exceptionally demanding years of pandemic practice.
There is much to think about in here, and much of immediate practical value. It is brilliant.
This 2020 first novel by Micah Nemerever was brilliant. Set in 1970s Pittsburgh, the plot follows two precocious college freshmen who are drawn together by their intelligence and slightly offbeat interpretation of the world. But—and this can’t possibly be a spoiler, as it’s the content of the prologue—their obsession (love?) for each other ultimately drives them to committing terrible crimes.
Nemerever does a fantastic job of weaving together the intense emotion of attraction with a sense of growing foreboding. The writing is almost poetic at times, with no wasted words or throwaway lines. The intensity and claustrophobia Nemerever creates is intense enough to feel a little exhausting at times, in the best possible way.
This short TLS book published about a year ago has been widely praised. It features a combination of lived experience, polemic, and humour used to illustrate that antisemitism has been left out of much of the current present social discourse about racism. I thought it was excellent, and well worth an hour of your time: it helped me to much better understand some of the issues discussed, in particular the feelings experienced in response to the recent issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party. It’s a book which is light on detail and critical analysis, but is most certainly an easy-to-read introduction to some of the key issues.
I was slightly distracted by quite how much of the discussion was rooted on Twitter, a platform that actively promotes outrage and strong negative emotions, though Baddiel did at least acknowledge multiple times that Twitter is not a true proxy for the ‘real world’.
I can’t remember what made me pick up this bestselling 2020 novel, but I’m afraid it just wasn’t my kind of thing. It seemed like fairly basic romance genre fiction to me: two young adults who are ‘polar opposites’ fall in love. I found the writing uninspiring and the plot predictably leaden.
The book is enormously popular, so it clearly has merit, but it just wasn’t up my street. I came close to giving up on it, and when I decided I may as well finish it, I couldn’t manage more than a chapter per day for the last section of the book.
The two most popular quotations from this book on Goodreads are:
“When I watch you sleep,” he said shakily, “I feel overwhelmed that you exist.”
and
“I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person.”
Both of those strike me as clunky and wooden; clearly, by virtue of their popularity, many other people feel differently. Perhaps if these quotations speak to you, the book will too. Please don’t let my lack of enthusiasm put you off.
Rooney’s 2017 bestselling debut is one of those books that is so wildly popular and widely read that writing about it seems redundant. In fact, I thought I’d read this book some years ago, shortly after I readNormal People. But I think I was confused: I read Rooney’s short story Mr Salary a couple of months after that.
I didn’t especially enjoy Normal People, finding it a bit flat and claustrophobic, and I didn’t think much of Mr Salary either, finding the dialogue unconvincing. Yet, I enjoyed Conversations with Friends.
As you almost certainly already know, the plot concerns two University students (former lovers) who form a friendship with an older married couple, and the complex web of relationships which develops between the four of them.
For what it’s worth, I still think Rooney’s dialogue is astonishingly unrealistic given how widely praised it is: this is a novel where everyone talks in sentences and paragraphs, and can spontaneously express complex thoughts and feelings with immediate precision. But this book did have a lot going for it in terms of characterisation and emotional complexity.
This is a recently published “popular philosophy” book by the writer of the television comedy series The Good Place. I picked it up mostly because I enjoyed that series.
The book is a guided tour of some schools of thought on ethics and philosophy, along with (mostly humorous) examples of how these relate to everyday life. I found the discussion mostly superficial, which is really a result of the structure and the decision to cram so much into a short book.
The writing style was, for my liking, far too conversational in tone, to the point where I slightly struggled to understand parts and had to go back and mentally “read them aloud” to parse what Schur was trying to say. I found that annoying.
This just wasn’t up my street (which, as you’ll see, is a bit of a theme this month: poor choices abound).
All of that said, the last chapter—concerning apologies—was a cut above the rest. It’s quite disconnected from the rest of the book, and while I still found the writing style a bit painful, I think this chapter could be published and well-received as a separate essay.
This 2018 gender-swapped reworking of Pretty Woman is not my usual sort of novel, but I wanted something light and easy after a run of slightly dull books that I’d struggled through.
This fits that bill. While it was never going to be a book I’d love, I appreciated its straightforward plot and implausible but easy-to-follow dialogue. The characters were lightly sketched, as was appropriate for the plot. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but repeatedly misread the main character’s name, Stella Lane, as Stena Line, which often made me laugh.
This novel has spawned a couple of sequels: this didn’t have enough of an effect on me to consider picking them up, but that’s no real criticism given that I knew it wasn’t my usual kind of novel when I bought it.
Published in 2020, this Is Sam Lansky’s semi-autobiographical novel about coming to terms with our own past. The plot concerns a character—also called Sam—working with a shaman who offers ‘open-soul surgery’ which fixes ‘everything that it is wrong with you’ in three days.
I thought this was an interesting concept, but the book didn’t quite live up to it. I suppose I was hoping, in the end, for a discussion on how the process didn’t work, and how life and our own interaction with our past is altogether more complex than the conceit suggests. Unfortunately, Lansky delivers the opposite.
The ‘surgery’ consists of drug-fuelled trips into angsty memories, with superficial (and really quite dull) reflections on how they have shaped the present character, somehow leading to a positive and hopeful outcome. I didn’t find myself drawn into the process or the plot more broadly.
This recently published non-fiction book looks at the future of humanity’s relationship with computers generally and artificial intelligence specifically. Winterson draws lessons from the past, in particular from the industrial revolution, and sketches out how our future might look.
I learned a lot from this book and found Winterson’s absorbing. Her arguments about how the future might look are compelling. As with any great writing, Winterson brushes by fascinating tangential ideas which cause a lot of thought and reflection. Two of these ideas stood out for me in particular.
The first was Winterson’s discussion of effective immortality, or the idea that we could upload our consciousness to a device and continue to think forever. The thought horrifies me: the idea of living forever, of going on and on and on without any sense of progress or completion, totally repulses me. I hadn’t realised how strongly I felt about this until I read this book. And Winterson gently challenges that response, pointing out that it is essentially selfish, denying humanity the benefit of infinite life experience (and perhaps wisdom). A lot to chew on and unpack there!
The second was Winterson’s impassioned plea for science to involve writers. Precision, and perhaps even beauty, is essential in scientific communication, and is a dying art. This chimes with my own ideas about the field of medicine, where clinical guidelines are increasingly poorly and imprecisely expressed, often leading to competing interpretations. This ought to be a key lesson of the pandemic, but I strongly suspect it won’t be learned.
(An aside: I was once involved in writing some national guidance, and suggested a simplified reworking of over-complex advice. Others on the committee felt like it read too much like common sense. I asked what was wrong with guidelines that reiterate common sense if that’s what the evidence supported. I was told quite plainly by the Chair that “common sense” wasn’t the sort of thing this particular national body produced; which raised far more questions than it answered, at least in my mind.)
Additionally, publications in the medical literature are ever-more narrowly targeted as sub-sub-specialities talk to themselves in their own coded language. This has, perhaps, been more broadly recognised, but the response is typically an inelegant press release for public consumption, rather than much-improved writing in the first place.
I think you can probably tell that I thought this book was brilliant, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I put it down.
This 1977 semi-autobiographical novel is chock-full of dark humour. In the post-war period, a teenage girl is sent to convalesce after an illness with her great-grandmother, who she barely knows. Great Granny Webster turns out to be an ice-cold matriarch, seemingly to the point of caricature, at least when seen from the teenager’s viewpoint.
Yet, as the novella progresses, it becomes clear that the titular character is just one among many remarkable and off-beat women in the family, and we begin to understand a little of their background. It may be a “youngest child” thing to find this reminiscent of family conversations about unknown and unplaceable distant relatives—but that’s how it felt to me.
I found this funny, macabre, and strangely moving—it feels like there is a lot in its 108 pages.
I used to avidly read Lucy Kellaway’s Financial Times column, and even listened to the podcast version after that launched. When she announced in 2016 that she was leaving to become a secondary school teacher, I was surprised and intrigued.
Re-educated is a recently published memoir of this period of Kellaway’s life, in which she also left her husband, moved into an architecturally notable house, and stopped dyeing her hair. As with Kellaway’s columns, she injects wry humour throughout, while also writing with emotion and honesty.
I enjoyed this, but it’s a little difficult to disaggregate my feelings about this book from the fact that I already liked Kellaway and her writing.
Winner of an English PEN Award, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, I read the 2020 translation by Adrian Nathan West of this book—novel?—by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut.
The book consists of five stories about major scientific discoveries and the many unexpected negative consequences that flowed from them. The first of the five stories is almost entirely factual, and the amount of fiction in each account gradually increases. It is a book about the boundaries of science and thought, and the personal and worldly consequences of pushing them.
People much better-read and more intelligent than I have found much to love about this book. I found its premise intriguing, but the book itself really quite dull. It had some nice imagery, including a great passage about the life cycle of citrus trees (which I don’t know whether was fact or fiction), but I found much of the prose really quite wooden. I was also surprised by how much the integration of fact and fiction annoyed me: I wanted to know which bits were true, and found this a bit of a barrier to immersion in the story.
I think this is perhaps a book that would reward close study far more than my disappointing casual reading of it.
This is a novel which was published in 2018. I picked it up after reading some press coverage of the release of the sequel: it was explained that Pearce had been inspired to write the novel after gaining insight into the lives of women who lived through the Second World War through her study of women’s magazines of the period.
The protagonist, Emmy Lake, is an aspiring journalist in her early 20s who gets a job typing the ‘agony aunt’ page of such a magazine. Unfortunately, she’s also intensely irritating, though the author seems to see her as sympathetic. Interfering, overbearing and terribly earnest, Emmy is a character I simply couldn’t warm to, which rather spoiled the book.
The writing style also grated, with Unnecessary Capitalisation of Random Words, and a frightfully annoying use of adverbs that came to feel like a parody of BBC radio announcements of the period.
The plot was astonishingly predictable and most of the characters barely have two-dimensions, let alone three.
This 2016 debut novel is appropriately titled: the protagonist, Maya, is a married New York bookseller writing an MA thesis, while also having an affair with her former college professor, living with an addiction to heroin, and making questionable life choices in pursuit of money to fund her habit.
This book is gritty and explicit, with some bits which are stomach-churningly disgusting. It is also full of dark humour, which occasionally made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is especially sharp.
Sharma’s writing made this book feel true. Her close observation and vivid description feel real. I was particularly taken with the description of the protagonist’s shifting perceptions of.a psychiatric hospital.
The overall effect—despite the dark subject matter—was strangely uplifting, though it was certainly not a ‘light’ read.
Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novella in which the titular character falls in love with a giant man/frog/monster called Larry has recently been reissued with a lovely Faber Editions cover. It is a book with an engaging surface plot, which very funny in places, but whose subtext deals with a whole range of sociocultural issues.
There is a load of gender politics in here, which I expected from a sort of background cultural awareness of the book. Ingalls also has interesting observations to make about psychiatric illness, both for Mrs Caliban and for Larry. The latter aspect resonates with a lot of the themes explored in Frankenstein.
The writing is also sublime. At a little over a hundred pages, this could be comfortably read in a single sitting, and it is well worth that short time investment.
I confess that I went into this much-recommended recently published book with some trepidation and quite a lot of cynicism. Everything about it screamed “self-help” including the cringeworthy subtitle (“Embrace your limits. Change your life.”)
Nevertheless, Burkeman won me over. This isn’t really self-help, this is engaging philosophy which happens to be relevant to the moment. Burkeman argues that life is short and our time ought to be lived, not seen as a resource to be ‘used’. We should recognise and make peace with the fact that there will never be time to do everything that we want to do, nor everything that is demanded of us. Being more productive will not substantially alter that fundamental fact, but the effort might distract us from living.
I really enjoyed this, and will search out Burkeman’s other books.
This 2020 biography was a Christmas present last year, and I’ve been reading it in chunks through the year. It is an exceptionally detailed account of JFK’s life, up to the point where he decided to run for President.
Unfortunately, this is one of those astoundingly well-researched biographies that contains so much detail that it feels like it loses its thread. It is only 654 pages long, but feels much longer, and it felt a little like the sense of the subject’s character got lost among the weeds.
At one point, Kennedy is invited to a house to watch some film footage he is to narrate. Logevall insists on telling us that this was a “twenty-room beachfront home” which was “built in 1936 for film industry titan Louis B. Mayer”—details that add precisely nothing to a visit that lasts one sentence, beyond exhibiting the research.
I’m uncertain whether I’ll read the second volume.
First published in Italian in 2014, I read Allen Lane’s 2015 translation. The book consists of six numbered brief lessons on aspects of physics, followed by a somewhat philosophical closing section called ‘Ourselves’, which serves as the seventh lesson.
Somewhere into the third lesson, I came to the shuddering realisation that I simply wasn’t all that interested in physics. Rovelli writes with lyrical clarity about complex subjects. I used to very much enjoy reading popular science, yet I found myself struggling to be astounded that general relativity and quantum mechanics sometimes disagree. Nor was I moved to really care whether black holes are hot or cold. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.
The final section was a little more absorbing, partly because it involved Rovelli introducing his physicist’s perspective to wider questions such as the future of our species, which, I think, is what I enjoyed about There Are Places…
Essentially, overall, this was beautiful writing about a complex subject that doesn’t really interest me. There is enjoyment and value in that, but perhaps less than I was expecting to find.
This 2021 bestseller was a bad purchasing decision on my part, and one driven by online shopping during lockdown. I enjoyed Haig’s previous books, Notes on a Nervous Planet and Reasons to Stay Alive, though as I noted at the time, I preferred his personal reflections on his experiences rather than the aphorisms and superficial psychology.
I think others may have had exactly the opposite opinion, as The Comfort Book is essentially a compendium of short ‘inspiring’ texts, some extending to only a few words, others to a couple of pages. None of this is up my street, and had I flicked through the book in a physical shop before I bought it, then I would have known that.
I’m confident this will book will bring a lot of comfort to many people, but it wasn’t my sort of thing.
This has felt like a month where I haven’t read much, but the above photo suggests otherwise. I think it is just that this has been a very long month: it seems like a very long time since I read some of these!
This 1950 biography was first recommended to me in a conversation seven years ago, and has cropped up with some regularity since. The recommendation has always been accompanied by the comment that this book is hard to get hold of as it is out of print. Copies do now seem to be available on Amazon, but I read a copy from The London Library.
It is astonishingly good.
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the subject of this biography was clearly remarkable. I hadn’t previously appreciated the full breadth of Nightingale’s achievements or the strength of her character, and I was blown away.
Secondly, this is brilliantly written. The prose is exact, the subject matter is well-organised and clearly explained, and the depth of the underlying research almost drips off the page. It feels like it could have been published today, and yet is a little over seventy years old. This is one of those biographies that gives real insight into the character of the subject, and draws out clear lessons from their life: it is so much more than a list of facts. I can scarcely believe that this was Woodham-Smith’s first history book: hers was clearly a remarkable talent.
Perhaps those who know a little more about Nightingale’s life would take less from this than I did, but this is one of my favourite books of the year.
I’ve raved about Will Storr for a long time: his talent as a writer and a journalist is truly remarkable, and he deserves every accolade. His byline on one of his signature long-form newspaper or magazine articles guarantees a fascinating read and new insights, even if the subject at hand isn’t something that appears immediately interesting.
It’s therefore no surprise at all that I loved this recently published book of his about social status and how it drives human psychology. His argument is that the acquisition of social status drives everything we do, without our realisation, and even when we believe we are acting altruistically. We all want to be heroes.
As in all of his writing, Storr takes a broad view of his topic. His discussion encompasses serial killers, social media ‘celebrities’, the history of religion, and (slightly less convincingly) the rise of the Nazis. He writes very interestingly on psychology, and how each person’s perception of the world differs markedly. Storr’s storytelling style holds the text together, with an appreciable dash of wry humour.
Storr’s insights always live long in my memory, perhaps because I enjoy his writing so much, and perhaps because of his memorable storytelling style.
While I loved this book, I’m not sure whether it’s the first I’d recommend to people new to Storr’s writing as his central thesis (while convincing to me) might prove a bit of a barrier: I’d perhaps suggest that Selfie is the best starting point (or his reams of journalism).
This recently published autobiography by the former President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom was absorbing and inspiring.
This is Lady Hale’s account of her professional life, from her time at school and through her legal career. Her passion for her subject shines through on every page: there are not many people who could be so excited by an exam question as for it to feature in their autobiography, but it happens in here. Her enthusiasm is infectious. It is clear, too, especially from Hale’s accounts of complex family law cases, how much she is interested in the effects of the law on “real people’s lives”.
Beyond her childhood, Hale touches only very lightly on her personal life, though I was moved by the deeply personal “afterthoughts”.
Mostly, though, I found this book inspiring. Hale’s dedication to her profession, and her strength and stamina—even in the face of endless sexism—are remarkable.
This 2004 short novel was another recommendation from my friend Julie, who previously recommended Flagg’s Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! which I enjoyed earlier this year.
This is an inconsequential but heartwarming story about a dying man moving from a city to a small rural town in the southern United States. It’s a book that all about generating warm feelings with a gentle pace, straightforward plot and a cast of entirely good-natured characters (one of whom is a redbird).
This isn’t a book with any great life lessons or new insights into character; rather, it’s a lovely, heartwarming yarn which I found to be a very relaxing read.
This is the American humourist’s first volume of diary extracts, published in 2017 and covering 1977 to 2002. If you are familiar with Sedaris’s work, you’ll know what to expect: wry but insightful observations on growing up in the USA, plus life in Paris and the UK.
As you might expect, I found Sedaris’s earlier writing (before he began writing professionally) less engaging than his later work, but I enjoyed this nevertheless.
Published this month, this is Iannucci’s parody of an epic poem telling the story of the UK Government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. It is brief, and yet by turns silly, quotable, depressing and very funny. Andy Riley’s illustrations are quite brilliant, fitting the tone and content of the book while also adding their own dimension.
However, I think the fact that every day at work Is still dominated by the pandemic means that I don’t have the psychological distance from recent events to enjoy this to the full.
This recent publication is one of six novels by Korelitz, and the only one I’ve read. The novel follows Jacob ‘Finch’ Bonner, a down-on-his-luck author who we first meet as a teacher on a writing programme.
An irritatingly over-confident student of Bonner’s has a plot for a book which he considers to be guaranteed massive literary success. The student outlines the plot to Bonner, and then dies before finishing his work, only a few pages of which Bonner has seen. Bonner then appropriates the student’s plot without attribution, has an incredible hit, and begins receiving threatening messages from someone who knows his ‘terrible secret’. This is standard thriller territory.
I picked this up because of reading endless rave reviews. I was familiar with the outline of the plot, and thought it would be fun to read a book which, through its own premise, would have to cleverly work its way around revealing the plot of the book concerned. After all, it wouldn’t be possible to write a convincing novel about a spectacular, world-altering book and also reveal the contents of that book. I assumed it would need to be tightly constructed, probably with a dose of humour, to build tension around something that could never be convincingly revealed.
It turns out that the book isn’t nearly that clever. The character’s plot is explored at length, and we even get extracts from the character’s book. The plot of the character’s book is also pretty standard thriller fare, which means that it doesn’t really support the superstructure the novel builds around it.
Korelitz also introduces some discussion about the morality of retelling stories, comparing this with cultural appropriation in a way which seems to misunderstand the long tradition of the former and the ethical challenge of the latter.
This was a good holiday thriller, but wasn’t nearly the complex, layered, literary novel the reviews (and perhaps my preconceptions) had led me to expect.
This is a recently published history of UK politics in the years 2000 to (roughly) 2015, told mostly from the perspective of the newspaper coverage of the time. Turner tries to place the politics in a context though plentiful references to popular media.
I was surprised that I found this a bit of a slog. For example, Turner devotes many more pages to Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown than to the 2005 London bombings, which is a curious approach. For all the strange choices, Turner never reaches broader conclusions nor draws out the hidden themes behind the history of the times. As a result, this ended up feeling like an eclectic collection of stories with little unifying thread, and I was left wondering what point (if any) Turner was trying to make.
I read this famous 1951 fictional memoir in the 1954 translation by Grace Frick, in a London Library volume which has been borrowed more than two dozen times before I was born. It takes the form of a letter written by Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, reflecting on his life.
This book has been recommended to me several times, is well-loved by friends, and highly rated on Goodreads. It’s therefore a bit awkward to admit that I didn’t really enjoy it.
There is much to like: I took numerous quotations from the book and enjoyed its reflective and somewhat melancholy tone, especially towards the end. However, for reasons I can quite put my finger on, I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief and become absorbed in this book. I kept questioning what was fact and what was fiction, and whether Hadrian really would have seen things in the way Yourcenar suggests. This is partly because my knowledge of Roman history is weak.
The overall effect was that I felt like I read this at a remove, rather than becoming emotionally involved. The result of that was that it felt more like studying a text than becoming immersed in a novel. While that’s not an experience I’m totally averse to, it isn’t what I expected or hoped for from this book.
I often think that we only connect with books if they find us in the right mood. Perhaps I just read it at the wrong time.
The first word that comes to mind to describe Elif Shafak’s recently published novel is ‘magical’. At its heart is a love story in between a Greek Christian (Kostas) and a Turkish Muslim (Defne) on Cyprus in the 1970s, just as the violent coup divided the island along those very lines. But this isn’t only a love story: it’s a story of how history echos for future generations, with the novel moving backwards and forward in time between 1970s Cyprus and 2010s London.
In the 2010s, Kostas and Defne’s teenage daughter Ada is mourning her mother’s recent death and having a difficult time of doing so, partly because of the influence of social media. Ada’s parents have fiercely protected Ada from their traumatic past in Cyprus and brought her up to consider herself to be British. The arrival of Ada’s Cypriot maternal aunt pierces that barrier (and also brings with her a whole load of charming Cypriot aphorisms).
Complex human emotions are obviously in abundance. Shafak’s masterstroke is to make one of the main narrators a fig tree: and what a fig tree! The tree itself was displaced from Cyprus to London along with the family. She (and yes, it is a she) brings her own altered perception of the passage of time, and a warm appreciation for the complex emotional relationships between the characters, and between the characters and their countries.
And the ending was breathtaking.
I’ve only read one other novel by Shafak: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was one of my favourite books of 2020. The Island of Missing Trees is entirely different, yet certainly one of my favourite books of 2021. I can’t wait to make my way through her back catalogue.
Just out in hardback, this is John Boyne’s new comedic novel, which skewers society’s obsession with social media. The epigraph is from Umberto Eco, and summaries the thesis succinctly:
Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.
The main characters make up the Cleverley family, all five members of whom are irredeemably awful people. George, the patriarch, is the host of a BBC TV chat show which has been running for decades. Beverley, his wife, is nominally a writer of romance novels, though makes extensive use of ghostwriters. Alike with their three young adult children, the two hold themselves in unfathomably high esteem. Each member of the family makes use of social media for self-promotional purposes.
As with Boyne’s last novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, the plot is fairly ridiculous. The previous novel used a mad plot as an opportunity to string together a series of moments of high emotional drama. This novel uses one to string together a series of laugh-out-loud set pieces into one long downward spiral of farcical consequences. This is a very funny book, with lots of satirical contemporary references. (And, to note, Maude Avery—one of my favourite literary characters after her introduction in the previous novel—is referenced several times in this one.)
While this is a skewering of social media, it’s hard not to notice that social media delivers justice in the book, albeit by perverted misguided means. Through that authorial decision, Boyne leaves some interesting questions to ponder, rather than just writing off the whole medium.
This recently published polemic against England’s private boarding schools for boys had me riveted from start to finish. This book is a reckoning with the emotional and character damage inflicted on Beard by being sent off to boarding school at the age of eight. It is also a condemnation of the impact of these schools on the country at large, given the astonishing proportion of senior figures in public life who share this background. This includes twenty-eight of the last thirty-two Prime Ministers (an astonishing statistic, even if the school lives of people born in the early 1800s ought to have little relevance to a twenty-first century argument).
This isn’t a balanced book: it is passionate, angry, withering, and all the more readable for it. That said, it is written with enough subtlety to allow us to feel sympathy for the immediate ‘victims’ as children. This is no mean feat given the illustration of the devastating, sometimes deadly, consequences for the rest of us as their adult sense of confidence and entitlement outstrips their competence.
While not discussed in the book at any length, this made me view from a new perspective the frequent political talk about ‘British values’—a soundbite often used but rarely defined. I’ve often thought that it’s essentially a dog whistle for racism. However, Beard’s book made me reflect that it perhaps has a whole other layer, recalling the perverted ‘values’ of class preservation and emotional repression that seem associated with these institutions.
This recently published semi-autobiographical first novel by Jarred McGinnis opens with the main character in his mid-20s waking up in hospital following a car accident. He learns that his passenger has been killed and that he has suffered spinal cord damage which has rendered his legs paralysed. From there, McGinnis follows the story forward, to find out how Jarred learns to live with his disability. In alternating chapters, we also follow Jarred’s childhood in a violent home, and his reaction to his mother’s death early in his life.
What emerges is a portrait of a complex man, flawed in myriad ways and—maybe like us all—affected in profound ways by both his upbringing and life events. In particular, Jarred’s changing relationship with his father is explored: having run away from his alcoholic father and having not spoken for several years, his accident means that he ends up living back in his childhood home with his father caring for him again.
This is a book of complex and ever-changing relationships, filled with characters which feel real and multi-faceted. Somehow, despite the darkness, the book feels somehow up-lifting. It is also hilarious, filled with dry wit and very dark humour.
This was off-beat, moving, tender and laugh-out-loud funny.
I read Edgar Garbelotto’s 2008 translation of this short and very strange 2004 novel about a Brazilian writer who comes to the UK at the invitation of a Londoner. The protagonist is confused from the start, and descends into further confusion as the novel progresses. It’s always dangerous to diagnose a fictional character, but this seems to be a portrait of some sort of dementia.
In essence, this is a very readable study of what it is like to lose your sense of person, place and time—involving a surprising and perhaps disturbing number of casual sexual encounters. There are several points where it is unclear whether the narrated events are simply confections of the protagonist’s confused mind, or whether they have some basis in the novel’s reality.
This is precisely the right length, in that it can easily be consumed in a single sitting and doesn’t drag to the point that the confusion just begets reader frustration. Instead, the novel is rather reflective and thought-provoking.
I read Tanya Leslie’s 1993 translation of Ernaux’s 1991 autobiographical essay about the passion she felt during her affair with a married man. I picked this up after seeing Eric’s Lonesome Reader review.
Choosing to try to translate the overwhelming intensity of feeling into a short book is an interesting enterprise. The autobiographical nature of the work also means that there is a superimposed layer of societal judgement on Ernaux’s essay, which she tries to disregard but perhaps concentrates on more as a result of the attempt.
I particularly liked Ernaux’s honesty in exploring the darker aspects of her passion: even very intense positive feelings have their immediate downsides, as does the longing between encounters. All-consuming feelings consume the positives as well as negatives.
I read this 2004 novel in its 2008 English translation by John Brownjohn. I had picked this book up having seen several reviews which compared it to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favourite novels.
Sulzer’s novel is mostly set in 1930s Switzerland, where Erneste works as a waiter in a grand hotel. He has a passionate affair with a younger waiter, Jakob, and their perceptions vary as to the significance of the relationship. The novel is narrated from the perspective of Ernest as an older man, looking back on his time with Jakob after the latter has re-established contact after many years.
To me, this book shared few similarities with the Ishiguro novel. The main theme of Ishiguro’s novel is of regret at a life spent in service of the wrong ideals. The main theme of Sulzer’s novel is the limits of the extent to which we can ever know the lives and minds of other people. In theme and emotion, the two are fundamentally different, and I’m not sure the comparison is fair or helpful.
The writing was also less good: Ishiguro’s novel was evocative of its setting and time, whereas I didn’t find Sulzer’s transporting, more because the prose seemed humdrum than because the setting was unremarkable. Ishiguro’s novel clouds deep attachment in the language of restrained period ’Englishness’ whereas Sulzer’s novel reads as just a little oddly detached from his central characters.
This was just a bit disappointing, but perhaps the comparison meant that it was always destined to be.
As COVID-19 has consumed almost all of my working life for the past nineteen months, I’ve been somewhat loath to read even more about it in my spare time. Yet, I found this recently published book by two investigative journalists from The Sunday Times extraordinary, gripping and devastating—and the experience of reading it, mildly reassuring.
The book starts with fifty pages on the history of coronavirus outbreaks around the world, and the likely sources of COVID-19. It then launches into 350 pages covering the response of (mostly) the UK Government to the pandemic up to the end of 2020. People often characterise NewsUK journalists as being supportive of Conservative governments, yet this book, which sticks to a mostly straightforward timeline of events, could not be more damaging to the Government’s claim to have handled the pandemic well.
Perhaps most damning of all is the section at the end where the authors explain that the Government’s response to their criticisms was to deny any errors in their handling of the crisis. It was this book’s elucidation of clear errors and lessons for the future that I found oddly reassuring: reflection, learning and continuous improvement is a cornerstone of any medical practice, and a routine part of health protection. Acknowledgement of errors felt like a return to normality—even where those errors have been on an unrecognisable scale.
Calvert and Arbuthnott include harrowing individual patient stories from the pandemic, which are tough to read. It’s also hard—as they themselves acknowledge—to be certain of how representative of the wider response each of these stories can be. Yet, their inclusion feels important to contextualise decisions and illustrate their human impact.
No work of journalism will ever be perfect, or fully reflect the truth of any situation: the blameless can be blamed, decisions made with the best available information at the time can look foolhardy in hindsight, and the real villains can go without mention. Perhaps Arbuthnott and Calvert are entirely wrong on key facts, or on where decisions were made, or on where they place the blame. But, right or wrong, this book feels like the first draft of the history of the UK Government’s response to the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sophie Harrison was an editor at Granta magazine before she decided to retrain as a doctor. She started medical school in 2003—the same year as me—and this memoir of her time at medical school through to her early career as a GP has just been published. I picked this up as I was aware of Harrison’s background and thought it was likely that she would write elegantly about her career, which, I thought, would be quite fun to read. I’ve somehow never really clocked her pieces in the LRB or the Financial Times Weekend, despite regularly reading both.
I thought this book was wonderful: warm and witty, exactly the tone I would like to strike if I had enough talent to write about my own medical training. The fact that Harrison is a contemporary of mine meant that her story brought back many memories from my own training, more-so than the many medical biographies from different eras. Harrison’s background also gives her a literary appreciation for medicine, and there are many references to medicine in literature contrasted with her experiences.
I enjoyed this enormously, more even than I expected. The combination of great writing and the memories it resurfaced as I read made this a real pleasure.
This recently published debut novel by Andrew Palmer has not received brilliant reviews, yet I very much enjoyed it.
This literary novel is set in the contemporary USA. Its protagonist is a man in his late 20s who has recent split from his “almost-fiancée” and returned to his home town, housesitting for a friend of his mother. The main plot of the book concerns the protagonist’s love life.
Alongside the main plot, the protagonist becomes caught up in watching the reality television series The Bachelor, and also in researching the life of the noted American poet John Berryman. Through these, the book becomes an exploration of the degree to which our perception of the world is real, and—separately—how much of it we believe. For example: is a well-researched biography any more or less ‘true’ than reality TV? And what is it about some aspects of art which allow us to suspend our disbelief and to be constantly questioning others? And why is it that those decisions are rarely rational: we can often end up questioning things we know to be meticulously researched and balanced more than those things which we consciously know to be manipulated.
I have never watched an episode of The Bachelor, though I’m sort of culturally aware of it, and I’m not familiar with the life and work of John Berryman. I can, however, completely relate to getting drawn into reality TV and to becoming deeply interested in a person’s biography. I think that this was perhaps helpful in that I appreciated the context but didn’t get too caught up in the specifics, and allowed me to enjoy the wider points.
Palmer integrates much broader examples into his discussion, including a very interesting bit on the truth of classical music, and the degree to which the composer’s score and the players’ interpretation are in opposition as the ‘reality’ of the music. Having said that, the metaphors do feel occasionally forced, such as the time the protagonist spends living in a house with (literal) glass walls.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed this. It was both gentle in tone and plot, but also clever in the ideas it explored and occasional profound in its expression of those ideas. But I appreciate that this isn’t how many others who have read it feel: perhaps it just happened to be right up my street.
This brief 2020 book by Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles argues that outrage on social media is often blown out of proportion, achieves little, and takes attention away from worthier causes and more constructive expressions of disapproval. Charles interviews a couple of people to explore these ideas further: Rachel Dolezal, the campaigner who identifies as black despite being born to white parents, and Katie Hopkins, the controversialist British media personality.
And… that’s it. Perhaps partly because the argument Charles is making seems pretty self-evident to me, I didn’t feel this book added much to the conversation. I enjoyed reading it: in particular, I liked the sense of wit running through it and the juxtaposition of personal anecdote and wider observation. However, I didn’t really feel that I learned much from it, and nor did it really give me any new perspective on the harms associated with social media.
One day, I’m pretty sure we’ll look back on the use of social media by healthcare organisations in the face of accumulating evidence of harm with much the same horror as we today look back on doctors’ promotion of cigarettes—but that’s an argument for another day.
This recently published novel by Rachel Cusk appeared on the Booker long-list, so clearly has a lot going for it, but I’m afraid it didn’t really do much for me.
Second Place is a ruminative observational novel. After a strange introduction in which the protagonist is chased around Paris by the devil, the main plot point is the protagonist inviting a renowned artist to come and stay in her guest cottage. This is a study of character and the interrelationships of characters, with a particular focus on gender-related power dynamics. Yet, we only get to know about the characters through first-person, unreliable narration from the protagonist. This makes it slightly difficult to work out what is really going on or what anyone’s motivation is.
In the end, this proved to be a little too high concept for me, and not very engaging. I think this book would probably reward a close read with study and reflection, but didn’t work for me as a casually read novel.
David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College is something of a cultural touchstone of my generation, with references turning up frequently and in the oddest of places. Despite this, I’d never actually engaged with it. This problem would have been easy to resolve: a quick internet search brings up the complete text, and an audio recording of the speech is freely available (including in many presentations on YouTube).
But that’s not really my style: no, I chose to engage with this when the 2009 Little, Brown & Company edition was recommended when I was buying some books. It was printed in the US, and according to the dust cover, priced at $15, which makes the price I paid a substantial discount.
The content of the address is fine. The basic universal message is to think compassionately of others, but (as you’d expect from a great writer) it is written in a style which defies convention. I can see why it has stuck in people’s minds and become part of the common canon of my generation.
But the specific hardback book is awful. Presumably because the text is short, and the publisher wants to charge a premium, they’ve chosen to bulk out the length by presenting every sentence on a separate page. There are many examples of talented writers playing with form, but this isn’t one of them. This is a speech, where each line builds on the last to create a coherent whole, and someone has made the decision to butcher it into individual sentences. Some pages have two words on them.
I’m irrationally angry about this because it ruins the meter of the speech, it destroys the sense of an argument gradually building, and—frankly—because it is almost the worst possible way I can think of to convert this speech into a book. Not since I read No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, a book in which the publisher has chosen to collect speeches which have large parts repeated from speech-to-speech, have I felt so annoyed by a production decision.
So do read the text: it’s just shy of 4,000 words, it won’t take you long, and it’s worth it (even if it isn’t totally mind-blowing). But don’t buy this book: read one of the many versions online, or listen to the audio on YouTube.
This 2002 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer prize—and in my view, entirely deserved it. I thought this was brilliant.
The plot is focused on Calliope Stephanides, an intersex man who—despite a XY chromosomal pattern—has a genetic disorder which causes him to be born with feminine genitalia, and to be raised as a girl. The condition reveals itself as Calliope reaches puberty.
But this isn’t just a novel about an intersex man, or even just about gender identity: most of the previous paragraph makes up only the final third of the novel. The rest explores Calliope’s family history, commenting on the immigrant experience for his grandparents moving from Greece to Detroit, and telling a compelling set of stories of consanguinity. The narrator is also witty, and this book made me laugh.
I thought this was brilliant, both in terms of its telling of the broad canvas story of immigration and social change, and of the specific plot and the gender issues caught up in it. It is a real page-turner of a story, as well as having a lot to say.
❧ I alternated between an ebook from Scribd’s library and a hardback from The London Library. I then ended up buying the pictured paperback because I enjoyed this so much.
This is the 2021 translation by Howard Curtis of the 2017 best-selling Italian novel by Gianrico Carofiglio. In terms of describing the plot, can do no better than quoting Curtis’s note at the back of the book:
This is basically a novel about communication, a story of a father and son who, through extraordinary circumstances, are forced to spend time together and, in doing so, to discover truths about each other they might not otherwise have learned. They do this mainly by talking, really talking to each other, for the first time in their lives. Over the course of two sleepless days and nights in Marseilles, the characters discover the power of words to reveal the truth of the human soul.
This was right up my street, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s the first Carofiglio novel I have read, and I very much enjoyed the precise style of writing, particularly for a book which is about such imprecise and shifting qualities in human relationships.
The son in the book is, for the most part, in his late teens, so this is also something of a coming-of-age novel. The ‘extraordinary circumstances’ which force father and son together are related to a diagnosis of a particular kind of childhood epilepsy, so there’s an interesting parallel between ‘growing up’ in an emotional sense and growing out of childhood conditions.
There was loads to think about in such a short book, and I think it would reward re-reading too.
❧ I bought a hardback and read most of this from there, but did dip into an ebook version from Scribd’s library now and again.
Fannie Flagg’s 1998 novel about the life and complicated past of an up-and-coming female newsreader in the 1970s is not the sort of thing I’d usually pick up for myself, but it was recommended ages ago by my friend Julie.
While it felt a bit melodramatic, there were some interesting underlying social history themes (it’s hard to be more specific without revealing too much of the plot!) and the writing style and tone were light and fun: perfect for a holiday read. There’s even a dash of romance.
This was a great recommendation: something is never have come across myself, and which I really enjoyed.
Translated by Sue Dyson in 2008, this is French author Jean Teulé’s popular 2007 fable about a cartoonish family (not unlike the Addams family) who run a shop selling suicide methods in a future where climate change has ravaged the world.
In 169 pages, Teulé combines black humour with a moral message which feels highly relevant to our times. It made me laugh out loud a couple of times, and I enjoyed it, but in retrospect I’m not sure if it may have been just a little bit too twee despite the darkness… but perhaps that’s how fables are supposed to make us feel.
❧ I read most of this in ebook form from Scribd’s library, but switched to a paperback sometimes which I bought a while ago.
I’ve never been to the original Disneyland in California, and haven’t really got any strong interest in it, though I have been to the Florida and Paris versions at various points in my life. I passed Anaheim on a train a few years ago, and wasn’t drawn to take the opportunity to pop out for a gander. I couldn’t reliably tell the ‘Matterhorn’ from ‘Big Thunder Mountain’. Yet, I enjoyed this 2019 history of Walt Disney’s personal involvement in the design and building of Disneyland.
This book reminded me in a sense of The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon, another book I unexpectedly enjoyed, in that interest in the primary subject matter doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for gaining insight from the text and getting caught up in the ‘plot’. I suppose, to some degree, that is the mark of a successful non-fiction book. This is as much a sociocultural history as it is a book about a theme park, and it was filled with anecdote and wit, and Snow’s enthusiasm for his topic shines through.
This is a book I’d never have picked up except on recommendation, and yet I enjoyed it from start to finish. I’m not sure I’ll remember many of the details twelve months from now, but it was very diverting while I read it.
❧ I bought a hardback and alternated between it and an ebook version from Scribd’s library.
I picked this up because my friend Rachael recommended it. It is a recently published first novel by Bella Mackie, in which the protagonist, Grace, decides to murder all of the living members of her estranged family in order to secure an inheritance.
I enjoyed this to a point: Grace was a fun character sketched with dark humour rooted in contemporary culture. But to me, she was a bit too fun, and not really dark and calculating enough to convince me that she was capable of multiple brutal murders. It felt like the character lacked an edge.
This was problematic, as there isn’t much carrying this book other than Grace’s character. The plot is essentially little more than a short story collection of vaguely related murders, with a disappointing cop out of an ending which does little to round off the story or round out Grace’s character.
So, in the end, this was a fun read… but really not much more than ‘okay’ overall.
❧ I bought a hardback and read most of this from there, but did dip into an ebook version from Scribd’s library now and again.
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