Summer by Ali Smith

This was the recently published brilliant finale to Smith’s astonishing seasonal quartet.

If one was setting out to publish a novel a year reflecting the times in which we live, one could hardly have picked a better four years to work with than the last four. Smith’s ability to capture and reflect on the age of Brexit, coronavirus and George Floyd with such a publication schedule, while the rest of us are struggling just to keep up with events, is pure genius. This volume revisits some of the characters from the earlier novels, and I slightly worried that I’d struggle to recall them, given the time that has passed since I read the first of the novels – but they all came flooding back.

I feel a bit lost knowing that this series is now complete – it has been the series that I’ve most enjoyed and most anticipated in recent years. I’ll miss it.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak

This was the 2019 bestseller which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I picked it up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop and vaguely thought I’d heard good things about it. It turned out to be an extraordinary book.

The book comprised three parts. Part One followed Tequila Leila’s lifetime of reminisces over the first few minutes following her death, covering everything from her own birth into a polygamous family to her murder as a sex worker. Each memory focused on a specific friend whose life was also explored. Part Two followed these closes friends in the day following Leila’s murder. And the brief Part Three followed her soul into the afterlife.

I found this emotionally exhausting. The characterisation and storytelling were so strong that I sometimes forgot this was fiction. Despite the tragedy and emotional weight of the story, it was leavened with moments of humour. It felt to me like this book was as much about Istanbul as it was about the human characters.

Definitely a book I’d recommend.

Ramble Book by Adam Buxton

This was Adam Buxton’s recently published autobiography. I first came across Adam with his friend Joe Cornish in their Adam and Joe Show days, when I was in my early teens, and have followed them ever since. Adam now hosts a successful podcast in which he hosts essentially long form interviews with a huge variety of cultural figures, but which also gives insight into his life in rural Norfolk.

This book’s central thread was the relationship between Adam and his travel-writer father, although he also talked at length about his school days, his career, and his love for David Bowie. I found the section on his father’s last illness particularly moving. I read this shortly after listening to Buxton’s recent podcast recorded the day after his mother’s funeral, in which and Joe reflected movingly and at length on the challenges of parent-child relationships in later life.

I was pre-disposed to like this book because I like Adam. It’s one of those books which I’m not sure would appeal to people who aren’t already familiar with him and his career, but I really enjoyed it.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The 2009 blockbuster Booker winner – a book on which my opinion really couldn’t matter less!

I don’t usually read historical fiction, but this was recommended to me so often that I thought I had to give it a go. It was my redoubtable friend Julie who tipped me over into reading it, by telling me it wasn’t really a historical novel.

I have mixed feelings. I found the plot confusing and often lost the thread (not helped by my complete historical ignorance). On the other hand, the writing was brilliant, filled with witty turns of phrase and clever language. I wouldn’t hesitate to read more of the trilogy, and would consider re-reading this volume at some point—I suspect it would all make a bit more sense second time around, and I’d enjoy revisiting the wonderful prose.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

If you regularly follow what I’m reading on this blog, you’ll know I’m having a bit of David Sedaris moment, enjoying his light and humorous approach to life during a time when life feels rather heavier than it might. This was another collection of his essays, most of which were originally published elsewhere, and most of which are very funny.

This 2004 volume, even more than the others I’ve read, was focused on David’s family and his relationships with his parents and siblings both as a child and as an adult. I really enjoyed it.

Windscale 1957 by Lorna Arnold

First published in 1991, this was a very detailed account of the nuclear accident at the Windscale site which occurred in 1957. I read only the 160-page main text, and didn’t delve into the many appendices of official reports.

While well-explained by Arnold, some of the physics was a little beyond my level of casual interest. However, the broader themes of what went wrong in this incident were fascinating in their familiarity: a service over-stretched as a result of Government pressure to deliver more than the expert workforce could adequately oversee, rapid recruitment of non-expert staff to essentially “make up the numbers”, and a resulting lack of expert oversight of activity whose complexity was routinely under-estimated created the conditions for things to go wrong. 

Some official reports of the incident then blamed the pressured staff for the incident, although it was rapid local decision-making (including crucial decisions in the absence of robust scientific evidence about discarding milk) that contributed most to protecting the population after the accident.

There are so many lines in this book which could apply directly to much more recent incidents across the public sector (especially covid-19) that it is difficult to conclude that the broad lessons were ever truly learned.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Another collection of Sedaris’s amusing autobiographical essays, this volume having been first published in 2000. These were easy to read, clever, and very funny: exactly what my brain and soul needed during troubled times!

The first half focused mainly on his youth, the second half more on a period he spent living in France. I found the latter half funnier and more satisfying, but all of it was delightful. Sedaris is someone I enjoy most in small doses, so I tried to limit myself to one essay a day—but with some in this collection being particularly short, that wasn’t always possible.

The essay about his French class desperately trying to explain Easter despite limited vocabulary was a particular highlight.

You by Caroline Kepnes

I picked this up because I fancied a light summer thriller sort of read, and it ticked that box perfectly. It was a first-person narrated story about a bookseller who was also a stalker. It had a wonderfully silly plot and Kepnes perfectly trod the line between thriller and comedy.

I’m not sure I’ll remember anything about this in a fortnight’s time, but it was great fun.

The Monocle Book of Gentle Living

Monocle is a slightly guilty pleasure of mine. I’ve been a fan since the first issue of the magazine, which I came to via Tyler Brûlé, whose Financial Times Fast Lane column (latterly relaunched in a Monocle email newsletter format as Faster Lane) fascinated me for years. For a long time, I believed Tyler to be satirical caricature, and then only grew more interested when I realised he was real.

I’m a Monocle subscriber, but I don’t think I’m the target demographic: I’m never going to spend £435 on a pair of high-end curling boots, nor £750 on a shell jacket, nor £665 on a tweed cardigan, no matter how much they try and push them on readers of their journalism. But I do love reading and listening to their intelligent discussions of UK and world affairs, and I get a little thrill out of knowing that there are people out there who can write hundreds of words of copy on the colour temperature of the lighting on the latest European rolling stock.

So I bought the Monocle Guide to Gentler Living as a bit of COVID escapism, and it was perfect for that. It was essentially a long, themed edition of the magazine, with lavish photography and illustrations, stripped of display-ads and hard-bound. There was very little detail and substance to any of it, but it did sort of come together to make a coherent set of ideas about slowing down in life. (Think: three paragraphs on why train travel is better than flying, followed by one sentence on each of five “best rail journeys”, accompanied by lovely photographs; some blurb on giving up high powered jobs for “the better life”, with accompanying three-paragraph case studies; a section on fashion with a page dedicated to why one should own a t-shirt—any t-shirt—which consists of a stylish photo of a t-shirt and about fifty words of text).

It was light, fluffy, and totally escapist. I took virtually nothing from it, but really enjoyed it nonetheless. So much, in fact, that I’ve picked up another of the Monocle books in a recent sale.

Breath by James Nestor

This was a recently published popular science book about breathing. It was structured around a series of self-experiments conducted by the author. I found this to be a very engaging style, but it did mean that the book was heavy on anecdote and light on proper science. There was also a strong dose of self-help content.

There was a lot of stuff in here that felt like pseudoscientific nonsense. Nevertheless, I found it so engaging that I enjoyed reading it. I even tried some of the described techniques out of curiosity (and got no real benefit).

However, my wife Wendy is a respiratory physician. My top tip to anyone in the same position is to be judicious about sharing passages—there was a fair amount of eye-rolling every time I did, though we did also occasionally descend into fits of giggles, so it was probably worth it.

The Caravaners by Elizabeth von Arnim

This was von Arnim’s 1909 book featuring the ridiculously self-important German Baron Otto Von Ottringel going on a caravanning holiday with his wife Edelgard in England. I was sent it in one of the London Review Book Boxes.

The Baron, who narrated, was quite a character: the holiday was to celebrate what he saw as his silver wedding anniversary. He had been widowered some years before and re-married, but felt that his twenty-five years of marriage ought to be marked nonetheless.

He was astoundingly sexist: “Indeed, the perfect woman does not talk at all. Who wants to hear her? All that we ask of her is that she shall listen intelligently when we want anything. Surely this is not much to ask. Matches, ash-trays, and one’s wife should be, so to speak on every table; and I maintain that the perfect wife copies the conduct of the matches and the ash-trays, and combines being useful with being dumb.”

There was humour in the book derived from the contrast between the Baron’s perception of himself and the evident level of regard in which others held him. There was also historical interest in the portrayal of British/German relations, given the world events just around the corner.

However, I found this a slog. The constant casual sexism and outmoded attitudes, while really the point of the piece, were quite wearing to modern eyes. It felt to me like the same points could have been made in a short story, rather than hammered home in a novel, but of course that’s partly because the satirical points being made are well accepted in modern society, which was not so at the time of publication.

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

There are lots of biographies of Leonardo da Vinci; this one, Walter Isaacson’s 2017 book based primarily around Leonardo’s notebooks, is the only one I’ve read.

It was fantastic. Isaacson brought Leonardo to life as a complete, fascinating person. I had little idea how many different disciplines Leonardo held an interest in—I had no real idea of his contributions to the study of anatomy, maths, or engineering. I knew nothing of his personal life. I had no idea that he was so reluctant to finish any project he was given. And yet, by the end of Isaacson’s book, I felt like I knew Leonardo.

There were so many bits of this book which will stick in mind for a long time (including the tongue of the woodpecker!) but I was perhaps most amazed by the description of Leonardo’s work on the mechanism of closure of the aortic valve. Leonardo has this figured out in 1510, but it wasn’t until 1960—the same decade as the first heart transplants—that cardiology rejected the traditional understanding that Leonardo had disproved 450 years earlier.

I also enjoyed Isaacson’s occasional commentary on the complexity of writing a biography, and appreciated his clarity on occasions where his own views of circumstances were different to those of other notable biographers of Leonardo.

This was an absorbing and clear biography of a fascinating man.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

This was Ben Lerner’s 2019 part-autobiographical novel, which was a Christmas present from my parents.

The book, set in the 1990s, was narrated by Adam, a Kansas high school student participating in a national debating competition, and his parents Jane and Jonathan, both psychologists. The narrative was non-linear and also featured short sections outside the main narrated chapters: these featured Darren, a patient of Jonathan and an acquaintance of Adam.

At heart, this was a bildungsroman. It explored modern masculinity in interesting ways, reflecting particularly on modern expectations about physical and linguistic strength in ways that gave me new insight into the well-worn debates about the relative value of muscular versus intellectual prowess.

The writing was dazzling and poetic, and reminded me of Ali Smith’s approach. This felt like a book which would be even more powerful on a second reading.

Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas

This was Tsiolkas’s 1995 novel focusing on twenty-four hours in the life of Ari, a 19-year-old Greek-Australian lad living in Melbourne. This was essentially nothing but teenage nihilism for 152 pages, one big drug-induced sex-filled meditation on the terrible life of adolescents in the modern(ish) world. Despite that, it somehow felt powerful and relevant, which I think was down to the quality of the writing and perhaps the currency of reflections on cultural identity.

Ari’s life couldn’t be further from my own, but the grittiness of the drug-taking and explicit sexual encounters felt true to life and relevant to the characterisation (and occasionally stomach-churning) rather than being gratuitous.

This isn’t really something that I’d usually pick up, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

This was Kathrine Kressman Taylor’s famous 1938 anti-Nazi epistolary novella, which deals with the relationship between two art dealers, Max Eisenstein and Martin Schulse. Both had moved from Germany to America, and Schulse decides to return in the early 1930s. The story had a great impact at the time of its publication, but perhaps has even greater weight when read today, knowing the events that were to occur in the coming years.

It was very short (19 letters over 66 well spaced pages in my edition) and the plot was rather simple, but it still landed powerful emotional blows and wasn’t an easy read. There was so much horror packed into so little space. A real reminder of the brutal banality of evil.

This was one of those books that I won’t forget in a hurry.

Elly by Maike Wetzel

This was Maike Wetzel’s 2018 novella about a missing child, first translated from German into English by Lyn Marven in 2020.

The plot was straightforward yet intriguing: a young girl had gone missing at the age of eleven. At the age of fifteen, she was found and returned home: but how could anybody be sure that the returnee was the same girl who went missing in the first place? (I mean, sure, a DNA test could resolve matters, but how could anyone bring themselves to require a test to identify a child they had raised for eleven years?)

Really, though, this novella was an extended reflection on how we all change as individuals over time, and how none of us are really the same people as others imagine us to be. The novella was structured in very short chapters (often only a couple of pages) with the narrator switching between all of the principal characters. The narrator was not explicitly stated, which—at least for me—led to some gripping moments of re-evaluation as I realised half way through chapters that I had been misattributing them. The chapters were also non-linear, which is clearly a requirement of the plot, but also helped to emphasise the change in characters over time.

I found this gripping and thought-provoking.

Conspiracy Theories by Quassim Cassam

This was Quassim Cassam’s philosophical analysis of conspiracy theories, first published in 2019. At only 125-pages, it was a relatively brief and light read. Overall, I found it a little unsatisfying: the length dictated that the book could not explore some of its concepts in detail, and I was a little disappointed at some of the obvious omissions.

For example, one section of the book discussed why people believe in conspiracy theories. From a philosophical perspective, the interesting question here is really about the nature of belief, particularly as Cassam asserted that people often claim to simultaneously believe mutually exclusive conspiracy theories (e.g. believe both that Diana was murdered, and that she faked her own death and is still alive). I can see why Cassam didn’t start exploring the philosophy of belief in such a short book, but at the same time, the omission left me wanting.

All of that said, the central message that we need to consider conspiracy theories more in terms of politics and less in terms of intellect was thought-provoking and, I think, pretty well argued.

The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

This was Lukianoff and Haidt’s 2019 bestselling polemic about psychological safety in American society. I picked this up because it was recommended by my friend Lea, and though I wouldn’t highly rate the book, it was a good recommendation nonetheless. It was one of those books that caused me to think and reflect quite a lot about why I wouldn’t particularly rate the book or its ideas, and in that sense, it was quite a good read.

The authors asserted that there are three “great untruths” increasingly accepted as facts in various facets of US society, and that these “great untruths” counter the basic principles of cognitive behavioural therapy. The “untruths” were that negative experiences are always harmful; that life is a dichotomous battle between good and evil people; and that one should always trust one’s feelings over one’s rationalised thoughts. The authors suggest that a range of negative impacts flow from these “untruths”, from political polarisation to disinvitation of speakers at university events to over-protection of children to the extent that it harms their development.

However, the evidence for the acceptance of the “great untruths” in society is weak and often predicated on extreme examples, and the sequelae they suggest flow from the “great untruths” are much more complex and multifactorial than they acknowledge. Some sections seemed completely disparate from the main thread of the argument about the “great untruths”—over-precautionary parenting did not neatly reflect any of the “untruths”.

There was good stuff: I particularly valued the authors’ insights into the importance of kindness and polite disagreement, as well as their suggestions on how to better foster this sort of discussion in society. I thought the discussion of filter bubbles and their contribution to psychological distress was timely and well-argued.

But all things considered, I thought this book wasn’t terribly cohesive, and it seemed to lack robust critical thought about many of the issues it discussed.

Shanti by Vikram Chandra

This short story was first published in Love and Longing in Bombay in 1997. I read the standalone Faber Stories edition published in 2019 as part of reading the whole Faber Stories series.

This was a story of two people experiencing profound loss: Shiv, grieving his identical twin brother, and Shanti, whose fighter pilot husband was missing. Through a series of stories within stories, the two grew closer.

This short story was just not for me. I found it frustrating and predictable all at once, and while others have praised the language, it just did nothing for me. This will always be the nature of reading a series like Faber Stories: no-one will enjoy everything in the series. Obviously, others have really loved this, so don’t let the fact that I was unmoved put you off reading it.

Giacomo Joyce by James Joyce

I know this is a bit of confession, but I haven’t read any James Joyce. This set of 1914 scribbles which contained some insight into the creation of his later masterpieces was therefore of no interest to me.

Joyce’s biographer called this a work of “small, fragile, enduring perfection” so it’s no doubt great if it’s your sort of thing. As someone coming to Joyce for the first time, it felt like a fragmented, disconnected mess which had some nice lines but felt at times uninterpretable.

Not a book for me, sadly.

Calypso by David Sedaris

This was a collection of Sedaris’s mostly autobiographical stories which was published in 2018. It featured work previously published in several different periodicals (The New Yorker, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveller). In Sedaris’s usual style, the coverage was eclectic but grounded in everyday life, and very funny throughout. This was perfect reading for relaxation while work is a little more busy and challenging than usual!

While it never felt heavy, there was some particularly reflective and moving material about his estranged sister’s death by suicide. This illustrated Sedaris’s skill in communicating larger ideas by concentrating on (and finding the humour in) the everyday.

I thoroughly enjoyed this; it was one of those serendipitous combinations of finding a great book at the perfect time to read it.

Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt

This was first published in 2012 and has been on my “to read” list ever since. I think, but can’t be certain, that I’ve sat through a talk by the author at some point in that period—though it may have been someone talking about him!

Professor Nutt is best known for having been sacked as chair of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2009. In a lecture, he made an evidence-based comparison between the risks of taking ecstasy and the risks of horse-riding. The fact of the comparison was unpalatable to the Government of the time, and he was removed from his post.

Nutt described his disagreements with Government in some detail at the start of this book. Unfortunately, given that it was at the start of the book, I found this a bit unconvincing: it read as though he felt scientific evidence was the only aspect to be considered in policy-making (or at least in the operation of specific policy levers).

However, the bulk of the book was a clear, coherent and evidence-based discussion of the benefits and risks of recreational drug use. This included a section of parental advice on how to discuss drugs with children. Nutt’s text had humour and wit, and the book was easy to read. I learned quite a bit from it!

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Camus’s 1948 classic, which I read via Matthew Ward’s 1989 translation. In retrospect, this was an odd choice, as Ward wrote at some length in his translation note about how his was an American English translation for an American audience… whereas I could have picked any number of British English translations. Never mind.

The novel followed Meursault, a French Algerian, and the sequelae to his societally atypical response to his mother’s death. This made me wonder whether, if Camus wrote this book today, Meursault would have been given a diagnostic label rather than being a quirky character—though I suppose that is only really a modern take on the theme of existentialism and absurdism for which the novel is famous.

I really enjoyed this.

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

This novel of Baker’s was first published in 1988, and it was very much of its time. The 135 pages (with many, many footnotes) were essentially a stream of consciousness covering the period during which the narrator rides up an escalator while returning to his office following his lunch break.

I found it both funny and exasperating in equal measure. It wa one of those books which I think I’ll remember for a long time, even though I didn’t really take that much from it.

Fairy Tales by Marianne Moore

This volume contained Marianne Moore’s versions of three tales written by Charles Perrault for the niece of Louis XIV: Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. These were first published in 1963; I read the 2019 Faber Stories 44-page paperback collection.

These versions deviated a little from the commonly received versions: Sleeping Beauty wasn’t awoken with a kiss and Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t ugly, for example. However, I can’t claim to have taken much from this book. The plots were essentially well-worn and the writing didn’t strike me as especially notable, but perhaps that just makes me an uncultured heathen who doesn’t appreciate Moore’s greatness.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant

I read the expanded 240-page hardback edition of this after reading some glowing reviews. It wasn’t for me. I found the autobiographical sections oddly cagey (the book was about his recovery from business failure and I don’t even know from the book what business he was in), and the self-help sections were just not up my street.

I know others have loved this and found it very helpful in their lives, but I’m not going to stare in a mirror and repeatedly profess my love for myself no matter how many times Ravikant emphasises that this is a great thing to do.

This just was just a bad choice of book on my part. Don’t let my bad experience put you off if it sounds good to you.

I Choose Elena by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

A 2019 essay on the lasting effect of trauma on Osborne-Crowley, exploring the effect that a rape at knifepoint when she was fifteen years old changed her life.

This was a deeply personal and powerful account. Osborne-Crowley reflected on the influence literature had on her recovery, including Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels which the title references. She also reflected on the personal circumstances which she believes underlie the reason the experience had such a profound impact on her life, in a section that knocked me sideways.

This will stay with me.

Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski

This was a newly published book by first-time author Tomasz Jedrowski. It followed a boy growing up, coming to terms with his sexuality, and falling in love against a background of political and social turmoil in late twentieth-century Poland.

I picked this up because I had read that it heavily featured James Baldwin’s classic Giovanni’s Room, which I have only recently read, and I was interested to see how this work would use that one. It turns out that it played a central part in the plot.

Jedrowski is an exceptionally talented writer who brought new emotional insight by referencing themes like social acceptance, shame, guilt, perseverance, and vulnerability in various aspects of the characters’ lives. There were, for example, complex emotional parallels between rebelling against an oppressive political regime and rebelling against a heteronormative society.

I really enjoyed this book and thought I got a lot out of it. The experience of having recently read Giovanni’s Room led to me reflect quite a lot on the different influences the same book can have on different people’s lives. Giovanni’s Room clearly meant something different to someone exploring their nascent sexuality in a country which suppressed homosexuality compared to what it meant to a straight 30-something in the UK in 2020: this made me reflect much more deeply on that point, and how much what we all take from books depends as much on what we bring to them as what is in them.

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

I picked this book up entirely on the strength of the cover, so all credit to designers Sara Wood and Steve Marking.

It was a book about Ava, who left Ireland at the age of twenty-two to teach English in Hong Kong. She befriended a banker, Julian, and then a lawyer, Edith, and much was made of the trio’s diverse backgrounds, financial situations, and approaches to life. At heart, this was a love story. Dolan’s writing was sharp and witty and was the real star of this book.

What could we need more during these strange times than a warm and witty love story? It was modern in a way that will date quite quickly (lots of commentary on iMessage typing indicators and ways of working at Starbucks), but it was still lovely.

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Milan Kundera before. This was forty-three pages first published in English in a collection called Laughable Loves in 1974, and now republished as a standalone volume in the Faber Stories collection. Regrettably, the volume doesn’t credit the translator of the original Czech; from a bit of web searching, I think it was probably Suzanne Rappaport.

The plot concerned a man and a woman who previously had a sexual encounter when he was 20-ish and she 40-ish coincidentally meeting again 15 years on. Narration alternated between the two of them for each of the fourteen chapters.

There was a lot packed in here: the plot may have been straightforward, but the melancholy atmosphere, the lost love, the detail of the imagery, and the reflections on aging and changing and mortality elevated this to something more than a simple narrative. Kundera packed more into these forty-three pages than many authors I’ve read recently fit into a full-length novel.

Intruders by Adrian Tomine

This was an 81-page graphic novel (or, I suppose, graphic short story—but that doesn’t seem like it means the same thing). First published in 2015 in the collection Killing and Dying, I read the 2019 standalone Faber Stories volume.

Graphic novels aren’t really my cup of tea, but I enjoyed this, nonetheless. The book followed an American soldier returning home between his second and third tours of duty. The tale was a clear allegory for war abroad: without the consent of the new occupant, he secretly visited (and ended up defending) an apartment which he previously occupied. This choice made me think a lot about the authorial intent: was this a narrative device to make us think about war differently? Was this a reflection of the mental state of the solider? Was it a bit of both?

The blurb called it a ‘disquieting evocation of a post-traumatic life’, but I’m not sure that fits with how I read it. I found it a little too fantastical to be read as a realistic evocation of anything, but it did make me reflect quite a lot on the psychological impacts of war.

Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

This was Haig’s 2019 book about the effects of various aspects of modern life on mental health. I like Haig’s writing, so I enjoyed this book. Haig mixes his first-hand experiences with discussions of the evidence base which made for an engaging but light book, with quite a bit of wit.

I don’t think I learned a huge amount from this book, but I enjoyed Haig’s take on the topic.

Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley

This short book was originally published in 2012, but I read the 2019 edition with a new introduction by Max Porter. It was extraordinary.

The book concerned Riley’s reaction to her son’s death, but she concentrated on a single element of that experience: the altered perception of time, or perhaps more accurately, the absence of a perception of time, which followed the death. Riley began with forty-one pages of notes written at intervals between two weeks and three years after her son’s death, reflecting on her own experiences and relevant snatches of literature and poetry. This was followed by thirty pages of reflective postscript.

The decision to focus on this single aspect of grief—the perception of time—is brave and brilliant, and Riley’s exploration and reflection altered my own perception of what this must be like. I read parts of this at the same time as the novel Human Traces which has a section covering broadly similar themes from a distinct perspective. The contrast between Faulks’s fiction and Riley’s reality was arresting.

There was one paragraph right at the start of Riley’s book which particularly struck me, and pulled me into the rest of her reflections:

There’s no specific noun for a parent of a dead child; nothing like the terms for other losses such as ‘orphan’ or ‘widower’. No single word exists, either, for an ‘adult child’ – an awkward phrase which could suggest a large floppy-limbed doll. For such a historically common condition as outliving your own child, the vocabulary is curiously thin. The same phrases recur. For instance, many kindly onlookers will instinctively make use of this formula: ‘I can’t imagine what you are feeling’. There’s a paradox in this remark, for it’s an expression of sympathy, yet in the same breath it’s a disavowal of the possibility of empathy. Undoubtedly it’s very well meant, if (understandably) fear-filled. People’s intentions are good; a respect for the severity of what they suppose you’re enduring, and so a wish not to claim to grasp it. Still, I’d like them to try to imagine; it’s not so difficult. Even if it’s inevitable, or at any rate unsurprising, that those with dead children are regarded with concealed horror, they don’t need to be further shepherded into the inhuman remote realms of the ‘unimaginable’. So I want to try, however much against the odds, to convey only the one striking aspect: this curious sense of being pulled right outside of time. as if beached in a clear light.

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

I picked this up because the sequel, Cleanness, has had a lot of great press reviews lately. What Belongs to You was first published in 2016, though the first third was published as a novella in 2011.

The novel concerned an American professor who moved to Sofia to teach. He was already culturally isolated when he developed a sexual relationship with a male prostitute, Mitko, and became a little uncertain about his own identity. He reflected on the parallels between being an outsider in Sofia and being an outsider as a gay youth in the south of the USA.

There was some exceptionally thoughtful and moving writing in this book, and both the nameless professor and Mitko were fully realised as characters. There was a particularly good subplot involving a diagnosis of syphilis. But somehow, I just didn’t feel particularly engaged by the plot. It may be because I too recently read the James Baldwin classic Giovanni’s Room which covered some of the same territory (albeit in a completely different setting and time period).

I enjoyed What Belongs to You enough that I will pick up the sequel at some point to see what all the fuss is about.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Another eleven short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, including The Final Problem. This collection was first published in 1894; I read a handsome well-thumbed 1959 edition courtesy of Newcastle City Library, and the sensory experience added to my enjoyment.

While I found this collection a little more interesting than The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I still missed being drawn into a full-length novel. Luckily, The Hound of the Baskervilles is next in the series.

The Non-Existent Knight by Italo Calvino

This Calvino novella was first published in Italy in 1959, with an English translation by Archibald Colquhoun published in 1962. I read a lovely 1962 edition from the London Library, which (according to the date labels) had been borrowed more than forty times before I was born.

The story, supposedly recorded by a nun called Sister Theodora, concerned Agilulf and Raimbaud, two paladins of Charlemagne. Agilulf was the eponymous non-existent knight: a sentient empty suit of armour, celebrated for being a perfect knight and meeting all expectations of knighthood. Raimbaud is a younger knight who struggles to balance his passion for humanity against the expectations placed upon him by knighthood.

This allegorical satire which felt relevant to the modern world: how often do we all feel like we are expected to fit a role and be non-existent as personalities? It also made me laugh, especially Sister Theodora’s commentary at the start of many chapters about the difficulty of drafting the story, and the fact that she is mostly making up the events she is recording.

All of that said: I found this slightly trickier to read than The Cloven Viscount, the other one of Calvino’s “Our Ancestors” trilogy that I’ve read to date. I think this is because I haven’t read much about the court of Charlemagne or many classic tales of chivalry, and so was a bit confounded by some basic elements (including the word ‘paladins’ which I had to look up). Readers more versed in that world will find it easier to jump straight in!

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

This was the 2005 mega-bestseller about a pre-adolescent girl, Liesel Meminger, growing up in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The book was narrated by Death.

For the first four-fifths of the book, I struggled with the style of narration. Having Death as a narrator in this context is a strong idea, but Zusak didn’t really seem to build on that creative choice in an interesting way, other than by making Death an affably weird character. However, Zusak gave Death an odd style of narration in which the text was filled with bizarre idioms and broken up in affected ways. I found this style tedious. But then, somewhere around the 400-page mark, the style “clicked” for me and I started to find its rhythm and enjoy the quirkiness.

The plot seemed to derive most of its power and interest from the historical context rather than from the events in Liesel’s story specifically, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. For a book in which the proximate cause of a lot of the suffering is the actions of the allied forces in the war, it felt oddly lacking in moral complexity. It all felt a bit sentimental to me.

Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks

I picked up this 2005 novel as it was recommended by my friend and esteemed work colleague Julie. In short: it was right up my street and I loved it.

The novel followed the lives of two doctors, from their late 1800s childhoods through their careers as early specialists in psychiatry to their old age. They set up a clinic together despite developing contrasting theories as to the causes of and treatments for mental illness, and their intellectual differences both bound them together and drove them apart.

This novel was perfect for me because Faulks skilfully wove together fictional biography with medicine, psychiatry, travel, the thrill of early scientific discovery, moral complexity, interpersonal relationships, love and philosophy—all things I really enjoy reading about. The sometimes lengthy exposition of early psychiatric theory in the book is often singled out as a point for criticism, but I found it fascinating. I was completely absorbed into the world Faulks created.

The edition I read ran to 786 pages but felt far shorter. This is a book which I will remember for a long time.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

This novel was thoroughly depressing and heart-breaking and brilliant. First published in 1957, Giovanni’s Room followed David, a young American who lived in Paris and who awaited the return of his fiancée from her travels in Spain. He fell into an intense romantic relationship with a barman and things went downhill from there.

Really, this was a book about personal identity, guilt and the complexity of living with love. Despite the huge shifts in societal attitudes to sexual identity since the 1950s, the plot didn’t feel at all dated. The themes were universally applicable.

Baldwin’s writing made this feel absolutely complete despite it running to only 157 pages.

Mary Poppins Comes Back by PL Travers

First published in 1935, this was the second in the series of books by PL Travers featuring Mary Poppins. It had a similar structure to the first, with ten chapters each giving a reasonably ‘standalone’ account of some sort of adventure concerning Poppins and the Banks children.

I know this book was written for children, but I really enjoyed it. Poppins was a fascinating antihero of a character, not only possessed of unexplained magical powers (unless it was all in the children’s imagination) but also acid-tongued, cold and vain, with only occasional passing hints at underlying sentimentality and perhaps even love. As with the first book, there were some truly dark scenes in this volume which seem almost tailormade to give children nightmares.

Even after reading only the first two books, I can easily grasp why Travers had such a negative reaction to Disney’s treatment of Mary Poppins as a character: Disney’s saccharine singing source of warmth and comfort is certainly not Travers’s vision. And Travers’s vision is much more interesting.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A Norman

This was originally published as “The Psychology of Everyday Things” in 1988; I read the “revised and updated” 2013 edition.

This book made me think differently about what “design” means. I had expected this to be a book about the physical properties of man-made objects, which I suppose it was at heart, but Norman’s scope for the book included all sorts of stuff. For example, there was discussion about the relevance of design to investigation of errors and how best to manage “design” projects.

This book felt in parts more like practical philosophy than a textbook on product design. My job as a public health doctor doesn’t really involve designing anything and yet there was a lot of transferable content in here. Norman also added quite a bit of humour to the subject matter.

I had expected to enjoy this book because it would make me think differently about everyday objects. It achieved that and I took away much more besides.

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes

I had mixed feelings about this.

Barnes’s latest book was an account of the belle époque centred on three main characters, including the eponymous Samuel Jean Pozzi, who was a pleasingly complex character. The problem with this book—to the extent that there was one—was that I just couldn’t really bring myself to care about this historical period. I’m not a fan of historical fiction, and while this was fact rather than fiction, I struggled to find any real interest in the history.

But Barnes is such a brilliant writer that this almost didn’t matter. I particularly liked his frequent reflections on the process of writing a historical account, which were deftly woven into his narrative. And while I couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for the history, Barnes’s own enthusiasm shone through in every line. Barnes also gives frequent and interesting commentary on portraits of the characters, often playfully contrasting his account with those of the gallery labels.

I suppose I enjoyed reading this book whose main subject matter was not of particular interest… if that makes any sense at all.

My Son the Fanatic by Hanif Kureishi

This short (29 pages) story was first published in the collection Love In A Blue Time in 1996; I read the recent Faber Stories standalone edition.

Kureishi explored the father-son relationship, as Pakistani-American immigrant Parvez struggled to understand his son Ali’s development of a strong attachment to Islam. To begin with, Kureishi played up the generational and East-West clash for comedy, but the characters’ estrangement became more serious and dramatic over time.

I liked this because it provided food for thought in terms of intra-familial culture clashes and the nature of fanaticism, things that I haven’t really had cause to think about a great deal. I’m not sure it’s a book I’ll return to or which will stay with me for a long time, but I appreciated the stimulation it provided.

The Cheater’s Guide to Love by Junot Díaz

This short story was originally published in 2012 as part of a collection called This Is How You Lose Her.

The story in these 56-pages was centred on Yunior, a Dominican-American writer and university professor, who cheated on his fiancée with some fifty other women and then worked through the fallout over a number of years (much of which involved further bad behaviour). The use of second-person narration and Dominican-American dialect gave this short story a real feeling of energy and urgency, which I really enjoyed. And despite its shocking premise, this was really a book about someone discovering the meaning of love.

Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty

This novel, first published in 2016, concerned a group three couples of adult friends. It was, I suppose, a character study: it tracked how the characters developed over time as various secrets came to light and events occurred which challenged their friendship.

I picked this up because I know a lot of my friends like Moriarty’s books and my sister gave this five stars on Goodreads. I did not enjoy it, and there were a number of times where I almost gave up on reading it.

It was a long book at 415 pages, and felt longer than that. The novel had a contrived structure which jumped about in the timeline in order to add suspense, but there was no real payoff because the “secrets” were a bit humdrum.

I found almost all of the characters unlikable and the setting claustrophobic: nothing in this book strayed beyond fairly superficial observation of suburban Australian life. There was neither depth of observation nor exploration of a wider set of themes (at least as far as I could derive).

That said, clearly many people love this novel and it has been a major commercial success for Moriarty, so perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon outside of the target audience.

Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

Published in Hungarian in 1970 and with an English translation by George Szirtes published in 2008, Metropole is considered to be Karinthy’s greatest work, and one of the novels of the century. I read it as it had been selected for inclusion in the London Review Book Box.

Despite that, it didn’t do much for me. The novel’s protagonist was Budai, a linguist who ended up in an unknown city whose language he couldn’t speak. He spent most of the book moaning and acting in a manner that felt a bit dim, all while developing a seemingly non-consensual violent sexual relationship with a young woman he couldn’t communicate with (it was ‘unconventional’ according to the cover blurb, but ‘unacceptable’ according to me).

There were some interesting allegorical ideas and, to my mind, this would make for an interesting short story. It made me reflect in particular on how much the world has changed since the 1970s, how close we all are to destitution, and how hit and miss everyone’s communication can be. It was just dull when spun out to this length.

Ghostly Stories by Celia Fremlin

This volume contained two short horror stories: The New House (first published 1968) and The Hated House (1970). These were very much ‘genre’ short stories, in that they didn’t seem to reach for anything beyond the straightforward ‘ghost story’.

Neither did much for me: while competently written and easy to read, I found them bland and forgettable. The plots were predictable. I don’t think I’ve read anything by Celia Fremlin before, and these stories wouldn’t encourage me to seek out more of her work.

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Pale Rider by Laura Spinney

In the couple of years since it was published, Laura Spinney’s history of the 1918 influenza pandemic has been recommended to me by more health protection colleagues than any other book.

Spinney did a great job of weaving together, virology, public health, history and sociology to create a genuinely thrilling volume on a subject that is often treated as a little dry. Spinney brought it to life while also comprehensively covering her brief, and used a light and engaging touch as well as lots anecdotes to illustrate larger points.

It took me a little longer to get through this than my enthusiasm for the book would imply, but only because my days have been filled with coronavirus work lately, and reading about something similar for pleasure seemed a bit masochistic!

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A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov

I picked this up because my Goodreads friend Richard Smith called it “marvellous” and it sounded right up my street. I agree with his assessment.

In this book, Bulgakov describes the experience of being newly qualified and the sole doctor attached to a rural hospital in Russia in 1917. I may have started as a junior doctor (in Newcastle upon Tyne) some 91 years later than Bulgakov (and, for that matter, 32 years after Richard—sorry!) but the stories resonated.

The terror and reading up before shifts; the heart-in-mouth adrenaline rush as the DECT phone rings (or the nurse knocks on the doctor’s bedroom door in Bulgakov’s case!); the conspiratorial performance of maintaining the fiction for patients that the doctor knows exactly what they’re doing, even while being gently steered by the nurses. Even the twin comfort and dread brought by heavy snow felt familiar—comfort as fewer patients will turn up and I might have chance to think, but dread as I have to cope with the weather too.

There was an engaging emotional range to the book, from the amusing and absurd to the tragic. I’m fortunate not to have seen any colleagues become addicted to controlled drugs, and count myself very lucky given the statistics not to have had close experience of doctor colleagues ending their own lives… or murdering healthy patients.

The first mention of Leopold Leopoldovitch in the book reminded me that I watched the TV adaptation of this starring Jon Hamm, Daniel Radcliffe and the scene-stealing Vicki Pepperdine in 2012. I remember enjoying it, but don’t remember enough of the content to have any idea of how closely it followed the book.

The version I read was the 1975 translation by Michael Glenny: other (newer) English translations are available, but it’s hard to imagine how they could be any better!

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Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

My parents bought me this for Christmas… at my request. It wasn’t a unfestive forced selection, but rather a book I’d wanted to read because the reviews were so good.

Higginbotham gave a brilliantly written and researched account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. I found it gripping.

Higginbotham managed not only to explain nuclear physics in a way that I could understand, his characterisations of the key figures in the story were excellent. It’s rare to read someone who is this good at writing about complex science and the human aspect of a story.

Thoroughly recommended.

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Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

I feel sorry for the person who spent ages on the cover design for this book, but this dust-cover-less copy is what the library supplied, and so that’s the picture I’m sticking with. There’s no photoshopping to meet literary beauty standards here!

Because Internet was a study of informal, casual written English, with a particular focus on the internet since, McCulloch argued, the advent of the internet has allowed academics to study informal writing extensively. Prior to the internet, informal writing was generally private (diaries, letters, shopping lists) whereas it is now commonly public (forum posts, tweets, blog posts).

To me, that insight alone was worth the effort of reading this book. I have never pondered the extent to which analyses of written English have been informed only by formal written English, and I’ve never before really thought about how the present generation is the first to publicly express itself in informal English. There’s a lot of food for thought in that.

But McCulloch had much more besides in this volume, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Sometimes, books are so insightful as to explain to the reader why the reader does things which just seem automatic: this is one of those books.

McCulloch managed that very difficult feat of marrying rigorous academic analysis with clear and accessible explanations, a lightness of touch, levity and wit. I thought this book was great.

Mostly Hero by Anna Burns

While this was first published in 2014, the copy I picked up was newer: a part of the 2019 extension to the Faber Stories series I read last year. This volume somewhat stretched the bounds of definition of “short story”: at 127 pages, this was really a novella rather than a short story, and the cover price was consequently higher than the rest of the (much slimmer) volumes in the series.

All of that said, I thought this was a very clever book which I enjoyed reading. Burns presented a sort of literary take on comic book superhero stories, which I’m almost tempted to call “spoof”: it riffed to great effect on common comic book tropes, but Burns also gave the story real depth and meaning. Mostly Hero was inventive and played with language in creative and interesting ways.

At heart, it was a love story featuring a character named “hero” and one named “femme fatale”, but it ranged much wider than that single genre despite its short length. Burns had interesting things to say on societal expectations, gender and the nature of good and evil, all of which were explored under the cover of the absurd cartoonish world she created.

Moral Essays: Volume II by Seneca

When I read the first volume of Seneca’s moral essays translated by John W Basore in 2018, I was completely blown away and read the whole thing pretty quickly.

I’ve read this second volume a section at a time over a much longer period, and don’t think I got quite as much out of it as with the ‘total immersion’ approach of the first volume. The slightly dated language of Basore’s 1932 translation takes some getting used to. The print quality in some parts of my copy wasn’t great, which took me out of the moment a few times.

All of that said, this was still brilliant, and doesn’t feel like it was written millennia ago.

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Grandeur and Greed by Giles Smith

Take a journalist best known for writing columns about sport and music, send him to review five of Europe’s great art galleries, and Grandeur and Greed is the result.

In this short volume published in 2019, Smith reviews The Louvre, The Prado, The Rijksmuseum, The Uffizi and The National Gallery. Each enjoys an off beat and lighthearted review from someone with a casual interest in art. Smith even reviews the cafes. I found this short, light, funny and insightful.

I think it’s the other that the physical format of the book was, however, poor: it is very flimsy, and the binding means that a large central portion of the impressive double-page photography is lost in the gutter. Smith’s reviews were originally published online, and I’m not sure that enough thought has been given to the transfer to the physical page.

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I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux

This was a moving account of a daughter’s relationship with her mother, as the latter develops and ultimately dies from Alzheimer’s disease. I read the translation by Tanja Leslie.

Reading this book made me reflect that it probably shocks less today than it did when it was published some 23 years ago. Over the last couple of decades, I think societal awareness and understanding of dementia illnesses has increased markedly over what is really quite a short period of time. I think some of the exposition about the illness would be handled differently today.

Nevertheless, this remains a powerful emotional account.

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Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

This newly-released novel was set in a three-hour period during which a school in Somerset was attacked by shooters who also had explosive devices. The book was set in the present day and had a contemporary feel, with Lupton weaving in many of the touchstone issues in the social and political debates of our time (Brexit, Katie Hopkins, Donald Trump, etc). There were also a few decent plot twists along the way.

I enjoyed this, but I felt slightly removed from the action: I felt more of an observer. I think this was partly because some of the plot stretched credibility (would a British rolling news channel really interview someone caught up in this while they were in hiding in the school?) and partly because of the heavy-handed and slightly tiresome way Lupton drew comparisons between her plot and Shakespeare.

Defeated by Brexit by Chris Cook

In this short 2019 book, Chris cook gave a good insight into the Government’s chaotic approach to Brexit. Unfortunately, his analysis ended at a point in time which seems odd in retrospect (a few weeks before Theresa May’s resignation). The text was also a bit too long for an overview, and a little too short to really get stuck into the detail. I think there are probably better books on this topic.

This was published by the same house as the Giles Smith book, and was similarly flimsy.

Dreamerika! by Alan Burns

This 1972 surrealist fantasy was my least favourite book of the month my some considerable distance. I’ve no doubt that Dreamerika! has artistic merit, and it was certainly very clever, but the collage style of cut-out headlines interspersed with paragraphs of discontinuous text was just not my kind of thing.

This was recommended by the London Review Book Shop, and I’m glad I tried it, but it made me realise that I need a good bit of prose to get stuck into a book.

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Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

I loved this book. First published in 1963, this was a collection of twenty short stories about Marcovaldo, a poor Italian man who was fond of nature and rural life but lived with his family in a big city. The stories followed a seasonal cycle, so that there were five set in each of spring, summer, autumn and winter.

In each story, Marcovaldo engaged with nature or the physical world in some way, and the outcomes were always unexpected. There was a lot of humour (I could imagine Marcovaldo being reduced to a comedy character on TV), but there was an equal amount of philosophy and some melancholy.

The writing was wonderful, simple and yet poetic. But then I really like Calvino’s style, and know that it isn’t universally loved. The translation I read was by William Weaver.

I enjoyed this so much that I didn’t want it to end, and tried to give myself time to reflect on each story before reading the next.

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Tory Heaven or Thunder on the Right by Marghanita Laski

This satire was first published in 1948, but if I didn’t know that, I’d have guessed that it was published last year. (In fact, it was republished by Persephone in 2018.)

The plot followed five people who, having been marooned on a desert island for some years, returned to England in 1945 to find it transformed into “the England of all decent Conservatives’ dreams.”

The country was divided along strict class lines, with every citizen receiving one of five Government-assigned grades, and required to live in accordance with what would be expected of their class. The novel primarily focused on the experiences of the privileged James Leigh-Smith (indistinguishable from Jacob Rees-Mogg), and largely left the reader to fill in the blanks and draw the moral lessons.

This was a really easy and fun read with a clearly enduring underlying message.

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Mary Poppins by PL Travers

Wendy loves Mary Poppins, so after 16 years of not entirely voluntary viewings of the Julie Andrews film, the more recent Saving Mr Banks and Mary Poppins Returns, and countless features and documentaries, I decided it was time to engage with the original source material.

Obviously, it was a children’s book, but I was surprised how dark it was—and it was more interesting for it.

Mary Poppins, a truly memorable character, was acid-tongued, cold and vain. Mr and Mrs Banks had little interest in or interaction with their children.

I think many younger children would be scared by the situations into which Poppins lures the children, such as the full moon birthday party in which shes surrounded by snakes.

Neither the book nor the character have the redeeming and nurturing warmth I expected, which left me more intrigued than if this had been the more saccharine tale I imagined.

Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq

I had never read anything by Houellebecq before, but knew of his reputation for gloom. This book lived up to that reputation, mostly in a good way. I read the translation by Shaun Whiteside.

The protagonist was a depressed agricultural advisor to the French government on farming and agricultural matters. He was prescribed a novel antidepressant which increased his serotonin level (hence the title). The novel followed this not entirely likable character as he made increasingly strange life choices.

The high suicide rate among agricultural workers is well known, but this novel made me think a bit more about the myriad causes of this, especially in modern society. It was also good at giving a slightly different perspective on the experience of depression and medication. There was a good dose of dark humour mixed in with the tragedy.

There was a fair amount of gratuitous sex, including bestiality and paedophilia, which seemed like it was there more to shock than to perform any intrinsic function. Also, in one of those bizarre turns of fate, there’s a section in this reflecting on Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories, which I was reading at the same time!

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Night Train by Martin Amis

This was a book that started off as a crime procedural narrated by a policewoman called Mike, but turned out not to be a crime procedural at all. It was rather a sort of dark fictional philosophical exploration of suicide.

By pure coincidence, I had Miles Davis playing as I read much of this, and I was struck by how the writing seemed ‘jazzy’: police procedural cliche played with, improvised, turned on its head, and using the same forms to different ends. I enjoyed it.

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The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

Contrary to most of the reviews I’ve flicked through, I enjoyed this less than A Study in Scarlet. It felt like there was more padding, and the long narrated resolution at the end felt more tedious than than the second part of the first book.

While I of course accept that the casual racism and pejorative language used by Conan Doyle reflect the social mores of the time it was written, the quantity of it in this volume became a bit wearing.

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Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

I picked this up because it was featured in an article about how brilliant ‘young adult’ fiction had become and how we should all be reading more of it. It was a ‘love through secret correspondence’ story with a gay 16-year-old high school student as the protagonist and narrator.

The straightforward plot dealt with issues of contemporary high school life, including traditional tropes like bullying and blackmail, and some more modern concerns, such as emails and blogging.

It felt tightly targeted at its audience: many of the cultural references passed me by somewhat (though I can’t be certain whether that was an age thing or a not-being-American thing). It is narrowly focused on high school life, and it limited itself to the sort of language teenagers use. There is a very teenage dichotomy in which almost everything in the book is either “freaking awesome” or terrible, which felt true to life, but a little wearing. Overall, the writing felt a bit teenage, which is what the author was going for, but doesn’t really have a great deal of interest for me.

All things considered, this seemed like a well-constructed book, but it didn’t really convince me that we should all be reading more young adult fiction.

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Murmur by Will Eaves

This was a novel based on the imagined thoughts of Alan Turing as he experienced chemical castration and the associated psychological therapy.

In fact, the main character was a sort of ‘version’ of Turing called Alec Pryor, but having read a biography of Turing relatively recently, I recognised that many of the peripheral characters share the forenames of similar characters in Turing’s life. As if that wasn’t a complicated enough premise, several of the sections were dream sequences imagined by Pryor.

This layer upon layer of narrative complexity allowed Eaves to explore all sorts of interesting territory relevant to Turing’s life, from the morality of his treatment to the nature of consciousness to the development of artificial intelligence.

This was a very clever book which I think would reward multiple close readings. I often found myself a bit disorientated in terms of the plot, and while that sometimes made it a bit of a chore, I mostly found myself carried along by the writing, the fantastically poetic imagery, and the exploration of complex ideas.

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

A collection of twelve short stories about Sherlock Holmes cases narrated by Dr Watson. Obviously a classic and one where everyone knows what they’re getting!

I personally preferred getting engrossed in the full-length novels earlier in the series than these short stories, but I still enjoyed seeing how the characters developed over the course of the collection.

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Journeys: Tortoise Quarterly, 1ed

Tortoise Quarterly is more magazine than book—it features thematic collections of longer articles from the Tortoise website.

In this edition, I particularly enjoyed Matthew D’Ancona’s account of experiencing delirium while he was a patient on a high dependency unit, Ian Ridley’s moving story of his wife’s death from cancer, and Tanyaradzwa Nyenwa’s reflections on working as a cold caller.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

I fully recognise that this has a reputation as one of the greatest collections of short science fiction stories ever written, but it was just not for me.

I don’t usually enjoy science fiction but decided to challenge myself with this: it has a reputation for being so accomplished that it appeals to people who don’t usually enjoy science fiction. But I found it a real slog to get through.

I’m not sure what it is that generates such a negative reaction in me. I think it might be something to do with the fantastical nature of much science fiction—I don’t like fantasy stories either, so perhaps my imagination is limited to stuff grounded in reality.

I think it might also be something to do with the writing, which often struck me as inelegant, despite clearly being loved and respected by better informed people than me—to me it often felt more scientific than poetic, and I think I prefer poetic descriptions of emotions (not ‘Neil was consumed with grief after she died, a grief that was excruciating not only because of its intrinsic magnitude, but also because it renewed and emphasised the previous pains of his life.’)

So I’m still not a fan of science fiction.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

This was a novel charting the course of a marriage between a middle class African American man and woman in the contemporary United States. In particular, it covers the strain placed on that marriage after the man is wrongfully imprisoned. It is told in sections from the points of view of multiple characters.

The main themes were the gap between hopes and reality, the effect of incarceration on people’s lives and families, and the clash between traditional gender roles and those in modern society. The characters were well developed, believable, and entirely as irrational and frustrating as real people can often seem.

This was a slow and closely observed novel on a domestic scale. I found it absorbing and moving.

Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli

This was book about the negative effects of engaging with the news, arguing that we should essentially disengage from daily consumption. I enjoyed this book and found the argument convincing, partly because I’ve been on a similar journey of late.

I would have preferred Dobelli to make the distinction between ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ a little earlier in the book, because I occasionally found myself arguing with his positions until I understood better that he was treating these as distinct entities. But, nonetheless, I found his perspectives throughout worthy of consideration.

Definitely a book I’d recommend, particularly in current times.

My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes

Originally published in 1958, this short novel was narrated by a troubled Hollywood screenwriter. In the novel’s opening, the screenwriter intervened to rescue an actress from the sea at a party, following what might have been an accident or might have been a suicide attempt.

The two almost accidentally fell into a relationship (an extramarital affair for the screenwriter) which took on a progressively darker air as their damaged selves came to the fore.

I found this intense and gripping. It had the concise and precise language of the classic American novels which worked well to heighten the tension.

Car Park Life by Gareth E Rees

This was a personal study of some of the hidden parts the UK’s retail car parks—not a topic that obviously required its own book, but a topic that turned out to be well worth reading about nevertheless.

Car Park Life was great, with exactly the right mix of wit, satire and underlying earnest. Rees mixed a beguiling and flowing combination of humour, psychology, sociology, autobiography and history around this unassuming topic.

This book has definitely changed my perspective on car parks!

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

I thought I’d read all of Sherlock Holmes as a teenager, and decided to re-read it in 2020. Having read this, though, I’m now pretty sure this is my first reading: I don’t remember any of the mormon-themed second part of this book.

Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed this first in the Sherlock Holmes series. There seems little point saying much more: you know what you’re getting into.

My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs by Kazuo Ishiguro

You can watch or read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel lecture for free online, but I didn’t. I bought a small paperback copy which I read over a bowl of soup one lunchtime in Caffé Nero. That is possibly the most planetary resource intensive approach, and I should probably be ashamed… but I enjoyed it.

Ishiguro’s lecture described his lifelong development as a writer, underlined the importance of literature and made a plea for greater intellectual diversity in writing and the arts. I really like Ishiguro’s writing, so was predisposed to like this lecture. I suppose I probably wouldn’t have found it interesting if I didn’t find him interesting, so your mileage may vary!

Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge

I picked this up out of interest having enjoyed the TV series: this is the text of the original one-woman play.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the play and also reflecting on the creative differences between the original text and the TV series. I also enjoyed the text on its own terms: Waller-Bridge has created a memorable and distinctive character.

On the other hand, much of the rest of the stuff in this volume felt like filler to me.

Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

This was a moving, eloquent and personal description of Matt Haig’s experiences with depression which I think helped me to better understand the subjective experience of mental illness.

There were some parts that felt less successful to me, though perhaps others appreciated them—I wasn’t particularly interested in others’ Twitter posts quoted in the book, for example—but I’m glad I picked this up nevertheless.

A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes

Barthes built up a picture of the subjective experience of love through a series of “fragments”, descriptions of individual aspects of the experience drawn from literature or philosophy.

This was an astounding analytical work, in as much as it put into words emotions I’ve felt but never even considered classifying or really dwelt upon, but which certainly form part of being in love. Some of the ‘fragments’ felt like truly revelatory insights into my own life experiences.

On the other hand, if I’m being honest, most of this book was a bit of a slog to get through: it was a bit like reading a reference work of discrete entries. I read it piece by piece over several months because I couldn’t take it all in one go.

It was astounding and hard work to read at the same time.

Christmas with Dull People by Saki

It would probably have made more sense to read this in December, but it didn’t make its way to the top of the pile until this month.

Christmas with Dull People was a 48-page collection of four short, sharp stories satirising Edwardian social norms around Christmas. I don’t think I’ve read any Saki before and enjoyed his cutting wit. I enjoyed the last story, which concerned the writing of thank you letters, the most.

Motherland: Tortoise Quarterly, 2ed

Tortoise Quarterly is more magazine than book—it features thematic collections of longer articles from the Tortoise website.

In this edition, I particularly enjoyed Martin Samuel’s profile of Gary Linekar (who I previously knew almost nothing about), Zelda Perkins’s account of producing a musical with and for David Bowie, Susie Walker’s story of life as a female stand up comedian, and Simon Barnes’s deep dive into the causes of flooding in the UK.

Indistractable by Nir Eyal

It’s important context to know that Eyal is the author of another book on how to make technology addictive. He believes, and frequently argues, that such technologies should not be regulated because we can control our own usage of them.

In Indistractable, Eyal argued that one can maintaining focus despite potential distractions such as—but not limited to—addictive technology. He set out a few commonly described methods by which it is possible to maintain focus (such as planning to complete given tasks at given times). He also set out a few techniques commonly described techniques for reducing technology distractions (such as switching off notifications). He then set out a few commonly described tips on parenting in the age of modern technology (such as making sure children can use devices competently before allowing them unsupervised access). None of the ideas seemed original to me, and none added up to the thesis that these technologies should not be regulated.

Irritatingly, Eyal had a habit of presenting banal information as stunning insights. The most glaring of these was his repeated insistence that “total time spent on email = number of emails × average time spent on each email”. That is not an insight into anything, it is simply basic mathematics.

There was also a depressing assumption of affluence in Eyal’s writing. He suggested that we might encourage ourselves to go to the gym by bargaining with ourselves that if we failed to do so we’d burn a $100 bill. And he assumed an awful lot about availability of cash and time for parenting. All of which serves to undermine the thesis about regulation, which—after all—serves to protect the most vulnerable in society.

All in all, I found this pretty infuriating.