Wow. Wow. And for the avoidance of doubt: wow. Caleb Azumah Nelson writes astonishingly good prose.

It’s three years since I read his ‘stunning’ first novel, Open Water. I bought this second novel when it first came out, a year ago. I’ve been scared to read it because I didn’t think it could possibly live up to the promise of his first book, and I was braced for disappointment.

But wow.

Nelson writes prose that is also poetry. His turn of phrase, his toying with language, and his perfect elucidation of specific thoughts and feelings are incredible.

Despite that talent, the theme of this book is music and how it traverses the limits of language. It’s so lovely to read a recent novel that is sceptical of the power of language, that is not a peon to the written word. For it to be written in such beautiful language itself is a singular treat.

I can barely tell you the plot of the book because I was so taken with the writing that I almost didn’t notice. That narrator, a young black Londoner born to Ghanian parents comes of age, struggles with his relationship with his parents, and visits his extended family in Ghana. He revels in jazz, dancing—the solution of all of life’s problems—and playing the trumpet. I wasn’t as absorbed by the plot of this book as I was by Open Water, but I didn’t really mind.

The New York Times called Nelson’s writing in this book ‘overwrought or just bizarre’, so I’m more than willing to accept that this isn’t a book for everyone. But it was certainly for me, and I will wait with a combination of excitement and trepidation for whatever he writes next.

If I had to name one genre that I struggle with more than any other, science fiction would be it. Kawaguchi’s series about a cafe called Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo is plainly science fiction, but it had been recommended so many times that I thought I’d give it a go.

This first in the series was a play in 2010, published as a novel in Japan in 2015, and an English translation by Geoffrey Trousselot was published in 2019.

The conceit is very silly. Funiculi Funicula has a particular seat whose occupants can time travel, though only once in their lifetime. They cannot move from the seat, and they return to the present once they finish their coffee—which they must do before it gets cold. Oh, and most crucially, nothing they do while time travelling can affect the present in any way. In this volume, four people make a journey through time.

For the most part, the tone of the book is warm and light: it has an awareness of the silliness of its premise, and there’s a weary humour about it within the dialogue. But there are passages that are deeply moving, events and moments of realisation that hit with surprising heaviness and melancholy.

This isn’t really a book about time travel: it’s a book about leaving the past behind, making the most of the present and embracing the future. It’s to no-one’s benefit to live in their past and thereby become a ghost in the present.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. There are three sequels which have already been published, and another due in September. I will look out for all of them.

Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust.

I took this out of the library after seeing that the second book in Deary’s intended trilogy, How We Break, had recently been published and positively reviewed.

How We Are was first published in 2014, and it’s a book which blends philosophy with some self-help. It is broadly about habits and the degree to which we live our lives on autopilot. It’s also about how we break out of those habits.

The book is in two ‘acts’, named ‘saming’ and ‘changing’, as in the lyrics to the song These Boots Are Made for Walkin’—‘You keep saming when you ought to be changing’.

And in two words, that’s why I didn’t get on with this book. It is stuffed with pop culture references, particularly to films, which meant absolutely nothing to me. It’s neither fun nor enlightening to read passages about why the action of a character in a movie you’ve never heard of illustrate a key philosophical point.

I suspect this is also the reason other people rave about Deary’s book. I suspect that if you get the references, this genre-bending book is fun and enlightening. I can imagine that it might even be delightful.

But not for someone as ignorant as me.

I still took away some nice quotations:

London Transport, the governing body of the capital’s transport infrastructure, used to have a surprisingly abstract definition of family. On the back of their family ticket, where up to two adults and two children could travel cheaply, they defined family like this: ‘Family are those who stay together for the duration of the journey’

‘A walk in the park’ is a synonym for ease because the park knows how to walk. It does it for us. A good park anticipates our desire. Anticipated desire is the key to leisure. People have been paid and good money has been spent on figuring out what we are going to want to do. They care so that we don’t have to. The good hotel, the theme park, the penny arcade, the pub, the cinema – all of them relieve our consciousness of the burden of worrying about what to do next.

The better the park, the less we have to think what to do next. We place ourselves at the beginning of the path and it walks us, guides us through its sub-routines, its different games. Here for children, there for the scenic stroll, there for tennis, here to sit and enjoy the sun. The path leads, we follow. Many other sets of circumstances, many other social objects, play a similar game with us. The fairground and the playground are the archetypes of these. We want to be taken for a ride, to give over agency, to abdicate will, for a while, to something that will move us without our conscious intercession. That is what we want from leisure, it’s what leisure is — the switching off of choice and doubt.

I am dedicating myself to the perception that, however unlikely, however against nature, improvement happens, people get better. I mean better at living, at being who they are, at handling life with grace, humour and courage. Some people handle life admirably. And other people really don’t. Some get stuck in hideous deforming places and postures and become ever more unbearable versions of themselves.

I inhaled this short novel in a single sitting. A group of young American tourists are staying at a hotel on the Amalfi coast as a result of their luxury yacht breaking down. They meet a mysterious gentleman from Peru, and we’re sucked into a beguiling tale about missed connections, unfulfilled potential, lost opportunities, how we can’t escape our past, and—most of all—the tenacity of love.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling the book. I’ve previously said that no-one can write ‘longing’ quite like Aciman, and he proves that here by taking it to an extreme. The book evokes the Amalfi coast as brilliantly as Aciman’s previous books have evoked their sun-drenched locations. This book has a fair slice of allegorical fantasy to it, but is still firmly grounded in love and philosophy.

I really enjoyed this: reading it was like being taken on an Italian holiday for a couple of hours. It was transporting, delightful, insightful, and emotional. It was great.

Here are some lines I highlighted:

‘Sometimes the best things couldn’t be simpler: the scent of lemon, a few bars from a Beethoven quartet, the shiny broad shoulder of a woman in a bathing suit resting on a beach towel, a seascape by Dufy, or just the smile on someone’s face you love.’

‘Can we add Caol Ila from Scotland to the list?’

What neither realized was that all their bile and venom and their contempt for each other was precisely what allowed instant intimacy to spread between them without their sensing, much less suspecting, that it had already happened.

For this is what life is: a waiting room. But feel for the dead, who take what they’ve waited for to the underworld and continue waiting to come back to earth to be made to live again and wait some more. So, better one hour spent doing things we’ll regret having done than a lifetime waiting for heaven to touch our lives.

We may no longer be the person we once were, but what if this person did not necessarily die but continued his life in the shadowland of our own, so that you could say that our life is filled with shadow-selves who continue to tag along and to beckon us in all directions even as we live our own lives – all these selves clamouring to have their say, their time, their life, if only we listened and gave in to them!

The point is we all go back. We spend more time than we know trying to go back. We call it fantasizing, we call it dreaming, we give it all manner of names. But we’re all crawling back, each in his or her own way. Very few of us know the way, most never find the door, much less the key to the door. We’re just groping in the dark. Some of us may even feel we’re not from planet Earth but have come down from elsewhere and are all pretending to be normal earthlings. And yet not one of us is. to be We might as well come from Mars or, as happens my case, from a very distant place, or planet, called Peru, which may no longer even exist for me. Some know their way back and some won’t ever know.

Published last year, Monica Heisey’s bestselling comic novel follows Maggie, a 29-year-old Torontonian PhD student, as her marriage ends. This really wasn’t for me.

There is precious little plot in this novel: it’s intended, I think, as a character study. However, the central character seems to be a collection of clichés rather than a believable person. She is endlessly self-centred and devoid of a sense of agency or responsibility. She is ‘extremely online’, forever worrying about her pictures on Instagram and dating apps. She capitalises Important Phrases. She is cartoonish.

Perhaps as a result, I didn’t feel any emotional connection to the book or its characters. It was all just a bit flat. There were some funny lines, but they didn’t add up to an engaging whole.

Here are some bits I highlighted:

The idea of Jon writing breakup songs in some dark sublet filled me with equal parts deep despair and incredible relief – despair, to think that I had caused him such pain he’d been driven to experimental songwriting; relief that I wouldn’t have to listen to it.

No adult starts a hobby from a good place.’

She was right. It didn’t matter if it was a buzzy new fitness trend or an aspirationally useful class or something fun and specific, like life drawing or an Italian conversation group – everyone involved in adult learning was running from something.

I looked beautiful in it, but walking down the aisle that day I still felt enormously stupid. What was I doing, veil or not, tottering around a church in a virgin costume in front of everyone I knew, toward a man I’d been living with for years? Why did we need to validate our commitment with this showy little stroll?

I told her getting divorced was like getting stuck in a blouse at Zara: I was struggling, and it was clearly the wrong fit, but maybe it would be more embarrassing to try to take it off, to come out of the dressing room and have to admit, I tried, but I couldn’t make it work. Maybe it would have been easier not to attempt extraction. Maybe I should have flung open the curtain and proclaimed it my favourite, insisted on wearing it out of the store and every day thereafter, laughing as it cut off the circulation to my arms

My feed was saturated with alluring images of expensive medical procedures that made women in their forties and fifties look ten years younger merely by cutting their faces off and sewing them back on higher up.

I received this book as a particularly well-chosen Christmas present, just a few months after I finished Tim Marshall’s excellent book The Future of Geography. While Marshall’s book considers space in geopolitical terms, Peake concentrates on the human experience of space flight, from the first cosmonauts to the current Artemis programme.

Peake’s experience in space means he can bring personal insights into much he discusses, and he’s also a great writer. It helps that his focus in this book is on humans, which means that it doesn’t get excessively bogged down in discussion of the technology of spaceflight, which I have sometimes found hard to follow in other books.

Rather than recounting the history of human spaceflight chronologically, Peake tackles it thematically. For example, the early part of the book covers the process of astronaut recruitment and selection, and Peake shows how this has changed over time. There’s a lot of social history woven through the narrative, which I felt added some extra interest. I found this an inspiring read.

Peake discusses the unique contribution that humans can make to space exploration. This section prompted me to reflect: in many areas of life, we’re used to considering how robots can replace humans. In spaceflight, the discussion seemed to start from the opposite point, looking for the areas in which the unique contribution of humans displaces the automatic assumption of using robots. With the expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence and automation becoming ever-more common, including in medicine, I wondered whether this might be a worthwhile thought experiment. If we assume that everything can be done by robots and algorithms, where can humans bring added value? I suspect the conclusions may be more nuanced and helpful than just thinking about which bits of a process can be replaced by automation. It’s an approach I might steal for future discussions about my own work.

I’ve read a fair amount about space exploration over the years, so much of this book’s content was already familiar. However, Peake’s enthusiasm and insight made for an enjoyable read, and his approach to telling the story highlighted areas I’d perhaps under-considered. I raced through this and would thoroughly recommend it.

I can’t remember when I first read a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, but I can remember when he became one of my favourite novelists: I was blown away by The Remains of the Day in 2016.

I can’t remember when I first heard Stacey Kent’s singing. I suspect I’d have first heard her on Monocle Radio, and I know for sure that she’s been on my playlists for about a decade.

I can remember when I first learned of a connection between the two: it was six months ago, when Faber announced the publication of this book. It is a collection of sixteen songs Ishiguro has written for Kent since 2007, several of which are still to be recorded. Some of my favourite Stacey Kent songs are in here: how did I miss that they were written by one of my favourite novelists?

Reading the lyrics of familiar songs on the page is a strange experience, and it is most definitely not the best way to experience these pieces of writing. They are made to be sung.

And yet, seeing them written down in the book, alongside beautiful cartoons by Bianca Bagnarelli, gave me a different appreciation for the work.

As astoundingly obvious as it may be, I’ve never before noticed that many of Kent’s songs are rooted in the present day, unlike jazz standards. No matter how many times I’ve heard The Ice Hotel or Bullet Train, it’s never previously occurred to me to think, ‘Gosh, that’s an unusually modern setting for a jazz song.’

I was also surprised by how short many of the lyrics are: the songs tell complete stories in my mind, and I’ve never before realised the linguistic brevity with which they’re told—or, perhaps, how much of the story-telling relies on Kent’s performance.

This book therefore gave me a renewed appreciation for the talents of both Ishiguro and Kent—but if you haven’t already heard the music, then it might not do much for you.

This book sold by the tonne last year, and the resulting coverage of ‘ultra-processed food’ was unavoidable. I studiously avoided reading the book, though. I’ve dabbled in nutritional research in the past, and have a reasonable handle on how complicated the subject can be. I assumed that this was another book by a celebrity doctor who would be giving an oversimplified, somewhat self-promotional message.

But then I gave in and was pleasantly surprised.

This book is quite narrowly focused on the under-recognised harms of ultra-processed food. As one of van Tulleken’s interviewees memorably puts it: ’It’s not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.’

This is explicitly not a diet or self-help book, and van Tulleken repeatedly emphasises that there’s more to diet than this narrow topic: cutting out all ultra-processed food from one’s diet does not guarantee a long, healthy and happy life. The central argument is merely that the introduction of ultra-processed food is probably an under-recognised driver of ill health at a population level. I was fairly convinced by that argument.

I found the book easy and enjoyable to read, partly because of van Tulleken’s humorous style of writing and his personal anecdotes, but also because some of the background literature he cites is familiar to me. I sometimes found some arguments in the book a little reaching, particularly when it came to trying to connect the development of ultra-processed foods with wider ethical concerns in some multinational corporations. I came to accept this as a rhetorical device in keeping with the tone of the book.

I enjoyed this and felt that I learned from it, and regret misjudging it from its cover!

The cover of this book caught my eye when it was first announced, but its subtitle—’an A-Z for the weary’—didn’t appeal. I imagined it to be a slightly patronising self-help book, and I didn’t buy it when it was published in January. This brief review in the TLS changed my mind, and I thought I’d give it a go.

The book is a literal A to Z, from ‘A is for Acceptance’ through to ‘Z is for Zeitgeist’. Each chapter is only a few pages long, but provides some genuine insight into burnout, and the relationship between modern work and exhaustion. Schaffner is a ‘burnout coach’, which is not the sort of title that fills me with confidence, but she is a great writer and clearly brings a wealth of experience and insight.

This isn’t a self-help book in as much as it isn’t directive: there are no instructions here for overcoming burnout. It’s a book designed to provide insight. Many of the chapters were about things that were already familiar—Bartleby the Scrivener, for example, or the Stoic philosophers—but I did find value in having Schaffner’s reflections on how these examples related to modern-day burnout.

So, I enjoyed this more than I expected.

Here are some passages that I highlighted:

The writer Jonathan Malesic defines burnout as the experience of being pulled between expectations and reality at work. We burn out, he argues, not because we are exhausted but because our hearts are broken. Our love for work went unrequited – it did not love us back. And nor did it bring us the dignity, purpose and recognition for which we hoped. Burnout, he writes, is ‘an ailment of the soul.

When we are in the grip of anhedonia, we often cannot even remember what used to bring us joy, and what it feels like to be properly alive, engaged, connected and full of zest. If that is you, then I urge you to find a hobby. This is not facetious advice for the following reasons: hobbies serve no purpose other than making the person who performs them happy. Like child’s play, they are unapologetically non-instrumental activities. They cannot be monetised nor utilised.

Sometimes, being caught in a bad situation can drain us of all vitality, even destroy our will to live. When we are that unlucky, we turn into ghosts, neither fully alive nor dead. We may continue to function at a physical level, but our spirits appear to have departed. Empty shells, we are incapable of experiencing joy. In fact, more often than not, we don’t feel anything at all. We have numbed our feelings to such an extent that we don’t even register the true scale of our suffering. And this is the point, of course: because it would be too devastating to hear what our feelings have to tell us, it is safer not to feel anything at all.

‘Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.’ In other words, what tends to be within our control is our inner life, our judgements, our reactions and how we treat others, while most other things, including what people think of us, are not.

The news we are fed is almost unremittingly negative. Studies have shown that it triggers our limbic system and stimulates the release of cortisol, thus deregulating our immune system, inhibiting the release of growth hormones and making us more prone to infections. As well as making us more fearful, aggressive and desensitised to the suffering of others, it can become a source of chronic stress. It can also kill our creativity.

During those dark nights of the soul, when all hope is gone and we feel lost and alone, we still have one option: to do the next right thing.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

This book was a gift from some friends, and like all good gifts, it’s something I’d never have chosen for myself: with occasional exceptions, I tend not to read books about wars. This novel is set in Newcastle in County Down, during the First World War. It is a fictionalised portrayal of an army unit set up to manufacture lifelike masks for soldiers who had suffered facial injuries during the war. It became known as ‘the tin nose shop’.

A novel about a British army unit stationed in Northern Ireland is not an obvious choice of subject for an American author, and it felt a little tonally off, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It’s really a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and the horror of war, and Snyder leans in heavily to the obvious allegory of a mask of normality hiding life-changing wounds.

Before reading this book, I had no idea about the historical existence of the ‘tin nose shop’. The venue on which the one in the book is based was actually located in London; Snyder’s introduction talks about relocating it to Northern Ireland after he holidayed there. I’m not sure if this was the right decision: the inevitable inclusion of the Easter Rising felt like an unnecessary additional complication to the plot. It worked for me, though: the imagery was lent a poignant vivacity by my previous visits to the town.

Without wanting to spoil anything, I was also surprised and pleased by the ending. I wasn’t surprised by the revelations at the end of the book, but I was surprised and moved by how they played out.

This isn’t the sort of thing that I’d normally read, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.