Steinbeck’s 1945 novel has been on my ‘to read’ list for years. I’ve finally got round to it after a friend pressed it into my hands. I had recommended Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan to her, and she said that she felt the two had similarities of style and theme. I agree.

There’s probably little point me rehearsing the plot of such a famous book, but if you’re unfamiliar as I was, Cannery Row is set during the Great Depression and is formed of a series of interlinked short stories about characters who live on a street of sardine canneries. It’s a charming, nostalgic, funny and wise book whose characters live long in the memory.

It’s one of those short classics that I wish I’d read sooner.

This book combines a history of the development of PowerPoint software, an ode to its functions, advice on presenting well, and—most up my street—an excoriation of poor corporate communication. The prose is written in a personal, conversational style, interspersed with PowerPoint slides—a couple of which I recently shared. It is a riot of a book.

Davies argues powerfully and convincingly that PowerPoint is often wrongly blamed for failures which lie elsewhere—usually in poor decisions about communication. Too often, screeds that should have been documents are pasted onto slides.

I didn’t understand why everyone was so contemptuous of a tool I found so joyous and liberating. I understood that bad presentations were bad. I’d sat through a lot of them. But I couldn’t quite see why everyone blamed the tool itself. It seemed like blaming pulpits for the boringness of sermons or printing for the tedium of books. I started to get a chip on my shoulder about all this PowerPointHate.

The section about presentations before PowerPoint—overhead projectors, transparencies, and those special felt-tipped pens—brought memories of giving presentations at medical school flooding back. Even in my fourth year, by which time PowerPoint was pretty common, we were routinely expected to have a backup on transparencies in case of ‘technical failure’—I remember deciding to buy transparencies that my printer could print onto, at what seemed like enormous expense. I hadn’t thought about that in years.

The second on corporate communication was great, which isn’t surprising: Davies was heavily involved with the creation of gov.uk which has a brilliant style guide. It is a shame that it is not more often followed by government departments. The line that will stay with me for longest is the astute observation that the word ‘key’ can almost always be deleted from any corporate document without consequence.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I’m not normally a big fan of historical fiction, preferring to read things set in the present day. However, Tom Crewe’s debut novel was so widely recommended that I thought I’d give it a go.

The novel is fiction, but it is inspired by the story of John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis jointly writing one of the first medical texts about human sexuality in the late Victorian era. Both of the male authors portrayed in The New Life are married, though each has particular sexual preferences: one has relationships with men, while the other is aroused by women urinating. Their medical text concerns homosexuality—or ‘inversion’ in the language of the period—and forms part of their wider view that world ought to embrace progressive social change. The arrest of Oscar Wilde reveals a greater level of establishment prejudice than they had perhaps anticipated, and indirectly threatens their work.

I enjoyed reading this, but I found the Victorian dialogue a bit wearing and the claustrophobic, stifling social norms hard work. I know that it could be argued that that’s the point, but I find it quite hard to empathise with people who are buttoned up to quite that extent… which is one reason I don’t really like historical fiction.

I did highlight a few passages:

We must live in the future we hope to make.

‘And you look very fine.’ She tugged playfully at his lapel. ‘A new suit! Is it horribly uncomfortable?’

‘Horribly. Freedom lost for freedom gained.’

‘And what are you? You are not so oblivious as to think there are only two of us. Is the law beyond scrutiny? It is a rotten, filthy law. That is the stain. The point of my conclusion, which you single out for scandal, is that there is a benefit, as you call it, in a proper comprehension of the past. The knowledge that what we punsih with hard labour — a crime for which men used to hang in our fathers’ time — was once praised, understood, practised, by the very men whose thought we teach our sons, whose heroics we pride ourselves on matching, whose marbles we line up for edification; may that knowledge not do some useful work in the world? How can it not?’

‘But Henry,’ she almost shouted, ‘you never did have me to yourself. It was on that basis that we married, that we thought up our marriage. No two people need be everything to each other.’

‘You have become everything.’

She stared at him defiantly. ‘I do not want to be, to anyone.’

Anguish locked in this throat. ‘You are. I am only loneliness without you.’

She stared at him still. ‘Then we should never have married,’ she said, quite plainly, putting down the plates.

A couple married for as long as they had been could know many things without ever talking about them. Sometimes it was the need to speak which signalled trouble.

It had mattered that his father was a doctor. As a child he liked the comings and goings at the house — the front door opening on a patient was like the beginning of a story — and he liked his father for being so wanted and necessary.

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.