They say that reading history is the only way to understand the news. Someone recently, perhaps in a news article, suggested reading Conundrum as an essential text to understand the current hysteria over gender.

Morris died in 2020 at the age of 94: she was of my grandparents’ generation. She is best known as a journalist and travel writer, including the only journalist accompanying Edmund Hillary and colleagues on the first expedition to successfully ascend Mount Everest in 1953.

This book, published in 1974, documents her gender transition. She was born James Morris, the name she used until after her gender reassignment surgery in 1972. There is, by the way, plenty of background colour about her journalistic career, which I found fascinating.

Conundrum is of its time, and some descriptions and gender stereotypes would be considered ‘problematic’ today. It is, nevertheless, beautifully written, and I had no trouble turning the pages.

I’ve sometimes struggled to fully understand the motivation behind transitioning from one gender to another. I’m in the privileged position that it’s something I’ve never been driven to contemplate at any length. Perhaps I undervalue the impact of my gender on my life, and so I find it difficult to appreciate why it’s such a big deal to others. Morris helped me see this differently and understand that—for her—the change and associated surgery were ‘corrective’.

This is an idea I’ve come across before, but something in Morris’s explanation made it ‘click’ for me. I think I appreciated her comparison between the medical ethics of removing a healthy arm and a healthy penis, a perspective I hadn’t considered before. I found myself challenged and enlightened as a result.

I also found Morris’s discussion of the bureaucracy of her change insightful: whether she could remain married, still be a member of her male-only members’ clubs, and so forth. I was struck by how such things were dealt with in the 1970s, mostly with compassion, care and, perhaps above all, consideration for Morris’s feelings.

It feels worlds away from the unpleasant approach of those who seek to divide us in the 2020s. It’s both unimaginable and yet true that half a century later, Ministers of the Crown try to score rhetorical points in Parliament by discussing whether women can have penises. There is no compassion for any individual in suggesting, as a former Home Secretary did at the despatch box, that Sir Keir Starker may run as Labour’s first female Prime Minister.

This New Year’s Eve, perhaps we can hope for the future that our leaders will be better at learning from our past.

This book contains 23 short chapters, each of which Housel attempts to identify an aspect of the world that never changes. Therefore, I had expected this to be discursive and philosophical and was disappointed. This is more the sort of book which belongs in the business section of an airport bookshop, which isn’t the sort of book I tend to enjoy (though many people do).

It’s a book that creates trains of logic between different disciplines, but in a way that does not always seem to work. For example, one chapter is dedicated to the need for businesses to keep ‘evolving’ to stay relevant and successful. Housel uses the example of Sears as a business which became too static, partly because of its size. He relates this to comparing a T-Rex and bacteria: the T-Rex is too large and therefore vulnerable to extinction, whereas bacterial species have tenaciously survived for millennia. But this example undermines the original point: the bacteria have remained static in evolutionary terms, especially compared to a T-Rex, so it’s a counterargument to the requirement to keep ‘evolving’—not a supporting argument as Housel seems to think.

Much of the book struck me as similarly confused. There are a lot of things in this book that Housel cites as fundamental, unchanging lessons about the world, which I think are anything but. He rarely looks back more than a couple of centuries for his supporting anecdotes, and the format doesn’t give him the space to develop his ideas or refute any counterarguments.

At one point, Housel quotes Bertrand Russell as saying:

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I would characterise the book as ‘stupid’, but it is certainly long on confidence and short on doubt.

One sentiment that I thought Housel put across well in this book was about the difficulty of maintaining long-term plans:

Saying you have a ­ten-­year time horizon doesn’t exempt you from all the nonsense that happens in the next ten years. Everyone has to experience the recessions, the bear markets, the meltdowns, the surprises, and the memes. So rather than assuming ­long-­term thinkers don’t have to deal with ­short-­term nonsense, ask the question, “How can I endure a ­never-­ending parade of nonsense?”

But overall, this book just wasn’t my kind of thing… but it might be yours!

I read this popular Japanese novel in its English translation by Alison Watts, and if I could use only one word to describe it, it would be ‘warm’. The book has five sections, each narrated by one of a diverse collection of residents of the Hatori ward of Tokyo. Each of them, for one reason or another, visits the community library. The fearsome librarian, Sayuri Komachi, recommends an unexpected book which helps things work out in their life.

This is a comforting book about things which turn out well for lovely people, if not quite as originally envisaged. It’s a kind and tender book, but it’s a deep kindness: this is a story with depth. I was charmed by it.

This quotation captures the theme of the book, I think:

Life is one revelation after another. Things don’t always go to plan, no matter what your circumstances. But the flip side is all the unexpected, wonderful things that you could never have imagined happening. Ultimately it’s all for the best that many things don’t turn out the way we hoped. Try not to think of upset plans or schedules as personal failure or bad luck. If you can do that, then you can change, in your own self and in your life overall.

Sometimes, books which feature books become a bit overly sentimental about, well, books. Aoyama nicely captures the way that the experience of reading depends as much on the reader as the writer. This is an obvious truth, but it’s too often overlooked in favour of sentimentality about books in books:

Readers make their own personal connections to words irrespective of the writer’s intentions and each reader gains something unique.

It was just lovely.

In recent weeks, I’ve found it a bit difficult to concentrate when reading: there’s been a lot of other stuff going on. I felt like I needed an easy read to get back into my groove, so when I saw Backstory recommending Quietly Hostile, I thought it might fit the bill.

Prior to picking up this book, I’d never heard of Samantha Irby. It turns out that she is a well-known American comedic writer in her early 40s. She came to attention by writing a blog of humourous observations about her life, bitches gotta eat. Since then, she’s written five books, hosted a number of shows, and worked as a writer on the Sex and the City reboot. Quietly Hostile is her most recent book, consisting of a series of short humorous essays.

It was a good fit for my intention: it was easy to read, mostly trivial, and quite funny. I enjoyed reading it partly because Irby’s life as a black American female comedian is so far removed from mine, while still remaining relatable. This did mean that many of the knowing references were lost on me. I skipped the essay about Sex and the City in its entirety as I simply couldn’t follow it.

I don’t have any intention of re-reading this book, nor of seeking out Irby’s other similar titles, but this book served the purpose I asked of it. Can we ever ask more of a book than that?

A couple of quotations I enjoyed:

I like to have the news on in the background when I’m puttering around at home because I find the tone-modulated droning of newscasters oddly soothing, and my preferred way of learning what’s happening in the world is to absorb it via osmosis, never directly because that feels too stressful.

‘Quietly hostile’ is how I would describe my public personality; I am mild-mannered and super polite, but just beneath the surface of my skin, my blood is electrified and I am one inconsiderate driver away from a full Falling Down–style emotional collapse.

A few years ago, I read psychotherapist Philippa Perry’s How to Stay Sane. I thought the writing was good but that the book was too practical and less analytical than I had hoped it would be.

Recently, I’ve read this new book—which, for brevity, I’ll call Everyone—and I enjoyed it much more. Relationships are the book’s focus, including social relationships, those in the workplace, and those within families. Perry advises on valuable techniques for getting the best out of interactions and illustrates many of her concepts through advice related to letters from readers.

The advice in this book feels grounded. It is neither earth-shattering nor new, yet the book is an easy read which manages to be both comforting and challenging. I enjoyed spending time with it.

Some quotations:

There’s a difference between thoughts and thinking. You’ll have thousands of thoughts a day. Latching on to a thought turns it into thinking; you fertilise it. So, latch on to the good ones and let the others float by.

Putting a feeling into words is what we call in therapy ‘processing feelings’. When you can calmly talk about how you feel you have control of the feeling, rather than the feeling having control of you. If we don’t get into the habit of doing this, we will continue to act out the feeling, or hold it in, where it might burn away at us.

Often we can fall into the trap of interpreting behaviour by what it would mean if we did whatever the other person is doing. Someone else’s behaviour has a different meaning from what it would mean if you did it.

As we are in charge of ourselves, rather than other people, if we want something to change, it is our responsibility to change ourselves. Others will respond to that change or they won’t, and that is not within our control.

Sometimes other people are annoying and awful, and sometimes they are simply approaching life differently to us. If we don’t learn to cope with difference, either we’re fighting the whole time or we collapse and lose our sense of self, consumed by what others want of us.

This book seems to have had a digital release in September, but isn’t coming out in physical form in the UK until 2024. It’s therefore the first book I’ve read in ages which I’ve read purely digitally. I bought it after the book was referenced in this Johnson column in The Economist.

It’s a short book largely based on behavioural science about how to write clearly and concisely. At work, one of my pet peeves is poorly written corporate communications. I get quite riled when people send mass emails which I can’t understand, frequently with calls to action that are bafflingly unclear. You wouldn’t know it from my rambling on here, but in professional life, I spend a lot of time refining things I write to make them as precise, concise and clear as possible.

As a result, I spent most of this book nodding along. I don’t think I picked up anything new from it, but I appreciated how to authors compiled sage advice into this short, actionable format. It should be required reading for anyone drafting any sort of corporate communication… and many of the principles are applicable in personal life as well.

I read the 2023 translation by Alison L Strayer of Ernaux’s 2022 autobiographical essay. It is not long: the Fitzcarraldo Editions version extends to 26 pages of very large print text.

The essay covers Ernaux’s relationship with a student thirty years her junior, which occurred around the millennium when Ernaux was in her fifties. It felt honest and thoughtful, with the plain and quite direct style of writing that I remember from reading Simple Pleasures a couple of years ago.

My overriding feeling was a sort of envy at Ernaux’s self-awareness and capacity for self-analysis, even if not for the choices she makes in her life. I think I’d enjoy reading more of her work.

Eleanor Catton is a much-loved, Booker-winning author. This is Catton’s third novel, but the first I’ve read. The plot, set in New Zealand, concerns a dispute between a guerrilla gardening collective of stereotypical eco-warriors and a stereotypical tech billionaire.

This book has received rave reviews elsewhere, so I think the fault is with me rather than the book, but I just didn’t get it. The writing in the first part of the novel is great, and there is a lot of fun as Catton introduces her well-meaning but essentially ridiculous group of eco-warriors. There’s a particularly memorable scene where the group discusses translating their name—Birnam Wood—into an indigenous language. The group gets into an insane argument over whether that’s a way of showing respect, or whether using someone else’s language is cultural appropriation.

The problem is that the later parts of the book—which are a sort of plot-driven thriller—require me to care about people who have been set up as cartoons. Then the book also ends cartoonishly, sort of reverting to type. I couldn’t make those shifts, and didn’t really care about the characters, losing interest in the slightly silly plot.

Most upsettingly of all, especially for a literary novel, I didn’t feel like I came away from this book with any new perspective on anything. It felt like the novel relied on well-worn tropes without doing anything to subvert them.

So, in summary, this wasn’t for me.

This is a newly published book, but not a newly published story: it was published in The New Yorker last year, and even translated into French and published as a hardback. For Faber, this feels a bit like a cash-in on Keegan’s Booker shortlisting, like money for old rope, admittedly with the odd word changed. It’s 6,000 words or thereabouts: it would be hard not to read it in a single sitting.

None of which says anything at all about the work itself, which happens to be brilliant. I’ve previously enjoyed Foster and Small Things Like These by the same author, though was left unmoved by The Forester’s Daughter, so my praise for Keegan hasn’t been universal. But I thought So Late in the Day was exceptional. The tone reminded me a bit of the pervasive regret of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels.

It’s hard to write anything meaningful about such a slight novel without giving everything away. Its French title was Misogynie. Our narrator is Cathal, an Irish Civil Servant, and we find him contemplating the history of his relationship with his ex-fiancee. The prose is understated and precisely written.

I would highly recommend it.

I loved Eliza Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, which was dark, violent, and very subversively funny. I really looked forward to getting stuck into this second novel, though I slightly feared that it might be a ‘difficult’ second novel. There was a danger that Clark might just try to repeat the singular tone, style, and content of her first novel, and not quite pull it off.

I needn’t have worried: Clark is clearly a much better writer than that.

Penance is a parody of a true-crime book. It is ostensibly written by Alec Carelli, a thoroughly unlikeable journalist whose obsequiousness drops from every page. He is manipulative and judgemental, and Clark relentless skewers him.

The crime in the book is the violent murder of a 16-year-old girl, committed by three of her school friends on the night of the Brexit referendum. Clark inhabits no end of different styles for this book, perfectly parodying true crime podcasters, commenters on internet forums, and discourse on Tumblr. She even writes a pitch-perfect Guardian interview as a postscript.

Granta recently named Clark as one of the best novelists under 40. I think she’s one of the best novelists, full stop, and this book only goes to prove that.

Some quotations:

Vance Diamond, for the uninitiated, was a nightclub owner, radio and television presenter and a philanthropist. He was also a serial sex offender – possibly one of the worst in British history if one could quantify sex offences on a scorecard the way we might ‘score’ a serial killer.

The Cherry Creek massacre was a pretty obscure case—it still kind of is outside of true-crime circles, honestly. Another American school shooting—it feels like there’s one every five minutes so it’s like who cares, big deal, even the most obsessed people can barely keep up with them.

Violet liked battered things. Nothing was so delicate and precious as that which had already begun to fall to pieces. She wanted to preserve its last gasp of colour and beauty.

I would put up a big front online, but I spent a lot of time alone in my room, feeling really shitty about myself.