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.

I read this short book in an afternoon, as a sort of escapism. It had been recommended somewhere—I can’t remember where—as a gentle alternative to Marie Kondo’s books. I love a bit of Marie Kondo, but the idea of a gentle alternative felt comforting.

At heart, this is a book for people who are, for whatever reason, struggling in life and finding the tasks of looking after themselves and their home to be overwhelming. I am fortunate not to be in that position, but I nevertheless enjoyed the book.

Alongside the practical advice, Davis reflects on her own challenges in life, and passionately makes the point that household maintenance is not a moral issue. Her advice isn’t always practically generalisable—this is firmly disposable income, large house stuff—but I think Davis is really trying to suggest a mindset rather than particular cleaning techniques.

I was struck that Davis doesn’t seem to acknowledge the impact of social media on her own mental health, despite several mentions of TikTok comments leading her down dark paths. This seemed a strange omission given the themes explored in the book. It was only after reading the book that I understood that the book is a spin-off from her TikTok fame, and so perhaps her social media experiences are fairly singular.

I was interested to read this, and it was short, and it gave me something of a different perspective on the topics it explored—but I’m uncertain if I’ll remember it a year hence.

I’m not typically drawn to reading fiction set in the First or Second World War. This may seem odd and limiting, but I often feel uncomfortable about using such horrific events as a backdrop for fiction. This discomfort distracts me from the story, leading me to dark reflections on human nature—something I usually prefer to avoid.

This book was an exception. I avoided reading it for all of the above reasons, but eventually the weight of the number of recommendations wore me down. It was Tom Rowley and Amy Strong’s recommendation that finally tipped the balance. And, my goodness, I’m glad it did. I was interested that Amy said exactly the same as me about generally avoiding books set during the war.

This was an outstanding novel—and it’s a debut.

It begins at Preshute, a posh English public school. The novel focuses on two of the boys at this school—Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt—who we find on opposing sides of a school debate in 1916 about whether war is a necessary evil. We follow their relationship as they both end up on the Allied frontline, a particularly challenging experience for half-German Gaunt.

Winn examines how war transforms individuals, both subtly and profoundly. She captures the sheer brutality of war at a personal, intimate level, but skilfully mixes in humour and doesn’t shy away from highlighting the absurdity of war.

I would normally also object to the book featuring almost entirely upper-class experiences, but Winn won me over. I appreciated how she showed us the unhinged and unhealthy intertwining of the public school and class systems and the war. In that respect, this book makes an interesting companion to Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men and Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland.

The ‘historical note’ at the end of the book knocked me for six.

I’d recommend this very highly.

Yesterday, I promised to share some more from the latest Monocle Companion, so here are some thoughts on a grab-bag of essays.

An article on sleep by Claudia Jacob has some admirably straightforward advice:

So how can we simplify our sleep? The science tells us that the signs are abundant and free to see. Do you depend on an alarm to wake you? Do you need naps during the day and crave caffeine? Have you fallen asleep while hearing about a colleague’s weekend plans? If so, it’s probably time to get an early night to replenish your reserves. While the science of sleep is galloping ahead, you don’t need an app to understand it.

If only all journalistic health advice was so clear-minded.

In her essay on blame, Sally O’Sullivan says

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, sets up the mistaken idea that there is one right story, one truth. I’m sorry to say that this is never the case.

Every family member will see a situation differently and this multiplicity of truths is invariably complex. But no family is immune from these tussles. Indeed, the closer the relationship, the more likely it is that we will revert to blame.

This made me feel sorry for the Prince. I’ve seen so much vitriol directed at him for the phrase “my truth” often—wrongly, in my view—being taken to suggest that multiple truths are possible, rather than one singular truth. Here, he’s being criticised for exactly the opposite, based on exactly the same text.

The capacity of commentators to find fault may be infinite… this blogger included.

In an essay on reforming the modern approach to business, Josh Fehnert writes:

To conduct your business in good faith, in a way that’s transparent, rigorous and fairly managed, is a job in itself and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Remember that it is OK to forgive people. That said, distant targets, such as decarbonising by 2050 or improving the gender balance of your board within a decade, ring hollow. Isn’t it better to get going right away, even if that means making a few missteps, and reach your goal rather than kicking the can down the road?

Bravo. I’ve been involved in too many tedious arguments about long-term plans for organisations, which everyone knows no-one will stick to. This sometimes boils down to confusing strategy with implementation. It’s good to have a long-term strategy which guides an organisation’s approach. It’s also essential to have a separate plan for implementation with a much shorter time horizon and tangible staging posts. The vicissitudes of life will necessitate changes in implementations, which the strategy ought to float above.

I recently read a ten-year strategy for an organisation which—for sound reasons—no-one reasonably expects to exist ten years hence. So, apart from hubris, what was the point in giving the strategy a decade?

In an essay on the recycling symbol, Richard Spencer Powell suggests adding

a visible green circle on the front of all recyclable packaging. That means no ifs, buts, or claims of being “partially recyclable”; it either is or isn’t.

Alternatively, if your plastic packaging isn’t recyclable (or doing so involves very specific efforts from the consumer) then brands should be obliged to put a red dot on it.

I appreciate the problem Powell is trying to solve: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to fish crisp packets out of recycling bins, a problem excavated by claims on the packaging that it is recyclable… but only via a specific scheme.

But it’s evidence that Powell underestimates the challenge: even within the UK alone, the items which are recyclable in local council bins vary enormously, as do the conditions in which the recycling must be presented. It’s clearly not feasible to have regional packaging dots.

But quite apart from that, the byline makes clear that Powell oversaw the design of this very edition of Monocle Companion. The book not only omits any recycling guidance, but also is perhaps the only one I’ve read this year containing no information on the sustainability of its paper source.

Perhaps he ought to start closer to home?

Albert Read writes:

I believe that imagination is something you can work at. If we’re attentive to ours, we can find all sorts of potential within ourselves. We should pay attention to our imaginative health in the same way that we look after our physical health and emotional wellbeing. All the studies show that being imaginative and creative makes us happier and more fulfilled. It’s the root of being alive.

I’m not keen on the ‘medicalisation’ of the topic, and I’m turned-off by the phrase ‘all the studies show’. But I completely concur with the wider point. Imagination and creativity are undervalued assets in life.

I’m not sure what made me relate this essay to work—I’m starting to see a bit of a theme in this post. Yet, I think that a little less adherence to change theory or management models in some health organisations, and a little more deep creative thought and engagement, would go a long way.

In a fantastic essay on friendship, David Sax says, in the context of the workplace:

Humans remain a social species and trust is the only currency that matters.

I reflected a lot on this. It’s obviously true: if I have a tricky professional decision to make, I run it past people I trust, not necessarily people with particular titles. Similarly, my close colleagues will often ask, ‘Who’s a sensible person to ask about X?’—which is really a question about whom I would trust.

I think I’m often critical of others for trying to use hierarchy in place of trust. But this made me reflect that perhaps I have become a bit slack in fostering trust too. It’s easy to get frustrated with being asked to explain principles repeatedly to different people, but perhaps I don’t spend enough time considering that it’s only the first time I’m explaining it to the latest person. Using it as an opportunity to patiently foster trust is probably a better approach than getting frustrated.

In an essay on commuting, Lilian Fawcett writes:

It’s a liminal time between commitments that gives our minds space to wander.

I know I’m not alone in finding solace in liminal spaces: sitting on a train, in an airport departure lounge, in a hotel lobby. I find it uniquely relaxing to be anywhere where I have a right and necessity to be, but where there is no expectation on me.

I also thoroughly enjoy my walks into work, but I hadn’t really connected these two preferences until I read Fawcett’s essay. Now I see that they are essentially the same thing… albeit walking is a little more active.

I’ve recently read the latest Monocle Companion while on holiday, its slightly battered appearance being testament to the not-quite-library conditions in which I read it. These paperbacks, of which this is the third, are collections of short essays by Monocle contributors, many of them previously published elsewhere. This is the first collection that I’ve read.

I’m milking two posts out of this, so you’ll be getting more tomorrow. Firstly, I want to tell you about an essay by Andrew Mueller which gave me pause for thought. Mueller is sharing his lessons from 35 years as a journalist.

Online, everything is forever. Every so often, some outraged archivist will dig up something stupid or obnoxious that I wrote for the music press when I was much younger, and much less clever than I thought, and brandish it angrily at me via email or Twitter, demanding to know whether I penned the offending snippet. Yes, I’ll tell them, I did. I wouldn’t write it now, and I won’t defend it now, but that is indeed my byline and, while there are probably more productive uses of everyone’s energy, I am accountable for it.

I occasionally doubt my own decision to keep over 20 years’ worth of blog posts on this site. Like Mueller, I wrote some stuff when I was younger that feels embarrassing today. But even if I were to delete the back catalogue, “online, everything is forever”: it’s not like it would be hard to find cached copies. And, in the end, to delete it is just to disown it, and I’m not confident that changes anything.

There is a lot on here that I wouldn’t write today. But I did write it, it is out there, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to delete it now rather than trying to maintain it in some sort of context.

Even with the best will, and the most meticulous diligence, you are going to get things wrong. In journalism, if all works as it should, a sub-editor will catch it between your keyboard and the page (and if they do, thank them). But if they don’t spot it, a reader will and they will write in to make it known. So always respond gratefully and humbly. This life offers few more exultant joys that being proved right and you should not wish to deprive anybody else of that.

I’m a doctor, not a journalist, by my goodness this felt familiar. Some of the most frustrating professional experiences of my life have come about through people being unwilling to admit errors, even when they are plainly visible.

We all get things wrong. It is when we get things wrong that we’re most able to learn, both from the error itself, and from understanding how the error arose. Was it a misjudgement? A misunderstanding? A lack of knowledge? A simple slip? A systemic issue?

It’s rare in any part of medicine that we can implement a change that will have a lasting impact on numerous people: mistakes are a golden opportunity to do exactly that, by preventing others from experiencing the effects of the same error repeated. To ignore mistakes, or to pretend they don’t exist, is to pass up a golden opportunity.

The best result of all is where the error is solely mine, perhaps because I misunderstood something or misread something or failed to take something into account. Those situations provide the opportunity for personal growth, to share learning, and to be open, allowing me to cultivate precisely the culture in which I’d prefer to work.

You should do the best you can at what you do, of course. But you don’t get to decide its, or your, value to anybody else.

Hurrah for that statement. My professional life would be much less enervating if I wasn’t regularly told that ‘service changes’ or ‘modernisations’ or ‘system improvements’ were extremely valuable in terms of making my life easier when the opposite is true.

I know Luke O’Neil from his email newsletter Welcome to Hell World, where he has been heavily promoting this recently published book. It is the most unsettling book I’ve read in a long time. The book is a collection of short stories and poems which I think I’d broadly categorise as ‘horror’, but horror which is grounded in contemporary reality. This is a book about climate change, the breakdown of society, racism, police brutality, gun violence… essentially, all the catastrophes that stalk the Western world, and the USA in particular.

O’Neil writes in a distinctive style which eschews commas, and often other punctuation marks as well. I went backwards and forwards on how I felt about this: his style gives his text urgency and pressure, but it did become a little frustrating at times that everything had urgency and pressure.

The content, though, is both breathtakingly imaginative and yet also very much based in the contemporary real world. It is filled with myriad offbeat observations: O’Neils short section on the distance that the people killed by gun violence in the USA in a year would stretch if their bodies were laid end-to-end created imagery in my mind that I’ll never forget. Similarly, his climate change allegory about a pair of scuba divers accidentally abandoned at sea.

This book was quite unlike anything else I can ever remember reading, and I’d highly recommend it. Not every story within in resonated with me, and I found that the style of writing meant that I could only stand to read it in short chunks, but it will live long in my memory.

Some quotations… quite a few quotations… it’s very quotable…

Something is wrong with me but I think it’s probably the same thing that’s wrong with everyone so maybe it doesn’t matter.

The average adult in America is about 66 inches tall. Around 40,000 people die from gun violence here a year. 2,000 or so of them are children or teenagers so they won’t be that tall but we’re doing rough math here.

66 inches per body

x

40,000

=

2,640,000 inches

That’s roughly 42 miles of bodies a year.

Does that seem like a lot or a little to you because I guess I was thinking it would be more than that but then again I’ve never thought about it in these terms before so I have no frame of reference.

It would take you about an hour to drive from the beginning of the bodies to the end depending on traffic. Your kids would get bored and rambunctious on the trip in the back of the car and you’d have to turn around and be like alright you two that’s enough.

The average person would have a very hard time walking that far in one go. They’d have to make a lot of stops along the way and stay hydrated.

Imagine the biggest house on your block was always in flames and it burned all the time and it burned so often that you eventually just accepted as a given that there was going to be a house down the street that would be burning no matter what anyone did which was in any case not much. If firefighters were cops and when they came they just stood around and were like I don’t know what to tell you champ and got pissed off about you asking them to do anything at all then kicked your asshole in.

We have to address Fire House the stern mayor would say on TV and then they would get it under control for a while until they didn’t and the mayor would have to come on TV again. Goddamnit he’d say. This time I mean it.

You would get used to the smoke after a while right? It’s probably not going to get me you’d think then you’d go run your errands at the store and the mayor would get in trouble for fucking someone he wasn’t supposed to fuck and everyone would get preoccupied about that for a week or two.

We dragged the tree inside from the cold like it owed us money and set a bowl of water out for it so it could drink and pretend it was still alive for a little while longer pretend it had a future and then a few days passed and we still couldn’t find the goddamned box of lights in the wet basement so it stood there in the corner in its nakedness.

When the hornets were attacking me I dumped off my bike and ran back to my mother and she told me to take the jacket off. Take the jacket off she yelled at me but I couldn’t. I decided to roll around on the ground like I was on fire which I sort of was and thereby squishing all of the stingers into me. Stop drop and roll would have been one of the only things they taught kids about not dying at that point in history. Not getting into strange vans too I suppose. They didn’t even teach kids how to hide from gunmen yet when I was young that wasn’t invented yet.

I never used to understand in dystopian stories why people seemed to be racist against robots very early on in the narrative like before they had even switched to being evil but then I realized that in their fictional world they probably had some odious billionaire that everybody had long already hated for exploiting them by the time he invented the robots so then I got it. It’s humiliating enough just being ambiently enslaved by these guys I can only imagine what it feels like when the transaction becomes literal.

I read the comments under the video and some people said it was a shark but then other people said it was a dogfish and then other people still said a dogfish is actually a type of shark fucking dumbass why don’t you go kill yourself etc. You know how conversations go online.

Due to a miscount by the person leading the scuba expedition the couple emerge from the depths to realize the boat has left them behind. At first they presume that the mistake will be rectified in the way we all do when something goes wrong. Well this is fucked but certainly order will be restored presently we think.

She didn’t pay attention at first because she was busy cultivating her maladies.

A friend called that I haven’t spoken to since the early days of the pandemic back when you would call your friends or Facetime them and such and they’d go like what the fuck is going on ha ha ha and you’d go I don’t know ha ha ha back before millions of people died.

The Mall of Louisiana was trending and she thought oh here we go again and then she clicked on it and it turned out it was because a python was on the loose and she let out a sigh of relief because it was only a twelve-foot-long monster and not some guy. At least a monster will only attack when it’s hungry.

Every so often I’ll go in to see a new orthopedist or spine doctor and this thirty-two-year-old guy in his comfortable sneakers will go oh yeah I have a bad back too I know how you’re feeling bro and it’s like wait did I come to the wrong place? You literally work at the back store.

I don’t know maybe they want you to register their capacity for empathy or something but it always feels like eating at an emaciated chef’s restaurant.

This doctor today told me about his back but I wasn’t seeing him for that kind of pain it was on the other side. Front pain. No one calls it front pain. No one says I’ve got a bad front. I happen to have a bad front but no one says that.

The Bible was basically a Google doc where everyone had editing permission turned on.

This book, published a couple of months ago, is the first of Claire Kilroy’s novels I’ve read.

Kilroy is an Irish writer, and this book’s main characters are a new mother and her child who are living in Ireland. Despite the intensity of the bond with her child, the protagonist struggles with the transition from a working life and an independent identity to adopting the full-time role of ‘mother’. This also creates new tensions (or perhaps reveals existing tensions?) in her relationship with her husband, who continues to work. I mentioned a particularly striking passage a few days ago.

This was an intense, tough read: there isn’t a lot of plot, but the book brims with powerful emotion. Kilroy’s writing was transporting and gave me new insight into a tough life experience. It felt true. It felt like it explored an aspect of motherhood that is, perhaps, under-explored in contemporary literature: not a dislike of motherhood, exactly, but something more like a trapped ambivalence.

Another key character in the book is a stay-at-home father, a schoolfriend who the central character meets again in a playground. This provides another interesting set of insights into a relatively uncommon social situation. Kilroy incorporates this so naturally that it wasn’t until after I’d read the book that it really registered as a thoughtful bit of plot development.

This is well worth reading.

Some quotations I noted down:

Well Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another’s arms. The Earth moves beneath us and all is well, for now. You don’t understand yet that what we share is temporary. But I do. I close my eyes and I understand.

I saw in the small hours of Good Friday in a black rage, a malevolent force pacing the corridors of my own home. I was an exhausted woman exhausting myself further and I seem to have broken through some barrier that night because reality ceased to be reality, not that I understood that at the time. To my mind I had experienced a staggering revelation. Namely: I was just a woman. I was just a woman! How had this not registered before?

I sat on the couch. ‘How was your day?’ I asked him and he embarked on tales of valour and derring-do from a distant galaxy. Things he had said, problems he had solved, names, many names, people I would never meet. It was too tiring to try to imagine them. ‘You’re not listening.’ I opened my eyes. May or may not have been asleep. ‘Sorry. How was your day?’ ‘I just told you.’ ‘Oh. You did. Sorry.’ ‘How was your day?’ ‘My day?’ I wondered, drawing a blank. Nothing recorded. Vegetative state. ‘Em,’ I said, ‘long.’

The day you were born a door appeared—or was revealed, really, having been there all along—the door out of life, the door when it’s over, you’re done, thank you: next, and I have to go through it first.

I always knew that, as the mother, I would get the blame for everything. If you grow up to be a serial killer, if you stash decapitated heads in your fridge like half-eaten turnips, they will say it was the mother’s fault.

In 2019, the journalist and (then) editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell, decided to write a diary of the books that he read on the train to work. This book is a collection of those diary entries, mostly focusing on the books, but also on some significant events in his life and in the news.

I didn’t really enjoy this. I think this was a problem of the medium more than anything else: this felt like a blog that had been printed and bound. It felt performative rather than introspective. I like reading this sort of thing in small chunks online, but reading a year’s worth of one person’s slightly random thoughts about a slightly random selection of books in one go is a bit much.

Some of Abell’s observations were interesting and some of his anecdotes were genuinely amusing, but this just didn’t feel like a particularly coherent whole to me.

Nevertheless, here are some quotations I enjoyed:

My emails—unlike my spoken words—have become a nauseating thicket of exclamation marks: ‘Hi! Thanks!’ Sounds Good!’ and so on. Exclamation marks, those miniature distress flares of chumminess, are awful, I know they are awful, and yet the medium seems to compel their usage.

A quick check of my manuscript so far shows I have used more than 620 semicolons, at a rate of about one every 180 words. Herman Melville would be scoffing right now: he used one every 52. The final word, though, on all this (as it does in the TLS article) must go to Irvine Welsh, a fine exponent of the semicolon: ‘I’ve no feelings about it—it’s just there. People actually get worked up about that kind of thing, do they? I don’t fucking believe it. They should get a fucking life or a proper job. They’ve got too much time on their hands, to think about nonsense.’

I do think it can be risky to over-fetishise books, and I am always suspicious of people who want to preserve them in sterile perfection. I constantly scribble on or bend or drop in the bath things I am reading. And I don’t mind seeing the surface damage of prior readings. Sylvia Plath would not agree. She once lent someone a book, and got it back a bit torn. This was her diary entry: ‘It was so horrifying and it was as if my children had been raped or beaten by an alien.’ Which we can all agree is an over-reaction, I think.

I have a theory (I always have a theory) that there are three main things in life: family; work; friends. And it is possible to do only two of them well. So I am friendless, in that I spend no time socialising with people outside work or family. My colleagues and my family have become my friends in a sense, and I am fine with that. I don’t think my dad had friends when he worked either. If I have a problem, there is nobody other than my wife I would speak to; if I have an evening free, there is nobody I would go out with other than her.

The interior designer Nicky Hallam (who, let us be clear, is no Mitford) came up with a list of ‘things he found common’. They are, one hopes, tongue-in-cheek, and are very funny: breakfast meetings; being on time; tours of the house; conservatories; self-pity; swans; mindfulness; Bono; rinsing fruit; loving your parents; not eating carbs; organic food; being ill; using dog walkers. That is not even all of them. I love the fact that loving your parents is common.