Three years ago, I enjoyed Naoise Dolan’s first novel, Exciting Times. Her second, The Happy Couple, is a rather different novel in scope and setting, but is no less enjoyable.

The Happy Couple begins with the engagement of Celine, a professional pianist, and Luke, whose exact occupation I can’t recall, but it was something like investment banking. The novel then follows the couple as their wedding approaches, with the central question being whether they will actually end up marrying.

The narrative perspective shifts several times through the novel between different members of their friendship group and the wedding party. Archie, the best man and Luke’s ex; Phoebe, the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister, who is uncertain about Luke; and Vivian, a wedding guest and another of Luke’s exes. This isn’t nearly as complicated in practice as I’ve made it sound.

As with her first novel, Dolan’s writing is razor sharp, and yet still warm. The characters—and especially the way they relate to one another—feel true to life, and the novel feels very current.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

I noted down far too many quotations to paste in this post, but here’s a selection. The first is a lovely line from the acknowledgements, the rest are from the main body of the text:

As a child, I read hundreds of novels before it even occurred to me that people had written them, let alone that I could be one such person. I learned my craft from fellow authors, most of them long-dead. So thank you to fiction, my favourite thing, my thing that I somehow get to do.

I only ever say good morning if someone else has decided that we’re doing this. Sleeves up, let’s deem the morning good. But all mornings are good to good morning people, making it really a statement of pessimism. We give the day that greets us a participation trophy because we assume it can’t do better.

Both parents were from Dublin, but I was born in London when my mother’s plan to go off to England and get an abortion had been executed partly but not fully.

I find it irksome when book blurbs say right at the end: ‘It’s also very funny’, as if humour were an afterthought and not the central force that prevents us from killing a) each other, and b) ourselves.

Loneliness wasn’t having no one. Loneliness was the gap between what you hoped for and what you got.

‘I don’t want you to fuck off for months at a time without checking if I mind.’

‘Okay, yeah, sorry,’ Luke said.

Confirmed: truly impossible to make Luke fight.

Archie said: ‘Sorry and you’ll change, or sorry and you won’t?’

‘Sorry, I won’t, Luke said. I mean, I probably won’t. I’m not good with relationships.’

‘But that’s not a mysterious… you’re talking about your own actions like it’s a weather forecast. You’re you. You’re management. You decide if you’ll be “good with relationships” or not.’

They did not, as a rule, ‘share feelings’.

Celine’s family had never taught her how. To see the tint of your internal mood ring as warranting disclosure, and to expect a rapt audience—no, no.

Ever since those prep classes, the phrase ‘Jesus died to save our sins’ has bothered me. I mean even just the grammar. Shouldn’t it be ‘save us from our sins’? If the sins themselves were the subject of salvation, wouldn’t that mean Jesus died to save your gambling addiction, i.e. to keep you gambling? Wouldn’t that make him an enabler? Or Him, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I’m only happy when doing something that makes me forget I exist.

As well as his outstanding journalism over the past thirty years, including many years as Diplomatic Editor for Sky News, Tim Marhsall has written a couple of books which I’ve previously devoured. 2016’s Prisoners of Geography presented ten maps and explained how the geography displayed influenced the development of nations and the political relationships between countries. I was enthralled, so much so that I read 2017’s Worth Dying For the very next month. This was an utterly brilliant exploration of different flags and the ideas they intend to communicate—not just those of countries, but also institutions like the United Nations and the Olympic movement, and even ideas, like the white flag of surrender.

I skipped 2019’s memoir Shadowplay, mostly because it was described as ‘harrowing’, and I wasn’t in the frame of mind to cope with that. And the news of 2021’s The Power of Geography—a return to the ‘ten maps’ format—entirely passed me by until I came to write this review.

Back in April, Marshall’s latest book—The Future of Geography— was published. I was in two minds whether to buy it. It was sold as an exploration of geopolitics in space, or ‘astropolitics’ as it’s known, and I thought that maybe this would be a little removed from Marshall’s area of expertise and interest. I worried that the book might be a disappointment. In the end, Wendy convinced me to buy it.

Wendy was right. I thought this was an absolute tour de force, my favourite of the three Marshall books I’ve read. This was a fascinating account of the history of space exploration to date and the underlying international politics. Marshall has a real gift for bringing such apparently dry subjects to life, and to squeeze a little humour out of them. I felt like I learned loads from this book, and gained a whole new insight into an aspect of space exploration which I’ve never really thought about before. It’s never occurred to me, for example, that attacks on satellites which have the effect of ‘blinding’ nuclear early-warning systems have the potential to precipitate nuclear war.

I was particularly fond of Marshall’s frequent references to the early days of seafaring, and his comparison of space law to maritime law. Casting early spacefarers as equivalent to early seafarers helped me to think much more clearly about the issues which space exploration is likely to raise. It also helped me to better orientate myself as to where humanity finds itself in ‘space history’.

It was also just really refreshing to read a book on space which isn’t primarily concerned with technology, but rather with some of the wider societal issues the technological developments precipitate.

Without a doubt, this is one of my favourite non-fiction books of the year so far, and I’d highly recommend it.

This is Rob Burley’s account of his 25-year-long career making political television programmes, mostly for the BBC. He starts with the political interviews that he watched as a child between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher, and concludes with thoughts on the start of Rishi Sunak’s term as Prime Minister.

There were some great insights into the work that goes into making such programmes, with a particular focus on long-form interviews. Burley’s views on many of the topics he discusses are almost diametrically opposed to my own, and his passionate arguments were therefore interesting to read.

Burley believes that television interviews are particularly important, and perhaps the best way of testing political candidates. I think that radio, television, and press interviews and profiles all have equally significant roles to play. Burley argues that the failure of Truss and Johnson to participate in set-piece 30-minute television interviews is almost an affront to democracy—I don’t think they would have changed a thing. I don’t think it’s reasonable to argue that the electorate didn’t know what they were getting from the acres of coverage and dissection of both of their campaigns. I think their choice not to face a forensic interview was revealing in its own way. Burley didn’t convince me of his perspective, but I appreciated his insights.

The book was also very funny in parts. It was light and very readable. I enjoyed it.

Ruby Wax has written many books; this is the first I’ve read. I decided to read it because I’d seen from a two-line newspaper review that it was about Wax’s admission to an in-patient psychiatric hospital for a depressive episode, and was an account of her time there. I’m often interested in reading first-person accounts of this sort of thing, particularly as my experience in these settings has been entirely from the professional perspective, and it’s interesting to get the other perspective. Although fictional, Jasper Gibon’s The Octopus Man did this very well, and I enjoyed reading it back in February.

Unfortunately, this is only a small part of this book. The bulk of it is a collection of autobiographical anecdotes, many of which have no obvious connection with the mental health aspect. It’s a bit like a celebrity autobiography: a chunk of the book is a behind-the-scenes account of the making of a television documentary about Isabella Bird, there’s another chunk about working with refugees, and so on. This isn’t what I was expecting, and I’m not certain that I would have picked up the book if I’d understood the content to be so varied, but there were some interesting observations in there.

This didn’t inspire me to explore the back catalogue.

I didn’t find out until after I read this book that Alejandro Varela is a specialist in public health. That explains the focus of many of the short stories in this collection, and also why they intersected with many of my own interests.

Verela is based in New York, which serves as the setting for these interconnected stories. The focus is on people who are at the margins of society, either as a result of being quietly introverted or due to more structural issues. The main themes in the book are around romantic relationships (particularly among men), parenting, and everyday racism.

The ‘book is also very funny. ‘Carlitos in Charge,’ a comedic piece about the absurdity of the United Nations (and the sexual encounters between the staff) stood out to me as riotously good fun, not least because the satire had the sting of underlying truth to it.

As in any collection, some stories were more successful than others. Short stories are not my favourite medium, but I enjoyed this book, and will add Varela’s much praised first book, The Town of Babylon, to my list.

Some quotations I noted down:

That doesn’t matter, Dear. My grandmother said this in response to almost everything: marital spats, earthquakes, authoritarianism, late-stage cancer. Whether it was the tone or the pith that made her words so persuasive was unclear. But whomever heard her say them understood that she knew well the distinction between problems and pain.

The transportation app on my phone flashes a warning about the F train: it’s been rerouted and delayed. In other words, one can be late for a place they never intended to visit.

In a short period of time, I learned that the United States was immune to easily interpretable, common-sense data on everything -pollution, tuberculosis, birth control, abortion, breastfeeding, war, rape, white phosphorous, blue phosphorous, red phosphorous, lithium, PTSD, GMOs, slavery, winged migration, lions, tigers, polar bears, grizzly bears, panda bears, capital punishment, corporal punishment, spanking, poverty, drug decriminalization, incarceration, labor unions, cooperative business structures, racist mascots, climate change, Puerto Rico, Yemen, Syria, Flint, Michigan, women, children, wheelchairs, factory farms, bees, whales, sharks, daylight saving, roman numerals, centimeters, condoms, coal, cockfighting, horse betting, dog racing, doping, wealth redistribution, mass transit, the IMF, CIA, IDF, MI5, MI6, TNT, snap bracelets, Pez dispensers, Banksy. It didn’t matter what it was. If the Human Rights Council (or Cuba) advocated one way, the United States went the other.

She’s wearing a gold band, but no engagement ring. I’m relieved. Literate women who wear engagement rings destabilize all my notions of feminism. I’m grateful this tradition seems to be falling by the wayside.

As if on cue, my little wombat skulks into the room with a guilty but also aggrieved turbulence in his eyes and brow. We adopted Julio, and he looks nothing like me, not his hair, not his teeth, not his marshmallow face, but he is me, almost more so than I am.

“Did you hear that, Julio?” I shout toward my son as he and his friend take off down the hallway. “One hour. I don’t want to hear any crying or screaming. I’m setting a timer too.”

Timers. Christ.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for any tools or techniques that facilitate the trauma-free domestication of our small, wild humans, but the gulf between my childhood and my children’s is vast and vertigo inducing. My parents used to set timers with the backs of their hands. Sometimes, the timers were made of leather. But those were different times, I’ve heard people say. I assume they meant different income brackets.

Earlier this year, I read and enjoyed Jessica Andrews’s first novel, Saltwater. I said then that I looked forward to reading her second novel, Milk Teeth, and here we are.

I thought the first novel was particularly good on the sense of ‘otherness’ that people from the North often feel when they are in London. This novel channeled similar feelings but on a bigger canvas: instead of London, our female northern protagonist finds herself in Barcelona and Paris. The slightly disorientating non-chronological structure is back, as is Andrews’s brilliant, lyrical writing. Milk Teeth is both a love story and a coming-of-age story. It examines how relationships can help us grow, but how those same relationships shift as the people within them change.

As with the first book, I found the writing to be superior to the plot—although this time round, the plot was pretty engaging on its own terms. I found the main character’s descriptions of her relationship with food to be interesting and insightful. This relationship was a recurring theme through the book, perhaps reflecting the coming-of-age aspect of the novel.

I really enjoyed this, and won’t hesitate to pick up Andrews’s next novel.

A couple of quotations I noted down:

I bathe my knee carefully with a pan of warm water, wiping away dust. There is a big chunk of grit trapped beneath the skin and I dig it out carefully with a small twist, like a loose milk tooth wrenched from a gum, and it leaves a tiny wet hole. I roll it between my fingers and wonder how long I might have carried it around, if I had not noticed it. I imagine my skin healing, growing over the stone, sealing it inside me. I wonder if it would have got infected, or whether my body would break it down. Maybe I would have just carried it for the rest of my life, without even knowing it was there.

I didn’t know how to explain to you that I want wanted sensation, beauty and chaos but I had to swallow my basic needs so I could meet my wants because they were bigger than I could afford. I wanted to go beyond the borders of the life that was set out for me, to stand on the threshold and see the world beyond it, but stepping off the edge came with a cost I did not anticipate. I want to inhabit a space with ease, somewhere airy and light with room to grow into. I want to be part of the world instead of just skirting the edges, to feel deserving of love and care. I want to hold onto the good things tightly, to learn what it means to stay.

I’ve previously read Max Porter’s popular book Grief is the Thing With Feathers and not really liked it. But so popular is his writing that I thought I’d give it another go with Shy, a novella covering a few hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

Like the previous book, this just wasn’t up my street. The writing was a bit too abstract and confusing. Some people have described it as poetic, and perhaps it is, but it’s not a style of poetry with which I connect.

I don’t think I’d pick up another of Porter’s books, but mine seems to be a minority opinion, so don’t assume that you won’t like them.

This book was a 2019 bestseller, which has since been adapted into a TV series. It’s author, Brodesser-Akner, is a celebrated writer of magazine features.

It took me over a month to plough through this. I didn’t exactly dislike it—it had some sparkling writing, and some great one-liners—but I didn’t feel particularly engaged, nor did I develop any emotional attachment to the characters.

The novel is set in New York, and initially focuses on Toby Fleishman, a hepatologist in his 40s who is estranged from his wife, Rachel. Early one morning, she drops their two kids off with him, and then disappears from their life.

The novel is oddly structured. The narration for the greater part of the book is told from Toby’s perspective, but by a named third-party narrator, Libby. Later in the book, Libby also narrates from Rachel’s perspective, and from her own perspective. This doesn’t seem to add much, but does make things unnecessarily confusing at times.

I didn’t really find myself drawn into this book. Unusually, I am quite interested to see how it translates to television, so I might seek that out at some point. But really, this book just didn’t resonate with me.

A few highlighted passages:

In the park, the beautiful young people—they were all beautiful, even if they weren’t—would be lying out on blankets even this early, their heads tilted up toward the sun. Some of them were sleeping. Back when Rachel consented to go on long walks with him, they would make fun of the sleeping people in the park. Not the homeless people, or the strung-out ones. Just the ones who’d made their way over to the park in their sweatpants, laid out their blankets, and pretended that the world was a safe place that only wanted you to be well rested. Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park in Manhattan; the anxiety was a thing they had in common to the end.

His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She’d apparently gotten three strikes. “What a night,” she’d written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write “Enjoy this for now” or “All desire is death.” It was best to stay off Facebook.

He marveled for the millionth time that summer about how a person could be this miserable and bewildered, and this horny and excited, all at the same time. What a piece of work is man.

People who are good don’t need ambition. Success comes and finds them. See? Competence and excellence are rewarded for those who are competent and excellent.

“Marriage is like the board in that old Othello game,” he said as he ate a chicken breast baked dry, no added oil, please. “The board is overwhelmingly full of white discs until someone places enough black discs in enough of the right places to flip all the discs to black. Marriage starts out full of white discs. Even when there are a few black ones on the board, it’s still a white board. You get into a fight? Ultimately fine and something to laugh at in the end, because the Othello board is still white. But when it finally happens and the black discs take over—the affair, the financial impropriety, the boredom, the midlife crisis, whatever it is that ends the marriage—the board becomes black. Now you look at the marriage, even the things that were formerly characterized as good memories, as tainted and rotted from the start: That adorable argument on the honeymoon was actually foreshadowing; the battle over what to name Hannah was my way of denying her the little family she had. Even the purely good memories are now haunted by a sense that I was a fool to allow myself to think that life was good and that a kingdom of happiness was mine.” (I told him I understood his metaphor, but also that’s not how you play Othello.)

Toby left the room and found his fellows right outside the door, waiting for him. “What is wrong with you all?” he asked. They looked surprised.

“Dr. Fleishman?” Logan asked. Joanie and Clay looked at each other.

“You were making notes while that man was crying.” Toby began walking and they followed, but then he stopped and turned to face them. “You have to look these people in the eye. This isn’t organs. This is people.” He kept walking and arrived at his office. “The people who come to you—they’re not here for checkups. By the time they get to you, they know something is wrong. They’re sick. They’re afraid. Do you know how scary it is for a body you’ve had your whole life to suddenly turn on you? For the system you relied on to just break down like that? Can you just close your eyes and try to think what that might feel like?” He was filled with disgust for the three of them and the way they looked bewildered. “Maybe you should all go into surgery if you hate people who are awake so much.” He walked into his office and before he closed his glass door, he said, “I’m very disappointed.”

“It seems so clear to me,” she’d said, “that the ocean would rather you didn’t surf on it. If it wanted you, it would give you a more sustained wave.”

“I think that’s the point,” he’d said. They were sitting on the bench on their balcony, she upright and he lying down, his legs crossed over her lap.

I’m grateful to Newcastle City Library for lending me their copy of this book to read.

This paperback has been taken on numerous trips as my ’emergency book,’ in case all other sources of reading material fail me. I recently decided to retire it from that role and actually read it.

Unfortunately, this really wasn’t my kind of thing. It’s a Sunday night TV drama of a book about a group of Brixton residents mounting a campaign to save a lido that the Council wants to sell off. It’s black and white, residents good / developers bad sort of stuff. It’s a warm mug of cocoa of a book, with no unsettling surprises and no challenges to any preconceptions.

To me, I’m afraid, it was very dull. But others have found it uplifting and heartwarming, so each to their own.

This 2022 popular science book by Annie Duke is focused on when we should walk away from an endeavour. Its thesis is that we tend to over-celebrate ‘grit’ as a characteristic, even where to ‘quit’ would be the most beneficial option. I picked the book up after reading about it in Trung Phan’s email newsletter, which gives a much more complete summary of the key messages.

Duke’s central argument is reasonable: I see overcommitment both in profession and in other areas of life. Within my own team, I’m the hard-wired ‘quitter’: I’m often the person challenging the team whether processes or ways of working are still serving their intended purpose, or ought to be stood down. There are few things that frustrate me as much as attending regular meetings which have outlived their purpose. Emails asking for suggestions of things to be discussed at future meetings are a pet hate of mine: the meeting should not have been arranged until it was apparent that there was something to discuss.

I found insight in Duke’s discussion of the link between identity and positions which run counter to the general consensus. I recognise this in myself.

However, as so often in popular science, I think Duke pushes her ideas too far. Duke seems to have the view that if only humans were more economically rational, their lives would be better. I profoundly disagree. I think Duke misses the point that economics is a science which tries to describe human behaviour, but which does so imperfectly, rather than a perfect science that humans fail to live up to. I think our irrationality is part of what makes us human, and is the source of a lot of beauty and joy in the world.

To give a specific example: Duke makes the argument that we should ignore sunk costs by suggesting that if we would not accept a free ticket to an event as a result of the prevailing weather conditions, then we should also not attend that event if we had pre-purchased a ticket. Duke’s argument is that the rational basis for decision-making is the expected future value, and that this does not differ between the two scenarios.

This argument fails on two fronts.

Firstly, the expected future value does vary in the two scenarios. To make only the most obvious point, if I have paid for a ticket and then decide not to go to an event, my willingness to pay for tickets in future may change because of the psychological burden of that decision. The same does not apply to an offer of a free ticket.

Secondly, the expected future value is not the only relevant consideration. The fact that we view situations with the same expected future value different is a feature of the human condition, not a bug. Our financial position might be improved by being ever-rational, but our lives would be very much poorer.

Duke also talks about ‘kill criteria,’ an idea from military and economic strategy which suggests that, when embarking on an endeavour, we ought to set criteria that would direct us to quit. This helps decision-makers to avoid over-committing to a losing position, such as continuing in a battle with too few helicopters, or continuing to invest in a business that is not growing as expected. ‘Kill criteria’ make sense in these settings.

But, Duke argues, we ought to be equally ruthlessly rational in other parts of life. She suggests that we ought to set a time limit on after which we end a relationship if marriage isn’t proposed. She recommends that we plan to quit a job if we haven’t secured an appropriate promotion within a pre-set time limit. I think this advice is appalling—it allows no room for learning and growth to change our priorities or our view of the world. The way our views change as we progress through life is one of the joys of humanity. We might hope that a new partner will alter our view of what relationships mean, or that the experience provided by a job will alter our desired career trajectory. Setting ‘kill criteria’ on things like this, and sticking to them, sounds like a bleak way to live life.

This is minimally explored in the final section of the book, but more from the point of view of diversifying your skills and assets to protect against external shocks like a company going bust, rather than from the point of view of learning and developing yourself, and growing as a person.

In the end, I felt that this book promoted an unfamiliar and possible unfamiliar goal-orientated approach to living life. I found this uncomfortable, and I am not confident that it is healthy advice.

I think it’s helpful to read books that make me a bit uncomfortable and give me new perspectives and ideas. This book made me reflect on my response to it, and I probably understand myself a little better as a result. However, ultimately, I don’t think I took much of value away from the book itself, and it isn’t one that I’d recommend to other people.