Douglas Stuart’s 2022 follow-up to his Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain explores familiar themes in a familiar setting: more domestic violence, more alcoholism, more coming-of-age against among the impoverished Glasgow schemes in the early 1990s.

Like its predecessor, it has sharp social commentary, profound insight, and beautifully lyrical writing. There is, once again, a particular focus on the mother-son relationship. Like Shuggie Bain, Young Mungohas been universally acclaimed, and so my opinion doesn’t really add anything.

But, for what it’s worth, I didn’t enjoy Young Mungo as much as its predecessor.

The character Mungo is a little older than Shuggie Bain, and is struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality. This adds an interesting extra dimension that was only hinted at in the previous novel. It adds a complicated element to descriptions of child abuse in the book, which is sensitively explored.

However, I didn’t really enjoy the structure of Young Mungo, which jumps between two different time periods within the same plot. This is a structure that is used in plenty of books, and when used cleverly it can draw out intriguing and compelling comparisons and reflections. But here, it felt like it was added as a device designed to sell the novel as more complex than it really is. I’m probably wrong, but it didn’t feel as though the chapters were initially written with this structure in mind.

I also didn’t really buy some key elements of the plot, and wasn’t as convinced on some of the characterisation. It’s difficult to discuss the former without spoilers. In the latter case, it’s no spoiler to say that a character who described a couple as ‘phlegmatic’ early in the novel describes another character as a ‘talking bicyclopedia’ later in the novel: maybe that is consistent characterisation in Stuart’s mind, but I can’t reconcile the two.

I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy this: this is one of the better books I’ve read this year, but I thought that it was a little more patchy and unconvincing than its prize-winning predecessor.

The Dead is the final story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, but it is also sometimes issued as a single-volume novella, which is what I read. Published in 1914, it centres on a teacher called Gabriel Conroy attending a Christmas party hosted by his aunts. It is easily short enough to read in a single sitting, as I did, and has been cited by TS Eliot and others as literature’s finest short story.

It becomes a meditation on the relationship between life and death, and particularly, how all of our lives are influenced by people who are now dead. There’s also some reflection of how little we know about what goes on inside others’ heads, even those we know intimately.

If I had been reading this blind, I’m not convinced that I would have dated it at more than a century old. I would have said that it was well crafted, and did a good job of drawing out quite complex ideas through a relatable real-world situation in a few pages. However, I don’t think I would have ever imagined it to be considered one of the best short stories of all time… but then that judgement is based on a century of other works building on these ideas.

This is a book that’s well-quoted elsewhere, but I particularly enjoyed the line:

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

The subtitle, ‘The Mystery of Mastery,’ would have been much the better title for this reflection on mastery, but there isn’t much else that I’d change about this book.

I know of the American writer Adam Gopnik from his many non-fiction essays, his byline being one that always guarantees an interesting read, no matter how esoteric the subject. He has published many books, but this is the first I’ve read. I was inspired to read it after seeing an FT review by Erica Wagner.

Gopnik tries to understand what it takes to master skills in a variety of fields, sometimes by simply spending time with masters, and sometimes by attempting to learn the skill himself: be it magic, dancing, bakery, painting, boxing, urinating (he suffers paruresis) or driving. He reflects philosophically on the similarities in mastery between fields, while keeping the tone light.

Gopnik’s observation that mastery is much more common than we realise is perhaps the one that will stick with me longest from this book. There are people all around us—including ourselves—who are exceptionally skilled in various ways, but that don’t necessarily recognise that description even of themselves.

I was also taken by Gopnik’s observation that mastery of magic has very little to do with the technique of illusion—which is sometimes elementary—and much more with the patter and performance around it. I also enjoyed his reflections on the similarities between ballroom dancing and boxing, which would never have occurred to me until they were pointed out.

Like all good books, though, this is actually about a huge number of other topics, from Gopnik’s relationship with his aging parents, to the nature of life, and to his relationship with his children.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it provided much food for thought.

Some quotations I noted down:

By now, you have heard the rumor: the hummingbird and the whale have the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime, differently expended. In that truth we seek some consolation for the speed of our mortality. Each being has a heart that beats a billion times—one over months, the other over decades. The hummingbird lives a brief and busy life, its heart beating literally a thousand times a minute, and the whale a slow and ponderous existence out in the deep. Yet their inner experience, the heartbeat rhythm of their lives, is foundationally alike. The hummingbird would not trade its place for the whale’s, because the hummingbird’s life is the whale’s, in a decent existential translation.

More than we fear being evil, or even outrageous, what we fear most in life is being embarrassed. It is the great constraint, and the great propellant, of human accomplishment, and of its opposite, human destructiveness. Much of the worst of history is only comprehensible as a tale of embarrassment feared and, at huge lengths, avoided, or trying to be avoided.

The highlights of life are first unbelievably intense and then absurdly commonplace.

Studying snowflakes, we were once told that they were all different, and thus gave some kind of natural metaphoric endorsement to our inherent individuality. Instead, it turns out that snowflakes are all alike, when they begin in clouds, changing in form and appearance only as they drift to earth through the accidents of wind and weather. A better image, that, of how we truly live and differentiate ourselves.

People were fooled because they were looking, as we always seem to do, for the elegant and instant solution to a problem, even when the cynical and ugly and incremental one is right.

If the concert audience is baffled, they are intrigued, even impressed. In show business, if they are baffled, they leave. In our age, the difference between entertainment and art is that in entertainment we expect to do all the work for the audience, while in art we expect the audience to do all the work for us.

My mother continued baking and cooking even as she aged, and though some of it was at her usual level, a habit of habit crept in and then triumphed. She worked, this woman whose ease in the fine art of strudel-rolling was my very first memory in life of mastery, increasingly intently, increasingly angrily—if one can imagine an enraged croissant or a pain au chocolat baked in fury—increasingly made for its own frightened sake. I can still do this. I can. On that much smaller scale, my mother’s baking became, as the years went by and our visits became first more infrequent (it was exhausting to go) and then more frequent (they needed more care), baking for the sake of the bagel. The bagel eaters were left outside the circle of dough.

But, and this is a truth that must be said, over and over: suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, and so we cannot grade it on any kind of absolute scale. What we feel is what we feel, and though it may be true that we cry when we have no shoes until we meet a man with no feet, the larger truth is that having no shoes is our only way of beginning to understand what it must feel like to have no feet. Deprivation, discomfort, unhappiness—these cannot be wished away by pointing to those who have better reason for them than we do. If we could be cured by the truth that someone is suffering more, then human suffering would long ago have been cured.

We have to pack our own parachutes with the silk that we have gathered and tested, probing it for each possible moth hole and tear… but then you have to jump out of the plane.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because while the only kind of action we can attempt may be illusory, a stone rolled up a hill only to roll down again, the happiness it gives us is not. Sisyphus is right to be happy with his work. It’s what he’s got. It’s what we have. In a doomed, fatal, mortal world, we are all Sisyphus rolling stones, but we are also aware of the possibility of contentment as we do, not because the stone won’t roll back (eventually, it will), but because when it does—and this is the secret, hopeful side to the curse that the gods gave Sisyphus—it doesn’t actually crush us. It just gives us the work to do again.

I decided to read this 2020 bestseller by Katherine May after reading about the idea of ‘wintering’ in a magazine earlier in the year. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but ended up enjoying it.

This is essentially a memoir of times in May’s life when she has withdrawn from the world. These include homeschooling her struggling child from school as a result of bullying, or travelling to Iceland at a particularly difficult moment in her life. While this is a deeply personal book, May includes interviews with others, reflecting some wider experiences, and draws comparisons to similar behaviours seen in nature.

I enjoyed May’s style of writing, which was quite poetic at times, and I enjoyed her reflections. May’s life is very different to mine in many ways, but I nonetheless found her observations insightful and interesting. She briefly reflects on the lack of time in the modern world for true recovery from illness, which reminded me of recent books I’ve read by Gavin Francis and MR Rajagopal.

Most of all, I found this book easy to read and comforting, a bit like a large warm drink of a book. I think I might seek some of May’s other books to see if I similarly enjoy them.

Some quotations I took away from this book:

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

They say that we should dance like no one is watching. I think that applies to reading, too.

We’re not keen, as a nation, on expressions of mass exuberance, unless it’s related to football. We’re suspicious of the donning of robes, of the desire towards ritual. We like our belief tempered with an apologetic quality, a signal of humility. Sermons must bore us. Prayers must be muttered. Singing must be undertaken as a grim obligation, mumbled in the quietest possible voice, by people maintaining strict personal boundaries. The seeking of ecstasy doesn’t come into it.

There’s no doubt that we are supposed to immediately perceive the White Witch’s evil, but neither can we fail to perceive her glamour. Hers is an icy beauty, sharp and crystalline, speaking of the power to walk alongside the hardships of the cold. She seduces Edmund with Turkish delight and promises him magical powers. I’ve always thought that she carries a suggestion of Christmas: the sweets and food, the promise of gifts, but also the way that it forces children to dance with their own greed for a season, encouraged to desire worldly goods, but also scolded for wanting them too much, and with too much alacrity. She is the adult half of Christmas, perceived through a child’s eyes, that slightly bitter edge which they can’t help but notice as the grown-ups lecture them on the need to modify their demands, on the sacrifices they’re making to stage their midwinter dreams. She is the mother dressing up for a party from which children are excluded, leaving the house masked in unfamiliar make-up and perfume; the adults lingering at the card table with drinks on Christmas evening, their cosy duties discharged. She is a glimpse of adult pleasures that they don’t yet know how to crave.

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

I don’t generally enjoy science fiction. I have enjoyed many books which have an element of science fiction but which are really about other things—Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun or Never Let Me Go, for example. But books which fit squarely into the science fiction genre rarely do much for me.

But, I like to challenge myself, so I picked up Becky Chambers’s 2021 science fiction novel after seeing it recommended by Andrew J Hawkins on The Verge.

The plot concerns a human monk, Dex, on some distant planet. Robots, previously used in much the same way as in the modern world, have become sentient, and for several centuries there has been a separation between areas where humans live and where robots live. Dex, however, comes into contact with Mosscap, a broadly humanoid robot who wants to understand the needs of humans which the robots might be able to support.

In a first for me, the central character of the novel, Dex, is non-binary and uses ‘they/them’ pronouns. I’ve never really thought about the honorific one would apply to a non-binary monk, but Chambers has: ‘Sibling Dex.’ Mosscap is mostly referred to using ‘it/its’ pronouns, but is occasionally also referred to using a ‘their’ as a possessive, and I couldn’t work out the pattern as to when this happened.

I was confused by the ‘they/them’ pronouns more often than I’d like to admit. When there are multiple characters in a scene and ‘they’ do something, I was often briefly confounded, despite the text being perfectly clearly written. I suppose this is an effect of unfamiliarity, and more exposure to these things over time will educate me.

The book explores ideas of identity and philosophy. The robot and the human share certain characteristics yet differ in key ways, and have to feel their way through the building of their relationship. There is also some exploration of what drives characters, and what makes them happy. This was all done in an atmosphere that I’d describe as ‘cosy’—this is a book to curl up with, not one that is challenging or especially thrilling. I enjoyed that about it.

But I’m still not raving about this book, and it’s because of that underlying lack of connection with science fiction. I found all the world-building a bit of a drag on the main thrust of the novel. For me, staging the novel between a human and a robot was also a little unnecessarily allegorical, and removed some of its impact. I think the same messages would have had more impact in a real-world setting, and it’s not hard to come up with possibilities.

This doesn’t in any way mean that this is a bad book, and clearly Chambers’s audience would disagree vociferously with me. For people who like science fiction, science fiction is the sort of thing they like, and more power to their elbow. But this wasn’t a breakthrough crossover novel that converted me as someone who typically avoids the genre.

I was also disappointed that the plot isn’t self-contained in this book. It is promoted as the first of a series, so perhaps I should have known what to expect, but this does feel very much like the opening section of a longer story rather than a complete work. I found that quite narratively unsatisfying.

I liked that this was short, cosy, touched on interesting philosophical discussions and had lovely central messages. I liked that it unapologetically immersed me in the modern use of pronouns. However, I’m not yet sure whether I’ll read the second in the series.

Some quotations I noted down:

You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.

They brought people joy. They made people’s day. That was a tremendous thing, when you sat and thought about it. That should’ve been enough. That should’ve been more than enough. And yet, if they were completely honest, the thing they had come to look forward to most was not the smiles nor the gifts nor the sense of work done well, but the part that came after all of that. The part when they returned to their wagon, shut themself inside, and spent a few precious, shapeless hours entirely alone.

Dex took note of Mosscap’s phrasing. “So, it is correct, then? You wouldn’t prefer they or—”

“Oh, no, no, no. Those sorts of words are for people. Robots are not people. We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its.”

“I’d say you’re more than just an object,” Dex said.

The robot looked a touch offended. “I would never call you just an animal, Sibling Dex.” It turned its gaze to the road, head held high. “We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”

It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward. Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.

Many thanks to Northumbria University library for letting me read their copy of this book.

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, which was published pre-pandemic in Japanese, but whose English translation (by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) was only released in November. I’ve read a handful of Murakami’s previous books, but by no means the complete works.

According to this post from 2012, I once listed Murakami’s Norwegian Wood as one of my favourite books, and I’ve also watched a film adaptation. This astonishes me: I barely remember anything about the book, and I have no recollection at all of the film, and would have denied all knowledge of its existence.

Anyway, Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of eleven essays in which Murakami reflects on all sorts of aspects of writing novels: his writing history, his thoughts on the relationship between writing and society, his inspirations, how he responds to being asked for tips by aspiring writers, and his views on literary awards, among many other things. He writes in his idiosyncratic wandering style, which gives the essays the quality of speaking with a knowledgable friend. There are, of course, frequent references to Murakami’s previous novels, though I didn’t find this book difficult to follow as a result of not having read all those books.

I really enjoyed this insight into Murakami’s craft, though I wonder if I enjoyed the style more than the content. I don’t think there were any earth-shattering revelations, though it is always interesting to peek into how people go about writing novels.

This 2019 bestseller is tricky for me to write about because I have strong feelings in two completely contrary directions.

This book is excellent at highlighting hidden injustices faced by women around the world on a day-to-day basis. Because of my background, I was particularly swayed by the section on medical research and the fundamental problems introduced when women are excluded from studies. The lack of inclusion of women in car safety standards is also shocking, and the section on the lack of careful consideration of the needs of women in relief aid was heartbreaking.

This book is important for highlighting all of these issues. I don’t want anything else I say to take away from the fact that this is a book which deserves to be read, deserves to make people angry, and deserves to inspire change.

But there are quite a few ‘buts’.

Firstly, the style of writing is desperate. Criado Perez swings from detailed, thoughtful discussion of cited studies to hyperbolic polemic even within paragraphs. She makes statements that are patently absurd with even a moment’s thought, such as:

There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.

and:

“The Fawcett report is all the evidence we have, because the data is not being collected by government, so unless this particular charity continues to collect the data, it will be impossible to monitor progress.”

To state the obvious: there are women who do no paid nor unpaid work; anyone could continue to collect data, even if ‘this particular charity’ was closed down.

This sort of writing flows through the book, and it is problematic because it often undermines Criado Perez’s brilliantly argued case—not least because it’s often right in the middle of a paragraph that’s making the case. A good editor should have spotted this.

Secondly, I disagree with Criado Perez’s assertion that if women are the majority practitioners of an activity, then barriers to that activity are automatically a gendered issue. The obvious example here is that gritting roads rather than pavements is, essentially, sexist because women make more journeys on foot than men.

I disagree: this might have a differential gender impact, but I don’t think it is primarily a gendered issue, and I don’t think viewing it from that perspective is especially helpful. I think viewing it from that perspective is unlikely improve the overall inclusivity of the flawed policy.

Thirdly, some of the logic is distractingly unusual.

Criado Perez argues that spending money on road-building prioritises men because women more often take the bus, without any acknowledgement that buses run on roads.

Criado Perez talks about the first artificial hearts being too big for women, and them having to wait years for the technology to be miniaturised: but I’m not sure what the alternative is. Ought we not to use products only in one sex until the technology is sufficiently advanced to use them in both?

The author talks about the over-citation of male authors of research based on implicit bias, but also cites evidence to suggest that female authors are frequently assumed to be male. Obviously, while pulling in different directions, both can be true at once because not all of those cited will be unknown to the person doing the citing. But both also pull in different directions in terms of solving the problem, so it’s not clear how it advances the author’s argument.

The tortuous logic was often distracting.

Fourthly, I had a strongly negative reaction to Criado Perez’s repeated dismissal of psychosomatic symptoms, with phrases like:

Four different medical professionals thought it was in her head, that she was simply struggling with anxiety.’¹

There is nothing simple about struggling with anxiety, and it is no ‘lesser’ a diagnosis than the uterine fibroids that complete the story from which I’m quoting.

Of course, misdiagnosis is regrettable, and of course, it is especially problematic that the rate of this sort of misdiagnosis is gender-patterned and of course that must be addressed. But to describe a serious—if incorrect—psychosomatic diagnosis as a patient being ‘told she was imagining it’ is also deeply regrettable, and especially so in this book given the female-skewed epidemiology of genuine psychosomatic illness.

Finally, this isn’t really a book about data gaps. It cites a few, but frequently Criado Perez concludes sections with phrases like:

This isn’t exactly a data gap, because the data does mostly exist. But collecting the data is useless unless governments use it. And they don’t.

This is really a book about non-inclusive decision-making. It’s a book that points out tragic flaws which arise when people fail to properly consider (or even monitor) the impact of decisions on all the people they affect. It’s about so much more than data gaps, and by boxing its arguments in those terms, it rather limits its own conclusions. I worry that the publisher has marketed the book in those terms because of a trend in books about data, rather than because that’s the approach that best suits Criado Perez’s argument.

As I said at the top, this is a book which deserves to be read and which deserves attention. It is worth your time. But, like many books, it’s also flawed in ways which might have you—like me—grinding your teeth. I’d suggest grinding through it.

Many thanks to Newcastle University library for letting me read their copy of this book.

1. It’s All In Your Head happens to be the title of Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent book on psychosomatic illness, which I very much enjoyed in January. ↩

This is a bestselling 2022 comedic novel about Elizabeth Zott, a chemist working in the 1950s and 1960s, who also ends up presenting a television cookery programme called ‘Supper at Six’.

Early on, I came as close as I have in a long while to giving up on a book. Garmus manages to hit quite a few of my pet hates in novels full square.

The cast of characters includes Six-Thirty, a preternaturally intelligent dog who reflects on idioms, becomes irritated by another dog’s ‘smugness’, and even overhears a phone conversation and leads its owner to a wardrobe in response. This is a novel which, at heart, is about emotional truth; I find it hard to access that when I have to suspend disbelief so frequently. Having an omniscient narrator unrealistically imbue an animal with human-like emotions reduces the impact of that same omniscient narrator telling us about other characters’ emotional states.¹

Garmus also writes exceptionally clunky dialogue: this is the sort of novel where everyone speaks in complete sentences, which often also include a dose of narrative exposition. “Jesus, it’s as if you’re not familiar with TV’s tribal ways.”

Garmus also writes the plot in a way that elides time and effort, which is particularly curious when a theme of differential time and effort requirements for men and women is seeded throughout the book. Zott becomes an elite rower virtually overnight, and an accomplished television presenter in a matter of days.

But but but… I didn’t give up. Somehow, Garmus won me over, and I found myself enjoying this despite all of the above. The evocation of the treatment of women in science (and society) in the era was strong and insightful. The funny bits were frequently actually funny. The core messages were well-meant, if a little heavy-handed and preachy.

I’m not certain that I’d rush to read Garmus’s next novel, but I nevertheless enjoyed this more than I initially anticipated.

1. I know that this is all quite niche, that lots of people routinely anthropomorphise animals—and especially their pets—and I should just let it go… but I’m not describing my rational, conscious response, just my immediate emotional reaction. ↩

This 2022 book was drawn to my attention by a review in the TLS, yet somehow still managed to get the wrong end of the stick regarding what it was about. I had expected something fairly anatomical, but as Vout says in her epilogue:

This book is less a biography of the Greek and Roman body, its birth, growth, death, afterlife (though there is a bit of that) than a scenography in nine acts that puts the human body into a series of performative contexts, contexts fuelled by fantasy as much as by scabby reality. And not just the bodies of the wealthy, healthy men that dominate elite texts, but female bodies, disadvantaged bodies, dead bodies. It is what has made visual and material culture so vocal, and replaced a narrative arc with a perspectival view that gives these bodies space to breathe.

I found this book to be a slightly odd combination of content about mythological stuff, like the bodies of the Greek gods, and real-world stuff, like the treatment of Roman slaves. I wonder if this combination comes naturally to Vout as a classics professor, and is only confounding to someone with absolutely no knowledge in the field, like me.

This meant that there were some bits of this book which I found very dull. I really couldn’t give two hoots about the sexual relations of mythical gods. But there were also riveting bits which gave me entirely new insights into life in Roman times. There were more of the latter than the former, and they have transformed my understanding of some historical trends.

For example, I had no idea that the early Christian church was fairly ambivalent about marriage, and that Roman society saw this as a threat. I had no idea that religious involvement in funerals is a relatively modern development. And I had no idea that the debates raging today about gender identity have some interesting parallels in Roman times.

Here are some quotations which I noted down:

Having a baby was a public duty, and one for which the women of Sparta were especially primed. Rather than sitting inside and spinning wool like their Athenian counterparts they were mandated by law to take as much exercise as the men, participating in running races and physical training so as to increase the chances of giving birth to vigorous offspring. Spartan husbands were ordered to spend only limited time with them, the implication being that this would increase the longing of both parties, and again, the strength of the children. These women were not just born to breed; they were breeding machines, honed like well-fed thoroughbreds to produce the kind of stock that would best serve a competitive culture.

Giving oral sex was considered particularly demeaning to the man, demanding as it did that he debase himself for his partner’s gratification. But women who performed fellatio were also condemned; the charge of having an impure mouth was the ultimate insult, whatever one’s gender, and the preserve of the prostitute.

For Plato, drugs were a last resort. Diet and exercise were where it was at: ‘no diseases which do not involve great danger ought to be irritated by drugs’. I think back to the neuralgia I experienced a few years ago and to my GP prescribing an anti-depressant that had ‘a helpful side effect’. And I am grateful to the friend who told me to throw the tablets in the bin and book my first yoga class.

Ask Antony or Timarchus whether they were homosexual or heterosexual and they would have struggled to understand the question. But this does not mean that the ancients were blind to the sex or gender of their bedfellows. In a world in which women were widely regarded as inferior to men, sleeping with them had to be different. Sleeping with slaves had to be different too, whether male or female, however masculine or feminine. Timarchus’s prosecutor is keen to acknowledge that relations between citizen males could, and should, be intimate and affirming, as indeed they were between Greek heroes, Achilles and Patroclus, who also slept with women. This is not the same as advocating intimacy over and above sex: there was nothing wrong with homosexual sex as long as citizens did not demean themselves in the process. It is about creating a space for love, and a love between men that could be as erotic as it was educative, more erotic in some ways than with a wife or prostitute. Sex with women was functional: in the case of Neaira, the brothel worker made wife, the jury (all male, of course) was being reminded that we have hetaerai for pleasure, concubines for the daily service of our bodies, and wives for the production of legitimate offspring and to have a reliable guardian of our household property’. In Greek discourse, if not also in practice, sex with another male was seen as more cerebral.

Christianity threatened the state by threatening the institution of marriage that had played such a central role in the story of Rome’s foundation. This was very much the line that Augustine pedalled when, in 401 CE, he wrote tracts on marriage and on holy virginity. A couple did not even have to be married, as long as they were faithful, prepared to put up with each other until one of them died, and relaxed about getting pregnant. Contraceptive methods were to be discouraged, but abstinence from sex was permissible, as long as both partners were happy with that, and as long, of course, as they were not getting their kicks elsewhere.

This wasn’t the book I was expecting it to be, but I enjoyed much of it nonetheless. I’m grateful to the London Library for lending me a copy to read.

This 2018 novel has a big following of fans, and I’ve been intending to read it since it was published. I was finally inspired to start reading after it appeared in a list of books enjoyed by readers of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, a novel which I enjoyed enormously.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is set in Manhattan in 2000. The narrator, a receptionist at an art gallery, decides that modern life it just too stressful, and that she’d benefit from a year of hibernation. The recent death of her wealthy parents means that she can survive on her inheritance.

She consults an entertainingly mad psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle, and pretends to be suffering from insomnia to build up a large supply of drugs to assist her hibernation. Her best friend, Reva, is a walking, talking, cheesy self-help book, whose own life is in chaos.

This novel is a satire of social privilege, ‘first world problems’, and capitalist psychiatry. I found it very funny, driven by zinging one-liners.

Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats.

The characters are entirely unlikable and exhaustingly self-centred. Dr Tuttle provides light relief, but I think the novel would have benefited from some sort of moral compass or naive character to ground the insanity. I think Boy Parts was much better-balanced in that regard.

Moshfegh has decided to root the plot in a specific period: George W. Bush’s inauguration appears at one point, for example, and I’m not sure what this is intended to add. Perhaps it was intended to make us reflect on how simple those times seem in retrospect, and heighten the pathos of the narrator’s need to escape from the world—but it seems an odd period to choose, if so.

All things considered, while I enjoyed this book, I thought Boy Parts was a substantially more successful work. It dealt with broader and more pressing societal issues, it was more disturbing, it was funnier, and I felt I took more from it. But perhaps that’s in part because Moshfegh’s novel is American and Clark’s is British, and the local one resonated more with me.

Some other short quotes that I noted down:

Studied grace is not grace.

I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.

My blind eye was the one real comfort I could give her.

My thanks to the Newcastle University library for lending me a copy of this book.