Butler-Gaille is a young Church of England priest, and this—not his first book—is a recently-published memoir of his first year following ordination. It’s rare that a book makes me actually, really, laugh out loud, but this one did that several times over. It also affirmed Butler-Gaille’s deep-seated faith, while recognising some of the frictions and absurdities of the institution of the Church of England.

I’ve often said that there is a lot of crossover between the occupations of a doctor and a priest, and this book underlined that more than ever. The parallels are manifest, from the constant requirement not to show judgement of people who have got themselves in the most peculiar pickles to the value of simply listening to someone unburden themselves, even when solutions aren’t forthcoming.

This book helped me to see the similarities in the organisational absurdities, too—just as my employer likes to talk in managerial jargon and to proceed with baffling decisions that priorities the oddest things, so the Church of England seems to act. Yet Butler-Gallie’s unwavering dedication to his faith shines through, as I hope my unwavering dedication to my patients does.

If it weren’t for my total absence of faith, I think I’d make a great priest—possibly a better priest than I am a doctor.

This short book is well worth reading. Here are some quotations I noted down from it:

Much of the time people describe medical phenomena that doctors have assured them simply are not there. Failing to find a medical solution, they come to a priest, crediting dark powers or supernatural attacks as being responsible for anything from tinnitus or corns to serious illnesses or even impending death. A willingness to listen, no matter how far-fetched the issue may seem, saying a prayer with the sufferer, allowing them to feel safe in church, is often enough to make these attacks go away. Sometimes all people want is someone to take them seriously.

Yet, as unusual as it may all seem in the twenty-first century, the Church of England still keeps, in every diocese – the chunk of the country under a particular bishop – a diocesan exorcist. These days they call them ‘diocesan deliverance ministers’, which makes them sound like the sort of person who’d leave you a ‘We’re sorry we missed you’ slip after knocking on your door with all the force of a gnat. ‘We tried to deliver your exorcism at ILLEGIBLY SCRAWLED TIME but sadly you were out. Please come to INCONVENIENT ADDRESS between HOURS YOU COULDN’T CONCEIVABLY MAKE to have your devil/demon cast out.’

In fact, they’re highly trained and experienced clergy, who either have degrees in psychiatry or act only in accordance with a psychiatrist to whom all instances of paranormal activity that seem to go beyond the explicable are referred.

Perhaps the most influential medical saint from Naples (just to keep things to a nice, broad category) isn’t Januarius but St Aspren, a Neapolitan convert from the first century whose prayers were asked for help with headaches and who, of course, was the inspiration for the brand name Aspirin.

Advent was historically a time when clergy would preach about the ‘Four Last Things’: death, judgment, Heaven and Hell. Unsurprisingly, the Church doesn’t bang on too much about them during Advent. Imagine the festive scene:

‘Ah, a knock at the door! I do hope it’s carol singers. “Jingle Bells” is my favourite.’

‘Hello, madam, have you heard the one about an unending lake of fire?’

That said, I think we should keep one eye on the apocalyptic at this time of the year. The temptation to be cheerful, generous and well fed for the entirety of December not only takes the shine off Christmas, which becomes one long hangover, but it’s not really possible for some people. I found that for a lot of people December really was a truly miserable time, replete with less than jovial ghosts of Christmases past. ‘Jingle Bells’ really does make some people think of torment. Lots of quiet tears are shed among the tinsel. Having a period of the year that says, as Advent is supposed to, ‘This is a bit crap, but something better is coming,’ is actually more hopeful a message for those people than unending smiling.

I can’t remember the last time I gave up on a book. It must be more than a decade ago. I know this is irrational: there are more good books to read than can ever be read in a lifetime, so persisting with a bad book is a waste of time… although it does make me appreciate the good books all the more.

I was recently unexpectedly detained in town for a couple of hours, so popped to Newcastle City Library. Unusually, I didn’t have access to my list of books that I wanted to read, so plucked Pier Review off the shelf based on the cover alone. I liked the pun, and thought a bit of light history of seaside towns would be entertaining and informative.

It turns out that this book doesn’t fit that premise: this is a crowdfunded book about a blokey road trip written by a couple of bloggers. It is written in alternating short sections by the two authors, alternating between a serif and sans-serif typeface. I’ve no doubt that this book will appeal to plenty of people, but humour is subjective, and this just didn’t tickle me.

After the first couple of chapters, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t getting anything out of the book, and decided to abandon it. I did flick forward briefly to see what they had said about the piers I’m familiar with, but didn’t find even that text particularly engaging.

This book wasn’t for me and I couldn’t finish it, but I don’t think I was ever really the target audience. You might well love it: don’t let my negativity put you off.

This 2022 novel was the first of Wait’s that I have read. It is a family drama set in the present day in a modern, dysfunctional family. The central character is one of two adult twins, and the book explores the relationship with their brother, their parents, and their wider family and friends.

The book opens with the funeral of their mother’s sister. This brings the family together after they have quite dramatically fallen out, and the rest of the book explores what lay behind that falling out, and whether it can be healed.

This all sounds very dramatic, and perhaps it is, but what really stands out is the humour. Wait made me laugh out loud several times, not least because the characters and the absurd situations in which they find themselves are so relatable.

This was a book I thoroughly enjoyed.

Some quotations I noted down:

People, Celia has observed, are not very imaginative and will in almost every case say what is obvious, not what is interesting.

But one day during the summer term, Olivia comes to him with that intense look on her face that always makes Michael nervous. ‘There’s something you should know,’ she says, sitting down on his bed. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘God!’ Michael says. ‘Oh my God. Wow. Wow.’ He can see he isn’t doing particularly well. ‘Whose is it?’

He knows immediately that this is the wrong thing to say, but it is too late to take it back.

Olivia glares at him. ‘Does it matter?’ There is a pause, then she says, ‘It’s yours, if you must know.’

Michael is shocked by this, especially since they’ve never had sex.

‘Not yours literally,’ Olivia says. ‘Yours emotionally. I’m closer to you than any man I’ve ever known. My body is infused with you, and this baby is yours. Its soul is part you and part me.’

I think we just forget when we’re older all the hard things about being a child. I remember feeling anxious a lot of the time. It’s not always true that children are happier than adults. Even if you had a nice childhood.

‘Do you think he didn’t love us at all?’ she says to Hanna.

‘I don’t know,’ Hanna says. She has been unusually quiet since they learned about the will. ‘I think he probably did. But it’s sort of irrelevant what you feel if you don’t act on it, isn’t it?’ She is frowning, looking away from Alice. ‘His kind of love wasn’t worth much in the end.’

Thanks to the London Library for lending me their copy of this book.

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. ↩