This is a well-researched reflection on the relationship between humans and computers, published in 2018. Bridle’s central point, I think, is that we often don’t have a great understanding of how technology we rely upon undertakes its work, and the development of new technologies like artificial intelligence clouds this further. In turn, this reflects back on us, clouding our own understanding of the world around us.
There were two specific points in this book which challenged some pre-existing conceptions I had held.
The chapter on YouTube transformed my understanding of the site. I had no idea that, for example, violent parodies of Peppa Pig are on there, and can be served to children by YouTube’s algorithm (which continually plays back to back videos if left—I hadn’t even clocked that!) I also hadn’t realised how much bizarre autogenerated content existed on the platform. I had thought that there was some reasonable content moderation, possibly because I hadn’t understood the true quantity of uploaded material.
I also had no idea that the NSA had cracked some prime number factors commonly used in encryption, nor that mathematical developments like this are routinely kept out of scientific journals—harming the development of the science—effectively as a cyber warfare strategy. I was a bit bowled over by that revelation, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been so naive.
Throughout, Bridle writes with real perception and clarity. This book has changed and better informed my view of technology as an adjunct to human thought. There was a lot to ponder in here.
This is a slim selection of diary entries from March 2020 to March 2021, capturing Bennett’s experience of lockdown and the pandemic, including the re-making of his Talking Heads TV series. As always, Bennett also shares gossipy anecdotes from earlier in life and reflects with horror on the state of modern politics.
This is a very short book, but brought half an hour or so of the unique joyful warmth that always runs through Bennett’s diaries.
I picked this up after seeing it featured in a New York Times piece which called it “a turning point for the genre” which had sold more than 1.3 million print copies. It’s also won numerous awards. I was disappointed.
The plot concerns a romance between the twenty-something son of a female President of the United States and a similarly aged Prince of the United Kingdom, younger brother of the third in line to the throne. There are many interesting questions to dissect in this scenario, but none of them are addressed in this frothy romance.
I found this superficial and poorly researched: there was a section where I struggled to follow the geography until I realised that the author thought that Buckingham Palace was in Buckingham, which was a part of London. Somehow, there is a lot of discussion of the political impact of religious objections to the relationship in the States, but no mention of the monarch’s role as Head of the Church of England. The writing is also unforgivably clunky in parts.
I think, at heart, this just wasn’t the book I expected it to be. From a “turning point for the genre” I think I expected something more considered, grounded in reality and exploratory, but instead this just seemed like a ten-a-penny by-numbers romance.
5: I’m reading Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive at the moment, and there’s a line advocating for greater ‘mood literacy’ which I found a rather lovely turn of phrase. It reminded me of this blog post advocating examination of one’s own response to the outside world to better understand one’s mood. Both taught me something about self-examination.
6: One of the room booking systems at work requires me to “invite” a given room to attend a meeting. I’ve now learned through bitter experience that rooms can decline invitations… which felt a little humiliating, even if it does open up a whole new seam of entertaining insults (e.g. “that meeting sounds so pointless that even the room declined the invitation”).
10: The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is only a short walk from the city centre and is a great place for a winter stroll. The uphill walk back to the city centre is a touch more tiring.
11: Over the past decade, the proportion of the UK’s electricity generated from wind and solar power has increased from 2.4% to 20.5%. The proportion from coal has fallen from 31% to 2.9%. (As reported in Positive News, though the specific article isn’t online.)
15: I have long known the North East is an outlier for antibiotic prescribing in primary care, but hadn’t fully realised until a meeting today that the North East isn’t an outlier for antibiotic prescribing in secondary care.
22: Over 70% of 12- to 14-year-olds in China are short-sighted. The Communist Party has set targets for reducing that, leading to some slightly strange practices in schools, including compulsory twice-daily eye massages and dressings-down for those whose sight worsens over time.
24: Blinded trials are not always best. I remember having to write an essay or answer an exam question on this topic at some point in the past, but haven’t really thought critically about it in years.
25: The attendance fee for the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos is 27,000CHF (£21,400). I will never complain about medical conference registration fees again!
26: Luxury branded homes—as in, “I live in a Bulgari residence” or “I’m in the Porsche apartments”—are now a thing. Is it possible that this is a global conspiracy to see how far the definition of “gauche” can be pushed?
29: Pulmonary tuberculosis can be detected in babies by doing PCR tests on faecal specimens. Sensitivity of the test varies according to the exact methods used, and this is an active area of research.
31: The TV series Love Island has an unexpectedly innovative business model which involves selling items seen on the show via the app which viewers download to vote for contestants.
This was the 1943 Turkish classic by Sabahattin Ali. I read the Penguin Classics 2016 translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe in a day (it was only 168 pages) and loved it.
The 1920s plot concerned a young Turkish man moving to Berlin to learn about the perfumed soap trade. He developed an intense longing for a woman he initially saw in a painting, and a powerful and moving—if somewhat unconventional—relationship developed.
This was a book about social changes in the first part of the twentieth century, and particularly morphing gender roles, but was also full of profound longing. It oozed atmosphere.
This was one of those short books that, despite the page count, somehow managed to create complete characters who will live long in the mind, and to completely immerse the reader in a time and place, and to make larger observations about social change. And all that while the first 40 pages felt slow to get going! It was great.
This was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2014 essay in which she drew on her own life experiences to illustrate why feminism remains important, and how society continues—in ways small and big—to treat men and women inequitably. It seems like this should be self-evident but, as the book pointed out, there are many who wrongly think that these problems are historical and resolved.
The argument was passionate and well-made. This was a slim 50-page volume filled largely with anecdote, and so I don’t think I learned anything new from this, but I enjoyed reading such a powerful and convincing case for feminism.
This was Levy’s 600-page history of Facebook, published earlier this year. Levy has covered Facebook as a technology journalist for many years and clearly has good connections within the company and with those who have left the company along the way. Many reviews I’ve read suggest that Levy was very soft on both Facebook and its founder in this book, but I though he was quietly damning.
For personal context: I joined Facebook in 2005 and left earlier this year, not in any grand protest but just because it had become more aggravating than useful as a service. I still use WhatsApp, another Facebook property, and have an on-again off-again relationship with Instagram.
Levy’s book was interesting for the insight it gave into the way that Facebook had grown and taken decisions, time and again, without fully considering or planning for obvious consequences.
I happen to have read this book at the same time as Pinker’s Better Angels, so the thing that leapt out to me most was their lack of consideration of factual accuracy and filter bubbles. Pinker argues that one reason for the decline in violence in the last century is the rapid spread of information: we cannot condone violence on the other side of the world when graphic images of it are on the newspaper on our breakfast table. Levy argued that Facebook’s concentration on feeding only our narrow interests necessarily narrows our world view, and presenting lies, gossip and facts in indistinguishable formats only serves to further pervert our understanding.
The final section, in which Levy describes Facebook’s plans for the future, is where the soft damnation appeared: Levy talked of Facebook concentrating on the “fun” offered by new features, while completely ignoring the negative consequences of making filter bubbles completely impenetrable through encryption and disappearing messages.
This was a great dive into the history of a era-defining company which left me with the impression that the company doesn’t yet understand its past mistakes, and is doomed to repeat them.
This was Sayaka Murata’s 2016 bestseller, which I read in Ginny Tapley Takemori’s 2018 translation. This was a short novel centred on Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who had been working in a part time role at a convenience store for half her life. She enjoyed her work and found that the role of ‘convenience store worker’ gave her life meaning, though increasingly came to feel societal pressure to find a “proper” job and a husband. Therein lies a plot, featuring an attempt at living a “normal” life.
If found this a relatively light book with a sharp edge of social commentary. Others on Goodreads seem to have found it side-splitting; I thought it was more wryly amusing, if not a little depressing when it prompts pondering the underlying issues.
This 2007 collection of blessings was not my usual kind of book by any means. In it, O’Donohue offered poems for a wide range of life events, mostly (though not completely) excluding reference to gods and/or religion.
O’Donohue’s writing was awe-inspiring for its ability to capture the emotions and actions associated with both ordinary and extraordinary events. This was poetry that often firstly crystallised my understanding of my own emotions in situations and then, by virtue of writing about it, demonstrated that while they felt unique to me, they were universal parts of the human experience. The poems about extraordinary life experiences which I haven’t had helped me to reflect on how those situations must feel to others.
I don’t read much poetry: this book made me think that perhaps I should read more.
There are lots of different treatments of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, including the original LRB essay from 1989, a play from 1999, a very popular 2005 film, and the one I read: the 1990 book.
Written in Bennett’s characteristic warm, funny and engaging style, this short memoir describes Bennett’s interactions with Mary Shepherd, and an eccentric lady who came to live for fifteen years in a dilapidated van on Bennett’s driveway. I thoroughly enjoyed this: it was fun and moving in equal measure, one of those cosy books that restores faith in humanity.
Originally published in the LRB in 1996, this was a typically wonderful Alan Bennett story of extraordinary and comic happenings in British suburbia.
Mr and Mrs Ransome, a middle-aged middle-class couple, returned from the opera to find that their flat had been burgled to an extraordinary extent, having relieved the place even of its fitted carpets. For Mrs Ransome, this becomes liberating in some unexpected ways.
This 2014 novella was featured somewhere—I can’t recall where—as one of a pair of books to read together, the other being Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones.
The Pharmacist focused on Billy, a man in his 20s, who falls into a friendship with Albert, an older gay man who lived in a flat in the same building. As their friendship developed, Albert introduced Billy to illicit drugs, and their relationship became closer and more complex.
I enjoyed this for the contrast between Billy and Albert, as gay men who had come of age in very different eras. It was a book which made me reflect on how much society’s response to people shapes us all, and moreover how much accepted societal norms have shifted over just a few decades. The rapid change in society’s attitude to homosexuality makes contrasting older and younger gay people an interesting tool for reflecting on progress in society.
This wasn’t a book I’d normally come across or read, but I enjoyed reflecting on it.
A short and many-award-willing novel by Mars-Jones’s published earlier this year, recommended somewhere as part of a pairing with Justin David’s The Pharmacist.
Narrated from the perspective of a tube driver in his 40s in contemporary Britain, novel was mostly set in the late 1970s, when the narrator was an 18-year-old gay man who fell into an abusive relationship with a man a few years older. Despite the subject matter, the tone was kept remarkably light and humorous (one sexual encounter is described as “dutiful, like Prince Philip opening a hospital annexe”).
Fairly suddenly, the book transformed unexpectedly into something rather different: a moving meditation on how well we know even those closest to us, and how we only ever really have our own singular perspective on reality.
The recommendation to pair this with The Pharmacist was a good one: the two novellas have mostly similar beats in the plot, but treated completely differently. For my money, Box Hill is the better novella: I think I would have been disappointed if I had read them the other way round.
This was Richard Osman’s recently published first novel, a cosy but complex piece of genre fiction in which a group of four friends in a retirement home banded together to solve a murder. It is the first in a series of books to be published about “The Thursday Murder Club.”
I found much to enjoy in this book. The main characters were well drawn and fun to spend time with; the plot was pleasingly multi-layered; and the frequent clashes between the older protagonists and modernity were handled very well, using humour without being patronising about older people, and including firm but friendly challenge to social views that are no longer mainstream.
But this just isn’t really my kind of thing. It reminded me of nothing so much as a Sunday night television drama, the gently paced inoffensive and unchallenging moving wallpaper that I’m pretty sure Nancy Banks-Smith once compared to death. This book felt like it was a cut above most in the genre, but it still didn’t feel to me like it had anything new to say.
Given it’s popularity, and given that the series will no doubt become part of the cultural conversation, I’m glad I read it… but I won’t be picking up the next in the series.
This 2017 novel is well-loved by many, and clearly has a lot going for it, but was simply not up my street. The premise was that a new technology company called “death cast” could, with absolutely reliability, inform people shortly after midnight that they will die during the day. This premise opened up a Pandora’s box of interesting philosophical questions around how people will respond after receiving the notification, and also how knowing with certainty that one will survive every other day will influence society.
These philosophical questions weren’t tackled at any length in the book, and where the societal response did come up in the plot, it was often inconsistently described. I was looking for complex moral and philosophical knots and new insights into the human psyche, but that clearly wasn’t what Silvera was looking to provide nor what his audience expected.
This book was really a story of a saccharine budding teenage romance, narrated (for the most part) by the two teenagers themselves, on the day of their death. For those who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like, but it wasn’t for me.
On reflection, there was plenty of evidence to the contrary. For every The Beautiful Indifference I’d struggled through, there’s was a Difficult Loves or a One More Thing that were memorably enjoyable. I came to the conclusion that I had formed an utterly irrational prejudice against the short story.
Later that month, I came across Faber Stories, a collection of twenty tiny handsome books published in celebration of Faber & Faber’s 90th anniversary. Each minature volume contained a short story from Faber & Faber’s archive.
I was intrigued. Here was an opportunity to challenge my prejudice while also getting a set of lovely little books to decorate my bookshelves. Somewhat rashly, I bought the lot.
Over the last seven months, I’ve read all twenty.
In a nod to a bit of quantitative analysis, the mean number of stars I’ve given the books on Goodreads (out of a possible five) is 3.05. My average for all the books I read in 2018 was 3.80, so it seems that this set didn’t reach my usual level of enjoyment.
Of course, this isn’t surprising: I usually pick books I like the look of. In this case, I took the whole job lot of a series, whether I liked the look of each individual volume or not. It is to be expected that the average score would be lower. And there were some real stinkers: I gave eight of the books one- or two-star reviews.
On the other hand, I gave seven of the books four- or five-star reviews:
Five of these were written by authors I’d never read before. That’s a pretty good outcome in terms of discovering new writers whose work I enjoy.
I’ve also been reminded, partly the single story format, of the joy of reading a complete work in a single sitting. I’ve come to better appreciate the precision and concision required to tell a story in short form.
In short, I think I’ve been cured of my prejudice. I’m no longer someone who doesn’t like short stories. So much so, in fact, that I’ve already ordered the additional ten volumes that Faber & Faber announced over the summer.
But now I’m asking myself: what other literary prejudices shall I tackle? I’m no fan of science fiction or historical fiction, so perhaps I should look out for some examples of either of those to challenge myself.
Molly Ringwald’s translation of Lie With Me, by Philippe Besson, was one of those books which totally disrupted my day as I couldn’t help but read it in a single sitting. The short (148 page) book told the story of an intense romance between two teenage boys in France in 1984. It isn’t completely clear whether it is autobiography or fiction. It was completely transporting, evocative and immersive. By the end, I also found it deeply moving. It left me in a bit of a daze.
Find Me was the sequel to André Aciman’s much-acclaimed Call Me By Your Name (I read that volume in February). It was a rather different book, but no less successful. Find Me was narrated in sections by several of the characters from the original novel at five-year intervals, starting a decade on. The sequel had an altogether gentler, more philosophical tone than the original, which was fitting given that it was written from an adult rather than adolescent perspective. The novel intimately explored a series of romantic relationships, with a interesting musical thread weaved through the book. In all, I thought this was as good as the first book, even if it is very different.
Eradication was Nancy Leys Stepan’s comprehensive history of work to eradicate various infectious diseases, with a unifying thread of examining the life and work of Fred Lowe Soper. Stephan gave a great, sobering illustration of how many attempts at disease eradication have failed for essentially the same reasons. She also gave a balanced account of the dangers of eradication programmes, and in particular the opportunity costs. Stepan sometimes lost me in her discussion of the finer details of some of her examples, but nevertheless convinced me of her central thesis that “eradication campaigns should be exceptional and rare”. This was a great read.
Nuclear War in the UK, by Taras Young, was a bit of a niche title describing the public information campaigns the UK government has run in connection with preparing for nuclear war. It gave a fascinating account of the different approaches used over the years, the reasons that the government chose to adopt these, and the public response. Around half of the book was given over to reproductions of pages from various leaflets and information booklets. I would have liked the content to be extended a little to cover the ‘modern’ attempts at communicating similar info in different circumstances (e.g. 2004’s “Preparing for Emergencies” campaign), but that may have diluted the specificity of the book, and I thought this was great nonetheless.
As we’re in the midst of a general election in the UK, I thought it was a timely moment to read Philip Freeman’s new translation of Cicero’s Commentariolum Petitionis, published as How to Win an Election. This was a letter of no-nonsense advice from Quintus Cicero to his brother Marcus Cicero about how to win the consul election in which he was standing, written in 64BC. Reading this was a little cathartic: for all the many failings of our modern politicians, at least none of our candidates has killed and decapitated the corpse of their brother-in-law. That said, the exhortations for campaigning politicians to make promises they can’t possible keep felt depressingly contemporary (“Broken promises are often lost in a cloud of changing circumstances so that anger against you will be minimal … but if you refuse to make a promise, the result is certain and produces immediate anger in a large number of voters”).
I read the Angus Turvill translation of Nagisa Tatsumi’s The Art of Discarding, a guide to changing one’s relationship with physical “stuff” to avoid accumulating too much. This was music to my ears, as I’m already an anti-hoarder with a strong preference for discarding stuff. The book was a little uncomfortably sexist in places, and could have used a little more emphasis on the environmental aspects of discarding, but I thoroughly enjoyed the slightly smug feeling this book engendered in me.
In 2016, Heathcote Williams published Royal Babylon, a 500-stanza poetic rant about the British Monarchy. I picked this up as last month I enjoyed Williams’s (prose) essay on Boris Johnson. There were similarities between the two in that Royal Babylon also serves as an extended character assassination with many astonishing anecdotes. However, a difference between the two was that the logical argument in Royal Babylon wasn’t clear to me. The book dealt mainly with the character flaws of individual members of the royal family which seemed an odd way to argue for the abolition of monarchy; much as it would be odd for the Boris Johnson book to conclude with a clarion call for the abolition of the post of Prime Minister. Nevertheless, this was an entertaining read.
Philippa Perry used her book How to Stay Sane to set out some simple psychotherapy techniques for maintaining mental health. This was something of an accidental purchase, as I expected a discursive and analytical volume, and got an instructional book of ‘exercises’, none of which I actually did. Nevertheless, while this wasn’t my cup of tea, I appreciated the clean and clear style of writing and the advice within seemed pretty reasonable.
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga has, apparently, become something of an Asian sensation. I picked up the English translation, which I think was translated by the original authors, which is the kind of achievement that could make anyone feel inadequate. The book was a sort of philosophical introduction to the psychological teaching of Alfred Adler. I don’t think I’ve read much about Adler’s ideas before, and so I found this exploration interesting. It certainly challenged conventional wisdom, though I can understand why others have rejected it as unhelpfully victim-blaming. The book is presented as a dialogue between a philosopher and a student, and the authors gave a vigorous defense of this approach in the afterword. Nevertheless, I didn’t take to this format, and found it intensely irritating at times. I would have much preferred a more traditional approach with a clearer explanation of the underlying evidence.
No One is Too Small to Make a Difference was an exceptionally poor form of Greta Thunberg’s persuasive arguments on the urgency of tackling climate change. The volume collected eleven short speeches delivered over eight months: as with anyone giving a series of speeches on an identical topics over a short period of time, Thunberg recycled whole paragraphs from speech to speech, making the book highly repetitious. There was no opportunity for Thunberg to air the detail of her arguments, as a short speech will naturally never dive deeper than key headlines. Thunberg is an inspiration; but unfortunately, this book was neither convincing nor satisfying.
I also continued reading the Faber Stories collection of short books this month.
The Shielding of Mrs Forbes was very Alan Bennett, including a rather wonderful line about “a death that might seem to have more to do with narrative tidiness than driving without due care and attention.” It was a story about the complexity of interwoven family secrets which started with a man continuing a clandestine gay affair on his wedding night and only ramped up from there. This was great fun.
The Inner Room was a Robert Aickman short story in which a young girl chose a doll house as a birthday present and creepy things ensure. I’m not quite sure whether I’d class this as “horror” exactly, but it was certainly weird, tense and atmospheric. I enjoyed it, but not sure I’ll remember it twelve months hence.
Thom Jones’s Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine was the atmospheric story of a young boxer’s fight. It concentrated mostly on the boxer’s thoughts in the run-up to the event. It had a driving plot and a cleverly building sense of tension, but it’s not really a story that stayed with me or taught me any great lesson.
Paradise, by Edna O’Brien, was a 62-page story in which a young woman had swimming lessons while on holiday with her much older and wealthier lover. It’s main theme seemed to be around the tension between meeting the expectations of self-entitled wealthy people and being one’s own person. This struck me as a little pedestrian, and the characters and scenery weren’t especially memorable. I don’t think this book lived up to the promise of its theme.
Claire Keegan’s The Forester’s Daughter was a kind of domestic drama set in rural Ireland about a woman who married a farmer “for want of someone better”. A dog features heavily, including a few lines which are somewhat bizarrely narrated from the dog’s point of view, but with a heavy dose of anthropomorphism (“His urge to roll in the cow-dung is almost irresistible but this is the type of house where they might let a dog sleep inside.”) This left me unmoved.
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