I’m behind in my reading, so this isn’t really new, but I’ve just enjoyed this David Sedaris essay published last month in The New Yorker. There was something quite festive about it in a bit of a Chris Rea sense—it’s an account of driving through the night from Maine to Manhattan.
This post was filed under: Media, David Sedaris, The New Yorker.
This will be the last of these posts, at least for a little while. In 2023, I’m going to go back to posting about books individually, rather than in a compiled end-of-the-month post.
But for now, I’ve five books to tell you about.
This Booker-shortlisted 2015 novel is one of those books that has been recommended to me by many people over the last few years, but that I’ve never quite found time for. This is partly because it is long, and starting a long book always feels a bit like taking on a big commitment. But mostly, it’s because the premise didn’t attract me.
This is often described as a story about four male college classmates, following them and their ever-changing relationships over the course of their lives. And yes, that is a part of this book, but it’s not how I’d describe it. I would call it a fictional biography of a brilliant lawyer with a traumatic childhood.
In my premise, this is a book which looks at the lifelong effects of trauma on both the person who suffers it and those around them. There’s a second thread about fatherhood, and the father-son relationship in particular, explored through an adult adoption process. The stuff about modern male friendship is interesting and under-explored in modern fiction, but I didn’t think it was really the focus of the book.
One thing those who recommended this book didn’t get wrong: it is very moving, harrowing even. It was a little over-written, and it took a while to find its focus and get going, but all of that is outweighed—for me, at least—by the complex layers of emotion that the book explores. This is definitely one of my favourite books of 2022.
With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.
This latest collection of funny observational essays covers the COVID-19 pandemic and, movingly, the death of Sedaris’s father.
As documented in his previous books, Sedaris had always had a strained relationship with his father. In this book. Sedaris describes how his father’s late-in-life cognitive decline brought them closer together. He also talks about the complex emotional reaction to his death, given the history between the two of them.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, as I have Sedaris’s previous books… but if you’re new to his essays, you’re probably better off starting with the earlier volumes.
With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.
I was a bit reluctant to dive into this newly published book reviewing the legal framework governing the COVID-19 pandemic in England. I wasn’t convinced that I was ready to relive earlier parts of the pandemic we’re living through, especially considering the impact it had on my professional life.
However, the reviews seemed strong, and I couldn’t resist at least making a start—and then ended up racing through the whole thing.
I was struck by the extensive similarities in the ‘chat’ Wagner reports among legal professionals and the ‘chat’ I participated in as a public health professional. Like Wagner, I was surprised that the Government chose to underpin so much of its guidance with law, in a way that is most unusual for public health practice, rather than concentrating on outlawing only the most egregious behaviour. Like Wagner, I was frustrated that the law and guidance rarely aligned. And, like Wagner, I was confounded by late publication of crucial documents, which often came hours or even days after Government announcements, leaving us all guessing in the meantime.
Wagner’s central argument is that the ‘emergency state’ needs clearer boundaries within the English constitution. His argument won me round.
With thanks to Newcastle University’s library for lending me a copy.
Written in the early part of the pandemic, this is Smith’s short collect of short essays which reflect on her experiences and her relationship with Marcus Aurelius. The final essay is a version of the opening section of Aurelius’s Meditations.
Despite its short length, I describe this as “patchy” and “uneven”. There were sentences that produced that vertiginous effect of totally changing my perspective on something:
Writing is routinely described as ‘creative’ – this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.
but also passages which seemed inconsequential. I suppose, to some degree, that was the pandemic experience for many—so perhaps the form is more considered than I took it to be.
With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.
I was inspired to read this bestselling 1984 French classic translated by Barbara Bray after seeing a short piece about it in The Atlantic. It is an autobiographical novel set in what is now Vietnam in 1929, and concerns the poor 15-year-old narrator falling into an affair with a rich 27-year-old man. Duras wrote this when she was 70 years old, so had considerable distance and perspective on the events it describes.
The novel is short, a little over 100 pages, and is written in a fragmentary style which is not always strictly linear. I found it difficult to get into, and didn’t take much from it. It’s possibly a book that would close study more than my casual read, though I’m aware that Duras herself described it as “a load of shit” that was written “when I was drunk”.
Basically, this just wasn’t up my street.
With thanks to Northumbria University’s library for lending me a copy.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Adam Wagner, David Sedaris, Hanya Yanagihara, Marguerite Duras, Zadie Smith.
This has felt like a month where I haven’t read much, but the above photo suggests otherwise. I think it is just that this has been a very long month: it seems like a very long time since I read some of these!
This 1950 biography was first recommended to me in a conversation seven years ago, and has cropped up with some regularity since. The recommendation has always been accompanied by the comment that this book is hard to get hold of as it is out of print. Copies do now seem to be available on Amazon, but I read a copy from The London Library.
It is astonishingly good.
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the subject of this biography was clearly remarkable. I hadn’t previously appreciated the full breadth of Nightingale’s achievements or the strength of her character, and I was blown away.
Secondly, this is brilliantly written. The prose is exact, the subject matter is well-organised and clearly explained, and the depth of the underlying research almost drips off the page. It feels like it could have been published today, and yet is a little over seventy years old. This is one of those biographies that gives real insight into the character of the subject, and draws out clear lessons from their life: it is so much more than a list of facts. I can scarcely believe that this was Woodham-Smith’s first history book: hers was clearly a remarkable talent.
Perhaps those who know a little more about Nightingale’s life would take less from this than I did, but this is one of my favourite books of the year.
I’ve raved about Will Storr for a long time: his talent as a writer and a journalist is truly remarkable, and he deserves every accolade. His byline on one of his signature long-form newspaper or magazine articles guarantees a fascinating read and new insights, even if the subject at hand isn’t something that appears immediately interesting.
It’s therefore no surprise at all that I loved this recently published book of his about social status and how it drives human psychology. His argument is that the acquisition of social status drives everything we do, without our realisation, and even when we believe we are acting altruistically. We all want to be heroes.
As in all of his writing, Storr takes a broad view of his topic. His discussion encompasses serial killers, social media ‘celebrities’, the history of religion, and (slightly less convincingly) the rise of the Nazis. He writes very interestingly on psychology, and how each person’s perception of the world differs markedly. Storr’s storytelling style holds the text together, with an appreciable dash of wry humour.
Storr’s insights always live long in my memory, perhaps because I enjoy his writing so much, and perhaps because of his memorable storytelling style.
While I loved this book, I’m not sure whether it’s the first I’d recommend to people new to Storr’s writing as his central thesis (while convincing to me) might prove a bit of a barrier: I’d perhaps suggest that Selfie is the best starting point (or his reams of journalism).
This recently published autobiography by the former President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom was absorbing and inspiring.
This is Lady Hale’s account of her professional life, from her time at school and through her legal career. Her passion for her subject shines through on every page: there are not many people who could be so excited by an exam question as for it to feature in their autobiography, but it happens in here. Her enthusiasm is infectious. It is clear, too, especially from Hale’s accounts of complex family law cases, how much she is interested in the effects of the law on “real people’s lives”.
Beyond her childhood, Hale touches only very lightly on her personal life, though I was moved by the deeply personal “afterthoughts”.
Mostly, though, I found this book inspiring. Hale’s dedication to her profession, and her strength and stamina—even in the face of endless sexism—are remarkable.
This 2004 short novel was another recommendation from my friend Julie, who previously recommended Flagg’s Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! which I enjoyed earlier this year.
This is an inconsequential but heartwarming story about a dying man moving from a city to a small rural town in the southern United States. It’s a book that all about generating warm feelings with a gentle pace, straightforward plot and a cast of entirely good-natured characters (one of whom is a redbird).
This isn’t a book with any great life lessons or new insights into character; rather, it’s a lovely, heartwarming yarn which I found to be a very relaxing read.
This is the American humourist’s first volume of diary extracts, published in 2017 and covering 1977 to 2002. If you are familiar with Sedaris’s work, you’ll know what to expect: wry but insightful observations on growing up in the USA, plus life in Paris and the UK.
As you might expect, I found Sedaris’s earlier writing (before he began writing professionally) less engaging than his later work, but I enjoyed this nevertheless.
Published this month, this is Iannucci’s parody of an epic poem telling the story of the UK Government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. It is brief, and yet by turns silly, quotable, depressing and very funny. Andy Riley’s illustrations are quite brilliant, fitting the tone and content of the book while also adding their own dimension.
However, I think the fact that every day at work Is still dominated by the pandemic means that I don’t have the psychological distance from recent events to enjoy this to the full.
This recent publication is one of six novels by Korelitz, and the only one I’ve read. The novel follows Jacob ‘Finch’ Bonner, a down-on-his-luck author who we first meet as a teacher on a writing programme.
An irritatingly over-confident student of Bonner’s has a plot for a book which he considers to be guaranteed massive literary success. The student outlines the plot to Bonner, and then dies before finishing his work, only a few pages of which Bonner has seen. Bonner then appropriates the student’s plot without attribution, has an incredible hit, and begins receiving threatening messages from someone who knows his ‘terrible secret’. This is standard thriller territory.
I picked this up because of reading endless rave reviews. I was familiar with the outline of the plot, and thought it would be fun to read a book which, through its own premise, would have to cleverly work its way around revealing the plot of the book concerned. After all, it wouldn’t be possible to write a convincing novel about a spectacular, world-altering book and also reveal the contents of that book. I assumed it would need to be tightly constructed, probably with a dose of humour, to build tension around something that could never be convincingly revealed.
It turns out that the book isn’t nearly that clever. The character’s plot is explored at length, and we even get extracts from the character’s book. The plot of the character’s book is also pretty standard thriller fare, which means that it doesn’t really support the superstructure the novel builds around it.
Korelitz also introduces some discussion about the morality of retelling stories, comparing this with cultural appropriation in a way which seems to misunderstand the long tradition of the former and the ethical challenge of the latter.
This was a good holiday thriller, but wasn’t nearly the complex, layered, literary novel the reviews (and perhaps my preconceptions) had led me to expect.
This is a recently published history of UK politics in the years 2000 to (roughly) 2015, told mostly from the perspective of the newspaper coverage of the time. Turner tries to place the politics in a context though plentiful references to popular media.
I was surprised that I found this a bit of a slog. For example, Turner devotes many more pages to Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown than to the 2005 London bombings, which is a curious approach. For all the strange choices, Turner never reaches broader conclusions nor draws out the hidden themes behind the history of the times. As a result, this ended up feeling like an eclectic collection of stories with little unifying thread, and I was left wondering what point (if any) Turner was trying to make.
I read this famous 1951 fictional memoir in the 1954 translation by Grace Frick, in a London Library volume which has been borrowed more than two dozen times before I was born. It takes the form of a letter written by Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, reflecting on his life.
This book has been recommended to me several times, is well-loved by friends, and highly rated on Goodreads. It’s therefore a bit awkward to admit that I didn’t really enjoy it.
There is much to like: I took numerous quotations from the book and enjoyed its reflective and somewhat melancholy tone, especially towards the end. However, for reasons I can quite put my finger on, I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief and become absorbed in this book. I kept questioning what was fact and what was fiction, and whether Hadrian really would have seen things in the way Yourcenar suggests. This is partly because my knowledge of Roman history is weak.
The overall effect was that I felt like I read this at a remove, rather than becoming emotionally involved. The result of that was that it felt more like studying a text than becoming immersed in a novel. While that’s not an experience I’m totally averse to, it isn’t what I expected or hoped for from this book.
I often think that we only connect with books if they find us in the right mood. Perhaps I just read it at the wrong time.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Alwyn Turner, Armando Iannucci, Cecil Woodham-Smith, David Sedaris, Fannie Flagg, Florence Nightingale, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Lady Hale, Marguerite Yourcenar, Will Storr.
This is the sixty-second of these monthly posts about what I’ve been reading, and I’ve got seven books to mention.
This is Zweig’s 1941 novella, only 80 pages in length, which I read in Alexander Starritt’s 2013 translation. Some translations have been published with the original title The Royal Game, which I think I prefer.
With such a short book, it’s hard to talk much about the plot without giving away key details. The setting is a ship travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Our narrator discovers that a chess world champion is on board, and a number of matches follow.
Zweig crams more food for thought into 80 pages than most full-length novels. His main theme seems to deal both explicitly and allegorically with Nazism, largely from a psychological perspective. There is a brilliant account of prolonged isolation and it’s psychological effects. And the plot itself moves at a reasonable lick.
This was very easily read in a single sitting, and well worth it.
My friend Rachael recommended this to me as a book which, despite being very close to home, she’d raced through in a couple of days. Published earlier this year, but written pre-covid, it is a novel set mostly in the UK in the near future concerning a global pandemic. Unlike covid, the pathogen in the book affects only men and has a very high mortality rate.
This was a great recommendation.
The plot and characterisation are, to be honest, a bit bonkers: for example, one of the main characters is an A&E consultant who loves the ‘certainty’ of medicine (is there any specialty that’s less about certainty and more about balancing risk than emergency medicine?) and who changes to a completely different specialty overnight, with no training.
The book has a cast of different narrators, and the vast majority of the narration is by female characters. This is a really inspired creative choice, widening the scope of the novel and focussing on those ‘left behind’, and most of the recurring characters were well fleshed-out. The decision to have the occasional standalone chapters widened the field even further. The gender issue feels like it would have attracted more controversy in reverse, though it’s not like the world is short on books written from a male perspective about the deaths of women.
The choice to include ‘newspaper articles’ as chapters was weakened by deciding that those articles should be first-person narrated, in the same style as every other chapter. The writing throughout struck me as pretty pedestrian.
But you know what? For all its faults, I raced through this book much as Rachael did. It feels wrong to call a book about the deaths of millions “fun”, but it really was. And perhaps even a little cathartic.
Published in 2011, this is Madeline Miller’s much-acclaimed retelling of the story of the Trojan War, focused on the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles. It is narrated from the perspective of Patroclus.
My knowledge of Greek mythology isn’t great, though I think I remember a little bit from school. I was a little nervous of reading this despite all the recommendations because I thought it might be a little too fantastical for me, what with all the gods and centaurs and everything… but at its heart, this is a story about the nature of love and courage, and the context was so well realised by the author (helped, no doubt, by centuries of earlier material for which the author has a clear passion) that I didn’t find it to be a barrier.
This was both a thrilling page-turner and a love story, and I enjoyed both equally.
This is Sedaris’s 2008 collection of humorous autobiographical essays, and I was predisposed to enjoy it given that I’ve enjoyed all of his other similar volumes.
This one had a fantastic essay about time spent in a Medical Examiner’s office (‘The Monster Mash’) which brought back memories of my medical school elective spent in a Medical Examiner’s office in Calgary. One of the essays also had some examples of strange English phrases spotted in Japan (‘The Smoking Section’) which made me choke on a drink on public transport, resulting in coughing fit which has become entirely socially unacceptable in the pandemic era.
This is Annie Dillard’s 1989 collection of short essays on how she writes, and the process of writing in general. I don’t write for a living (obviously), but much of what Dillard says in this book felt familiar from the times when I have done bits of writing here and there, and I enjoyed the deeper insights of such a well-regarded and talented writer.
This was well worth reading considering its short length.
Carys Davies’s much-celebrated 2014 collection of seventeen short stories wasn’t really up my street. This isn’t that surprising, and nor should it put you off: I’m not generally a fan of collections of short stories.
The lengths in this collection are highly varied, from a few sentences to thirty or so pages. I didn’t pick up any particular theme running through the collection, though quite a few of the stories contain unexpected twists, and I suppose in retrospect that most of them build up some kind of tension or suspense. I particularly enjoyed the titular story, and also ‘Sybil’, but it was ‘The Quiet’ which was the standout story for me.
However, many of the others in the collection did nothing for me at all, and unfortunately I don’t think that the signal to noise ratio was great enough that I’d want to pick up another of Davies’s collections.
I picked this book up because I’d heard about it in passing somewhere, and evidently had the wrong end of the stick. I had understood that it was an autobiographical account of personal suffering and challenge and insightful tips on how to cope with life “when things fall apart.” It isn’t really that. First published in 1997, it’s an introduction to several aspects of Buddhist practice, explained in an accessible and relatable way, with lots of personal anecdote thrown in and a warm, caring, personal tone.
While this was interesting and easy to read, I don’t think I would have picked it up had I done my research first, as it’s not really my kind of thing. I won’t be picking up any of Chödrön’s other (many) books—but if this is a topic you want to read about, this book seems like an approachable starting point.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Alexander Starritt, Annie Dillard, Carys Davies, Christina Sweeney-Baird, David Sedaris, Madeline Miller, Pema Chödrön, Stefan Zweig.
I’ve read some really good books this month, and also some I liked a little less…
The 2020 Booker Prize winner was, for me, a Christmas present from Wendy. It is one of those books so universally praised that it doesn’t really matter what I write about it, because the tonne of critical and popular opinion far outweighs the thoughts of a person on the internet.
For what it’s worth, I thought it was brilliant. It is the story of the relationship between young Shuggie Bain and his alcoholic mother Agnes. It follows them while Shuggie is growing up, from the age of five to fifteen, against the backdrop of impoverished Glasgow in the 1980s.
It has everything: deep characterisation, moving plot, social commentary, beautifully lyrical writing, profound insight, and more. It is superb.
I’m reminded of Jeffrey Archer whinging through one of his characters that literary prizes are never given to “storytellers”: this book conclusively proves him wrong.
Published in English last year, this is physicist Carlo Rovelli’s collection of newspaper and magazine articles, mostly from Italian publications over the last decade and translated here by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. As the author says in his preface,
the pieces collected here are like brief diary entries recording the intellectual adventures of a physicist who is interested in many things and who is searching for new ideas—for a wide but coherent perspective.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, from the columns on (what seem to me to be) minutiae of physics to the wider social and cultural commentaries, though the latter held more appeal for me. Rovelli writes engagingly and insightfully on everything from the covid pandemic to activism, and from his experiences taking LSD to his atheism. There is always something interesting about hearing people with a huge amount of knowledge and understanding of one area of life applying their perspective and approach to something different… though the three-part essay on black holes also sparkles and his tribute to Stephen Hawking moves.
I haven’t read any of Rovelli’s books before now (despite them selling in their millions), but the quality of his writing and the clarify of his imagery has got me adding them to my “to read” list.
This is Julian Barnes’s 2013 genre-defying short book. It consists of three essays which are thematically connected in myriad unexpected ways: ‘The Sin of Height’ is a biography of the first aerial photographer, Nadar; ‘On the Level’ is a fictional romance between adventurer Fred Burnaby and actress Sarah Burnhardt; and ‘The Loss of Depth’ is memoir, dealing with Barnes’s experience of grief following the death of his wife.
Altogether, this makes for an exceptional portrait of love and grief. It is deeply moving and feels at times painfully honest, and even has the occasional sparkle of humour. It feels both raw, yet also thoughtful and considered. It deepened my understanding of both love and grief.
It’s no secret that Barnes can write, but it is almost impossible to grasp how he covers such expansive territory with such emotional depth in only 128 pages. Exceptional.
Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, recently published this book about the experience of launching her own bank. Through the press, I’ve followed the story of Starling and it’s competition with rival Monzo over a number of years: indeed, I am a Starling customer. I picked up this book as I was keen to learn more.
This turned out to be a real page-turner, giving a lot of insight into what it is like to develop a seed of an idea into a huge business. Boden, a woman in her 50s from Wales, is not the typical model of a financial technology entrepreneur, and faces a number of challenges as a result of her “outsider” status and her desire to challenge the status quo of the banking world. The book opens with the story of her taking her final job in traditional banking as Chief Operating Officer of AIB, and her decision to take on a job which she knows will be unpleasant yet extremely challenging sets up many of her persistent character traits.
Boden reflects at length on the transition from working as a senior banker in traditional firms to setting up her own business. Boden openly discusses her strength and weakness, and the missteps she has made along the way. It was also interesting to have some insight into the regulatory processes that accompany setting up a new bank, all of which were new to me.
Boden talks in some detail about the events which led co-founder Tom Blomfield, along with other senior members of staff, to leave Starling and form a rival bank, Monzo. Clearly, Boden can only ever give her own side of the story, she couldn’t avoid discussing this pivotal point in the story of her bank, and she couldn’t have foreseen future events; but equally, in early 2021, it is a little uncomfortable to consider Boden’s one-sided and unflattering portrait of Blomfield in the light of his post-publication resignation from Monzo and disclosures in recent weeks about his mental health. I suppose this is something of an occupational hazard when writing about fairly recent events involving real people.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed this peek into a professional world which is so far removed from my own, and Boden’s humour combined with the pacy plot kept me racing through the pages.
This is the third essay I’ve read in the Tortoise Media FUTURES series, and my favourite so far. Written by Vinjay Gupta, the violinist (and social activist), it is a hopeful account of how our behaviour around purchasing and consumption is likely to change as we become more aware of the systems that support products.
Gupta’s central argument is that we can’t just buy a widget, for example: we are supporting a much broader system which produces said widget, which might well include supporting disgraceful labour practices on the other side of the world. As the world moves towards greater information flow and transparency, and—crucially—as we get better at managing and processing that information, our perspective on purchasing is likely to change.
As a basic example: if an online supermarket were to introduce a simple site-wide filter allowing customers to opt to see only “vegan” products, that would be enormously helpful to individuals and drive sales of those products. As our social conscience moves forward, perhaps there will be similar filters for ethically produced products and so on. And as data on product provenance becomes more widely available and codified, the same data can be used for better advert targeting, and so on and so forth.
I found the argument convincing, and it’s nice to be convinced by something so hopeful these days!
I’m still on a bit of a Sedaris binge, having read many of his books over the last few months. This is the earliest collection of his essays that I’ve read, published in 1997.
I found the essays in this volume to be a little more hit-and-miss than the later collections, as though he was still trying to find his style, but I still laughed frequently.
Published last year, this is a collection of ten short stories by Emma Cline. Seven of the ten have been previously published in either the New Yorker, Granta or The Paris Review.
I have previously read the author’s first novel, The Girls, which was a best-seller but left me a bit cold. I enjoyed this collection more than the novel, though the stories all shared a similar structure, consisting mostly of characterisation around an unspoken central event or situation. There’s also a theme of gender running throughout, particularly a theme of unpleasant men. Having a similar structure and a similar theme to all of the stories struck me sometimes as interesting (different facets into similar issues) and sometime as a bit dull, I think largely depending on my own mood.
The final story, A/S/L was my personal favourite, perhaps because the unspoken nature of the central fact fitted into the setting the author created so naturally. I think, though, that this collection might be better read as individual stories than as a single collection.
I was lucky enough to read this famous essay in an original 1944 edition.
It starts off well: Liddell Hart gives a lot of interesting theories for why we seem not to learn from history, with a central tenet being that we aren’t very good at truthfully recording events in the first place.
He then lost me for the second half of the essay by going into some detail about the Second World War and perceived problems with the Christian church, which I’m sure would be interesting to many people, but don’t seem obviously related to the titular question.
It’s only short—58 pages in my edition—so I got my effort’s worth from it anyway.
This 2019 novel by Yiyun Li imagines a series of conversations between a mother and her teenage son, who she has recently lost to suicide. It is a short book at 192 pages.
My first impression of this was strong. The imagined conversations are true to life (or perhaps true to death) and interesting philosophical. The mother character writes novels, while the son was a budding poet, and there’s a lot of ‘philosophy as language’ in here: the conversation is often taken deeper through discussed reflection on the etymology of chosen words, for example.
However, my interest in this waned over time despite the short length. It felt a little emotionally flat to me, and there wasn’t a great deal of progress in the conversation. Perhaps that is intended to reflect something of the lived experience of the aftermath of a child’s suicide; I’m not sure.
It came to feel to me that the desire to dissect language as a way into the emotion was limiting rather than enlightening. Perhaps others will feel differently.
Published in English for the first time this month, this is Harmange’s 2020 essay on hating men.
Lest we think the title is just a rhetorical device, Harmange is emphatic:
I hate men. All of them, really? Yes, the whole lot of them … Hating men as a social group, and as individuals too, brings me so much joy.
Even her nearest and dearest are hated:
We need to be vigilant, we have to keep an eye on the genuinely decent ones, because anyone can stray off course, and all the more so if he’s cis, white, wealthy, able-bodied and heterosexual.
I’m a man. It’s fairly clear therefore that Harmange hates me, even though I followed her advice:
The very least a man can do when faced with a woman who expresses misandrist ideas is to shut up and listen. He’d learn a great deal and emerge a better person.
I really don’t know what to do with this book. It’s full of justifiable and passionately expressed anger. But if anger begets only hate, where does that leave us?
I’m not sure I learned a great deal, and I’m not sure I emerged a better person. I emerged mostly as a slightly sadder person, and one that’s a little less hopeful for the future of humanity now that I know that books that actively promote hatred on the basis of unchangeable innate characteristics can become bestsellers in the twenty-first century.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Anne Boden, B. H. Liddell Hart, Carlo Rovelli, David Sedaris, Douglas Stuart, Emma Cline, Julian Barnes, Pauline Harmange, Vinjay Gupta, Yiyun Li.
Six books to mention this month… though in truth, I was reading Wolf Hall much of last month as well!
This was the recently published brilliant finale to Smith’s astonishing seasonal quartet.
If one was setting out to publish a novel a year reflecting the times in which we live, one could hardly have picked a better four years to work with than the last four. Smith’s ability to capture and reflect on the age of Brexit, coronavirus and George Floyd with such a publication schedule, while the rest of us are struggling just to keep up with events, is pure genius. This volume revisits some of the characters from the earlier novels, and I slightly worried that I’d struggle to recall them, given the time that has passed since I read the first of the novels – but they all came flooding back.
I feel a bit lost knowing that this series is now complete – it has been the series that I’ve most enjoyed and most anticipated in recent years. I’ll miss it.
This was the 2019 bestseller which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I picked it up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop and vaguely thought I’d heard good things about it. It turned out to be an extraordinary book.
The book comprised three parts. Part One followed Tequila Leila’s lifetime of reminisces over the first few minutes following her death, covering everything from her own birth into a polygamous family to her murder as a sex worker. Each memory focused on a specific friend whose life was also explored. Part Two followed these closes friends in the day following Leila’s murder. And the brief Part Three followed her soul into the afterlife.
I found this emotionally exhausting. The characterisation and storytelling were so strong that I sometimes forgot this was fiction. Despite the tragedy and emotional weight of the story, it was leavened with moments of humour. It felt to me like this book was as much about Istanbul as it was about the human characters.
Definitely a book I’d recommend.
This was Adam Buxton’s recently published autobiography. I first came across Adam with his friend Joe Cornish in their Adam and Joe Show days, when I was in my early teens, and have followed them ever since. Adam now hosts a successful podcast in which he hosts essentially long form interviews with a huge variety of cultural figures, but which also gives insight into his life in rural Norfolk.
This book’s central thread was the relationship between Adam and his travel-writer father, although he also talked at length about his school days, his career, and his love for David Bowie. I found the section on his father’s last illness particularly moving. I read this shortly after listening to Buxton’s recent podcast recorded the day after his mother’s funeral, in which and Joe reflected movingly and at length on the challenges of parent-child relationships in later life.
I was pre-disposed to like this book because I like Adam. It’s one of those books which I’m not sure would appeal to people who aren’t already familiar with him and his career, but I really enjoyed it.
The 2009 blockbuster Booker winner – a book on which my opinion really couldn’t matter less!
I don’t usually read historical fiction, but this was recommended to me so often that I thought I had to give it a go. It was my redoubtable friend Julie who tipped me over into reading it, by telling me it wasn’t really a historical novel.
I have mixed feelings. I found the plot confusing and often lost the thread (not helped by my complete historical ignorance). On the other hand, the writing was brilliant, filled with witty turns of phrase and clever language. I wouldn’t hesitate to read more of the trilogy, and would consider re-reading this volume at some point—I suspect it would all make a bit more sense second time around, and I’d enjoy revisiting the wonderful prose.
If you regularly follow what I’m reading on this blog, you’ll know I’m having a bit of David Sedaris moment, enjoying his light and humorous approach to life during a time when life feels rather heavier than it might. This was another collection of his essays, most of which were originally published elsewhere, and most of which are very funny.
This 2004 volume, even more than the others I’ve read, was focused on David’s family and his relationships with his parents and siblings both as a child and as an adult. I really enjoyed it.
First published in 1991, this was a very detailed account of the nuclear accident at the Windscale site which occurred in 1957. I read only the 160-page main text, and didn’t delve into the many appendices of official reports.
While well-explained by Arnold, some of the physics was a little beyond my level of casual interest. However, the broader themes of what went wrong in this incident were fascinating in their familiarity: a service over-stretched as a result of Government pressure to deliver more than the expert workforce could adequately oversee, rapid recruitment of non-expert staff to essentially “make up the numbers”, and a resulting lack of expert oversight of activity whose complexity was routinely under-estimated created the conditions for things to go wrong.
Some official reports of the incident then blamed the pressured staff for the incident, although it was rapid local decision-making (including crucial decisions in the absence of robust scientific evidence about discarding milk) that contributed most to protecting the population after the accident.
There are so many lines in this book which could apply directly to much more recent incidents across the public sector (especially covid-19) that it is difficult to conclude that the broad lessons were ever truly learned.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Adam Buxton, Ali Smith, David Sedaris, Elif Shafak, Hilary Mantel, Lorna Arnold.
September has been a very busy month in the world of health protection, so I’ve been reading mostly light stuff to take my mind off things!
Another collection of Sedaris’s amusing autobiographical essays, this volume having been first published in 2000. These were easy to read, clever, and very funny: exactly what my brain and soul needed during troubled times!
The first half focused mainly on his youth, the second half more on a period he spent living in France. I found the latter half funnier and more satisfying, but all of it was delightful. Sedaris is someone I enjoy most in small doses, so I tried to limit myself to one essay a day—but with some in this collection being particularly short, that wasn’t always possible.
The essay about his French class desperately trying to explain Easter despite limited vocabulary was a particular highlight.
I picked this up because I fancied a light summer thriller sort of read, and it ticked that box perfectly. It was a first-person narrated story about a bookseller who was also a stalker. It had a wonderfully silly plot and Kepnes perfectly trod the line between thriller and comedy.
I’m not sure I’ll remember anything about this in a fortnight’s time, but it was great fun.
Monocle is a slightly guilty pleasure of mine. I’ve been a fan since the first issue of the magazine, which I came to via Tyler Brûlé, whose Financial Times Fast Lane column (latterly relaunched in a Monocle email newsletter format as Faster Lane) fascinated me for years. For a long time, I believed Tyler to be satirical caricature, and then only grew more interested when I realised he was real.
I’m a Monocle subscriber, but I don’t think I’m the target demographic: I’m never going to spend £435 on a pair of high-end curling boots, nor £750 on a shell jacket, nor £665 on a tweed cardigan, no matter how much they try and push them on readers of their journalism. But I do love reading and listening to their intelligent discussions of UK and world affairs, and I get a little thrill out of knowing that there are people out there who can write hundreds of words of copy on the colour temperature of the lighting on the latest European rolling stock.
So I bought the Monocle Guide to Gentler Living as a bit of COVID escapism, and it was perfect for that. It was essentially a long, themed edition of the magazine, with lavish photography and illustrations, stripped of display-ads and hard-bound. There was very little detail and substance to any of it, but it did sort of come together to make a coherent set of ideas about slowing down in life. (Think: three paragraphs on why train travel is better than flying, followed by one sentence on each of five “best rail journeys”, accompanied by lovely photographs; some blurb on giving up high powered jobs for “the better life”, with accompanying three-paragraph case studies; a section on fashion with a page dedicated to why one should own a t-shirt—any t-shirt—which consists of a stylish photo of a t-shirt and about fifty words of text).
It was light, fluffy, and totally escapist. I took virtually nothing from it, but really enjoyed it nonetheless. So much, in fact, that I’ve picked up another of the Monocle books in a recent sale.
This was a recently published popular science book about breathing. It was structured around a series of self-experiments conducted by the author. I found this to be a very engaging style, but it did mean that the book was heavy on anecdote and light on proper science. There was also a strong dose of self-help content.
There was a lot of stuff in here that felt like pseudoscientific nonsense. Nevertheless, I found it so engaging that I enjoyed reading it. I even tried some of the described techniques out of curiosity (and got no real benefit).
However, my wife Wendy is a respiratory physician. My top tip to anyone in the same position is to be judicious about sharing passages—there was a fair amount of eye-rolling every time I did, though we did also occasionally descend into fits of giggles, so it was probably worth it.
This was von Arnim’s 1909 book featuring the ridiculously self-important German Baron Otto Von Ottringel going on a caravanning holiday with his wife Edelgard in England. I was sent it in one of the London Review Book Boxes.
The Baron, who narrated, was quite a character: the holiday was to celebrate what he saw as his silver wedding anniversary. He had been widowered some years before and re-married, but felt that his twenty-five years of marriage ought to be marked nonetheless.
He was astoundingly sexist: “Indeed, the perfect woman does not talk at all. Who wants to hear her? All that we ask of her is that she shall listen intelligently when we want anything. Surely this is not much to ask. Matches, ash-trays, and one’s wife should be, so to speak on every table; and I maintain that the perfect wife copies the conduct of the matches and the ash-trays, and combines being useful with being dumb.”
There was humour in the book derived from the contrast between the Baron’s perception of himself and the evident level of regard in which others held him. There was also historical interest in the portrayal of British/German relations, given the world events just around the corner.
However, I found this a slog. The constant casual sexism and outmoded attitudes, while really the point of the piece, were quite wearing to modern eyes. It felt to me like the same points could have been made in a short story, rather than hammered home in a novel, but of course that’s partly because the satirical points being made are well accepted in modern society, which was not so at the time of publication.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Caroline Kepnes, David Sedaris, Elizabeth von Arnim, James Nestor, Monocle.
It’s been the busiest July I can remember, but somehow I still managed to get through six books!
This was a collection of Sedaris’s mostly autobiographical stories which was published in 2018. It featured work previously published in several different periodicals (The New Yorker, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveller). In Sedaris’s usual style, the coverage was eclectic but grounded in everyday life, and very funny throughout. This was perfect reading for relaxation while work is a little more busy and challenging than usual!
While it never felt heavy, there was some particularly reflective and moving material about his estranged sister’s death by suicide. This illustrated Sedaris’s skill in communicating larger ideas by concentrating on (and finding the humour in) the everyday.
I thoroughly enjoyed this; it was one of those serendipitous combinations of finding a great book at the perfect time to read it.
This was first published in 2012 and has been on my “to read” list ever since. I think, but can’t be certain, that I’ve sat through a talk by the author at some point in that period—though it may have been someone talking about him!
Professor Nutt is best known for having been sacked as chair of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2009. In a lecture, he made an evidence-based comparison between the risks of taking ecstasy and the risks of horse-riding. The fact of the comparison was unpalatable to the Government of the time, and he was removed from his post.
Nutt described his disagreements with Government in some detail at the start of this book. Unfortunately, given that it was at the start of the book, I found this a bit unconvincing: it read as though he felt scientific evidence was the only aspect to be considered in policy-making (or at least in the operation of specific policy levers).
However, the bulk of the book was a clear, coherent and evidence-based discussion of the benefits and risks of recreational drug use. This included a section of parental advice on how to discuss drugs with children. Nutt’s text had humour and wit, and the book was easy to read. I learned quite a bit from it!
Camus’s 1948 classic, which I read via Matthew Ward’s 1989 translation. In retrospect, this was an odd choice, as Ward wrote at some length in his translation note about how his was an American English translation for an American audience… whereas I could have picked any number of British English translations. Never mind.
The novel followed Meursault, a French Algerian, and the sequelae to his societally atypical response to his mother’s death. This made me wonder whether, if Camus wrote this book today, Meursault would have been given a diagnostic label rather than being a quirky character—though I suppose that is only really a modern take on the theme of existentialism and absurdism for which the novel is famous.
I really enjoyed this.
This novel of Baker’s was first published in 1988, and it was very much of its time. The 135 pages (with many, many footnotes) were essentially a stream of consciousness covering the period during which the narrator rides up an escalator while returning to his office following his lunch break.
I found it both funny and exasperating in equal measure. It wa one of those books which I think I’ll remember for a long time, even though I didn’t really take that much from it.
This volume contained Marianne Moore’s versions of three tales written by Charles Perrault for the niece of Louis XIV: Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. These were first published in 1963; I read the 2019 Faber Stories 44-page paperback collection.
These versions deviated a little from the commonly received versions: Sleeping Beauty wasn’t awoken with a kiss and Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t ugly, for example. However, I can’t claim to have taken much from this book. The plots were essentially well-worn and the writing didn’t strike me as especially notable, but perhaps that just makes me an uncultured heathen who doesn’t appreciate Moore’s greatness.
I read the expanded 240-page hardback edition of this after reading some glowing reviews. It wasn’t for me. I found the autobiographical sections oddly cagey (the book was about his recovery from business failure and I don’t even know from the book what business he was in), and the self-help sections were just not up my street.
I know others have loved this and found it very helpful in their lives, but I’m not going to stare in a mirror and repeatedly profess my love for myself no matter how many times Ravikant emphasises that this is a great thing to do.
This just was just a bad choice of book on my part. Don’t let my bad experience put you off if it sounds good to you.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Albert Camus, David Nutt, David Sedaris, Kamal Ravikant, Marianne Moore, Nicholson Baker.
Like the first two books in the series, it felt like a privilege to be read Ali Smith’s Spring, which are sure to become a classic, at the moment in time in which they’re set. Smith captures the voice of an age. I’ve found the writing in this series dizzyingly brilliant—the language and the fascinating ways in which Smith manipulates it are somehow more important than the plot. The raw anger in this volume in particular was something else. This was astounding.
There are lots of different editions of Italo Clavino’s Difficult Loves: mine had the classic collection of “Difficult Loves” short stories written in the 1950s, followed by the slightly longer stories “Smog” and “A Plunge Into Real Estate”. The overarching themes were love (in its broadest sense) and loneliness. I don’t usually get on with short stories, but this collection was an exception. The everyday tales which beautifully captured universal emotions; the dry humour; the hint of craziness that made me look at the world slightly differently; all allowed Calvino’s prose to take flight. It’s been years since I last read any Calvino, but I won’t let it be so long next time!
Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls was a collection of amusing autobiographical short stories or ramblings about travel, writing, and life in general. As you probably know, Sedaris is an American living in rural England and he draws a lot on differences in US and British culture in this volume. This is the first time I’ve read any of his work, and it made me laugh out loud a few times, which books rarely do – and it was pleasantly cosy and inconsequential. I’ll certainly read more of Sedaris’s collections.
I found Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall utterly gripping, and finished it in a day. It was a book about a group of undergraduates, guided by an amateur historian (and his wife and child) plus a university professor, going on a camping trip in Northumberland and trying to recreate Iron Age life. There were some beautiful descriptions of the expansive scenery of Northumberland, which meant all the more to me for being local, and some very carefully observed descriptions of the lack of recognition of domestic abuse among victims. This left me with a lot of food for thought.
Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen was a book about how to receive feedback effectively. I found the book baggy and over-long, with rather too many repetitive examples. That said, there was more useful stuff in here than I expected. It shifted my understanding of feedback conversations from being one-way (i.e. passively receiving feedback) to being two-way (i.e. working together to understand the intention behind the feedback and reach a mutual understanding on the next steps). This is an obvious point, but I confess that it’s not one that’s occurred to me in those terms before—perhaps fed by a lifetime of written feedback and evaluative assessment where there’s no opportunity to engage in further discussion.
Heartburn was a short and funny autobiographical novel about the breakdown of Nora Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein. It used a series of relatively frothy vignettes (interspersed with the occasional recipe) to reveal rather deep reflections on life, pain and betrayal. I think I perhaps prefer Ephron’s shorter essays than this longer book, but I found the book so cleverly put together that I might come to think differently about that as I reflect further.
Women and Power was a book based on two speeches by Mary Beard about the way in which women have been systematically denied a public voice. The first took a historical, longitudinal and structural approach to that question, while the second focused more on contemporary examples. I found Beard’s historical account interesting and compelling, but I wish it had gone further. In particular, I would have liked to better understand Beard’s views on how things can change, and what the future may hold – but perhaps that’s not the point of a history book.
This post was filed under: What I've Been Reading, Ali Smith, Books, David Sedaris, Douglas Stone, Italo Calvino, Mary Beard, Nora Ephron, Sarah Moss, Sheila Heen.
The content of this site is copyright protected by a Creative Commons License, with some rights reserved. All trademarks, images and logos remain the property of their respective owners. The accuracy of information on this site is in no way guaranteed. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author. No responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the information provided by this site. Information about cookies and the handling of emails submitted for the 'new posts by email' service can be found in the privacy policy. This site uses affiliate links: if you buy something via a link on this site, I might get a small percentage in commission. Here's hoping.