| Year | Month | Title | Author | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | January | Prophet Song | Paul Lynch | Won the Booker prize. Great at invoking the psychological impact of an imagines police/surveillance state in Ireland. Good, not brilliant. |
| 2024 | January | Geek Love | Katherine Dunn | Wonderfully bonkers. Imaginitively brilliant. Loved how the very limited first person narrative perspoective of Oly created a ‘walled world’ of the Binewski family, so that the weird becomes the normal. It felt like a fully built familial and business world. Sense of veracity came apart a little when Arty built his limb amputation cult. But still utterly brilliant. |
| 2024 | January | Kings of Shanghai | Jonathan Kaufman | Account of the Sassoon and Kandoori dynasties in Shanghai. How they made their fortune (initially opium), created an international enclave in Shanghai, and what happened when the Communist party came to power and it crumbled. Great from both a business acumen perspective, but also understanding why the Chinese resented the West. |
| 2024 | January | In the Skin of a Lion | Michael Ondaatje | A slow burn. Probably worth a re-read. It initially felt fragmented and lacking coherence, but transpired that was actually what was wonderful about the novel. Had some perfectlly crystallised poetic moments: the opening page: storytelling in car, the hanging rescue of the nun from the bridge, the dyeing men at work, the ice skating with fire, the moths, the illicit puppet show, cumming in her mouth. |
| 2024 | March | Hamnet | Maggie O’Farrel | Read as first book for Open Book Club. Maggie is the master of lists and ‘reverse similes’ From letter to Maggie: I loved inhabiting a vivid and full Elizabethan world: a household in Stratford, the overwhelm of London, the meticulously described ecology of a fateful ship’s passage. But primarily the imaginative leap into the mental landscape of your characters (particularly Agnes) and how they interpret and frame that world. A world where magic (of foresight; of nature; of writing) and science sit alongside each other but are not quite resolvedy. And the heartbreak of experiencing Agnes lose her son and her sure-footedness whilst her husband finds his feet separately from her was exquisite. |
| 2024 | April | The Home Child | Liz Berry | Winner of Writer’s Prize Book of the Year 2024. Fragmentary narrative poetry of the imagined life of Eliza, the poet’s great grandmother, who was shipped to Canada as a ‘Home Child’. Only 2 photographs remain of her. The narrative is heartbreaking: childhood and love curtailed, the machinations of the state, and the impact thereof: self-doubt, hatred, self curtailment. But beauty and escape is found in the everyday, particularly nature: a horse, the flowers, an applle, a ribbon. When a home child boy arrives she falls in love amnd her heart opens, like she expands into her humanity. But then they are discovered and he is taken away. Cue her shutting back down, experiencing grriefl, and then on the next page is a photo of her as an elderly woman where nothing has changed again in her circumstance. Devastating. Linguistically and poetically this is mindblowing. The langiuage of nature, sometimes feeling like natural elements are speaking directly, the West Country dialect, and ther wildness of a child/girl are contrasted with the trap-like language of administration and human ownership. Words of wonder and expansiveness vs words of curtailment. |
| 2024 | April | Indestractable | Nir Eyal | Separate notes |
| 2024 | April | The School of Life: Relationships | The School of Life | Separate notes |
| 2024 | April | The Power of Regret | Daniel Pink | Separate notes |
| 2024 | April | Designing Your Life | Bill Burnett & Dave Evans | Separate notes |
| 2024 | May | The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | Steven Covey | Separate notes |
| 2024 | May | The Living Mountain | Nan Shepherd | A love letter to the Cairngorms and the interplay between the mountains and person. ‘merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.’ allows ‘accession of interiority’ of both mountain and oneself Idea of oneness achieved in waking on mountain/listening to water/long steady tramping. Meditative. ‘Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered.’ ‘The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’ In the mountains ‘the body may be said to think’ |
| 2024 | May | That Reminds Me | Derek Owusu | Book club read. Didn’t enjoy it much. Writing felt muddled. Form felt forced without meaning. Some good fragmentary sections, particularly those describing self harm. Good to read a voice sitting in a space that is under-represented in writing (black Londoner, Ghanaiin, dislocation from both, alcoholic, self-harmer). And glad he was able to write it. |
| 2024 | May | Bright Fear | Mary Jean Chan | 3 sections: Grief Lessons, Ars Poetica, Field Notes on a Family that felt progressively stronger. Poetry written in the pandemic that has separation and dislocation baked into the form, but compounded by earlier dislocations of queerdom and the struggle of parents for what we are not. The poem ‘A Denim Shirt’ made me cry. Parental acquiescence and redemption is clearly a hot button of mine (see ‘All of Us Strangers’). Love the crispness of her writing. Will try her previous collection ‘Fleche’. Also Mary Howe, who’s poem ‘The Gate’ I discovered from her poem ‘Ars Poetica III’. ‘Postscript’ and the dedication of MCJ’s work to parents, are a battle cry for persisting with love in difficult circumstances. Learned: -Specular form. Hinged where 2nd half mirrors the first. Invented by Julia Copus. Allows the ability to roll back time and look at events differently, with hindsight. -Golden Shovel form. Invented by Terrance Hasyes. Take a line from a writer you admire and use each word as the final word in each line of poetry. MJC uses this in ‘The Painter, as homage to Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’. |
| 2024 | May | Mating in Captivity | Esther Perel | Separate notes |
| 2024 | May | Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows | Richard Hytner | Separate notes |
| 2024 | June | This Is How You Lose the Time War | Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone | A gobsmacking sci-fi romance, unfurled in letters between Red and Blue: 2 time-travelling agents working for opposing Universal organisations. The universe described is vague, but captivating in it’s infinite potentials and opportunity for subtle manipulations/machinations. However what shines is the development of consuming love between two adversaries. Love shines against the backdrop of yawning space and time, between two not-quite-known beings, and the way they discover love and describe it in the ethereal, poetic language. Unfamiliar and new to them. And both alien and familiar to us. Wrapped up with an intricately constructed, wholly satisfying ending. |
| 2024 | June | Rapture | Carol-Ann Duffy | An exploration of the journey from love through to grief. Grounded in the Romantic tradition: Sonnet forms & the natural world. But riffed on: playing with the form, the centrality of the mobile phone. Most affecting in it’s study of the pain and grief of love going wonky, and then lost. ‘I never asked for..’ |
| 2024 | June | The Prophets | Robert Jones Jr. | Queer love story on a slave plantation, set in the context of it being a sacred relationship it’s an ancestral history. (With ancestors who still interact across the divide with the physical world. The author is brilliant at using extended (sometimes stretched) metaphors of landscape to describe the internal states of the characters. After a while some of the more didactic language of deprivation started to grate. |
| 2024 | July | The World’s Two Smallest Humans | Julia Copus | 4 sections: 1) Durable Features – Brilliant at evoking loss: of relationship, but also death. Uses speculum poetry brilliantly for this. ‘Raymond, at 60’ is my favourite. Bus journeys reminding him of his dead mother. 2) Letter communication between Mozart and his employee, who transcribes his works and engages in an insinuated romance with his wife. 3) Hero: Ovid response. 4) Ghost: Haunting evocation of IVF and the pain and otherworldliness of it. |
| 2024 | July | Fleche | Mary Jean Chan | Stonking. Intersectional genius. Finds the exact but universal in the intersections. Structured loosely around fencing moves. At its most moving when evoking love: familial and romantic. Favourite: They Would Have All That: ‘They are gentler / because they have memorised each others’ fears / like daily prayer’… ‘They are gentler because they have / grown too knowledgeable to love any other way.’ ‘Beyond desire: / two clasped bodies holding the heart’s ache at bay.’ |
| 2024 | July | Ways of Seeing | John Berger | Far more of a socialist firebrand (in a good way!) than anticipated: ‘The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product’ ‘It remains credible because the truthfulness of publicity is judged, not by the real fulfilment of its promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer.’ |
| 2024 | July | The Republic of Motherhood | Liz Berry | Small and beautiful. Gives a glimpse into the isolation and bond of mother and child, and the powerful emotions and journey that take place behind the closed doors of conception, birth and motherhood. |
| 2024 | August | The Outsider | Albert Camus | Affecting in it’s dispassion, objectivity, emotional honesty/sparseness and distance. A novel of the Absurd school of thought: removing the big meaning giving narratives. Comforting to read in that it feels realistic and stripped of bombast. Discomforting in that it requires a removal of greater meaning and a finding this in the realism of the moment and experience. |
| 2024 | August | The Old Ways | Robert Macfarlane | My choice for book club. This man can write! -‘A sound came from above, an amplified riffle: banknotes being whirred through a telling machine. It was the compound wing-noise of puffins, thousands of puffins, criss-crossing the sky with their busy roosting flights.’ -‘Shoals of starlings, dense and particulate, shifted above the rooftops.’ -‘Wands of dogwood made zebra-hide of the path; hawthorn threw a lattice’ -‘Paths were figured as rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to weird morphologies, uncanny origami.’ On landscape: -‘For some time now it had seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?’ -‘I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket, screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.’ -‘Landscape’ is 1598 anglicization of Dutch ‘landschap’ which meant a unit or tract of land. Got bastardised in meaning into English due to 15th century Dutch school of landscape painting so that it’s meaning became ‘a painterly depiction of scenery’. Not used to mean physical landscape until 1725. (Link to John Berger’s essay equating (not good) landscape painting to ideas of ownership of land. On Edward Thomas and depression: ‘Mostly the rain calms him because it deprives him of context. It desirably subtracts some part of him, taking away from him ‘everything except the power to walk under the dark trees, to enjoy as humbly as the hissing of grass’. Vs ‘I am not part of nature. I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.’ Other people: -William Fox: ‘cognitive dissonance in isotropic spaces’. -‘After twenty miles you’re wall-eyed, inanely watching loops on what John Hillaby once called ‘the skull cinema’ -Richard Long: artist -Steve Dilworth: artist For me: Created a tension within me of seeing someone with similar leanings and passion (adventure, landscape, people, language) who has followed these passions throughout his life and is operating on a level that feels unattainable. But also a massive inspiration to lean in to these parts of me. |
| 2024 | September | The 2-Hour Job Search | Steve Dalton | Really good, clear structure to crack into job searching. Framework and working sheets on Excel. |
| 2024 | September | What the Living Do | Mary Howe | It’s about losing people you love. It’s about how people you love protect you from the ghost of past trauma. It’s about taking real joy from what you have in the now. Knockouts: Rochester, New York, July 1989 The Last Time The Gate Separation The Dream: ‘Sometimes the island wavers and shimmers underfoot, But the bridge appears when you walk across it – that’s How it works, right? There’s no end to this.’ Amazing how these poems hit so much harder within the narrative/structure than as standalones. |
| 2024 | September | Crush | Richard Siken | 2004 winner of Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poetry with a driving urgency but never with a clear sense of exactly what’s going on. Instead it provides a tapestry of recurring imagery: driving, guns, bullet wounds, smothering, loneliness in rooms with no clear sense of self, the gap between the expectation and reality of connecting with another lover. Cumulatively it summons forth an atmosphere of immense pain, yearnings dashed, of a lover who can’t find a foothold of stability or connection anywhere, and of sense of constant panic and danger that this instils. |
| 2024 | September | Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology | Edited by Shane Hawk and Throdore C. Van Alst Jr. | |
| 2024 | October | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | Perfectly timed to read before Gladiator 2 |