| 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 | The Heart of Tantric Sex | Diana Richardson | See Personal/Relationship reading notes |
| 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. | Read this for book club. It felt like it could have done with some more editing down – there were far too many short stories in here where I felt the writer did not have control of their craft and it often felt like a slog diving into the next one. Over time though I started to understand that these stories represented different ways of dealing with disempowerment, whether through imagined revenge, power, pity, supernatural acuity or a righting of wrongs, and that made reading them more interesting. Favourite story: The Longest Street in the World by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. Proper film noir vibes. |
| 2024 | November | Soho | Richard Scott | Read this after doing a poetry writing workshop with Richard Scott at Faber Academy (a lovely man and a beautiful way to spend a day). 4 sections: 1) Admissions: gay coming of age poems. I really enjoyed Crocodile – the metre feels like a death roll, Plug – for it’s naturalistic specificity of description, and Sandcastles – for the sense of splitting of possibilities of lives and selves that present themselves at the juncture of realising that there are other worlds for you. 2) Verlaine in Soho – 15 Love Poems after Paul Verlaine: I think I missed a lot of what is probably great in these poems due to having never read any Verlaine. But after reading a little about him (and Arthur Rimbaud), I’m keen to. 3) Shame: A series of poems only titled by their first lines about the causes of gay shame, where it comes from, and the damage that it causes. ‘Even if you fuck me all vanilla… even if I fall in love… we are still dangerous faggots’. I am sure there’s a lot of intertextuality that I’m missing here. Some lines have references in the margin that I don’t know. I did pick up on the response in [but our crab shells are orange] to Mark Doty’s A Green Crab Shell in which he destroys the conceit of seeing a yearning, hyperbolic beauty in a dead crab, instead ‘I cannot see heaven… the grey sand rimed with oil / diesel rainbows is littered with death / so many exoskeletons glinting at dusk like / sweat beads on a man’s body… sex will kill us all’. A section about self-harm, sex, isolation and feeling lost. 4) Soho: Only one poem here: Oh My Soho!, and it’s an epic blinder, putting contemporary Soho in the context of queer history ‘Oh my Soho, you are my museum tonight!’. Roman, Greek, Christian, Victorian, HIV, illegality vs MANBAR, HEAVEN & CHARIOTS. ‘But did we down our placards / for the sake of a good party’ |
| 2024 | December | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | I went into this knowing it was a pretty seminal Stoic text, but without a lot more context than that. At first I found it a little confusing and disappointing: unstructured, repetitious, and perhaps a little naïve of the situation of large swathes of humanity. (And also, perhaps, a sense of playfulness). I took a rain check about half way through to research and discover that this was very much a series of personal meditations (intended for no audience) by this Roman Emperor. When read in the context of a man in a particular circumstance taking time to reflect and guide himself according to his principles it came alive for me. Particularly the sense of gratitude for other people in his life who had demonstrated how to live in ways that he aspired to, but also the sense of self-exhortation to just crack on with the right thing to do at any given time without allocating time and energy to judging the events of the world or the actions of other people. Simple and effective. On getting on with it: ‘Do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts.’ ‘Well then, man: do what nature now requires. Set thyself in motion, if it is in thy power, and do not look about thee to see if anyone will observe it; nor yet expect Plato’s Republic but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter.’ ‘What matter and opportunity for thy activity art thou avoiding?’ ‘seek what is conformable to thy own nature, and strive towards this, even if it bring no reputation; for every man is allowed to seek his own good.’ ‘A man ought to consider as an enjoyment everything which is in his power to do according to his nature’ ‘In the morning, when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present – I am rising to the work of a human being.’ ‘So a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act’ ‘I do my duty: other things trouble me not’ ‘No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.’ ‘understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself’ On outside influences: ‘Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others… and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power.’ ‘The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer.’ ‘the wrongdoer has done thee no harm, for he has not made thy ruling faculty worse than it was before.’ ‘For it is in our power… to get out of the way, and have no suspicion or hatred.’ ‘It is in thy duty to leave another man’s wrongful act there where it is.’ ‘That which rules within…always easily adapts to that which is presented to it.’ ‘Be pacified and reconciled, as soon as they have shown a readiness to be reconciled’ ‘No-one can fix on me what is ugly’ ‘A good disposition is invincible’ ‘for to me that which presents itself is always a material for virtue’ On Finding Peace: ‘Tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind’ ‘It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing’ ‘Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.’ ‘Dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd’s fold on a mountain’ ‘Have I done something for the general interest?’ |
| 2025 | January | Orbital | Samantha Harvey | Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.’ Phwoar. This is a beautiful little thing. Described by Samantha as a ‘Space Pastoral’ this tracks the ISS through a ‘day’ of 16 revolutions around the earth (‘Space shreds time to pieces’). A novel that plays with paradox and perspective: are we focused on the ISS, The Earth, or the astronauts? Is space travel a worthy pursuit or hubris? Are politics and country borders entrenched or should we think bigger? Impossible to read this and not fall in love hard for our planet. ‘The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exalted lover’ I love that Harvey sets up 3 images within the novel: i) The painting Las Meninas. ii) Michael Collins’s photo from the Moon Landing iii) The photo of Chie’s mum looking up at the sky on Moon Landing day. How she interprets it is ‘just imaginings and projections, and they could all be wrong.’ And uses them to show how perspective and interpretation is a slippery and ungraspable thing. She then plays this slipperiness of perspective (even verging on paradox) throughout the novel: -Is Earth one unified thing, or a collection of national borders and political disputes. We get vast beautiful tracts describing the space station soaring over very detailed lists of countries, ‘a planet contoured and landscaped by want’, and yet from space even the weather systems are seen as part of the ‘one-ness’ of Earth. -Are astronauts ‘heroes’ or ‘idiots’. Is man’s lust for space ‘curiosity’ or ‘ingratitude’ -Is space exploration a scientific or a mythic pursuit ‘Strange how the most cutting-edge science brands itself with the gods and goddesses of myth’ -How the slight ‘billowing’ of sleeping bags hanging in space can change you from feeling ‘crestfallen’ to ‘The simultaneous not wanting to be here and always wanting to be here, the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledgeable of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you aren’t.’ There isn’t much plot, but a few passages really hit home in their emotional intensity: -Chie considering the death of her mother whilst she is on the ISS and contemplating the missing of key rituals to mark her passing. -The description of the EEG recording of a woman’s brain in love on the phonographs attached to Voyager 1 & 2; ‘In fivce billion years when the earth is long dead, it’ll be a love song that out-lives spent suns. The sound signature of a love-flooded brain, passing through the Ort Cloud, through solar systems, past hurling meteorites, into the gravitational pull of stars that don’t yet exist.’ -Orbit 13, which plots the entire history of the universe to date in a metaphorical calendar year and has ‘teabags’, ‘thermos flasks’ and ‘Beatrix Potter’ as key events that emerge in the final second of New Year’s Eve. ‘We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summary burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.’ Made extra poignant at the end of the summary by the astronauts waking up in the ISS after falling asleep in front of a movie, hugging, saying goodnight in 5 languages, and heading to bed. -When the mice learn to let go of their cage and fly. The whole sense of the novel feels like Nell’s line on waking from a dream: ‘She doesn’t know what it is she understood in the dream, it’s there in her mind but vanishes on contact.’ Or maybe it’s like Pietro’s dream: ‘Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which is itself nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.’ |
| 2025 | January | 100 Queer Poems | Curated by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan | Favourite poems: -Colette Bryce: A Spider -Jen Campbell: The Bear -Chen Chen: I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party -Leo Boix: Oval Table -Thom Gunn: Nights with the Speed Bros. -Carol Ann Duffy: Prayer -Lord Alfred Douglas: Two Loves -Seni Seneviratne: Philomela: Nest building -Natalie Diaz: Postcolonial Love Poem -Jane Clarke: When Winter Comes |
| 2025 | January | Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce | Helen Fisher | Infatuation lasts 18 months-3 years, followed by attachment. Monogamy and marriage are pretty universal across cultures, except for some harem behaviours. Adultery rates are really high! 40+% (but difficult to measure). Cross-culturally most divorces peak 4 years after marriage – same period as birth spacing in hunter-gatherer tribes. Divorce rates/feasibility depend on having movable, divisible, property. Only about 3% of all mammal’s form a long term relationship with single mate. Bipetalism proposed for why hominoids moved from harem to monogomous mating strategy. Noi longer could females have young clinging to them whilst going about life. Moving from forest to grassland meant resources were not rich enough to form a harem. And life was more dangerous. Some pretty conjecturous stuff on gender differences and power. Signposted by ‘undoubtedly’ Big change when brain capacity got over 700cc. Altricial young had to be born so they could fit through birth canal.. Greater nurturing burden. Also, longer childhoods and ‘teenage’. Robin Fox: conscience and guilt come from the need to restrain aggression and sex (follow the rules) to achieve power. Soft wired into brain in amygdala. Conflict between conscience and selfish reproductive gain David Hume ‘The heart of man is made so as to reconcile contradictions.’ 8k-5k BC farming emerged in Middle East due to glacial retreat. Invention of the plow denied women’s role on farm and subjugation (property, double-standards) emerged. Need to prove lineage for property rights caused lifelong monogamy. Need to defend/wage war further increased men’s power. Also, rank emerged as societies became more interconnected. Industrial Revolution allowed women to work again. They regained power (except for a weird postwar baby boom blip in 1950s). We’re now seeing a reversion to older patterns of behaviour (with some caveats about later age of marriage and cohabiting). Blended families and change are the new normal again. But what about social isolation and far flung mobility? (clan support for rearing no longer present). Girls used to be able to sexually experiment without risk of pregnancy but now become fertile earlier due to improvements in diet. Cause of teenage pregnancies |
| 2025 | February | Memorial | Bryan Washington | This novel was a vibe: a failing relationship, a dying absent father, a mother-in-law lied to a left stranded. And everyone communicating terribly with each other. It felt hopeless. But underneath it all, through the most gentle explication through action, there’s the slow accumulation of cross-cultural and interpersonal understanding. It’s not a happy ending, but there’s a silent, stealthy movement that occurs, and allows a kind of almost hope. |
| 2025 | February | Giovanni’s Room | James Baldwin | This felt so strangely contemporary in it’s direct gaze, honesty and explication on the dynamics of shame. It begins with David, an American who’s life has been irreparably damaged as a result of his decision to try to choose the easy life of ‘straightness’ contemplating the death by guillotine of Giovanni, who’s death he bears at least a partial moral responsibility for. Baldwin allows us a raw and unflinching look into the internality of David as he moved through the novel, including giving us a sense of the internal elements of his life that he can’t or won’t look at himself. This is set against the foil of Giovanni who is ready to love fully, assuredly and passionately. Further tensions provided between the cultural differences of Americans and Europeans, the dynamics of power and money that their relationship is inescapably set within, and tensions of family and homophobia. The way in which Baldwin absolutely nails the isolating nature of secrets right from David’s first homosexual encounter, after which we feel that he truly cuts emotionally from everyone around him, is haunting. |
| 2025 | February | A City on Mars | Kelly and Zach Weinersmith | This is such an ambitious and wonderfully executed book. The product of what was clearly incredibly deep and wide research, but written so engagingly (with whimsical cartoons to support) that it never felt as weighty as it clearly was. The central premise (which the authors proclaim to be disappointed by) is that space colonisation is much further away than the popular technological focused narrative would have us believe. For a few key reasons: -We have nowhere near enough knowledge on what the effects of space might do to human reproduction. Radiation and micro-gravity being two significant factors. -Resources in space are not as valuable and accessible as we might believe. -There hasn’t been enough research on creating ‘closed loop’ habitats off world. And any future civilisations on the Moon/Mars/Asteroids are likely to be hugely dependent on Earth for a very long time, negating the argument that colonising other celestial bodies is any sort of insurance policy for the Earth being damaged in at least the medium-term future. -Space Law needs some serious thought and intervention before we attempt it, to mitigate the risks of inter and intra planetary war as a result of a space race. -To establish a living colony there is a need to ‘go big’ in terms of numbers. Both to avoid inbreeding, but also to have the degree of specialism and redundancy required to be self-sufficient. Leaving the Earth for Mars ‘would be like leaving a messy room so you could live in a toxic waste dump.’ Things I enjoyed learning from this book: -Key pieces of space law: i) The Outer Space Treaty – 1967: only 2,500 words. States space activity ‘shall be carried out for the benefit and interests of all countries.’ ii) The Rescue Agreement – 1968: Any astronauts and equipment must be returned to their home country safely. iii) The Liability Convention – 1972: Liability is held by the state that ‘launches or procures the launching of an object into outer space’ as well as ‘each State party from whose territory or facility an object is launched.’ (Brings up issue of launching from states with most favourable laws i.e. flags of convenience like situation in shipping. iv) The Registration Convention – 1975: Any launches must be registered with UN. v) The Moon Agreement – 1979: Not signed by US or USSR. Largely ignored. vi) The Artemis Accords – 2020: Driven by the US. Came from an environment where the US was pro being able to exploit space (i.e. no sovereignty but the ability to capitalise on resources). Created idea of ‘safety zones’ around areas of activity, which cannot be entered without consultation by others. Also the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibited testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere or outer space. -3 key legal terms: i) Res nullius: ‘nobody’s thing’. Can be claimed. ii) Res communis: ‘common thing’. Open to everyone, but usually with regulation to prevent it being over-exploited. (e.g. Earth’s atmosphere) iii) Common Heritage of Mankind: ‘collectively owned by all of humanity’. If you use it you need to compensate all of humanity. 2 Earth models for space law: -The Antarctic Treaty System of 1961 effectively ‘froze’ territorial claims (whilst keeping them live) and banned exploitation of minerals, military bases and nuclear waste dumping. -UNICLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). Signed in 1994: Countries get an exclusive economic zone of the sea-bed off their border, but designates ‘The Area’ (50% of Earth’s surface) as managed by an international regime to control resource exploitation, in a way that attempts to share the benefits, particularly with developing nations. -The moon has VERY limited prime real estate at the poles where craters create Peaks of Eternal Light, where temperatures are a mild -70 degrees C, and Craters of Eternal Darkness where there is potentially about 100m tons of water (that could be used for oxygen generation, drinking, fuel cells or rocket fuel). These make up 0.1% of the lunar surface. The moon is probably only good as a launch site (less gravity and atmosphere to escape from) or for research. -Lava tubes on the Moon and Mars are probably the best places to try to set up a liveable habitat. -The cosmonauts on Mir had a VHS player and a copy of Emmanuelle. -John Glenn spent the entirety of his orbital mission with a rectal thermometer inserted. -There was a project called Biosphere 2, founded by billionaire Ed Bass, which put 8 humans in a closed loop system for 2 years between 1991-1993. They survived but had significant issues, including falling out with each other, nearly starving and dealing with deadly scorpions. -Wernher Von Braun was a rocket science pioneer for the Nazis, who developed the V2 rocket and was complicit some really nasty things such as treatment of concentration camp prisoners involved in the rocket program. He surrendered to the allies and became a key architect of the US rocket program. -JFK reportedly stated ‘I’m not that interested in space’, but was compelled to unite the US behind the Moon program due to the USSR launching Sputnik first. |
| 2025 | February | Paradise | Toni Morrison | This was a super interesting, if far from perfect novel. Melding themes of history, identity, power, mysogyny and societal fragmentation, with the women in the convent being held my the men of Ruby to be emblematic (or cause) of the ways in which their society was turning that they didn’t like (although it transpired this was pretty hypocritical). I loved the structure, as confusing as it was, with timelines chopped and changed, fragmented by memory and storytelling, so it’s never quite clear what the ‘correct’ version of the truth is, and the sweeping arc chapters of the convent women describing how their lives took them to be there. Reminded me of Golding’s Darkness Visible, which he also wrote after winning the Nobel prize for literature, was also interestingly structured and at times relatively impenetrable (in a similar ‘show don’t tell’ manner, and also played in the supernatural realm (visions, witchcraft) in a way that seemed to bely the fact that both authors were striving towards something that sits behind things, but weren’t quite convinced that their stories had quite accomplished this. |
| 2025 | February | Why Him? Why Her? | Helen Fisher | This was basically MBTI for relationships, with all the same kinds of objections/weaknesses, but also practical utility that a broad (but not always nuanced or entirely accurate) description of personality types and how they can best gel together offers. For the record, I’m an Explorer-Negotiator! And my partner is a Negotiator-Explorer. |
| 2025 | February | 12 Rules for Life | Jordan Peterson | Reading this raised eyebrows from the people in my network that saw me with it. I don’t naturally with Jordan’s total worldview. But I was really intrigued by his rule/chapter titles, which sounded wise and kind e.g. ‘don’t interrupt kids while they’re skateboarding’. This seemed like an opportunity to bridge to someone not in my bubble and hopefully learn something as well as finding common ground. And to some extent I was successful. His early focus on recognising the limitations of how we can see the world as individuals, and to work with an awareness of those parameters to improve self and the world around you to widen and find opportunities outside those parameters was gentle and inspiring. And whilst I’m perhaps not aligned with the centrality of the Bible as a creed to live by, his reading of the move from Old to New Testament as a move from explication of brutal cause and effect, to the world being shaped by what we bring to it (especially an attitude of love) was quite inspiring. BUT there was a nastiness and some real authorial/argumentation errors that were fatal for me. Some were relatively innocuous, such as his evidence for our limited perception being the energy intensiveness of our fovea (as if perception and the sense of sight were the same thing). Some were fatal, such as his lengthy (and quite fervent) evidence that sex differences are innate vs. cultural being largely based on Disney movies, fairy tales and other stories (and his anthropological explanations of women not having agency and utility other than child rearing being largely disproved e.g. by Helen Fisher in the Anatomy of Love, which I had read the month before). That’s not to say that broad gender differences exist on average across gender cohorts, but Jordan’s mysogeny was pretty evident from the outside. He refers to chaos as ‘feminine’ and order as ‘masculine’ and then titles his book ‘an antidote to chaos’. By the final two chapters his kindness and wisdom had slipped, to reveal a quite angry diatribe that could be summed up as ‘let (straight, presumably white) men do what they want, regardless of who else gets hurt, or society is at risk of collapse from accommodating the needs of ‘smaller and smaller minorities). Where did your nascent empathy go Jordan? And what about letting other people bring their potential to benefit society? |
| 2025 | March | Playground | Richard Powers | This was Zack’s choice for book club. This is an expansive novel, bringing a few narrative mega-threads together: -The Ocean: accessed through the story of Evie, a diver with total wonderment at the ocean and everything in it. The descriptions of ocean organisms are mind-blowing in their range, depth, behaviour and unexpectedness. At the very least this novel was a bit of a ‘sea-change’ (haha) for me in how I view animal consciousness. That dancing cuttlefish! And the playing manta ray. It also made real the importance and domination of Ocean on the planet, in scale and impact. -Related to this the idea of ‘play’. Yes it’s something that humans do (as brought to life in Rafi and Todd’s formative interactions over Chess and Go). But RP also puts evolution on a meta-scale within the bounds of ‘play’: a new piece gets put down and everything else re-arranges itself. -Play is also seen as a critical interaction for learning. We see this in humans, but also animals, and also… -The development of AI (here made real through Todd’s development of ‘Profunda’), which is seen to ‘play’ with training data and what it does with it. Here the question of what is consciousness and when can it be said to be present starts creeping into AI development too, as well as in the animal kingdom. How ‘separate’ really are humans from everything else. -Fundamentally, I still took from this novel that the friendships and connections we form and keep are the things that matter in the end. The final twist, that all the stories except for Todd’s personal narrative are a Profunda invention (intended as a story to soothe Todd as he deteriorates and dies alone at the end of his life, having never been able to repair the rifts that formed in his formative relationships with Rafi and Ina) left me with a real sense of tragedy and pathos, as all the characters and events that seemed so ‘real’ and vivid melted away from the imagined story, leaving Todd, alone and dying, being salved by the stories that he tells his phone being extrapolated and told back as a believable fiction to salve him. -But, but, but…. the Irony of feeling ‘cheated’ that the ‘story’ was made up by AI (in the fictitious story). When if it was ‘true’ within the suspended disbelief of the story it would still be made up. AND the further irony that the ‘AI/Profunda story’ was actually written by the author. As was the invention of the story being an AI derived story. A hall of mirrors where you’re never quite sure which level of disbelief you are suspended at any given time. Perhaps in the end these layering of different stories and different endings demonstrate to us the range of choices, potential focus, and endings, that are available to us in our own lives? |
| 2025 | March | The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership | Steven B. Sample | A really honest, clear and actionable take on several different concepts of leadership, as the author sees them. I got loads from this book, not least a desire to go read some of the ‘supertexts’ that I’m not familiar with. Thinking Gray: ‘Don’t form an opinion about an important matter until you’ve heard all of the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts.’ -Prevents closing mind to new facts & opinions -Prevents flip-flopping -Prevents believing along with herd mentality. Thinking Free: -A continuous practice rather than the limited ‘thinking outside the box’. ‘Allow your mind to contemplate really outrageous ideas, and only subsequently apply the constraints…’ -Great story about how Steven invented the digital control on a dishwasher by imagining how ‘hay bales, elephants, planets, ladybugs, sofas, microbes, newspapers, hydroelectric dams, French horns, electrons and trees’ could be used to solve the problem. -This is also true for leaders to be able to accurately play out in their imagination how decisions/contingencies will play out: ‘He has to be able to move people around in his mind and grasp how they would respond to the new situation. He has to be able to move resources and budgets around and be able to discern how those moves would affect the bottom line. He needs to be able to look at complex human situations and sense how the outcome would be affected depending on the sequence in which he interacts with various participants.’ Artful Listening: -Leaders must nurture a curia of inner-circle advisors / top level beaurocracy. These must be trusted people, who’s agenda/viewpoint the leader is familiar with, and with whom he can get indignant if he is not receiving candour in their inputs (and there should also be breadth of opinion). -Don’t react to all inputs. Ask ‘who is saying what to whom’ and stay gray until the facts are in place. Listen attentively, form empathy, and hand over to decision makers. -Notion of ‘open communication with structured decision making’. Anyone can voice anything to anyone, but to do something about it must go through the proper, aligned channels (stops confusion in reporting lines too). -Negotiation tactic: avoid hard ‘nos’ by taking what the other side says in bits, and when the pressure is on go in a tangential direction before circling back from a new perspective.’ -Utility of spending time in artful listening mode in an organisation (without decision making ability) before taking up the actual post. Leveraging Experts: -‘A leader should pay close attention to experts but never take them too seriously, and never trust them completely.’ -Experts should be ‘deep specialists’. Leaders should be ‘deep generalists’. -Be wary of ‘fashions’ in areas where they do not necessarily last well: buildings, fashion, social sciences. Use custom and judgement when considering use of social technologies (e.g. IQ tests). -Be cognisant that understanding science is increasingly necessary to understand technology and drive it forward (rather than just haphazard / trial & error discovery and usage). -‘It helps to know what you hope to get out of an expert before you ask him to become part of your team. And because his knowledge and expertise are esoteric relative to your own it helps to develop mutual sympathy and trust between you and the expert before going too far down the garden path together.’ Finally, it’s very important that the expert be able and willing to explain to you, in terms you understand, everything he’s doing or plans to do.’ You Are What You Read: -‘All leaders… are heavily influenced by what they read’. This can even have an outsize influence vs input from closest advisors. -‘For the contrarian leader, just one original idea is worth a hundred regurgitations of conventional wisdom’ -‘A good rule of thumb for contrarian leaders is to go where your competitors don’t go and read what they don’t read’. -He posits a spectrum of reading, based on how ephemeral or lasting the text is: Ephemeral = newspapers, trade publications (and now, surely social media). –> Enduring = supertexts, 500+ years. SUPERTEXTS: Macchiavelli’s The Prince, The Bible, The Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, The Analects of Confucious, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Shakespeare’s plays, Sophocles’ plays, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Montaigne’s Essays, Cervante’s Don Quixote, ALSO PERHAPS The Upanishads, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Aeschylus’s Plays, Plutarch, Chanson de Roland, Maimonide’s Guide to the Perplexed, Moore’s Utopia. BEST FOR MODERN LEADERS: The Prince – Direct advice to leaders. Biblical Leaders: Moses (Exodus), David (1 & 2 Samuel), Jesus (Matthew), Paul (Acts) Plato’s Republic – brings out the best in us Hamlet – A look inside ourselves Othello – Undone by an advisor Sophocle’s Antigone – pitfalls of rigidity. John Ciardi’s translation of The Divine Comedy – portrayal of the full range of human triumphs and foibles. -Supertexts tell us about what is enduring in human behaviour, and by dint of their survival have had an outsize influence on culture. ‘A leader can gain a tremendous competitive advantage by being able to discern the few things that are NOT changing at all, or changing only slowly and slightly.’ -Ephemeral media ‘lets others decide for us what we should pay attention to and what we should ignore.’ -And actually hearing about ephemera from others allows us to filter it through their agendas and get a range of viewpoints, which is better than just hearing it from one news outlet. -Actually, much of news media is simply entertainment/a soap opera. -Outside of supertexts, look for 50+ years of endurance (OR, I would add, stuff that I really want to read!) Decisions: -The most important decision a leader makes is what lieutenants they hire, nurture and fire. Getting this right is key. -Also takes the decisions that have the greatest potential impact on the organisation they are leading. -Don’t get sucked into decisions that you don’t have the authority to make (e.g. it sits with a regulator.) -Forcing decisions (e.g. setting a timeline for people/org rationalisation) can generate impetus. For other decisions: 1) Never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant (or elsewhere) -(Although you must still take responsibility for the result). -This helps develop strong lieutenants. -Be wary of becoming too predictable. Occasionally breaking this rule helps avoid becoming manipulable. 2) Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow. (‘artful procrastination’). -Clarify how much time you have to make the decision. -It allows time to adapt to stuff that happens, which may be favourable, or swing decision. (But be wary of leaving decisions until options start shutting down). -Consultation is important – smooth out divisions or hard feeling in inner circle (even if not aligned). Important that constituents of decisions feel involved on big stuff. -Judgement and luck are still pretty key elements. -Also is checking the primary data occasionally: data sources & pulls, original law and regulation documents. -Avoid factoring in sunk costs – you can only affect the future. -Listening to your conscience also important. Give the Devil His Due: -Don’t kid yourself that everyone is always universally ‘good’. Be realistic and understand the darker side of humanity. -Job is to minimise the worst and bring out the best. -Effective leading requires the laying down of rules and enforcing them even handedly. -Beware of humiliating an opponent unless you can eliminate them completely. Or they’ll come back for you. Know Which Hill You’re Willing to Die On: -Don’t confuse good leadership and effective leadership. You can do terrible things effectively! Judgement of good/bad depends on moral values. Know yours. -Once you know your firm red lines keep them secret so they can’t be used against you. -Also, manage the balancing act of ‘develop[ing] and hold[ing] your own moral convictions, while being as open as possible to the strongly held moral convictions of others.’ Work For Those Who Work For You: -‘You should spend a small amount of your time hiring your direct reports, evaluating them, exhorting them, setting their compensation, praising them, kicking their butts and, where necessary, firing them. When you add all that up, it should come out to about 10% of your time. For the remaining 90% of your time you should be doing everything you can to help your direct reports succeed. You should be the first assistant to the people who work for you.’ -Do the ‘grungy work’ that isn’t glamourous or recognised, but which allows your lieutenants to achieve great things. -Be wary of hiring people less good than you (and less good people doing the same). The organisation rapidly declines in quality. -Also be realistic about finding the right person ‘the best person available for the job within the time frame in which you must fill the position’. -Don’t be too rigid on finding the right person for a defined JD. Instead find a great person and build the appropriate JD around them. -Factor in the fact that you know the shortcomings of internal candidates vs external. Less risk. (But sometimes you need to bring in outside energy). -Achieving diversity (of experience, of thought, as well as characteristics) is hard and will make the organisation more resilient. -He cautions against having a layer of staff that are not line officer direct reports; ‘the staff person can exercise the power of the leader while being shielded from the hear and accountability that should always attend the exercise of power. This particular kind of occult authority can be especially seductive; even the most honest and selfless staff person can become addicted to it… they begin to manipulate the line officers, block their access to the leader and subtly distort communications twixt leader and line.’ Clearly I don’t think this has to be the case, but I like his point that ‘the leader and his staff are there to support the line officers, not the other way around.’ -He gives his officers unfettered access to him. If they reach a staffer and he is occupied the staffer explains where he is and what he’s doing, and gives them the choice about whether the staffer should go and get him now. The officer makes the choice. -He also ensures that important directives to them comes directly, not through staff. -Similarly, if lieutenants have an difference that they can’t reconcile together he has a rule that any one of them can escalate to him for resolution. Obviously this should be rare. But stops things getting stuck. -You have to ‘shoot your own horse’ if you need to fire a lieutenant. -Sometimes you have to sacrifice a lieutenant, or even yourself, for the good of the organisation. Follow The Leader: -Definition of a leader by SS: ‘Someone who has identifiable followers over whom he exercises power and authority through his actions and decisions.’ -‘When an effective leader turns in a new direction his followers turn with him’ (the real test of leadership.) Leadership involves getting others to move in a new direction ‘in which they’re not naturally inclined to move on their own.’ -Reality check: You need to sell yourself first and the vision or product second. Emerson ‘Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.’ -Building a creation story for an organisation, that can flex for differing situations and audiences, can be super helpful. It helps more if it embodies the idea of change to allow for new directions. -Having repeatable symbols, slogans and mantras also really help socialise the story, culture and vision. -BUT the new direction a leader chooses MUST be within the ‘range of possibilities buried in his followers’ hearts and psyches’. Otherwise it’s not going to be realistic. However WATCHOUT for using ‘opinion polls as a substitute for leadership.’ YOU should play a major role in shaping the long-term opinions of your followers. -War as ‘dramatic and compelling’ opportunity and metaphor for leadership. This is partly because the stakes are high and it ensures ‘mutual self-interest’ in the cause. -Look for ‘leadership leverage’ i.e. how to inspire and motivate followers who you will not have direct contact with. Each must be treated as a unique human and get individual attention by someone in the organisation. -‘Leaders don’t really run organisations… rather they lead individual followers, who collectively give motion and substance to the organisation of which the leader is the head.’ Being President Versus Doing President: -Leadership isn’t right for everyone (it can take you away from what you love doing) and it isn’t glamorous. -30% of your time should be spent on substantive leadership matters (and you should fight to keep this). -70% is spent residing or reacting to trivia, routine or ephemera. Stops them growing into a deadly dragon. -Handling the media and getting them on-side/on-agenda is important to do and pays dividends. Find hooks. -Frankin Roosevelt: ‘Energy is more efficient than efficiency’. Drive and enthusiasm (with some luck, that tends to come to people with drive and enthusiasm) are critical for success. Case Study on USC: -You can’t copy excellence. You need original thinking and unconventional approaches. -The USC playbook had its origins in a trustee asking SS to ‘write down all the things that make USC similar to other leading research universities, and all the things that make us different from every other university, and get it all to fit on one letter-size page in 12-point type.’ SS spend 100 hours on this. -Leadership is highly situational and contingent: what works in one context and time won’t work at another.’; |