WILD by Cheryl Strayed

For some reason I thought this was going to be kind of cheesy – maybe because it was made into a movie that was marketed as ‘inspiring’? – but in fact I did find it kind of inspiring.

It tells the true story of a woman in her 20s whose life has spiralled since her mother’s death, with divorce, heroin usage, and etc. She therefore decides to walk thousands of miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes up the West Coast of the US, from Mexico to Canada. She is ill prepared; she does not try out her pack before she begins, and once there finds out she cannot even lift it off the floor. She gets stronger as she goes along, losing 6 of her 10 toenails to the trail. She comes across coyotes, elks, and bears multiple times. She is threatened with sexual assault, but only the once, which is I think surprisingly good going for 3 months on your own, even if it is in the wilderness.

I was especially struck by how distant the 1990s felt. She does not have a phone, which seemed to me incredibly and impossibly lonely. I don’t know this surprises me so much: I was an adult before I had a phone myself, and I don’t remember being lonely without it.

I guess there is some deep evolutionary drive behind the long walk, because so many human societies have sanctioned it with the idea of a pilgrimage. It was interesting to read this very personal, spontaneous version of this idea, and to see how, toenails aside, it helped this lady get a handle on her life.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

I am a mega-fan of Rooney’s first book, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is one of the handful of books I have ever read twice in a row. I have been less of a fan of her other books, and especially of the last one BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Much of what I enjoyed about the first one was the comic and contemporary spirit, and as we went along I felt we were getting more and more miserable. This one is a return to form. It tells the story a pair of brothers and their various romantic entanglements, and is exceedingly more-ish. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the journey of one character who has to slowly give up his implicit assumption that he is and can be ‘normal,’ which I found to be quite liberating.

My only issue with it was tbh a bit of a political one. In all Rooney’s books there is a strong perspective that anyone who works in any area of commerce is obviously some kind of sad, dead-eyed zombie in slave to our capitalist masters. Apparently the only acceptable professions are like lawyer, journalist, arts administrator. You can work as e.g., a barista, but only if you feel utterly polluted by it. I just find this bizarrely decadent. As if any of these delightful professions would exist without this economic model. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss

This book sounded great: a historical fiction set among the coffee houses of eighteenth century London in the lead up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. Ooh obscure early stock market drama! Count me in.

It is that, but it is also a detective story. I am okay with a detective story but it needs to move quick. And this one moved kind of slow. So I enjoyed all the fun research, maybe there was a bit too much research – there was certainly an awful lot of exposition – but anyway: I had to quit at about 150 pages.

I don’t always record books I don’t finish, but I can just imagine that in 10 years I will be looking for something to read, and think: oh, this looks good! So, here’s something for me in 2034: Sarah, you did not like this book.

THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner

This is a very more-ish story about a woman serving a life sentence in an American jail. It was very absorbing, and very deeply researched.  Here, for example, is the recipe for prison alcohol “. . . juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar.  A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.”  Good to know. 

Somehow how though it left me curiously unmoved.  Maybe because I have recently read some really toe-curlingly magnificent memoirs from actual prisoners – e.g., SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox, which tells of his forty years in solitary confinement in Louisiana. It somehow made it hard for me to take this fictional version seriously, which is strange, because I usually find fiction much more compelling than fact.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

I loved this book the first time I read it, but on the re-read I was less impressed.  It made me realize I guess that it actually functions very much like a thriller/detective story, and thus once you know what the mystery is, it is much less interesting.   I also found it extremely depressing that SPOILER ALERT the clones don’t even consider fighting against their destiny – to have their organs slowly harvested.  Why is that? What is the message?  That we all are so deeply trapped in our worldview we can’t ever throw it off for any reason?  I don’t know, maybe that’s true, but damn. 

LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish

Here is a book about growing up on an Iowa farm in the Great Depression.  The New York Times put this on its notable books list of 2007 (I’m going in order from 2000 through those lists, truly I am desperate for something to read), but myself I had to quit half way through.  Essentially the author tells us about all the cooking and cleaning and farming stuff that happened on a farm in the 1930s. You’d think it would be interesting: but no.  Though I will include this snippet:

“When one of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.  Nobody would have been interested.  We just went to the barn or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound.”

Yikes.  There’s given children independence and then there is germs.

TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian

I was really impressed by this one.  It’s a coming-of-age story which, despite the title, is far more about sex than about race.  A woman decides her boyfriend is too interested in her 13 year old daughter.  Rather than dump the boyfriend, she sends the girl to live across the country with her ex-husband.  There, she gets very into masturbating and then SPOILER ALERT is raped by the 37 year old man next door.

What makes it successful is that nothing here is black-and-white.  For example, the father, despite he sometimes hits the girl, is somehow not portrayed as a monster.  The girl thinks she has a crush on the man next door, even after the assault.  It sounds bleak, and it is, but it is also not. You’d think this girl is a victim (because she is), but somehow, triumphantly, despite these very bad things that happen to her, she retains agency and energy.  I don’t quite know how to describe it, somehow it was a fundamentally hopeful book. I guess you’d have to read it. 

THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh

I just love an ordinary person’s diary.  This one is from a man who kept a diary from his 20s till his 80s, and is mostly extracted from his 40s (during the nineteen sixties).  They are mostly about sex, and especially about sex workers.  I have no idea if this is what all of the diaries are about, or if this is just this editor’s interest. 

The editor inserts himself into the story quite a lot.  He was a TV researcher when he first met Mr Lucas, looking for people who were willing to talk about their experience of rent boys.  He maintained a friendship with him for decades after that, in part because he wanted the diaries, and in part because he grew to like him; and indeed Mr Lucas gifted the dairies to him in his will. 

They are a charming/predatory picture of a certain slice of London life. It’s fun to hear places about places you know well .in a very different context.  Picadilly Circus was described as ‘the marketplace of the bugger boys’ by one judge, and it’s north railing was known as the ‘rack’ of the ‘meat market’.  Or, here’s Tower Hamlets:“’Victoria Park is a great haunt of inverts.  I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949. . “

It was extremely sad to be reminded of how recently people’s lives were destroyed for being gay in the UK.  At one point, the actor Sir John Geilgud was found by police ‘cruising for sex in a public lavatory’.  They were worried his career was over, but Sybil Thorndike insisted he come on stage with her

“She grabbed him and whispered fiercely, ‘Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me,’ and led him firmly on to the stage.  To everybody’s astonishment and indescribable relief, the audience gave him a standing ovation.”

That’s quite some allyship!  Mr Lucas ended up living a bit of a lonely life, despite all the sex.  He lived for decades in a house about 10 minutes walk from mine, and I plan to go past it, to salute him.  It’s just amazing to think every house in London is packed with not just its current inhabitants stories but those of decades, sometimes centuries, before. 

PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER by Caroline Fraser

Here is a life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.  First thing I’m going to say is, there’s a lot of encouragement here for late bloomers.  She wrote that book, and the six others, all in her 60s, with little previous writing experience.  What I found particularly interesting was that they are all – to some extent, and the extent is quite contested – auto-biographical stories, covering her life up to about age 20.   She wrote the books in part to make money, and in part because she was driven to. 

She had a real yearning to keep her parents and her childhood alive.  It was so bad that at night she often could not sleep, because the memories were coming back to her so thick and fast.  I guess it makes sense, as you get older, this desire to make it all mean something.  I find it quite touching, that apparently today you can go to various museums and see things like ‘Pa’s fiddle,’ and ‘Carrie’s sampler.’  How incredible: this low income, rural woman of the early 1900s has managed to immortalize her ordinary family. 

I think one reason she felt such a need to hold onto the past was down to how quickly it was changing in her own lifetime.  Her father was one of those who went out to ‘settle’ the West, so she had a front row seat to what that meant for the native Americans, and lived to see the prairies ploughed under and highways built.  I knew that frontier life was hard, and that very few settlers managed to stay on the land for the five years needed to ‘claim’ it.  But what astounded me was to learn that even in the early 1900s the government meterologists warned repeatedly that the prairies were too dry for small scale farming, and that only cattle would really work.  But the railways still pushed this dream on people.   It is just wild to think of the myth of the noble frontiersman and include in that the fact that he was basically being snookered by big business.  Wilder’s family had a terrible time. If it was not droughts, it was locusts (as many as a trillion individuals in one particular swam).  And once they had ploughed up the prairie, and taken the top soil that took thousands of years to develop, then there came the dust.   Apparently carts would go past with ‘In god we trusted in Kansas we busted,’ on the side, and ‘shack-whacky’ was a well known term for the mental health crises that were common in this difficult environment.   The only real solution was co-operative irrigation and government bailouts, which is yet another layer to the myth of the frontier. 

I can’t even get into her daughter, who was another whole topic, an early journalist who travelled the world, a depressive, and eventually a anti-Semitic libertarian.  A great book, it made me think about a ton of different topics.