Year: 2021

WHAT I READ IN 2021

The blog tells me I read 67 books this year, one more than last year, and more than any year since 2011.  One reason I keep this blog is as a reminder not just of the books, but of what the books carry with them, which is memories of where they were read. PREP, first book of the year, was in a Zimbabwean garden. SHUGGIE BAIN was read in part at a London coffee shop when we were finally allowed outdoor dining again.  LEAVING CHEYENNE I bought in a tourist trap in South Dakota. ZINKY BOYS was the beach in Croatia. WOW, NO THANK YOU was a flight to Corfu.  MEATY was a five hour delay in Amsterdam airport. 

I did an unusually large number of re-reads of old and beloved friends (EARLY WORK, THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, THE PURSUIT OF LOVE, and NOTHING TO SEE HERE).  I used to not re-read, but I do it increasingly. I think because I realize that there are not so many good ones out there in the world to be found.   I also read a larger amount of non-fiction and self-help (I can recommend FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS if you want to feel like blowing up your life).  Mostly it was fiction though, and it was a banner year.  I struggled to narrow the list of my favourties, so did not bother:

Every book SAMANTHA IRBY has written: (here, here, and here).  I put off this writer for some time, having the impression this was a book of essays was – as so many are – a book of thinly disguised lectures about gender/race/etc.  In fact they are a brilliantly sad and funny, and make you feel less alone in the world. 

UNDER THE SKIN by Michael Faber.  A story about aliens, but from the aliens’ perspective.  Let me tell you, whatever you think it is about, it is not about that.  Just drop everything and read immediately

OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS by Barbara Comyns.  A thinly disguised story of her own first marriage.  She wants to be an artist, and she marries an artist, but once a baby comes apparently what she wants doesn’t matter anymore.  A timeless story of being f*cked by gender roles, and very funny.  My one favourite part is that her husband, who to be fair to him, really SUFFERS for his art as he leaves his wife and child to starve, was not a success and is now totally forgotten.  My other favourite part is the amazing biography of the author on the first page, which covers her careers including poodle breeding, house selling, and painting, showing you do not need to sacrifice all to art to be an artist.

ALL MY CATS by Brohumil Hrabal.  I don’t know if I enjoyed it, but I thought about it a lot.  It’s one of the only books I’ve ever read about our relationship to our pets, and it investigates how difficult it is to keep boundaries around love

So far these are all backlist (and in Comyns case, almost a century old), but I also enjoyed the American and British blockbusters this year, CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen, and SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart.  It’s fashionable to hate on Franzen, and I get the impulse, but I think we have to give it up: the man can write.

Here’s to having less time to read in 2022 because COVID will be OVER.

The list:

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver Burkeman

SOMETIMES I TRIP ON HOW HAPPY WE COULD BE by Nichole Perkins

MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan

BABURNAMA by Babur trans. Annette Beveridge

DARING GREATLY by Brene Brown

SYLVESTER by Georgette Heyer

THE GRAND SOPHY by Georgette Heyer

THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut

WISE BLOOD by Flannery O’Connor

WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE by Samantha Irby

MODERN ROMANCE by Aziz Ansari

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN by Kingsley Amis

SWEET SORROW by David Nicholls

THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

MEATY by Samantha Irby

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K Dick

CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen

STAY SEXY AND DON’T GET MURDERED by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU by Sally Rooney

OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS by Barbara Comyns

SH*T MY DAY SAYS by Justin Halpern

MARIANA BY Monica Dickens

THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY by Laura Jean McKay

FOREIGN AFFAIRS by Alison Lurie

WOW, NO THANK YOU by Samantha Irby

AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM by Nicolas Mathieu

SEGU by Maryse Conde

ZINKY BOYS by Svetlana Alexievich

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE by Laura Ingalls Wilder

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrente

FALSE COLOURS by Georgette Heyer

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

WINTER IN THE BLOOD by James Welch

LEAVING CHEYENNE by Larry McMurtry

CROSSING SAFELY by Wallace Stegner

THE TRIALS OF RUMPOLE by John Mortimer

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet

LOVE LETTERS by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark

ALL MY CATS by Brohumil Hrabal

BATH TANGLE by Georgette Heyer

A BURNT-OUT CASE by Graham Greene

STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN’S CITY by Amy Stanley

SHOEDOG by Phil Knight

MOTHERHOOD by Deborah Orr

LITTLE EYES by Samantha Schweblin

UNDER THE SKIN by Michael Faber

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Abbie Greaves

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson

STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry

SOME TAME GAZELLE by Barbara Pym

EARLY WORK by Andrew Martin

AN OBEDIENT FATHER by Akhil Sharma

THE INVENTION OF NATURE by Andrea Wulf

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood

FIND ME by Andre Aciman

WAR AND TURPENTINE by Stefan Hertmans

DEPT OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill

YOUR BEST YEAR YET by Jenny Ditzler

FAMILY LIFE by Akhil Sharma

MONOGAMY by Sue Miller

PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver Burkeman

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS is the average human life span, and this book deals with how it is we can accept this horrifying fact. 

It’s a book about time management, but not in the usual sense, of how you can fit more into the time you have.  Rather, he says what is important is to accept that you will never do everything, and learn to find that a relief, rather than a regret.  Here he is:

. . . philosophers from Ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. 

He thinks that our usual approach to time management, which is to be as productive as possible, is essentially us running away from the great truth that no matter how hard we work, or how much we want to, we will never get round to even a tiny fraction of everything that is possible for us.  It is much better, in his view, to accept this up front:

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather then letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

He advises us, to ‘pay ourselves first,’ that is, do what you want to do first, and be comfortable that other things will slip (e.g., spend the first hour of the day on whatever is your most important priority). Second, he advises us to limit our ‘to-do’s, so we don’t kid ourselves we can do everything; and third, and most challengingly, to avoid our ‘middling’ priorities.  If you made a list of 1 to 25 of your priorities, he thinks you should focus on numbers 1 to 5, and then carefully avoid numbers 6 to 25, because they are the really dangerous ones – the ‘second-best’ options that could end up eating up your life. 

There is clearly much to think about in this book, but it was this observation that really struck me:

One of the puzzling lessons I have learned is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing.  I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns.  I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish. 

 In his view, a lot of what feels unpleasant – for example, boredom, or procrastination- comes from the fact that we do not like to encounter our finitude.  He thinks that often when we are struggling to concentrate on something we want to do, and turn to our phone, it is because it is deeply unpleasant to face up to the fact that this thing that matters a great deal to you is now real: like, it may not be as good as you hoped, it might fail, etc etc, and that is very painful. 

However:

If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it. 

And:

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results

There you have it. This book certainly gave me plenty to think about, and unfortunately I seem to mostly think about it when I wake up at 3am.  Always a great time for considering your life choices. 

Side point, he refers to a fantastic time management book from 1908, called HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE ON TWENTY FOUR HOURS A DAY.  I loved this book in my early twenties. If you’d still like to take a go at fitting everything in, then I recommend it. 

SOMETIMES I TRIP ON HOW HAPPY WE COULD BE by Nichole Perkins

Despite the fantastic title, I did not enjoy this. I had high hopes too, because Nichole Perkins podcast THIRST AID KIT is brilliant. It examines what makes dreamboat men dreamboats. The one on Joshua Jackson (always Pacey from DAWSON’S CREEK) is revelatory. It’s rare and liberating to hear women discussing sexiness. Depressingly, their conclusion is often that x person is sexy because ‘they are a good guy’ or ‘would be a good dad.’ I would like to deny it but I kind of see it, and Pacey is a case in point. LADIES WE NEED TO BE COOLER.

This is a series of essays about Perkins’ life, mixed up with her observations on pop culture. Perhaps they just suffer by comparison to the wonderful essays I just finished by Samantha Irby, but I was kind of amazed by how boring Perkins manages to make her own life. Most people’s lives are interesting, if only because I am nosy. This really was dull. The only interesting point I can recall off the top of my head was that she had this guy where their only relationshp was him giving her head, which routinely would go on for over three hours. Perhaps I am an innocent, but . . wow, that’s a lot.

Anyway, all this detail aside (he used to pull up at her crotch, seated in a chair, as at a table), the reason it all comes off as rather bland is I suspect because she is not actually sharing anything truly vulnerable, or anything she has really struggled with. Not that anyone has to share any such thing, of course, but if you are going to write a memoir it’s kind of what you are signing up for.

MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan

This book got rave reviews. Myself, I could not see it. It begins as a story of teenage boys going to a concert. I could see that it was well-written, but I found it hard to follow: it was so very, very deep in British culture, in the 1980s, and in men, that it was almost incomprehensible. I suspect the rave reviews come from older men who remember this world?

The second half of the book is about the same group of men, but thirty years on. So I hear: I didn’t get there.

BABURNAMA by Babur trans. Annette Beveridge

Here are the memoirs a 15th century Mongol warlord.  I can’t believe this actually exists. 

You might think this would be kind of bloody, and you would be right.  It is incredibly violent.  Every other page he is either sacking or being sacked.  Straightforward sample:

Those our men had brought in as prisoners were ordered to be beheaded and a pillar of heads was set up in our camp

A few pages later, after a battle, their Afghan enemies put grass between their teeth, which apparently means ‘I am your cow’ and is a sign of surrender.  In response:

Some heads of Sultans and of others were sent to Kabul with the news . . some also to Badakhshan, Qunduz and Blakh with letters of victory

It is not all beheadings.  He gives us many interesting descriptions of the peoples, animals, and landscapes he sees during this orgy of violence.  He tells us that the elephant is “an immense animal and very sagnacious” but warns us that one can eat “the corn of two strings of camels.”  He also describes his friends. How sweet is this guy:

He used to wear his tunic so very tight that to fasten the stringe he had to draw his belly in and, if he let himself out after tying them, they often tore away. 

Or this guy:

He was extremely decorous; people say he used to hide his feet even in the privacy of his family

Or this one:

He danced wonderfully well, doing one dance quite unique and seeming to be his own invention

Imagine, five centuries later, this is all that persists of you in the world.  And its more than most people get.   

Later Barbur falls in love, with a local market boy:

I could never look straight at him: how then could I make conversation and recital?  In my joy and agitation I could not thank him for coming; how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away?

You almost start to like him, partly because heis also charmingly pre-modern.  The sun, we are told, is ‘spear-high’ and he once swims with his horse ‘as far as an arrow flies.’    Then you are reminded who we are dealing with.  He meets some locals:

Snow fell ankle deep while we were on that ground; it would seem to e rare for snow to fall thereabouts, for people were much surprised. 

How charming! Villagers in their first snowfall.  Then he kills them all too.  

This makes me feel modern life not all bad after all.

DARING GREATLY by Brene Brown

Here is a famous self-help book that I decided to give a whirl. The first three chapters were kind of good, but then it got kind of repetitious. The insight is basically that we often do not reach our full potential because we are too afraid of taking a risk, and espeially the risk of what other people will think.

This is a painfully true observation. The worst part I think is that probably we are often not even aware that we are limiting ourselves. If it was conscious, it would be easier to change. So I guess we have to continually challenge ourselves to remember it. I could tell you a lot more about what’s in the book, but the idea is best expressed in the speech by Theordore Roosevelt after which it is named. If you’ve never read it, here it is, you can thank me later:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut

Here is a spectacularly well-written book that I admired, but did not enjoy. It tells the story of a South African family, across four funerals, where the supposed engine is a promise made to the domestic worker to give her the deeds to the house she lives in on their property.

Let’s start with what was great. Here’s a description of the family home:

Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre. Where you, perhaps, also grew up. Where all of it began.

BOOM. Amazing, and if that does not speak to my minority I do not know what does.

The cast of this book is large, and it’s amazing how the author seamlessly moves between perspectives. He also has a lot of fun poking holes in his own illusion. One lonely woman sits with a cat on her lap, and then he tells us maybe she doesn’t; maybe he will leave her truly all alone. This is both annoying and fun.

Given this mostly seems to be compliments, I struggle a bit to tell you what I didn’t like about this book. I think, first off, it annoyed me that everyone in the book was either mean or sad. That’s just not true of real life, and it seemed kind of self-indugently despairing. Like everything is hard enough, I don’t need to deal with this ludicrously bleak world also. Omicron is quite enough right now. Also, it’s probably not fair, but this conflict about the domestic worker’s land never really got off the ground for me. It just seemed a sort of cliche attempt to make some kind of commentary (that other people have made far better) about South African inequality. Maybe he felt he couldn’t write a white domestic drama without foregrounding this issue? Maybe he is one of these old white people who mostly relates to race-based issues through the only back people they know, i.e., domestic workers? Okay, now that’s getting really unfair. I’m getting as mean as the people in this book. I blame it on Omicron.

WISE BLOOD by Flannery O’Connor

Here is a book that involves a man in a gorilla suit using an umbrella skeletron as a weapon, a hit-and-run accident that is not an accident, and some self-blinding with lye. Unsurprisingly, it is in fact a book about religion.

It’s a strange, Gothic Southern story, that I did not enjoy but some how admired for its insanity.

I guess what I took from this book is that human beings have a very high level of baseline crazy. Sometimes this comes out in belief in god, sometimes it comes out in belief in ghosts, sometimes in QAnon.