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THE PIANO TEACHER by Elfriede Jelinek

This is a very sexual book, without being at all sexy. Did I enjoy it? I really have no idea. It’s a super-compressed super-heated story about a piano teacher (you may have guessed this from the title), who has been heavily controlled by her mother. Her adult student falls in love with her and they have creepy sex in a public toilet. She is a virgin but apparently has an active imaginary life where she is a big masochist. The student is surprised to put it mildly. The mother is not too happy about this new boyfriend, so, (spoiler alert) the teacher kind of sexually assaults the mother?!? In summary, it all goes on. I am just kind of surprised people have the time and energy for all this sexual mania. It’s set in Austria, and my theory is this is all down to the social safety net which means people have too much free time

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

LOVE’S WORK by Gillian Rose

The author wrote this memoir after her diagnosis with cancer at 46. She was dead by 48. It’s a highly compressed, painful read. She was a philospher, and you can tell. It’s not clear if this book is personal story or work of philosophy. Maybe all personal stories are works of philosphy, but not so clearly as this one. It’s remarkably dense:

“My journey to Auschwitz and east across Galicia to Belzec on the border of Ukraine did not affect me in the ways I had expected; it was the unexpected, rather, which provided the. nodes of enigma that compressed incompatible and uncomprehended meanings together.”

What?

Here is some rather beautiful lines from Swinburne. Let’s all think about death:

“From too much love of living,

From home and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no man lives for ever,

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

BLANK CANVAS by Grace Murray

Here is book about lesbians at art school. I am not sure why this sounds dismissive. The beginning was kind of fun, where a young woman lies to her acquaintances, saying her father is dead. It’s not totally clear why she does this, but I guess for attention or sympathy. Then thing went downhill. It is fashionable in modern novels to have protagonists who are apathetic and directionless, and this is unfortunately one of these novels. I just can’t. I just don’t know why I should care about your life if you don’t.

Side bar, the author is 22. Deal with that how you can.

CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O’Hagan

I liked the epigraph of this book, from RL Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

I also liked the first sentence: “Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.”

It sort of went dowhill after that, though I did managed about 400 pages. The idea of the book is cool, being a sort of state-of-the-nation, if the nation was North London. The main character is an author who married into the upper classes, though not unfortunately into money, who develops an unlikely friendship with a half-Ethopian student. And the word ‘unlikely’ here is kind of key. I liked the effort to show all London, from top to bottom, but I found half the characters unlikely (e.g., a poor student from an immigrant background goes to a cocktail bar ?!? has the author never been poor?), and the politics rather trite and poorly thought through. I guess the author is trying to say something about inequality, which is nice of him, but let’s do some research. For example, a news report is quoted as saying that ‘migrant children are doing worse than any other group in the UK,’ which is just factually untrue. I think it’s pretty well proven that the academic success of immigrants is why London has the beset school results in the country. ANYWAY.

EMMA by Jane Austen

I did this book for A-level, and so read it many times in adolesence. Perhaps as a result, I have not read it in about 30 years. What I am struck by on this reading is how completely wrong Emma is on every level. It is a much funnier novel than I recall, and much more damning of Emma. It is not nearly so good as some of her others, but obviously still head and shoulders above 90% of all other books GOD this lady was talented.

MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’ I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail.

It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much. He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’ Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran. He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran. Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country. Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair.

RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

I cannot now recall how I decided that what I needed to read was 400 pages of reportage of a family in 1980s Bronx, but I am glad I did. This was really banging, and unlike anything I have ever read.

The author embedded herself with a single family and tells about their day to day lives over the course of about a decade. I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of non-fiction before that totally avoided commentary or context. It just plunges you right into the day-to-day of these peoples’ lives, and tries to very deeply understand the inter-personal dynamics that are driving the decisions they make. And by deeply, I mean DEEPLY. It’s clear she has interviewed people about stuff like how they first started having sex, and who was cheating on who and why, and so on. It’s interesting to read about any family’s interpersonal dynamics in this degree of objective detail, but this one is particularly so, because there is almost nothing else going on. Almost no one has a job, and many are in jail. All the family’s girls are pregnant at 14. 14! And then go on to have at least one more child before they are 18. They are caught in a very, very difficult spiral, and they handle it with extraordinary courage and good spirits. What I found particularly astonishing was how open they were to helping each other. One woman (Jessica) has 5 children before she is 21, and then goes to jail at 23. All of her children are absorbed by her family, rather than being put into care, despite the fact that her family really has no space or money for more. I was also astonished how appalling the prison system was. Apparently a single 15 minute call cost $4! And this for people who are often trying to make $10 do for two weeks of groceries.

One side point is I read this over the course of a delayed flight – MUC-LHR – and I note I read continuously for 4.5hrs. This makes me happy: clearly the phone has not totally eradicated my attention span.

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner

I read this book because it was recommended by Denis Johnson, whose TRAIN DREAMS I so admired. It’s about small-time boxers, trying to ‘make it’ in the ring in the 1940s. I can’t deny it’s extraordinarily well-written. Characters are evoked in just a couple of lines of dialogue and the arc of boxing failure is heart-breaking. What I didn’t like about it though was exactly that: it was heart-breaking. There was not a single character who was not very obviously doomed to disappointment. It wasn’t just the boxers (who were going to fail + have brain injuries) but also their promoters, and their variously pregnant or alcoholic girlfriends, and also random people they met in bars. I mean: okay? I am not sure what I am supposed to get from this? It was just dreadful and sad.

WHAT I READ IN 2025

My blog alleges I read 73 books this year, which seems surprising, because it felt like kind of a slow year reading-wise. Shout-outs have to go to the amazing HEART THE LOVER by Lily King, which I read in one short sleepless night; to I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman, a post-apocalypse book that makes you wonder why we don’t wonder more at this pre-apocalypse world; and Gail Goodwin’s VIOLET CLAY, which most expertly and unpleasantly flashed me back to my twenties.

Potentially though even more shout-outs have to go to non-fiction this year. I don’t know what’s happening: I never used to read non-fiction, and now second year in a row it’s been killing me. NOBODY’S GIRL by Epstein survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre, which makes you ashamed of every time you have called something ‘too hard,’ the anonymously written A WOMAN IN BERLIN, the real diaries of a woman who survived rounds of gang rape when that city fell in WWII, and found the dignity and even the comedy in it; and Erik Larson’s THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, about the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 (I can’t believe this was even interesting, but don’t even get me going on how the Ferris Wheel was invented because I am a FOUNT of information). Some books I can tell I liked because I am just dying to tell unwilling audiences all about them. Don’t mention Peru or Spain or colonialism near me unless you really do want to hear a summary of Kim McQuarrie’s THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS, and don’t mention the Nile or Victorians or the Kama Sutra unless you are ready for my enthusiasm for Candice Millard’s THE RIVER OF THE GODS.

I also re-read PERSUASION this year, but I do not intend to insult Austen by including it on some ‘best of the year ‘ list, when it needs to be on some as yet un-written lifetime list.

These books so shaped and coloured my experience of the year it makes me wonder what it is like to be someone who doesn’t read. Of course non-readers must have as full a life as readers, but I wonder what their lives are full of? Their own thoughts? I honestly can’t even imagine. Anyway here’s the list:

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING by Hu Anyan
THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard
THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann
A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold
PIRANESI by Susanna Clark
STOP TIME by Frank Conroy
TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson
DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck
A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace
THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz
A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous
BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan
NOBODY’S GIRL by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
HEART THE LOVER by Lily King
FAN SERVICE by Rosie Danan
WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan
BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott
JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz
YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck
JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner
GHOSTROOTS by Pemi Aguda
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner
DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis
ALL THE WORST HUMANS by Phil Elwood
STARTER FOR TEN by David Nicholls
THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez
LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Abby Jimenez
MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser
FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters
WORRY by Alexandra Tanner
THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith
AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING by Laurie Lee
YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls
THE MISSIONARY’S WIFE by Tim Jeal
I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue
I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman
NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis
THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES by John Byrne
BORED GAY WEREWOLF by Tony Santorella
THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA by Ray Nayler
LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor
WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley
THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin
THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Yukio Mishima
MONKEY GRIP by Helen Garner
GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry
ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler
THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart
KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly
OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wiley
PERSUASION by Jane Austen
FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros
DREAMSTATE by Eric Puchner
SAO BERNARDO by Graciliano Ramos
PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson
A STOLEN LIFE by Jaycee Dugard
IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy
YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck
HAPPY PLACE by Emily Henry
FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry
BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry
BEACH READ by Emily Henry
ME AND YOU ON VACATION by Emily Henry
RIVER OF THE GODS by Candice Millard
YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue
I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara
SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones
THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim McQuarrie
BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison
FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor