Author: sarahwp

I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara

This book is about a journalist’s fixation with a particular serial killer, the Golden State Killer. A very prolific offender, he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes over about 15 years. Curiously, despite this, he was not especially famous. This journalist, Michelle McNamara, spent a large amount of time with people she met on internet message boards, and with the police, researching the case and trying to solve it, and this is her account of her fixation. In the end, he was not caught by any of this work, but by genealogical DNA. She was important not because she solved it but because she drove interest in it, even giving him the name the Golden State Killer.


Two things struck me about this book, the first being how awful it is that in fact serial murders are completely capable of stopping. This one did. Their crimes are not compulsions, but choices. This makes it much worse. In this case, as the offender was a police officer, they think he stopped when he became aware how powerful DNA was.


The second thing was that the book was not finished by McNamara. She died part way through, in her sleep, from an undiagnosed heart condition mixed with prescription medication. It was sad to see the second author trying to find a way to end the book from her scribbled notes. It reminds you you do not know the day or the hour. In any case, the Golden State Killer was caught a few months later.

SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones

Here is a piece of non-fiction about the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. I’d never heard of it. Apparently after the plague, there were so few working people that they were able to up their day rates, which the nobles didn’t like. Hilariously, they therefore tried to fix prices at the pre-Plague rates. In addition to this great idea, they were also busy trying to rule France by means of an expensive war, and decided that peasants should accept the introduction of taxation to pay for it.

This did not go down well. Inspired by a priest called John Ball, who was basically miles ahead of Marx with the communism (and from who the famous line “When Adam delved and Even span, who then was the gentleman?” comes), the peasants marched on London, killed a lot of nobles who deserved it (and some who potentially did not), and took the Tower of London. Richard II, then fourteen, granted them all their demands, and the revolt started to ease. So then he set up vindictive kangaroo courts and had thousands of peasants executed in revenge. Rich people got to rich I guess.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim McQuarrie

Due to being an insufferable swot I always like to read a book from a country I am in when I am in it.  Thus THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim MacQuarrie while I was in Peru.  This was some hair-raising non-fiction.  I knew very little about South American colonialism, and now I know a little more all I can say is YIKES.  These sixteenth century Spanish were intense.  However so also were the Incas. 

Basically the tiny amount of contact the Incas had had with Europeans had spread smallpox, which the Inca Emporer (Sapa Inca) died of.  This triggered a civil war between two of his sons, and when I say a civil war, I mean the winner (Atahulpa) aimed to exterminate his brothers whole blood line down to hanging the unborn babies BY THEIR UMBILICAL CORDS.  Then the Spanish turn up.  There were only 163 of them, and Atahulpa had a victorious army in the tens of thousands.  So you can see where he was not worried.  He went to meet them the day after he found out his brother was dead, so he was really finally the Sapa. He was mostly just interested in seeing the horses, as they did not exist in his Empire and he saw how valuable they could be.  They immediately kidnap him.  Poor guy: one day as the Sapa.  So unconcerned was he about the capacity of the Spanish (who he thought were strange savages, which is of course exactly what they thought of him) that from his prison he ordered the continued execution of senior figures in the Inca opposition, instead of – for example – asking them to rise up and save him.   You can see where he is coming from: there are only 163 of them!  But what he did not bargain on was that they had iron.  I guess I did not appreciate the importance of iron, but it meant that their armour made them basically invincible, especially with the horses.  

It just gets worse and sadder from there on all sides.  These Spanish were not representatives of the Crown but really just independent entrepreneurs, who risked their lives on the chance there was gold somewhere out there in places they did not even know existed yet.  Pizarro, the main one, grew up really poor, as did most of the others. I guess you need to be really desperate to get on one of those ships.  I got the impression that these were some seriously traumatized people before they even left Spain, and it went downhill from there.

There are about a million more things I learnt, like how the Incas kept everything the Sapa touched (eg., left over food) and burnt it once a year, or how the Sapa executed a whole batallion once for flinching the first time they saw a horse, or how this poor 19 year old the Spanish put in place as a puppet emperor grew into a guerilla leader, or how his wife was tortured to death in public but shamed the Spanish by not saying a word, but anyway I guess you will just have to read it.  

It was strange to read so much history while in a country.  I had a coffee in a central square about which my only context was that 3000 Incas died defending it.  

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison

This novel is about a girl born to a 14 year old waitress.  The waitress has a big family, who help her with child care, so it is a lot about that family.  It is kind of an uplifting story of small town life, until the waitress marries a man who starts sexually abusing the child.  The child eventually tells an aunt, so the mother removes them from the man; but then he ‘promises’ not to do it again, so they go back.  The mother tries to make sure they are never alone together.  Great solution!  Then he rapes her really brutally,  and the mother walks in on it.  The child goes to hospital, but her mother DECIDES TO MOVE TO CALIFORNIA WITH THE MAN (!?!).  

This just seems so awful as to not really be believable, but I’m sorry to tell you that apparently this is a lightly fictionalized version of the author’s life.  To be fair, her mother never actually left her, but she did make them all live together even once she was aware of the ongoing abuse.  He even gave her an STD, which left her permanently infertile.  Sounds like a gruelling read, and it sort of was, but it also wasn’t, because I guess of the courage of the author, who has rebuilt her life with amazing courage.  I learn from the Introduction that the book has been banned from schools on many occasions. I know that people who make sure bans like to claim they are protecting children, but I think we all know who this actually protects.  

There was an interestng line to a character recently bereaved: Now you look like a Boatwright.  Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl.  This is the way you’ll look until you die.  

FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.

WHAT I READ IN 2024

This year I have read 79 books, the most since 2011. I was surprised; it didn’t feel like any more than normal. Though there was a Greek beach vacation in there where I was reading about a book a day, so perhaps that’s where the numbers come from.

In real life I read in 6 countries, but all in just the one year, of 2024. In reading life I went everywhere, Cairo in the 1950s, Polynesia with Captain Cook, medieval Norway, the Spanish Flu in Connecticut. Looking at this list, I realize what I read shapes what I think about to the point where I do sort of wonder who I’d be without it. Horrifying prospect.

Example, I can hardly look at a plate of food at the moment without thinking of William Woodruff’s memoir of his impoverished 1920s childhood, THE ROAD TO NABEND, in which he explained that they were so hungry that “all meals were our favourite meals.” I don’t think I’ve complained about a dinner since.

Best of the year this year: I have to give it up to Peter Carey’s THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, a book about Australian outlaws that is a triumph of narrative voice; SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson, a really sad memoir about a teacher grooming a male student, and the loss of his twenties to her narcissism; and PRAIRIE FIRES by Caroline Fraser, an unexpectedly wonderful biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (a writer I don’t even care about). This is my first year ever I think where highlights were more non-fiction and memoir than fiction. Honourable mentions have to go to LOVE LESSONS by Joan Wyndham, astonishing diaries about a young woman’s sex life in the second world war, and don’t laugh, but to THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears, a book that has left me amazed no one has gone to jail yet for what they did to her.

Here’s the list:

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil
PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte
TROUBLES by JG Farrell
THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell
WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford
THE EMPEROR by Ryszard Kapuscinki
GERMINAL by Emile Zola
THE MAN OF PROPERTY by John Galsworthy
DINNER WITH VAMPIRES by Bethany Joy Lenz
TOM LAKE by Ann Pratchett
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK by Joan Lindsay
WILD by Cheryl Strayed
INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney
A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss
THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner
NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro
THE STRANGER AT THE WEDDING by AE Gauntlett
LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish
TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian
THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh
PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER by Caroline Fraser
DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith
AN HONEST WOMAN: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND SEX WORK by Charlotte Shane
NEVER SAW ME COMING by Tanya Smith

SHEEP’S CLOTHING by Celia Dale
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by Alice Munro
ENEMY WOMEN by Paulette JilesTHE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides
ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS by Megan Nolan
THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley
BANAL NIGHTMARE by Halle Butler
LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
THE FUTURE by Naomi Alderman
THE ROAD TO NAB END by William Woodruff
THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI by Pierre Boulle
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey
THE FLATSHARE by Beth O’Leary
CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann
SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson
ALL FOURS by Miranda July
GREEN DOT by Madeleine Gray
THE INHERITORS by William Golding
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell
SMALL FRY by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING by Alan Sillitoe
THE WALL by John Lanchester
FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry
MONEY by Martin Amis
YOU AND ME ON VACATION by Emily Henry
YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck
ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman
COLD CREMATORIUM by Jozsef Debreczeni
THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER 1864-1875 by William Finaughty
SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila McDonald
A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim
HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman
SUPER-INFINITE by Katherine Rundell
STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide
LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham
SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King
DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald
WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe
THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver
WITH LOVE, FROM COLD WORLD by Alicia Thompson
TRAVELS INTO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA by Mungo Park
THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer
CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks
THE SUITCASE by Sergei Dovlatov
BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB by Waguih Ghali
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell
SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby
AT FREDDIE’S by Penelope Fitzgerald
OLAV AUDUNSSON: VOWS by Sigrid Undset
THE WRONG KNICKERS by Bryony Gordon
THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears
NORMAL WOMEN by Ainslie Hogarth
POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray
THE TRIO by Johanna Hedman

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil

This book is a fantastically named sequel to his first, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR. The Singularity is moment at which our brains are able to meld with a computer, so we will – according to him – be able to be fantastically more intelligent. A bit like the leap from Neanderthal to today.

It’s a book absolutely bristling with ideas – I highlighted lots of it. Like, for example, do you know the odds of the sperm and egg meeting to make you was 1 in 2 million trillion? And then go back through all the people who had to meet and mate to produce your parents, to see how lucky you are to be alive. Even wilder, he talks about how many things had to go right for life to have emerged on earth at all; apparently it is the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.

He has lots of big ideas for the future – for example, for when nanotechnology will be able to print anything, because it will be able to assemble stuff at atom level. So lithium will no longer be precious; nor will diamonds. He believes the world is getting better (did you know deaths from war in prehistory were about 500/100K; now they are 4/100K, even counting nuclear weapons?), and will continue to get better quickly. He makes some good arguments, pointing out how unimaginable landing on the moon was in the early 1900s, when no one had even flown yet.

I struggled a lot with all this talk of the ‘one way march of progress.’ I see what he means, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I do. What about the fall of Rome? What about the dangers of AI? I hate to say it, but all this boundless optimism just said one thing to me, and that one thing was: boomer. I get it, your life has just been one long upward swing. Here’s fingers crossed for the rest of us.

PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte

This book is very more-ish and seethes with verbal energy. Try this:

“If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life and emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. . . . Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested – reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes”

It was also kind of hilarous; one character, we are told, has seen ‘most of’ the porn on the internet. Given that this is set in 2007, what is eerie is I guess this might just conceivably be possible. Today I suppose it would take several lifetimes. The book tells the story of four friends living in San Francisco a couple of years after they graduate from Stanford. About two-thirds of the way through, I started to get exhausted. Everyone was so self-harming! There was anorexia, self hatred based on race, failing to take your anti-psychotics, lying about rape, and that’s just the first few I can think of. And of course there was no redemption: it was just self-harm and self-harm some more. But weirdly I still enjoyed it.

TROUBLES by JG Farrell

This author was kind of a jock at university. Then he caught polio, poor guy, just a couple of years before the vaccine was invented, and had to abruptly enter an iron lung to stay alive. Sport’s loss was literature’s gain, because he’s a wonderful writer. This book tells the story of a WWI veteran who goes to visit a woman he met in Brighton during his leave. She says she is fiance; he can’t remember if she is or not. It gets weirder from there. The alleged fiance lives in an enormous decaying hotel in Ireland, and dies almost immediately after he gets there. For some reason he stays on, while the hotel crumbles around him. A bunch of stuff then happens that has something to do with Irish political history, I could not follow all that. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is a taste, when they brought in the family dogs to try and chase out the huge family of cats who were living in abandoned rooms:

“But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.”

THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell

I found this book in my house, but have no idea where or when I got it. It’s part of the EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY series – a fantastic series I used to read a lot of back when I haunted the Harare City Library – so I assume I picked it up based on that alone. And once again EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY has come up with the goods. I’d never heard of this JG Farrell, but this is a banging book. It is a fictionalization of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857, which I’d also never heard of, in which a group of English colonials withstood a long siege by the rebellious Indian army. It is a hair-raising story of delicately brought up people reduced to eating rodents, but it is a also a hilarious book of ideas. Try this description of a young man:

“From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had one had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian.”

This gives you a flavour. It would have been really easy to write a book of stereotypes, because these poor starving people are so obviously getting what they richly deserve, but somehow he avoids it. Strongly recommend! So strongly in fact that I immediately read his next book TROUBLES. Of which more shortly.