Tag: male writer

JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz

Okay this one killed me. It was just so incredibly charming. It is the real letters of a young German who visited England in 1782. And et me tell you, he is LOVING it. Sample this from the day of his arrival:

“How different did I find these living hedges, the green of them and of the trees – this whole paradisical region – from ours and all others I have seen! How incomparable the roads! How firm the pathway beneath me!”

It rejoices in chapter headings like “Richmond: A Perfect Town.” He finds the street lighting amazing; though apparently this wasn’t just him – a German prince who was there shortly before found it so unusual that he assumed they had illuminated the town just for him.

Weirdly I just read another book by a young man who went on a long walk – Laurie Lee’s WHEN I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING, and it has just the same vibe. While I was impressed that Laurie Lee could relax just by looking at the view (no podcast, nothing), I was even more impressed by Moritz who relaxes by reading Milton. What could make you chill out like PARADISE LOST?

It was a deeply charming window into 18th century London. For example, apparently it took so long to get from the mouth of the Thames to London that most travellers got off at the coast and took a carriage. The river was so busy that you always knew where it was because of the forest of masts.

But to be honest the appeal was not so much the historic fact, as it was the joy and enthusiasm of this young man, dead these two hundred years.

ALL THE WORST HUMANS by Phil Elwood


Here is a memoir about working at the sketchiest end of what is already a sketchy industry, i.e, PR.  The author has spent a career shilling for dictators.  He was a big debater in high school, and it shows.  He thinks he is just so terribly clever.  The book was kind of interesting e.g., I learnt the horrifying fact that there are 300K publicists vs only 40K journalists in the US, and that a PR firm exists who took $18.8M from Saudia Arabia to try and spin the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.  But it was also kind of boring, because its just a litany of ways he tried to spin stuff that he thinks is very clever. I’m not sure they are that clever, I just think the list of people willing to do this stuff is not very long so the competition is not very steep. 

One part I did find interesting was the weekend he spent in Vegas trying to make sure that Gaddafi’s son, Muatsaem, did not do anything newsworthy.  It was wild to see how completely unhingedly entitled this guy was, down to beating hotel maids for trying to clean.  And how wildly unhappy.  I also enjoyed his visit to Nigeria, where he goes to try and massage the kidnapping of the Chibok girls.  Try this:

” “The whole world just found out where Nigeria is on a map because of these kidnappings,” I say.  “Everyone is watching you. You need to do something about this problem.”

“Problem?” an official asks.”

Everything about this is hilarious.  As if Nigeria was unknown to the world because this PR guy didn’t know about it.  And I just love the profoundly Nigerian reply, as if a few hundred more kidnappings is not that big deal, which, to be fair, it is not, in the larger scheme of the security situation in the North.  Also of interest to me was that he stayed in the Abuja Hilton, a place I have myself stayed for many months, and also noted the oil men, prostitutes, etc.  Strangely he was very stressed out by it.  I guess if you’ve never even heard of Nigeria before the Abuja Hilton is quite an introduction.

I also learnt something we should all recall, which is that in PR you should never state a negative. Apparently the first phrase that Americans think of when they think of Richard Nixon is ‘I am not a crook,’ which is something he said.  This is a classic example of accepting the wrong framing. You should always say ‘I am a good man,’ or ‘I love America’ and etc. 

One last thing, the writing is often sharp and funny.  He has a friend who is very Republican.  Here’s the friend explaining:

“Nobody who doesn’t have a generator and two years’ worth of food in their garage outflanks me on the right.”  Says the author: “I describe him as ‘authoritarian-curious’”

I love that phrase!  Perfectly describes these decadent rich people who don’t understand what democracy has given them.

STARTER FOR TEN by David Nicholls

I really enjoyed this author’s new book, YOU ARE HERE, so thought I would give his first one a try.  He’s a skilled guy, but for me it was a bit meh.  This is partly I guess because he has grown as a writer, which is interesting to see.  This one, like YOU ARE HERE, is lightly comic, but it has much less heart. 

Perhaps also I was slightly put off by the subject matter, being an account of an awkward young man’s first year at university.  Not that this is not good subject matter, but let’s be real, it’s been done a lot.  Many authors historically have been men, and awkward men at that, so they’ve had a lot to tell us about that experience.  So the bar is high.  Side bar, I note I have also read many accounts of men losing their virginity to prostitutes. I have yet to read one by the prostitute. Any suggestions? 

MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser

Here is a Pulitzer-winning book that I despised.  This just goes to show how incredibly personal taste in fiction is, because it is not easy to win the Pulitzer, and objectively speaking I can see that this is good writing, but god, I just found it irritating. It has a lot of lists.  I don’t think there is any object in nineteenth century New York he does not list.  I guess this could be called dense world building. I found it annoying.  It tells about a young man who has a drive for success and gets rich off building hotels while mysteriously marrying a woman who is obviously unsuited to him.   I mean: why?  I could not get it.  I’d also whacked my head hard on a car door and was icing it for much of the reading so perhaps that came into it.

AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING by Laurie Lee

Here is a classic memoir of being a young man.  It’s 1932, and Laurie sets out from his rural home to walk to London, bidding farwell to his (I assume exaggeratedly) elderly mother.  First he walks to Southampton, as he has never seen the sea.  Try this charming description of the seaside shops: “tatooists, ear-piercers, bump-readers, fortune-tellers, whelk-bars, and pudding boilers.”

Pudding boilers!  Then he goes to London, where he has some pretty intense country-mouse style experiences, and then he is on to Spain, where he walks many miles through extraordinarily rural communities, busking to pay his way.  He is a fantastic writer.  Here he is, entering an inn:

“The narrow stairs dripped with greasy mysterious oils and had a feverish rotten smell.  They seemed specially designed to lead the visitor to some act of depressed or despairing madness.  I climbed them with a mixture of obstinancy and dread, the Borracho wheezing behind me.  Half-way up, in a recess, another small pale child sat carving a potato into the shape of a doll, and as we approached she turned, gave us a quick look of panic, and bit off its little head. “

And I can’t go to a seafood restaurant without thinking about: “The dead eyes of fish, each one an ocean sealed and sunless.”

He writes the memoir as a much older man, and there is an elegiac quality to the whole thing. Here he is describing the sensation of his body on these long walks:

“. . seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions.  . . It was the peak of the curve of the body’s total extravagance, before the accounts start coming in.”

God, the accounts. 

I have thought often of this book since reading it.  There is something about the freedom of this walk, with no goal, no time limit, no agenda, that is really a challenge to my current life.  Also the safety of being a young man – imagine, just sleeping in a field, and not thinking you’ll be raped and murdered! Horrifyingly though, my main reflection was mostly about how he did all this without a phone.  Apparently he often just used to lie down in the heat of the day, and watch the ants, for hours.  Imagine doing all this without even a podcast!  Truly I need to get off my phone.

At the end he does what apparently everyone young did if they were in Spain in the 1930s, i.e., naively enter the civil war.  This part was dumb.

YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls

I really liked this one. I read the whole thing in 24 hours, not such a feat except in that same 24 hours I worked for 9 hours and went to a play for 3 hours (MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN at the Almeida is amazing), and I assume also ate and slept and hopefully bathed.

Let’s quote extensively, as I like to do with books I like. It’s basically a rom-com, and starts with the main characters both lonely. Here’s the woman:

“She was not one of those girls who hired a nightclub for her birthday but she’d easily filled a room above a pub for her twenty-first, a long table in an Italian restaurant for her thirtieth. For her fortieth she thought she might go for a walk in the park with a friend or two, a once popular band obliged to play in ever smaller venues. Year by year, friends were lost to marriage and parenthood with partners she didn’t care for or who didn’t care for her, retreating to new, spacious lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she fought on in London. Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment.”

And here, I’m sorry but this one’s just for Londoners, is a bit Euston train station: “a building whose exterior is somehow disguised – no lifelong Londoner can draw a picture of it – as is its function, the trains departing furtively from a back room.”

So true. I used to leave from that station once a week for about 6 months and I myself could not tell you what it looks like. And this one’s also specially relevant to Londoners, especially younger ones: “Her old age pension promised an income of two pounds twenty a week, and she furiously resented belonging to a generation whose future security depended on their parents’ death, so that only orphans could afford a holiday.”

I love the rage. And now here’s one not just for Londoners, but all British people: “The downpour sounded like a great, exasperated exhalation, as if even the rain was disappointed by all the rain”

Sadly, I’ve heard this particular rain myself.

I loved this one, strongly recommend.

THE MISSIONARY’S WIFE by Tim Jeal

Here is a story about a missionary’s wife. It’s set in the 1890s in Zimbabwe around the time of the first Chimurenga. I’ve read Tim Jeal’s work before – I love his biography of Stanley – but I was sort of torn about this one.

On the one hand, it is kind of stilted. Here is the wife, shortly after she gets married to the missionary, in her home town of Sarston in the UK: “Their lovemaking became for her not just the greatest pleasure in her life but a perfect expression of their real union.” M’kay.

On the other hand, it was full of interest. The wife’s mind is completely blown when she finds out that the locals allegedly rub bats’ dung into their labia to make them as long as bats’ wings. She tried to ‘imagine such things being mentioned in Sarston. People would faint at the very idea.’ I am doubtful this was ever the case, but I think it is super interesting to imagine what it must have been like for both sides of that wild first meeting of cultures.

Eventually it turns into an adventure story, and then unexpectedly a love story, and I enjoyed it in the end. It did make sad to think how little historical fiction there is, not just about Zimbabwe, but about Africa as a whole. So big thanks to Tim Jeal for adding to the small pile, ‘perfect expression of real unions’ aside.

NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis

I feel like I spend half my time trying to dig up ideas of books to read. Someone gifted me a subscription to the London Review of Books, and it’s proving a goldmine of obscure ideas. This one is non-fiction, a journal of a British intelligence officer in Naples in 1944.

It’s a fascinating look at what it was like for civilians on the losing side. Guys, it was bad. Really bad. No one has anything to eat, to the point that a huge proportion of the female population is having to do sex work. It’s grim.

I don’t know who this author is, but the writing is banging. One small example – he casually describes a minor character has having “a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy.” Lol!

THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES by John Byrne

This book is in the grand tradition of books that try to do a life end-to-end. It was engaging and I enjoyed it, skipping through 700+ pages in no time. But somehow it has not stayed with me hardly at all. God, writing is crazy. Readers are so difficult! If I was this author I would be like: WTF! WHAT DO YOU WANT WOMAN?!? And to be fair I guess I don’t know.

One thing I did take from this book was that Ireland was rough in the 1950s. This seems to be a trend of this year, because I got the same message loud and clear from LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor, from SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan, and etc. Ireland 1950s needs to up its PR budget

BORED GAY WEREWOLF by Tony Santorella

This book had a fun premise, in which a twenty-something slacker who is incidentally a werewolf gets sucked into a dodgy self-help movement. But then it went a bit sideways, and kind of trite, complete with fight scenes and ‘found family.’ I am not sure where I wanted this book to go, but it was not that way. But it was fun in any case.