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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.”

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.

THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt

This is a famous book I had never heard of. First off, this is not the (I have never seen it, but probably) problematic film with Tom Cruise. It is about as far from Hollywood as you can get. The author is a total rebuke to all of us weak people, having half-written an astonishing ~50 other novels before finally completing this one. During that time she worked as doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, night secretary etc.

The book was a huge hit, being a crazy, baggy, comic story about a single mother with high ideals. She got pregnant on a one night stand, and refuses to tell the father because she does not admire his writing. She manages the heating bills by spending their days riding the Circle line.

I found it funny and clever, but I gave up about 300 pages in. We got to a part where the child was trying to find his father and it became kind of like a series of short stories about the various potential fathers, and it just felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt bad, because I just love this author’s guts. She went on to write other strange books, and struggle to find a publisher, eventually only publishing one twenty years later. What a life!

A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold

Not sure how I got into this, but here is a memoir by the mother of one of the shooters at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold. First thing to note, which really astonished me, was that school shootings were extremely uncommon at the time of Columbine. Imagine how bad it would be to find out that your son is a school shooter, without even having a model of what a ‘school shooter’ is.

This woman’s experience is truly jaw-dropping. Dylan, far from the bullied outcast I always thought he was (trenchcoat mafia etc), had in fact a bunch of friends and had been to the prom a few days before. He was also a perfectionist who was the child they ‘never had to worry about’. I guess I should not be surprised: teenagers lie to their parents. It is just astonishing how people do not know each other, even if they see each other every day.

What struck me particularly was that Dylan was not just a murderer, but also a suicide. When they eventually found his journals and went through them, it turns out he had been thinking of ending his life for at least two years. Even the week before the shooting he had been debating with his father on what dorm room to choose. Apparently this kind of apparent ‘planning’ is common in suicides – something for us to bear in mind when deciding how worried to be about someone. Her main takeaway after a decade of agonising is the simple one, that she wished she had listened more and talked less. Poor lady.

I cannot imagine how she survived this level of shock and bereavement. It puts one’s own problems very much into perspective i.e., they are minor.

STOP TIME by Frank Conroy

Do I really need another coming of age story from an American man? Apparently so. I’ve enjoyed this one. Mostly, it reminded me of how boring childhood used to be. I know people talk about it a lot, but this memoir really brought back to me what it was like before phones and television. God, we were bored. And I had my cousins and a library card, so I was not even as bored as this guy, who had neglectful parents and a shack in Florida.

I am always awed/frightened by the idea of memoir. Imagine sitting down and actually trying to recall your childhood? It feels frighteningly impossible and also frighteningly possible. This deep in some Pandora box territory. I also really don’t like the idea of fixing the past into my specific narrative about it. I think the past does best when it is constantly changing, just like the future. That said, please enjoy this baller analysis of his step dad:

“Because for all his knocking around his view of the world was incredibly naïve. He believed important jobs were handed out in nightclubs by impulsive millionaires and that he was the sort of man they might be given to. Spoiled all his life . . . he deeply believed that the good things in life were given to one. Food, clothing, and the bare necessities had to be earned, but after that it was a question of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people or simply being lucky. It never occurred to Jean to work hard anything except menial labour. He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world – his image of himself.”

I came to this book from seeing that David Foster Wallace said it was the book that made him want to be a writer. I just love author’s recommendations of other authors. It’s sad this was only available in second-hand.

TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson

Well this is an almost depressingly fantastic novella. It’s an eerie and beautiful story about a railway worker in Idaho in the early twentieth century.

It’s kind of frustrating for anyone to be this amazing as a writer. I looked him up and I see that he was widely acknowledged as the ‘big talent’ of his generation of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I note I must be a bad person because I was almost relieved (!?!) to see he became a drug addict. He still went on to write more though, and apparently this is not even his best book! That is apparently something called JESUS SON. I haven’t ordered it yet because I almost dread finding out how good it is.

DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck

I really liked this author’s previous book, YOU, AGAIN, which managed the difficult task of novel-as-romcom. This one I didn’t like nearly as much. It’s just wild, and shows you how much of a mystery writing is. Even if you can do it once, it doesn’t mean you can do it again. Or at least not for this particular reader.