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THE STRANGER BESIDE ME by Ann Rule

Here is a story about a woman who is contracted to write a book about the police’s search for a serial killer, and ends up finding out that she is in fact friends with the serial killer. Astoundingly, this is non-fiction.

The serial killer starts off killing individual women, first by sneaking into their homes, and then by snatching them off the street. Then he starts to beserk, and in a single day abducts one woman and then a few hours later another one, from a busy park. He rapes and murders them both that day. This is a breakthrough, because he approaches many women that day so they get a name, and make of vehicle. That name is Ted and that car is a bronze VW bug.

Now this author, who is closely following the case, she volunteers at the Samaritans. There she has a friend, a caring young man named Ted, who owns a bronze VW. So confident is she that it cannot be him, that she does not even report him.

To cut a long story short indeed he is Ted Bundy, the famous serial killer. He was such a convincing sociopath that not only did he trick her, but also his jailers – he escaped TWICE. Most importantly though he tricked multiple women. His schtick was to pretend to have a broken arm, and need help putting something in the car, or to pretend to be the police, so LADIES let us be reminded: BE ON YOUR GUARD, EVEN FROM THE APPARENTLY SAFE ONES.

HALF HIS AGE by Jeanette McCurdy

I loved McCurdy’s memoir I’M GLAD MY MOM’S DEAD, so I thought I would give her fiction a whirl. It wasn’t for me as good as her memoir, but I still enjoyed it. She’s a sharp writer of uncomfortable topics.

In this novel, a seventeen year old girl pursues her English teacher. He does not put up much of a fight. They have lots of very explicit sex. You will not be amazed to learn she does not have a very stable home life. She gets very fixated on him, and eventually demands he leaves his wife. I was surprised to feel rather sorry for him. Here he is on how teaching is not his dream:

I wanted to be a writer. A novelist. But I couldn’t handle the lack of security required to be one. I couldn’t tolerate the fluctuating, inconsequential strings of income. The consistent rejection. The scrutiny of my parent’s friends . . The uncertainty. I chose being able to afford take-out from the Thai place on the corner over roughing it, living off ramen noodles. I chose going to the game with the guys over submitting my short stories to publicatins. I chose catching up on my favourite TV show over finishing a draft. I chose comfort over betting on myself.’

He leaves his wife for her, and once she has him she does not want him any more.

STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST by Erin Somers

It is never a good idea to like a book so much that you immediately buy another one by the same author. It never works out. I know this, but oh well. This author wrote THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR, which I very much liked, and being desperate and on vacation I decided to read her other book, her first, STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST.

I am utterly, utterly confused by the morality of this book. It tells about a 30 year old aspiring comedian who is trapped doing a menial receptionist job at the late night talk show of an older comedian she very much admires. The show gets cancelled, and he invites her to spend the weekend at his home. Creepily, she agrees; but she seems weirdly checked out from the whole experience. Like, if you are going to sleep your way to the top, at least being enthusiastically trying to get to the top. Or agonise about it. Or do something. I really can’t stand these books where the protagonist does not care about their own life. At the end she has generally transactional sex with the old guy, and he says: “was it everything you dreamed of?” Maybe I’m naïve but it was gross. I think I’d rather be naïve than whatever this is.

However it did have fun parts. How is this:

I watched a young woman shelve cough syrup for a while. She seemed calm, sapced out, like she was on the cough syrup herself. It was the same look I’d seen on the face of the shopgirl the night before. Boredom so total it delivered you to the astral plane. I knew the feeling from my agent’s assistant days, my audience page days, my receptionist days. You could function in that zone. Answer the phone or take an inventory of the supply closet . . . Meanwhile your brain made the connecting sound of the early internet and played a video of a dog you’d never laid eyes on running through a field.

God this takes me back to temping!

THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR by Erin Somers

I really enjoyed this one, as have many others – it is on many ‘Book Of They Year’ lists. It tells about a woman living in the suburbs outside New York who has an affair, first imaginary, and then real. It’s generally very funny, but also rather sad. Saying ‘it’s about an affair,’ might make you think it’s some kind of tragic love story, but in fact it’s more about boredom and mortality.

There is a lot of angst about having decided to leave the city for upstate New York: “People back in Brooklyn thought you were Henry David Thoreau, but then they came to visit and saw that you lived in a vinyl-siding house. It was only rustic in that you could not get good Thai food.”

There’s also career angst. The main character, Cora, has a dull job, having downgraded her ambition around network television after an internship showed her how much work it was:

“To do something you believed in or enjoyed, you had to throw yourself at it like Eliot or Jules. Cora’s mom had envisioned her as a no-nonsense lady, like Barbara Walters or Gayle King. It had hurt her to learn that Cora was, in fact, nonsense.”

And then comes the affair partner, who when she first sees him she notes: “He wore socks printed with fir trees and a chambray shirt. His jeans were only mildly terrible.”

This jeans comment really makes me lol. This is indeed the low bar straight women accept from straight men. So much of the story is about the imaginary affair that when the real affair happens, it is inevitably something of a let down. I really liked this, as a commentary on the actual affair: “The shabbiness of real life. You had to admire its consistency”

It is kind of interesting how the affair does not seem to affect her love for her husband. It’s more her working through her own feelings of emptiness. I note again, just like SO YOUNG, SO OLD, that friendships are once again presented as difficult and superficial. I don’t know if that’s just what happens to youwhen you move to the subrubs, but I’m not about ot find out.

Once the affair is real, the imaginary life becomes one where she has a third child with her husband. I like this line, from an acquaintance, when she decided not to have the child partly because she fears what it will do to her body:

“Your body is going to a grave, said the woman. To a landfill. It’s a single-use item. You might as well wreck it.”

MAURICE AND MARALYN by Sophie Elmhirst

Called A MARRIAGE AT SEA in the US, not sure why in the UK it has this name, this is the true story of a couple who spent 117 days in a lifeboat after their sail boat went down.

Lots of SPOILERS. The husband was a pretty rigid and eccentric character, and was fairly lonely till his late thirties, where he met his wife, who was ten years younger. They did not come from money and saved hard to have the chance to go on an epic sailing trip. They made it across the Atlantic okay, but in the Pacific, a few days away from the Galapagos, a dying whale sank their ship. They scrambled onto the lifeboat with what they could, and Maralyn (the wife) took a photo of the tip of its sail as it went down.

Then began 117 days. They saw 8 ships, none of who saw them, before they were rescued. They got through their food in 20 days, and then started on what they could catch. They fished with safety pins, and caught turtles and sharks (!) with their bare hands. They sometimes caught birds too, and ate not just the birds but the fish the birds vomited back up. They were thirsty enough to think fish eyes were delicious water source. Hardest of all was the despair. Maurice was willing to give up, but Maralyn insisted they would live. Towards the end the raft started deflating, so they had to pump it back up EVERY HALF HOUR. They were near death (and I’m talking pressure sores that reached to the bone) when a South Korean ship rescued them.

They are (get this) eager to get back on the water again and use the money they make from selling their story to buy another boat and sail on. Eventually though they run out of money and are forced to go home. I felt bad for them that YouTube was not invented yet. They would have raked it in. They are less happy on land, but still extraordinarily happy together, until Maralyn dies at 61. Maurice is bereft.

Bizarrely, the author begins the ending of the book with this:

“There are many ways to take the measure of a life. In the linear version, Maurice’s life had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, an isolated end”

Yikes. Imagine thinking it’s your business to take the measure of a life. What does that even mean? Luckily she takes a steer from Maurice, from his self-published autobiography (which, charmingly, only begins on the day he meets Maralyn), where he says:

“Although I am wary of accepted truths, I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”

So she concludes with the idea that you could “measure (a life’s) success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved. On that count, his life had been a triumph”

SO OLD, SO YOUNG by Grant Ginder

Here is a book about a group of friends from when they meet in university on until their mid-forties. In short, catnip for me. I read pretty much the whole thing on one pretty sleepless night. Let me give you a flavour. Here is a man’s response to a cheerful text message from his university girlfriend:

“in this text her tone was buoyant, if not overly friendly, which hurt Marco in a way that he hadn’t expected. He thought their history precluded an excessive use of exclamation points.”

This sounds like I enjoyed this book, and I did, but I can’t say it didn’t have it’s issues. I found some of the characters kind of unlikely, the bad boyfriends were extremely bad, the one-who-got-away clearly got away, and etc. But it was still very more-ish.

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.