Tag: USA

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott

Here is a book about writing that is very famous and I can see why. It is not at all a technical book, but more about the actual emotional experience of sitting down to write.

Mostly what I enjoyed was her chapter SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS, which is about shitty first drafts. She encourages mess:

“Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what. . . Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. . . . Perfectionism will keep your cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

And she encourages risk, telling about how she told her student, who was very hung up on mistakes that “. . . when he was old, or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, “God! I’m so glad I took so few risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!”

I also liked this part:

“Don’t be afraid of your material of your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”

I found much of her advice helpful beyond writing. I thought about this suggestion a lot:

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbour’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen.”

It was also somewhat hilarious. Please enjoy this:

“Now Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.”

DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis

Prepare yourself to hear that there is an author who has won more major SF awards than Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov COMBINED, despite having written fewer books than any of them.  Yep.  It’s this Connie Willis. I have never heard of her and will be amazed if you have.  In the introduction, they say that she has ‘one thing’ that makes her different from those other writers, and that one thing is her ‘ability to make you care,’ and I would say, yes, I hope so, because my assumption is that is the existence of a ‘vagina.’  However let us not get bogged down in all that.

This book raises the interesting question of what would happen to the careers of historians if time travel were invented. It tells of an ambitious young historian that volunteers to go back to what they consider one of the most dangerous centuries, the 14th.  And then boom, suddenly it’s a novel SPOILER ALERT of the black death.  It’s just a straight up story of what it must have been like to be there then.  Interestingly, they called it ‘the blue sickness.’  I had never considered how awful it must have been to go through the plague without even paracetamol or disinfectant.  It’s stomach churningly terrible.

The people in the future (which looks a lot like the 1950s) try and rescue the young historian, but they can’t get back into the past initially, and what I was struck by was how incredibly inefficient phoning people used to be.  They spend absolute ages waiting by the phone and taking messages and trying to catch people at home. It’s guess I had underestimated how much the group chat alone has improved human efficiency.

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.

THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom.  I just read a genre rocmcom by the same author two days ago, as I am on a long beach vacation, and what was weird was this: it was basically the same plot –  couple are blissfully in love, but girl has an illness that means she must break up with him instead of talking to him (?).  Like I appreciate that genre is genre, but damn, it was literally the same story.  However I was three beers in by this stage and the sun was hot.

LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom I read on the beach in an afternoon.  It was a genre romcom, so what can I tell you?   Boy meets girl, it ends happily, this is what we are looking for in genre fiction. However, one interesting part was that the girl believes she has a terminal illness, and will likely be dead in two years. She therefore lives her life as fully as she can, always getting the good wine, always doing the trips, etc, and it really made me think how funny it is that because we have (maybe) fifty years instead of two, we think we should not get the good wine.  It’s not as if fifty years is so very long.

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.

WORRY by Alexandra Tanner

I thought I was going to like this book.  Despite selling well in the US, it’s kind of hard to get in the UK – only being sold through Blackwell’s – so I went to some effort to get it.  It tells about a girl whose sister comes to live with her in her tiny New York apartment.  It’s very GenZ, with lots of anxiety and self-harm and talking about the internet. 

It had lots of lines like this: “There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer.  I’m a Floridian.  I’m a consumer.”

When I started to write this, I thought I had quite liked this book, but now as I try and think what to say, I wonder if I did like it.  I actually can’t remember a single other thing about it.  It’s already mixed up for me with all the other books I know where women talk about anxiety and self-harm and the internet.  Honestly, we need to work on our sh*t.

THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith

This was a memoir about a woman and her toddler who spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo in WWII.  As you can imagine, it was not too good a time.

The part that really blew my mind was that everyone knew the Japanese were coming, and she had multiple opportunities to get out (e.g., the wonderfully poetic ‘last boat to Singapore’).  She declined because she did not want to leave her husband.  DAMN. 

She is extremely, extremely hungry, so much so that she has to avoid watching her son eat so she will not steal from him.  When she is finally freed, she is so malnourished her sight is affected, and she cannot read.  She only cries twice: once, when they are interned, and then once again, when the Australian army drop flyers on the camp to say that Japan has surrendered.  This was already rumoured, and so the Japanese prison guards had suddenly been treating them very well, including inviting them to a – get this – farwell banquet?!?  This reminded me of COLD CREMATORIUM, another story about someone who made it to the last day of the war in a camp, and lived to see the prison guards start to worry about consequences.

The reason they had already heard about the surrender was that the British soldiers had managed to create a radio.  It took them one month to make the radio, but three months to make the tools to make it. It is completely from scratch from various bits of waste metal, and one elderly civilian’s hearing aids.  GodDAMN people in the 1940s knew how to do things!  It ran on a hand cranked generator, and the strongest man was given extra food so he could crank it.

I think the most horrifying part was the section where the womens’ camp is moved on, and they believe the men, who are left behind, will be executed.   The wives and husbands are allowed to speak to each other across a ditch.  She thinks this is the last time she will ever see her husband.  When the Australians finally arrive, and she is given paper to write home, she writes this:

“We are all alive.  George thin, but well.  The day we have lived for has come at last.  There are no words to tell you what this means to us.  I have no words to say what I feel.  Peace and freedom at last. Thank god.”

Imagine the state you have to be in, that the first thing you right is, ‘We are all alive.”  It was the first news her family had had of her since the beginning of the war. 

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.

THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA by Ray Nayler

I gave up on this book, but I still enjoyed it. The 300 pages I did read were jam-packed with ideas. Basically it asks the horrifying question on what would happen if octopuses acquired our level of intelligence. This I consider a really big concern. Because let’s say dolphins did, or parrots, they don’t have opposable digits, so basically nbd. But octopi have four times our number of opposable digits! Its set in the far future, and is one of the few really believable far futures I’ve ever read. There’s a slave ship for scraping the last protein from the ocean, which has slaves on it because they are cheaper than robots, there’s a cyborg whose feelings are hurt because academics can’t agree if he is conscious or not, there’s customized hologram boyfriends, and that’s before the octopi get super intelligent.

There’s also a cool part about how our brain floats around in total dark, and our whole sense of the world comes from electrical impulses sent to it in its black chamber. I love this image.