Vonnegut was a big part of my early 20s, and I haven't read anything of his for a little while. I used to religiously wear a t-shirt69th book of 2024.
Vonnegut was a big part of my early 20s, and I haven't read anything of his for a little while. I used to religiously wear a t-shirt that had the gravestone on it that read EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT. Slaughterhouse-Five shook up what I thought a novel could be or do. And I guess in a way, something of Vonnegut's humour and worldview helped me construct mine as adulthood became something I no longer looked at from afar but was a 'part' of.
After watching Hozier at Finsbury Park, I had some time in the city. I read this cross-legged in Foyles in London the other day. I have a bad habit of reading books in bookshops so I don't have to buy them. It's maybe unethical.
Vonnegut dies a lot in 'controlled near-death experience[s]'. When dead, he goes to the 'blue tunnel' and meets the other men and women who have gone to heaven. There is no hell. So he even meets Hitler up there. It's sometimes hard to know whether we should laugh or not. Hitler says to Vonnegut, "I paid my dues along with everybody else", and that he hopes a 'stone cross, since he was a Christian' be placed on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York, dated '1889-1945', and read, '"Entschuldigen Sie." Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I Beg Your Pardon," or "Excuse me."'
Mary Shelley, after Vonnegut tells her that people are always calling the monster 'Frankenstein', replies, "That's not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one. And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein."
I did laugh (as in, I didn't laugh at all, but my brain was tickled), when Vonnegut said he was asked to provide some filler and interview someone who is actually alive: 'He is science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout.'
But Vonnegut also chats to Isaac Asimov, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, and more.
Fun for those who already have a soft spot for old Kurt. ...more
Well, here we are again with a 1-star Pulitzer winner, like Demon Copperhead last year. Phillips has written a clunky, mostly boring55th book of 2024.
Well, here we are again with a 1-star Pulitzer winner, like Demon Copperhead last year. Phillips has written a clunky, mostly boring novel, set in a fascinating time period (post-Civil War). It felt like a shoddy Faulkner wannabe. It starts,
I got up in the wagon and Papa set me beside Mama, all of us on the buckboard seat. Hold her hand there, he said to me, like she likes. Sit tight in. Keep her still. I saw him lean down and rope her ankle to his. I was warm because he made me wear my bonnet, to keep my skin fine and my eyes from crinkling at the corners. In case someday I turned out after all. Talk to her, he said. Tell her she'll like it where she's going. A fine great place, like a castle with a tower clock. Tell her.
Many reviews focus on the graphic and longwinded sexual assault/rape scene, but there are plenty of problematic scenes, even right at the end with the most ridiculous, dramatic and excessive climax imaginable. The characters' motives all seemed unbelievable and the writing is transparently trying to be good, and so, comes off false. Coincidentally, in my current Karl Ove Knausgaard volume, he talks about Phillips, along with Bret Easton Ellis, as being the good American authors he likes. I'd never actually heard about her, or this book, till she won.
When she's not trying to be Faulkner (the 'fool' Weed has some perspective chapters that read a bit like crap Benjy imitations), I also saw Crane's influence with the singular war scene. I just find myself frustrated by the whole thing. It felt messy, drawn-out (then very rushed at the end with everything magically falling into place like a romance novel), and tiresome. Weed's chapters, particularly, just felt gratuitous. Not a worthy winner at all....more
These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years as seen against the background of the twentieth c
43rd book of 2024.
These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years as seen against the background of the twentieth century, which has become, indeed, as Lenin predicted, a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of that violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator.
So starts On Violence, which Arendt wrote between 1967-69. Though short, it is riddled with quotations and explorations from a number of other sources, such as Marx, Sartre, Fanon, and Chomsky. Her main line of thought seems to be in detangling the idea that power and violence are synonymous; Arendt believes, on the contrary, they are opposites. I found her idea interesting that violence is the result of failing power*. She does, state however, that violence can destroy power, whilst also being 'incapable of creating it'. In one brilliant portion of the essay, Arendt asks, 'Who are they, this new generation?' and answers her own question with, 'Those who hear ticking'. As Spender calls the future, 'a time-bomb buried'. This is very of its time, post-WW2, and in the middle of the Cold War, but it is true of today too. As she writes on the very first page (partially quoting, too, Harvey Wheeler),
The 'apocalyptic' chess game between the superpowers, that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our civilisation, is being played according to the rule 'if either "wins" it is the end of both'; it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games proceeded it.
An interesting read, though at times a little bogged down with the insistent quoting. The argument could have been tighter, but the last few pages where she begins to conclude some ideas, are worthwhile. Sadly, she also leaves lots unanswered and unexplored. ___________________
*
Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its 'solution' of the Czechoslovak problem - just as it was the shrinking power of European imperialism that became manifest in the alternative between decolonisation and massacre. To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.
Pure narrative delight. At times like Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, at others, like Forrest Gump. A freewheeling novel that40th book of 2024.
Pure narrative delight. At times like Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, at others, like Forrest Gump. A freewheeling novel that jumps through time, multiple storylines, like flash-fiction, multiple places, and complete with many real historical figures appearing briefly as characters: Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, Emiliano Zapata, and, recurring throughout the whole novel as if a strange motif himself, Harry Houdini. The end of the novel culminates into a kind of revenge plot. And yet, with all its threads, starts and stops, the novel remains compulsively readable. The central fictional family at the centre, made up of simply Father, Mother, Younger Brother, etc., are well-drawn and worthy anchors to the ragtime, indeed, ragged rhythm, around them. I'm certainly a Doctorow fan now. ...more
I've wanted to read Martin Eden for some time, and a colleague recently raved about it, so I finally took it down from my main case 39th book of 2024.
I've wanted to read Martin Eden for some time, and a colleague recently raved about it, so I finally took it down from my main case and began. The plot is simple: an uneducated sailor, Martin, dreams of becoming a famous writer and falls in love with a woman, Ruth, from a bourgeois family. It's a writer's bildungsroman. Anyone who writes, or dreams of writing, would find this a moving and relatable read. As Martin asks himself at one point, '"What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own life?"'
There are many discussions on socialism and art throughout the novel. The introduction makes it clear that London wrote this semi-autobiographical novel as a way of attacking the world he lived in, but instead, made Eden one of his most endearing and ambitious characters.
"But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers ever arrived?" "They arrived by achieving the impossible," he answered. "They did such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them. They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle's battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that is what I must do. I must achieve the impossible."
So there is indeed more to London than The Call of the Wild. This is a well-written and well-plotted novel about the plight of all artists, not just writers. It seems in today's society, as much as in London's, there's a certain scorn around budding artists. As Martin Eden in the novel discovers, he was not praised for 'work performed'; when he finished a story, the people around him did not care, and continued to tell him to get a job, but when that same story was later accepted into a magazine: they congratulated him, adored him. The age old battle of the artist and the so-called 'real-world'. A man who lives across from my parents used to baulk at my degree choice of writing and literature and, in so many words, mock me whenever I was visiting home and we met in the street. This same man, on the next occasion, would attempt to impress me by works of classic literature he was reading and adoring. Amazingly, it never occurred to him that these artists he loved (writers, musicians), would never have created the works of art he relied on, had someone like himself been in their lives, stamping on the embers of their passion. One of the great ironies Martin Eden would have attacked. ...more
Three Jewish boys in 1907 Poland are on the road to what could be an imaginary place, Lublin, to sell brushes. They fight, tell joke38th book of 2024.
Three Jewish boys in 1907 Poland are on the road to what could be an imaginary place, Lublin, to sell brushes. They fight, tell jokes, stop for plenty of pisses and stories.
"An alter moid, who needs but cannot find a husband, agrees to meet the most undesirable man in Mezritsh and a date is arranged. The night of the date, there's a knock on the door. When she opens the door, the old spinster sees a man with no arms or legs sitting in an invalid's chair on wheels. "How can I marry you?" she asks, "you have no legs." "Which means I can't run out on you." "You have no arms." "I can't beat you." "But are you still good in bed?" she enquires at last. "I knocked on the door, didn't I?"
'What does a Russian bride get from her husband on her wedding day that's long and hard?' a restored Elya asks his friends. 'A new last name!'
'What do you call a beautiful girl in a Russian town?' Elya is going for two in a row. 'A tourist.'
'A rabbi wanted to try pork,' says Elya. 'He drives his carriage one night to a distant Polish inn and order this forbidden food. And plenty of it. Just as the waiter sets down a whole roast pig with an apple in its mouth, the doors opens and a group of men from his synagogue enter. They stare at the rabbi in disbelief. "What kind of farkakta is this?" the rabbi greets them, throwing up his hands. "You order an apple and this is how they serve it?"
And so on, and on. But for all the jokes, puns, play fights and tomfoolery, a thread of unease runs through the book. Someone else aptly refers to it as "the walking of Godot"; and, it's quite clear, that Wilkinson doesn't want us to feel too comfortable. There are frequent references to the future. And with so much lightheartedness, the darkness at the end of the book feels like the only payoff we should expect. And Wilkinson serves it to us like a roast pig with an apple in its mouth....more
Weirdly, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine the other day about how women eating people seems to be in vogue right now. S37th book of 2024.
Weirdly, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine the other day about how women eating people seems to be in vogue right now. So I waved this book in her face and said, You won't believe it, this is about a woman eating people (she's a zombie!). She replied, "God forbid women have hobbies."
Trust Fitzcarraldo to publish a zombie book. If it's one thing you'd expect never to work, it's zombies. The only writer who has written a zombie book that I can think of, and one of the few writers I trust to write a zombie book, is the inimitable Vladimir Sorokin; but, you know what, de Marcken gives it a good go. This is a "funny", first person narrative about a girl who is a zombie. Her arm falls off in the first line of the book. The world is a wreck, humans run around avoiding zombies and zombies, when they're not hungry, avoid humans.
When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land. That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don't try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.
There is a horrible moment in the book where the narrator spots a little old lady, alive, going into a little shed. On the other side of an inner wall, the narrator hears a small voice, "I'm hungry." The old lady reassures the little voice before putting a wooden spoon in her mouth and sticking her already-stump of an arm through a sort of cat-flap. The sound of noisy eating commences, and the old lady cries. Her grandson, a zombie, is on the other side of the wall. She is slowly feeding him her arm so he doesn't go hungry....more
A sequel to Less Than Zero, one that, I guess, never needed to be written. I read Ellis's debut years ago and I remember all the mot28th book of 2024.
A sequel to Less Than Zero, one that, I guess, never needed to be written. I read Ellis's debut years ago and I remember all the motifs that get thrown around: "DISAPPEAR HERE" and the horrible gang-rape of a young girl at the end of it, which is referenced at the beginning of this novel. This book was published in 2010, just five years after Lunar Park (2005), and they share many of the same ideas. In this, Clay is now a screenwriter and the start is a bit meta, about the movie adaption of Less Than Zero and how his life was written by someone else. In Lunar Park, a version of Ellis is the main character and he is haunted by Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Interesting that his books circle the same few characters and events and they all seem to hail from where it all began when Ellis published his first book at 21. And now The Shards, which I read part of, is out too, 13 years after this was published, and returns to an idea that, supposedly, 17-year-old Bret had, but couldn't write. Anyway: Clay is still disillusioned, nihilist. He thinks he's being followed, there's a small cast of characters all somehow connected in his half-baked noir novel. There's a few expected Ellis scenes which are grotesque to read: a torture involving an insane amount of stabbing, tongue cutting-out, and the tying down of a woman who has been drugged and having seizures, raping her, pissing on her, and her eyeball coming out, before finally murdering her. Sometimes I look at the number of Ellis books I've read and wonder Why? What for? But perhaps he's still writing of generations gone, the exaggerated, sexed-up violence of the 80s which he can't seem to escape from. ...more
I wrote a piece on Shelley, Lord Byron and Trelawny in Greece a while ago and did a solid amount of research for it. Most evenings I26th book of 2024.
I wrote a piece on Shelley, Lord Byron and Trelawny in Greece a while ago and did a solid amount of research for it. Most evenings I was trawling through newspaper clippings, through biographies and through what the men themselves had written about that time. I wrote a ridiculous amount of words, mostly amassing to nothing but aimless passion, before stripping it all back to find the heart of what I was saying. When I saw the blurb for Hall's latest novel, a story about motherhood, birth and miscarriage struck alongside Mary Shelley's life, motherhood and miscarriages, I was sold. The second paragraph of the book reads,
Still, however, parts of her story detached themselves from the page and clung to my life. The fact, for instance, that in her later years she recalled that Frankenstein was written in the aftermath of a "waking dream": a "pale student" kneeling beside a creature he'd sewn together. The vision terrified her, she said, so absolutely that she couldn't shake it all through that strange, gloomy summer, the summer of 1816, the year after the fall of the Napoleonic empire, when ash from the volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora had blotted out the sun's light.
And, of course, later on, the famous anecdotes about how Frankenstein came to be, from telling ghosts stories by Lake Geneva with Percy, Byron and Claire.
However, despite Mary's importance in the first part, she fades from the narrative. The descriptions in the middle portion of the book, of labour, miscarriage, bleeding, were incredibly visceral. The passages on childbirth alone were enough for me, as a man, to feel relief and guilt.
Then comes the final long part titled "Science Fiction" in which an old friend of the narrator's, Anna, comes back into her life. Hall showed off a certain skill in the first part but I was sorely disappointed with the final: Anna's past comes to light, her troubles with an abusive ex-boyfriend she tried to "fix", and Hall uses this as a clumsy and obvious parallel to Frankenstein creating his monster and suffering the consequences. She spells it out, frequently. I also began to shake the book furiously at the amount of times she uses the word 'nauseous'; I counted it five times on a two-page spread. Perhaps it is the perfect word for pregnancy, but I couldn't help but think, How did she not realise how jarring it was to be used this many times? So for all my initial excitement, it was a botch job at the end, a baggy and slightly messy book, like, dare I say, bits and pieces sewn together into a monster. ...more
Often regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction books ever written, and recommended by a colleague who has read (it seems) eve27th book of 2024.
Often regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction books ever written, and recommended by a colleague who has read (it seems) every novel ever written, Bester's book left me a little underwhelmed. It's pulpy, rough and jagged. Bester's prose staggers along so there's hardly a pause in the book. It's The Count of Monte Cristo in space, and minus about 900 pages. So there's credit there, that Bester does it in such a short space. And for its publication date in 1956, all the jaunting (teleporting), technology (accelerating time), Solar Wars and whatever else, it is impressive when looking at it with context; but it's aged, it feels lacking. The writing suffers and isn't as strong as other sci-fi writers and generally pulp doesn't interest me anyway. A massively influential book (often hailed as influencing the rise of cyberpunk in the 80s), that has its issues as it ages. Bester also wrote for DC Comics ("He clearly didn't mind slumming it," as my colleague put it), and when he died, left his literary estate and home to his bartender. ...more
This book was my companion last week as I was in Malta with my brother. We walked the usual 20,000+ steps a day when travelling, had23rd book of 2024.
This book was my companion last week as I was in Malta with my brother. We walked the usual 20,000+ steps a day when travelling, had no dinners and instead opted for liquid dinners (big lunch at 3pm, then in the evenings drink local Cisk beer), and woke every morning to the Basilica view our fairly large apartment gave us.
V is far easier to read than the other Pynchon's I've read, save perhaps Vineland. Of course, Gravity's Rainbow remains the most challenging (but at times, the most rewarding). Pynchon's writing here is sometimes exceptional, and he wrote this aged 26. I actually found the Whole Sick Crew and the modern bits a bit gratuitous; I wonder how much is autobiographical or just Pynchon enjoying writing about yo-yoing and getting drunk. The historical bits were more interesting to me, particularly Mondaugen's long story in chapter 9 (which I read almost entirely in Malta International Airport). One of the standouts, as many have already said though, has to be Profane hunting alligators in the sewers and the bit with the priest and the rats. But generally, the same old problems I have with Pynchon persist: there's too much going on, loose threads, too many characters, it's difficult to care about anyone or anything; it is enjoyable at times but a lot of the time, I just felt like he was waffling, even showing off. Alan recently sent me something about Pynchon from James Wood, which I won't quote in its entirety but,
There are pleasure to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases [e.g. Pynchon's novels], and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists.
And I think I agree with that; as much as I start to enjoy a passage or a chapter of Pynchon, by the end, everything is a wash of silliness, fart jokes, puns and cardboard characters with no true menace or heart. Or he goes the other way, like in Vineland, and made me sick with the heart. Perhaps I'm impossible to please. ...more
4.5. Brilliant novella. Larsen has somehow managed to create this tiny thing out of just a few perfectly balanced scenes. The sort 21st book of 2024.
4.5. Brilliant novella. Larsen has somehow managed to create this tiny thing out of just a few perfectly balanced scenes. The sort of book you read and feel as if you are in the hands of a master, which is astounding as this is only her second novel and the last thing she ever wrote. I read that she worked for some time on a third novel, but nothing came of it. One of the scenes, the sort of centrepiece of the novel, is this genius cobstruction where one of the character's, a white man, discusses and jokes about how much he hates black people, unknowingly, in a room of three "passing" women, one of them being his wife. The dramatic irony is palpable. It's a shame this was probably overshadowed for so long. A fantastic little book....more
My first Limón. I liked the personal poems and the nature, two things I care about myself. I think all good writing is, in essence,16th book of 2024.
My first Limón. I liked the personal poems and the nature, two things I care about myself. I think all good writing is, in essence, autobiographical. Some poems were far better than others, of course. She has a talent for looking at a bird and realising that that bird, or the that moment, reflects something bigger about herself or her experience. One that really struck me was
Joint Custody
Why did I never see it for what it was: abundance? Two families, two different kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two creeks, two highways, two stepparents with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record scratched and stopping to that original chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy but I was loved each place. And so I have two brains now. Two entirely different brains. The one that always misses where I'm not, and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.
I also thought highly, particularly, of the beginning of,
The Hurting Kind
I. On the plane I have a dream I've left half my torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go
back for it, but it's too late, I'm flying and there's only half of me.
Back in Texas, the flowers I've left on the counter (I stay alone there so the flowers are more than flowers) have wilted and knocked over the glass.
At the funeral parlour with my mother, we are holding her father's suit and she says, He'll swim in these.
For a moment, I'm not sure what she means,
until I realise she means the clothes are too big.
I go with her like a shield in case they try to upsell her the ridiculously ornate urn, the elaborate body box.
It is a nice bathroom in the funeral parlour, so I take the opportunity to change my tampon.
When I come out my mother says, Did you have to change your tampon?
And it seems, all at once, a vulgar life. Or not vulgar, but not simple, either.
1. Blue: the first thing I think of is that it is the colour of sadness. The second thing I think of is my childhood bedroom, painte13th book of 2024.
1. Blue: the first thing I think of is that it is the colour of sadness. The second thing I think of is my childhood bedroom, painted a duck egg blue.
2. Being a man and realising most things in my wardrobe are blue. Being an adult and realising there aren’t as many colours as you thought when you were a child: at least not wearable colours.
3. People say everything was brighter when they were child.
4. On the train I briefly put Bluets down to look out the window. On both sides, fields. Soon the castle on my right, up on the hill. It looks as if the landscape has been painted and then washed over completely with blue. Everything has its own colour, but everything tainted by blue. It’s before 8am in January – that’s why.
5. My sudden hunting of the colour blue seems a little childish and forced and yet at the same time, I haven’t been able to help myself. I’ve been photographing the blue I’ve found in unlikely places: a little blue padlock, the blue wire-frames in a vegetable garden, a row of blue garage doors. It doesn’t necessarily make me feel any particular way, other than surprise. For example: I went into the palace gardens only a five minute walk from my workplace. I tend to do a walk there before clocking-in. At this point, it’s just past eight o’clock in the morning. Ignoring the sky (which, mostly, has actually been a kind of grey colour anyway), I found it incredibly hard to find anything blue in the whole gardens. Not even flowers. At a push, some of the pigeons were bluish-grey, but I didn’t count those. The only thing I found in the whole gardens that was blue was on the little map there was a little circle marked ‘POND’ and coloured blue. Funnily enough, I’ve never seen a pond there.
6. And funnily enough, again, Pond is a novel written by Claire-Louise Bennett, published by Fitzcarraldo. Now Fitzcarraldo blue is something my house is covered in. Shelves of them, piles of them, everywhere.
7. Blueberries aren’t blue.
8. Nelson says at one point about yellow being the most unattractive colour. In recent years, you’ve decided you quite like ochre. Bright yellow, is, of course, horrible; but a deep yellow is lovely. Sadly, my toes are coming through the only ochre pair of socks I own.
9. What started as an aching in my back, which spread to my neck and down my calves, has turned into illness. I am sent home from work. I lie on my blue bedsheet and stare at the white ceiling. I shut my eyes tightly and behind my eyelids is blue, then black, then blooms a fleshy red. Eventually, it goes black again. I wonder how many times I’ve fallen asleep in this bed, how many times I’ve had sex, had a nightmare.
10. When I think about, blueness being the colour of depression seems strange when the sea, spanning out in azure blue, is so healing. And what more do we want but a blue sky? Particularly being British; it’s all we ever hope for.
11. Though my eyes are blue, I’ve often been associated with earthy colours. Green, usually. I think I’m blue on the inside and green on the outside.
12. Conversely, my girlfriend is yellow on the outside and green on the inside. Come to think of it, she has green eyes: maybe our eyes reflect our inside colours and not outside colours.
13. Sundays, to me, are blue. Sunday is my least favourite day of the week.
14. The opening chapter of Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, “Prussian Blue”, is the perfect radical companion to Bluets.
15. Blue isn’t a frightening colour, despite all its associations. Blue isn’t scary, it’s just deep, sometimes a little dark, but not scary.
16. On a Greek island (Zakynthos?) as boys, all my brother and I had eyes for was a blue bottled drink we’d seen. My parents vetoed it immediately: blue drinks are not good for you. I think it must have been a blue Powerade. All week we brought it up, this blue drink we’d seen. It was the first of its kind for us. Finally, on the last day, my parents buckled (or planned all along) and said, You can have the blue drink. We both took one sip of it and decided it was the most disgusting thing we’d ever had. My dad finished it, reluctantly. But a lesson was clearly learnt, because to this day I avoid energy drinks, blue or not.
17. After discussing our respective colours, my girlfriend and I then discussed colour more broadly. She said depression wasn’t a dark blue to her but a pale one, like ice. I could not believe it; I’d never considered depression to be anything but dark blue.
18. Grief is undoubtedly black: does this mean it is the darkest and most painful of all emotions? In the newspaper the other day I read the statement of the mother of one of the 19-year-old students murdered last year in June on the way back from a night out. She said, “I have been to the darkest corners of my mind.”
19. ‘134. It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death’s approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does this thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue then you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.’
20. Pockets full of stones: Woolf. Sucking on stones: Molloy.
21. Arguing between colour and color.
22. Is boredom also blue?
23. Still ill. Bored blue. My bedsheets blue enough that I could be bobbing on a wave. That would explain the headrush. The slight wobbly stomach.
24. Blue could be the most human of all the colours....more
4.5. I toyed with five stars but I think I'm going to stick with four for now. I have no doubt this will stay in my mind and theref14th book of 2024.
4.5. I toyed with five stars but I think I'm going to stick with four for now. I have no doubt this will stay in my mind and therefore I may bump to five in the future. I've always known the title of Trumbo's novel and been vaguely aware of it, but it was never on my immediate radar. My girlfriend and I went into a library that isn't our local a few weeks ago and looked at their stock. This book had come in only a few weeks before, brand new.
War fiction has always been a favourite of mine. This is ironic as I can't stand war films. My nerves are too bad; I've never made it once through Schindler's List and though I've seen things like Saving Private Ryan several times, I am left deeply unsettled for hours afterwards. I think it's down to the fact that when I go away from it or close my eyes, the images on the screen can quite easily replay behind my eyes. Words, however stirring and haunting they are, at least, don't replay in that way. I guess they just echo instead.
Trumbo has somehow written a 250 page novel about a man lying in bed after a mortar strike. Joe doesn't know what has happened to him. The book is a journey of discovery. The past invades and we go back in time. There are biting and overt monologues on anti-war sentiments, but what I find most shocking about these hyper-focused novels is the personal side. Trumbo creates Joe's interior world, his girl troubles, his friends, his memories, the whole universe that is a person, and by the end we remind ourselves that this was a single man. The Battle of the Somme alone had over 300,000 fatalities. You cannot fathom 300,000 people. It's simply not possible; but when you try, when you imagine each and every one of them thinking about someone at home, missing their mother, their father, their dog, the smell of grass, the tree by their house or the sea...
Incredible writing. There is a mania to it. Trumbo does away with commas so the prose jumps along in a staggering but often addictive speed. I think we are meant to fumble. The final 50 pages or so are some of the most emotionally charged I've read in a little while. It's a brutal, body-horror, anti-war mess. I'm surprised it isn't read more frequently. Maybe it is, but I've never seen or heard anyone discuss it myself.
Hickory dickory dock my daddy's nuts from shellshock. Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and burned out his eyes. A diller a dollar a ten o'clock scholar blow off his legs and then watch him holler. Rockabye baby in the treetop don't stop a bomb or you'll probably flop.
On the news the other day they were discussing the dwindling UK military and fears that they were leaning towards National Service / conscription. They assured not. The military's pride, they said, was on being a voluntary force. If the time came to protect our country, they said, I think many young men would join up. They are looking for purpose and adventure. ...more
An intellectual tour-de-force that strives to overturn the current ideas and biases surrounding humanity's history. This was recomme12th book of 2024.
An intellectual tour-de-force that strives to overturn the current ideas and biases surrounding humanity's history. This was recommended to me by a bookseller who, in light of the recent findings about the bestselling Sapiens and its inaccuracies, said this was the book I was looking for instead. Graeber and Wengrow begin the book by wondering, Where did social inequality begin? They dismantle the Hobbes and Rosseau beliefs and from there, the book spirals outwards in a huge accumulation of social history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, archaeology and more. The book boasts hundreds of footnotes and background reading (so much so that I actually gave up recording all the essays and books that they alluded to). Unsurprisingly, not the whole book is interesting. My personal tastes found my interest waning, for example, in the long chapter devoted to the history of farming. Conversely, my interest piqued, for example, at a reflection on humanity's violence [1].
The main argument that seems to hold all the moving parts, and digressions [2], of the book is that the idea of early humans being 'ape-like' and/or stupid/uncreative/simplistic, compared to humans now, is wrong. On only two occasions do they make direct reference to Harari (author of Sapiens), and one of those instances is on this topic:
If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just have easily written 'as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang', and 'as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune'. One might have imagined the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with would be . . . another group of human beings. Why, then, did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers? [...] Yet Harari, like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes anyway.
Graeber and Wengrow discuss the starting point of this book as being a sandbox. They were playing; but slowly, they realised the information they were looking for, the books they imagined would exist, did not. When they turned their focus to early humans, then later to the subjects of the book (Imperial Rome, ancient Greece, Mesoamerica, Aztec Mexico, Inca Peru, Pharaonic Egypt, Han China, et al), they realised the amount of knowledge was missing, and the writing that they did find, was wrong. Everything seemed to come from European, Imperialist, patriarchal viewpoints. And worse still, they argue, human history was boiled down to broad statements, lazy pigeonholing and the belief that inventions came around as suddenly as, say, the lightbulb, changing the lives of millions at once and revolutionising the present.
Still, it often seems difficult for contemporary writers to resist the idea that some sort of similarly dramatic break with the past must have occurred. In fact, we've seen, what actually took place was nothing like that. Instead of some male genius realising his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.
So presuming that early humans were less capable of invention, societal change, self-reflection and organisation, all comes from, essentially, a Colonist bias.
So despite its length, its digressions and the broadness of its subject (boiled down to social inequality and where humanity has come from, and, partly, going), the conversational tone keeps the book (mostly) lively. It does strive to turn over everything we are taught in schools, by which, we see that we weren't, once, just ape-like, unintelligent, uncreative people who hadn't invented the wheel and therefore could not grasp anything abstract that plagues us today. We have in essence, always been struggling over the same matters. Who is deserving of what? Why do we always return to war? Who is in charge, and why? How do we build an egalitarian society, and, as Graeber and Wengrow explore, if we were once closer to an egalitarian society, why did we lose that? One argument is that there are simply a lot more humans, and it is harder to govern on such a grand scale. For anyone interested in these sweeping ideas as well as detailed exploration of early human communities and states, then this is your book. _______________________
[1] Periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace, often lasting centuries, in which there is little to no evidence for destructive conflict of any kind. War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming; indeed, long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet it had a stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later.
[2] Example: 'IN WHICH WE OFFER A DIGRESSION ON 'THE SHAPE OF TIME', AND SPECIFICALLY HOW METAPHORS OF GROWTH AND DECAY INTRODUCE UNNOTICED POLITICAL BIASES INTO OUR VIEW OF HISTORY'.'...more
3.5. I never got fully swept up by this, though it has a lot of ingredients I generally like. It's a real writer's book. Anyone who w2nd book of 2024.
3.5. I never got fully swept up by this, though it has a lot of ingredients I generally like. It's a real writer's book. Anyone who writes will enjoy fragments of this book, which, whilst dealing with grief, reflects on the nature of writing as catharsis (among other things). Also, for those who have studied writing, like I did (for better or worse), there are fragments of 'workshops'; over four years I did countless workshops a week and have had my fair share of them, and, of course, have heard a hundred of the same things over and over. Most of the time, workshops are useless at a basic writing level. No one knows what they're doing, the advice they give they give tentatively, as if knowing they're wrong (or knowing they'll be ignored (which they will be)), and more often than not, people are dissuaded from their work rather than inspired. When I got to my MA in writing (novel writing, specifically), my colleagues were as a disillusioned as I was by the process. It had, in a sense, murdered the act of writing for us. Ruined it. Rather than writing a novel all the way through as one draft, showing no one, and keeping the doors closed, we had to arrive every week with an artificially polished chapter. Even Swann, my professor, warned me that more often than not, writing courses only create bad habits, and bad feelings.
Anyway - Nunez has written a breezy book that somehow manages not to be maudlin. This is amazing enough considering it is about grief and looking after a Great Dane (who is the cauldron of said grief). It's just not the style I enjoy to read, short paragraphs, colloquial voice … but I respect the skill it probably took to write it in this offhand but meditative way....more
4.5. I hate rewrites and reimaginings and after Kingsolver's rubbish Demon Copperhead, I was skeptical to read Everett's James (wh149th book of 2023.
4.5. I hate rewrites and reimaginings and after Kingsolver's rubbish Demon Copperhead, I was skeptical to read Everett's James (which is due to be published in March next year), but I adore The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and couldn't resist starting immediately when this advance copy was sent to me. Safe to say, pretty early on, this was going to be a different story.
The beginning follows the plot of the original. Many events that happen are exactly as Twain invented them, but of course, everything feels different: Jim is the narrator, and Everett has crafted him into something better. For starters: the way Jim speaks in Twain's novel is merely, we learn, a 'language' that all slaves speak, and put on, for white people. As soon as any white people leave a scene, Jim drops the act. And, at times it's clear Everett wants us to laugh, however uncomfortably, as soon as a white person reappears, Jim picks it up again, Lawdy, Lawdy! He can read, he can write. He harbours nihilistic tendencies. He is not Jim, but James.
And Huck. There is no shortage of reviews damning Twain's novel as being racist. There's no shortage of people thinking it should be banned, even now. I won't lie, I was unsure about how Everett would deal with it, because there's no hiding the fact that the original novel has had a controversial and problematic history. He nails it, though. Huck feels exactly like he felt in the original. It felt like reading Twain. Huckleberry Finn is a problematic person, as history often created; he is a child born into a world of slaves and racism, with a deadbeat and abusive father. And despite the horrible ending of the original novel, Huck, I believe, even in Twain, loved Jim. And Everett blossoms that.
By perhaps the midway point, Everett begins to steer the story. The plot changes. There are some twists and inventions. There are some Django Unchained moments of revenge and retribution. The book is riddled with satire, action, pain and suffering. I've only read The Trees but this already feels like the book Everett was here to write. This is a theory from Swann, my old professor: that every writer spends their life trying to write only one book, and everything else, all their other books, are merely tests, byproducts. Vonnegut's, for example, was Slaughterhouse-Five. This, I think, with my limited knowledge, was Everett's. It just feels like it. It feels like all his power and energy collected here.
If you haven't read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, read it. It's one of the Great American Novels. Then, in March, when this hits the bookshops, buy it.
A thousand thanks to Pan Macmillan for the advance copy. ...more
2.5. I'll review the book itself and throw all my Lord of the Rings similarities in a footnote down the bottom for anyone who cares142nd book of 2023.
2.5. I'll review the book itself and throw all my Lord of the Rings similarities in a footnote down the bottom for anyone who cares enough to see*. Naturally with any book that's 800 pages long, the plot waxes and wanes. The start is interesting because it's new, the middle was a slog, just inn, to inn, to inn, and the ending was interesting because... it's ending? I read this because my little brother and I have almost nothing in common, but one common ground we've often navigated over the years is he likes fantasy novels and I read a lot. Years ago I read the whole of Game of Thrones so we would have things to talk about. He's just read this and pushed it my way so we can discuss: here I am. (Though that's not to say we don't otherwise have anything to say to each other; we are actually quite close, as brothers go.)
Jordan's writing isn't awful and it isn't great. Some of the descriptions are nice but generally it's the sort of prose that just bobs you along without you noticing it one way or the other. There are a few bits of italicised thought-processes (one of my most hated things in fiction), but I let it slide as it was infrequent enough. A few short snappy sentences that also bother me. And everything in the footnote as distracting throughout. I'm surprised it's one of the bestselling fantasy series of all time, frankly.
*Rand has a friend Merry Mat and Pippin Perrin. They live in the Shire Two Rivers, which is a place cutoff from the rest of the world where everyone is a humble farmer and stays out of the wars. They meet up with Aragorn Lan, a Ranger Warder and go on an adventure. Once their adventure begins, they are pursued to Bucklebury Ferry Taren Ferry. All the while, Sauron The Dark One can communicate and give nightmares to Rand and his friends. At one point Mat picks up a magical ring dagger that ties him to the enemy, giving them the ability to 'see' him and track him, and, above all else, taint his personality and make him evil. And I could go on: there is a Mines of Moria part, an ent like figure... ...more
Matthew Ted
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