February reading round up

It was nine days into February before I finished a book, which is rare, partly due to reading The Story of Art in chapters, but also flitting in a restless way between a number of things. Mostly non fiction, which I find mostly to be best read in small chunks and not as immersive as fiction. And the fiction I was reading was, well, you’ll see…

The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

This is having a brief moment because it was written in the early 1990s, is set in 2025 where wild fires are devastating Los Angeles and a new president has been elected with the slogan Make America Great Again. Butler was a great writer but here she was also a prophetess. On the cover this has been compared to both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale but where both of those were authoritarian regimes, in The Parable of the Sower, society has broken down to chaos and violence, which somehow feels more realistic. America in this book is devastated, climate change and economy are in pieces and our heroine Lauren Olamina is living in a gated community with her family and several others for safety and security. They do not go ‘outside’ but Lauren knows she cannot stay at home forever, that there has to be a better life. They are not rich, but they have more in terms of home grown food and housing than others outside so they become a target. But to add to this, Lauren’s mother was given a drug when she was pregnant which has given Lauren hyperempathy syndrome – she can feel other people’s pain. It is something she doesn’t publicise but it does give her insight into how to make things better and she is writing her ideas and poetry into a tract of sorts, The Book of Earthseed. She uses this to feed her ideas of a better life, a faux-religion that, when the time comes to run and make her way north, she can talk to people they meet on the way as an idea of a society to work towards together. Snippets from Earthseed are at the beginning of every chapter. This is the first in what Butler was planning to make a whole series but she only wrote one further book before she died. It’s bleak and full of violence but there is hope throughout – it highlights both the best and worst of humanity.

London Parks – Hunter Davies

Where do old journalists go when they have given up the cut and thrust of chasing a story, or when the world has said it no longer wants an old journalist? It’s hard to stop writing so they get nice cushy indulgent books to write like this. I like Hunter Davies and I like parks and I like London. This is Bryson-esque in its old man pottering about talking to people about day to say stuff and I did learn some interesting things about some of London’s parks. I like that Davies sought out the park manager at each one, a role I’d not really considered. Years back, in a different job, I worked on a scheme that helped support parks in a tough funding environment and it was pretty depressing that this was needed but this is an issue that Davies covers in the book and it feels easier for London parks to make money from visitors than the rest of us away from the capital. Anyway, this was nice enough bedtime reading but spoiled by the number of typos and one mistake in the text – none of which was captured by the proofreaders, if it was even proofread. Another cost cutting consequence. What a world.

London Rules – Mick Herron

Another foray into Slough House with Jackson Lamb. The usual chaos ensues. I loved it.

The Cafe with No Name – Robert Seethaler

Published this month, I read an pre-publication copy via Netgalley. I’d not read Seethaler before but I know my reading group read A Whole Life one month that I couldn’t make. Seethaler is Austrian and this is translated from the original German. It has a distinctive style, descriptive but not interior, if that makes sense. The story, such as it is, is spread out over several years and often we get a chapter on a single incident and then leap forward in time. The main character is Robert Simon who always wanted to open a cafe, works to build up a little cash and contacts in a market area of Vienna and then opens his establishment but never knows what to call it. No matter, people come anyway, and the book covers the comings and goings of them. That’s pretty much it.

The Party – Tessa Hadley

Speaking of books where not much happens. This was enthusiastically pressed on me by a bookseller in London before Christmas and in general Hadley’s books are always raved about in certain circles. I didn’t buy it then but it was in the library the other day. It’s very short and is about two sisters going to a party, meeting two men and then going to another party. Something happens. I need to remember that I always find Hadley’s books disappointing. It’s all well written, of course, but on the whole I do end by thinking, oh who cares?

The Passion – Jeanette Winterson

This was recommended by Nick Harkaway on Radio 4’s Take 4 Books programme and I tried to understand the joy he found in it. It’s a wild ride, full of imagination and storytelling and wonder, but I often find those sorts of books leave me emotionally cold and this felt like the case here. It is about Henri, who loves Napoleon, and serves him huge amounts of rotisserie chicken, following him in the depths of his campaigns across Europe until the love is gone. It’s also about Villanelle, a beautiful woman who also loses her heart, but to another woman in Venice, and who ends up in a loveless abusive marriage, and is passed to the army. Together Villanelle and Henri make quite a team. I’m still thinking about the flights of fancy and story telling in this, but clearly others got a lot more from it than I did.

The Garden of Evening Mists – Tan Twan Eng

Harkaway also recommended this, which I enjoyed a lot more. Set in the time of the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, it tells the story of a Malayan girl who had been captured with her sister by the Japanese in the Second World War, and who wanted to build a garden to commemorate her sister. She learns gardening from one of the greats, Aritomo, who was once gardener to the Emperor of Japan. The story is told in flashback as she returns to visit Aritomo’s garden having retired years later from life as a judge. There is a lot more to it than that, exploring conflict and legacy and love and war, but this is a slow burning book, thoughtful and involving. I knew very little about this part of history so it was also good to learn more. If I wondered about several plot strands that felt unanswered, and if there could have been slightly better characterisation in some places, then these are minor quibbles.

City of Girls – Elizabeth Gilbert

My reading group’s choice this month. It started off being mildly irritating but on the whole it was mainly quite boring. How someone wrote a book about 1950s theatre in New York and managed to make it dull and predictable is anyone’s guess, but there we are. The astonishing thing is that one of the characters turns to the main character and tells her that she’s a boring person – so the author knew that and carried on anyway for 500 pages. Apparently Gilbert wanted to write a book about women’s promiscuity but people sleeping around has never been entertaining by itself – there has to be a lot more going on, and you really do have to give a toss about the characters. This was a fail for me.

Poverty Creek Journal – Thomas Gardner

Someone recommended this to me in passing and I like books about running. This is a diary of a year where poet, professor and runner Thomas Gardner kept a note of his daily runs. It’s also the year his brother died unexpectedly and the journal contains some aspects of how he tries to deal with the grief. I never run without headphones and there is a part of me that finds wonder in the cerebral musings he comes to when he’s out, where I’m being entertained by Desert Island Discs or You’re Dead to Me, Gardner is pondering deeper meanings of life and comparing them to his knowledge of Emily Dickinson. Looking at this paragraph, this review sounds awful but I really enjoyed it. Each entry is short and he is able to convey a great deal of thought into each sort piece. It’s clearly writing that has been well drafted and practiced, with consideration and care. It put my in mind, in a different way, of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, which is a series of short essays where he pulls out the positive in small things, and he is able to also manage to say something quite profound in these essays. Between them, the two books make me feel I need to go deeper in my writing, and try and say more, better. Including in my book reviews if this is any guide.

Moments of Pleasure

Having rewatched Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility with E last month, I was quite in the mood for Miss Austen on BBC1 this month and rather liked it, whether true or not. If nothing else, it demonstrated how marvellous women’s dresses with pockets are, so top marks to the costume design team.

I also watched The Importance of Being Earnest with National Theatre Live which was a gloriously camp riot of fun and silliness, and Ncuti Gatwa, who I adore. What a blast of sunshine he is.

Less sunshiney but still absorbing was The Outrun with Sairse Ronan, a film of Amy Liptrot’s recovery from alcoholism. As mentioned in previous blogs I’m not a fan of addiction stories but recovery stories, those can work and this was very well done.