One of the go-to books on my Kindle is The Collected Stories of T.C Boyle (which I think is actually just his first three collections. While unable to sleep, I read ‘Green Hell’ and it reminded me of just how much ground you can cover in a short story.
'Kala' by Colin Walsh
Well, I had a whole post about this, but Squarespace ate it and I can’t be bothered to write it again.
This is a pretty good thriller, albeit without the most original premise. Old friends reunite in their hometown, haunted by the disappearance of a childhood friend when they were teenagers.
I’d tried a couple of duds on my Kindle and was very pleased when I found this. It cracks along and the characterisation is pretty good.
Buy ‘Kala’ by Colin Walsh at bookshop.org
Excerpt
…at one point I made a comment about Auntie Pauline’s softness, and Rossie said, ‘It only looks like softness from outside.’ We kept working. But a few minutes later he piped up again and said, ‘It takes strength to be that delicate.’
‘Quint’ by Robert Lautner
I’ve bounced off a few books lately, starting them and not feeling any desire to continue. One of the books that’s sat on my shelf for a while is Peter Benchley’s original novel of ‘Jaws’, which I got for Christmas. I think I’ve read it before and even though I don’t remember it being great (apart from the cover of the 70s edition I had) I probably would have read it if we hadn’t watched the film on Christmas Day.
Anyway, this prequel by Robert Lautner was pretty good. I tend not to be a fan of prequels, but got this from the library because I was mildly interested but not enough to actually buy the book.
It’s pretty good. There’s a fair amount of grisly details as you might expect, given that it covers the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in flashback and a fairly bloody bit of shark fishing contemporaneously. Years ago, a couple of friends were raving about Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ and, honestly, I found all the fish talk pretty dull. Maybe I’ve matured as a reader since then. Maybe not. Perhaps reading ‘Moby Dick’ has radically reshaped what I think too much detail about fishing is. Anyway, this was pretty good, although it mainly made me think about how great Robert Shaw was in the film.
Excerpts
The devil
God never turns up. The Devil tips his hat to you, walks right beside you. God sits on a throne, keeps you beneath. You can get to know the Devil on first-name terms. He'll come to dinner fi you ask him. God sent his son and angels. The Devil comes in person. Gotta respect that a little.
– p131
Kaitens
You know what a Kaiten is? That's a suicide torpedo. Got a man or two on board, guiding by periscope. Hatches close and they got no opening on the inside. They used kids from poor families, eighteen years old, with the promise that their families would get a great pension. I know bad ways to die but that tops a lot. Fired out of a tube ni hte dark, into the night, into the black water, and if you don't hit, don't explode and burn, you'll sink to the deep and suffocate or blow up from the pressure. blow yourself out your own asshole. Got to give it to the J*ps. They really wanted to win. I just wanted to eat.
– p143-144, (censorship mine.)
Baby Sharks
Sharks birth live young. She has eggs like a fish, sure, but they hatch inside her and they ear the weaker ones so thems that come out are the strongest. They come out killers. Killers of their siblings to start their life. Earn their place.
— p171-172
‘The Medium is the Massage’ by Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore
Slightly shitty scan of the cover. Soz.
Weird book, picked up at a discount at a shop that was closing down. Although I’ve heard of McLuhan, it’s really only as a cameo in Annie Hall and for the phrase ‘the medium is the message’, which I heard a lot at one time (not so much anymore) and which I felt I understood on an intuitive level without ever really interrogating what it means.
Anything with interesting layouts and weird typography is going to get my attention and after a few months on the shelf, I read it during a couple of hours downtime.
My brain tends to hear Charlie Brown’s teacher when text gets too academic (bwah-bwah-mwah-bwah), but I’ve picked out a few bits that I found interesting. I will say, though, that as I was going back to scan a couple of spreads, bits started leaping out at me. It might have spared itself from the charity shop, at least for a while.
Anyway, some stuff:
Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. […] Anti- environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.
Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.
I also liked this, quoted:
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and note remember of themselves…. You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” – Socrates, “Phaedrus”
and:
The Balinese say: “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.”
Buy ‘The Medium is the Massage’ by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore from bookshop.org
'Burn Book' by Kara Swisher
I mostly know Swisher from her various podcasts. She's fairly funny and level-headed about the inherent stupidness of much of the technology industry. I tried her earlier book There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere, but didn't make much headway, largely because I wasn't that interested in AOL as a company. I vaguely remembered reading an article about the company in Wired back when it was still a going concern and even then it was categorised as dull. I'm sure there's more to it and Swisher's book probably explains a lot of the now-incomprehensible AOL Time Warner merger. But it wasn't for me.
I tend to read books about business and technology when I go to sleep. I find them weirdly comforting. I particularly like books about ambitious hardware or software projects, such as ‘Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft’ by G. Pascal Zachary, which is full of technical detail or ‘Careless People’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which is full of weird, subhuman behaviour. The latter surprised me not with the callousness and ignorance of the technology entrepreneurial class, but more that anyone was shocked by it. The most surprising part of that book was that the author ever thought that Facebook could be a tool for genuine social good. It felt like an idea from long, long ago.
Swisher’s book is more of an overall precis of Swisher’s career and a round-up of the most notable figures in Silicon Valley. Although there’s promise of gossip, there isn’t much. Although fairly blunt, none of the commentary feels unfair, which is a fine line to tread.
Extracts
I’m not saying these are the best bits, but I’m trying to clip things from books that I find interesting. Just imagine the pencilled notes in the margins saying “yes, so true”.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Sandberg, for her part, listened and then said in her silky-smoothest of voices some version of “Calm down, Kara. We’re handling it.” Well, they didn’t handle the propaganda. Not from the Russians. Not in Iran. And not in Sri Lanka, where a Buddhist mob attacked Muslims over false information spread on Facebook, prompting a government official to tell the New York Times in the most perfect of metaphors: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”
Spalding Gray’s show Interviewing the Audience, which I saw five times at the Kennedy Center in the 1990s. You could actually see it countless times because each show, Gray pulled three audience members onstage to talk.
the much-discussed Section 230 gives the sector an unusual amount of protection. Still, most regulators and politicians are utterly missing in action. Europe has done a much better job in large part thanks to the scourge of Silicon Valley, Margrethe Vestager, the Danish politician who headed the European Commission for Competition.
goat rodeo
I mean...
…it’s a bit blatant, isn’t it?
Radioposter Launches Paper-fi: Analog Books with Synchronized Soundtracks
From the Colossal article about this melding of audio and print:
The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio. Whether music, ambient sound, or narration, the soundtrack moves with you at your own pace.
While I think there’s lots to explore in the intersection of books and sound, this feels like a bit of a Juicero situation. I’m not sure there’s anything here that couldn’t be accomplished just by a playlist set to ‘repeat track’, with the reader pressing ‘next’ when they turn the page.
More info here if you’re interested: https://www.radioposter.com/blogs/paper-fi-blog/paper-fi
'Flesh' by David Szalay
This was a Christmas present that I just got around to reading. It’s funny – as I was describing the book to my partner, I realised it all sounded fairly conventional, but it didn’t feel that way as I was reading it. The main character goes from relative poverty in Hungary to London’s elite and… I don’t know… learns lessons along the way, I guess.
The writing is very sparse, which I quite like. It gave me some ideas for the thing I’m currently working on, which is always something to be viewed with suspicion.
It’s only as I try to find cover art to include here that I realise it won the Booker prize. It might be the first Booker winner I’ve ever read, as I tend to stay away from that sort of thing. It was good. I’m not sure I would call it ‘extraordinary and singular’, as the Booker judges did, but it’s all right.
These notes are supposed to be me just keeping track of what I’ve read and seen, but they do come across as quite grumpy, don’t they?
(I’ve missed quite a few books. I might have to bung them all in a round up post.)
Anyway, ‘Flesh’ was pretty good. I’d wait for the paperback, but whatever.
'The Ballad of a Small Player' by Lawrence Osbourne
I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for some time and it may be the recently released Netflix adaptation that made me pick it up again. It’s the story of a gambler, passing himself off as an English lord, losing money in the casinos of Macau.
Some books you re-start and wonder why you ever put them down, only to get to the point you reached and remember. That was the case here, where it was another entry in the canon of shitty-man-has-woman-dote-on-him-for-no-good-reason. I always find that a bit annoying, but pushed on through here.
I’m honestly not that interested in gambling. I count myself fortunate that whatever fascination people seem to have with losing money, I don’t share. Of all my vices, that’s not one of them. But the idea of luck and superstition have a certain appeal and when the book explores these, I found it a bit more engaging.
As always with page-to-screen adaptations, I would be interested to see what changes in transition. Colin Farrell has turned out to be an actor whose work I find interesting. I’d previously dismissed him, having seen him in iRobot and the poster for the sacrilegious Total Recall remake. But having seen In Bruges, my opinion came around. I really enjoyed the Apple TV series Sugar and although I wasn’t convinced at first about the necessity of The Penguin series, it turned out to be pretty good. Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be about Colin Farrell, but rather the book.
Because if there’s one main takeaway I have from reading The Ballad of a Small Player, it’s that I love little hardbacks. The dust jacket for this one got lost somewhere along the way and it’s just a perfect little red volume, pleasing in its size, weight and tactility.
'The Feral Detective' by Jonathan Letham
I’m not going to write a lot about this, because it’s 1.30AM and I really should be sleeping, but I did enjoy it. I’m a little bit tired of shaggy detective stories by now (and snarky narrators, as per my previous post) but this was pretty good. I’d previously read Letham’s ‘Motherless Brooklyn, as well as having ‘Fortress of Solitude’ out from the library for so long that I had to pay for a new copy. I never read it, though.
The trek through weird desert communities of ‘Rabbits’ and ‘Bears’ was interesting enough, but I suppose what struck me most was the use of the first Trump presidency as a point of historical reference. Not that long ago now, but it feels like it. As for all the outrage the narrator feels at the time… lady… you ain’t seen nothing yet.
'The Librarians' is inspiring and depressing, in unequal measure
I’ve been wanting the opportunity to see The Librarians since reading about it on social media a few months ago. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that it was screening on iPlayer as part of the BBC’s Storyville strand.
I think it’s probably not a surprise to anyone to learn that right-wing populists are on the ascent, but it’s still incredibly scary to see the effects of that. This feature-length documentary follows the struggles faced by librarians in the face of aggressive campaigns of intimidation and abuse. A pseudo-grassroots book-banning campaign to remove LGBTQ+ books, books about race and books about fascism from library shelves becomes incredibly ugly when seen up close. The amount of intimidation and hatred faced by these librarians - librarians, for god’s sake - is incredibly depressing.
It’s amazing to see what they endure. It is utterly unsurprising to discover that the campaign run against them is calculated, co-ordinated and run by a millionaire who is slightly to the right of the kaiser. School boards, it seems, have become the latest target of the right’s strategy to consolidate power. It makes me wonder how progressive politics can ever effectively counter such an organised and calculated approach. You have to believe it’s possible. You have to.
'White Riot' by Joe Thomas
On a recent trip to the library, this was the last thing I added to my pile, but the first thing I read when I got home. A fictionalised version of the racism and corruption within the Metropolitan Police in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this multi-threaded crime story reminded me of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. Like that, I absolutely hoovered through this and wanted more by the time it was over. It’s only book one of a proposed series, a fact that I both like and loathe in equal measure. It’s disappointing that there isn’t really a sense of conclusion here, but I’m already looking forward to the next installment.
I think I also just miss London a bit. I know the streets and estates talked about here.
'The Poet' by Michael Connelly
Honestly, Michael Connelly books are kind of cheeseburgers for me. Even reading them occasionally is probably a bit too often. That said, we’re only human and sometimes a cheeseburger is exactly what you fancy.
While Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer and now Ballard are the more well known characters, I always like thrillers with journalists as protagonists. Here, Jack McEvoy’s brother is a homicide detective who commits suicide… or does he? The reporter investigates and finds out that there’s more to this than meets the eye and so on and so on.
Really, I only mention it here because it came out in 1996 and it made me nostalgic for pre-internet technology. A major plot point centres around the use of a digital camera - an item so rare that it has to be ordered from a specialised dealer. Sending a fax from a computer is a key piece of evidence. McEvoy has a laptop computer and mentions it every chance he gets. There’s also a very unpleasant computer bulletin board system, which perhaps is a preview of the online horrors to come.
I don’t want to come across like a luddite - I’m posting this on the internet, after all - but there is something really soothing about not having an investigation based around looking things up online. As is often the case with these series of genre novels, there’s a little preview of another book in the series at the end of The Poet, set many years later and the protagonist goes on Instagram in the first twenty pages. Even our novels don’t have attention spans any more. I wonder how all this will date. I can’t help but think that the early 2010s stock line of dialogue, “It’s trending on twitter” will seem as hopelessly anachronistic as the 1990s thrillers that dedicated 30-40 seconds of screentime to a character using dialup internet. Perhaps we just need more time to pass and these things will seem cute and nostalgic.
I decided not to read 'Julia' by Sandra Newman
It might be good, but as an endeavour it feels like it’s moving us one step closer to the Orwell Cinematic Universe, and that’s something I can’t bring myself to contribute to, even with my time. (For the record, I’m not talking about a Burmese Days movie or the 1997 film adaptation of Keep The Aspidistra Flying, but rather the grim inevitability of a Winston Smith Jr. spin-off for young adults or a How I Became Big Brother prequel.)
I think my main reason for wanting to read it was a description of the novel-writing machines Julia works on, but in this instance it didn’t really scratch that itch.
Fiction was a vast and windowless factory floor that took up the first two basement storeys of the Ministry of Truth. The space was dominated by the plot machinery, eight mammoth machines that looked like simple boxes of shining metal. When you opened them up, their guts were a bewildering array of sensors and gears. Only Julia and her colleague Essie knew how to crawl around inside without doing damage. The central mechanism was the kaleidoscope. It had sixteen sets of claws that selected and transported plot elements; hundreds of metal sorts that were grabbed and discarded until a group was found that fit together. This successful pattern was assembled - again by machinery - on a magnetized plate. The plate was dipped into a tray of ink, then swivelled out and was stamped onto a roll of paper. The printed length of paper was cut away. A production manager lifted it free.
The result was a gridded print, jocularly called a 'bingo card', that coded the elements of a story: genre, main characters, major scenes. A Rewrite man had once attempted to explain to Julia how these were interpreted, but to no avail. Even after five years on the floor, to her they might as well have been Eastasian picture-writing.
Now she watched as a production manager snatched a new print off the roll and waved it about to dry the ink. When he was satisfied, he rolled it, inserted it in a green cylinder, and shoved the cylinder into a pneumatic tube. From up on the walkway, Julia could watch the cylinder's flight through a tangle of translucent plastic hoses on the ceiling to plop into a bin at the southern end of the room. That was Rewrite, where men and women sat in long rows, muttering into speakwrites, turning bingo cards into novels and stories. But by that stage, no machines were involved and Julia's interest was at an end.
Which, I suppose, is the most logical way of constructing a novel-writing machine, but it just producing a ‘bingo card’ of plot feels disappointing. It kind of speaks to the problem with prequels, in that they have to provide mundane answers for casually mentioned things that fire a reader or viewer’s imagination. How exciting and mysterious did ‘the clone wars’ sound in Star Wars and how boring was George Lucas’s version of it in the prequels?
OK, when it’s got to the point of complaining about the Star Wars prequels, it’s time to wrap it up. Julia is going back to the library. If you’ve read it, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Buy ‘Julia’ by Sandra Newman at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child' by Morgan G. Ames
I was always fascinated by the One Laptop Per Child programme, both from an ideological point of view and as a piece of industrial design. I was never really convinced by the founders’ notion that cheap computers were the developing world’s path out of poverty, thinking that things like schools and clean drinking water were more of a priority. But the fact that it was so different a priority meant I tried to understand where they were coming from.
This study of the project takes the view that it was flawed from the outset, that the project leaders used their own, relatively privileged backgrounds, as justification for the project, without any real understanding of the actual social and economic factors at play. Put simply, they had prospered with computers, so thought that everyone else would, too. The author frames this as the archetype of the ‘technically precocious boy’ – a category I always thought I fit into when I was younger, until I met people who were actual examples. Being able to run a word processor on an Amstrad CPC wasn’t the same thing.
Anyway, this is largely an academic text, which brings with it some problems. The first of these is that it has a specific argument - that ‘charismatic’ technology is attractive and exciting, but often so much so that it blinds people to its actual utility or lack thereof - and goes about showing examples of its theory at work. If you’re studying the use of new technology in economically depressed environments, it’s useful to have case studies like these, but I honestly wanted a more general overview of the project. I’m a layperson, craving details about the organisation of the project and particularly the design process. Perhaps that’s the technically precocious boy inside me.
Adi Robertson had a good article on The Verge, giving a big-picture overview, but I would have liked more detail. I also would really still like to have a go on one. There’s an online emulator for its Sugar operating system and from the sounds it, the XO laptop had a number of recurrent hardware faults. Still, as the article says at the end, “I’ve still never seen anything like it.”
'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child' by Morgan G. Ames is published by MIT Press (I got my copy off eBay, though)
‘Bitter Harvest’ by Ann Rule
I don’t read a lot of true crime. I’m not really sure why, as crime fiction makes up a reasonable proportion of my leisure reading. Perhaps I just prefer it to be made up. Still, I picked this up from the library as something to read on my week off. As I understand it, Ann Rule has a pretty good reputation for this sorry of thing - better, at least than a lot of the more salacious parts of the market and now that I’ve finished it, I can say it was… pretty good.
The thing about writing stories is that you come to understand their shape. I spent quite a lot of this book expecting a turn in the narrative. It never came, perhaps because it’s based on real life. They say that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. That’s sort of true, but I think it’s also worth mentioning that truth is often a lot more mundane than fiction. That, maybe, is the appeal of true crime. It’s not the glamour, it’s the mundanity.
(Also, can I just mention that the marketing on this cover is weird? “A mother’s sacrifice” is certainly one way of framing it.)
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/bitter-harvest-a-woman-s-fury-a-mother-s-sacrifice-ann-rule/4936811?ean=9780751579178
(It seems the iPad version of Squarespace doesn’t allow you to put links in blog posts. That can’t be true, can it?)
'Strange Houses' by Uketsu (trans. Jim Rion)
Conceptually, I love the idea of telling mystery stories through floor plans[1] and this Japanese book sets out to to exactly that. It begins by the author noticing a space between two rooms - a gap in the house that seems to serve no practical purpose - and expands from there, tracing a narrative through the arrangement of walls, windows and doors over several architectural floorplans. The design is functional and while I didn’t love the typesetting, it does manage to feel very different from a regular novel. I say that the cover design was very well done - simple and effective use of vectors by Luke Bird, although now I look at it I’m realising that actually I think I just like floorplans.
Sometimes I read a book in two sittings and somehow have managed to break at an inflection point. The first half of Strange Houses was inspired - a real story emerging from seemingly mundane details. Then the book goes into explanation of why these houses have been built this way and I kind of lost interest. There was a point at which family trees were introduced and I thought that this was going to be another kind of structure that would reveal details through odd interconnectedness, but it didn’t quite happen.
Most of the book is not told in standard prose fiction, but as scripted dialogues between participants and reportage of their movements. Later, when the story delves back in time, there are sections of regular prose, but contained within correspondence, a device that always feels somewhat inauthentic to me.
It’s a shame, because I would recommend the first half of the book without equivocation. I haven’t read the previous Strange Pictures, but skimmed it in the bookshop and it didn’t have the same appeal as the floorplans. I might get it from the library if it’s available, and hold out hope that the forthcoming Strange Buildings will concentrate more on buildings than world-building.
[1] I tried to do this with Proposal for the Elimination of Rick Burgess in my 52 Murders project, but feel that I didn’t quite nail it.
‘Invisible’ by Paul Auster
I picked this up in a closing down sale of a local independent bookshop, which was a shame. As nice as the shop was, its location meant it was probably doomed (in the basement section of a sparsely populated artisanal shopping centre, away from the high street). The fact that I can’t even remember the shop’s name is possibly significant. The fact that I also picked up a quite nice rug for my workroom there is probably less significant to anyone but me.
Anyway, I hadn’t read any Paul Auster in a long while, but remembered enjoying The New York Trilogy somewhat and The Brooklyn Follies somewhat more. There’s sometimes a satisfaction in reading a writer so established in their abilities that they can write pretty much anything and it comes out readable and moreish. I wouldn’t say this was one of his best, but I certainly didn’t expect the content of the book’s second part, which was caused a bit of a double take.
It’s also one of those books without quotation marks for dialogue. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this and decide whether it’s a contrivance or a sensible piece of efficiency. I think I might be too square to write dialogue without inverted commas.
'They' by Kay Dick / The fix-up novel
I had high hopes for this slim little novella and while it didn’t entirely live up to them, I’m still thinking about it a few days later. Set in a very English dystopia, the nameless, genderless protagonist moves between various friends of artistic bent as they resist an ill-defined but ominous presence. In this version of England’s green and pleasant lands, travel is restricted, people are disappeared and curtains are always kept close.
The ongoing sense of unease is countered by the beauty and idyl of the surroundings, making it possible to belive how the majority of the population would go along with the rise of ‘they’. It’s never described exactly who they are or what they stand for and while communication and artistic expression aren’t explicitly outlawed, there are measures in place to hinder such activities. Their mission is to create an atmosphere of oppression that is almost invisible, but which can be felt in every fibre of one’s being.
The foreword by Carmen Maria Machado uses a term I hadn’t heard before: the fix-up novel. Made up of a collection of previously published stories which share a shared world and may be connected in the very loosest sense, but are connected.
(To be clear, Machado uses the phrase to say that ‘They’ is not a fix-up novel, but the idea is interesting to me. I will say, though, that ‘They’ worked better for me as it drew to the conclusion when it felt like it was pulling in a particular direction.)
The novel was out of print for many years and has been recently re-released by Faber Editions.