Things I have read

I properly had the last few weeks of my sabbatical off trying to do things, other than walking the dog, hanging out on the Isles of Scilly for a week, and reading books…

The Hydrogen Sonata - Iain M Banks. I do enjoy an Iain M Banks - but I did find this one quite hard work. For all there were a lot of extremely enjoyable Culture Ship Names, it never quite took off for me. Sometimes I wonder if I think this every time, and then they grow on me afterwards (Matter certainly was like that), but I’m not quite sure that the ‘what really did happen at the beginning’ thing really hit its nail on the head.

English Pastoral: An Inheritance - James Rebanks. If you’ve been around me enough, you know I love the work of @herdyshepherd1, so I was very excited to read his new book. Folks, it’s so beautiful. It’s wonderfully written and honest and open (without being massively self-exposing or self-flagellating), and has what for me is a wonderful balance of imagination and hope with realism and pragmatism. I love a book that outright says, there are no easy answers and you’re going to have to work out your choices and recognise that they’re not perfect. I had a tiny weep over the end.

Real Life - Brandon Taylor. I have not read much of the Booker shortlist, but this book is on it and I would be totally cool if it won it. It’s a weekend-in-the-life of a black gay man at a mid-western college, in which the tensions and fissures in his life begin to crack open in the middle of his friendship group. It manages to reveal the cruel realities of trauma, casual systemic racism and internalised homophobia without ever making the lead character some kind of unrealistic saint. And it’s a wonderful, sharp, humorous read. (Also, the author is the MOST fun to follow on twitter, I promise)

A Delicate Truth - John Le Carré. Back into the Le Carré back catalogue (this one’s not that old) and oh, how nostalgic it made me for the international garbage and casual networking-corruption and nonsense of the Blair-Brown years, which seem so much simpler and lesser than what’s on display today. How I enjoy reading these books so much when I’m pretty sure that everything in them has happened at some point, I do not know.

She Would Be King - Wayétu Moore. A little bit of West African magical realism, for a change-up. Moore is a Liberian who emigrated to the US during the civil war, and this book is about the establishment of Liberia, seen in connection to the lives of three humans with powers: Gbessa ‘the witch’, the ghost-born escaped slave June Dey, and the invisible Jamaican Maroon, Norman Aragon. It’s a bit strange and a lot wonderful, and I particularly enjoyed the way it drew out the tensions and colonial hierarchies in the new Liberia between the indigenous tribes and the former slaves from the Americas.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke. Finally, after who can remember how many years, a new Susanna Clarke novel (about a quarter of the length of her first!). Piranesi is both different and similar - it builds a world and atmosphere quite wonderfully, and draws you into it. Why would you want to go home. It shows you the cruelty of ambition and self-interest and meditates on memory and identity. I’m not sure if it was as satisfying as Strange and Norrell, but for me a part of the satisfaction of that was its size and how long I got to live in it as a reader, but I definitely want to revisit it.

Things I watched

I made it to the cinema to see Tenet, and I’m really glad I did. I’d like to see it again, to see what I think of it a second time, but I’m not sure when that’s going to happen now, with the autumn COVID-rise.

I think, broadly, I got what was going on (though I wish Christopher Nolan wasn’t so fond of having people deliver key dialogue through masks) and generally enjoyed it, but I’d like to see it again to see if I enjoy it more on a second viewing because things pop out, or less, because you know it now. I found it chillier than I usually find Nolan (and I don’t find him unemotional or cold), and less emtionally engaging. The obvious comparison is with Inception, and I think both that the characters that film connected with me more strongly and that the idea at the heart of the film felt more exciting and, weirdly, even plausible. As a piece of filmmaking it was beautiful and surprising, and I particularly enjoyed Robert Pattinson in it (he is such an interesting film star), but I definitely feel like I need to see it again to know how I really feel about it.

A recommendation of some kind

I’ve been really enjoying The Magic Gang’s new album, Death of the Party. It’s the kind of music that makes me wish I were the kind of person who casually started dancing wherever I happen to be when it comes on.

In the pile for October

Back to college, so farewell extended reading time. I’m currently halfway through Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld, but I’m not loving it so who knows if I’ll finish. Marilynne Robinson’s Jack is coming out, so I will be into that one quick-sharp, and then we’ll see. I’ve packed a lot of books that I need to read and then store away or pass on, so I’m going to try and start working my way through them without buying any more, she said, optimistically.

A photo from my month gone by