Bookish friend, I have found it hard to be a dedicated reader lately. I was directing a show in Melbourne and my thoughts strayed constantly to small problems like how to sneak a prop from point A to point G. Nearly all the books on my list I tossed aside. I have been roaming, grazing, noshing. Here’s where I landed despite it all.
#95 in 2023
I rarely read science fiction but my son told me I should read this and who am I to ignore my son? Kim Stanley Robinson is a bestselling sci-if author and Ministry for the Future is his latest bestseller, a success that surprises me because the book is barely a novel. Though it starts with a blast — a devastating heat wave in India cooks millions of people to death, leaving one survivor — much of the book consists of non-fictional explorations of how to save humanity via scientific and economic tools. Robinson works at keeping it simple for stupids and throws in some entertainment here and there, which is a hard thing to squeeze out of the primary location, Zurich. I learned a lot about economics and was persuaded that capitalism is over. And often I was filled with dread but that was offset, like my carbon footprint, by the hope generated by the fact that a book about the people trying to save the world can be a bestseller.
Capitalism: after a long and vigorous life, now incurable, living in pain. In a coma; become a zombie; without a plan; without any hope of returning to health..
If you give up on sentences you end up in a world of gangsters and thieves and naked force, hauled into the street at night to be clubbed or shot or jailed.
That’s one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works. You know the world is spinning towards catastrophe. You know it’s time to act. Everyone knows everything.
I began reading Robinson in December 2023 and it is now So Last Year.
Instead, tah-dah!!! Here we go with a New Year of counting books. Will I make it to 100 this time?
#1 in 2024
Ursula M. Franklin could be the heroine of Robinson’s sci-fi semi-novel: so many of her views echo and even predate his. She was a feminist and a scientist and there’s a high school in her name in Toronto. The real world of technology is very dated, and yet and yet — published in 1989, revised in 1999, these are dispatches from Cassandra, broadcast on national radio, written before technology really took over our lives and resonating even now.
Technology needs to be examined as an agent of power and control, and I will try to show how much modern technology drew from the prepared soil of the structures of traditional institutions, such as the church and the military.
Franklin announced that we were living through a major revolution of the social order and warned that technology is a catalyst for the spread of control and management, and that whenever human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures a culture of compliance flourishes. A short, sharp read.
#2 in 2024
Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old.
After all the serious stuff, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, Less was the perfect sorbet. Turning fifty is shocking for most people, and no less for Arthur Less, who has one perfect suit which he wears on his travels all around the world, with nary a care for anything but his flagging career, his age, his suit, and his broken heart. This is a novel about a not-too-successful writer and novels about writers and their vagaries are a genre in and of themselves. I don’t know if non-writers would chortle at descriptions of readings which no one attends, and conferences that go awry, but I certainly chortled. Less was the perfect escape after ten hour rehearsals. Also, the book won the Pulitzer Prize, and there’s a sequel.
The minusculitude of his own worth
Less stares at his schnitzel ( a crisp map of Austria).
She shakes her finger and says, “The roses will be taken first. Like a bird…what is the bird?” “A canary in a coal mine.” “Si. Esatto.” “Or like a poet in a Latin American country,” Less offers. “The new regime always kills them first.”
#3 in 2024
Restless, dear bookish friends, I was so restless. Some books I abandoned after ten pages; others after 150. Can you even toss aside a digital book? There it remains on your Kindle, daring you to drag it into the trash. Anyway, after weeks of screen-reading, I went in search of a physical book I could actually toss. I crisscrossed Melbourne in search of a used book store and found a really bad one that didn’t even bother to arrange them alphabetically. (Boo, Snailfish.)
But there I did stumble upon my old friend Geoff Dyer. His Out of Sheer Rage is one of the funniest books ever; and his tribute to jazz But Beautiful is the best. However, Dyer can also be tiresome, especially when he objectifies women. He belongs to the round table of Martin Amis, Ian MacEwen and Christopher Hitchens, men whom you love for their wit and hate for their sexism and then love them again because their writing is so good and their humour so caustic.
White Sands isn’t Dyer’s most amazing book, but it was perfect for my state of mind. I liked the cover and how it nestled into my hand. These essays on travel and art are short and often funny, sometimes profound. He takes you to Tahiti, Beijing, Lightning Field (Mexico?), Taos, Norway. He tours the houses where Theodore Adorno and Arnold Schoenberg lived in Los Angeles. He agrees with me that The Magic Mountain is boring. He goes to Norway to have the Northern Lights Experience, and has the Expense Experience instead. On a drive in New Mexico, he picks up a hitchhiker and regrets it: A few minutes earlier I was worried that he might be a murderer; now I was worried that might be a bore, but it was possible that he was a murderer and a bore.
Some of his jokes are so unabashedly sexist that I think he feels old and doomed and doesn’t care who gets mad at him anymore. I try not to take it personally. I did not toss this book. Because he’s my old friend Geoff, and he saved me when I was distracted.
#4 in 2024
I rarely read science fiction but Maureen’s daughter told her to read In Ascension by Martin MacInnes and then Maureen said I would love it and who am I to ignore Maureen or her daughter? It was only after I finished, mildly awestruck, that I discovered it was long-listed for the Booker Prize, as it should be, since it is unlike anything most of us have ever read.
…as if from nowhere, I realised, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive.
A novel that breaks the rules all the time, characters pop out of nowhere, the narrator, Leigh, doesn’t get a name until some hundred pages in, and the androgynous moniker is a name that no child born in Rotterdam would ever have. The story has an epic sweep, from deep ocean to deep outer space and the title refers both to being lifted up but also to a strange island in the Atlantic which isn’t close to anything.
The pasta shortage is basically the fault of the same people who killed her sister.
Leigh is an expert in biotechnology and gets on a ship funded by companies wanting to mine and dredge the sea floor. They discover a trench in the ocean that could revolutionize cellular theory. Then she works on developing algae that could grow in space and function as both food supply and as an emotional support for a crew. Then… well, I don’t won’t to spoil it, but ground control to major Tom.
You drift out of your berth into the empty mid-deck, you see a faint silvery glow in the dark, you’ re moving automatically and you approach the porthole and look out into stellar radiance, points of light thousands of light years away. You réalise you’re hanging in this intermediate darkness, transported in a small vehicle surrounded by the closest thing possible to infinity. But it’s dangerous, you can’t sustain the thought, you have to function, so you close it down, you ignore the porthole and the wonder, you take water from the filter and strap yourself back in, think about smaller worries, try somehow to sleep in this place, and the last thing you realise is that it’s always been this way, that the experience is identical to every night on Earth.
#5 in 2024
Here’s betting a hundred dollars that In Ascension was inspired by Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, because how can it be a coincidence that in Chapter Thirteen I read these words:
There is strong evidence that the chemical outlet of deep-ocean vents laid the basis of the internal chemistry of every living thing today.
That is exactly the premise MacInnes spun into his novel as an earth-shattering revelation.
Otherlands takes you on a tourist bus tour of the Earth as it was a half a billion years ago. It is weirdly soothing to discover that there have been five major mass extinctions - in one of them, the Great Dying, 95 percent of life was wiped out.
Throughout its history, the world has flipped between two stable states, an ‘icehouse’, when there is permanent ice at the poles, and a ‘greenhouse’ ,m where that ice is absent.
When seen at the scale of deep time, permanence is an illusion
After disasters, it is the opportunists that rise first, and among plants ferns are some of the greatest opportunists of all.
Mountains and oceans are geologically temporary constructions.
This is the type of book I would never, ever read, because it is straightforward non-fiction description and guess who nearly failed Biology in high school. It was recommended by my nature-loving bookish friend Juliet and it was slow going because I kept looking up words describing landscape and animals.
Fingerstrut wings
Frazil
Drumlins
Sastrugi
Katabatic
Velvet worms
A great stramash
This book keeps going back in deep time, making the point that nature always revives and adapts, that life always continues, though not always with humans. While each chapter moves backwards, the tale is always told in the present tense. Halliday is very good at conjuring what might have been, and so I stayed on his bus, where he might be saying ‘over here, on the left side, through this window you will see the bunostegos’. Also, I kept thinking if Juliet can read this, so can I. I was going to finish this one, dammit.
Also, way back when there was a continent called Baltica.
Started well but couldn’t finish Melissa Febos, Body work: The radical power of personal narrative, 2022
Wasn’t in the mood for: Anne Enright, The Portable Virgin; May-lee Chai, Tomorrow in Shanghai and other storiez; Natalie Haynes, Stone Blind; Deepti Kapoor, The age of vice, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Three Plays; Percival Everett, Dr. No
**
Next I will tackle:
Featured Author: Percival Everett, The Trees, 2021
Second Latest Title Saved: Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848
Reader Recommended: Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia (an Italian goes to Latvia, 2003, thank you, Diz)
Oldest Title on the List: Christopher Moore, Shakespeare for Squirrels, (“wildly entertaining murder mystery” 2020)
The Random List:
Eliza Minot, The Tiny One (know nothing, novel, 1999)
Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (can’t wait, 1959)
Julia May Jonas, Vladimir (debut novel, 2022)
Edmund St. Aubyns, Mother’s Milk (tantalizing, looks like the end of a series, might have to start at the beginning, 2006)
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (thriller, 2015)
Viola Davis, Finding Me (I never read books like this one, memoir of a renowned actress, 2022)
Both The British Library and the Toronto Public Library have not recovered from being attacked by ransomware. I am so pissed off. Libraries are profound spaces and should not be tampered with. In Melbourne, I staged a whole scene in a library.