Still reading
Absolutely incredibly poor timing from Brian Abrams to write an oral history of the Gawker network in June 2015. There’s an off-hand reference to the Hulk Hogan sex tape which is very funny in retrospect. An interesting counterpoint to Ben Smith’s Traffic which I read earlier in the year, a more direct first-hand account and more focused on Gawker itself, but suffers moreso the same issue of focusing mostly in on the blog itself rather than the network. I want to hear more about Lifehacker and io9, damnit.
Harris makes the usual promise of a post-campaign memoir about not pulling punches and being frank, and to her credit she does where she can afford to, but there’s still a lot of punch-pulling. The more diaristic nature of it, as a result of the shall we say more compressed campaign, is compelling when she steers into it but less so when it just becomes a platform for a stump speech on her policy areas. Still, it is crushing to remember the defeat and what it means for all of us.
Still reading
A web of contradictions (as opposed to a mess thereof, to be fair). For all Zane is keen to dispell the notions of bi men being easy, sex-obssessed, and unfaithful, he’s not half proving their point. It’s an interesting read, with lots to think about, but I don’t think this is particularly the bisexuality that I identify with.
Still reading
The second disappointing book about stand-up comedy that I’ve read this year (following Julia Raeside’s Don’t Make Me Laugh). Bordas’ novel focuses on a comedy masters course in Chicago, and suffers from the same problem - authors just aren’t funny in the same way as stand-ups. The jokes are laboured, the observations don’t ring true, and it’s just an exhausting time with these characters’ interior monologues.
Lent to me by my friend Ellie with the warning/endorsement that each essay, however unlikely, will inevitably end up in some account of sexual assault or harassment. Which, to be fair, is the modern condition. Occasionally a bit too self-indulgent for my liking, its best moments are towards the end when Savage talks more about the craft and life of writing, touching on autofiction and other topics.
The blurb on the ebook plays itself up a bit much, talking about the paper version’s “complexity”, which is a very grandiose way of saying that this is effectively two books with one published upside down. an effect I first saw in 2006 with The Simpsons Ultra-Jumbo Rain-or-Shine Fun Book, so y’know. The “first” half (at least for me) is the novella, blurring into autofiction, with the “second” half being more memoir, providing context for Lacey’s mindset in writing the former. I’m sure the experience would be slightly different the other way around, but I don’t think to any great degree. The memoir is much more interesting, more open and expansive in thought, as opposed to the novella which keeps itself tightly wound.
Devoured in a train journey back from Edinburgh (and bought from Toppings in Edinburgh, as is tradition). Taking place in some sense over a single day but in another over 15 years, The Most beautifully captures a marriage not necessarily fracturing, not yet, but one where both participants have their own secrets, and the game of metaphorical (but aptly so) tennis that only one of them knows they’re playing. I’ll need further reflection on why, exactly, Anthony has set this on the day that Sputnik 2 - of Laika fame - launches, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. A slight but rich novel that plays its own game of tennis with the recollections of different events being batted back and forth between the couple in their own respective chapters, building up the fuller picture, or as full as is possible, I suppose.
Still reading
I’ve not read Detransition Baby, so I’m coming in relatively clean to Peters’ work, but obviously it is unsurprising that this is a collection of stories about, in one sense or another, the trans femme experience. More surprising is that for a short story collection, it’s really a novella and three short stories, the titular novella the vast majority of the book, a tale of lumberjacks and the gap between being gay and being trans. For my money, though, the jewel in the collection is The Chaser, which does what the best art does and really puts me in mind of I Saw The TV Glow: even if I can’t relate to the central allegory directly, it speaks so truthfully and specifically to a wider range of experiences that it’s impossible to not feel seen. Maybe that’s just me, though.
An essay that ostensibly begins about anxiety and Sudjic’s response to the response to her first novel (the excellent Sympathy, highly recommended), but quickly morphs into something a bit more interesting - the way female authors are read compared to male authors. It’s a subject I’ve long been interested in. There was a strech in 2020⁄2021 of reading a lot of contemporary female authors - Sudjic, Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan, Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, inevitably Sally Rooney - where it really felt like they spoke to me in a way, or at least were writing about subjects, that contemporary male authors weren’t. Sympathy, for example, so precisely captures the feeling of staring at a locked Instagram account of someone you… fancy? Have a crush on? Semi-obsessed with? That limerent feeling. Capturing that in a way that e.g. Ben Lerner is not particularly writing about. In the face of, as Sudjic puts it in Exposure, the chorus of male voices in the back of female authors’ head about what right have they to assume people will relate or that this is worth writing, against the male authors’ ability to presume a standard world view without being assumed to simply be recounting their own lives with names changed, I hadn’t considered truly how hard those novels must have been to write. But they are, potentially, all the more affecting for it. It’s been a few years now since Sympathy Road; I hope Sudjic is soon able to overcome whatever anxieties might be present in writing her next.
Airport business book through the lens of Taylor Swift (or should that be the other way around?). A perfectly passable read, charting Taylor Swift’s career and trying to apply that to how companies and brands care about marketing or innovation or so on and so on. A classic blog post dragged out to 50,000 words style book, which little in the way of original research. It’s also interesting to consider how the book itself plays into the marketing strategies it claims to have special insight into: the treating of Taylor Swift throughout her career as being her own machine. And, look, I am a Taylor Swift fan. Not going as far as describing myself as a Swiftie, but I like her! I went to the Eras tour! I’m not having a go! But the treating her as a singular strategic genius as if she doesn’t have a whole team behind her is really weird - she’s not sat there figuring out the vinyl release strategies, there’s a whole team behind her for that. And that’s ok, that’s how it should be, but this need to hold her up as some one-man band who’s responsible for every last detail is an unhelpful overcorrection to the view of her as manufactured.
I cannot pretend that on some level anything in this book feels like new information to me - Meta is a cancer on society; Mark Zuckerberg is at best short-sighted and uninterested, at worst sociopathic; Sheryl Sandberg is a wild hypocrite. Like, on an instinctual level, I wouldn’t have told you that Careless People could have informed me any further on those points. But, christ. The idea that Instagram was tracking when teenage girls posted and then immediately deleted selfies and in that moment advertising them beauty products is just abominable. I do agree with Wynn-Williams that even if not coming from top-down, bottom-up I do think Facebook (later Meta) was full of idealists who thought they were making the world better, or at least one day could. I don’t know when the turning point was between “not realising the deep impact this stuff could have” and “realising and exploiting that”, but it clearly happened. Wynn-Williams writes compellingly about her own role in this, understands her part in it, so Careless People is plenty readable. If you’ve paying attention, most of this won’t be new to you, but the insider account has its own merits and even those following the saga most closely will still find new things in it to feel uncomfortable about.
Oddly, for Glass, a comparatively straight-forwardly written novella for the most part. Some of her more specifically stylistic writing does appear at points, and as ever to deliberate effect, but there’s a feeling of wanting to more directly make a point in this novella about a young woman’s battle with cancer and the way that turns her into a different person, the wish that she could be a different person, how life may different if that were the case. Heartbreaking in just the right ways.
Having rewatched S1 and S2 of Twin Peaks, it was good to finally many years later actually get to The Secret History of Twin Peaks, nicely coinciding with the personal development of accounting for how much Mark Frost was quietly responsible for a lot of the things people love about Twin Peaks, even though David Lynch was the more public facing of the two. The Secret History is fascinating in how it both indulges and refuses to indulge the desire for explanation of the lore. It would be, in some way, easy to put together a book that puts it all out on the page. And, yes, there are some sections like the one documenting the history of Big Ed, Hank, and Norma that feel like gap-filling. But on the whole, Frost uses this to vastly expand the scope of the lore, adding more questions than he answers. The Native Americans, the assassination of JFK, UFOs, and more (Donald Trump!) get brought into things, and absolutely fantastically at some point Frost has Richard Nixon uttering “I am not a kook”, so fair enough it’s all worth it for that. Built up of a classified dossier with annotated margins, collecting newspaper clippings, FBI and CIA files, diaries, letters, etc., it’s a formally fun book in that regard. Do not read seeking answers, but to spend more time ensconced in this world. I’m looking forward to getting to The Final Dossier post a The Return rewatch.
Feels like an evolution on Intimacies (which maybe, if I recall correctly my own opinions from a couple of years ago, felt more of a leap from A Separation). I admired the jarringly disruptive jump between parts one and two, an excellent wrong-footing that enhances the thematic thrust of the book and a means of unreliable narration that felt fresh to me, at least. It’s clean, measured prose and it’s effective as a result. A deep tangling and untangling of interior lives and what we give of ourselves to others, the routines in which we hide.
A fun collection of short stories that does not attempt to be more than that (cf. the number of collections that feel the need to interconnect). Williams seems to love a neat conceit built around wordplay, but the highlights here are the ever-so-slightly heartbreaking ones - a skywritten proposal, a shipping forecast gone awry - which really make the most of the form, ending before the ending, leaving you with the ambiguous uneasy feeling in your stomach as you wonder what happens next.
A poetry collection that traces the events and cast of characters across a London house party. A lot to like here, that transcends the context I am lacking. Some lovely reflections on being young and finding your place.
The conceit of a 200-odd-page email, unbroken, as a novel is fun, as is the typography that puts me in mind of Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch. Goodlord unfortunately ends up going in a pretty similar direction tonally and narratively as Little Scratch, which is not an incorrect direction, nor one that should be discouraged, but a shame when it already feels so in debt formally. The constant referral to the email’s recipient by name also delightfully recalls Second Place by Rachel Cusk (oh Jeffers!), so I am well-disposed towards it. I will look forward to seeing what Ella Frear gets up to hence.
Where do you draw the line between a novel and a collection of inter-connected short stories? Wherever it is, Universality is certainly straddling it. It does, I suppose, form a cohesive narrative across its chapters, but with each one written from different characters’ perspectives and indeed formal styles. I do enjoy the shifting sands on which it’s written, even if I’m less convinced by its conclusion. But I enjoy the ambiguity of it.
I saw the film adaptation of The Front Runner a few years ago when it came out, and thought it was fine if a pretty by the numbers political drama. Interesting to see now that the source text is actually a lot less… that. Rather than a direct telling of the final days of Gary Hart’s campaign, it’s a much more discursive work around the role of the media in politics, to what standards we hold our politicians, and what we all hath wrought as a result of letting this specific example happen.
Still reading
An enjoyable read, if more deeply than superficially - the premise is fun (the protagonist finds an unidentified blob in the garbage behind a bar, takes it home, and semi-inadvertently turns it into the perfect boyfriend, or is he etc. etc.) and it’s used to make some interesting points, but there’s some often clunky prose and dialogue and it’s sometimes hard to find what sets this apart from anything else. Maybe more a novella?
Still reading
Ooh boy it’s bleak out there. Ten Men is a memoir of a year of casual dating by Kitty Ruskin in which we quickly come to realise - or, rather, remember - that there’s a lot of shit men out there. It’s hard not to feel this is to some degree a form of misery porn by the fifth or sixth man whom Ruskin takes home only to endure at best unfulfilling sex, at worst awful sexual assault or rape. That’s not to criticise Ruskin in any shape or form. You have to hope for all of our sakes’ that the answer cannot be to simply stop trusting or trying, but equally it’s understandable why an increasing number of women (and, indeed, men) do just that. She deserves to be able to believe that not every man is like that. It sounds like, from the conclusion, that this is more happily the case now - a relief, for sure. As with a lot of books around this (see also: Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates), there is a grimness you are forcing yourself to endure by reading it, and at this point none of it should be new to you, but that shouldn’t be a reason to turn away. Read it, feel it, do something about it.
An acutely observed coming-of-age novel, of the first time you fall - in love? in something with another boy, wanting to be with them, be them, destroy them, the conflation and confusion of love and jealousy, the vying for attention and approval of them and others. This, doubled up with being the headmaster’s son, its own use case of seeding a need for rebellion, the mix of wanting but not wanting that affirmation. Oh the turmoil of it all! Amherst does this so well, an impressive debut indeed.
Broadly readable for the most part, but with a real tail-off towards the end. Never fully convincing from the off, though - perhaps a problem with being involved in the stand up industry, the set-up, characters, and overarching narrative don’t really ring true. Yes, there are terrible men in stand up (and, to be honest, a brief moment where I wondered whether one of the characters was an avatar for a specific one I know), but this reads too closely to a fanfic of what it must be like from the outside. There’s an amount of fiction-as-wish-fulfillment in it, every character too broadly drawn and every plot contrivance too perfect. I’m no one to suggst that Raeside isn’t allowed that for herself, but it doesn’t make it interesting. A shame.
I must confessed I missed the apparent virality of The Feminist, the opening short story in Tony Tulathimutte’s debut collection, but I can’t say it surprises me in hindsight. It fits in that Cat Person vein, something that allows everyone to confront the horrors of straight white men online whilst patting themselves on the back for being better than them. It’s interesting, then, how Tulathimutte uses that as a seed for the remaining stories, each building on that in some way thematically and narratively to implicate all of us in the same base, repulsive instincts. There’s some formal experimentation, which is fun, and one story (no spoilers) has such a beautiful example of a narrative trick that I genuinely laughed out loud on a train at the gumption of it all. Very excited for more.
A precision-strike on the late millenial class, so targeted in its observations but so general in its reach. I am almost entirely the people described here. I enjoy the trappings of what I imagine high taste to be, the minimalism, the combining technology and creativity, the wanting to move to Berlin (which, I genuinely nearly did circa the age of 27), and all of that. The social circles that expand and contract, the places and times spent with those circles, the nagging feeling that there must be more meaning. Latronico takes all this and pours it into a never-named couple living initially in Berlin and then moving around, the prose efficient but still drolly humourous. Beyond the generational satire, though, is a small but magnified observation that has stuck with me since: I miss when Instagram was just peoples’ lunches and holiday photos. When I deleted Facebook and abandoned Twitter (2017 and 2022, respectively), I retreated into Instagram because it wasn’t full of links to doom-laden articles, videos of atrocities, political snark. It was about the people underneath. And now, as I idly doomscroll through Instagram stories, it’s the same thing. Maybe something will replace it. Maybe it’s a sign of great privilege that I can live my life not having to care on an intense level about these things going on in the world around me. But in just 120 pages, Latronico absolutely nails the kind of person I am and my cohort is. (Sidenote: in its opening chapter, Perfection uses a special edition of In Rainbows on vinyl being on display as a specific marker of a certain type of person/couple, but it must be assumed he is thinking of the bright, vibrant colours of the standard edition, rather than the greyscale charcoal drawings of the limited discbox edition. I hate that this is a thing I am commenting on here).
Recommended to me by Ruth, it’s been a lot of fun reading through this for inspiration. Dinhut writes passionately about the importance and versatility of condiments, which I grant you is not the least niche of subjects but a crucial one regardless. I can’t help but feel I’m going to end up making a tonne of jam at this point, so that’s great news for all involved except my dentist. A lot of intriguing ideas for pairings in multiple forms, from how to match base ingredients and herbs/spices at the condiment creation stage, to how to match the condeiments themselves to the right meals. The illustrations by Evi.O are absolutely gorgeous too.
I greatly enjoyed Tucci’s first book about food, finding his to be a compelling voice in his passion, frankness, and humour. So why not more? What I Ate In One Year lives up to the title, acting as something of a diary, covering his time filming Conclave in Italy, various promotional duties, birhdays, family holidays, and medical issues. He speaks to how food and family intertwine - it’s a lot of fun to see how proud to see he is of his childrens’ developing tastes over the 12 months. When he’s acerbic, he’s acerbic, notably in recounting some terrible service at the airport. The writing is self-effacing, never tipping into grandiosity or self-importance. He appreciates the privilege of the life he leads and is careful to make sure he is sharing it rather than gloating in it. I’d read a volume every year.
Oh man. This had been on my list for a while, but moved considerably up in response to starting Neverland by Vanessa Kisuule which was not quite the book I was expecting - whilst that more used the idea of discussing the art vs. the artist as a launch pad for talking about how hero worship takes on a life outside of the art, I wanted to read something more specifically delving into art vs. artist and what is to be done about, as Monsters’ subtitle asks, great art by “bad” people. My investment in this: I have eschewed art I loved by people who turned out to be bad. I am also a big fan of someone whose name gets thrown around a lot in this arena and whose guilt I, to be honest, think is questionable but nonetheless feel a certain discomfort around enjoying as a result. Dederer is a fascinating, thoughtful writer who takes neither prisoner nor easy answer. Monsters is a book of much nuance, so to distill it would do it a disservice, but I think it’s fair to say that it tips its hand towards the side of the art still being worth enjoying, though not without caveat. There’s a really interesting conclusion to be drawn around how this fits with our inescapable model of capitalism and consumerism, which has left me with a lot to think about. The whole thing delves into a rich tapestry of different approaches, different types of “bad” people, and the idea of the stain that spreads out wider and backwards, re-colouring the art in unimaginable ways. It is hard to watch Manhattan in the same way as it is Annie Hall. It is difficult to listen to The Suburbs in the same way as you did before. That doesn’t, I think, necessarily make it wrong. So why do I still cut out some art but not others? Why does it feel more right to want to not consume JK Rowling or Louis C.K., compared to others? I have spent so many years thinking about this, and whilst it doesn’t necessarily crystalise every thought I had, (and while it does crystalise a whole bunch of other thoughts I hadn’t begun to consider) Monsters is as comprehensive a text as you could hope for, written with grace and humour. A high recommendation.
A brief little book that presents less of a cohesive thesis and more of a series of jumping off points for ideas to make you think about how one might create and consume works of art, or even what we consider to be or to not be art. Food for thought, with some delightful illustrations from Adriaanse, but I would have liked something a bit more fleshed out or detailed from someone like Eno, who surely has more to offer than these generalities.
Very much my jam. In another world, Traffic is the source material for some prestige TV series of film, as The Accidental Millionaires was for The Social Network. An excellent account of the burgeoning industry of blogging, its growth from bedroom hobbyists to influence at the highest levels of media and politics, through the lens of the warring Gawker Media and Buzzfeed. I used to be, in 2007 or so, obsesses with Gawker Media as a media company, seeming to have this very astute identity and voice online, the range of blogs staffed by people who cared alternately about the quality of the site or the metrics on any given day. In an ideal world, there’d be a book that was just that, but the HuffPo/Buzzfeed side of things offers important contrast. Smith has a knack for narrative and inside information, being at the heart of it (a fact, admittedly, only noted about half-way through the book when he becomes a character). It’s a well-structured book as well, with chapters being dedicated to outside interests; an especially interesting one steps back from Gawker vs. Buzzfeed to zoom in on how the New York Times approached the shifting landscape, or the one on The Dress acting in shorthand as an allegory for the whole thing. Immensely readable, highly recommended to understand how we got to where we are today. It’s sad to see Gawker’s fate, but equally I don’t know, from reading this, how it could ever have been any other way.
Not the book I was intially expecting from the brief description I had seen of it, but that’s to Kisuule’s credit. It would be - I’m not going to say easy, but more straightforward - to write the “what do we do with good art by bad people?” book about Michael Jackson, and that was to be fair the kind of thing I was looking for when I picked up Neverland. That’s not quite what this is (although there is certainly some of that in here), but I was equally happy with what I found. Instead, Kisuule uses Jackson as a jumping off point to examine how we see this in ourselves and in those around us - why do we hero worship, such that this is then an issue? How do we do we deal with loved ones who are not perfect, and how do we deal with ourselves? It doesn’t absolve Jackson - doesn’t even attempt to - but paints him as a cautionary tale of generational trauma but why that’s not an excuse to carry it on. A lot to like here; I would still, though, like the “good art/bad people” book.
Probably Ayoade’s most accomplished book in his bibliography of doing “books like this”. It feels more lived in, more detailed. There are some bitingly funny lines, some well-drawn characters, but the highlights for me remain the “excerpts” of Hughes’ screenplays and scripts, all excellently observed parodies of a certain type of British film or play. It gets a little muddled in the final stretch, but on the whole a satisfying read.
The annual tradition continues, thank you Mum. The platonic ideal was still the one like 4 years ago with a good short story, and I refuse to believe it’s just because I’m 31 now.