A novel courtesy of Alasdair for my birthday last year (the pile of books is not to be underestimated), bought in hopes of providing a counterbalance to the numerous not very good novels about stand-up comedy that I’ve read over the last few years. These other novels’ issues have ranged from mawkishness to inaccuracy beyond credulity, but all of them suffer from feeling utterly un-lived in and incredibly unfunny. They were written by authors who were not stand-ups, and it showed. So a relief, then, to find that Running The Light is by far the closest in terms of versimilitude. The protagonist - Billy Ray Schafer, a washed up comic surviving on the road - actually sounds like a stand-up when the routines are depicted. The little details all add up. Norm Macdonald is even a character for a couple of chapters. Taking place over a somewhat disastrous week, it captures the downward spiral of a man already down on his luck, with a Stanhopeish cynicism and depravity, which only occasionally wears, but is otherwise engrossing. I just have to hope this is never me.
A very glossy book covering the history of Curb Your Enthusiasm - a show that’s been on my mind recently, having finally finished the big Seinfeld rewatch (/first time watch for Alasdair), which in turn cues up the big Curb rewatch (likewise for Alasdair). There’s a good amount of content derived from the actual people involved, including a wonderful description of David’s early stand-up material which is very much my jam. Another highlight is the insight into the writing process, with the scene briefs and audition descriptions being genuinely fascinating in demonstrating how carefully planned it all is.
A brief compilation of some of Rayner’s more cutting restaurant reviews. A relief to not see any Bristol places this time around, and the Le Cinq review remains a classic. As Rayner himself says in the introduction, there’s no pleasure in a bad review, but they are the ones that catch the eye the most, and for good reason in his case. Some incredible turns of phrase.
Oh we are so societally and completely non-virtually fucked. AI companies weaponising and monetising a loneliness epidemic, bulldozing its way through the human experience and insisting that you don’t need friends, you don’t need a partner, and you don’t need to grieve. Why would you! Create your random text generator facsimile, and more than that, turn the deceased into the person you want them to be rather than the person they actually were! Christ. Love Machines covers a wide number of case studies in this, but Muldoon frustratingly both-sides his way through it, all of the above seemingly balanced out by “but still, pretty cool though, right!”. No. No no no. Shut it all down, burn it to the ground, and talk to your friends. Please.
A vivid, feverish novel, of the escalation of teenage anxiety and panic attacks into mania. It’s not quite my experience with anxiety (thank god), but it feels lived in. A fantastic discursion into the virtue of understanding the root cause or just making up your own. There are scenes where I personally found it tough going, when the protagonist Nick gets ganged up on by the cool kids when getting high for the first time, expertly written by Clune in the intertwining external and internal sources. There’s a beautiful vignette towards the beginning of the book where Nick describes this idea of childhood prophesying, of telling his babysitter when the wind will rise. Remarkably touching in its view of the world.
Oh man. A quick, scorching read, full of lyrical prose (“I am sunwarm and eveningwonderful” - I’d love to know more about how Hazel Evans approached the translation from the original Danish). A devastating examination of the weight of being a teenage girl in a world of men waiting to devour you. The duties and expectations of being pure and virginal but ready and eager, incubated but not long enough, and what agency do you have within those constraints to own them? The epilogue maybe doesn’t quite stick the landing - or, I think, less that, more that it decides in the last few pages to veer off into a different direction that isn’t really in keeping with the rest of the book. But beyond that, a difficult triumph.
God, this was a refreshing read, if only to feel like I’m not the only one seeing this and to inspire some optimism about the future. This is a heart-on-sleeve fact-based polemic on the state of late-stage technocapitalism, with a convincing and thorough laying out of how we got into this mess of every service getting worse as it gets more essential, how it plays out in the here and now, but most importantly it provides practical - if ambitious - solutions. It’s also really made me think about my part in this (as a consumer, not a producer, although inevitably the HPE/Juniper acquisition gets mentioned, but we escape it until 92% of the way through the book) - what services do I subscribe to, what efforts do I make to not reward enshittification in these services, and what alternatives could be out there? It’s also just nice to be reacquainted with Doctorow’s writing!
We are fully in the age of the millenial novel, and I mean that as a compliment. Flat Earth revolves around Avery, an art student in New York who is to varying degrees jealous of her varyingly successful friend Frances. The specifics are largely irrelevant. Instead, it talks more to the way the world as we have made it exacerbates and influences that jealousy, the means it provides as an outlet. The precise and cold prose models the remove at which Avery has to take the world, the job at the dating app for the patriarchy, the casual relationships where even she seems unsure whether it’s anything more than just something to do. And why do we want so much what still doesn’t make other people happy?
At one point for my late teens/early 20s, I’d have probably told you that Douglas Coupland was my favourite author - oh for the days of certainty! This didn’t change out of any particular personal growth (mine) or creative decline (his), more just he stopped publishing as much. But picking up this post-covid collection of microfiction, I’m instantly reminded of what I loved about his work. It’s a generational voice that works when stretched above and below that generation, consistent across these 60 bite-sized stories that quantum leap from character to character, but still different enough that each character feels suitably real. Laugh out loud funny in one moment, ruminative on the state of the world the next, and very hard to put down.
I’ve read a few books on the general theme of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency (Michael Lewis’ hagiography of SBF, Zeke Faux’s excellent investigative journalism on Tether), but Howson’s Let Them Eat Crypto takes a different tack somewhat. Rather than another book about the technicalities and the obvious scamminess of it all, this instead looks at the broader social impact: the poor communities in South America and Africa suffering from modern day colonialism; charities and NGOs being scammed into solutions that supposedly work towards their aims but instead absolutely make them worse; the supporting of far-right/longtermist/incel groups. Let Them Eat Crypto is unapologetic in its view that there is not a single good use of the blockchain, and offers a full-throated defence of that that is refreshing to read. What struck me most, though, was how easily translateable this is to the current AI hype - custom-built hardware that will burn out in a year and will end up on landfill, the same names making the same landgrabs for everyone’s mindshare and personal data, the same hype rush overtaking the people asking what this is all actually good for. The books will write themselves in a couple of years time (or, at least, metaphorically).
As is tradition, Mum has given me the Doctor Who annual for Christmas, and as such it is the first book of the year. Not much, as ever, to talk about here. The usual guff, and a short story from Pete McTighe (how many times can Ruby say something “tinged with sarcasm”?).