Tag: review

Some Thoughts on Murakami’s Men Without Women

I was gifted this collection for Christmas and I’m glad I was. I’ve been aware of Murakami for a long time (and I’ve owned some of his novels for a long time), but just never got around to giving him a serious go. This collection was a great way in to his work, I think.

As usual when I look at a collection of short stories, I’ve taken the #onetweetreviews approach; I’ll post my raw notes, lightly edited, below the break, and then will develop my thoughts a bit after that.

Drive my Car

This story made me think about pacifism, about what it means to be capable of doing someone a great harm, and wanting to, and not doing it.

Yesterday

For anyone who has ever found themselves playing a role in someone else’s relationship: this one’s for you.

An Independent Organ

Men will go to any lengths to justify their behaviour.

Scheherazade

This is some hyperfixation.

Kind

The repressed always returns.

Samsa in Love

A fun twist on a classic – it is weird having a body, isn’t it?

Men Without Women

The strangest story in the collection, with the most savage hurt at the centre of it.

I realised while I was reading these stories that, recently, I’ve not read many conventional stories where men and women worry about their careers, love each other, hurt each other. In fact the context I can most easily recall that does include that stuff is the occasional murder mystery I read. My habits are my habits, I’m trying not to worry about them. It might have reached the surface of my mind because I read about half of this collection on a train moving away from someone I love (but towards someone else I love).

Love and pain are felt in so many exquisite degrees, right? This collection is about the many big and small ways that we disappoint people, are disappointed, how those feelings linger. I’d point particularly to Yesterday in this collection. Kids playing at adult games are liable to get hurt in ways that are deeper than they notice at first, and this story captures that feeling exactly.

Again, I haven’t “properly” read Murakami yet, but I knew I’d probably like him. His main concerns, as I understand them (apart from love), are The Beatles, Cats, and Jazz, and that means I’m likely to get on with him. They’re all present here.

And Kafka, I guess. An Independent Organ is a devastatingly sad riff on A Hunger Artist, and Samsa in Love is a playful look at The Metamorphosis that supposes, just what if?… Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself turned in to a man. Terrifying, I know.

Shecherazade is another standout, elevating pillow talk to high art and again riffing on a classic, The One Thousand and One Nights. Most of these stories revolve around male desire, so one that tries to centre a woman’s experience is welcome. It’s also totally unhinged, but all these stories are, in their own way, and maybe that’s Murakami, but maybe that’s also just how love makes you.

The translation duties are shared between Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen; they do an admirable job of keeping the voice consistent in these stories. The narrators all come from different backgrounds, but they are also clearly of a piece, and this helps strengthen the theme, I think. It’s quite a spare voice, matter-of-fact. This book taking its name from a collection of stories by Ernest Hemingway shouldn’t be lost on you.

I think I’ll have to move up reading one of his novels. I have copies of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and Kafka on the Shore, I think, somewhere. Would you start with one of those, or would you try something else?

Some Thoughts on Viriconium

M. John Harrison is one of those writers that I knew on paper I should fall in love with but hadn’t properly tried. Up until last year I’d been a big fan of his blog and his tweets but hadn’t read much of his fiction other than The Centauri Device. Then I got gifted a copy of Wish I Was Here and couldn’t help but devour it over the course of a couple of afternoons. (I reviewed it here.)

I was sold on M. John Harrison, so I decided to finally get started with the Fantasy Masterworks omnibus of Viriconium stories that I bought myself last year.

It’s an incredibly varied body of work with a lot to offer, and that asks a lot of questions. At no point did Harrison condescend to my expectations. Not every story hits, but that’s as much down to my reading comprehension as it is anything else, I think. I imagine these stories would be similarly rich on re-reading as Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books are supposed to be.

As has become my habit with these collections and anthologies I end taking notes story by story. I’ll post those raw notes, slightly edited, below the break, and then continue my discussion after.

Viriconium Knights

Why do I get the feeling that the tapestry is obliquely showing me important plot points?

The Pastel City

Like a heroic fantasy adventure inside a T.S. Eliot poem. The vibe here is impeccable. Harrison really goes out of his way to portray a world being scoured by a wind only moving in one direction; capital T Time, before pulling the rug and demonstrating that even at the end of Time, change is possible, is in fact the only constant. I think writing a fantasy novel about a swordsman who refuses to name his sword is hilarious. I just love the way he writes – I love the vocabulary, I love the odd choices of words. Gene Wolfe uses a similar technique in The Book of the New Sun. If you want to make it strange, writing about it strangely will go a long way.

Lord of Misrule

You don’t have to go to the end of time to meet sad people full of memories.

Strange Great Sins

Strange indeed. Is there a greater sin than not becoming yourself?

A Storm of Wings

Even sadder and more elegiac than usual. I miss tegeus-Cromis. So do a lot of people. The world, failing to end, undergoes a mutation. Filled with weird architecture you’ll struggle to imagine.

The Dancer from the Dance

Weird things happening on the heath.

The Luck in the Head

I could bound myself in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

The Lamia & Lord Cromis

Fate exists and you could not possibly guess at it.

In Viriconium

We spend more time in Viriconium than in any other story, and what a run down, claustrophobic place it is.

A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium

You always suspected that Viriconium could be anywhere or anywhen.

I noticed as I was reading these stories that I was tracing the dying earth subgenre of SFF backwards. Or science fantasy, if you wanna call it that. I read The Book of the New Sun a few years ago and had never read anything like it, but knew you could follow it back to Jack Vance and The Dying Earth. The thread runs through Viriconium.

Opening this collection with Viriconium Knights is a smart move, I think. It drops you right it and disorients the hell out of you in terms of the setting, the characters, the way people view the world and how they speak to each other. It’s a concentrated hit. I didn’t understand the significance of the metal bird at the time, but having read Wolfe and been annoyed with myself at totally missing the significance of Dr. Talos’ play in Claw of the Conciliator, I was primed when the old man showed Ignace Retz the tapestry. Re-reading it quickly as I write this, it is a terrible echo, ever so sad; the first time I just nodded my head and knew what to expect.

I don’t know if Harrison arranged the stories or if that choice was made by an editor, but I think it’s significant that the stories from Viriconium Nights were broken up and arranged around the three novels, and not put in as their own block in the same order as published. Viriconium Knights would have one effect reading it after tegeus-Cromis has departed the stage, a nice little callback, do you remember that character? He was swell, wasn’t he? Placing it here, first, an echo of a thing that hasn’t happened yet, deprives you of that feeling of warmth and just highlights the disconnect, the instability of time and identity within these stories.

If The Pastel City was the only Viriconium thing then it would stand very well on its own as a great novel and fine addition to the genre. It’s an epic adventure story that subverts as many ideas and tropes inherent to epic adventure stories as it can, and even has some horror elements. (Thinking about it a lot of these stories have horror elements.) It’s a quest narrative where the quest only obliquely gets fulfilled and the hero is a master swordsman who refuses to name his sword and prefers to think of himself as a poet. The novel is written like the novelist prefers to think of himself as a poet. I mentioned it above, that using weird, archaic language can create that sense of strangeness.

(This extends even to the colours. I learned so many new words for colours reading these stories. Make it new!)

I just came across (here) an old essay of Harrison’s on the idea of worldbuilding. I think this quote is particularly edifying;

Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain

Harrison is writing a kind of post-structuralist fantasy, writing a constantly shifting city into existence by relying on the constant shift of language, asking the reader to do a lot of the work knowing full well every reader “reads” a different text into existence.

In Wish I Was Here, Harrison talks a lot about T.S. Eliot – I thought as I was reading the Viriconium stories that it was like a fantasy novel set inside an Eliot poem, but it goes deeper than that imagery. Harrison is as disobliging as Eliot. Eliot expects you to be familiar with so much stuff outside of his text to be able to fully grok it, Harrison does likewise. Harrison even quotes directly from The Waste Land without citing it, a few times actually, in much the same way Eliot doesn’t let you know when he’s copped something from Fraser, or Shakespeare. It’s poetry, innit.

Which is all to say that I adored The Pastel City, that if you were writing a fantasy novel just for me, just to appeal to my own interests and predilections, you would write The Pastel City.

The short stories that in this collection begin to serve as connective tissue are even more oblique, and I’m going to have to re-read them, I think, to have the same relationship with them that I developed with the novels. Some of the imagery starts repeating, like the Mari Lwyd.

A Storm of Wings is an odd one. In a world that is kind of already post-apocalyptic, but has reached a kind of equilibrium, what does the end of the world look like? It’s something totally alien, totally unimaginable, and it’s far enough in the future that our hero, tegeus-Cromis, has passed, and we must deal with it ourselves. A lot of the characters are heard aloud wishing for the return of their poet-cum-swordmaster in a way that probably echoes what the general reader is thinking. Instead we’re given; a rogue, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and is losing their grip on reality, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and *has* lost their grip on reality, and Tomb the dwarf, so that at least we’re not totally alienated, because despite me using words like “post-structuralist” to describe these stories, they are still stories, and Harrison knows what he is doing.

Harrison isn’t too arch to give us what we want, he just isn’t gonna do it in a straightforward way. The Lamia & Lord Cromis is another quest narrative, because that’s the kind of context that tegeus-Cromis belongs in. Lords of his house are fated to have to find and slay a rare beast, the eponymous Lamia. He does, eventually, do this, but it doesn’t bring him the fulfilment he expects, and I think him losing a ring in the same swamp that he loses one of Queen Jane’s in The Pastel City is interesting. tegeus-Cromis is directly engaging with his fate in this story, but not in the way he thinks.

(I just want to point out that even in giving us what we want, Harrison doesn’t. tegeus-Cromis spends a lot of The Pastel City brooding over his dead sister, in what I imagine might be a reference to Elric, but Harrison doesn’t use the prequel story to show us that loss, or bring tegeus-Cromis’ sister on stage for cheap dramatic irony. Remarkable restraint.)

By this point, and leading into the next novel, I was really noticing what Harrison wasn’t showing us, what he refuses to explain. There is plenty of advanced technology like airships, power armour, and laser swords, that he doesn’t explain, and doesn’t have the characters theorise about in-text either. The stuff just is, like stuff in real life just is. The way he describes the radiation from these technologies is cool (again, he’s not *against* the reader, he’s just not doing it all for them), they give off motes of white and purple light. In Viriconium, the last Viriconium novel, has a plague that is never explained, only its effects shown, that of sapping the will, the creative energy, the life force, of the city.

I actually had a moment reading this one where I thought, “I wonder what it’s like to live through a plage?” It took me a few moments, but I realised I had. And it had had a similar sapping effect on my energies, my life force. I know some people managed to have incredibly creative quarantines; I felt like such a dick because I didn’t. On paper it sounded perfect. My wages were getting (mostly) paid, and I had to stay home. The perfect time to work on that novel. I ground away at it and just felt miserable. None of it came easy. I kept a journal on and off. I’m glad I tried to keep myself busy and have some material to show for it, but it’s hard to look back at it as a particularly fruitful period.

(“Why won’t Harrison explain the plague?” I wondered to myself, as if anyone ever fully explained COVID.)

The protagonist, Ashlyme, a painter, has a friend who is also an artist and who is suffering from the plague. Ashlyme recognises his friend, Audsley King, as a great painter, but struggles to understand her recent work or why she choses to wallow in the plague zone instead of getting out and lapping up the adulation she surely deserves. Audsley has no interest in the praise of people she does not respect. This friction animatesthe whole story and the plague is just a backdrop. The stuff with the secret police, and the twins; I’m sure they represent the city, but otherwise am having trouble reconciling that subplot with the story as whole. Which might be the point. Art has contradictions and unreconcilable parts. Does some of this speak to Harrison’s attitude to the Viriconium stories as a whole? I think so, at least a bit.

The last story, A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, is a gear shift, set as it is in our world, among our people, some of whom have been to Viriconium before, some of whom want to visit for the first time. It’s an interesting contrast – what makes one story set in grimy cafes with a cast of weird people a fantasy and what makes another story set in grimy cafes among weird people not a fantasy story? Is it just the names? Some pretty weird names in this one, but then some of it takes place in York. Is Viriconium a place or a state of mind? I don’t know how I feel about this story, haven’t come to a nice conclusion. I just have questions and ideas I’ll be happy to think about every now and again until I eventually re-read these stories and maybe glean a bit more.

I’ve always enjoyed the modernist bent in SFF, the New Wave stuff, the exploration of inner space. Having read this and The Book of the New Sun, I’m thinking about how some of those other modernist ideas and ways of working leaked into the fantasy side of SFF, as a way of providing a kind of jungle gym for the reader’s mind. I came away from Viriconium with a lot of things to think about and a huge list of vocabulary to look up.

I love a book where I can feel myself becoming a better writer as I read it. The way Harrison constructs his worlds and stories looks so maximalist, and on closer inspection is so deliberate and restrained. Sometimes there is an impulse to explain every cool idea you have, and it is so satisfying to be trusted as a reader to fill in gaps, to be left space enough for a world to grow in me. Viriconium is ever changing in the stories, and is ever changing in my own mind and in the minds of everyone else who reads it.

Viriconium!

First Contact: Some Thoughts on The Caltraps of Time

The Caltraps of Time is a collection of short stories by David I. Masson, all of which (in the 2012 SF Masterworks edition, anyway) appeared in the British New Wave SF magazine New Worlds.

I think the nature of consciously writing in a different, experimental mode, means that you’ll get some duds, because of course not every experiment is going to succeed. Caltraps is a record of Masson’s experiments. Most of them are okay, and one of them is good enough to justify the whole collection.

People have a lot of different reasons for creating art. Expressing yourself is a fine and good aim, but if you’re really honest with yourself, some of the impulse will be rooted in wanting to make a contribution to humanity, in wanting to be remembered. Sure there are people whose entire oeuvre is capital A Art1 , but there are more people who create one really good thing that cements them. All you have to do is write one really good guitar riff, one really great story, one memorable character.

Which makes it sound easy. I know it isn’t. What do you think I’ve been trying to do?

It is time for me to be entirely honest with you. I read the first half of this collection a few years ago, during COVID, and then dropped it. Recently I’m trying to finish off books I’ve already started rather than starting and dropping more new ones, so I picked it back up, and I remembered that I dropped Caltraps (now that’s an image) because there’s a story written entirely in Olde English.

We’ll get to that, but in the spirit of fairness, I’ll post my notes from the first few stories verbatim as well. I have no memory of them otherwise and don’t want to re-read them. This was around the time I started taking more notes on my reading and particularly would write mini reviews of short stories as I worked through a collection (like my notes on Ballard’s complete fiction, volumes 1 and 2).

Lost Ground

A messy story with some great imagery. A bit Ballard-lite. Manages to convey some weighty emotions.

Not So Certain

Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent.

Mouth of Hell

What a hole.

On to the second half, which I just finished reading and am pretty sure is the stronger half, even if one of the stories wears a bit thin after a few pages and just keeps going.

A Two-Timer

Hilarious title. A fun time travel travel caper, but the middle third drags. SF works by making things strange, of course, but page after page of a guy talking in Olde English about what a fright a horseless chariot is gets a bit old.

The Transfinite Choice

A terrifying answer to the colonialist logic inherent in a lot of stories about alternate dimensions. Reminded me a bit of the Philip K. Dick novel Cantata-140.

Psychosmosis

You need to be able to name the dead to keep living, yourself.

Traveller’s Rest

Heart-wrenching time-travel story. War never changes.

Oh yeah, this is definitely the stronger half, but with qualifications

A Two-Timer is a fun story wrapped around a dull exercise. This is what I mean about experimental fiction not always hitting. It’s a great idea, right? If I’d had it I’d have written it, and I doubt I have the chops to pull it off half as authentically as Masson. The idea: a time travel story where we get the perspective of someone from the 17th Century who has mistakenly travelled to the mid-20th, written entirely in language authentic to that person’s original era. The guy learning to use the time machine is lots of fun. The guy getting into trouble in the 20th Century before returning home; also fun. The middle section where he goes on and on and on at length writing about modern technology in Olde English? You expect a bit of it, sure, but it’s just too long and too dull.

Now The Transfinite Choice, that’s good, tight SF. He has a great idea but leaves enough for you to figure out that it doesn’t outstay its welcome (see previous story). Masson lays out the terrible logic our society functions under. We may well discover time travel, but we would immediately use it to try and solve “problems” that we have decided are ineradicable-because-unprofitable to fix, like overpopulation. I won’t spoil any more if you haven’t read it, but this is a great story.

Psychosmosis I find it difficult to talk about, not because there isn’t anything to say, but just because I’m starting to notice that, having had a fair bit of grief heaped on me in the last few years, I will read a story as being about grief if there’s even the slightest hint of it. This story, about refusing to name those you’ve lost in an attempt to carry on living in a world that is empty without them, is almost too on the nose.

Traveller’s Rest is the really great piece, the one that means that most of the rest of his stuff will stay in print along with it. I don’t want to ruin the story for you, but once you’re halfway in and get the gist you’ll know what’s going to happen anyway. There are some really great works about how war and conflict alienate you from the people you love, the society you’re protecting. Masson uses the relativity of time as a metaphor for that alienation in this deft, perfectly paced story that ends with a really ferocious sense of irony and futility. This mines the same vein as Inception and The Forever War.

Laying it all out like that, it’s really clear how these stories fit in to the New Wave. They’re all about the relativity of time, or the relativity of perceptions of time and space, how our inner worlds affect our outer worlds. If you’re into that kind of thing (I am), then this collection is definitely worth reading, but if you’re not sure, read Traveller’s Rest first to get the vibe (here’s a link to it at Lightspeed Magazine).

1 (although I’m reminded recently of seeing a rash of Bob Dylan records turn up in a charity shop window near me. All the really good ones (there was a copy of Highway 61 Revisited) went quickly. The last one left was a copy of Nashville Skyline. It’s still there.

Some Thoughts on S.U.M.O. and Rest is Resistance

I don’t generally read self-help, but a colleague loaned me a copy of Paul McGee’s S.U.M.O. (Shut Up, Move On), and I did my best to approach it with an open mind. And you know what? It’s pretty good.

I don’t generally read self-help, but a colleague loaned me a copy of Paul McGee’s S.U.M.O. (Shut Up, Move On), and I did my best to approach it with an open mind. And you know what? It’s pretty good.

Most of Paul’s suggestions revolve around a simple idea, which is that you cannot control the world, you cannot control other people, but you can control yourself, and how you react to things. This, as far as I can tell, is repackaged stoicism, which has its uses. You might well be going through something you can’t control – a calm and steady voice like Paul’s can be a real comfort.

(I’m not entirely sold on stoicism for two reasons. One; any train of thought that so naturally attracts right-wing grifters is suspect to me, at least as something I’d want to apply to my own life. Two; is not the logical end-point of stoicism a whole bunch of people putting up with things they shouldn’t have to put up with? Do what you can to keep your own head straight, absolutely, but some things should not be borne: they should be fought against, even if you know you’ll lose.)

Some of S.U.M.O. is just emotional intelligence for dummies. I’m not saying I’m some empathy genius, but McGee suggests a lot of things that I thought people did naturally. Apparently not. If someone cuts you off in traffic, or is mean to you, have you considered that they might be having a bad day? I had, but enough people hadn’t that this book was worth writing. Or how about taking the time to make sure you don’t make emotional decisions? Writing a letter angry but sending it only after re-reading it calm. Sleeping on it for a bit before quitting your job. This would have been very useful advice to me at, twenty? Maybe some of it as late as twenty five? Again, I am not a genius; I am some knob with a blog. That said, I’ve definitely met some adults who need to learn these lessons.

I did particularly like that McGee sprinkles the book with personal anecdotes. He doesn’t just tell you what to do. He provides you with examples of things that weren’t going great in his life before he learned the lesson he just imparted to you, shows you what an improvement it’s made to his relationships. S.U.M.O. is mostly about improving your relationships, and that’s absolutely something worth doing. Even if the knowledge in it isn’t new to you, it might teach you a way of articulating it that is, or some exercises that use that knowledge in a way you hadn’t considered. You can use S.U.M.O. as a workbook, but I didn’t, partly because my copy was a loaner but mostly because the pages slipped by quickly. S.U.M.O. is like having a conversations with a wise friend.

I’m reminded of another self-help book I read recently, one called Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. A lot of the knowledge in that is not stuff that was already second nature to me. I’ve burned out super hard a few times recently, during COVID and since then, and I needed someone to articulate to me why I wasn’t doing myself or the people that I love any favours.

Hersey makes an utterly compelling argument about the insidiousness of work pushing itself into every waking moment of our lives, about how this is by design, about what we can do to push back against it. I approached it as someone who does work that relies on me being emotionally engaged, and as someone who has attempted to side-hustle themselves a living.Rest is Resistance wasrevelatory.

I needed to be reminded that I am allowed to do nothing, that I sometimes need to do nothing. I’m considering re-reading it to make sure I’ve absorbed all the arguments, but the title is the central and entirely complete argument in and of itself. Rest is resistance.

Every YouTuber I follow seems to have read Atomic Habits. It wasn’t my intention to fall down a self-help rabbit hole, but maybe I will. I have read Aurelius’ Meditations and found them helpful, and I’ve read a bit of Seneca as well. I fully intend to give the stoics a full and proper consideration, but I’ve always had trouble completely subscribing to any ideology or way of being, and like with a lot of other things I’ve tried, I imagine I’ll take what works for me from the stoics and leave the rest.

Which is probably what the stoics would suggest I do.

Some Thoughts on The Shortest History of Germany

Throughout my GCSEs, A levels, and also as an undergraduate, I found the Horrible Histories books really helpful, and I know I’m not the only person in my class who did.

Throughout my GCSEs, A levels, and also as an undergraduate, I found the Horrible Histories books really helpful, and I know I’m not the only person in my class who did.

Hear me out.

If you’re having to read a book set in a particularly historical milieu, but you don’t know anything about it, that lack of context can really hinder your enjoyment, particularly if you’re going to have to write about it at least a little bit intelligently. You’re probably also reading with a deadline, and don’t have time to research an authoritative guide to a particular time period.

So what do you do?

You read a Horrible Histories, which you can be assured is accurate at least as far as the basic facts go, can be read in an hour, gives you a nice broad overview, and will be simple enough that a child could understand it.

You can’t cite it, of course, but that doesn’t matter. You can’t cite Wikipedia and you still look at it, don’t you? It’s easy to digest and gives you the info you need to improve your understanding of other texts.

I’ve often wondered if there shouldn’t be a similar kind of thing for adults. And then a friend loaned me James Hawes’ The Shortest History of Germany.

In 227 swift pages, Hawes lays out pretty much the entire history of Germany. He picks some eras and people to focus on, but otherwise gives you a nice broad sweep of the region before it became the nation we know today. He’s witty, urbane, not afraid to let you know what he thinks. There are plenty of illustrations and diagrams that help explicate the points he’s making.

A chatty, funny tone, with illustrations? It’s a Horrible Histories. And I do mean that in the nicest way possible.

The maps and pictures do help. The territory of the region in question has shifted a lot over the years; even with Hawes being as clear as he is it’d be difficult to follow along without the constantly updating map.

The drawback to the author being so present in the text is that it can take you out of it if you disagree with them. There are a couple of instances I want to note, one of which is quite amusing, I think.

1) Hawes rightly denounces the extremist politics that tore Germany (and much of the world) apart in the 20th century. That’s fine. But his own position seems to be “let’s just stay in the middle and let the markets sort it out”. If you believe in letting the market decide things then fine, but presenting markets as some kind of value neutral thing that extremists messed with, I found a bit odd.

(If I’ve misrepresented your argument, I’m sorry.)

2) In addition to the above, Hawes points to people following Hegel’s methods as having done a lot of damage to Germany and the free world. He *specifically mentions the idea of dialectic*. But then, all over The Shortest History of Germany, there are diagrams that follow a dialectic formula. Event A + Event B = Event C. I can’t tell if he’s winking at you as he does it. It’s very effective, either way. I don’t know the first thing about Hegel but I’m familiar with what a dialectic is and the concept seems to be reasonable to me.

At least Hawes is clear about his feelings. Everyone is coming from somewhere, and in a book of accessible, popular history, why not just be open about it?

I’m gonna look out for the other Shortest History of… books, because I really like the format, and if the others are as engagingly written as this one is, with some intellectual heft behind it, then they’re a great way of brushing up on a subject without having to do too much research.

Some Thoughts on Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

It’s been a few days since I finished The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, which probably means it’s excellent literary fiction.

I wrote that sentence and then closed the file, because I still wasn’t sure, and I’m reopening it a few days later determined to at least get some of my thoughts in order.

I can’t think of a novel that more accurately portrays the change you undergo in your teens, when you are, if you are at least a little curious, fascinated by an adult world full of adult games, any glimpse of which fills you with a feeling in your stomach you can’t quite describe. Like when we found my friend’s mother’s “erotic” dice and wondered why would you possibly want to lick someone else? And of course after a while you understand, until you get so tantalisingly close to it all and still aren’t a part of it. You might even be let in for moments; a favoured history teacher buys you a pint at prom, another teacher swears in front of you totally unconsciously. That feeling is so hard to describe, and it’s captured here perfectly.

And the eponymous Miss Jean Brodie is a perfect manipulator of that feeling. I came away utterly disliking her, which I thought I was supposed to, but a glance at a few reviews and posts showed me quite a few people admiring Miss Brodie, which seemed odd to me considering she does her best to radicalise her students and encourages them to sleep with other teachers for her own ends. That’s pretty bad stuff right? I’m not saying it makes this a bad novel; it’s an excellent novel, and I’m reminded that a lot of people misunderstood Fight Club.

She’s not unlikeable. To give her full credit. she’s not just likeable, she’s utterly charismatic and knowing. Part of that is a reflection of the power imbalance and is again one of those aspects that helps capture that feeling of, if not wonder, then admiration. Have you ever had the sad experience of meeting someone you knew in your teens, an older person, the parent of a friend maybe, or even, why not, a teacher, when you are yourself now the age they were when you knew them? How much smaller they seem. How much less they seem to know. This novel is that process of diminution.

It’s an excellently structured novel. You know it’ll all crash down, and you’ll spend the whole book wondering how Miss Brodie doesn’t get Prevent-dutied – but it was a different time and a different place. I don’t know anything about interwar Edinburgh that I didn’t learn from this novel but what I did learn is that a lot of historic beauty sat alongside a lot of desperation and deprivation, in quite some contrast to the Brodie set.

Spark really knows how to make every conversation, every image, count. This slim novel encompasses a broad sweep of time and of emotion and it all gets moved through at a pace that gives it all the proper weight while moving towards an inevitable conclusion. And it’s hard not to feel sad for Miss Jean Brodie at the end, even if she is a monster, something engendered I think by the fact that the story is told from the perspective of the girls in her charge.

If you’re wondering how to write a multidimensional villain that your reader will care about, read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, because it’s as good as an instruction manual.

I know I’ve said this before, but writing really is magic. I didn’t know how I properly felt about this book until I sat down and made myself write about it. Have I got a perspective on it that’s new? Probably not, but I’ve gone some way to knowing how I feel about it.

Write, and you’ll know what you think.

Some Thoughts on M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here

Just before sitting down to write this, I learned that Christopher Priest passed away, on February the 2nd, 2024, at the age of 80. He was a contemporary of M. John Harrison’s, and it made me all the more grateful that so many people from the New Wave are still around and working. Rest in Peace, Christopher.

–

I’ve been broadly familiar with M. John Harrison for a long time (he’s great on Twitter and has a blog you should definitely be reading), but until recently the only novel of his I’d read had been The Centauri Device, which was a delightful, complex, psychedelic space opera that had clearly been an inspiration for Iain M. Banks, an SF writer I adore. I knew Harrison’s reputation for subverting, and sometimes outright demolishing, genre expectations, and The Centauri Device lived up to those… expectations. Which means he… lived up to my expectations by subverting them? Anyway. More recently I read The Pastel City, which I loved and will be reviewing once I’ve read more of the Viriconium stuff,. I also got gifted a copy of his new memoir Wish I Was Here for Christmas, and I’ve just finished it.

Well, I call it a memoir. It’s billed very clearly as an anti-memoir, which in this case means that while it is autobiographical, it isn’t a strict, linear account of Harrison’s life. All the better for it. It is fragmentary, elliptical, told in snatches, it reflects the complexities of inner life and of attempting to reckon with memory in a way that’s far truer than a straight account. I’m reminded of classes I’ve taken on modernism, where we all argued about whether Virginia Woolf hadn’t actually written far more “realistic” fiction than Dickens.

And Wish I Was Here is fiction, really. At the core of the book is that remove between the version of yourself you are in the present and the version of yourself you were. You are no longer that person, to write about them is to write fiction by definition, albeit fiction informed by your memories, and whatever notes you’ve taken, notes that are also impossibly removed from you, something you’ll be familiar with if you’ve kept notebooks or journals. If you haven’t, read this excellent Joan Didion essay. Like I noted in my review of Chris Porsz’ recent exhibition, there’s something to be said for a consistency of accretion, for shoring fragments against your ruins.

I wanted to put off Wish I Was Here until I’d read more Harrison, but I glanced over a few pages and instantly got sucked into the rhythm and flow of it. He writes with a voice that is knowing, funny, wise, that takes you into his confidence. You want to keep listening. When someone is sharing with you the way Harrison is sharing with you, you don’t want to stop them. And it is funny as hell. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes or stories but the little routine about the sink rotting in a ditch in the midlands is great, trust me.

You get the feeling he’s determined not to write about himself, but that’s fine. There’s some great nature writing in here, some lovely passages about the magic of owning a cat and the awfulness of losing one. There’s some writing advice I wish I’d heard years ago, and plenty of insight into other writers Harrison admires. There’s some frightening passages about the nature of the discontinuity we’re living through; that you’d say the book is partly a reflection of, if you didn’t know any better.

He shows glimpses of letting you in, laying out the details, explicating the five Ws, but they’re a feint. He draws you in with one hand and then keeps you at a distance with the other, the way he is distanced from his past selves. He details conversations and relationships he’s had but he lets you know he’s fictionalised them. He mentions some famous people he’s known but the anecdotes don’t get much juicer than having been a few tables over from Tim Henman at a restaurant, or bumping into William S. Burroughs at a party. Sonic Life, this ain’t, but that’s the point.

Harrison manages to not talk too much about his childhood or his relationships with his parents until the last few pages. It just doesn’t matter. Far more important to get across the sense of disconnection he’s always felt. In a way I think Wish I Was Here is an exercise in examining just how impossible it is to really know anything about your own life, let alone anyone else’s. In that sense I think it’s kin with Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and is similarly a masterpiece.

Yeah, I love New Wave SF, and I would have loved a nice long chapter on what it was like to be a part of New Worlds, but Harrison deftly shows us that that would be too reductive, that the work is what’s important, that it’d be impossible, anyway. You should immediately go and read Wish I Was Here. I’ll echo the recommendation that Weighing a Pig Doesn’t Fatten It gave – it’s among the best books I’ve ever read.

First Contact: Some Thoughts on Larry Niven’s Ringworld

“The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilisation. None had thought to build his own.”

page 250

Ringworld by Larry Niven is a really odd book. There are aspects of it that jar like it was written in 1870 – but it was published in 1970. You probably know what I’m talking about. 

It’s incredibly sexist. Tooth-gnashingly sexist. I just finished reading the Conan stories (and you can read my thoughts on those here), and this novel makes Conan look progressive. There are two female characters. The main one, Teela, is ditzy and air-headed and mostly seems to exist to give the main character something to screw. There is a good in-universe reason for her to act like this, and she is pivotal to the story, but she literally has zero agency. 

The subplot about humanity being manipulated by shadowy alien forces into breeding for luck was really interesting (I loved The Sirens of Titan and it reminded me of that), and this feeds really heavily into Teela’s character. Niven explains it away, and it was written in the late ‘60s and seems to take the worst of the New Wave as an influence. I was ready to give him a pass. 

But the second Teela is off the page, the protagonist meets the second female character; Prill, an intergalactic sex worker. Because our protagonist can’t possibly not have someone to sleep with. 

She gets treated really badly and I think Niven goes some of the way to articulating that manipulating people and denying them agency is Not Right, but he doesn’t go all the way there. 

It’s just weird and impossible to avoid. I’m mentioning it first because if you can’t get past this stuff you just shouldn’t bother reading Ringworld. It’s a pretty good SF novel but it’s not that good. 

It otherwise is a perfectly fine adventure story with some fascinating hard SF elements and a surprisingly soft, human element to it. The pacing is great, and the characters face a variety of unique perils they (mostly) use their ingenuity to solve. Niven strikes a great balance between detailing a wider universe and exciting us with action. 

The setting, the world-building, is great. Halo came out when I was eleven years old and I absolutely fell into that game. I’d go round my friend’s every day after school and we’d play the campaign in co-op. It was so mysterious and unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. The game provided some answers, but otherwise set up a vast universe for you to use your imagination in. I see now that that was just Ringworld. 

(I played Halo, then read Consider Phlebas, and then read Ringworld, working my way backwards. There’s something to be said for the scrappiness of mostly reading what you can find in charity shops. I do remember reading some of the Halo tie-in novels back in the day but cannot remember enough details to draw any comparisons.)

Halo got less and less interesting as that space shrunk, as more and more of it got explained and firmly narrativised. I don’t know if I’ll ever bother with any of the sequels to Ringworld but it’s hard not to see the same thing happening. 

There was an edge to this story that I didn’t expect at all – and it was the kind of dying world feeling that stories like Viriconium (I finished The Pastel City recently but will wait until I’ve finished more of the stories before writing about them) and The Shadow of the Torturer evoke. I know they were published after Ringworld, it’s just a vibe. 

(Jack Vance is on my list, don’t worry.)

“He’s old Louis. He got a massive dose of something like boosterspice, long ago. He says he took it from an evil magician. He’s so old that his grandparents remember the Fall of the Cities. Do you know what he’s doing?” Her smile became impish. “He’s on a kind of quest. Long ago, he took an oath that he would walk to the base of the Arch. He’s doing that. He’s been doing it for hundreds of years.”

page 261

A cataclysm or two happened on the ringworld long before the protagonists ever got there, and some of the obstacles they have to navigate are the people of that fallen civilisation, and their unruly technology. Niven even makes a few gestures at what religions might have formed. Like I said, surprisingly “soft” hard SF. And this is part of what makes the storyline with Prill so frustrating, because she otherwise has a fascinating backstory, hailing from this civilisation before it fell, her life extended by a drug. Prill’s character could have literally done anything else in her past life. 

But it’s Niven’s novel and he made his choices. It’s canonical, having won the Hugo and the Nebula. I imagine some people might read it out of obligation, in today’s context. I can’t say I have any particular problem with Niven the way you can point out that say, Ian Fleming or Philip K. Dick are clearly misogynists, because this is the first Niven I’ve read, but the ick in this novel is hard to avoid. I don’t normally write this negatively about living authors who could conceivably see it, but I’m hardly the first to point this out.  

1 All quotes taken from the 2005 Gollancz SF Masterworks edition of Ringworld, ISBN: 0-575-07702-6

Some Thoughts on 2023 – A Year in Review

It’s been a hell of a year and I’m knackered.

It’s been a hell of a year and I’m knackered. I’ve put off writing this post until I either completed my reading challenge or knew I absolutely wouldn’t be able to. The other day I just squeaked over the line having finished my fortieth book. How did I do it? I read a couple of chapbooks last week to make sure I got over the line, because as arbitrary as it is, I’ve completed the challenge for the last ten-odd years and didn’t want this year to be the time I failed it. I need a bit of constancy.

It was a struggle because I started a new and very challenging job this year and because I was also going through the stuff I discussed in this post. Let’s look at the top five most viewed posts I published this year:

Dinosaur Jr. at the Garage – Celebrating 30 Years of Where You Been?

What You End Up Missing

Some Thoughts on William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy

Some Thoughts on Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life

I Think I Thrive Under a Lack of Accountability

I’m glad some of these pieces proved popular. I posted some personal essays on this blog that I originally wrote for my Substack before giving up because the vibes were off. (I should listen to myself more often.) The concert review at the top was borne out of an impulse to make sure I take more notes. I’ve been to some excellent shows I can barely remember and feel sad about now. My review of Sonic Life was quite popular too, but I do know a lot of Sonic Youth fans.

I’ve got no idea how that mid-year accountability post was so popular. I can barely summon the energy to look and see if I kept to my word. Oh, ok then, but later in this post.

And the top 5 overall this year:

Some Thoughts on le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies

So, You Want to be a Dick-head?

Ender’s Game and the Hitler Comparison

So, You Want to Read Ulysses?

Some Thoughts on Len Deighton’s Game, Set, and Match

No surprise here – some of my higher effort and more quality posts – but that top one on Legacy of Spies is odd. I’ve noticed it getting a lot of views on and off and only recently realised it was driving a lot of traffic to my blog. I just checked and it turns out it’s on the front page of Google if you search for that novel’s title. Go me!

The Resolutions.

  • I want to read more classics.

Yeah, this didn’t happen. It’s fine.

  • I want to write with less fear, exactly what I want, for myself.

I’m trying. Still trying.

  • I want to spend more time listening to music.

I have been. Or at least, I feel like I have been. Need to wait for my last.fm to update to know for sure. Plus I went to a gig this year and want to go to more next year.

  • I want to be more present.

I’m working on it.

  • I want to keep going for walks.

I have been – I’ve got a psychogeography project that I’m deciding what to do with, plenty of material ready to go. Remember what I said about less guilt? I’m a white guy with a beard and I like walking. It was only a matter of time before I used the word “psychogeography”. I make no apologies.

  • I want to more actively consider what I can do to make the lives of those around me better. I want to widen my definition of “those around me”.

If only you knew.

  • More writing by hand. More journaling. More sketching situations and dumping my brain.

I have been, and it’s been great. Been journaling regularly, started writing with pencil again as well for a properly analogue experience. I’ll be writing an essay about that soon probably. I fell into the world of pencil blogs this year, particularly Polar Pencil Pusher, and ended up treating myself to some fancy pencils. It’s great. I need more hobbies and it’s cheaper than golf.

  • Fewer new projects, some considered work on old ones.

Whoops.

  • More rest. Less guilt.

I’m trying.

  • I want to read the books I already own. We have books at home. More frugality, consideration of purchases, using what I already have.

I’ve ended up buying more books. I always do. I am aware of this and am trying.

  • Make the most of opportunities I’ve already been given, see them for the value they have.

I’m trying.

  • I want to watch more movies.

I did! I went to the cinema a bunch. I did the Barbenheimer thing and I loved it. Saw the new Mission Impossible as well.

  • I do not want to start a TikTok or pivot to video.

I still haven’t.

  • I want to read more books by women (that I already own).

I read ten books by women and twenty-nine by men. Sorry. I’m aware of it.

  • I want to read more books in translation (that I already own).

Of the forty books I read, five were in translation. It’s fine. At least I know.

  • I want to submit more of my poetry.

I got lazy with this because I was super burned out by the end of the year, but I did get a poem into an anthology from Civic Leicester this year, which I am still super proud of!

  • I want to spend more time with friends.

I’ve tried to say yes more but see previous comment about burnout.

  • I want to read something a friend has recommended (that I already own). 

There’s a few books on the pile that friends have loaned me. I’ll get there.

–

There you have it. It is what it is.

If there’s one thing I’m glad I decided to start doing this year, it was just taking more notes. More journaling, general notes, that kind of thing. Writing things down does help you think and it helps you fix things in your mind.

There are things I wish I remembered or had more extensive notes on – going forward I’m taking as many notes as possible.

I have my reading journal in a notebook which I’m using to track the basics about what I’m reading, but I’ve also started a spreadsheet that I’m using to keep more granular data in a format that I control and that isn’t at the whim of a billionaire who might decide to blow up the platform for the hell of it.

(What’s happened to Twitter should give us all a lot of pause and make us think about where we keep our data, and what technology we chose to use.)

I really like the reading spreadsheet I put together. I’m using it to track:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Author’s Gender
  • Translated By
  • Translator’s Gender
  • Year Translated
  • Year Originally Published
  • Year Published
  • Publisher
  • ISBN
  • Genre
  • Form
  • Format
  • Pages
  • Source (as in, where did I get the book from)
  • Date Finished
  • Difference In Year Between Original Publication and Edition I Read

I know Goodreads do their own end of year thingy (here’s mine), but like I said, my spreadsheet can be more granular, and I control it. It’s how I figured out the gender split in my reading that I talked about above. Some more interesting stats include:

  • The oldest thing I read was published in 1863 (Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life).
  • I’ve read thirteen books published in the last decade or so, which isn’t bad considering I have a friend who constantly disparages how old my reading tastes skew.
  • I’ve read twenty-one non-fiction books this year compared to twelve novels. I’ve definitely been reading more non-fiction deliberately as I’ve made a conscious decision that I’m not that interested in writing fiction at the moment. It took me a long time to realise I could write about real life, and I’ve taken more of an interest in reading about it, too.
  • The longest book I read was A History of the World in 100 Objects at 707 pages (it was excellent and I highly recommend it). The shortest was Antinous by Fernando Pessoa, which was twelve pages in print and I read to bump my stats because I didn’t want to fail my reading challenge.
  • My spreadsheet makes the average length of the books I’ve read this year 247 (and a bit) pages. Goodreads makes it 250.
  • Of the forty books I read, sixteen of them were published by Penguin. No other publisher came close.
  • I read twenty-one paperbacks and eighteen e-books. I tell people I don’t have a preference and will read in any medium, and it’s nice to see it come out in the stats.
  • I read one hardback (the excellent Sonic Life). I prefer paperbacks and the stats show it.
  • Of the physical books I read, the most common source was the library. This’d be higher but I don’t work in a library any more. Of the e-books, six were from Google Play (it’s a good source) and five were from Kindle. Nice and balanced.
  • I only read one graphic novel this year. I tend to binge them when I do read them – I just haven’t been in the mood.
  • My top three genres 1) History 2) Science Fiction 3) Essays (essays got a late bump because I read two Joan Didion collections). I’m still not sure about recording genres. This might get more specific later.
  • I feel like I flit about and don’t read systemically and I can see it clear as day on this sheet. There were only three instances of me reading books by the same author back-to-back, and only a couple of clusters when it came to genre.

All in all, it’s really fun having a year of reading data at my fingertips like this. I’ll probably do a post on starting your own spreadsheet. It’s really easy.

But enough stats, what about feelings?

I deliberately don’t record a score on my own spreadsheet because I don’t care. If a book makes me feel something, it’s not going to boil down to a number. I journal about it, or I try and remember Scott Hanselman’s principle about not wasting your keystrokes and I type it up into a review to clarify and fix my own thoughts before sharing them.

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole watching YouTube videos on software development this year. I’ve bounced off trying to learn to code a few times, but the principles and ideas involved still fascinate me. Scott Hanselman in particular is a really good example of how anything can be interesting and you can make anything engaging. This talk about him migrating his website to a new host is just fantastic storytelling any way you slice it:

But again, to my feelings. The best book I read this year, the one I enjoyed most? Probably Speedboat, which I knew I’d love and put off reading because I knew I’d only be able to read it for the first time once. I realised it affected me deeply because I put it down and immediately wanted to write a novel in slavish imitation.

Sonic Life is a late contender for favourite read and my favourite non-fiction one. I’m a huge Sonic Youth fan. I was always going to love this one.

The biggest surprise was Stanley Tucci’s autobiography Taste. My partner got loaned it by a friend and I picked it up because it was yellow and looked fun – and I came away with a fresh perspective on the lives of working class Italian Americans in the middle 20th Century, as well as a lot of insight into Italian cooking, and food in general.

The biggest disappointment was probably Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño. I’ve wanted to read him for a while and picked this out of the library because it was short. I’ve since learned that his estate are strip mining his extant drafts for anything remotely publishable regardless of its real merit. The Hendrix Estate Manoeuvrer. Antwerp, in it’s sub-Burroughsian meanderings, falls into this category. I’ve got a copy of 2666 and I’ll read it one day, and I know I’ll like The Savage Detectives when I do get around to it.

I’ve read a couple of Joan Didion Collections in the past month, The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in that order. I do see what all the fuss is about now. Wasn’t expecting her to be as funny as I found her.

Here’s another end of year reading data tool someone just linked me, and here’s the graphic it put together for me. It’s great, check it out!

I joined a D&D group this year which is still going strong. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and I suggest anyone try a TTRPG if they haven’t. I was a bit worried I’d struggle but 5E is so simple compared to what I remember of AD&D or 3E. I’ve been reasonably diligent about writing up and posting my notes from that campaign. They’re mostly for the benefit of myself and the group, but they’re here if you do want to read them.

I’ve been a bit hot and cold on social media in general (my new phone gives me screen time reports and the only thing worse than knowing I’ve spent six hours on Football Manager is knowing I’ve somehow spent six hours on Facebook), but I have been posting on and off on my Instagram accounts, a bookish one and one where I mostly post photos of empty spaces like someone who has a problem. Follow them if you like.

–

There you have it. I accomplished a lot this year. Learned a bunch, too. About myself, about life. Picked up some new skills, honed some old ones. If I really look at it objectively it’s going ok.

See you next year!

“Truth be told, I think I thrive under a lack of accountability.”

I am not normally very good at keeping to resolutions, if I even bother to make them in the first place, but I have resolved this year to live more intentionally (which isn’t on this list, ffs James). I am trying to do things because I want to do them and not because I’ve always done them, and really prioritise and make space for things that feed my soul. Which is very wishy-washy, but it’s 2023, and we’ve all been through a lot.

This is not an exercise in punishment or criticism. This is simply me having a look at things I wanted to do back in January and see if I have made the space in my life to do them. If I am doing them, great. If I’m not, why not? There could be a challenge involved, or maybe further reflection has led me away from the desire.

Maybe I’ve been playing too much Hearthstone Battlegrounds.

(I’ve kept track of what I’ve been reading for the last ten or so years using Goodreads. This year I decided to start my own spreadsheet to track my reading, and also a paper reading journal. You should keep a journal. Elon Musk can’t buy it and ruin it.)

  • I want to read more classics.

This resolution has instantly made me notice an issue with my spreadsheet that I am going to correct. I’ve been recording the year of the editions I’ve read, but not the year those books were originally published. This is why we measure and reflect, right?

That said, by my quick reckoning, I’ve read some modern classics, like some Gertude Stein, James Joyce, Kerouac, Renata Adler, but nothing published before 1900. So I’ve not held up this resolution so far, really. That’s fine.

  • I want to write with less fear, exactly what I want, for myself.

Hard to quantify, but I’ve definitely been writing with less of an eye on what I think might be publishable and just getting it out and worrying about it later. So, yeah kinda.

  • I want to spend more time listening to music.

I should’ve made this easier to quantify, but I don’t have last.fm pro. I did listen to more music in 2022 than 2021, and I’ve been consciously trying to put music on instead of playing YouTube videos in the background. So, maybe.

  • I want to be more present.

Hard to quantify, but I definitely feel the universe has been a bit more open to me than usual. I’ve had a few experiences to that effect.

  • I want to keep going for walks.

It’s my main form of exercise, pretty much. I haven’t taken much time to go out walking just to walk, but I have had a lot on with a new job and some personal stuff. I can work on this one.

  • I want to more actively consider what I can do to make the lives of those around me better.

I try. I volunteer a bit. I’m helpful when it’s obvious to me how I can be helpful.

  • I want to widen my definition of “those around me”.

Between volunteering and my job I’m more part of a community than ever and I really like it.

  • More writing by hand. More journaling.

I have been. I’ve been keeping a regular journal, a reading journal, a commonplace book (that I need to write a post about), extensive notes at work, and also a personal scratch notebook I keep on me. It’s been pretty useful!

  • More sketching situations and dumping my brain.

Yep, been doing this. Maybe not as often as I should, but still. Ties in with the note taking above.

  • Fewer new projects, some considered work on old ones.

I started a new writing project a couple months ago, sorry. But, it’s closely related to some notes I was pulling together last year, so it kinda doesn’t count? For the purposes of these resolutions, blogging is “considered work on an old project”. I’ve had this blog for over ten years!

  • More rest. Less guilt.

A WIP. I read Rest is Resistance and it really bought some things in to focus for me.

  • I want to read the books I already own. We have books at home.

Of the twenty three books I’ve read so far this year, five have been from the library (which is fine). I have bought some books this year. Quite a few books. It makes me happy. I don’t think stopping entirely is ever gonna work for me.

  • More frugality, consideration of purchases, using what I already have.

I get a book out of the library if I can – if I can’t, I try get it on sale as an e-book or get a used copy. I haven’t spent too much on other hobbies really. I still buy things, but I know things won’t make me happy on their own.

  • Make the most of opportunities I’ve already been given, see them for the value they have.

WIP. I’m in the right place.

  • I want to watch more movies.

I haven’t done this, but I did watch True Detective, and I’ve seen a couple classics movies this year I never had before, like All the Presidents Men, and An Officer and a Gentleman. Maybe I should start a Letterboxd but I don’t know if I have another social media profile in me.

  • I do not want to start a TikTok or pivot to video.

Well, I haven’t.

  • I want to read more books by women (that I already own).

Of the twenty three books I’ve read so far this year, six have been by women. I could be doing better. Ice was a particularly highlight.

  • I want to read more books in translation (that I already own).

Of the twenty three books I’ve read so far this year, two have been in translation, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Bolaño’s Antwerp. I’m chipping away at Proust as well, the Moncrieff version. So, could be doing better.

  • I want to submit more of my poetry.

I just haven’t had the capacity. Which is a roundabout way of saying I’ve deliberately let this ball drop. I still would like to sub more things in general, but it isn’t as important to me as just doing the work, so I figure if I’m making progress, on something, anything, even if no lit mag would ever touch it or I would never dream of subbing it, it’s fine.

I did sub something last year that got published this year: I wrote a poem about Bretton Library and it appeared in Civic Leicester’s Welcome to Britain anthology. This is a big win fellas.

  • I want to spend more time with friends.

I have. I’ve tried to do things at weekends. I’ve made a conscious effort to stay in touch with people from my last job, and to make sure I’m in regular contact with people I value but can’t see all the time. I’ve just joined a D&D group for the first time in a long time.

  • I want to read something a friend has recommended (that I already own).

A friend lent us Stanley Tucci’s memoir, Taste, and it was exquisite. Her husband has lent me The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes and I am looking forward to getting stuck into it. But I didn’t already own them. Hmm. I’m gonna have to work on this one.

There you have it. I wouldn’t have bored you with it except a lot of them ended up relating to reading or my creative practise in general, and you might find it helpful. Did you have any resolutions? How are you doing with them?

(Speaking of measuring things, I did start a Librarything this year and I had a blast cataloguing my collection. The breakdown it provides is really interesting, even if it did confirm things I could mostly tell at a glance. Will do a post on that, too, once I’ve got my thoughts together.)

Header image source: https://www.hippopx.com/en/measuring-tape-measurement-tools-construction-instrument-of-measurement-construction-industry-ruler-141092