This is my first post from Argentina! We’ve hopped over the border from Chile and are in El Calafate, which I think people only visit if they plan to see the Perito Moreno Glacier. Oh, sure, there are options for seeing the glacier. You can go with a guide, see it up close from a boat or pay a lot more and hike on top of the glacier itself. We are counting our pesos and so did none of these things, but the simple bus and walking trip alone was well worth it, and so – fair warning – there are an awful lot of glacier photos in this post.
But first we have to start with our bus from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales, where we stayed for one night and attended the ‘3 o’clock talk’ at Erratic Rock to prepare for our upcoming Torres del Paine trek. Ezra (from Chicago) was incredibly helpful and, I thought, very patient with some of the questions at the end, including “so, do I need to book the campsites in advance?”. Yes, yes you do. Months in advance. We had also reached a remote enough part of the country where prices become truly ridiculous (10,000 CLP for a small calzone in a bakery, which is currently $14.75 or £11.57) but thankfully Erratic Rock was adjacent to a pub with cheap and tasty pizza.
The next day we boarded another bus and crossed into Argentina. Naturally, this involved filing out of the bus and queuing up for our Chilean exit stamp in one building before driving down the road and doing the exact same thing to get new entry stamps. Eventually we arrived at our hostel in El Calafate. You can tell I’m not a real traveller because this is actually the first time I’ve ever stayed in a shared dormitory, but everything was pretty uneventful on that front (no murder, no theft, and best of all no waking up at 3am) and in fact it was us who ended up being the most antisocial idiots, locking my keys in my locker and requiring the lock to be cut through with a saw.
Anyway, the glacier!
It really was beautiful and photos are not going to do it justice. First of all, it’s huge, so it’s very calming to just stare at it from across the water. The cracks in the ice glow with a pale blue light and the air is frequently punctuated by loud thunderclap sounds as chunks of the glacier break off and fall away. Each time this happened we whipped our heads around to try and see it, normally failing but occasionally spotting the ice and snow tumbling down. Never fear, though, because the best thing about this glacier is that – for once – it’s actually not melting at a frightening, climate-change induced rate. Everything has been in “a quasi steady state with no major changes in its size during the last and present centuries”, at least according to the reassuring sign on the path. Though emphasis on quasi steady – don’t get too close or you might be sliced open by debris.
We haven’t really done much else in El Calafate and are riding the bus back to Puerto Natales tonight to rent all of our hiking equipment and stock up on supplies. As you can see below, El Calafate does have some nice marshland by the lake where you can see flamingos and other birds, and the main street has a bunch of shops and restaurants to justify a couple of days’ stay. It’s really all about the glacier, though.
For the last couple of days we’ve been pretty quiet and chilled in the city of Punta Arenas, which is on the Strait of Magellan and is a frequent jumping-off point for other far-flung destinations – including Antarctica. “We’re at the end of the world!” cried the owner of a lovely little café here where I had my first pastel de choclo*, and I’ve certainly started to make use of the jumpers which have otherwise just been taking up space in my backpack. It was also very strange when we walked home after midnight one night with light still visible at the edge of the sky.
This is the city where Carolina grew up, and the most important thing I did here was reunite with her and Francisco to share some truly excellent pizza, drink a rhubarb-flavoured Pisco at their friend’s bar and argue with Francisco about the logic of ice-cream cones. (In Chile, it is common to serve ice-cream in a cup with an upside-down cone on top. This is manifestly ridiculous, like putting an egg-cup on a plate of scrambled eggs.)
We also checked out the city’s cemetery, which (Wikipedia informs me) made it into CNN’s list of the top 10 most beautiful cemeteries in the world. It is very nice. It’s also filled with the most phallic trees you can imagine. I’m not offering that as a pro or con, just stating it for the record so you can make an informed decision about your cemetery visits.
Other than this, we didn’t do an awful lot of touristy stuff as we are saving our energy and money for the Torres del Paine trek which we start in a week’s time. Our economising last night with a stay-at-home dinner was almost ruined when we were unable to work the AGA-style cooker, but luckily one of the AirBnb owners turned up before we had burnt off our eyebrows. (Apparently this is exactly what happened to their very first AirBnb guest.) Tonight, however, we ate out and shared this rather incredible cake.
*The owner of the café later asked to take a photo of us so she could share that she had foreign diners on her Facebook page. “Suddenly your Russian relatives will arrive!” commented one person.
We’ve spent the last week in Chile’s Región de Los Lagos. The area gets marketed as the ‘Lake District’ which causes me a little cognitive dissonance (what do you mean another country has a district with lakes?) but the connection is actually fairly appropriate given the weather. Whereas Santiago reminded us both of California this region is much more similar to the UK, with cooler (but not cold) temperatures and short, unpredictable rain showers which confuse Randi.
For the first (and almost certainly only) time on our travels we rented a car from Puerto Montt and drove – via a car ferry – to the island of Chiloé where we spent our first three nights in a town called Dalcahue. While in Chiloé we had intended to visit Chiloé National Park but after missing the entrance and instead following Google Maps for far too long up a tsunami evacuation route which reminded me of Hugo III, Jungle of Doom we turned around and ate our sandwiches and beloved Cheezels on the beach instead, happy to have made it out alive.
Shortly afterwards we picked up three hitchhikers (a Chilean, a Colombian and an Italian – I have no idea what happens if they walk into a bar) who wanted to go to the Muelle de las Almas which seemed like as good a plan as any. Ultimately the hitchhikers abandoned this idea when they discovered the entrance fee, but Randi and I persevered and had a good walk culminating in an awesome view.
The next day we eschewed driving and caught a local ferry to a neighbouring island, ending up in the seaside town of Achao. (I’m pretty sure you don’t pronounce this as a sneeze but it’s too good to pass up.) This is going to sound unflattering, but with its grey skies and rain Achao had that faintly miserable air of the seaside which is very enjoyable and rather invigorating, especially after a hearty local lunch. (You can tell it’s a local lunch place because there are no menus.) I can also confirm that the local bus service is much better than in the UK’s Lake District.
Side-note: Chilean breakfast television is terrible. I know this doesn’t sound like big news, but we watched the teenage son of a murder victim stood in the street for a full 45 minutes so that an in-studio panel could ask him questions and then debate the issue amongst themselves. 45 minutes! It was mesmerising.
Anyway, we left Chiloé and returned to the mainland for a further five nights in Puerto Varas. We’re staying in a nice hostel and I particularly appreciate the morning tea, although (and I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this yet) it is slowly dawning on me that all of the milk on our travels will be UHT, and it may be many months before I lay my hands on fresh milk again. I have new gratitude for growing up in a country with dairy farms.
After some light kayaking on the lake (until we needed to go against the wind, at which point the paddling became a little less light) our first full adventure here was hiking the Desolation Trail. This name makes it sound a lot worse than it is as the hike is relatively flat – though at times frustratingly sandy – unless you choose to do the 4km tangent up the mountain to the viewing point. Naturally we got to this just as it started to rain, which made us feel smart for carrying raincoats and very accomplished for making it to the top but did rather mist up the view.
The next day we went whitewater rafting on the Petrohué River, which was insanely fun. I have to say that it made our rafting in Yellowstone feel rather tame, as the rapids here were much bigger and almost enveloped the whole raft. Highly recommended if you are in the area, and for a small additional fee we also got the best set of photos I have yet seen on this kind of tourist activity.
We got back in time to join our hostel’s New Year’s Eve barbecue, and while we did technically stay up until midnight this year (not always a given, especially when travelling) we were already in bed by this time and only heard, rather than saw, the town’s fireworks over the lake. I’m sure they were lovely.
With no New Year’s Day hangover we were free to rent bikes from our hostel and cycle their recommended route to the town of Frutillar. This proved more challenging than we anticipated, beginning with some very bumpy unpaved paths before joining cars on the road. In theory the total length was 32km, but you should discount the not insignificant length I spent walking my bicycle up hills and then sometimes down the other side again, not being a big fan of steepness in either direction. You can get a sense of our struggles by the fact that we had planned to have lunch in Frutillar but ended up eating dinner there instead. (Fortunately we were able to leave our bicycles there rather than riding them all the way home, which would have killed me.)
That said, as the pain/terror of the ride fades, I can say now that I’m glad we did it and it certainly felt like a healthy start to the year. After a very hearty meal we came home to watch the Doctor Who Special, which on the whole was rather a triumph. It’s not easy to do something new with the Daleks while keeping them frightening and I thought this was an excellent way of reintroducing them to the show.
This was a big year. Not only was it my final year living in Chicago – and working for Groupon – but it also ended with Randi and I packing up and beginning our travels in South America.
January
After a nostalgic New Year’s Eve at Josh and Anna’s flat I landed back in Chicago on New Year’s Day without a coat, hat or gloves. [Cue montage sequence at REI where I bulked up for my final Midwestern winter.] Later in the month I saw the future governor of Illinois make his pitch alongside rival candidates at a townhall meeting and met Randi’s cousin (and soon-to-be Chicagoan) Arielle for the first time. I also shared a friendly Friday night with the forensics officer who came to investigate our apartment break-in. It turns out that American police will not accept cups of tea, though.
February
My strongest February memory is from Ashley and Erik’s Super Bowl party. I was sitting on their sofa, eating their chilli cheese and chatting to a fellow Hillary phonebanker when I said how pleasantly surprising it was that everything was working out just fine with Trump as President. He didn’t agree and I had to wait awkwardly for my British sarcasm to show. Close runner-up memories: my awesome surprise weekend in Atlanta courtesy of Randi, which included Jimmy Carter’s terrible Oval Office furniture, the church where Martin Luther King preached, a crazy man on our CNN tour and MARTA. Hurray for MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority! Later we also visited Randi’s family in Dallas and toured the only “book depository” anyone has heard of. We also saw Icarus (crazy Russian doping!) and – television highlight of the year? – the BBC’s documentary on IKEA. (Don’t mock, it was really good.)
March
I spent a chunk of March in California, beginning in Palo Alto for work and then moving to San Francisco where I saw Weightless with Jamie, hung out with Jonah’s family and accidentally scared Nolan’s roommates into thinking that I was breaking in. Finally I flew to Yorba Linda for Randi’s mum’s surprise 60th birthday party and narrowly escaped being mauled by a bobcat. Meanwhile, in Chicago, we drank goodbye to McKenna and Rusty (oh, the giant pretzel!), spent a morning in Evanston with Melissa and Rudy, celebrated Catherine’s birthday at Geja’s and introduced Grace and Charlotte to all of our Chicago dinner staples.
April
We started April with a combined Easter and Passover brunch (I ate most of the chocolate) before a little light Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri at Joe and Julie’s. The other really good film we saw this month was The Other Side of Everything about Serbian activist Srbijanka Turajlić, after which she made a guest appearance. I also wrote a cathartic essay to Jewel, saw Ed Miliband at a University of Chicago event and spent my accumulated Groupon Bucks on a weekend in Milwaukee. Highlights there included the Domes, the cheese, the Chudnow Museum, the surprise birthday party which the hotel struggled to hide from their electronic board in the foyer and – of course – the amazing Forged In Fire: Knife or Death.
May
One night – I don’t remember exactly when – Randi, Amanda and I had let ourselves into the empty apartment opposite to nose around. It turned out to be lovely and spacious, and by May we had successfully persuaded our landlord to let us move across the hallway. This upgrade was soon put to good use hosting our best-attended Eurovision party to date. Other achievements in May were seeing Haim at the Aragon Ballroom and somehow beating Marte at Mario Kart. But the biggest thing of all was Randi’s surprise 25th birthday party at Carnivale, which had involved a lot of lying / organising / secret meetings with Catherine and AJ in the lead-up, but came off very successfully!
June
My last Chicago summer! As usual, it was a busy time and included rock climbing with Catherine and AJ, a swim in the Pulaski Park pool, a brief reunion with Jonah, burgers at Au Cheval with Gonzalo and Francisco and a failed baseball outing with Toggolyn and Kevin. We hosted Christa, throwing in the Incredible Burger at Kuma’s and Death by Chocolate at Improv Shakespeare, and were the very first guests at Francisco and Carolina’s new home where they fed us Chilean hot dogs and vetted our South American plans. I had not one but two birthday dinners: at the terrifying Red Square (for nostalgia purposes) and the amazing Spacca Napoli. I also went back to Palo Alto – this time with Robert and Shelby – and satisfied my curiosity by wandering around Google’s Mountain View campus. Randi and I also flew to Charlottesville for Chelsea’s wedding where we stayed with our mutual friend Villy and toured Monticello. Afterwards, Randi and I hung out with her cousin Ben in DC and passed judgements at the National Portrait Gallery. Finally, I will remember June as the month where (a) Todd showed me Terminator, and (b) I caved and purchased a ridiculously large Dominion box. A great purchase decision, even if it is currently stranded in Chicago 😮
July
The World Cup moved up a gear in July and we persuaded Elana and Steve to join us for England’s victorious quarter-final match against Sweden. Things did not go so well at the semi-final and at an (otherwise lovely) morning at Karol’s I laid my football interest to rest for another four years after the unhappy play-off against Belgium. You know who was a winner in July? Me, in a game of Catan with Chloe and Aaron – that never happens! This month we also tried Gloomhaven with Jason and Carrie plus a whole host of other games at Joe and Julie’s, celebrated 4th July at Robert’s, saw Ocean’s 8 with Ellen and Lou and rode the new Navy Pier Ferris Wheel with Randi’s cousins from Philadelphia. Francisco patiently answered all of my Spanish questions over WhatsApp, Randi was mistaken for Millie Bobby Brown at Margie’s Candies, I absolutely loved The Pirates of Penzance and our flat had many nights in with Mrs. Maisel. I also saw Incredibles 2 with Amanda, Terminator 2 with Toggolyn and Three Identical Strangers at the Music Box Theatre. There was my final work trip to Palo Alto for an offsite, while in Chicago we finally made it to a Steppenwolf play (The Roommate) and also Devon Street after Randi practised her camerawork on Loyola Beach. Finally, there was a very popular video of me killing a fly. I killed many flies in July, but this one in particular was pretty special.
August
A few Chicago things took place in August, including Erik and Ashley’s block party (where I think we detained their state senator for a good 45 minutes), Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again and a stroll through Humboldt Park with Carolina and Poncho. But the majority of the month, and a real highlight of the year, was our trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. Randi and I were joined by both of our mothers in the brightest green Jeep you’ve ever seen on an amazing journey of lakes, caverns, geysers, bear spray and Huckleberry ice cream. The hikes in Grand Teton were our absolute favourite and after many, many family holidays which my mum had planned for me it felt good to invite her on a trip where everything had already been worked out. Including the Idaho Potato Museum. I also want to note that Randi and I cleverly left ourselves an extra weekend day after we got back home so we could blog about it all.
September
As our departure date crept closer, I invested in some travelling luxuries. So I went back to REI for an afternoon of packing and re-packing weights into bags until I found my perfect backpack and handed over my life savings to Apple in exchange for an iPhone XS. I also saw Daryl’s niece Zoe while she was in Chicago, hung out with Karol (for curry) and Zak (for cocktails) and celebrated Amanda’s birthday on the bow of a boat, listening to the soundtrack from The Greatest Showman and mocking Randi’s ghostly night circus which, embarrassingly, turned out to be real. Later we had a last meal at La Scarola with Amanda and Michael – a place which has a very fond place in my heart. We also saw my cousin Alix in The Wife, bookended by British lunches and desserts at the Duke of Perth, and posed a lot on the Blue Line for our photoshoot. Finally, we spent a weekend in AJ’s home town of Hartland where I learned to drive (a lawnmower) and spent hours in the world’s most elaborate corn maze. I was also disturbed to learn that parents of American high school football players aren’t allowed to keep up their spirits by drinking while they stand in the cold and watch the Homecoming game.
October
In October we got our first set of vaccinations for travelling and I started to tell more people that I was leaving, including at John’s cosy Groupon evening (where alas I arrived too late for the chickens) and over multiple Motel drinks. Mike and Melissa visited Chicago just in time, and together we saw Free Solo and Quantum Shark at Improv Shakespeare. I also enjoyed Crazy Rich Asians with Amanda, the start of Jodie Whittaker’s first season of Doctor Who (together with our neighbourly Doctor Who/Bake Off watching group!), an evening of 2nd Story and a trip to the Garfield Park Conservatory. Two other important highlights: winning an escape room (on a team organised by Toggolyn) and arguing about the nature of Jesus with Catherine over fondue. If you don’t think evangelical telephone helplines would be useful in your life, you haven’t lived.
November
And so it was finally here… my last month in Chicago, where I’d lived since June 2014. Randi and I had our last visitors to the city (the Moffitts) with whom we visited the funky Wndr Museum and saw our last Improv Shakespare (What I Learned From My Dog). I went to my last Groupon All Hands meeting (featuring Tiffany Haddish!) and then had my very last day at work followed by a leaving party at Revolution Brewery. Not forgetting my last corn beef hash (with blue cheese) at Windy City Café! We made latkes and lefse with Catherine and AJ, saw The Crimes of Grindleward with Arielle, left a bunch of stuff at Robert and Julie’s house (sorry!) and then one Monday morning I said goodbye to Amanda and flew home with many bags. While in London I managed an overnight stay in Chelmsford to see Abbi, Paul and Jack, a night with Cat and Matt, a Themes & Sources pub catch-up, brunch with Simon, random sibling fun and also learnt all about the pen licensing system at Salusbury Primary School.
December
Oliver and Abi’s wedding was so much fun and made me so happy. Together with fancy themed tea with Catherine and AJ it was the perfect note to leave London on and begin travelling. The rest of my December has been pretty extensively blogged already! Randi and I started in Lima, Peru and worked our way down to Chile, spending Christmas in Santiago with Francisco and Carolina’s family and ending the year in Puerto Varas in Chile’s Lake District. A particular highlight of December was our stop in San Pedro de Atacama, where we floated in salt lagoons in the middle of the desert and spent a night looking through telescopes at the stars.
2019 will definitely be a strange one. We still have a lot of travelling left, but what exactly I will be writing about at the end of my 2019 annual review is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, have an amazing new year!
Time for the annual book review post, which has grown longer and longer since I started in 2012! For another year running I met my annual target – “at least one more book than last year” – by reading 42 books (a great number) in total. This was definitely made a little easier by having extra free time in December. For 2018 I also instituted an extra rule of alternating between male and female authors after noticing that last year’s bookshelf was pretty imbalanced in favour of men.
Since 2019 is going to be such a transitional year – with all of our travelling and moving back to London – I have decided to take a break from my reading rules and targets. I’m still planning to read – a lot! – but I’ll just see what comes naturally, and maybe go back to normal in 2020. And without further ado, here’s my 2018 bookshelf:
Fiction
I started the year with Americanah, which left me a little flat. People have been surprised by this, especially given how much I enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun, and it’s not that I have any particular critique of the novel. It was well-written and enjoyable to read but just didn’t leave me with much afterwards. I then moved on to my traditional annual book recommendation from Todd, which this year was The Virgin Suicides. This was an unsettling read, clearly written in a different era, and the collective ‘us’ narrating the book is deliberately creepy. I have to say, I was never into the fetishisation of suicide which sometimes exists among teenagers, and structuring the book around the suicides of five sisters struck me as more totally horrific than maybe it does to a younger audience. Sticking with recommendations: I did enjoy Nina is Not OK, which came via Tash and felt very true to life.
The Power was excellent, centred around the very raw and mostly unspoken question: just how much of the modern relationship between men and women is based on the underlying awareness of physical strength? It reminded me a little of Exit West in that it uses a spark of sci-fi/fantasy to probe a big social question, but does so a lot more successfully. In a similar vein, I was excited to enter Margaret Atwood’s dystopian (and highly developed) world of Oryx and Crake and am looking forward to the rest of the series.
Let’s talk about Tess of the D’Urbervilles, because Tess’s life is really depressing… a shining example of when to just pack up and move to America. It’s impossible not to feel deeply for Tess and the unfairness of her life, and the force of fate which pushes her relentlessly from bad to worse to even worse, even though there are plenty of moments where things are – maddeningly – almost-but-not-quite rescued. The book also paints a vivid picture of English rural life – although, of course, I don’t feel the same sadness about its passing that Hardy does.
When it comes to Ishiguro I can’t stop myself working through his back catalogue, even when it means reading something as frustrating as The Unconsoled. It’s a dream world – that’s all you need to know. The kind of nightmare where space and time is all warped and you keep taking on new missions without ever completing anything. In comparison, I enjoyed reading Purity a lot more but it is also the weakest Franzen book so far, especially once it starts dragging in the second half with the memoir section. Also, can we please institute a complete ban on fictional characters in novels who are authors?
In contrast, Lethal White was so, so good and my favourite of the Cormoran Strike series so far. The novel was satisfyingly long, giving me more time with Strike and Robin after a far too prolonged absence, and the ending was less of a headtwist than usual… not that I saw it coming, but I felt that everything fitted together better plot-wise than the predecessors in the series. More please, JK Rowling, and soon!
I was a little disappointed that American classic A Wrinkle In Time is not actually a time-travel story (more of a space-travel story!) but it was cool as a piece of children’s fiction with a strong protagonist. The explicitly Christian message (and some overly obvious Cold War rhetoric) can be a little off-putting, and it is funny that the big bad is called IT, which now sounds more dreary than sinister. Sticking with the American sci-fi theme, The Golden Apples of the Sun – the third and final anthology by Ray Bradbury in the beautiful collection gifted to me by Katie a few years ago – was another amazing collection of short stories. Almost all of the stories manage to convey a complete, vividly-imaged world in just a handful of pages. The other short story collection I read this year was The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke’s brief return to the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I enjoyed these fairy tales, but I’m also up for a full-throated sequel.
I’m not really sure how I feel about My Brilliant Friend, which has been extensively recommended. The central characters were certainly interesting and I will keep reading the series to follow their lives, but I wasn’t nearly as gripped as many reviews suggested I should be. Similarly, Paul Auster’s ‘New York Triology’ (City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room) are the kind of unsettling and frustrating postmodern books which are good to read occasionally, but I really don’t love, and I’m worried that the Amazon and/or Goodreads algorithm is going to start sending me more.
The book which really rubbed me up the wrong way, however, was London Fields. I had enjoyed Time’s Arrow so picked this up as my next Martin Amis novel. It is, supposedly, regarded as his “strongest”. But it’s a car crash. Yes, it is well-written, but the good writing is just directed at being snide and cynical for no real purpose. It’s also endlessly racist and misogynistic. At this point I can imagine Amis popping out to complain that I’m being unfair because it’s the narrator character who is racist and misogynistic, not him. No dice. All the vitriol does nothing other than to furnish a vague and confused “state of society” critique for the “end of the millennium” [sic] which had already dated very badly by the end of the actual millennium since the book was written in 1989, anticipates literally nothing of the 1990s and anachronistically chucks in threats of a nuclear war between the Cold War superpowers.
OK, assuming I’ve persuaded you not to read that, what should you read instead? Kindred (a time-travel story from 1979 about a black American woman who finds herself back in a nineteenth century slave plantation) is powerful and very brutal. The Queue is both Orwellian and Kafkaesque, but set in a modern day Middle Eastern bureaucracy which is clearly Egypt. And I want to put in a good word for HG Well’s The Invisible Man, which is a short, fun classic of sci-fi about (unsurprisingly) a man who manages to turn himself invisible. Unfortunately, he turns out to be the worst, most petulant guy imaginable so the opportunity for superhero stunts is entirely wasted.
Finally, a few words for the authors who always make it onto this list. I planned to read Asimov’s classic Foundation years ago but decided to methodologically work through his interlinked Robot and Empire series first. This year I finally got there and while the underlying premise is slightly bonkers, I am reassured to have many books left in the series to enjoy. And I have almost caught up with Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series! The sixth instalment, The Hanging Tree, felt a little rushed at the end but did move the overarching plot along significantly and entering this world is always a treat.
Non-Fiction
A couple of my favourite non-fiction books this year have been recommendations from Vox’s The Weeds podcast, starting with Dreamland. It tells the intertwined story of the rise of opioid prescribing in the United States (most notably OxyContin) and, simultaneously, the revolutionary ‘customer-centric’ approach of the Mexican heroin trade, for example through salaried dealers who have no incentive to dilute the product. The result has been an opioid epidemic of devastating proportions. An excellent read – perhaps the only thing missing is a deeper examination of the origins of the physical pain driving the initial prescriptions in the first place.
Similarly, Ghettoside told a simple but effective story about murder in the most violent areas of LA. While many people are familiar with police violence in black communities, the other side of the same coin is chronic under-policing where it really matters. Clearance rates for murder are shockingly low, and we know from research that consistency of punishment is much more important for reducing crime than the harshness of the penalty. The homicide detectives in the book have low status even within the LAPD, but justice can’t be done without them. All in all, along with the powerful stories of wasted lives, the book is a good rebuke to the idea that only preventative policing is valuable.
I also really enjoyed Crashed by Adam Tooze – although that’s unsurprising, since I always enjoy his work. This book runs through the decade following the 2008 financial crisis, and the most memorable theme is the poor preparation and reactions of European institutions in general and Angela Merkel in particular. I think perceptions of Merkel are rose-tinted in a world of Trump and Brexit, and she may be personally sympathetic, but it’s still amazing to contrast Europe with the US Federal Reserve. The consequences (most obviously in Greece) have been dire.
I read A Spy Among Friends – about the notorious spy Kim Philby – after being inspired by a John le Carré novel a few years ago. It’s really just totally crazy that the guy running anti-Soviet intelligence for Britain was a Soviet spy the whole time. Astonishing. Sticking with a Soviet theme, How Not to Network a Nation is an interesting story about the aborted creation of a Soviet internet to manage the economy. It reminded me of an Asimov short story about globalised central planning by computer. At the same time, this is very much one of those academic books to which someone has given a snappy title and slapped a nice cover on. I could have done without the repetitive pondering.
The Guns of August is a classic of popular history, but I was expecting something more political. Instead, most of the book is taken up by the military history of the first months of the First World War, and the events which quickly led to a stalemate with no decisive victory for either side. Interesting, but not really the focus I wanted. On the other hand, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was absorbing and a really emotional read. Obviously you feel really badly for Anne’s mother, who is treated pretty harshly by her daughter, but I don’t think that makes Anne ‘unlikable’ as opposed to a teenager who was robbed of the time to grow up. The worst part is getting to D-Day: she is so excited that the invasion has begun, while the reader is just counting down the months until August when the family are discovered and the diary stops.
No, I haven’t read Democracy in America yet. Yes, it’s on my list. As a warm up, I read Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution instead. His writing (at least in this translation) is very fresh and easy to read, and the key point is worth repeating: “it is not always going from bad to worse that leads to revolution… the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform… every abuse that is eliminated seems only to reveal the others that remain”. (Admittedly the logic for rulers of bad governments is not great.) Equally, his passage on the feudal nobility – who once possessed greater privileges, and yet were less unpopular because they provided services in return – has interesting implications for government today.
Tara Westover’s Educated (yes, the book on every reading list) was not quite the memoir I expected. Based on her interview on the Talking Politics podcast I was anticipating an upbringing which was extremely cut-off from the rest of the world… but not necessarily one which is so straightforwardly violent and abusive.
Finally, I really loved The Prodigal Tongue, a book about American and British English which grew out of Lynne Murphy’s awesome Separated by a Common Language blog. It’s so nice to read a non-alarmist, well-informed and evidence-based exploration of English in two countries by someone who obviously loves language. Better than 95% of anything else you will read on the topic.
Todd on 2024: My Year In Books: “I know what Glass Hotel is about. It’s about a bunch of loosely connected, barely developed characters, with their timelines…” Jan 4, 17:17
