Abbi with the book
Tonight I was invited by Abbi to join the book launch of Love Letters to the Home Office, a collection of stories about families kept apart by the UK’s 2012 immigration laws. These reforms mandate a minimum income of almost £19,000 before you can begin to get your partner or your family home.
As it happens, I do know a little of what it’s like to say goodbye to someone you love at an airport, knowing that you have no legal right to stay in the same place together.
But that is nothing compared to the stories in this book:
“There’s a wee boy in Chandler, Arizona, USA. He’s 15 months old and his name is Robert. He has some baby toys but his favourite thing in the entire world isn’t a toy. Robert loves his mum’s Samsung tablet. He calls it ‘Da da’ and carries it around the house all the time.
Robert hasn’t seen his father since he was 6 months old. The tablet is all he knows of him. They talk on Skype when they can, but there isn’t always a good connection; he doesn’t understand why his dad is sometimes sad when they talk and play.”
This is an entirely fixable problem: we don’t have to keep families apart, it’s something this country’s leaders are choosing to do out of cowardice. For that matter, we don’t have to have an insanely bureaucratic, officious and expensive Home Office either. And this is something which should alarm all British citizens because – take it from me – you never know when you might find yourself in love with the ‘wrong’ nationality. Instead of looking for a system to pretend to protect us from the world outside, we should be demanding a system which gives us our rights as full, global citizens who can now trade, communicate, move from country to country and start families across borders more than ever before.
Go sign the petitions!
Success! For another year running, I’ve managed to meet my target of reading at least one more than last year’s total. And here they were:
Having discovered Ishiguro last year, in 2013 I greedily went back for more with A Pure View of Hills and Never Let Me Go. The latter was probably my favourite, although the theme of lying – mostly to ourselves – is always present in his works, and always compelling. Never Let Me Go is more subtle than a great social conspiracy: the characters are ‘told and not told’ about their world, which is very resonant. Truth, lies and storytelling is also central to Pullman’s short The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ but the story hasn’t stuck with me nearly as much. Perhaps it comes down to what you read as a child, but the image of the afterlife in His Dark Materials has always stayed with me as a frightening depiction of what religion would really entail. Nothing here came close in lasting imagery.
Someone else who got two books into my list this year was J.K. Rowling. I love J.K. Rowling, and I love how much gluttonous pleasure I get from her books in the same way (and this is my only Harry Potter comparison) that reading Harry Potter was addictive, and preferable to eating, sleeping or talking to real people. I mean, The Casual Vacancy was a joy, and an especially indulgent joy because it felt like a friend’s very funny skewering of a shared target: little England. There are plenty of other, more uncomfortable books to critique the flaws and hypocrisies of the city-dwelling, metropolitan middle class. (Cough.) But this was aimed at the snobbish claustrophobia of the suburbs instead, and felt like a better take down of the Daily Mail than any direct attack. That they obliged in calling it a “relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature crammed down your throat” by a “blinkered, Left-leaning demagogue” in return is the icing on the cake. I have less to say about The Cuckoo’s Calling, other than I also enjoyed it immensely and look forward to further adventures of Cormoran Strike.
And Then There Were None wins the award for most atmospheric read of the year: alone on a darkened evening in a quiet Welsh B&B, before getting to the end and wondering if anyone was going to jump out and kill me on my way to dinner. The Bloody Chamber was wonderful. (Does everyone else love Angela Carter yet? Good.) The Picture of Dorian Grey was flawed but interesting and confusing: what is Wilde trying to say about his own philosophy? The Blind Assassin was good but over-long, and that’s about all the emotion it summons up in me. I approached Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere with some hesitation, as it seemed that a fantasy novel set in a shadowy London underworld stuffed with Underground references was too good to be true, and bound to be a disappointment. Instead, I loved it, and it left me wanting more adventures in that world. And then right at the end of the year I ‘discovered’ Doris Lessing (to the extent that you can discover a Nobel prize-winning author first published in 1950) with the sad, haunting, sometimes scary The Grass Is Singing. Will definitely return to her in the next few years.
This year, the balance of injecting new authors alongside those I’d already read came largely from Book Club at work, and I’m really glad for it. Some of them I didn’t instinctively love (The Interrogative Mood, Are You My Mother?) but the discussion was always enjoyable and often made me retrospectively enjoy reading it, if that makes any sense at all. (Oh, the lies we tell ourselves…) Winesburg, Ohio just makes you want to shake the whole town and tell them to stop being so introspectivey European on us. And I think it’s almost a cliché for book clubs to read and then disagree massively on We Need To Talk About Kevin. Some hated it, some loved it… and I was kinda in the middle. I wanted to turn the (virtual) pages to find out what happened next, but the central characters seemed so absurdly distant from my actual experiences that it didn’t really matter much.
A more grounded view of growing up came from Melissa in What Should We Tell Our Daughters? – one of only a few non-fiction books this year. My abiding memory is reading this on the train, with Michele reading it over my shoulder and expressing frequent agreement, and just occasionally feeling a slightly hopeless feeling of ‘oh, the injustices are so layered and tug in so many different directions’. Lords of Finance was enjoyable although what stuck with me most was less about central banking and more about the sheer stupidity of the Treaty of Versailles, which is well trodden ground but well remembered as we go into 2014. And William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain was somewhat infuriating, because despite being well-written and informative about a part of the world I’ve never seen, it assumes too much complicity from the reader in accepting that the decline of Christianity in the Middle East is something to be mourned beyond the immediate human suffering endured by its adherents.
I’ve already been on a book buying splurge for next year 😀
Thanks to beauty of Goodreads, here’s what I’ve read in 2012:
I immensely enjoyed reading The Remains of the Day – my first book of 2012 – but regard it even more highly now, as both the themes and Ishiguro’s beautiful writing style have stuck with me throughout the year. Coraline and The Metamorphosis were both short, creepy and chilling, but some of the longer novels I’ve read this year were disappointing, especially when compared to other works by the same authors. The Time Machine isn’t as good as The First Men In The Moon, despite being more famous, and The Magic Toyshop felt like it was written before Carter really got into her stride.
The big exception to this in 2012 was Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? – easily the best thing I’ve read by Philip K Dick, whose book VALIS (think ‘William Blake in space’) still makes me shudder to think about. I was also a fan of Frankenstein – more so than I expected – while PG Wodehouse remains a reliable delight if you need cheering up (which particular Jeeves novel I happened to pick off a virtual shelf doesn’t seem to really matter much). Special mentions also go to The Hunger Games trilogy, which I am not ashamed to say I wolfed down with great pleasure, and Zadie Smith’s NW – because there’s something special about the one writer who most conjures up real feelings of home.
Non-fiction wise, the stand-out book was clearly Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma. I am deeply in awe of this man, and his devastating critique of modern medicine is so much more compelling for providing straightforward, inexpensive and entirely achievable remedies. If nothing else, this is a brilliant demonstration of how to make a sustained evidence-based argument, and I hope Ben has more campaigning success in 2013.
Go on, give me something else to read…
If you want a tedious dawdle around banal philosophy, followed by some actually-rather-gripping boy vs. tiger action… read The Life Of Pi. (Or go see the film, I guess.)
If you want to learn a lot about whales… read Moby Dick.
If you have a lot of time to spare and are insatiably interested in eighteenth century political theory… read The Spirit of the Laws. (Or go see the film. Apparently they’ve added a love interest.)
If you’re planning a 70s-themed sex party… read The Dice Man.
If you’re a proud Tube nerd… read Underground, Overground.
So this is an experiment, inspired entirely by watching Tash this morning, at reviewing the books I’ve read during 2011 so far. My tastes are perhaps rather eccentric, so this may not be of much interest to anyone, but let’s give it a whirl. After all, since there are way too many interesting books to read in the world today, and far too little time to read anything at all, perhaps you can treat reading this review as sorta equivalent to actually having read these yourselves? Maybe?
Also, I’m putting off tidying my floor.
The Brain; Longitude; Right Ho, Jeeves; On Liberty and other writings
I’m rather addicted to the Very Short Introduction series even though I remember little of the detail after finishing, and thus the attempt to be more scientifically literate doesn’t always progress much. Still, the brain is fascinating enough to read about repeatedly, and this book helpfully devotes a decent chunk of time just trying to establish the basics of how neurons actually work. Frustratingly, of course, some of the bigger questions about how consciousness as a whole physically comes about remain largely unanswered, and I very much hope that I’ll be able to read an updated edition in 50 years’ time summarising our further leaps in understanding. In the meantime, this is a primer to the usual high standards of the Very Short Introductions, although not quite as ‘fun’ as the still-extraordinary Phantoms in the Brain. And you know you’re in safe hands with a book which stridently sets out the ‘purely material terms’ of the discussion in the very first paragraph: no messing about with spirituality here.
Longitude – Dava Sobel
I read this as part of my quest to finally get through some books which have been sitting on my shelf for years. The story of eighteenth century clockmaker John Harrison and his life’s work building clocks accurate enough to determine longitude at sea, its greatest attribute is stimulating an appreciation of just how many people in the past worked their little socks off in cumulatively bringing us to where we are today. I mean, this guy really did care about his clocks, and hats off to him for that. The tone is breezy and easy to read – certainly no bad thing – although the narrative quest for heroes and villains does result in a number of people trotted out to be the ‘bad guys’, thwarting our ‘lone genius’ out of jealousy or contempt or bitterness, who unfortunately don’t seem capable of much more serious villainy than perhaps keeping his clock in the sun for too long. Still, sometime it’s nice to read history on a human-scale, and this book won’t demand much of your time in return for making you a lot more knowledgeable about sea clocks.
Right Ho, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Sublime. I’d never read any Wodehouse before, nor seen any adaptations, but this has instantly converted me into a fan. I sense that some people are turned off by a book set entirely in an inter-war bubble of insufferably posh idiots. Wodehouse is consistently mocking, of course, but it’s certainly very ‘gentle’ (as my dad said a little dismissively) and inclined to leave you walking around for days muttering ‘tush!’ and ‘what ho!’ at the earliest opportunity. Is this inculcating a romantic attachment to a pretty unattractive world of, as previously mentioned, insufferably posh idiots? No, it isn’t. It’s just funny, OK? Beautifully written, wonderfully unstated and hilarious… give it a try, and leave the searing social critique for some other writer in some other book. Right ho, Jeeves!
On Liberty and other writings – J.S. Mill
Toby Young makes a habit of saying ridiculous things, but one of his more outlandish theories revolves around the learning of Latin being necessary because it ‘teaches you to think’ and ‘argue logically’ and ‘swim 200 metres backstroke’ and so on. It’s a shame, not only because it demeans Latin, but also because it implies that English is somehow deficient as a language of serious thought. Reading J.S. Mill might cure him of this illusion. There are three works included here: ‘On Liberty’ (1859), ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869) and his posthumous drafts of ‘Chapters on Socialism’. Mill was progressive enough to render him immediately likeable to a modern audience, even if you don’t agree with everything he says, and his writing style smacks of a fair-minded consideration of the arguments melded together with passionate force in articulating what he believes. (The defence of freedom of speech in ‘On Liberty’ is particularly good.) I found the final ‘Chapters on Socialism’ the most interesting, actually, mostly because I think they would pass the ‘Saoirse test’: a discussion thoughtful enough not to prompt a metaphorical shot to the head. It was the following line from ‘On Liberty’, however, which had me beaming with nerdy political thought love:
“It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.”
Beth on Bergen: “It’s always fun to see you two having such a great time exploring a new place!” Apr 7, 15:05
