keep a record of interesting things I have read

by Thomas Glavinic was reviewed in the LRB recently and sounded interesting, so I got hold of a copy. Glavinic lives in Vienna, and the book has been translated from the German.

It’s set in Vienna and the main protagonist is Jonas, a thirty-something interior designer. On day he gets up, goes to the bus stop, and reads a paper while he’s waiting. Then he realises there’s no traffic. He calls his girlfriend who’s in Britain visiting relatives. No answer. He calls his father. Again no answer. He goes to his father’s flat – it’s empty – and doesn’t see anybody on the way. He turns the TV on; there’s just snow. The internet isn’t working either.

It becomes clear that everybody in the world has vanished, as have all the animals. There are no corpses, just an absence of people. The electricity is still working – Jonas can get himself food out of shops and cook it. Cars are around but they are all parked, there are none on the roads.

Jonas makes day trips to various places and leaves messages on pub menu boards: Jonas, 18th July. He starts having strange dreams about a scary wolf-bear, and hears noises. Worst of all, he sets up video cameras around Vienna and records himself sleeping. His alter ego, the Sleeper, is terrifying. “Jonas had the fleeting impression that one eye had opened. The Sleeper was looking at the camera. Looking at it in full awareness of being filmed. Then the eye snapped shut again.”

There are a lot of flashbacks as Jonas revisits his family home and also places where they used to go on holiday. At one point he gets lost in the woods at night, argh! Towards the end of the book he decides to drive to Britain in search of his girlfriend. I won’t give away the ending, but I found it a very disappointing anti-climax.

I read this book as fast as possible because it was so deeply disturbing and nightmarish. The closest thing I can think of is “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro which induced a similar state of dread from its opening pages. So, an interesting idea, but not an easy read at all.

I really like Ali Smith, but I suspect she’s the kind of writer you either love or hate.

Hotel World is about a hotel in a nondescript town somewhere in England. Sara Wilby works as a chambermaid there and in the opening chapter we learn that on her second night, she climbs inside a dumb waiter on the 6th floor as a bet, and plunges to her death. This is the backdrop to six chapters, each from a different character’s point of view and style.

The first chapter is narrated by the ghost of Sara Wilby, or is it? Weirdly the ghost doesn’t seem to know much about her – it’s like a small child and floats about the place. It haunts her family and then goes to talk to her decomposing body to find out more – if this sounds weird, it is. The next chapter is from the point of view of Else, a homeless woman whose patch is next to the hotel. One night she is invited in to the hotel to stay in a room, by a rebellious receptionist. The third chapter is from the point of view of Lise, the receptionist, who now has some sort of ME type illness and is trying to complete a government form. There is a flashback to the Else incident.

After that we hear from another woman staying in the hotel at the time, and then Sara’s sister who goes crazy, gets into the hotel and opens up the dumb waiter which has been covered over since the accident, to find out how long it would have taken Sara to fall down it. The final chapter is about various other characters who have popped up in the course of the story, and I found the ending, involving the girl in the watch shop on whom Sara had a crush, incredibly sad.

This account doesn’t do justice to the inventiveness of Smith’s writing. The sister’s chapter is amazing, with no full stops at all – it’s breathless, sentences just run into each other or are connected by “&”. I also liked the quotations from the hotel’s leaflets, and the government form. “Incapacity for Work Questionnaire. Do not delay filling in and sending back this questionnaire or you could lose money. How many days have I been holding this form in my hand? Lise wondered. Have I lost money?”

When I first read this book, it was like nothing else I’ve ever read. Now the closest thing I can think of is DBC Pierre’s “Vernon God Little” which had a similar immediacy.

Last week I read Smith’s latest book, “Girl meets boy” which is part of a series re-working ancient myths. The myth in this book is from Ovid about a girl who is brought up to be a boy so that she won’t be killed at birth. Smith’s story is about a pair of sisters living in Aberdeen, Anthea and Imogen. Imogen is ambitious and conventional and has just got Anthea a job at Pure, a dodgy company which wants to market Scottish water, but Anthea is clearly not going to last the course.

The androgynous Robin stages a protest outside the Pure offices and Anthea gets together with her. This leads to the best chapter in the book for me, where Imogen is having a conversation in her head trying to come to terms with this. There are a lot of brackets, which some might find irritating but I didn’t.

“(My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.)
(No, because the parliament lifted that legislation, didn’t it?)
(Did it?)
(I can’t remember. I can’t remember either way. I didn’t ever think that particular law was anything I’d ever have to remember, or consider.)”

Later in the book Imogen travels down to London for work purposes.
“(It is really English down here in England.)
First class all the way. I was the only person in Carriage J when we set off. Me! A whole train carriage to myself. I am doing all right”

This is a lovely book and has a happy ending. It’s also quite short so makes the perfect intro to Smith’s writings. After reading it I wanted to re-read it immediately!

by Steve Taylor is a discussion of time and the speed at which it passes. It’s not a science book, but is very readable with lots of anecdotes. He proposes five laws of psychological time:

1. Time speeds up as we get older.

Time seems very slow to children and I’m sure we can all remember how that felt. I distinctly remember being banned by my grandmother from taking part in some exciting group activity that all my cousins were doing and being told that I could do it when I was nine, and howling at her “But I’ll never be nine!” ;)

2. Time slows down when we are exposed to new experiences and environments.

So one way to make it slow down is to travel constantly or change jobs all the time to stimulate yourself. Certainly when I look back on recent holidays I seem to have done a hell of a lot more than in a typical day in the zoo.

3. Time passes quickly in states of absorption (“flow”)

Getting involved in a juicy spreadsheet or book or TV programme or computer game (or, er, 43T) makes time fly!

4. Time passes slowly in states of non-absorption.

Anyone else think this is just the opposite of no.3? ;) When you’re bored as hell or waiting for something to happen, time drags awfully. Friday afternoons at the office spring to mind.

5. Time often passes slowly, or stops altogether, in situations where the ‘conscious mind’ or normal ego is in abeyance.

Here he discusses the effects of mind-bending drugs, and suggests that meditation is a better way to go. Also mindfulness – the old “take the time to do the washing-up properly” advice. It’s good advice when one remembers to do it.

There was an interesting chapter on different cultures’ perspectives on time and how many tribes don’t have words for time in the way that Western cultures do, but their words are much more cyclical and nature-based. It was interesting reading this book while in Burgundy because everyone was very excited about the harvest – wine-making is essentially an agricultural activity – and it made me realise how disconnected I am from nature living in the city and having an office job. I get the feeling Taylor may have an anthropological background – for me, although this chapter was interesting, after I’d heard about the 10th tribe that didn’t have language for “next week” I started getting diminishing returns.

On the other hand, one bit which fascinated me, but which was only a page or two, was about the current physics take on time. Apparently all modern self-respecting physicists believe that the linear view of time, our sense of the sequence of time, is an illusion. Blimey! I’d like to have read more about that, but instead he started talking about precognition, retrocognition, appearances of ghosts, near-death experiences and all that sort of thing, which was rather anecdotal for my liking. There was a bit about how the historian Arnold Toynbee would be reading e.g. a book about ancient Rome and would suddenly have a vision of what had happened in the book. I had trouble taking this stuff seriously. However, this is a minor criticism – overall this is a fun and thought-provoking book.

I guess PJ O’Rourke is a Guilty Pleasure. The pleasure thing is not difficult to explain: he writes to entertain, and he has a lot of talent and experience; he writes at length so he can really unpick a place or topic and he writes about places that most of us haven’t been so he can be our eyes and ears there. Sometimes he includes accounts of incidents that aren’t particularly “telling” and I think the editing is a bit sloppy; sometimes his sentences need reading twice to make sense because they’re oddly phrased. Love his vocabulary though and sometimes he’s funny. I don’t want him to TRY to be funny about everything. I like it when he just phrases something in a dry way. That’s enough to suit the content because when you go to the trouble spots of the world the last thing you should do is look for the joke in it all.

So why is he a “guilty” pleasure? Because of his tough attitude to misfortune I think – his “get over it, get a job” mentality. He believes that there is nothing that liberal policies can do for people that the market mechanism won’t do better, quicker and cheaper, and that might is right, so stop whingeing. He loves taking a needle to the caring bubbles of the left wingers. Sometimes I just find that he seems to be espousing nihilism, or some political equivalent: that nothing works, so don’t try, and in 30 years everyone will have got over it (and largely forgotten about it) anyway. In short, he is a kind of depressing addiction, hard to put down his writing because it’s good, strong and fun, and depressing because he knows there is so little we can do for many of the world’s desperate or unfortunate people.

I’ve read this book several times and consider it to be the most frivolous of Jane Austen’s works, which is probably why it’s also my favourite.

The heroine of the story is Catherine Morland, who “had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility; without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient. This was strange indeed!”

From this unlikely beginning, the story develops as Catherine visits Bath with family friends the Allens. To begin with, there is a lot of sitting around sighing and regretting that they lack acquaintance, but then the dreadful Thorpes (gushing Isabella and appalling John) appear on the scene, followed closely by the dashing Henry Tilney, and engagements and entanglements follow.

The narrator’s voice is always a strong presence and there are plenty of witty interjections. “She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” He he!

Later on, Catherine is invited to the Tilney family home, Northanger Abbey, and with a feverish mind as a result of reading too many books by Mrs Radcliffe, has a dreadful encounter with a Japan chest, and begins to suspect that General Tilney has either murdered his wife or had her locked up. It’s a very amusing satire on gothic novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, quite ironic as these days Jane Austen remains an extremely popular author, but who has read Mrs Radcliffe?

At the end of the book, Catherine gets her man, and it’s interesting that Austen says “I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought”. Not the most romantic sentiment, but Lauren Henderson uses this sentence as the basis for rule 1 in her “Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating” – if you like someone it’s best to make it obvious! Good advice there I think.

by Salley Vickers is quite a deep, haunting read. Vickers is probably best known for “Miss Garnet’s Angel”, a book about a spinster (urgh horrid word) who goes to Venice in her retirement and comes alive, which is a very nice feel-good book and I’d highly recommend it.

“The Other Side of You” is about the relationship between a psychotherapist and a patient who has attempted to commit suicide. David the psychotherapist is the narrator, and mainly sympathetic, although he has a problem with a ginger cat which made me dislike him!

Elizabeth Cruikshank is the patient, and gradually she reveals why she tried to top herself, which is all about a relationship she had with the amazing Thomas, who is really the star character in the book even though he doesn’t appear in person.

It’s a rather depressing love story. Elizabeth and Thomas meet in surprising circumstances and spend 3 hours talking as if they’ve known each other all their lives. They intend to meet again but circumstances intervene. Elizabeth thinks Thomas isn’t interested in her, so when she meets Mr Boring she marries him. Several years later she meets Thomas again and discovers the reason why he didn’t get in touch again (he was very ill) and they begin a romance. Thomas is a fantastic character, very lively and opinionated, but Elizabeth doesn’t manager to leave Mr Boring and the whole thing ends in tears. At the same time, her story causes David to think about his twin brother who died in an accident when he was very young, and to re-evaluate his relationship with his duplicitous wife.

Although Elizabeth seemed like a lovely, shy and intelligent person I had trouble understanding why she didn’t pack everything in and be with Thomas. From a plot point of view there were too many coincidences for my liking, and Vickers’ writing can be on the precious side. But the characters were very vibrant, and there was a lot of stuff about Caravaggio (Thomas is an art historian) which made me want to go and look at his paintings. Vickers used to be a psychotherapist, so the background details about the profession feel accurate. Rather sad, but good.

by Carol S. Dweck, is about two ways of looking at the world. You can have a fixed mindset, or a growth mindset, or a combination of the two depending on the situation. You have a fixed mindset if you tend to believe that you have the ability you were born with, and that it can’t really be changed much. You view talent and intelligence as pretty much innate. You have a growth mindset if you believe that you can learn and improve at anything if you put the effort in.

Dweck believes that the fixed mindset is unhelpful because it limits people. They’re scared of making mistakes in case others judge them negatively, and may work hard only to prove themselves to others over and over again. If you have this mindset then every test you take is a risk because you might screw it up. The growth mindset is better because it isn’t about judgement but rather about effort and improvement and learning for the sake of learning and taking pleasure from it.

Once we get the basic definitions out of the way, the book is divided into chapters on work, relationships, coaching and parenting, with many anecdotes about chief executives of big companies, coaches of famous basketball teams and schoolteachers doing an amazing job teaching little kids in deprived areas to read Shakespeare. There are also many anecdotes from Dweck’s own career – she is an academic pyschologist – and the effect of knowing about the two mindsets has had on her students.

She tells us upfront that she used to have a fixed mindset and even now lapses into it from time to time, which makes this a much nicer book as the tone is not hectoring at all but encouraging. I certainly found much of it rang true as I spent most of my childhood trying to be as academically successful as my brother. Only the other day when I was doing the creative writing assignment I found myself thinking that I didn’t want to spend too long on it, in case it came back with a bad mark and then I would feel as though I had invested myself in it and been found wanting. This is classic fixed-mindset thinking: hold the dream but don’t do anything to achieve it because it could turn out you weren’t capable of getting there. The growth mindset by contrast says maybe you’re not going to be the next Picasso but you can still learn to draw.

The chapter on relationships was particularly good. Dweck says that many people take the view that they come to a relationship as two adults “fully-formed” and that if something goes wrong then that’s that. People who have been dumped feel rejected and hurt and want revenge. “When people with a fixed mindset talk about their conflicts, they assign blame. Sometimes they blame themselves, but often they blame their partner. And they assign blame to a trait – a character flaw. But it doesn’t end there. When people blame their partner’s personality for the problem they feel anger and disgust toward then, Since the problem comes from fixed traits, it can’t be solved. So once people with the fixed mindset see flaws in their partners, they become contemptuous of them and dissatisfied with the whole relationship. (People with the growth mindset, on the other hand, can see their partners’ imperfections and still think they have a fine relationship.)”

There was a quote in the book from John Wooden who was the basketball coach for UCLA: “You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.” I like that.

by Nick Davies is an expose of the crisis in British journalism at the moment. Davies is an experienced journalist who has worked for several of the major papers, and is very even-handed in his criticism of them.

His argument is that in the old days, journalists used to go out in the field, interview people, dig up evidence, and above all check their stories. Nowadays commercial pressures mean that there are fewer journalists per page of output required, and rolling news means that deadlines are tighter than ever. The result is “churnalism” where a huge amount of what is produced is the result of recycled PR and even government propaganda. Very few papers have the resources to do proper, old-fashioned investigative journalism any more. They rely more and more on press agencies, but even these have fewer people and are not there to set an agenda, only to report who said what.

He kicks off with an account of the millennium bug fiasco – how we were told the millennium bug was going to mean the end of civilisation, nuclear bombs going off etc.etc. and it simply didn’t happen, and explains how the dangers were wildly exaggerated by people with vested interests, and journalists simply didn’t know whether these claims were true and didn’t bother to find out.

The book contains many other anecdotes, for example on how the Observer (the Guardian’s sister Sunday paper) fell for the Washington / Downing Street line on weapons of mass destruction and ended up supporting the invasion of Iraq, despite having evidence to the contrary. There is also a scary chapter on the Daily Mail, which any right-thinking person loathes. Apparently it once sent a reporter to investigate the murder of a woman and her children in the north of England, only to recall him as he was halfway there because the paper had just found out that the victims were black.

This is a scary book, and it has opened my eyes and confirmed some of my prejudices. Experts get wheeled out to make comments and no indication is given of the fact that they are paid by industry interests. I was extremely pleased to discover that Susan Jebb, who is a nutritionist at the Medical Research Council and is always making anti low-carb diet comments, is funded by the flour industry. Hmmm. Reminds me of the time my doctor gave me a leaflet on how to lose weight which said sugar was fine. I immediately wondered if it could really be ok for me to live on wine gums, as it didn’t seem likely. Then I saw in small print on the back page of the leaflet that the British Sugar Council had helped pay for it. That was at least ten years ago and I haven’t trusted NHS nutritional advice since.

As for PR, only the other day I was listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme, which is its early morning news flagship programme, and heard a piece about a book on derelict London. It was essentially a five-minute plug for a book someone had written. This is not what I pay my licence fee for. But before reading Flat Earth News, I probably wouldn’t have realised that this was PR masquerading as news.

The question the book raises is who can you trust? And it sadly doesn’t have any prescriptions on that front. I think from now on I’ll take my news with a large pinch of salt, and rely on the London Review of Books which carries lengthy articles by well-informed people. I’m also considering subscribing to the New York Review of Books and resubscribing to Private Eye.

is Catherine O’Flynn’s first novel, and what a first novel!

The first section is about a young girl, Kate, who wants to set up her own detective agency. It’s beautifully observed and had me gripped with pleasure from the first page. I enjoyed the way the author played with my preconceptions – twice in the first few pages things are not quite as they seem.

When I discovered Kate has a stationery fetish it got even better. “Kate had not been prepared for the level of riches in the stationery cupboard. First, it was not a cupboard, it was a room. Secondly, it was evident that the full range of stationery she and her classmates had ever used were but tiny and very dull drops in the vast ocean of the cupboard. The room contained luxury items like multi-coloured Biros, metal pencil sharpeners, entire packets of felt-tips alongside serious, high-end items like concertina files and jumbo staplers. Kate didn’t hear a word Mrs Finnegan said because she was in a state of actual, physical shock.”

Later on, Kate gets given a swivel chair for her room and has to ration the amount of time she spends spinning on it. Shades of “When We Came to the End” there.

After this section, the book becomes sadder and darker and generally less jolly as themes of loss and death emerge. The later parts are set in the enormous, fictional Green Oaks shopping centre on the edge of Birmingham and involve a security guard and the deputy manager of a record store. They’re both sympathetic characters and gradually more about them is revealed and connections made. This is all set against a backdrop of the decline of manual industries in the 1980s and the subsequent rise of retail and Sunday shopping.

I’d never even thought about the existence of the “secret” passages for staff in a large shopping centre, but here they are central to the plot. O’Flynn worked in a record shop, so I assume some of this is based on her personal experience. This book reminded me of Ali Smith’s “Hotel World” which is also about the other side of a familiar institution, the hotel. That’s one of my favourite books _{albeit very weird} so this similarity is no bad thing.

I read this book over two days and was sorry when I finished it. O’Flynn is a very talented writer and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

by Suzanne Segerstrom is about optimism and presents the results of psychological research into the differences between optimists and pessimists. Segerstrom is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.

She has an engaging writing style and there are a lot of self-deprecating jokes, which I enjoyed to start with but found increasingly irritating as the book went on, mainly because most of them are in footnotes which I find distracting.

I thought the first couple of chapters were the best. There is a whole chapter about the pursuit of goals which is likely to be of interest to many on 43T. Segerstrom argues that optimists and pessimists don’t differ much in the type of goal they set, but in how they approach those goals. Optimists are more likely to expect to achieve their goals, and are more committed to them. “Expecting success is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who hold optimistic beliefs also believe in their goals, work harder towards their goals, and thereby set themsevles up for success.”

She uses a thermostat as an analogy. A thermostat has a goal (an ideal room temperature) and a state of being (an actual room temperature). “Stretching the analogy somewhat by endowing thermostats with motivation, the thermostat is motivated to take action to reduce any difference or discrepancy between the ideal and actual room temperatures: to heat the room if it is too cold or cool the room if it is too warm.” Similarly, people have states of being. “When current states of being and goal states differ, as they frequently do, discrepancies arise. When people notice discrepancies, they become motivated to reduce them and take action to get closer to their goals.” Optimists are more likely to persist at their goals and this is a large reason for why they are more likely than pessimists to achieve them. Pessimists give up more easily.

Much of the book is based on Segerstrom’s own studies of law school students, and she is generous in sharing the credit for these studies with her graduate students, which is something you don’t see much of!

In the chapter on relationships, she talks about how we compare how we are doing on our goals with other people. If other people are doing better than us, optimists are more likely to find them inspiring, whereas pessimists are more likely to find them threatening. “Social relationships can have both positive and negative consequences. We can have negative, conflict-ridden interactions with others, we can feel inferior to them, and their help can even make us feel inadequate to life’s tasks. The positive expectancies that come from optimism, however, seem to lead to positive relationships in which believing the best of others brings out the best in them, people who are excelling become sources of inspiration rather than envy, and the perception of support buffers us against social events.” Good point.

There is also some information about how to act like an optimist even if you’re actually a pessimist. The top tip is to keep a “three good things that happened today” diary – like the gratitude diary some 43Ters have – because this encourages you to think about positive things.

Perhaps diminishing returns kicked in because I didn’t find the second half of the book so interesting, and occasionally had trouble concentrating – I’m not sure if this was because the book is a little repetitive or whether I was just too tired to take it all in.

Right at the end, Segerstrom talks about her reluctance to have her work lumped in with the positive thinking genre, and refers to a book by Norman Vincent Peale. She says “The Peale book was full of examples of people whose positive thoughts helped them achieve miraculous things…. Notable by their absence were the examples of people whose positive visualizations were not realized.” If someone dies from cancer it’s a bit revolting to imply that they didn’t hope enough or have enough positive thoughts. I’m glad she makes that point. She is also at pains to emphasise that positive thinking isn’t enough – you have to act, and it’s the action that makes the difference.