Reading etc.

More of it.

Serpentine by Philip Pullman

A bit slight. Witches, Lyra, a small companion volume to the “His Dark Materials” world.

Courtiers by Valentine Low

I did enjoy this. It’s about the civil service of the British monarchy except they’re not civil servants but courtiers. Interesting.

The Toxic Travel Guide by Frankie McNamara

This was a Christmas present from one of my children. A hit with the young people, I imagine and I have to hand it to the youthful author, he has covered every county in Ireland. It didn’t really make me laugh except once when referring to some less than wonderful part of Ireland, the author merely said, “No.”

The End and Other Beginnings by Veronica Roth

This is a terrible sci-fi short story collection. Cannot recommend.

Lockwood and Company The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

Lockwood and Company The Whispering Skill by Jonathan Stroud

Lockwood and Company The Hollow Boy by Jonathan Stroud

Lockwood and Company The Creeping Shadow by Jonathan Stroud

Lockwood and Company The Hollow Grave by Jonathan Stroud

I watched the Lockwood and Company series on Netflix which was excellent and was intrigued so got out the books from the library. They are really good. Very well-written and engaging. I loved them. They are for children, obviously, but I do think that if this kind of thing (teenage ghost hunters) appeals to you, you could do a lot worse. It’s been a while since I’ve read something so well-written for this age group.

Ghosts of the Shadow Market by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link and Robin Wasserman

This is an appalling set of short stories set in the Shadowhunter universe (look at me, Shadowhunter universe). I do not know when I have read something as poorly written. Avoid.

Florida by Lauren Groff

Somebody recommended this author to me in the comments. These are exceptionally well-written short stories. Sad, intriguing, beautiful. But quite a hard read. Recommended but you would want to be in the whole of your health.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez

This book was originally written in French but I read it in English. I don’t normally go for books in translation but I thought this was a pretty good rendition. The author has taken the known facts about Mengele’s life and supplemented them a bit with his imagination in places. I found it interesting though very grim in places. Interestingly, if the author is to be believed, by the 60s, Mossad were much more interested in the security of the Israeli state in the Middle East than tracking down former Nazis in South America.

Bournville by Jonathan Coe

A triumphant return to form as the reviewers say. I did not enjoy “Mr Wilder and Me” but I really enjoyed this which sees our author safely back in Birmingham in a story that covers interlinked family lives in the period from World War II right up to the pandemic. I loved it.

Love Novel by Ivana Sajko

This is translated from the original Croatian. Only 100 pages. Thank God. It’s about a tormented relationship. I was tormented. I did not enjoy it. More full stops needed.

Calypso by David Sedaris

David Sedaris is reliably hilarious. You will never go wrong with a book of his essays. Lots about family here.

The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon

This was a book club book. Our member who likes the hardest books said to me nervously, “It’s a bit literary, Anne, give it a chance.” This naturally made me approach it with considerable caution. Nevertheless, I liked it. It’s a good story about two siblings who go back to Connemara to retrace their steps on a memorable summer holiday with their mother. It’s really well done and beautifully written. I have, however, a prejudice which I find it difficult to get rid of. Dublin people tend to go to other parts of the country for their holidays – Kerry, Cork, Donegal, Connemara – buy second homes there and act like they own the place. I find this extremely irritating. I do not at all object to people from other parts of the country buying holiday homes in scenic locations (take, for example, everyone in Cork city who has a house in west Cork – not a problem), so this is just pure anti-Dublin prejudice. To be fair to the author, she does seem to be aware that not all of the locals are necessarily enthralled by the hordes of Dubliners descending on their towns. There is something there though, in the author’s own voice, that implies some kind of ownership, I can’t put my finger on what but I found it annoying. This is, however, a personal issue and overall, I recommend.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

What a delight of a book. I have read almost everything Curtis Sittenfeld has written and I believe she is a truly gifted writer but, if I have a criticism, it’s that her books can be a bit grim occasionally. I waited nervously for something awful to happen to these characters. Nothing awful happened and it was wonderful even though set largely in the pandemic. A lovely, lovely read.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

This is a retelling of David Copperfield in a modern setting. It is set in the prescription drugs crisis in Appalachia. A really impressive achievement. Perhaps even better if you are at all familiar with David Copperfield which I am not (I’m getting it out of the library on foot of this). It definitely stands up on its own.

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

This is a weird, short book that I saw recommended in the paper. It’s about a girl who is taught to do everything right and what happens when her parents disappear. More fable than fiction, entertaining all the same.

The Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

“Home Fire” by this author was an absolute revelation to me. I thought it was amazing. This book about two girls who are school friends in Pakistan and end up living in Britain is not as good but quite good in its own way.

Pretty Bitches edited by Lizzie Skurnick

A series of essays about words which can be used to put women down. Depressing. I was astonished to discover the rules around declaring race in Virginia.

The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic by Seamus O’Mahony

I think I’ve read all of this man’s books. He’s a retired doctor from Cork and a good writer, I find. This, however, is not him at his best. He really dislikes Freudian psychoanalysis and, on the basis of this book, it’s very hard to blame him but the book reads like it could have done with a bit more prepping or editing and it’s quite confusing in places. Great footnotes though and some jaw dropping revelations.

Tornado of Life by Jay Baruch

A thoughtful ER consultant writes about doctoring, including through Covid. I thought I would enjoy this but I only found it alright. He was just too nice and sincere or something, it didn’t land for me.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks

I enjoyed this. The author, obviously, needs no introduction. He knows a lot about film making and I liked his insights. The writing is grand and the story trots along at a good clip. I was sorry that the one truly awful character exited so early as I quite enjoyed him. I have to say that the film that it described sounds terrible.

Marzahn Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

Another book in translation. Am I crazy? It was short and won the IMPAC prize. I was tempted. Very glad that I was. This is a series of lovely stories – a bit autobiographical – about a chiropodist who lives in East Berlin. Life affirming, as they say, and a lovely picture of a community. Also, you will have a new found respect for chiropodists when you’re finished.

Becky by Sarah May

This is clever. A re-telling of Vanity Fair where the titular heroine is a 90s tabloid journalist. Really well done, I would recommend. Though needs more Brussels.

English Pastoral by James Rebanks

This is the same man who wrote “A Shepherd’s Life” which I enjoyed very much. He is a wonderful writer. I feel in his writing the distance from the farm in England which is much less of a feature here. Although, I suppose, it will get that way. My cousin farms the land that my grandfather bought in the 1940s. It’s a big farm in a good part of the country for farming. Three generations have got a good living from that farm. My cousin is unmarried. I was surprised, talking to him recently, to hear that he has got out of diary farming and now only does beef. It’s a family farm and he has no wife and children of his own and it’s impossible to get workers for the farm. He was run ragged trying to keep it going as a dairy farm and when he lost half his herd to TB, he thought it might be time for a change. He has nephews and nieces (including three nephews who are growing up on a farm up the country, his sister having married a farmer also). “Do you think any of them would be interested in taking over the farm?” I asked. “God, no,” he said, “they’d run a mile.” It’s funny, when I was growing up, a family farm was a sinecure and now it almost seems like a millstone. In England they seem to be a bit ahead of us. It seems to be really, really hard to make a living from farming. The author lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of cheap food prices. I think he’s right but that is a very, very hard sell.

He has done amazing, interesting things on his own farm which help to promote biodiversity and that is fascinating but, as he says himself, it does make the farm less productive. He is not in the business of judging his neighbours for their farming practices and he does appreciate that people have to make a living. And, honestly, it seems that he isn’t. I hesitate to say this because he loves his farm and what he is doing seems completely right but he has to do other work to keep things going and the farm is close to a hobby. So I don’t see how these approaches can work for full time farmers. He makes a very compelling argument that cheap food is literally costing the earth but that’s a hard ship to turn. In an unlikely turn of events on foot of reading this book, I now find myself mildly curious to read the recommendations of our Citizens’ Assembly report on biodiversity loss which came out in April to very little interest from me. We’ll see whether I manage to sustain my interest levels.

One thing that I did find a bit surprising is that he made no mention of the EU. My friend’s mother is from Dublin and she married a man from the west of Ireland and moved to a small rural town in the 1960s for love and worked there as a GP. She says that everyone lived on credit and money only flowed on mart days when people had money to pay their bills. When Ireland joined the EU farmers had money for the first time from CAP payments and it revolutionised the town. Surely Brexit is having a negative effect on smaller farmers in England. I would have been really curious about his views on the impact of Brexit on his farm but he didn’t mention it in any way at all. I see from a very dull article in today’s paper that the CAP Strategic Plan 2023-2027 includes “two heavily funded environmental measures [which herald] a new era in addressing biodiversity issues.” We’ll see.

Anyhow, this is a thoughtful, interesting book. The author really hopes one of his four children will take over the farm but I don’t see how they will be able to afford to unless things change radically.

La Grande Illusion: Journal Secret du Brexit by Michel Barnier

I started reading this when it came out a couple of years ago and only finished it very recently. God, it nearly killed me. Despite a genuine interest in the subject matter and great admiration for how Barnier managed to keep the EU 27 together (honestly, there is a man who has worked with every politician in Europe and who used that contact book) and deal with the UK, this is a really, really boring book. It’s like an excellent briefing note or textbook. There is almost no gossip or personal detail. Even Covid barely gets a mention.

Barnier is wearily aghast by the rotating cast of characters the UK sent to negotiate. He is unfailingly polite though one does get the sense that he does not like David Frost. But the only person who really seems to get on his nerves is Martin Selmayr, Juncker’s right hand man. He seems to have been busy attempting to shaft Barnier and Barnier was roused to genuine ire. That’s it really. There was the (pretty limited) thrill of seeing people I knew from the Commission years ago now elevated to stratospheric heights including one woman who went out with a good friend of mine for a while. I asked him whether it was the same person and he confirmed that it was. She was not a native English speaker and at their unhappy breakup apparently her final words to him were, “Thanks for improving my English anyway”. Well, she’s using it to good effect now.

There was a funny story about when Chirac (before his elevation to President) came to some event Barnier was hosting in Savoie (Barnier’s home turf, he loves Savoie). First question to Chirac from the audience was from an irate woman who upbraided him and said that what he was saying was in contradiction to his actions in Paris and did he think that they were incapable of reading the newspapers in Savoie and knowing what was going on. “Who is that woman?” hissed Chirac to Barnier. “She’s my mother,” said Barnier apologetically. At the very end he tells us that his mother-in-law was a strong woman from North Ossetia. Clearly the forceful older lady was a theme in his life.

Barnier is a big, big fan of Charles de Gaulle. Steve Barclay, third Brexit negotiator, decides in 2019 to serve up to Barnier a bit of CDG wisdom. Barclay’s calling on the EU to be flexible and says “The great political leaders have always respected the need to take risks. And it is General de Gaulle who said, ‘a real statesman is someone who is ready to take risks.'” I’m not quite sure what Barclay was hoping to achieve by this but when he met Barnier in Brussels, Barnier said that he was particularly touched by his reference to the General. So far so good. Then he said that he did not accept the use of the phrase here, the risks were too serious for posturing. The parties were speaking of preserving peace on the island of Ireland and the integrity of the single market. He goes on to say that there are two things that Mr. Barclay should know about the General. Firstly that he implemented the Treaty of Rome when he became President and was very in favour of the common market. And secondly that the General was very fond of Ireland and had personal and family ties to Ireland. So there. I paraphrase.

Twitter is a big feature of the book and a lot of engagement takes place over Twitter and in my view that is, at best, unhelpful. I think the demise of Twitter might be a real help to diplomacy.

Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy by Deirdre Raftery with Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck

Herself got me this for Christmas. It was one of those presents where you think, “Thanks?” It took me months to get started and it took me months to finish it when I got going. Mostly this was because this is a pretty academic text. Each chapter is a bit like a scholarly article in itself. The authors did a lot of research and we heard about it. There is a lot of digging around in old convent archives, checking through invoices and the like.

Surprisingly little is known about Nano Nagle’s own life given that she lived in the 18th century, was from a prominent, wealthy Catholic family (which took some doing at the time given the disincentives for wealthy people to remain Catholic) and was the foundress of a religious order. So her life is pretty much disposed of in chapter 1. Here’s a picture of the woman herself from the Crawford gallery. Or an imagined picture anyway as I note that she died before the artist was born.

I had possibly heard previously that Nano Nagle was a cousin of Edmund Burke but it came as a surprise to me all over again. His mother was a Nagle. From our friend Wikipedia “Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. His mother Mary, née Nagle (c.?1702–1770), was a Roman Catholic who hailed from a County Cork family and a cousin of the Catholic educator Nano Nagle“. I said as much to herself who had texted me that she was reading Burke’s “The Sublime and the Beautiful.” I was naturally anxious to point to his Cork roots from where, clearly, his genius sprang. Response from herself: “Appaz, he’s a colonial tool or something. So stay humble.”

I digress. The book itself was mostly about the 19th and early 20th century expansion of the order and, honestly, the scales fell from my eyes. These women, what they did with nothing: their enterprise, their hardiness, their devotion. They were asked to set up a school on a Friday and they often turned up within the week to set up in deeply unsuitable premises (for living and schooling) and enrolled hundreds of children. There were the nuns who only had a board for a table and two beds and almost nothing else. The combing of the archives indicated that people left lots to the nuns including odd things like a chandelier which can’t have been at all practical. I hadn’t previously realised that nuns’ dowries can’t be spent, in case they leave, but the interest on the dowries can be spent and invest it and spend it they did building convents and schools all over the world. Some crazy bishop brought them to Newfoundland giving no indication of the likely hardship so one can only imagine the surprise in the mother convent in Ireland when they received a letter from one of their sisters there indicating that she would have to end her letter as the ink was freezing in the inkwell.

The order was set up not to take money for educating children and they basically stuck to that. Their focus was on the poor. The Mercy nuns (I am a Convent of Mercy girl) were more willing to take fees although they started out similarly. In fact their foundress, Sister Catherine McCauley, served her novitiate in the Presentation Convent on George’s Hill (something not much covered in my Mercy education). The French orders were seen as a bit of a step above (the Ursulines, the FCJs – where my mother went – and the Sainte Union) but the Irish orders provided education to everyone and went all over the British Empire.

I read an article by Polly Devlin quoting Carmen Callil who apparently said “If you’re convent-educated, you have no self-confidence at all”. Honestly, I have to say, that I feel that’s a bit true for the later 20th century in any event. I cannot in all honesty say that the Mercy nuns instilled in me a great sense of confidence. But I feel now that this is a bit reductive and ignores an astounding legacy.

Ironically Carmen Callil attended a Presentation Convent where Germaine Greer also attended. In the book blurb the latter is quoted:

I’m more like them than I am like my mother. I owe them more in a way because they loved me more and they worked harder on me than my mother did. They really loved us. I realise that now, although I didn’t realise it at the time.

A couple of weeks ago, I was passing George’s Hill, one of the earliest established Presentation Convents where the archives are now kept. It’s in a part of Dublin which remains very deprived. As I cycled along a crocodile of small boys and girls, little working class Dubliners chatting animatedly and holding each other’s hands went into the school two by two. Although I imagine Nano Nagle would have been surprised by the diversity of the group and the tracksuits, it is still recognisably her order doing what she set them up to do more than 300 years ago. How’s that for a charism?

Good present.

Madly Deeply – The Alan Rickman Diaries edited by Alan Taylor

I found these quite disappointing. They got good reviews but they are quite dull. A lot of famous people I went to dinner with which fine, but not fascinating. The bits I found most interesting were where he talked about his own family and the death of his mother. But mostly it’s a pretty boring recitation of where he was and who he’s meeting. I hadn’t quite realised how peripatetic actors’ lives are.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38 by Chips Channon edited by Simon Heffer

OK, now, this is 1000 closely written pages and it is only volume 1 of 3 – just so’s you get the picture. This man is a prolific diarist. Weirdly, I was slightly reminded of Alan Rickman’s diaries as there is a lot of name dropping. Honestly, you go through 1918 learning the names of millions of French aristos as he climbs the social greasy pole only to find them completely irrelevant as he heads off to England and ingratiates himself into a new social milieu. For an Irish person, England is more rewarding as the names are all familiar (that’s the English ruling classes for you). He himself is an American. He marries a Guinness heiress. His brother-in-law to be comments that the Guinnesses are the Medicis of our times. Indeed.

I was a bit torn about this book. You can’t read 1,000 pages of someone’s diary entries without beginning to feel some kind of affinity or relationship with them. He is awful but then you are seeing him from the inside and things he would confide to his diary are not necessarily what he would say. Nevertheless, I read it in tandem with the Nano Nagle book and their lives are almost comically opposed.

Still, he is on the inside. He has a ringside seat for the abdication (having just managed to ascend to the tip top of the social scale by having the King for dinner, you can only feel for him as it all tumbles about his ears); he is a major appeaser, loves the Germans and had a fantastic time at the Berlin Olympics where he was a VIP guest. So, not a man without flaws, but a good eye for details and the inside track on everything. If I am feeling strong I may go for volume 2.

Occasionally, it is (unintentionally) very funny. I give you this extract from an entry from December 1936:

I woke from a deep dream in which I had travelled to Paradise, and there most unexpectedly found Wallis Simpson enthroned with the Archangel Gabriel at her side – and, lo! – his face was that of Lord Cromer, and the Archbishop, look as I might, was nowhere to be seen. You see Chips, she greeted me in the nasal drawl that is as attractive as it is irritating, if I couldn’t be Queen of England, I’ve got to be the next best thing, for I’m Queen of heaven?

I found the editor a bit irritating from time to time also. While the footnotes are indispensable and it is clearly a labour of love, there was something about the tone that irritated me. Take these two on Irish matters:

George de Valero (1882-1975), who had changed his name, whether legally or otherwise, to Éamon de Valera by the end of the nineteenth century, was a New York-born Irishman who came to prominence during the 1916 Easter Rising; he avoided execution because of his American birth. He was President of the Executive Council of Ireland from 1932 to 1937, and Leader of Fianna Fail from 1926 to 1959. He was Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, of Ireland three times between 1937 and 1959, and President of Ireland from 1959 to 1973. De Valera used the abdication as a moment to end the Irish Free State and create a republic, removing from the Irish constitution the notion of a ‘King of Ireland’.

Personally, I’ve never heard of George and I thought that “whether legally or otherwise” was a bit snide.

A war of independence in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 was then followed by a civil war in which one Irish faction attempted to wipe out the other. Ireland was poorly equipped economically for independence and these higher taxes were a part of the attempt to make ends meet.

I mean, although admirably pithy, does this not look like it’s slightly glossing over the role of the former colonial masters in all of this?

The Other Guinness Girl A Question of Honor by Emily Hourican

I only read this because it is a fictional re-imagining of the life of Mrs. Honor Channon, Chips’s wife over approximately the same time as volume one of his diaries covers. I cannot recommend. The author, was obviously working from the same source material as I had recently read so there weren’t many surprises. I didn’t really think it worked as a book and, to be honest, Honor seems just as enigmatic at the end as she did in Chips’s diaries and very, very saintly which I consider a bit…unlikely. I mean, she may have been but it doesn’t really convince.

You will recall (I am sure) that in early May, someone sent round an invitation to keep fit classes in the neighbourhood group chat. The venue is five minutes away. I had no excuse. I felt it was time. Despite my age, gender and the fact that everyone I know does yoga or Pilates, I have never done either so it was…a learning opportunity.

My first Pilates class was grand. I mean, I was stiff for a week but it was an exercise class and it reminded me of PE in school a bit. This feeling was possibly in part due to the fact that the class was held in a sweaty hall.

Then after two lessons, the Pilates teacher went on a week’s holidays and she was replaced by a yoga teacher. Dear God in heaven. She told you to put your limbs in weird places, and when you were knotted up a bit like Twister, she would say, “Now, gently raise yourself in the air.” I mean, I wouldn’t have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen a whole room of people (including pensioners) doing just that. I had unwisely settled my mat between two expert practitioners who were like bendy rubber people so that didn’t help either.

Also on offer was pickleball which is basically tennis for pensioners. At least, it is the way it’s played locally. The scoring is truly peculiar and the ball bounces delightfully slowly. I was entirely unsurprised to learn that it was invented to entertain small children. If you play tennis at all, you will star at pickleball. I may have been a dud at yoga and only alright at Pilates but by gum, I was the star of pensioners’ pickle ball from day one. It helps that I don’t limp.

Of course I was riding for a fall here. All was well and despite the fact that on week two I was hit on the thigh by a smashing pickle ball which drew blood, I remained keen for three weeks. Unfortunately at an unrelated incident – a very mild cycling accident* – I appear to have wrenched my elbow somehow and although it is not a problem in general, it is quite sore when pickling. I have retired temporarily, felled by pickling elbow.

On Fridays there is what I am now casually calling S&C – like I have ever actually been in a gym – and I was a bit unnerved at first, but I have been three times and I kind of like it. The first time the trainer was a bit worried about me when my face turned into a tomato – a constant when I exercise – and I said, “I’m not doing as badly as you think, it’s just that my face always goes red when I exercise.” “Do you have low blood pressure?” he asked. I do, and apparently that’s a thing because your heart is so anxiously pumping blood to your head to deal with concerns that your brain may be deprived of oxygen, it turns your face bright red. I am glad to have this explained after all these years. I am surprised how much stronger I seem to be getting after only a shortish time. I am no longer bottom of the class but proudly second from bottom. I fear it might be like skiing where you become alright very quickly and then never manage to progress from there.

So you are reading the words of someone who has been engaged in consistent weekly intensive exercise for the first time since she gave up hockey in her late 20s. I am really surprised how much I am enjoying it. I feel way more energetic and I am becoming surprisingly stretchy. Perhaps if I do yoga again, I may even be able to rise gracefully into the air. Perhaps not. We will be stopping for the summer and by the time we recommence I may be back at work but perhaps I will look into evening classes. Perhaps not.

*I was cycling into town to meet a friend for lunch and I was a bit late. It was raining and I turned too fast (although my maximum speed is VERY slow) into a street which is now pedestrian and bicycle only expecting it to be pretty empty which it was, except for the cyclist I bumped into. We both pulled our brakes pretty hard and the actual collision was very slow and I didn’t even fall over. He did in extremely slow motion. I was mortified and apologised profusely. The odd pedestrian scurrying by in the rain paused hoping to be amused by the bike on bike violence but the man was really nice, very gentle and quietly spoken. As he got up, saying he was ok, he added “Please try to cycle more carefully in the future” which was pretty mild, all things considered. However, in braking hard and turning my front wheel, I do seem to have done some mild damage to my elbow. Let us hope that my temporary retirement from pickleball will give it time to recover.

I love a printed newspaper. I hate reading my news online. I don’t mind that my news is, by definition, at least 12 hours out of date by the time I read it. I like being alerted to the news I don’t read, even if I just flick through the many pages dedicated to sport. I like reading things in hard copy. I like being able to see at a glance just how long I will be spending on an article.

I was kind of appalled by how hard it was to get any kind of paper in New York.

Recently, I went into a convenience shop in Temple Bar where I have frequently bought the paper in the past only to be told that they do not sell newspapers. The, presumably new, employee said that they never had. I mean, I suppose they didn’t sell a lot of newspapers there but still and all.

When I go abroad, I like to pick up a local newspaper and see what’s going on in my chosen holiday destination. Is all this to end?

Well, according to this article in the Irish Times (note how I have photographed it from the paper, rather than putting in a link, a nice touch, I think you will agree), yes. Oh alas.