Book review 2021!

Hello guys, we’re back for the annual event! Happy third birthday to the Thoughts Unqualified Annual Book Review.

I’ve actually cheated here because there are 21 books on the list but I have only finished 16 of them. Poor effort. I aim for 20 books a year at least. When I was in Mauritius, I read 34 in six months, but then I didn’t have the swirling attention plughole that is the internet.

I have also already read a book in 2022! So the 2022 review has already started.

Well, here’s your 2021 picks.

1. Chasing the Light, Jesse Blackadder. 7/10. Although I feel like 7 might be a bit generous. Although, although, this has really good reviews. Maybe it’s just me. My friend lent me this ‘novel of Antarctica’ because I am desperate to get to Antarctica and she really enjoyed it but I spent about 500 pages just REALLY wanting to get to Antarctica. Spoiler alert, in the last couple of pages they put feet on it for five seconds. I felt like it was a whole, very, very long book of women being bitchy to each other and creating misunderstandings (simplification) and I am not here for it because women support women. There were good gory whaling bits (I’m not bloodthirsty, I promise, I am very ‘save the whales’, but the descriptions were fascinating, and I didn’t realise the scale of whaling and how far fleets were pushing to meet their grisly demands, and I am FURIOUS with humanity for being so STUPID. Anyway). My favourite bit of the book was the afterword, which explained a little bit about the actual women this fictional account was based on. All in all, I wouldn’t really recommend it. But equally I wouldn’t dissuade you. You’d probably get something different out of it. There, that’s useful, isn’t it.
2. Who Owns England, Guy Shrubsole. 9/10. Will infuriate and galvanise. The first few days I read this, I would text random facts about Britain’s privatisation, land hoarding and sceptred isle inheritance bullshit to my mum, until she said ‘Please don’t tell me any more! I knew it would be bad, but not THIS bad.’ Spoiler: It’s really fucking bad. Between literally landed gentry descended from William II’s barony, and corporations … You wouldn’t believe. Read it.
3. The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman. 8/10 I read this in two days, no joke. It started great. I was super invested in Malcolm (and, as a side note, started reading just after attending my grandad’s funeral. His name was Malcolm.) I thought he was a genuinely lovely boy and I wanted him to do really well. I trusted him. And he does – he is lovely. But the story started to get really weird. And it was like turbulence. It wasn’t Pullman’s previous His Dark Materials slow descent into highly plausible dark fantasy. It was plodding along, canal, pub, nuns, books, and then BOOM a fairy on an island, a god in the river (that seems to have no purpose), a heaven/hell where they’re invisible. It all went a bit haywire for me until my suspension in the fantasy universe just felt too obvious and I could feel the elastic creaking.
4. Nocturne in Iron, Eli Auslender. 8/10. This is another total privilege by me of another unpublished novel! I do have marvellous creative friends. I think this will be published. As a first draft it’s very good. I don’t feel able to leave you a comprehensive lowdown, because it is bound to undergo metamorphosis. But it’s set in a highly realistic, believable future New York, with the definition of humanity in question, and it’s a great story of moral and ethical dilemma, family turmoil, trust, mistrust, and futurism. The characterisation was really very good – Eli makes you root for a very questionable antihero.
5. Māori Myths and Legends, compiled and described by Alistair Campbell 8/10. It would be 10/10 for the myths and legends obviously, but I feel Campbell has sanitised them a bit and removes some of the background. However, if you’ve never investigated Māori culture may I take this opportunity to encourage you to. I used to live in NZ and even as an ignorant ten year old I was fascinated, enthused, started to learn te reo Māori, learned songs and dances, visited marae and a hangi, and I remember almost everything because I was so interested.
6. The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman. 7/10. I just don’t know. I enjoyed His Dark Materials SO MUCH when I was a kid. Is it that I’ve grown up? I felt like this was – well – a bit childish?! Haha. I am not a fan of books that are a journey for the sake of a journey, really. And this is all journey. It’s incredibly heavy on characters, many of whom seem to be introduced for no reason, and minor ones who make a reappearance are like squidging through silt at low tide, trying to prise them out of the mud in my brain. The purpose of going on the journey also seemed very tenuous – Pan is missing, sure, but his note is so minor. Why would he go to a place they don’t know exists? It just seems so improbable and pointless. I’d sit still, if it were me haha. The book sped up towards the end – the last few chapters are when I really got engaged – but it’s a bloody long book to get to that point. And just when you think ‘Hold up there are suddenly way too many questions and the pages I have left are JUST NOT ENOUGH’ whoops it’s the end and there’s another book to come, which I didn’t realise at first. It is good in terms of a bit of political intrigue, religious intrigue (we know Pullman doesn’t shy away from controversy in that department, but I am a bit on edge wondering what’s to come), surprisingly bloody in parts. I don’t know. Not the best I’ve read, not even Pullman’s best, but I am going to hang in there for the end.
7. 52 times Britain was a Bellend, James Felton. 9/10. Seems weird to give such a high score to a book about atrocities, but it manages to be entertaining as well with a sorry, dark, dry humour. And I learned a lot. I listened to it as an audiobook, my first audiobook, read by Mat Baynton (I have loved him forever haha) and he’s so easy to listen to. So if you are interested in history, especially hidden history, and if you want to dig into national disillusionment rather than the flag-shagging currently being celebrated, and if you give a shit about knowing some of the background to why other countries hate us so much and why we should be thoroughly ashamed and make some small amends in whatever way the more informed people see fit (anti-racist movements, reparations, returning stolen treasures), this is a must-read. I mean, he describes Britain as an ‘EastEnders amnesia Hitler’. We dropped our records of colonial atrocities in the sea in weighted crates, or burned them in huge bonfire before breaking up the ash, so even we don’t know what we did, but how bad must that be …
8. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry, Jon Ronson. 9/10. My brother sent me this, and I don’t think he’s ever given me a bad recommendation. I really enjoyed it. It manages to be funny and entertaining, introspective, educational, and thoroughly interesting and thought provoking all at once. Ronson beautifully weaves narratives together (to the point that his bringing in another interview to his self-doubting passages seems almost like an in-joke). He leaves you to try and make up your own mind in the sea of doubt he has thrust up around you – which is exactly the point. Who knows anything any more?! I immediately asked my brother to send me Men Who Stare At Goats.
9. Orlando, Virginia Woolf. 9/10 I’ve never read any V.W. before, which seems a huge cultural omission, but I never beat myself up about that, because one cannot do everything. However, I recently invested in a bunch of queer books, feeling like I should know my forebears and all the work they were doing before I was allowed to live openly as I do. Orlando is Virginia’s love letter to Vita Sackville-West, and honestly, it reads like one huge in-joke. It is so self-aware. I read it guiltily, like I do when I’m really enjoying a delicious meal – my senses are so delighted that I hurry it down, the more to enjoy it faster, but the rush means I don’t savour it like it deserves. Its delectability leads to my disrespecting it with haste. I think this will be a book I revisit multiple times, because I think layers will keep revealing themselves as I grow older and learn more about myself (and more about early 20^th century literature, probably, as I’m well aware that I will be missing defining contexts, e.g. her literary circle and influencing friends). Anyway, I really enjoyed it. It’s a treat.
10. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf. 8/10. The waters can always be a little muddy but I felt like this was the high tea of books. I could see the sights, sniff the scents, feel the sun on my back as I walked behind Mrs Dalloway with a parasol through town. I followed Septimus through his rooms. Her set pieces are so vivid. And at the book’s end you can’t help but link it to the knowing of her end.
11. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens. 10/10. Best fiction book I’ve read in a long time. I was there. I lived it. I have seen the marsh and the gulls and the fireflies. I have listened and heard the silence. I cried. Can’t praise it enough.
12. The Pink Pigeon Parade. I shan’t give this a rating, because I wrote it myself, but it is full novel length. I wrote it in 2017 and just fancied seeing what I was getting up to back then. It’s not exactly great literature (it is my diary, largely, from my time working as a bird ecologist in Mauritius) but it did bring back some fantastic memories, and it also made me laugh out loud.
13. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall. 10/10. Up there with Where the Crawdads Sing, but with the sheen of the past lingering beautifully, a book in the light of dusk. Just the scope and emotion of it, in all the shades of grief, in the moments of pure happiness, and its strange aura of prophecy. Known as ‘the lesbian bible’, I completely see why, and its honestly and rawness will claw at your heart. I will warn you that there are a couple of lines which jerked me right out of the misty dream it otherwise enchants the reader into – lines of really horrible racism. I can’t help feeling Radclyffe Hall must have been behind even her contemporaries. But it is two sentences in a book from 1928 so I have accepted it as part of her, and our, ugly history. But it shocked me.
14. Normal People, Sally Rooney. 5/10. This is a weird, frustrating, and in my opinion, extremely overrated book. I started watching the BBC adaptation and gave up a couple of episodes in because it was just pointless sex between unbearable, unsympathetic characters. I thought the book would be better – they generally are – but I wouldn’t necessarily say so here. I did get to the end, because it hooked me enough to want to find out how they end up, and YOU DON’T EVEN FIND OUT, so if you’re halfway through and on the fence, just put it down and go and find a Daphne du Maurier. Connell is a dickhead, a soft dickhead with some redeeming features, but nonetheless a dickhead. Marianne is more sympathetic but also just keeps wasting and waifing away. There’s no explanation or context for her family situation, which feels gratuitous without justice. The book plays up to all my least favourite tropes – a woman damaged by men and keeping crawling after them being the main one. Wtf even is that Swedish dude and why is he in the book, what purpose does he serve at all? The main characters are just two fucked up people, treating each other horribly, and having a bunch of usually bad sex. I don’t like them. I don’t like the book. I don’t like the end. It had some entertainment value, but most of those five points come from some sparse but very sage and beautifully phrased observations about things like class, money, and art. For balance: my mum really enjoyed it and made me read it. There you are.
15. A Walk in the Woods, Brian Bilston. 9/10. Love a Brian Bilston book. This was written in 1996, for some reason I thought it was more recent. But that brings a lovely charm as well – before phones and GPS and battery packs etc. It’s a brilliant tale of a very normal bloke’s attempt at the Appalachian Way. It’s hilarious in parts. It’s educational. It’s warm and friendly and a very easy read. What less would you expect of Brian Bilston? I loved it. And I want to get more books on Appalachian history now.
16. The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf. 7/10. She says a lot of true things and a lot of things I agree with and a lot of things I already knew. However, Wolf also makes some leaps that I think are a bit of a stretch. Definitely worth a read though.
17. How many lightbulbs does it take to change a planet? Tony Juniper. Unfinished (as yet). This is a really good book. I’m tired of all the disaster. I KNOW the disaster. It haunts my every waking second. This is a book of SOLUTIONS – not foolproof, not total, not entire. I don’t even always agree with him (he is anti-GM, for example, whereas I find it difficult to write it off as yes, it poses problems, but it could solve a lot too). But they are solutions, goddamit.
18. Everyday Life in the Extraordinary Era of the Norsemen, Kirsten Wolf – unfinished (as yet). This one I’m working through as a reference book to the book I’m writing myself. It’s very good, interesting.
19. Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari – unfinished (as yet). This is absolutely cracking, I’m really enjoying it.
20. On Anarchism, Noam Chomsky – unfinished (as yet). I should really stop opening new books until I’ve finished a few, but I like a smorgasbord. You’re not always in the same mood, are you? Anyway, God bless Noam Chomsky.
21. Kleptopia, Tom Burgis – unfinished (as yet). I’ve barely started this really – couple of chapters into a hefty book – but OooooohhhHH. Come and find the secrets.

Is that it?! oh my. It is. I think I might have a better year this year. Hopefully those bottom five will be (almost) at the top of next year’s list.

See you soon and I wish you a very very happy new year

Yours perusingly

Georgie

In Other News: The Dating Pool

My city ain’t the biggest city and not long after I moved here I had a lovely little fling with someone, who turned out less lovely by dumping me and moving to London with a boy. I did what any girl does, and joined Tinder. I got me a date. She asked me if I wanted to take a stroll to the bog. Obviously, yes. So we strolled to the bog which is actually quite a long walk and we were only halfway when she mentioned the last girl she’d dated, saying she was emotionally distant. I nodded fervently. ” She ended up dumping me for a boy.” Mild buzzing noise begins in my head. “Actually, she started doing a PhD in OurCity.” Buzzing becomes mild alarm bell. “But she quit.” Alarm bells very loud. She looked at me. “Oh God, you know her don’t you?”

“Is is Alice?” I said.

“Yup,” she said. “Did you date her?”

“Yup.”

Small towns, man. Bit awkward after that.