jwhr

I came late to this continuum of English men that seems to run through Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, then somehow to connect with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and into the murky depths of modern “rationalist” movements and “free thinkers.” I worry that if I'd been exposed to it at the right stage of being an angry young man, I'd be more insufferable today.

Putting all that to one side for a minute, McEwan and Amis are both very good at writing pointy stories about horrid men. Money is particularly interesting at the moment because it's hard not to read the protagonist as Trump, isn't it? This man lusts and sweats his way around New York, ugly and moving always in a patina of, if not the reality of: money. The hollow in the middle of the man. His downfall as a result of his own stupidity and the avarice of the wronguns around him. It all has echoes.

The foul, brilliant narration is impressive if exhausting. The inclusion of the author as a character gets a little bit of an eye roll from me but I don't mind it terribly. In the end, I come away wondering quite why these men of dubious intellectual circles are so good at writing these male monsters that want to make you tear your own skin off. And yes, I come away entertained.

It's strange how the cultural moment say, eight years ago can feel so much more outmoded than two decades back. It's the narcissism of small differences, maybe, that made me recoil in irritation from this book. It's a micro-memoir, it's a piece of gonzo reporting about love and sex in a particular corner of the modern age: Silicon Valley in the years of optimism.

The author is a Googler living in the Bay Area. She finds herself at sea with the evolving landscape of relationships and dating. She asks good questions about where the free love moment has actually landed us. Do we have new, better models to follow in our love lives? Or are we just fucking it up in novel ways?

She goes some way in looking for answers. She looks at dating apps, the production of professional porn, chat girls, something called orgasmic meditation, sex parties, polyamory. She does in-person gonzo reporting. She reflects through the lens of her own relationships. All the while, there's a feeling building in me (no, not that kind), and it culminates in the Burning Man section.

God I hate these people. Yes, self-awareness pours off the page, about being a rich tech worker ruining San Francisco, ditto ruining Burning Man. It failed to inoculate me from the feeling that whatever the answers are to the cultural questions of the moment, I wish this distorted region of the West Coast wasn't treated like the laboratory of society. It's an idea generally in decline, and this book only makes me glad to see the back of the cultural era.

There is a bookcase in an apartment in Mallorca. It's full of wrinkle-spined paperbacks of a certain age that get more crispy and soaked with salt and suncream year after year. It's got books in languages that I can't really read. It's got Italian yellow fiction, the original ones with the eponymous yellow spines. It got some classics, some modern classics. Every year though, I try and pull something off there that is in English and is unapologetically genre.

Last year, I read an original 80s paperback edition of Fletch and The Man Who, and this year I read The Interrogators. It was first published in ‘65 and the Pan Books copy I had can't have been much younger than that.

Get your bingo cards ready. In a fictional town in Northern England, a jaded detective (name of Savage) takes on one last case. A girl is abducted, sexually abused, and murdered by a depraved killer who is still on the loose. Savage is assigned a naive rookie as a partner, and together they try and crack the case. If it weren't for these politicians and higher-ups, they might have a chance.

It couldn't be more rote, and I'm not even here to claim that this is more than it says on the tin because it's not. But it was an unputdownable, workmanlike detective fiction that saw me through a couple of afternoons by the sea. It was my annual reminder that clichés exist for a reason and that I need to get over myself once in a while.

It unfurls until it's bigger than the men, then it keeps unfurling until it's bigger than the world.

A poet writes a novel and the prose is beautiful. I had never heard of Kaveh Akbar before this year and I was drawn to this book at first based on the physical object. The cover is arresting but it was also in a format I hadn't seen before: a European trade paperback. It's sort of equivalent to the hardback I'm used to. It comes out first, is pricier. It's just a bigger paperback. All of this to say, a larger than life book with a great cover, an unknown, and a title like Martyr!, always with exclamation mark. It got me.

It's a confident, swaggering book. Dream sequences, notoriously pointless and annoying, in Akbar's hands are touching and very funny. Humour runs throughout this pretty tragic story. He knows how to joke about US-Iranian relations, the search for God, and the search for his mother.

I can't really get it across to you how brilliant the prose is in this chaotic, swerving but beautiful book. Great books often feel like a magic trick by the end. All the scraps laid down for you suddenly come together and the author reveals a live dove that flies away. Martyr! certainly does that; the ending is a beautiful culmination. But what makes it special is you feel like Akbar could do this all day.

I love books about an intellectual scene and I love books about Fucked Up Little Guys(tm). These two interests often intersect. Other examples include Bright Young People, about the social set that dominated British tabloid headlines in the 30s and were sent up in Evelyn Waugh's fiction and Grand Hotel Abyss, about the lives of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. They're all messy weirdos who bounced off of another and brilliant to read about. Also you get to sound intellectual whilst basically just reading tabloid gossip.

When We Cease to Understand the World concerns itself with the figures responsible for the rise of quantum physics. Schrödinger, Heisenberg, all the boys are here. What Labatut does that is particularly good is depicting the psychological effect of the discoveries. The scientists finding these irresolvable truths and actually understanding them basically all lose their marbles, and Labatut does a good job at depicting why to an innumerate audience (me).

There's something pruriently exciting too about the intellectual 20th century scene. Heads up, fascism is coming, do your equations and figure it out before the bombs start falling and the camps are built. You can feel the precipitous acceleration towards mechanised society and the nuclear bomb from all the way back to the 1910s, when the secrets of the subatomic are revealing themselves to these neurotic little guys — and freaking the fuck out.