There is a small, unimportant detail in Use of Weapons that caught me more than perhaps it ought to have. In hope of extracting a favour from a university, the Culture tracks down a set of wax tablets on which the legendary lost works of a great poet are inscribed. They are held in the wall cavity of a monastery, and are almost completely intact, except for three or four that have been damaged by a fire lit by a passing shepherd.

Some time ago I decided that I would try to write a little on this website about every book I read. This was a very good idea: adding a sense of obligation to something you enjoy can only ever make the joys sweeter. The idea did not last long, and I reap the rewards of dropping it to this day. For example: would someone who has committed themselves to posting publicly about every book they read choose to read Crime and Punishment? Of course not. I do not need the feeling of exposure that comes from having to voice opinions about ‘important’ books. I had my fill of that at university.

The film Titanic felt fundamentally broken to me. Here was a love story, not especially compelling but competent enough; now, crashing into it and holing it below the waterline, is a disaster in which hundreds will die, terrifyingly realised. The love story continues as nothing more than a distraction: too melodramatic to bring the loss of life closer, but not engaging enough to take centre stage.

Our Lady of the Nile is building to disaster, too—the disaster within the novel, and the greater disaster it prefigures. Against this, the everyday concerns of its schoolgirls could seem similarly unimportant. Instead, they underline the horror and the tragedy.

A Life of One’s Own is plainly a book with a lot to offer, much of it up my street: literature; feminism; personal growth. But I wasn’t looking for anything in particular from it. I bought because it was coincidentally due for release shortly after I finally got around to Biggs’ last book, which I thought was superb. That doesn’t leave me with much of a measure of success, but handily, the book succeeds on its own terms, is plain about what those terms are, and makes a strong case for why they matter.

I didn’t write about this when I finished it a month or two ago, because I was pressed for time and because I didn’t know what to say about it. I enjoyed it a lot, but I’m not an experienced enough reader of comics or graphic novels to know how to talk about them. But I’ve recently been battered with adverts for Tetris World Tour, a microtransaction-pushing, power-up-laden mobile Tetris game, and it made me think of this page:

I bought All Day Long when it was published in 2015; I distinctly remember ordering it online with great enthusiasm following a recommendation from somewhere. As with all parcels, I waited impatiently for its arrival. I then put it on a shelf, where it sat patiently for eight years while I never quite felt in the mood to read it.

In 2015, I was interested in the basic premise of the book: Biggs interviews people in various different jobs about their work and what it means to them. Finally reading it, I was pleased to find it does more, drawing out insightful connections between its subjects, and to the state of British politics and the economy. The result is a compelling and fascinating exploration of modern working life, with Biggs finding an excellent balance between her subjects’ voices and her own.

This is an unusual book that feels like it shouldn’t be unusual. A long poem or verse novel set in the post-WWII USA, The Long Take is accessible enough that I can easily imagine a world in which it kicked off a popular interest in its form. Perhaps if it had won the 2018 Booker, for which it was shortlisted, this wouldn’t feel like the kind of thing only bookish weirdos with English degrees read, novels-in-verse would be less of a rarity, and I wouldn’t have found this one in a remaindered book shop at a knock-down price.

I’m always delighted to approach books (and other works) with as little knowledge about them as reasonably possible. (If you’re the same, and you haven’t read The City and the City, then please forgo reading this post, which contains conceptual spoilers if not plot ones.) This novel, which sat vaguely on my reading list for some time until I received it as a Christmas present, occupied a middle ground: I vaguely knew the central conceit of its setting, but nothing beyond that.

I promise I don’t only read books that Katie gives me.

‘How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life’: you have to admire the attempt to make inevitable title for the sequel to Alex in Numberland make sense. A more pedantic author would have gone with Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alex Found There, but then again, a more pedantic author would probably have written a more tedious book. Personally, I would have gone with Do the Fucking Maths, but that’s tenuous even if you place the stress where you need to.

Not about the streets of London. The Knowledge attempts to summarize the essentials for ‘rebooting’ civilization after a global catastrophe.

About three chapters into The Knowledge, I went to a picnic for science communicatiors and played a game of Kubb ¹ with the author that lasted so long it seemed entirely likely that civilization would have collapsed by the time we finished. Late in the third hour, despite some valiant cheating by Dr Dartnell, we lost.