January 29, 2024 · 3:41 pm

Cormoran Strike: Six Audiobooks to Replace the Podcasts

If you, like me, are struggling to stop listening to All the Politics Podcasts because none of them make you feel anything other than deep worry for the world and sadness and whatcanyoudoanyway, then let me offer you the suggestion of murder mystery audiobooks.

There are two types of audiobooks: those you need to listen to closely and carefully – say literary fiction and those that you can have on in the background while you clean, make lunches, drive. If you are aiming to replace podcasts – that perfect medium for doing something else while listening – then you need the second category. The books that have enough plot and enough repetition of that plot that if you stop paying attention for a few minutes, say to take the clothes out of the dryer, you haven’t missed some crucial piece of character development.

And here is where the Cormoran Strike mysteries shine. Lots of repetition of key plot points as the two detectives, Cormoran and Robin, discuss their investigations, crushingly slow development of their romantic relationship, near endless reminders that Cormoran has an amputated leg and likes greasy food.

What does not work as well is the muddling of the murder investigations themselves. Lots of characters involved – in one of the books, Ink Black Heart, there are eight or so characters who have both internet names and real world names and you have to try to match each to each while only paying Half Attention. It doesn’t work very well. So you really have to accept that you’ll always be a little unsure of who is who in the murder investigation, or maybe actually read the books.

Having finished all six I can’t claim these are the best murder mysteries out there – probably hovering more like average – but I will say I am very glad to have purged my life of endless speculation about the 2024 election and reporting of polls that don’t matter anyway. So if you have another series to recommend, let me know.

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January 29, 2024 · 2:27 pm

The Fraud: What, truth?

You can’t read Zadie Smith’s The Fraud in 2024 and not feel cold shudders of recognition for how easy it is to distort/create truth for an audience willing to believe – or disbelieve – anything so long as those fabricated facts meet their aims.

Set in the 19th century, historical fiction does its best work here by using the past to illuminate pressing truths of the present. The novel follows the infamous trial of a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne – who had bee presumed dead at sea. The “Claimant” – despite being very obviously a butcher and not an aristocrat – continues to insist he is Sir Roger, and finds swelling numbers of supporters willing to accept his – clearly fabricated – claim to be the real Sir Roger. His supporters, like the Claimant, explain away the obvious and glaring inconsistencies by way of conspiracies against him by the press and others. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the connections to our Current Political Moment.

I guess that’s not really what the book is entirely about – it’s also about Eliza, who lives with her comically terrible author-cousin, William Ainsworth, and tries (albeit unsuccessfully) to edit his horrible books. In Ainsworth’s new wife – once his maid – Eliza debate the credulity of the Tichborne trial and in doing dramatizes the fundamental crisis of our moment: We cannot agree on basic facts of reality. In Eliza’s rational understanding she knows and believes the Claimant to be utter nonsense, but finds herself wanting to trust the absurd possibility that he could, indeed, be Tichborne.

As the reader-surrogate, while Eliza debates within herself the possibility of the utterly implausible (as well as in the morality of taking money she knows to be earned through slavery; and of the ethics of letting Ainsworth continue to believe he is a good writer when he is Definitely Not; and of the ease with which we might lie by omission when it comes to the border of love) we, too, are called to defend our conviction of what we believe True, and how far we are willing to go to bend that truth to accommodate the feelings of those we love.

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December 22, 2023 · 4:08 pm

Home: Slow and beautiful

I have tried a couple of times to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead but each time gave up with boredom (despite it being routinely included on best-of-all-time lists). So what made me think I’d fine the second book set in the town of Gilead and focused on religion to be more captivating, I’m not sure. But I was! More captivated that is. Still not going to run away with any prizes for being enthralling or Utterly Engrossing, but definitely a winner here in the slow burn of character development and theme.

The book follows Jack and Glory, siblings returned home to care for their dying father – a retired minister. I guess Jack didn’t really come home to care for him, or Glory either, both sort of find their lives falling apart and return home, conveniently to care for the dying dad. For Jack it’s a return after a long exile/absence and for his father this is something of a chance to redeem Jack (who’s soul he has been Very Worried About).

Unfolding over many scenes of making tea, or standing in a garden, or rocking on a porch bench, Glory and Jack reconnect and cautiously share and build trust. It asks readers to figure out where the limit of familial bond might be, how we carry/negotiate/give up/fail/rebuild familial expectations, and when – if ever – we might be allowed to start our lives again when they Go Wrong.

If you are tired, sleepy, exhausted, even a bit likely to doze, I’d say make this a Morning Book as you will almost certainly fall asleep within a paragraph as the lyrical writing and slowwww pace are very… lulling. But if you’ve got your 8 hours and a cup of coffee, you could do much worse for a book to read and contemplate What It All Means.

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December 14, 2023 · 7:16 pm

What Strange Paradise

I had such resolve to blog this one quickly because I had thoughts on the ending, but December, man, is just too much between gastro illnesses and parades and who’s turn is it for the chocolate calendar.

Onwards we go, regrets about time aside: Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise oscillates its chapters between two perspectives one of the young boy Amir, who is the sole survivor of a shipwrecked group of refugees, and of Vänna, a girl on the Greek island where Amir washes ashore. Vanna is doing her best to help Amir – for reasons that aren’t exactly obvious other than perhaps young people, not yet made assholes by the world, are better able to empathize and respond to the vulnerability and need.

At a time of year where the Christmas story surrounds – that of a refugee taken in with hospitality and care etc – and while the world heaves with displaced, erased, violently taken humans it is hard to read this one and probably necessary (maybe why it was in the short list for Canada Reads?).

And if this book is a reminder of why we read fiction – to be in this space of empathetic connection both with those running and those who feel overrun – it is also for its speculative possibilities. The end of the book calls us to question not only what has happened in the preceding pages, but also if and when. With the alternating chapters those of ‘before’ and ‘after’ our final chapter is ‘now.’ In that final chapter the reader can read into the ending multiple paths of possibility at once – those of hope and loss simultaneously. Wanting a satisfying conclusion you could join the thousands of others who have googled “what does the ending of What Strange Paradise mean, or you could, I suppose, approach it as a question of what you do now to shape that and the broader ending.

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