Weekly Reading Wrap-Up: Remoteness, History, and Camp Shenanigans

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Hello, I'm Bob the Bookworm, and welcome to my channel. And today, I wanted to talk about the books that I've been reading this week, including this lovely one.

[00:00:07]Um but yeah, I hope you're all doing really well. Uh we are in the midst of some very warm temperatures in uh the UK. So, I am melting. Um but hence the sort of slightly pink sheen uh well, more than a sheen at this point that is going on with me. But anyway, I hope you're having a great week, um and let's get talking about these books.

[00:00:26]So, first up, this book that I keep on waving around, John of John by Douglas Stuart. And so, following on from Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain, this book follows in a similar kind of pattern of looking at uh the experiences of working-class men, but particularly uh working-class gay men in a kind of community that doesn't always necessarily understand them. And um I really, really greatly enjoyed this. This book is focused on um sort of a Scottish islands instead of being on the mainland, and that is an important thing and an important part of this. Um Douglas Stuart himself was living on uh the islands at this time of the of sort of writing this. He was he'd written Shuggie Bain, was kind of it was out there waiting to be hopefully picked up, and he went away and sort of lived on the islands for a little bit, and this is where he he sort of got the ideas for this. Um and it's interesting in kind of kind of comparison to a lot of his other work. Um he is really focused in this book on particularly father-son relationship, and one that is really beautiful in quite a lot of ways, but also quite a tricky relationship. Uh so, we have uh Cal, but his name is John Callum. He is the son of a man called John, hence John of John. And in many ways, this is also sort of really indicative of how things go on this island, where people often refer to who you essentially belong to to help make sense of who you are. So, oh yes, I'm uh John of John, and I'm over on this island, or I'm this person of this person of this person of this island and that kind of gives people a context for who you are. His father works within the church and so the sort of elder John works within the church and is often part of the person a part part of the group um since he's singing the hymns and all of these sorts of things. But that it basically means there's a very specific kind of masculinity allowed on the island where you have to be very practical, you know, you go out, you tend to the animals, you work on the land, you do very physical things. But also there's a sort of tenderness the men have book clubs and they sing and that the arts are important to them and religion is important to them.

[00:02:39]Um and you've got Cal who is younger who is the son and he goes away to the mainland to study at the sort of arts and fashion school and then comes back. And the book is mostly focused around these two men and their relationship. But what is I think really beautiful about the way this unfurls is that the men there's a lot that's unsaid between them but also a lot that's said only in Scots Gaelic or Gaelic and it's it's in the book in italics. So every time something is written in italics that was essentially in um in Gaelic or Scots Gaelic um and so as a result you've got these sort of conversations that happen between certain characters and don't happen elsewhere. So the father and son will talk knowing that nobody else or that somebody else in the room might not necessarily understand them or they will switch to English when they want to inflict harm in a certain way or you know, certain things happen within the language.

[00:03:36]But I think this book is just so so beautiful for the way it explores essentially queerness or a kind of understanding of yourself. Um Cal himself is struggling with trying to understand that and piece that together and it impacts the way that he sees his father because he has to navigate what he thinks is going to be a solemn judgment about it with religious overtones. And and without giving a lot of this book away, it really blossoms and develops in the way these two men speak, but there is also so much that's hidden and that's a large part of the the kind of sort of constant presence in this book is that there is so much that is unsaid.

[00:04:16]There is so much that lives in silence and just sort of lurks in the distance and I think that's what's so so effective about this book is it allows those spaces in between for those two men. So I thought this was really beautiful. It got really tense and emotional and gorgeous and horrifying and in so many parts, but I think it was also really lovely. I saw him speak at the Hay Festival Hay-on-Wye Festival over the weekend like last weekend and it was just really beautiful to hear him talk about some of the inspirations around that as well about this sense of what it must be to be a gay person on an island where you know, it's just it's taken as a given that if somebody um that you speak of never married and died alone that that was just because that's what they wanted as opposed to maybe that they were gay and there's a kind of culture of silence all hidden around it.

[00:05:06]So yeah, I just thought this is a really beautiful beautiful book and and sits really neatly in a kind of trilogy with the maybe not a trilogy but kind of a trio with his previous two books as well. Really really gorgeous bit of writing. Next up something very different indeed, Fruit Fly by Josh Silver, a book that's only fairly recently come out. And this book focuses largely at least at the beginning on two certain characters mostly focused initially on one woman who is a writer who has had some success with her first book and sort of I think early writing but basically feels like she's lost inspiration, is struggling and feels like her publisher will drop her. And so she starts to think what is successful, what kinds of things are selling. And it comes to her and she sort of finds from other places and sort of a course and everything else like that that basically what sells are books that are tragic and books that are gay and even better if it is gay and tragic. I realize the the joy of putting this after John of John.

[00:06:07]But this book that she then thinks about writing, she thinks well I need inspiration for it and so she starts going on various dating apps, especially Grindr.

[00:06:16]And calling that a dating app feels very generous.

[00:06:20]But she goes onto Grindr and is basically looking for to basically talk to people and to some degree to steal their stories. And so this is kind of partly where the title Fruit Fly comes from, this idea of her hovering around the fruit of sort of gay men to kind of steal their stories here. But what we do see as well is she also meets a man who is struggling himself, who is homeless, who is trading sex essentially for a living with, you know, for either for for drugs or for a place to sleep for the night and all of those sorts of things. And she is drawn to him and sorts sort of wants to almost absorb him into her life. And so begins then a story of these two people and the various ways that they essentially both serve a role in each other's lives, whether good or bad. But I think what's really quite special about this book is it's incredibly funny but there is something incredibly deeply tragic running through it. I don't want to spoil anything here but essentially lots of assumptions that I think you could make at the beginning of the book about certain characters are unravelled in some way.

[00:07:36]And so there's a lot that goes into this book. It's incredibly dark about addiction, about mental mental ill health, about power and control, about abuse, and about so so many other things.

[00:07:49]But, it's also just a book that is deeply deeply funny. It involves the line right at quite There's a whole scene involving Grindr, um which just has to be enjoyed. Um but, it does involve the line, "Virginia Woolf would have loved Grindr."

[00:08:04]Which I just think is fantastic and almost feels sacrilegious, but is also just brilliant. Um and incredibly It just feels like an incredibly well-observed and thought-through novel.

[00:08:16]It It does the sensitive part really well, I think. But, it's also completely raucously funny and absurd, and I really loved this. I just thought it was a real breath of fresh air. Last but not least, I read The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lee Lyse Doucet. Um and this is on the Women's Prize for nonfiction. Um and I found this book to be a really quite big surprise. Um I kind of thought it sounded [clears throat] like an interesting concept, but I really love the way it played out. So, essentially the idea is telling the story and the sort of history of Afghanistan um over a sort of specific period of history, but through really the lens of a hotel. Um and this is the InterContinental Hotel um in Kabul. And so, because of its status as a bit of an international hotel, one that often houses dignitaries or uh journalists or kind of the wealthy or what have you, it means that it's this really interesting intersection and this really interesting place during quite a few big moments of history. And so, what we see is as various uprisings happen, revolutions, um killings, all of these other things happen in and around this hotel. The hotel is this odd character almost where the walls keep standing just about and that allows us to tell the history of what's happening around it. Who is coming in and out of the building, who is sort of um not coming anymore because of a certain war. All of these sorts of things and and actually I I found it really interesting not as somebody not knowing a great deal about um the history of Afghanistan to have it through this lens. And it's also quite interesting cuz Lyse Doucet was a journalist at the time.

[00:10:02]Or still is, I believe, but was, you know, was working in Afghanistan during some of these really huge moments. And so there are these moments where she refers to herself in the third person and says, "Oh, you know, and this is something that Lyse Doucet would have written down." Uh and there's there's something quite interesting about it of actually, yeah, like she was in she was there. Um but I think it's done so so beautifully um that just allows this really rich history to be told in a very specific way, but also through the lens of knowing that there is, you know, outside of the walls of the hotel, there are many people who are struggling to make ends meet, who are missing loved ones who have been killed in wars, revolutions, and in whatever else. And so this this book kind of stands as a bit of a it's kind of odd way of telling a people's history, but I think in a really clever way as well. And I I just found um it really compelling just the way that this was done. So, that's what I've been reading this week. I hope you're all keeping really really well.

[00:10:57]Take care. Hopefully you're not melting and speak to you soon. Bye-bye.