Sunday Reads Late Spring

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Hi book and welcome to new video. This is a Sunday reads for 10 books recently read. Helen Dit the English understand wool.

[00:00:11]The mystery dock by Matthew Mintosh.

[00:00:15]So 63 pages long or 1,630 pages long.

[00:00:21]Dough by Colton uh what's his name?

[00:00:27]Sorry, Connor Holman.

[00:00:31]Uh, moderation by Elaine Castillo. She was on the women's um fiction prize long list. Uh, The Copyriter by Daniel Poppik.

[00:00:44]Um, No Measure by um, Kelly Crumbry.

[00:00:50]Short book as you can see.

[00:00:53]Don Dillo Ratner star another short book John Burgers the red tender of Bologna and a couple of poetry collections to finish up with Muriel Riza selected poems and Camille Ralph's debut collection after you were I am okay so I'm going to start with the Helen Wit I get to it amongst all these monsters there the English understand more. So what a delight and absolute treat this was. The the control over the material, the control over the reader emotional experience is just a wonder to behold in this. It's only 63 pages long, but it's so rich.

[00:01:41]So, a 17-year-old girl uh her parents who were incredibly rich uh died when she was a baby and she was swept up by this couple who uh brought her up until her age of 17 when the novel opens.

[00:01:58]And uh the mother is someone who uh brings her up with sort of breeding aristocratic manners. And the greatest fear is is to do something or to behave moto as in with bad taste or I actually think it sounds to me sort of in a bad tone leaving a bad taste. Uh because that that is sort of the greatest thing to avoid. It's it's a sort of a delicacy.

[00:02:27]It's a balance. It's an etiquette. It's a set of manners. Um, and it's good refined taste. So, the English understand wool is um the first thing we're introduced to in that the finest wool is to be found on the sheep in the highlands and the aisles of Scotland so that the mother and daughter travel there to purchase the uh the wool direct from the direct from the the shepherds.

[00:02:52]But they know that the best place to have it sort of made up into woolen clothes is with English tailor. So then they travel from from the highlands of Scotland down to England. And equally lots of things like linen, the best linen is produced in Ireland, but again they take they would take it to uh English seamstresses to to make up. And so it's all this thing about taste and sort of getting the best top-notch quality of of everything. And money is no real object. But it's not just in material things. It's also in, as I say, in breeding. So, she's given piano uh lessons uh by a teacher who in order to swing the deal uh was installed in a house uh that they own um for six months.

[00:03:38]She's getting this sort of beautiful palatial house to live in. Um she she's taught to play bridge. uh she's taught to play bridge because there are times when adults have the the child around and rather than the child sort of doing childish things and demanding their attention taking away from the adults, why not just include it? Make make the child like an adult and play play bridge. Um tennis is another thing that that she learns to play to a high standard and and and has a personal coach. there are all the all these things and um the the notion of Moon or avoiding Moveton, they learn that because they have a house in Marrakesh um which is in Morocco this population is is Muslim uh that when it's uh Ramadan and they're fasting, it would be bad taste and indecent to expect their staff in this house to wait on the hand and foot when they're fasting. So they decide uh that they will take themselves away on their holidays during Ramadan so as not to impose on their staff and they also give them the mother also pays them a bit extra over that period even though they're not waiting hand and foot on on the master and the lady because they're not in residence. But that's not done out of a sort of human empathy or a concern. It's done because it's it's kind of to not do something like that would be indecent. It would be mo on. It would be bad taste. And what happens is that our 17 year old girl has uh traveled with her mother down from Scotland having bought the bolt of wool and uh she wakes up in the hotel in London and her mother's gone and has cleared out quite obviously it's cleared out everything and just left her one of the bolts of wool. Um so the the girl now has to try and piece together what's happened and she has no money. She's left without any money, but she does have the residence, the the ownership of the house that was for the her piano tutor. And very quickly when this story uh gets around uh the media uh that basically um that the her mother and father were con artists. It's it's a fascinating story and there's a you know there's she's encouraged to write down that story.

[00:06:02]there's a bidding war for her story even though she's only 17. You know, there's going to be lots of money in it for her.

[00:06:08]So, she, you know, she thinks there's actually quite a good solution to her immediate problem of money.

[00:06:14]And the second half of the book is her dealings with the world of publishing and agents and editors and is hilarious.

[00:06:21]It's it's basically the first half is about the sort of the aristocratic uh manners and etiquette. here she's taken these stylings uh in her dealings with the commercial capitalist world of the bourgeoisi and of the neuvo ree of those as say editors agents publishers and I don't want to spoil it for you but it it's it's wonderful this sort of clash of class dwit dit captures it so well and in a way I can't help feeling that dwit is playing a playful joke if not a playful revenge on the world of publishing that she always seems to been slightly outside of. Uh even even recently the last couple of weeks she was awarded a a literary prize £175,000 dollars I suppose prize which is a lot of money. Um but she said she had to turn it down because because the demands on her for media and and things would just take her away from her writing. She wasn't prepared to do it. Um, so I get the feeling that Dwit is a bit of a literary outsider and I yeah, I just love this. This was absolute treat. Five stars. Now on to the first of two big books, The Mystery Dock. As I said, 1,630 pages, but there's a lot of white space, empty space. There's sections which are redacted. There's sections which are covered in asterxes.

[00:07:49]There's sections which are are either film stills or um f photographs which seem to be taken by the author or come into his possession. Uh and I'm going to do a little um sidebar on on pictures in novels uh when I finish talking about this book. So it opens with um an author who wakes up in the morning and he's got amnesia. He can't remember a thing. He doesn't think the w that the wife who who's in bed next to him who gets up to go to her work is his real wife. It's that she's an imposttor and in fact everything seems to be sort of deliberately staged around him to recreate a familiarity. Um but he feels it none of it's real that they're all as I say similar or whatever. Um the one thing he knows is he's a writer so he goes to his laptop and he finds a file called the mystery dock.

[00:08:46]And when he opens it, the only thing in there is the title, the mystery dot do.

[00:08:50]There's no there's no text or anything.

[00:08:52]And that's the launching off point. And that sort of story line um sort of feeds back periodically. There are other story lines. So there's a 911 um person on the 83rd floor of one of the towers who's took, you know, on on the line with the emergency services, you know, no getting out, but they're trying to keep her, you know, positive in case, you know, the fireman can reach her by going up the steps. There's uh this seemed to be the stories of Matthew Mintosh's um the death of his father or or his father dying from brain cancer.

[00:09:30]Um so amnesia and and sort of plays on the brain seem to be a sort of returning theme of this. There's also a family who have three daughters. the third dies as an infant after you know being born with a you know a fatal condition.

[00:09:50]Um there's there's if you ask me what this book is about I couldn't tell you. Uh but I absolutely enjoyed the immersive experience you know not trying to figure it out not trying to decode it just reading it for its own merits and the pleasure to be derived there. And yes, there's a sense of achievement because, you know, I started this book on the 2nd of May and I finished it on the 5th of May, that's 1630 pages. But of course, it's not 630 pages, as I say, because there's lots of things that you can sort of whiz through. You can do, you know, if your average reading session is an hour and a half to two hours, you can do three to 400 pages of this. So, it won't take you long. Do not be put off by, you know, it's uh and also there is a helpful bookmark as part of the which was vital for keeping keeping my place. So, I really enjoyed the experience of this. I couldn't tell you what it was about. I think there was some very good writing bits. It is fragmentaryary.

[00:10:51]The whole the whole structure and some of the actual sort of dialogue exchanges are fragmentaryary. And in a way, by pure coincidence, the next book I'm going to read is is this the oldest alive by Morgan Day. And the very first chapter of this I think actually gives quite a good um overview of what this book is. So it's got um it's got the letter I uh small case surrounded with two sets of brackets and it's so let's call that I. I is the standard representation of life. The figure is made of three parts. The letter I is the self. First pair of brackets is cosmic matter. Second pair of brackets is the physical for the body. And in a way that I felt that that sort of sums this up. You know, it is dealing with the individual psyche within the the sort of community and the sort of cosmos trying to find one's place and the physical bodies involved, death, things like that, you know, and the fragmentaryary nature of a single mind, i.e. uh Matthew Macintosh's plus the reader single mind trying to put these fragments together only will only ever give us glimpses but glimpses are enough I feel in the way that this book is satisfying you know I I did really enjoy doing this as I say that's probably um bumped up by the sense of getting through such a big book I mean I think this is the biggest book I've ever read in terms of pages um so yeah I enjoyed I gave it, you know, I'd give it four and a half stars.

[00:12:28]The the one thing in it, there's an awful lot of photos here. There's a lot of stills from movies uh and TV and stuff. And I always wonder what they're for when I see photos and even maps in in books. You know, I never resort to a map or, you know, I just feel that I'm going to figure it out through the words and if I don't, if I get lost geographically in the novel, so be it.

[00:12:52]Then the author hasn't done a good enough job. you know, I don't want the short hand of a map. Similarly, with the photographs, with one exception that I'll tack on to the end of my my talk.

[00:13:02]The first thing is photos in books are very hard to reproduce in any kind of quality, any kind of definition. So, you're getting quite a poor image where you are literally sort of straining half the time to make out what it is. There are a series of photos here. There's like one of the American flag flying outside somebody's house and the changing lights um you know sort of um sort of hexagons of light on the camera lens as it's taken at different times of the day which put you in mind of Matis's waterlies great fine but what couldn't see what it was alluding to there are film stills that build up in sequence so they're successive frames again didn't really see what the point of them was I mean they act as spaces mental spaces, spacers, as I say, you know, all the white, all the white space, all the redacted stuff, all the asterisks are sort of pause points for you. You know, you've been sort of gading along and you can you can breathe, you can relax because you've got this lesser intense thing, but you could do that with, as I say, you don't need photos and stills for that. He's done it with redacted text. He's done it with asterxes. He's just done it with blank white pages. So, I do not see the point of photos. They never seem to relate to to to anything and and they're always in the context of a novel to me, they're always sub they're always inferior to text. Trust the writers should trust the text. Now the one exception to that I will say is WGC board particularly in a novel like Oelitz because it's not what's in the image so much other than the trustworthy nature of the image and the um therefore the reliability of the narrator because he's throwing in these photos which make you which he leads you to believe are reference to the characters or their ancestry in the book and they're not at all they're they're found images they're bought from charity shops and things like that they're completely random they do not portray and and how could they because his other books are fictions so how can you have pictures of real people in a work of fiction I mean yes they're real people and that they are photos of people but they're not photos of these fictional characters who never existed and it's that kind of brilliant sort of meta mind screwing stuff But, you know, that's when it works, when you're using it to tilt and interrogate the text rather than supplement plot or supplement character in that traditional novelistic way. So, Sabbold is the one exception I'd I'd make to putting pictures in novels. Unless you want to come and and and tell me different, by all means uh you know comment down below if if you feel that you know of a book or books where the use of images and pictures and photographs has been very successful. But I you know uh I on the whole don't find them to be successful.

[00:16:06]Okay. And on to Joe by uh not Joe Doe by Connor Haltman Haltman. So um this is a book about um the or taken from the database of uh Jane dos and John Doe's in every state in the US and a lot of those are historicals. So for example some of them go back to the 1930s where there was a Cleveland serial killer. Um five of his nine victims were never identified. Um but they're not just murder victims. There can be people who commit suicide. There can be people who died of natural causes. Lots of transient deaths because they're outside of society. Nobody knows. Nobody's looking for them. Nobody knows, you know, they, you know, they've secreted them away themselves away in woods or whatever. Um there are um also a couple of people who who don't die but they their mental illness means they don't know who they are either and they're both sort of taken to asylums where they die for natural causes. So they're still John or Jane Doe's because no one knows who they are and it points up a lot of things about America. So the first thing is it's divided into um the open cases of unidentified human remains in each of the 50 states. So it separated by state.

[00:17:30]And as you can imagine, the most populous number of doe's are in California, New York, and Florida. Who could have predicted that? Whereas Iowa only has one. Now, obviously, I don't know how complete that database is of of all the John and Jane Does in America.

[00:17:48]But it seems pretty, you know, this is a big old book. Again, lots of white space, so you can rattle through it, you know. Um, and it's the these are actual cases because there was one early on where it mentioned that although they didn't know who the victim was, someone was uh eventually um accused and convicted of of the murder. And so I looked him up and then it was real and it said that, you know, one or two of his victims were unidentified.

[00:18:17]Um, the only thing every single entry just about has is the clothes of the deceased. So, um, you get a you build up a real sense of things like class and the era that it's in from the clothes that are left. Uh, you also get the an insight into who's making these entries. It's a bit like sort of Wikipedia's sort of common source that once you're granted access to the database, you can put the details in because one of the contributors seems very obsessed with whether the male victims are circumcised or non-ircumcised. At first, it was just in one state. I thought, oh, whoever's entering this for this state, but actually one or two in other states. So, um, it's things like that that just stop you up short. you know, we there's this whole industry of sort of true crime and it's, you know, on TV, it's in sort of high quality camera. Even, you know, when you get sort of footage from police body cams and stuff, it's high quality.

[00:19:22]This is much more gritty and yet empty because the details are so minimal. The clothes, as I say, a lot of the bodies have become skeletonized because they haven't been discovered for so long.

[00:19:34]Some of them are in um pieces because of of you know animal activity and things.

[00:19:40]I mean it really pulls you up short. Um so I found it very affecting. It is a bit of a one-trick pony in that you get 50 states worth of John and Jane Jones, but actually if you make a little bit of a mental effort and you know you treat each one on its merits and you distinguish them that these are different people um that that it is very effective. And of course now identifying human remains even skeletonized ones is a lot more possible than the ones that you know pre990 um because of DNA and then um famil familial DNA genealogy where you can at least track the family that are likely to be have derived from genetically. Of course, the 1930s ones, you're not going to go that far back, but even the 1980, there's one in 1988. You're not going to you're not going to, you know, a lot of these were buried in porpa's graves or they were bur given a funeral by someone who just didn't want to think of them dying unknown and alone and actually paid for a proper grave with a headstone. Even if it sort of said, you know, some of them are named by the the emergency services, particularly when it's children, they're given names. Um, so at least they can put it on the headstone. You know, these people are not going to be exumed because there's nothing in it to to exume them when they're sort of back from the 1980s.

[00:21:07]What you know, if they were murdered, the chances of the murderers probably, you know, also long gone, dead or in prison or whatever. So, it is very it's surprisingly touching. You will get through it very quickly. um 600 pages of the 50 states, but again, lots of white space, lots of minimal information really because not only do we not know their names, we don't know much more other than um the clothes that they they were found in. Um so yeah, this this was a you know, an interesting experience.

[00:21:38]It's hard to recommend unless you're into that sort of thing really. It's not a book you can idly pick up. I think you have to have be have a sort of pre-incarnation that that is this sort of thing. But I gave it four stars.

[00:21:53]And now to a couple of more disappointing works. So this is Moderation by Lane Castillo, which as I say got onto the women's long women's prize long list.

[00:22:02]And um it seems to be a book that can't make up its mind what it is.

[00:22:08]So, it starts off about um a Filipino or um sort of Filipino heritage uh American woman called Girly who is a moderator of things like you know posts of Facebook or you know whatever. I mean it's given a fictional she's given a fictional company that she works for. It's basically the people who have to moderate, you know, extreme content of violence and sex and all sorts of things on these platforms. And she's the best at it in the sense that it's a it's um a job that burns its its people out very quickly. And she's stuck it for 10 years. She's stuck it for 10 years because she's sort of numb. She she she has a sort of trauma that makes her numb to it in the first place. So So it's no skin off her nose kind of thing.

[00:23:00]So, it starts off really interesting because I am very always very interested in in in this this thing about moderation of of social media content and I've read sort of two or three novels and none of them have really taken it anywhere sadly. So, we get a lot about sort of being a Filipino of Filipino heritage and her extended family.

[00:23:23]um we get uh she's head-h hunted to um do moderation in a VR uh product that's going to be launched. And VR seems to be rather, you know, been and gone. It's it's, you know, it hasn't really taken hold of our imaginations as we thought it would.

[00:23:41]It's rather been superseded by AI, it seems to me. So, that seemed a bit sort of out of whack and out of date really.

[00:23:49]And uh the head of that firm, the guy header. So then we have um a sort of romantic thing, will they?

[00:23:58]Won't they? All the way through. There's also an element of techno thriller that while she's in the VR world, this this guy, this avatar um seems to be not dealing with her. He's he's sort of advancing on a um malevolently, but not not within the terms of the game, the VR world that they're in, but as if to get to a moderator and and attack the moderator for whatever, but that sort of dribbles away and goes nowhere. We don't really know what that's all about. Is the whole thing um a corporate um scam to get away from some financial? So there are all these elements and they don't really cohhere and in the end it it sort of fritters away to um will they won't they the romantic element really disappointing. So, two other problems I had with the book and the writing was that a lot of it is characters sizing each other up trying to interpret their body language or their expression because that would change the meaning of the words that actually emerge from their mouths. And while that's sort of fairly standard um stuff you'd put in a novel because it expands on the notion of character and motivations and things like that, she does it to death here. It's just constant on and on and on. Girly is just interpreting every single thing and it gets very wearing. And the other thing is so and again I think this is an example of moving from from island of of text to island of text of of text without ever really resolving what this book's about.

[00:25:37]She's into powerlifting weights and stuff. So, Gurley had a sub routine for every day of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday were her lifting days when she was running an upper lower program. She tried a three-day pushpull leg split before, then tried the six-day bodybuilding bro split, but found the former didn't give her enough volume on her compound lifts, and the latter didn't give her enough recovery time at some point. So, I mean, that's tedious.

[00:26:04]I mean, that, you know, unless you're into powerlifting, none of that makes sense and unfortunately isn't interesting enough for me as a reader to pursue it. Next paragraph. At some point around 2007 or eight, nearly everyone in her family had become a meatthead, i.e. into powerlifting. All her cousins lifted, mostly the boys at first, but eventually the girls got into it, too.

[00:26:26]There had been a bodybuilding streak in the community, meaning the Filipino community. Even back in the 1990s era bay, but things really took off in the decade between 2007 and 2017.

[00:26:40]There was suddenly a multitude of perfectly acceptable aesthetic, economic, political catastrophe induced depression related reasons for self-medicating via barbell.

[00:26:51]And then so you know this this stuff about the weightlifting goes on for about six eight pages. Of course, like everyone in the community who had the standard old duffel go bag of trauma in the trunk of the Honda, she'd spent years going through the whole rigma roll of building her body up. All that hard ass lady vengeance fortress woman.

[00:27:12]You shall not pass. But in the end, it was just too much work. Trying to be the strongest girl in her weight class, the strongest girl in every given in any given room. Turned out that sublimating one's quote adverse childhood experiences into being shredded AF did not in the end a personality make. No, it doesn't make a personality. So why have you just spent six pages on it? She was just someone who lifted. She didn't have to make the practice an autobiography. Again, absolutely spot on. Why are you giving me six pages of her biography about it? and then all her cousins join her and then then then they start gossiping and but it's still in the context of this weightlifting thing.

[00:27:52]I mean that drove me insane. So I was really disappointed in this book. Two and a half stars.

[00:27:59]So the first book I read this year was by a poet called John Tottenham who'd written his first novel called Service which is basically about and I'll post the link to my review of it and it's basically about a writer who was has to have a day job because the you know the writing doesn't bring enough money in and his day job was working in a bookshop and it's called service because it's all about customer service and how the customers drive you insane which I've experienced personally because I used to work in a record shop for 19 years so I know exactly what he was writing But it was awful because it was just so repetitive. Could have been cut in half and been just as successful.

[00:28:37]This is a book by a poet, first novel by a poet called Daniel Poppik about a poet who can't make enough money through his poetry, so has to have a day job.

[00:28:47]Exactly the same. And his day job is being a copywriter for products for making them sexy and desirable. Now, the difference between this and the John Tottenham book is, as you can see, it's a lot, it's a lot more spritly. It's a, you know, it's a, its touch is a lot lighter. It's funny. I mean, the Tottenham book was funny because when you're sort of relaying tales about awful customer service experiences and this is not dissimilar, it's but it's it's much more fleet of foot. It's much more light touch. You can tell this guy's a poet, whereas a John Top, you got no indication he was a poet. So it starts off well. So he's visiting his grandfather who's basically got dementia and his mom sort of introducing him. You remember your grandson? And she goes, "Um, Daniel is a poet, remember? Maybe he can read you a poem." Oh, good. My mom occasionally does this, asking me to play the part of poet to interpret a poem she saw in The New Yorker that meant nothing to me, or worse, to explain one of my own. And while I recognize that it would be worse still if she never asked at all, it is uncomfortable. It isn't practical or desirable to be a poet in every family situation.

[00:29:57]True, Dad. So, you know, again, the sort of writer talking to writer. I recognize that. Um, then there's some, you know, he is a writer, so he should be good at writing copy and indeed he is. So, he's his boss sort of drops on his desk that he's got to write the copy to sell um an Adal sand castle building kit. Uh because this is the level of sort of kit shei stuff that he's dealing with. I think of a sequence of words so stupid I can barely bring myself to type them. But I know from experience that this feeling means I've landed on a keeper. I email my creative director. Feeling pale spelled P A I L. Dig this. You need sun and a castle to call your own. Within minutes it is on the website where it will have more readers than my poems ever will. So pathy, punchy, funny, but also insightful. Great. I'm into this book at the start, but then nothing really happens. He's in a group of four with, you know, they're all poets. One of them gets pregnant and she's sort of going to change her life to sort of, you know, go more conventional.

[00:31:11]Um, but nothing really happens in in the book. He loses the job and gets another one where he's writing for a Jewish website and he has a crisis of moral conscience because they're sort of propos prepounding the legitimacy of sort of the Israeli government and all the war crimes and stuff and as a point of principle he's going to leave his job and his uh mother uh or father sort of challenge him what are you going to do for money he says well I'll get another job and that's it that's how the book finishes really so it starts started really well but then went absolutely nowhere. It had nothing to say other than the sort of insights about writers which other writers like me appreciate. But is it enough to sustain a book for readers who aren't writers themselves? And another thing both this and the Tottenham book in a way their day jobs um not unnaturally took over their lives. I mean they they did still sort of feebley keep the flame of writing uh alive but it was sort of subsumed under you know the daily living and earning a crust and paying the rent and all that sort of thing which is fine and very very accurate but then ultimately you're writing a book about the daily grind you're not writing a book about artists and poets and writers and all we both in the Tottenham and this in a way what they managed to produce these writers, these sort of um character writers at the center of these novels is this book and Tottenham's book. That's all they could produce is about this sort of clash between wanting to be an artist and being free and untraveled versus the the demands of actually sort of funding that lifestyle.

[00:33:00]Uh and you have to have a a day job. And ultimately I felt in both books um the mundane one and the artistry lost you know that this is all it delivered was a sort of naval gazing book for about a writer who has to earn a living as was the Tottenham. So I'm not sure this is a very fertile ground to pursue what writers have to do in order to fund their writing. I don't think it's terribly interesting and and and you know it's sort of first world problems really. So, um, I gave this sort of three stars because there there is good writing in the beginning, but it really trailed off very, very badly, I felt.

[00:33:41]Now, on to No Measure by Kelly Crumbry.

[00:33:44]Uh, this is going to be kind of hard to describe. It's sort of about um measurement as a weigh in, but also a measurement itself of uh a relationship. This woman seems to have desires on this guy who's totally obsessed with his job of measuring things, measuring things in a desert, delineating them, demarcating them, and bringing them out of a a sort of a wide uh undifferentiated sort of mass of a desert of sand and and bringing them into focus. And the fact that um our bodies, our flesh bodies also sort of are instruments. You know, if you one of the earliest measurements known to man was called the cubit, which was the length of the elbow, the forearm, you know, that that's one cubit. Of course, we all have different lengths of forearm. So, it's it's not a standardized measurement. So, uh I'll just read a couple of things very briefly. Uh I kind of enjoyed it. It reminded me of those sort of slightly alienating, you know, what am I reading books like motorman um and things like that that they're a world unto themselves. Today I discover that the ruler is the length of my forearm cubit. Um I'm also an instrument. My wingspan another measure.

[00:35:09]I spread my palm beside the grass. What fraction of me is the height of this? I pull out a string and wrap myself up.

[00:35:17]Then pull it taut ankle to knee. the circumference of my hips, a circle around my wrist. I lie down and draw my length in the sand. How many of me is the row, the fence?

[00:35:30]I've been trying to tell you this is about abstraction and reproducibility, repeatability, and what it means to measure, the desire to know and to mediate knowing, what landscape desire makes. So, it is kind of that it is sort of human beings. What is knowledge? What is flesh and body?

[00:35:49]what is measure and how measurements relates to all that. So, it's quite a self-contained book. I it was an interesting reading experience and I've ordered another Kelly Crumb because I'm interested to to see, you know, what else she's done, I think, on s in a similar vein. Um, so we'll see. So, I gave this four stars because I did enjoy the again the immersive reading experience of it.

[00:36:14]And on to Don Dilla at the start. So my previous video and I'll put a link to it which is about sort of being a completist reader of certain authors and how Dono is probably the author I read most more books up by him than anyone else except possibly Pever. I'd have to top them up. Anyway, this is one of two books of his that I hadn't read. So um I picked it up and um it's not very good. It really isn't.

[00:36:41]And what as I say in that video, I lucked out with Dillan that I started reading his middle career works which things like Underworld, Cosmopolis, uh, White Noise, Mal Too, which are all great and I even then liked his sort of more recent books where I've bought them as they're published and I've liked them all. But somewhere decid along the process deciding that I was going to be a completist. I went back and read his earlier works like Americana, Running Dog, um Enzo, this and then really not very good. Um so it was a bit of a chore to get because it's this is quite chunky. This is about 400 450 pages, is it? I don't know. 400.

[00:37:26]Yeah, near enough.

[00:37:28]But being a completist and being slightly too neurotic to to abandon books, so I sort of plowed on to the end with with no real return, I have to say.

[00:37:37]So the first part of the book is this 14-year-old mass genius is um sequestered into um this community of other geniuses from many different academic disciplines not just his man his maths thing because they believe they've had a communication from a star uh which has been called Ratnas star where it was uh 101 pulses with two gaps in between. One after the 14th and one after the 28th pulse and then but they've but it's only ever been transmitted once and they think it's alien life trying to communicate with them. Is it sending a warning? Is it saying hello? We'd like to meet you know that. So he's brought into the project to um do that. So he wanders around this sort of um I don't know what you call it sort of specialized campus I suppose and it read and each of these sort of weird and wonderful people he bumped into um it read like Gorman Gast um Mvin Pete's Gourman Gast it was it was so odd. I mean it it isn't a fantasy setting like Gorbongast is but that was the that was the feeling I had about it.

[00:38:56]Um, and there's, you know, it's, you know, so there's some great writing. So, um, just to give you an example, um, this boy is having a a meeting with with another guy who seems to be quite high up in the organization, and they're interrupted by a woman who's selling Bibles. Seems a bit odd, but anyway. Um, what do you want? Our Bibles are hand glued and handstitched by refugees. They told me a Mr. Dine might want to order in bulk. Go away, he said matter of fact. Matter of factly, both testaments, the woman said, translated directly from the original tongues, proof read by captured troops, Persian grain lever. We don't need Bibles. We have movies.

[00:39:38]Anytime we want, we can see Charlton H and James. So, you know, sort of his um typical sort of witty uh oneliners are on evidence in here, but just the whole thing. So the second half of the book is there's a sort of a breakaway faction who go to the deepest basement which is sort of not beautifully rendered architecturally. It's sort of raw stone and they don't even have proper beds and things like this. And the 14-year-old is part of this party whereby it's no longer about, you know, what is this message? Is it extraterrestrial or is it something else? And the boy has repeatedly been told upstairs that that that his what he was brought in originally to try to decode this pulse code is no longer relevant. Um and with these people is no longer and the boy takes to his bed most of the time. He's depressed. He's sick and stuff. So he's sort of this sort of passive uh immobile force amongst them. And we're bouncing around these characters.

[00:40:43]So at least it settles down because the first part of the book you're meeting different people every 10 or 15 pages here it's the same small group of people but the boy has sort of ab absented himself from it and we've been following through his eyes the whole the whole time and they they're they want to they're what they're striving to do is is to well if it even whether it's a message or not we can't possibly reply to it unless we develop a meta language language which it's it it seems to be coded in. We need to be able to speak that language, have that alphabet, that mathematical alphabet, which is why they tried to get the boy to contribute, but he's not really lifting a finger. Um, and that's it.

[00:41:28]There's 450 pages of of individual little set pieces that are fun to read, some of them, but there's a lot of turgid stuff that doesn't go anywhere at all. So, I'm afraid this is a twostar read.

[00:41:44]And onto John Burgger, the red tender of Bologna. So, this was sent to me by a longtime subscriber Bob Black because I'm visiting Bologna. And this is about it's a little bit of travel writing in a way, although it starts off about sort of um a couple of interesting characters. Um and it's it's John Burgger. It's beautifully done. It's one of these um I forgot what Yeah, Penguin Modern. So, they're very short. Um, it's very it's a very pleasant read. There's nothing more I can say to it than that really. Of course, this is whenever this was written, I'm guessing the 70s or 80s.

[00:42:21]Will I discover the same Bolognia when I visit? Who knows? But, you know, uh, this is great. Four stars. Now, on to two collections of poetry to end up with. So, this is Muriel Rukasa, selected poems. and uh she wasn't a poet I' I'd heard of but I came across a quote of hers which I've used in my current work in progress. So I thought oh you know having having poinied her her words it would be good to actually go and read some of the collection. Of course the poem that the quote I've taken is not in this collection but I've since tracked that down as well. But actually um this was a really worthwhile uh collection uh or it's a selection from her various collections. So the fir the first one which is called the first collection which is called u from theory of flight in 1935. She wrote all the way up into the 60s I think the 70s. Yeah in fact to the mid70s. Um so 40 years of poetry but this first collection from the theory of flight 1935 is a is a absolute sort of um almost a futurist pleasure. I don't mean with all the sort of Italian fascism that that that glutinated itself to futurism. This is an American futurism. So we get poems about the building of the Williamsburg bridge. We get poem about the um the first airplane that the Wright brothers built. Um we get the second collection which is called US1 from 1938 which is um sort of act sort of activist collection about uh West Virginia tunnel being born uh being being mined being bored out through the mountains uh in order to sustain a power dam and how all the workers on it basically got sick with silicosis and died. So it's very much about that very powerful but even that poet that collection has about the dam you know the this sort of massive monstrous of power and energy brilliantly described. So she almost takes time out from the collection talking about the individual cases of miners who died and the fight for justice and taking it to the you know the courts and stuff. But there's one section when she reverts back to the first collection a sort of modernist um uh futurist thing about you know this massive dam and I you know I really enjoyed those first two collections um have the collections after that were sort of didn't quite have this tight the focus I felt you know they're quite sort of political as I say there's sort of activism and stuff but I just felt for those first two collections alone I really enjoyed them four stars and finally a debut collection by I think she's a British poet called Camille Ralphs came out a couple of years ago called After after you were I am and this is um split into three parts. The first part is called uh book of common prayers and they're all poet excuse me they're all poems that are in dialogue with uh either poets who were also priests and vicers such as George Herbert John Dunn uh people like that but it's also about and saints it's uh dedicated also to types of prayers in other um in in uh you know from from sort of Christian uh collection of of poems.

[00:45:52]There's also uh one called after Jala alin roomi there's also um one after um the rig vader. Um there are some sort of interrogate um sections of the book of Job. Now, normally anything religious puts me off, but I have to say I was absolutely um beguiled by this because she's mixing the religious history or the his or all these religious texts and prayers that have come from history with a modern day sensibility about economy, capitalism, and how far the two seem to have be apart from each other. And I thought it was really effective. I thought it was really really good. The other two sections, one is about um a very famous uh 17th century uh witch trials and executions in Pendle in Lanasher which Janette Winerson has also written about I think um which she calls um uh Malin an elegy and 14 spells. So she takes each of the people who are executed and writes a poem devoted to them based on their sort of what they were charged with and what their fates were. I mean they were all executed but brilliant brilliantly done. Um and then the third section is uh from the spiritual diary of Dr. D. Now John D if you don't know was Queen Elizabeth I astrologer but he was also the guy who basically launched the concept of British Empire as a naval naval driven empire and advised the queen on you know the activities of the British uh on the high seas but he was also obsessed with um angels and he uh worked with this guy called John Kelly who seemed to be an absolute con man but the two of them worked together to try and track down and produce um the language of of angels which they called in Nokian had a lot of similarity with Middle English. Um but they were also um not only was he an astrologer but he you know they also dabbled in alchemy and they they sort of spent a lot of time in Bohemia, Poland uh amongst the aristocrats there sort of selling their wares as alchemists. So absolutely fascinating character and I have to say I didn't think the poems here based on historical facts around John D. really did John Dean justice because yeah I think you're better off reading a a good biography of John D quite honestly. Um so I did think that sort of let the side down a little bit but you know this was quite satisfying in parts one and two four stars. So there you have it. That was my recent reads. As I said, my next read will be Morgan Day, The Oldest Alive, and I suspect my next um reading wrap-up will be include my holiday reading. So, as some of you may remember, Jonathan Me's Empty Wigs, this is a thousandpage book which does not have lots of empty white space. So, it is genuinely a thousand pages. So, I'm on just under page 300 of this. I was always going to read it slowly through the year. Uh but I might, you know, depend depending how I've got a lot of train train travel. So, uh depending how that goes, I might be able to finish this or at least make a big indent into it. But just in case, I've taken three other books or I will be taking three other books. The Perfect Circle by Claudia Patrrui because I wanted to read something Italian. This is contemporary.

[00:49:39]Um, the overstory by Richard Powers because I've had it on my TBR pile for a while. This seems like a good opportunity to actually pick it up and read. And finally, some non-fiction which I I'm rather hoping or this is perhaps this is rather naughty on me will be a hate read. So, this is Willto, the science of storytelling. Um I I mean my book um stories we tell our children was was basically um I think 31 short stories flash stories about the um the danger of the stories we feed to our children because I feel they're the wrong stories or they're pedling the wrong messages. Uh such as you know even a white lie.

[00:50:22]We tell white lies to our kids for good reasons because we feel that the truth is not age appropriate or whatever. But then you've got politics, you've got which spins stories, you've got advertising which spins stories and and they're bombarding our children. You know, you can't protect them for it's just everywhere in the atmosphere. Even charity asks now are, you know, they have to involve story in order to get people to to to donate.

[00:50:49]all these reality TV shows, you know, it's all about the stories, not what's happening on screen. It's where they've come from as their backstories. I'll post the link to my little trailer uh video for stories we tell our children.

[00:51:02]So, I'm hostile to the whole concept of story. I'm not hostile to narration.

[00:51:06]Don't get me wrong. Obviously, there's going to be narration because I'm narrating each and every one of my books that I write, but I am hostile to the concept of structured story. Um, so as I say, I I'm going to um uh joust with this and and see where where we land.

[00:51:25]I've you know, I don't write in fiction books. I do write in non-fiction. So, I've got a couple of pens. Let's see how many words in the margin. Um this demand. Uh having said that, I don't uh write in uh in non-f in fiction books. There's one exception which is my review of Sally Rooney's uh Conversations with Friends of which there's a video which is an hour long which basically goes through all of my notes in the in in in my copy of that book. And um when you're basically line editing a novel, I think the book's in trouble. Anyway, till next time. Thanks very much.