Breathing Just a Little

This book is enlightening and depressing, but also suffers from an excess of repetition, which contributes to it feeling over-long, and is less compelling in its conclusions that I think the author intended it to be. That said, I think it is an important text, and perhaps will become even more so in the coming years. Doctorow knows what he's talking about, and paints a compelling picture of why everything feels a little to a lot shittier than it used to do - the Internet, of course, but not just that, all the tech we use and have to use in all aspects of our lives.  He provides a forensically detailed and meticulous analysis of the stages of how all things with a tech component (which these days is many to most things) get worse as competition is degraded - first user interests are deprecated, then business customers are also victimised, and finally the only real winners in the game are the mega-middlemen that can, and do, monetise frantically at the expense of all of our privacy, ...

 As predicted, my churn of new book completions has dramatically slowed in February compared with January, now that I am back to work and to my regularly scheduled life. I have, nonetheless, completed two  more new-to-me novels after the month opener, Offshore (reviewed here ) and am close to finished a non-fiction book (which will be reviewed soon, it is giving me much food for thought). This was an enjoyable story, with many moments of what felt like genuine insight and pathos, somewhat weakened by its very predictable rom-com beats and further flawed by a too-neat ending. Phoebe, the main character, was an appealing person who I could engage with, and I thought most of the secondary characters were surprisingly vivid and well-drawn. I especially liked Marla, the caustic sister-in-law to be; Juice, the groom's 12 year old daughter; Jim, the best man; and above all, Lila, the spoilt, often bratty, but compellingly attractive (and I don't mean just beautiful, I mean as a perso...

I have entered a season of wanting to pull back socially and shelter in place, regularly engaging only with my family and my close friends. (Of course, I also engage daily with my colleagues; work life is separate from personal / social life!)  I have been through such seasons before, often coincident with periods of health difficulties, anxiety surges, or ongoing fatigue. (All three are in play at the moment, not surprisingly). I know it's coming up when I start being secretly thrilled whenever plans fall over, and feel absolutely no FOMO when seeing photos or posts about other people doing things / going places / socialising (if anything, the opposite - the Joy of Missing Out is strong). This doesn't mean I'm turning into a hermit. I work, and I have good relationships at all my client workplaces. I volunteer once a fortnight and will continue to do so. I'll do some (although more limited) social things out of the house with my husband, my adult kids, my family of ori...

As part of my self-imposed Read the Booker Winners for the First Decade of My Life project, I have just now finished the audiobook of the short but sweet novel that won in 1979 - Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. Summary: I liked it very much, and rate it 8.5/10 .  Given that The Sea, The Sea also scored an 8.5 from me recently, and the two I had previously read (Midnight's Children and Schindler's Ark) are both easy 9s, so far, the decade of my birth is coming up trumps! I'm starting the Coetzee audiobook next, and reading the Gordimer as a library e-book because I couldn't find an audio version anywhere, so we shall see if this positive run holds. This is, simply put, a lovely little book. Quirky (but not in a bad, shallow way), frequently wryly funny, and very moving, it is the entwined stories of a collection of houseboat-dwellers living at Battersea Wharf in 1961, people with, literally (to misquote Shakespeare), one foot in water, one on shore. The characters ar...

Having just finished, and so enjoyed, the audiobook of The Sea, The Sea, I seem to have stumbled into a half-baked plan to try to cover all the Booker prizewinners from the first decade of my life (1973-1983) as audiobooks if I can find audio versions. I don't know why, my lists make little sense even to me sometimes :-) The list is: J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (1974* tie) Stanley Middleton, Holiday (1974* tie) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975) David Storey, Saville (1976) Paul Scott, Staying On (1977) ✅Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (1978) Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979) William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980) ✅Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981) ✅Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (1982) J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) I have already read Midnight's Children and Schindler's Ark, and of course have just read The Sea, The Sea, so they are ticked off. All three of these wer...

Every year in my January Month of Poetry exercise, the group is set a challenge one day of the week to write to a prompt. One of this year's challenges was to take lines from a favourite poem and build a new poem from them. I used the closing lines of Mary Oliver's On Travelling to Beautiful Places to create this one. On Being Alive as the Apocalypse Begins  and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go this ship that we can't get off, now maybe once we could have we could have dived off the deck, slick with salt and hard dreams cutting through the white horses of the glimmering sea to take our chances with the seals and the sharks turning our faces to the distant shore maybe once we could have turned this ship around or, if not that, we could have put the matches back in the box chosen sunsets and fruit and song and touch over the savage pleasures of power over watching the world on fire and delighting in our spite or even just ou...