What is real?

I have had Ruth Ozeki's 'The Book of Form and Emptiness' from the library before, it's long and I ended up returning it barely started, and for once I actually got around to borrowing it again. I confess it has been difficult. I read 'Tale for the Time Being' a decade ago, so I was determined to like this too. Like the previous book it also asks the question about reality. Benny and the Book take turns to tell us what is happening, and a lot is happening. I initially thought that Benny was experiencing something supernatural and was a bit suspicious of where the book was going, and I struggled watching Annabelle be overwhelmed and unable to have much agency in her life. The whole set up was quite frightening, how easily an apparently ordinary life can slip out from under you, and how much they had depended on Kenji, even though he seems to have been less than dependable. 

Kenji is killed in a stupid accident and Annabelle and Benny are left with grief and just each other. When object around him start talking to Benny he finds it annoying, to begin with. As the talk gets louder and more intrusive he has nowhere to escape it. He is sectioned the first time after the scissor incident and on the children's psyche ward he meets the Aleph. She has struggles of her own but she becomes someone who helps him make sense of things that are happening. 

"Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn't be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoy a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath the human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, unconscious fungal mat beneath the forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

Because we're all connected, we communicate all the time - agreeing, disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other - and we have our preferences and prejudices too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there's an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help." (p.94)

The Book as a character in the book is Benny's book. It is said we all have a book inside us, the story of our own life. Benny's book starts talking to him and as he spirals into his breakdown he feels that the book is the one in charge, the one making the bad things happen, and he wants to shut it out. The book tries to explain that it is just a narrator but Benny is struggling to see what is real. The other book that appears in the book is 'Tidy Magic', a decluttering self-help book written by a Japanese Buddhist monk.

While the book is about so many things, it centres on Benny's mental health crisis; we watch as he falls off the edge, it is vivid and frightening, and Annabelle is powerless to help him. He escapes school and finds a safe place in the local library that he visited as a child, reading voraciously and randomly to quiet the voices in his head. But then Annabelle has an accident trying to clear some of the accumulated junk from the house and things all fall further apart. The library becomes however a place where they both find help and a community of people who catch them before they hit the bottom. 

Sometimes a story does try to do too much, and there is a lot going on in this story; the sense of belonging and family, the disconnectedness of society, consumerism as a replacement for the lost connection, grief and friendship, and several references to the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 (that feature also in Tale for the Time Being). But it is all pulled together in this mother and son who need each other, but who cant weather their storm alone. 

Sometimes you get to the end of a book and are just glad to be there. 

Stay safe. Be kind.

Existential Disarray

'A Field Guide to Reality' by Joanna Kavenna, is reviewed on the front cover as 'hallucinogenic', and that is definitely a word I might have come up with. Fever dream might be another description. Another book with a young woman narrator. And a book with pictures. More grown-up books should have pictures.

Eliade Jencks works in a cafe, but she has a somewhat mysterious connection to Professor Solete who has just died. When a philosophy professor leaves his magnum opus, The Field Guide to Reality, to a waitress his colleagues are understandably confused. When the box he has left her turns out to be empty things get weird. What follows is somewhat like a treasure hunt, Eliade and Anthony Yorke following clues that take them across Oxford, meeting with old friends and obscure secret societies. The story flipped between the mundanity of her everyday life and these academicians who live almost in another world. 

Whole stream of quotes, because the whole book is pretty much quotable. Here they arrive at Cassavetes' narrowboat:

"An oil lamp was swinging above our heads. The place was rammed with books and detritus. If books are detritus too, then the place was simply rammed with detritus. Every surface, every region, was full of papers, books, pencils, drawings of the river, tastefully executed, musical instruments, compasses, maps, pot plants, plates, cups, teapots. A cat mewed from below; Cassavetes leaned down and stroked it. There was a pan steaming on the stove, and Cassavetes dished out bean stew. We ate on tin plates." (p.104)

They spend a lot of the book tromping around in the cold and wet. Here they have just had an argument over her use of the phrase 'I lost my father' as a euphemism for death:

"That produced a pause. For a while we walked inside the pause, which spread as the darkness spread across the meadow. Animals punctuated the silence, as if they were trying to help - a last flurry of birdsong and unknown beasts rustling through the hedgerows. All nature chorused and then, suddenly, fell silent. The pause swept across the darkening fields.

Yorke was hastening along again, shuddering and occasionally stumbling on the hard ground.

The treacherous moon rose above the houses, filling the mist with injurious light." (p.114-115)

I just love that 'walked inside the pause'. It captures so perfectly how it feels to be with someone and not talking, feeling the tension of things unsaid. 

Here, later, things are becoming unreal (but also loved 'sartorial philosophy'):

"Anthony walked faster and faster. There was something relentless about his pace. Of course, the cold, his general hypothesis that coats were evil, or whatever his theory of the coat. It wasn't quite the time for sartorial philosophy. I understood. I didn't understand at all. Anything. Even coats were becoming strange and controversial. I carried on, and on, and I felt something like - resistance? My own? Or, the mist was becoming turgid? We were approaching the centre of the old earthworks, the place of maximum power. If you believed that sort of thing, which I didn't. And I assumed, neither did Anthony. But we were desperate. Everything else was increasingly intangible. Trees rustled as we walked, and the clouds moved slowly above the towers of the city. Electricity hummed, or some other force I couldn't begin to understand. The moon slid through the mist, staining it silver. Another shadow leered towards me - I recoiled! But it was nothing, of course. Another frill, a tendril, and then I moved into another region of shadow, I stepped into it, felt the cold air grip me. Reality came in and out as if I were receiving it on an ancient radio. Crackling on the wires. Intermissions of static." (p.172-173)

The book lurches into mysticism and magic and science and mathematics before drawing us back to philosophy. At one point the book reminded me of Sophie's World, that I have actually only read part of, but it's as if Solete has left Eliade a puzzle to solve, rather than his own answer. And all the people she encounters tell her parts of a story that she has to make sense of:

"I thought for a moment that I would just keep walking around the rivers and around the city until something occurred to me. But what would occur to me? The sun shone, as if some fetid branch of fate was trying to convince me it was all OK. I didn't believe the symbolic urgings of the weather. I kept thinking, surely if I just try one more time, I'll manage to solve the thing. I was completely convinced for a moment that I could still find this single final thing, and even the Field Guide, if I just made more of an effort. I had to find something, and put it in the box. Solete had left me alluring emptiness - and of course, what else do you do with emptiness? You fill it!" (p.207)

The black and white drawings punctuate the book, sometimes of places they go, sometimes more abstract ideas. Here Eliade is in the canal, after Cassavetes pushes her in. It is almost as if the dunking breaks the spell and returns her to the real world. I had to let go of some stuff that I didn't understand but that did not lessen for me how much I enjoyed the book. There is a denouement, but I felt the exploration was the point of the story. Definitely a writer I will seek out again.

Stay safe. Be kind. Read something challenging.

Cold Water

I read 'Sick Notes' way way back in 2013 and it was a book that stayed with me because of my reaction to it. I must have read about a new one expected out from Gwendoline Riley (who still doesn't have her own website) and came up with Cold Water in the library. Again she is writing about Manchester and the book is littered with references to places, streets and businesses across the city. It's funny how it does make you feel more invested in the story. This one is actually her first book and you can see the same themes running through it, it could almost be the same character, the same aimlessness, trying to make sense of existence. Again life is very grubby. But I think what I like is that she makes something out of nothing. These people are utterly unremarkable, but aren't we all, and that does not mean their lives and thoughts are not worthy of interest.

Carmel is recovering from a broken heart. She works in a bar, when she bothers to turn up. She wanders around and hangs out with friends. She gets drunk. She tells us about the people she's hanging out and getting drunk with.

After all the lovely metaphors in 'Portable Veblen' I was on the lookout.

"'Well, whiskey killed my mother so it has semi-romantic associations for me,' he said as he lifted the glass. How drab. Some people carry their emotional life around with them like a dead rat in a shoe box. Ready to whip it open and flash it under people's noses." (p.16)

"I'd mentioned Tony, but he didn't even exist for me anymore. I'd sealed him in the past. He was a myth, he was a rumour, and this talk was just night-time, half-drunk hyperbole. It's a relief when you can fall out of love. It's one less stone in your satchel." (p.19)

"Her tights twinkled cheaply in the light of the blue-orange flames and her face dissolved into the vague dusk. The fairy lights cast weird shadows like barbed wire." (p.52)

"A couple of days later, at Irene's behest, we went looking for Gene's brother Arthur at Longsight Market, where I knew he ran a book and record stall. A bare-bulb sun hung beneath a slanting bank of black clouds; the rain made a static crackle as it hit the pavement. The cold air carried out the stink of the meat counters and the grubby tarpaulin canopies above the fruit stalls held their own puddles." (p.78)

That's kind of it really. It's a book all about the writing, the atmosphere she creates. Loved it again. Will keep an eye out for the new one.

Stay safe. Be kind.

Next Time

'Next Time Will Be Our Turn' by Jesse Sultanto has been the January pick for my book group, and I have to say I quite enjoyed this one. Set in Indonesia it concerns Magnolia (or Tulip to her friends) telling her life story to her granddaughter Izzy. We don't get to know Izzy much, she is just the modern day commentator on her grandmother's experience. 

Magnolia's elder sister Iris is shipped off to an Indo-Chinese run home in America when she gets too fond of the boys and risks the family reputation, which seems a weird thing to do but there you go. The two girls, previously close, become strangers, with Iris coming back in the holidays transformed into an American girl. It seems that many affluent families would send their kids off to West Coast universities and when Magnolia graduates she joins her sister and their parents have set them up in a little apartment together. Pushed aside and ignored by the worldly and experienced Iris Magnolia is all at sea. On her first day she encounters the amazing Ellery. They become firm friends but when Magnolia begins to fall in love with Ellery her life is turned upside down. She loves her, but cannot acknowledge it, and, as they do, things fall apart; Mangolia goes home to Indonesia while Ellery heads off to London. They live their lives. Magnolia recounts her life in a long series of letters that she writes and never sends to Ellery. She marries, but it is Iris' choices that set the future in motion. 

It was a lovely tale of a strong sisterly bond, that in the end is more important than anything else. It is about how you self sacrifice for love. 

What's weird about the book is the timeline, which has Magnolia born in the 1980s, and is a grandparent to a teenager at the end, so maybe it's supposed to be being told at some future time. Whatever. 

I managed to come home from work and sit on the sofa and forget to go to the book club meeting, and writing that I just realised I also forgot to go up and get the new book. I see a trip to town in my very near future.

Little quote, it made me feel sad how she resigned herself to the life that was expected of her, but then many many people live their lives like that and it does not mean it was an unhappy one:

"Parker and I dated for almost a year before he proposed to me. The proposal itself was sweet, but not a surprise because, of course, we'd very sensibly discussed it in great detail beforehand. We'd had meals with both my parents and his where marriage was brought up, and nobody expressed any negative opinions. We were, after all, perfect on paper - both of us from similar ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We even looked good together, Parker was five eight, tall for a Chindo guy, and when we stood next to each other, people often remarked what a cute couple we made. We rarely fought, and at the time, I thought it was because he was so agreeable and reasonable. I didn't think of how muted I had become over the years, how it had simply become habit to nod and agree with whatever anyone said." (p.166)

Stay safe. Be kind.

Never The Same Again

'The Portable Veblen' by Elizabeth Mckenzie is overdue at the library ... sorry. It was an excellent start to the year, a delight, that turned a little scary at times, because who doesn't need a bit of dramatic tension in their lives. And I love books with real people in them: Thorstein Veblen, after whom our heroine is named, was a real American economist and critic of capitalism (he doesn't appear in the story, but does get several mentions, and there are photos). Veblen and Paul are something of an odd couple, both with mildly dysfunctional families, but not in a bad way, but more than merely quirky. While Veblen is still deciding quite what to do with her life Paul has invented a device for relieving inter-cranial pressure after trauma to prevent brain damage, and interest in his device from a very powerful and wealthy woman sends events in all sorts of undesirable directions. Squirrels play quite a significant part in the story too. I can't really describe the story so that's all you're getting. The metaphors/similes were to die for:

"She was plain and mild in appearance, with hair the colour of redwood bark, and eyes speckled like September leaves." (p.2)

"Sometimes her reactions seemed to happen in slow motion, like old, calloused manatees moving through murky water." (p.14)

"He finished his bottle. The foam bubbled on his lips, tickling like root beer and first kisses." (p.70)

"This appeared to further unsettle him, which she rather enjoyed, a cool slap on the buttock of assumption." (p.179)

"She felt deflated, a balloon skin on the ground." (p.211)

"She drifted in like a stray feather." (p.295)

"She was aware that her mother had trained her to turn herself inside out, like a pocket to be inspected for pilfered change." (p.349)

The evolution of her relationship with her mother is central to the story. It has been a struggle for her to free herself; her mother constantly tries to reel her back in. This one gives you some idea of how things go:

"By now she recognised the patterns of her mother's behaviour that were triggered by any forward progress in her life. When Veblen finally made her move to Palo Alto, her mother fell into a horrible snit as Veblen finished packing that last day, throwing something at her while she zipped up one of her bags.

It was a patchwork cover for her computer, perfectly fitted, finely finished, made of scraps of Veblen's childhood dresses, just like the one her mother made for her typewriter once upon a time, an otherwise loving gesture except that her mother pitched it at her head and ran from the room in tears.

'Mom?' she called.

'What?' yelled her mother.

'I love it!' Veblen said.

'Melanie screeched, 'Go on, get out of here! Go, go, go, go, go!'" (p.130-131)  

I think I loved Veblen because she believed things so fervently, cared about everything. I loved her uncrushable idealism. And yet she still lived in the real world.

This, towards to end:

"She used to think falling in love was alchemy, that animals had weddings, that coal was a gemstone, that mountains were hollow, that trees had hidden eyes." (p.364) 

Stays safe. Be kind. Listen to the squirrels.                                                         

17th Blogiversary

 

I nearly forgot my blogiversary again, was distracted making an aubergine bake.

17 years makes it one of my longest relationships.

The statistics say 1670 posts.

Page views today 1169.

All time page views 1,256,926.

That's amazing, but slightly weird that 127,000 of them were on the 9th of January 2026. 

Equally weird, most visited post 'Not Offloading Much' from August 2025, which in one fell swoop overtook Margaret Atwood Poetry from April 2010 which has consistently been the most visited.

Still in the top ten are the Lizard Cake Tutorial and our 2009 trip to Oxford for Midsummer Day with Will and Lyra. Most visited novel review is Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong from 2021.

I like to think of it like a reading diary now; it will help in my old age so I don't waste my precious time accidentally re-reading things I have already read.

Off to bake the aubergine bake now.

Stay safe. Be kind.

Leonard and Hungry Paul

The best thing about 'Leonard and Hungry Paul' by Rónán Hession is the fact that we never find out why Hungry Paul is called Hungry Paul. It's a book all about people, my favourite kind. I knew I was going to love it from the opening sentence: "Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth." So Leonard's mother has died but he still has his surrogate family at Hungry Paul's house. Lovely description of Hungry Paul's parent's relationship:

"She met Peter after he had stopped one day to give her directions to an art exhibition and then invited himself along. They fell in love effortlessly. Their initial chemistry broadened into physics and then biology, until they were blessed with Hungry Paul's sister Grace as their first child. They then had Hungry Paul after two difficult miscarriages and, understandable in the circumstances, they treasured him. As a couple, Helen and Peter continued to share the closeness of two people who have been through a lot together." (p.6-7)

I think it would be fair, and they would be unlikely to disagree, to use the word nerds about Leonard and Hungry Paul. This is an early example of their conversations, during a game of Yahtzee:

" 'Indeed I do. I see you still have the fridge magnet of The Scream you bought afterwards as a momento. It's not just any artist that makes it onto that fridge.'

'Well, I was reading an article about that very painting today and guess what? Do you know what the most fascinating thing about it is?' tantalised Hungry Paul.

'Okay, let me think. The orange background is related to the eruption of Krakatoa isn't it? Is that it?'

'Interesting, but that's not it.' Hungry Paul was rattling his dice in the cup the whole time, adding to the sense of suspense.

'Okay, I give up.'

'The figure in the painting isn't actually screaming!' Hungry Paul spilled his dice on the board as he revealed this; a little too enthusiastically, as one of them had to be retrieved from under the table - a four, which did him no good.

'Really, are you sure?'

'Absolutely. That's the whole thing. The figure is actually closing his ears to block out a scream. Isn't that amazing? A painting can be so misunderstood and still become so famous.' " (p.16)

A few pages later they discuss the meaning of life (as you do):

" '... As you know, I have always been modestly Hippocratic in my instincts: I wish to do no harm. My preference has always been to stand back from the world. Much like the Green Cross Code, I like to stop, look and listen before getting involved in things. It has stood me well and kept me on peaceful terms with my fellow man. It's certainly better than trying to make my mark on the world, only to end up defacing it.' " (p.18-19)

And a few pages after that this lovely quiet sad moment after Helen has phoned Leonard about wedding arrangements (Grace is getting married):

"Leonard hung up and took off the mask of easy conviviality. Standing there in the kitchenette, there was something about the sincerity of Helen's awkwardness that had bought it home to him. The 'plus one' on his invite, received several weeks ago, must have been intended for his poor mother. The thought stunned him gently for a moment as a man in chinos walked in and made disapproving noises at finding mugs left to soak. In a hurry to get back to his noise-cancelling headphones, Leonard put away the tea caddy and finished stirring his own palpable milky loneliness." (p.24-5)

So Leonard forms a low key relationship with Shelley at work and Hungry Paul enters a competition organised by the local Chamber of Commerce, and the arrangements for Grace and Andrew's wedding are both vitally central to the plot and utterly in the background. Significant changes to their quiet lives seem to be afoot. 

I just have to put this lovely little bit in, because Hungry Paul has a part time job as an ad-hoc postman and this description is so weirdly out of date (wooden pigeon holes have long since been phased out in favour of frames with individual slots) that I wonder what research the author did to come up with it (love the reference to 'bachelorhood' too as if postmen are young and unmarried, very much not the case):

"When he entered the sorting area where his post bag was waiting for him, the large room was practically empty, the early rising full-timers keen to get their day started - or more specifically finished - as soon as possible. This was a busy place in a state of desertion, with a lingering atmosphere of bachelorhood and strong opinions. Hungry Paul started organising the post into pigeon holes, one for each street on the route, before ordering it by house number. Throwing up and setting in, as it was called. If you didn't know a street you didn't know how to order the letters. Some streets were best done in odds and evens, some in numerical order. In semi-rural areas, where houses had names but no numbers, it was all a question of local knowledge, which was unavailable to the casual postman. In most cases it would have made more sense to just leave the post until the next day when the regular man would be back, as hardly anything urgent went by post anymore, but they never did that. It was said that a clean bench was a clean conscience." (p.52)

So while Helen is gently trying to coax Hungry Paul out into the real world by taking him with her when she goes hospital visiting a random exchange with a mime artist is set to alter the course of his life entirely.

I don't want to spoil it for you. The whole thing is just a delight. 

Stay safe. Be kind.