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Fiction » Thrillers (Books)

The Best Spy Thrillers of 2023

recommended by Shane Whaley

2023 was a fabulous year for spy thrillers, with some fans saying there hasn't been a year like it since the 1970s, says Shane Whaley, host of the Spybrary podcast. He picks out five of his favourites from the year, all works of fiction that nonetheless give a sense of what it's like to work as a spy.

- The Peacock and the Sparrow

by I.S. Berry

- A Spy Alone

by Charles Beaumont

- Moscow X

by David McCloskey

- Kennedy 35

by Charles Cumming

- Beirut Station

by Paul Vidich

What was 2023 like for spy thrillers? Looking through the books you’ve recommended, it seems like it was a pretty good year.

It was a phenomenal year! We have lots of discussions among Spybrary listeners. Most of them say we haven’t had a year like this since the late 1970s. There were so many great spy thrillers published, some people had difficulties getting to all the books that are out there.

Even I’ve struggled this year. There are a few spy thriller authors that I’d normally read right away that I just haven’t had the time to get to. That’s pleasurable. I’d rather it be that way than the cupboard is bare.

2023 truly has been a bumper year.

What kind of qualities are you looking for in a good spy thriller?

When we talk about this at Spybrary it can be quite contentious at times. I feel there are a lot of books out there that masquerade as spy thrillers but are basically shoot-’em-ups.

The books I want to chat with you about today are what I consider the more realistic—yet still thrilling—spy novels. These aren’t big car chases or running across rooftops and firing AK-47s. This is what I would call true spy fiction. It’s classic spy fiction, which is more (dare I say it) cerebral, and more realistic. In fact, out of the five I suggest today, three are by serving or ex-intelligence officers: two for the CIA; one for MI6. I want to make it clear that that is the side of the aisle of the spy fiction genre that I prefer.

Do you get the sense, then, that these give an insight into what it’s actually like to be working as a spy?

They would all say no, because Charles Beaumont has signed the Official Secrets Act and, from what I understand, MI6 were none too pleased about him publishing his work of fiction. The US is different, in that a CIA officer can have their career declassified.

In the UK we don’t have that. Our intelligence services don’t really want former employees writing spy novels, whereas in the US there seems to be a different appetite for it. In fact, we discovered in an interview I held with IS Berry (who wrote The Peacock and the Sparrow) that there’s an organisation within the CIA called ‘Invisible Ink.’ They’re all budding writers who are working on novels and supporting each other.

Of course, each writer has their own spin on it, and you may have some ex-CIA who will write the more action-type of spy novel. But in the case of IS Berry and David McCloskey it’s very much the realistic spy tale.

I was reading McCloskey’s Damascus Station earlier this year and enjoyed it so much that I even read the acknowledgments. At the back, he writes, “for all its warts and complications, I love and admire the CIA and hope that readers of this novel will come away with a deeper understanding of its Mission and the sacrifices made by its officers to protect America and her way of life.” There’s an educational element. We have stereotypes of the CIA, he’s trying to give a more subtle sense of what it’s about.

I agree. Part of the fascination of the spy thriller is that it is this shadowy world that very few of us are ever going to exist in or know much about. If we wanted to, we could all train to become a private detective or a police officer. But not many of us will be handpicked by MI6 or the CIA. I think that’s why so many of us enjoy reading about this secret world.

I often say that when I read Ian Fleming I want to be a secret agent—it’s so glamorous and adventurous—and when I read John le Carré I want to be an accountant. It’s a very, very different read. You just can’t imagine yourself wanting to work in that environment. You literally can’t trust anybody. There is huge manipulation. Spies need information from an informant or a source and have to manipulate them in many different ways. I think IS Berry does a really good job of depicting that in The Peacock and the Sparrow.

1

The Peacock and the Sparrow

by I.S. Berry

On that note, let’s turn to her book, which is the first on your list of best spy thrillers of 2023. So it’s set in Bahrain and it’s about an ageing CIA case officer during the Arab Spring—tell me more.

Which is a familiar trope! A lot of the spies in the realistic books are washed up, weary spies coming to the end of their tenure. The writing in this book has a lyrical quality. It’s very reminiscent of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which she says is her favourite book. It’s different, but it’s definitely a love letter, an homage to that work.

IS Berry sets the scene with Shane Collins, who is a CIA operations officer on his final mission. I like the ethical dilemmas. He could just see his last mission out and go home, but things happen and he says, ‘No, I’m actually going to stand for something this time.’ Immediately — even though you might not think a great deal of this womanising, alcoholic spy — he does have these redeeming features that make you want to root for him.

One of the reasons I love IS Berry’s work is the way she describes the lives of diplomats and being based overseas. There’s Rod Stewart music being played and karaoke, and it seems that everyone’s getting drunk all the time. It almost seems like a parody. She says, ‘No, that pretty much was my impression of expat diplomat life in some of the stations where I was based.’

As you mentioned, the book is set in Bahrain which is interesting because often spy books are set in places like Berlin or London. It’s a good depiction of Bahrain and its culture. She writes about the dividing line between the ruling class and the poverty that’s in Bahrain, not something we tend to think about a great deal.

She is also able to weave in geopolitics, with the threat of Iran supporting a revolution in Bahrain against the ruling family. Who are the Americans backing? What’s actually happening with the terrorist cells? How serious are these terrorists in Bahrain (with her love of Graham Greene and Our Man in Havana, you also can’t help but wonder)? All this is set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring.

There are a lot of threads that IS Berry weaves into the book. I think even people who aren’t into spy novels will enjoy this book because of the story. It’s not just about espionage, it’s about the human condition, set against a backdrop of political turmoil, and a journey of personal discovery by a flawed main protagonist.

One thing I like about spy thrillers is they can be a great way of learning about geopolitics. To read a story set there and get completely involved in it is more fun than reading about Bahrain in The Economist, say.

It is. Also — and I’m particularly thinking of Paul Vidich with Beirut Station, and David McCloskey’s Damascus Station — I always get very hungry reading these books. They’ll start describing Lebanese cuisine, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, I can’t get that around here! This sounds like it’d taste amazing.’ I think bringing in the exoticism of the location, rather than rainy Berlin, also adds a lot to these books.

2

A Spy Alone

by Charles Beaumont

Let’s go to your next choice, A Spy Alone, which is about a spy ring in Oxford.

A Spy Alone is a debut novel by Charles Beaumont (not his real name), an ex-MI6 operative. Everyone knows about the Cambridge spy ring from the 1950s. His premise was, ‘What if there was one in Oxford?’ When I first heard about the book, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is really going to work for me,’ but then I realised he’s setting it in the modern day.

The first question I had as a reader was, ‘Why on earth would anyone want to be a spy for Putin right now?’ In the days of Philby — love him or loathe him — there was ideology: they were all fervent antifascist communists. Philby was still a traitorous so-and-so, with a lot of blood on his hands, but he had an ideology.

I wondered, ‘How is Beaumont going to create a spy ring that’s believable?’ I don’t want to go down Spoiler Straße — and that’s always very tricky, talking about spy thrillers, because they’re always going to have lots of twists and turns — but he’s given reasons why some of these Oxford students would be working for Russia, and these are actually very credible.

It’s not a surprise when you look at Charles Beaumont’s background — the little that he’s shared. He has served in war-torn places, and he’s seen how things have gone down. He’s taken his geopolitical knowledge and created these characters. I really like what he’s done with it. You have a professor based at Oxford who’s basically a spotter for talent, looking for people who might be able to serve Russia.

The main protagonist is an ex-spy, who has left the service and is down on his luck a bit, financially. There’s a lot of tradecraft. The detailed descriptions of spy techniques provide an educational aspect to the reading experience. I’m a fan of the classic espionage novel where the spy has to rely on his or her guile and cunning and wit, rather than a gun of some sort or the instant cavalry arriving, and that’s what you get.

There is a scene very early on in the book where we get the protagonist’s backstory. He’s giving a speech to a private concern on security, and he says, ‘This is the speech he really wished he could have given’ and he talks about his background in the intelligence services. That was a really good way of covering a lot of the backstory.

The political among us will be trying to guess who the characters in the book are based on. I don’t want to say their names because I don’t want to get sued and I don’t want to ruin the book, but it’s fun trying to guess who everyone in the Oxford Spy ring could be.

3

Moscow X

by David McCloskey

Let’s go on to Moscow X, by David McCloskey. His debut novel, Damascus Station, was brilliant: this is his second. Tell me what it’s about and why you liked it.

Moscow X starts slowly and then accelerates into a fast-paced thriller. We have the return of Artemis Proctor, who was in Damascus Station. The book opens in a quite dramatic fashion, where she finds herself in a very compromised position. I won’t ruin it for readers, but she’s immediately defrocked and sent back but she wants to get back in the game.

They throw her this project, which is an operation of mind games and trickery. It all revolves around Russian money and oligarchs and the West (or the CIA, in this case) trying to come up with a scheme that will have them all stabbing each other in the back and going after each other. So, a very carefully constructed plot by McCloskey.

What I particularly like is there are a large number of scenes about horse breeding. One of the Russians involved runs what they call RusFarm near St Petersburg. Then there is a CIA-backed horse farm in Mexico. How much of this is reality or not, we’ll never know. But it’s still fun to imagine that the secret services are putting businesses together as fronts. For the man who runs the farm in Mexico, the CIA recruited his grandfather first and it’s come down through the generations. He’s sent out to Russia with another agent, to RusFarm, to spy on the protagonists there.

I know nothing about horses and horse breeding, but what McCloskey was able to do was write about them in a way that was engaging. It reminded me a bit of Ian Fleming. Say the bridge scene in Moonraker. I have never played bridge in my life, but he is able to write about it in a way that, even if you’re not familiar with the game, you can follow the tension of the moment. I thought McCloskey did a really good job on that. Apparently, he researched with horse breeders in Kentucky—maybe that’s why he was able to write about it for the layperson, because he was once one himself.

The two main characters in Moscow X are both spies for the CIA and go undercover to RusFarm. There’s one line which shows just how tough it is to be a spy: they’re told, ‘Look, there are going to have cameras in your rooms. You’ve got to pretend to be a couple.’ Which means making love to each other even though they’re not partners. They have to do this. Again, you just scratch your head and think, ‘I could never be a spy!’

I liked the insight into the Russian goings-on in the book, including the descriptions of London’s financial dealings and Putin’s villa on the Black Sea. Also, that line: “A traitor and a hero. I am both…Like all good Russians.” How do you think the book compared to Damascus Station?

It had a different pace. The first half of Moscow X was a bit of a slow burn. There was a lot of set-up, but there was the payoff. I like slow burns.

On Spybrary we often joke that the Brits write the best realistic spy novels, but the Americans are really starting to stake their claim. Three of the writers I’ve chosen (Vidich, McCloskey, and Berry) are American. I might offend some Americans, but they are writing in a British style of espionage, where there aren’t the high-speed car chases and the mass deaths: it is more of an intricate, slow burn.

It’s interesting to see that, because my analysis of book sales in the US is that shoot-’em-up books sell a lot more. If you’re a writer who wants to make a ton of money writing spy novels, realistic is probably not the way to go. So we’re very lucky that these authors have picked this genre and are doing well in it. We’re blessed to have them.

Also, I just like books, and I tend not to look at gender, but we must be honest that in the spy genre the vast majority of authors are men, and the vast majority of heroes are men. So it’s refreshing to see IS Berry come along. There are others, like Alma Katsu, as well. It’s really good to see these authors write about spies, not just because they’re women but because they happen to write bloody good spy novels.

Are you seeing more China-related spy novels?

Since Adam Brookes’s Night Heron trilogy, not so many. The one that’s always talked about is Charles Cumming’s Typhoon, but that’s from 2008. I do hear on good authority that McCloskey is considering North Korea and China as the setting for a future book, though.

4

Kennedy 35

by Charles Cumming

Let’s go on to Charles Cumming’s latest book, Kennedy 35. It’s set in Senegal and is partly about the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. I really felt like I was in Dakar, going out to dinner at a restaurant. He does a great job of taking you there, doesn’t he?

Yes, and Charles has done a fair bit of research. I saw his photographs from Senegal. I think both he and Vidich are great at transporting us to locations. Even though I’ve never been to Senegal or Beirut, I felt it was authentic, the way they described the food and the smells and the nature and the landscape.

Kennedy 35 is the third in the Lachlan Kite series, and I feel Cumming has found his feet with this one. The other two were good; I enjoyed them. It was notable that this one was a smaller book, so a faster read, because Box 88, the first one, was quite chunky.

I like the two timelines. I’ve learned in our Spybrary community that some readers struggle with two timelines, but Cumming has a knack for being able to fuse them together in a way that they’re not jarring, and you know where you are. A good device he has to remind us of what era we are in is that when he goes back to the 1990s, he writes about music that was very much of its time playing in the bar. I thought that was a fun way of doing it. Both timelines are very interesting, very intriguing. It’s almost like you’re getting two books for the price of one—two good books.

We see Lachlan Kite in Senegal in the 1990s. His girlfriend is very ill. They’re involved in a stakeout—they’re going to snatch a war criminal from Rwanda. There are plenty of twists and turns. You’re worried about how that snatch is going to go and also what’s happening with his girlfriend, in the middle of Senegal, very ill. Then you’re smack-bang in the modern-life timeline. Having built up the character, he’s very good at fusing the two timelines.

I think, in some ways, this is lazy reviewing, but some people talk about Cumming as ‘the next le Carré’ or ‘in the footsteps of le Carré’. Le Carré was famous for building up this whole world and creating his own vocabulary for it. ‘The Circus’ was the head office of the Secret Service at the time; the Lamplighters were the technicians; and there are the scalphunters. Cumming does this as well. I should probably write up a glossary of all the different words and terms he’s using.

I’ve seen more and more spy writers do this. Charles Beaumont does it in his book as well. I love it because it’s building that whole world for us to go and explore—a world that we’ve never been privy to.

What kind of vocabulary does Cumming use?

The Cathedral, for instance, is the nickname of the London headquarters for his agency. Falcon are the surveillance specialists. The Closers is the military arm. I really get excited when spy authors do this and create their own worlds.

5

Beirut Station

by Paul Vidich

We’re now at book number five, which is Beirut Station, by Paul Vidich. You already said a little bit about it but tell me more. This is by an author whose background isn’t in spying, but it’s his sixth novel.

Paul Vidich is so good. That’s what I enjoy most about doing the Spybrary podcast. People write to me and say, ‘I would never have discovered Paul Vidich if it wasn’t for you and now I can’t get enough of it.’

I picked it this book up at Heathrow airport. I had been planning to watch movies on the flight but I inhaled this book instead. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s a thought-provoking and intense spy novel and I just wanted to finish it.

The book is set during the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006. The events depicted are fictional but revolve around historical incidents, including the tragic murder of the CIA station chief, William Buckley, in Lebanon in 1985.  They’re hunting for the assassin. The surveillance is run jointly by CIA and Mossad and Paul comes up with different characters for the different agencies.

Condoleezza Rice is visiting and there is a lot of worry that she is going to be assassinated by Hezbollah. There’s a lot of tension around her visit. A bit like IS Berry, Vidich is very good at weaving real-life events and geopolitics into the backdrop of the story. It makes the book educational as well as entertaining.

The main protagonist is Analise Assad, a Lebanese-American CIA agent. She’s not the usual downtrodden woman that you often see in spy novels. She’s a ‘NOC’ (non-official cover), which means she’s totally undercover and works for the UN Refugee Agency as a teacher. Her job is to befriend the grandson of the terrorist chief and get to him through the boy. As you can imagine, in a lot of these books there are moral dilemmas. You can ask, ‘Is that the right thing to be doing—to be using a kid to try and murder the grandfather?’ Vidich does this very well.

Analise is a very strong woman, but not in the same way as Artemis Proctor in Moscow X or Shirley Dander in Mick Herron’s books. Analise is a very thoughtful, intelligent officer who’s used to getting information that others may miss. For instance, when they’re tracking the villain, she notices that the one thing that’s constant with the driver is that he wears the same gloves. It’s a vanity thing. Everything else changes, but the gloves are the same. I don’t want to go into why that’s important, but she’s able to go in and pick out this information that’s crucial for them in their mission.

December 28, 2023

Fiction » Crime Novels

The Best Crime Novels of 2023

recommended by Sophie Roell

From a police procedural set in World War II Berlin to a man pushing his in-laws off a wall in Ningbo, the variety of settings for crime fiction continue to provide a lot of opportunities for armchair travel. Our editor, Sophie Roell, an avid reader of crime novels, picks out some of her favourites of 2023.

- The Running Grave

by Robert Galbraith

- Dead of Night

by Simon Scarrow

- Gaslight

by Femi Kayode

- Exiles

by Jane Harper

- Bad Kids

by Zijin Chen

Throughout the year I read a lot of crime fiction. It’s what I do instead of watching TV, to relax, so I tend to stay away from books that are too graphic. I’m particularly attracted to books that take me to interesting times or places. Inevitably, with thousands of books published, I’ve missed a lot, so apologies in advance for all the wonderful books I’ve left out. Among those I read that were published 2023, these were some of my favourites:

1

The Running Grave

by Robert Galbraith

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith

For me, the best crime series currently being published is the one featuring private detective Cormoran Strike. It’s written by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) and so it’s widely marketed and hard to miss when you pass a bookstore. Galbraith/Rowling is now at the 7th book in the series, The Running Grave,  published exactly a decade on from the first. These books are a slow-burn, for people who like long books and living alongside the characters. If you haven’t read one yet, it is important to start from the beginning and read them in order so you get to know the protagonists. I listen to them as audiobooks, and believe the narrator—British actor Robert Glenister—helps make the series exceptional (the only book in the series I haven’t enjoyed as much was the one I read as a physical book). In The Running Grave, Strike’s partner Robin Ellacott—who in my mind looks exactly like JK Rowling—goes undercover at a religious cult in Norfolk.

The Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith

2

Dead of Night

by Simon Scarrow

Dead of Night by Simon Scarrow

Simon Scarrow is a British author best known for his historical novels set in Ancient Rome. Dead of Night, in contrast, is a police procedural set in Berlin in 1941, under the Nazis. It’s the second in a series featuring Inspector Horst Schenke, who works for the Kriminalpolizei or Kripo (The first in the series was Blackout). Schenke is not a Nazi, but works for a state run by the Nazis. I read the book shortly after it came out in February, and the creepiness of the atmosphere has stayed with me. I suppose it meets one of my criteria for a good crime novel—does it make me feel like I’ve been there? I also like the fact that American journalist William Shirer features in the book. (In real life Shirer lived in Berlin through 1940. His book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is a great account of what it was actually like in Berlin under the Nazis).

World War II historical novels on Five Books

If you like police procedurals in a more conventional setting, another good one published in 2023 is The Broken Afternoon by Simon Mason. It’s set in Oxford and has two detectives with virtually the same name (but very different personalities) as the main protagonists: Ray Wilkins and Ryan Wilkins. This is the second book in the series, and opens with Ryan working as a security guard having been thrown out of Thames Valley Police. A child disappears from her nursery school, snatched away as her mum talks to one of the staff at pickup time.

3

Gaslight

by Femi Kayode

Gaslight by Femi Kayode

Travelling to countries I haven’t visited by way of a crime novel is always a treat for me. Gaslight is the second in a series set in Nigeria, featuring an investigative psychologist as the main protagonist. His name is Philip Taiwo and he first appeared in Lightseekers, set in a small university town near the oil town of Port Harcourt. In this novel, Taiwo is asked by his sister to investigate the disappearance of the wife of the pastor of a Christian megachurch. The pastor is charismatic, worth millions, and stands accused of his wife’s murder. Taiwo has moved to Nigeria from the United States with his wife and children, and his experience of that move makes up part of the backdrop to the story. One thing you get an overwhelming sense of in the book: Lagos traffic.

More African crime fiction on Five Books

4

Exiles

by Jane Harper

Exiles by Jane Harper

Jane Harper is an Australian writer of crime fiction who I’m a big fan of. Exiles is set in Australia’s wine country and features Aaron Falk, an investigator who has appeared in some of her other novels. Harper’s books are always atmospheric and well-crafted. As in The Dry, Falk is not investigating in a formal capacity, but in this case goes down south to celebrate being godfather to a friend’s son. Exiles opens with a six-week-old baby in a pram being found on its own at a food and wine festival: the mother has disappeared.

The best Australian crime fiction

5

Bad Kids

by Zijin Chen

Bad Kids by Zijin Chen

I tend to read quite a bit of crime fiction translated from other languages and 2023 was no exception. Bad Kids was first published in China in 2014—where it has (apparently) been turned into a wildly popular online TV show—but only came out in English last year. It opens with a man pushing his parents-in-law to their deaths off the side of a mountain. The book has quite a lot of fun horrifying the reader by completely upending Confucian norms—which emphasize respecting your elders and your parents in particular—and exploring what it takes to derail the perfect student. It’s set in Ningbo, the city near Shanghai where the author lives.

One book I enjoyed for its setting was Reykjavík, written in Icelandic by Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir and translated into English by Victoria Cribb. It’s a bit of a trip down memory lane as it’s set in 1986 and revolves around a murder committed in the 1950s. We see the development of Iceland and the Reykjavík Summit, when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met. It’s also the only book on this list written by a national leader: Jakobsdóttir has been prime minister of Iceland since 2017.

If you like crime fiction, you can find more recommendations in our ‘best mysteries of 2023’ list, which includes more UK-based crime novels, as well as a few ‘cosy’ mysteries. It also lists the books shortlisted for crime book prizes in 2023.

December 23, 2023

Food & Cooking » The Best Cookbooks

The Best Cookbooks of 2023

recommended by Becky Krystal

Casting their expert eyes, experience—and taste buds—across this year's new cookery titles, Becky Krystal of the Washington Post and colleagues have come up with a list of the best cookbooks of 2023. They cover everything from baking American-style biscuits to making the best use of leftovers, and a celebration of the unique cuisine of the Jewish-Roman community.

Interview by Benedict King

- Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit

by Abra Berens

- The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z

by Tamar Adler

- Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes

by Erika Council

- Comfort and Joy: Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen

by Ravinder Bhogal

- Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen

by Leah Koenig

Your selection of the five best cookbooks of 2023 seems quite diverse to me. Was there a particular theme that you feel ties them together or are they just the top five books produced this year?

That’s a good question. The theme is that these are all books that spoke particularly to various members of our staff. I think if there’s a common theme, it’s really about home cooks. We’re used to a lot of books from chefs. Those tend to get the most attention and glamor and publicity, but there is so much to learn from people who learn from their parents or their grandparents, make the most of what they have at home, and are being very practical and flexible and adaptable. I think that is a thread that goes through all of these books—at least four of the five.

1

Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit

by Abra Berens

Let’s go to the first title you want to highlight as one of the best cookbooks of 2023, Pulp, which is about how to use fruit imaginatively in cooking.

This is by Abra Berens, who is a chef I really like. She has written two other books: Ruffage, about vegetables; and Grist, about grains. This is the third in the series, and it focuses on fruit. What I love about her books is that they are cookbooks, and her recipes are very appealing and achievable, but they are also great reference books. These are the books that I keep at my desk when I want to learn about an ingredient.

She has tips on how to store fruit, how to prepare fruit, and how to preserve it. If you’re just looking for that kind of practical advice, this is a great source. If you want to learn about the people who make food or who produce it, she sheds a spotlight on that. She does profiles of producers. These are the unsung heroes who help make our food possible, and they often don’t get the attention they deserve. I appreciate that she talks about them.

She will let you pair different recipes together. She starts out the book with things to pair with fruit, like crackers and breads and batters and crusts, so that when you get to each individual fruit, you know what you can do with them as well. If you want to make a pie with this type of fruit, or you want to put this type of fruit over pudding—she helps you do that.

Also, and I think this is common throughout all these books, she’s a very strong writer. I love the way she writes. It feels like you’re standing with her at the farmers’ market and she’s telling you what to do. She says that blueberries are “the golden retriever of the fruit world,” that they’re just all-round pleasant company—which I think is great. You know exactly what she means when she says that.

Another thing I like is that she tucks variations into her recipes. If you read the introduction of the recipe, which is usually a few sentences, she will say: this also works with this fruit; if you don’t have this, use that.

I appreciate that she takes fruit seriously for the valuable commodity it is. It’s not just something you have to eat out of hand. People pigeonhole fruit. They think you just eat it on its own or it’s just for desserts, and she really shows that there’s so much more to it than that.

2

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z

by Tamar Adler

Excellent. Let’s move on to The Everlasting Meal Cookbook by Tamar Adler. This has won high praise from various quarters. Why is it one of the best cookbooks of 2023?

Yes. Similar to Pulp, it’s a great reference book. She has ideas for what to do with everything you have hanging around in your kitchen. She calls the book “a compendium of what to do with what you have.” That’s exactly what it is. You can page through and find ideas for every part of the potato or every variation on the potato—whether you have mash, whether you have this or that—and it makes you think twice before you toss the last bit of anything left in a jar.

Finish a jar of pickles? There’s the brine. What do you do with the brine? It’s easy enough to just pour it down the drain, right? The juice from a can of tomatoes is great for soups; it’s great for braises. Food waste is a big topic right now, and it can feel, on a large scale, very daunting. To know that there are things you can do in your own kitchen to tackle this yourself and make a meaningful impact in your own way is really empowering.

“There is so much to learn from people who learn from their parents or their grandparents, who make the most of what they have at home”

I think it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole and drive yourself crazy trying to use everything. I don’t think Adler wants you to do that; I think she wants you to take even just small steps to rethink leftovers. So much cuisine around the world is based on scraps or random odds and ends, and we’ve lost that way of thinking, in some ways.

We ran a recipe called Any Vegetable Minestra from this book. It is a very adaptable soup recipe: you use any liquid you have, any vegetables, any beans or starch. It’s all these disparate things that come together. You can flavor it however you want, and it’s just so smart. People need to be flexible with what they use, and I think this helps a lot.

Adler has a lyrical way of writing that is also very practical. It’s a very engaging read. This is one that my colleague Ann Maloney recommended. I read her copy of the book, and it’s full of bookmarks, which is a really good sign. I think this is one you’ll keep on the shelf and pull out all the time.

3

Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes

by Erika Council

Next on your list of the best cookbooks of 2023 is Still We Rise, by Erika Council.

I chose this book. It is a baking book, so it’s right up my alley. It’s about biscuits, which I adore. For your readers in the UK, I just want to clarify that these are not what you would call biscuits, which are what we Americans call cookies; these are more akin to bread or rolls. They are a Southern specialty, although people eat them all over. They’re what you’d have with something else or on their own. They’re fluffy, they’re flaky.

I talked to Council for a piece I did on biscuits several years ago, and I was very happy to see that she released this book. It is possibly one of my favorite single-topic books. I was so excited when I saw this book, and it didn’t disappoint.

Even today, the contribution of Black cooks and Black women is seriously underappreciated and underrepresented. It’s never been given the same platform or praise as European fine cuisines. People don’t give it the respect it deserves. They think, oh, it’s just home cooking, whatever. It shouldn’t be that way. These are supremely talented cooks.

What I appreciate about Council’s book is that she also takes a historical perspective. She weaves in stories from her family, and older cookbooks that were published by Black women and groundbreaking at the time. In a small way, it’s starting to do what these types of authors haven’t been able to do in the past.

Again, I like that it’s a fairly narrow-topic cookbook. It lets you dive into a single type of food without feeling overwhelmed, and it makes you feel in awe of how many ways you can eat and make a biscuit. There are sweet biscuits; there are savory biscuits; there are ones that you fold almost like pastry, so you get layers; there are scoop biscuits, where you just stir and drop.

At the Post, I ran a recipe called Butter Swim Biscuits from this book. It was one of our most popular recipes of the year. It’s a dough that’s simply stirred together. You melt butter in a dish in a really hot oven, and then you pour the batter over and you bake them. You get these fluffy, tall, salty, buttery, crispy-edged biscuits. I think this is my new favorite way to make biscuits. They can feel intimidating sometimes, and this recipe is not intimidating.

She just has all different types of recipes and ways to make biscuits that I would never have thought of. She has options for people who are gluten-free or who prefer whole-wheat, so she’s trying to be really inclusive. I think it’s a fun book and I look forward to making all kinds of biscuits from it in the future.

4

Comfort and Joy: Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen

by Ravinder Bhogal

Let’s move on to Comfort and Joy by Ravinder Bhogal. We’re going from biscuits to vegetables, right?

Yes, and they go well together. The Post’s Food and Dining editor, Joe Yonan, picked this book, and it’s completely engrossing. When he wrote about a recipe from this book, he said he immediately started bookmarking all the different recipes he wanted to make, which, again, is the sign of a great book. The recipe he did run was Cacio e Pepe Soup with Chickpeas and Kale, which also proved incredibly popular. It’s filling, comforting, and nourishing. It’s got cheese and butter, but also kale and chickpeas. Sometimes people think vegetarian food is very limiting, that it’s not filling, and that you’re going to still be hungry. This is just like a hug in a bowl. It’s the kind of book where you look through and you think, ‘I have never seen dishes like that before.’

Bhogal’s family background is Indian, but her grandfather had migrated to Kenya, so she spent the first seven years of her life in Kenya. She pulls inspiration from there, and she pulls inspiration from her Indian heritage, and now she’s based in the UK. Some of the things that I found really interesting are where she pulls together those different influences. She has pea kofta Scotch eggs, lemon and curry leaf crumpets. It’s so fun. This is the kind of stuff where you think, wow. It’s fusion not just for the sake of fusion. It’s really creative. She also pulls inspiration from other places. She has an Aegean dip that reminds her of Greece, and a hot corn and cheese dip that she had in New York, so it’s global and it’s fun and inspiring.

I love the way she writes with affection for her family, especially her grandfather and mother, and how they cooked for and nourished their families. I think she has a lot in common with Nigella Lawson, in terms of embracing the joy and sensuality of food, and that also comes across in the photos. They’re richly colored. They’re very enticing and fun. It’s a really exciting book and I’m looking forward to trying some more of these dishes, too.

5

Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen

by Leah Koenig

And the final book on your list of the best cookbooks of 2023 is Portico, by Leah Koenig. This is about cooking in the Jewish Roman community.

My colleague Olga Massov recommended this book. It focuses on Jewish cooking in Rome. Jews in Rome have a very long history, dating back something like two thousand years. For about three hundred of those, they were limited to a ghetto, a very small area of Rome.

This gets at what I was talking about in terms of home cooking, and being smart with what you have, because they were limited to certain ingredients. There were a lot of things they couldn’t buy, they couldn’t get, they had to have the small types of fish, so these were ingenious recipes through which they made do with what they had.

The cover of the book has an artichoke on it, and fried artichokes are an iconic Roman Jewish dish. People go and get them and eat them on the streets now, but back then, it was because artichokes were one of the things they could actually acquire, in addition to lots of olive oil.

What Olga really liked about this book and what I also appreciated was that, in general, the recipes are short. They don’t require a lot of ingredients. They’re approachable, again, because these are homestyle recipes.

It’s also part travelogue. Koenig mentions in the introduction that she wrote a lot of it when she was in Covid-19 lockdown, and we weren’t traveling anywhere. You get that feeling of love and appreciation and yearning for a place that makes you want to hop on the next plane to Rome. When she finally was able to visit, she and her photographer went, and the photos are just stunning. They give you such a sense of place. You feel like you’re there, it’s about real people, and it definitely feels like a coffee table book that’s about travel and cooking.

One of my pet peeves is when there aren’t that many photos of recipes in cookbooks, because I want to know what the dishes look like. There are a lot of recipe photos in this book. Not every dish has one, but I don’t mind because there are so many great atmospheric photos of Rome that really make you feel like you’ve gone there or that you want to go.

Olga said she already has given this book to people as a gift for Hanukkah and they loved it. It’s a great merging of place and food, and you can tell that this is a place Koenig is passionate about. It wasn’t just that she thought, ‘I need to write another cookbook.’ She cares deeply about these recipes and history and people.

Interview by Benedict King

December 21, 2023

Best Books for Kids

The Most Beautifully Illustrated Children’s Books

recommended by Ella Beech

What makes an illustrated book stand out? Ella Beech, the artist who has just completed a beautiful new edition of The Night Before Christmas for the Folio Society, talks us through some of her favourites.

Interview by Tuva Kahrs, Children's Editor

- I Am the Subway

Kim Hyo-eun, translated by Deborah Smith

- Little Echo

by Al Rodin

- Up Down Inside Out

by JooHee Yoon

- Haunted House

by Jan Pienkowski

- A Lion in Paris

by Beatrice Alemagna

What is considered beautiful illustration is very subjective. Before we get to the books themselves, can you tell me what you look for in a picture book? What were your criteria in selecting five beautifully illustrated and produced children’s books?

I wanted to choose books that feel beautiful as a whole. Often I will love a book for its story or I’ll love it for the illustrations — it’s really rare for me to feel a book is perfect. I love drawing and artwork, and I always have. I used to get lost in pictures as a child. The pictures were more than just pictures, I would dive into them. The five books I have chosen do the same thing for me now. In choosing them I trusted my gut.

It seems to me that the books you have picked are unique and a little off-beat rather than classically pretty. Would you say that these children’s books do something more for you than being aesthetically pleasing?

In children’s books you can have an expectation of what a book will look like, and I probably have chosen books that challenge that. Each one of the books I have chosen is a piece of artwork. You hope that they will be read again and again, that they are not just throwaway things to entertain.

I really love that there’s a market for turning books into artwork. All five books make me feel that the illustrator really enjoyed making the artwork. I feel they are all quite brave, that there’s a real exploration of the materials they use. They are mesmerising to me as an artist and I find myself getting lost in the illustrations. I really am admiring of the illustrators’ handling of materials and I think they have brilliant drawing skills. These are all books that look like they are made by hand, the sort of books that I almost imagine making, and that’s very attractive to me.

1

I Am the Subway

Kim Hyo-eun, translated by Deborah Smith

Let’s talk about your first pick, I Am the Subway by Kim Hyo-eun.

I am a fairly recent graduate from the Cambridge School of Art MA in Children’s Book Illustration, and now I teach on it as well. The course was designed by Martin Salisbury, in the belief that drawing from observation is the best foundation for being a children’s book illustrator. I Am the Subway is a brilliant example of a book that has been informed by observational drawing and how that can help you make a more original and realistic book.

There are lovely little details everywhere. Towards the end of the book, you can really sense the afternoon heat. There’s a double-page spread where the light outside is streaming in and everyone’s face is very warm; you get a sense that they’re tired at the end of the day. There’s another page where a cobbler looks chaotically happy and cosy. He is a big man who can hardly fit in his space. He is surrounded by shoes and little bits of leather and glue. You get the sense that he loves his job and that he has made the space his home as well as his workplace. There’s a little bowl of food outside where the cats are eating, showing his kindness — you don’t need words to tell you, and I love that. This is the sort of scene that I used to love as a child. You could spend hours studying and piecing together who the man in the picture is. The artwork has so many amazing, gorgeous details which give you clues about this man and his story.

I remember, as a child, that moment when I realised that everyone in the world has their own individual story in the life they are living. This book tells that beautifully. The voice is really unique: it’s from the perspective of the subway. I feel like it expresses everyone’s personal insights and the journey that they’re on with real compassion. The drawing is also beautifully rendered; you can imagine it in an art book as much as in a picture book.

This book is narrated by the Seoul subway, and that voice is very warm. I noticed that when people are busy — when they are a crowd of passengers — they have blank faces, but when the perspective shifts to individuals their faces are illustrated in detail and they get to speak in their own voices.

I think the fact that Kim Hyo-eun drew on the subway makes it feel really believable. Another thing is that this book conveys states really well. Each character has two spreads. The first shows the present where we view them on the subway, and then it shows you a scene of their day-to-day life. The two states are woven in and out beautifully. It’s a brilliantly made sequence.

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Little Echo

by Al Rodin

Your next pick of beautifully illustrated children’s books is Little Echo by Al Rodin.

A lot of people can make beautiful sketches, but when you go to colour it can easily feel a bit stiff and lifeless. In this book Al has kept his artwork really alive, it feels like it’s dancing on the page. He has got such a clever use of light, colour and composition in this book, as well as beautiful mark-making (the way that you express yourself with paint). He would have planned this carefully, and it’s such a fine balance of being free, but making something that is easy to follow, that has a clarity of image.

I like the use of colour in this book.

The colour is absolutely beautiful. It’s all in the dark and it’s got a wonderful sense of light.

The book is about a little character called Echo, a little yellow sort of mousy bear creature — who can’t find her own voice, she can only echo — and boy called Max, who is trying to find treasure in a cave, but is lost. Echo knows where the treasure is, but is too shy to talk to him, but then she has to speak to Max when he is sleeping and a bear sneaks up on him.

It’s a sweet story about friendship and finding your voice, which uses the character of Echo to show all the good things that can happen when you try being brave and speaking up. It also feels like a book of imaginative play, the sort of adventure I remember acting out with my friends as a child. The playfulness of the artwork complements the story beautifully. It looks fresh with a lightness of touch, but I know how difficult it is to achieve that looseness. It’s rich and textured in the colour and mark-making, and still very readable in terms of image. I’m in awe, and I want to know how he does it. As an illustrator, I find it a joyful celebration of painting. I think this is quite a brave book.

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Up Down Inside Out

by JooHee Yoon

Your third pick of a beautifully illustrated children’s book is Up Down Inside Out by JooHee Yoon, who is known for her work with traditional printmaking techniques.

I love JooHee Yoon’s artwork. This book is made in just two colours: red and blue. And yet, she has done that clever thing that you can with print making, when you get a myriad of extra colours by combining the overlays of colours. For example, you get a very dark, almost black, colour when the blue and red are in their full strength overlaid together. Plus, she’s used textures in each colour to get different shades. You have textured red, which almost makes a pink, and textured blue that makes light blue. It’s very creative use of two colours. You could say that the artwork is quite stylised for a children’s book, but I find it very appealing, and I think I would have loved it as a child.

The way she has done the flaps is really clever, “clever simple”, as my old boss used to say. Having worked in novelty books for 20 years, often I’ll look at a novelty book and feel fussy and I’ll want to change something about it, but with this book I don’t. I think it’s brilliant.

“It’s really rare for me to feel a book is perfect”

My favourite page is an image of a cheeky thief. You can see his eyes peeking above his coat, which he is holding closed with his arm. It is also a flap, and when you open it you reveal all of the watches underneath that he’s trying to sell you. Because the artist has made lots of patterns for the watches, it feels more than two colours. She is so clever with her use of the colours along with the white space. You have to have quite clever spatial awareness in your head. As an artist who works in layers of paint colours, I know that managing the design of the layers is quite a challenge in itself, and then you have to make the artwork readable as well. JooHee Yoon does it really well so I’m very admiring of her.

Can you talk briefly about the text?

She has taken idioms like “people in glass houses should not throw stones” and turned them into single page illustrations. As an illustrator, you’re not only using materials and artwork to make images, you’re telling stories. This book is sophisticated for a child, but I can imagine children really enjoying looking at it. It probably is a book for adults and children.

4

Haunted House

by Jan Pienkowski

Let’s move on to Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski, a pop-up book first published in 1979, which won him a second Kate Greenaway medal for children’s book illustration.

I am such a fan of Jan’s art and his illustration, but Haunted House stands out for me particularly in terms of production: it’s a really beautifully produced children’s book. I didn’t own this book as a child, but my friend did. We used to say “let’s go and look at the haunted house”, and we would seek out the special place where it was kept, take the book out and pore over it. I love the way that the voice is saying one thing and the images are totally different, so you have a sense that the words are not quite telling the whole story. That was really appealing to me as a child. And the paper engineering is amazing. I remember that feeling of getting totally immersed in this book.

I read that Pienkowski was in an air raid shelter in Warsaw in the Second World War and a soldier kept him entertained by doing paper cuts from newspaper. As an adult he founded a greeting card company, and did stage design as well. All these elements must have come together in the production of his children’s books.

It’s really clever. Every cut in this book is used to the best effect, there’s no extraneous paper engineering in there. I’m pretty sure that it uses both sides of the wheel in lots of the illustrations. So you’ve got a dial, and you’ll have one thing printed on the outside of the circle, and then you’ll have an inner ring which has got something different printed on it. When you put holes on the page in different places it looks like magic, and I remember being blown away by that as a child.

Now I’m on the illustration side of publishing, but when I was working as a designer I always used to ask the people I worked with about their first experience of books, because we were all obsessed. I think we all had very significant reading experiences as children. I feel that the books that I loved as a child really marked me as a human.

Despite having very little text, this book tells the story in a funny way because, as you say, what’s being said is so different from what’s being shown. And the illustrations are incredibly detailed.

This book has only got six spreads, but you can spend hours reading it because it’s got all these little doors that you can open. And when you open the flaps you’ve got little dials which you can turn and the cat’s eyes rove across the page and at the end a vampire bat comes out in a big pop-up. There are all sorts of different things happening at the same time. You open a door and it creaks because it has a serrated edge. It’s funny, and again it’s clever simple. It’s perfect. The words are sparse and yet what they say is brilliant. It’s more interesting because it isn’t just saying “once upon a time in a spooky old house”.

I really love this book, it’s very special. It has flavours of In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. I found something appealing in the strangeness as a child, and I still like books that have a touch of whimsy and oddness to them. Jan is a brilliant storyteller. I used to love his Meg and Mog books as well. Now they look very dated with lots of purple and orange, but I absolutely loved them as a child.

5

A Lion in Paris

by Beatrice Alemagna

We have come to your final pick of beautiful books for kids, A Lion in Paris by multi-award winning children’s book illustrator Beatrice Alemagna.

Beatrice Alemagna’s artwork obviously speaks to illustrators, because I know lots of illustrators love her. I think that’s because she pushes the boundaries of what’s seen as children’s book illustration. She’s experimental and isn’t afraid to be to be different. I remember finding her books quite surprising when I first saw them at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. She was memorable and really stood out amongst the illustrators.

I also chose this book because it’s such an unusual format. It’s really big, it is landscape, and you open it up vertically which creates a tall portrait book. The illustrations are shown on the bottom page, which means her illustrations are completely uninterrupted by the text, which is separate on the top page. This feels right for Beatrice’s beautiful illustrations, and I like that the illustrations are given such prominence and importance.

Is it mixed media collage?

Yes. A lot of the faces are photographs. It reminds me of some of my college projects as an art student. I used to buy 1950s ideal home magazines and cut them up and use them in my artwork.

What I also love about this book is that it’s a celebration of Paris. I grew up in London, and I could spend hours in London tourist shops looking at all the buses and maps; maybe it appeals to me as a designer. It is lovely, the way she goes around all the Paris landmarks and draws them. It ends up with the lion in the book sitting on a plinth and becoming part of Paris, that’s a really unexpected ending. She talks about her arrival in Paris and how she realised over time that the lion represents in a way all foreigners and their need to find a place to live happily, so this book has got a lovely message as well.

The text is about a lion on the grasslands that wants to find a job, love and a future. When he arrives in Paris by train he’s worried about how people will react.

Yes, the lion waited to see if he would terrify anyone. He looks a bit nervous, drinking his coffee in the café but everyone’s too busy living their own lives to notice him. It’s got a scene of him on the metro: “The lion liked to be noticed and thought it was very sad to be ignored”. It’s a nice personal story, and I think she’s brilliant at compositions. Her artwork feels very uncontrived. I remember reading in an interview that she feels she can’t do perfect perspective so decided not to worry about it and just do what comes naturally instead.

As an artist, there’s always a part of you that feels that you need to have the perfect perspective and be able to do everything skilfully to be “good”, but I think it’s when you let go of that and just let yourself be who you want to be as an illustrator that you find your voice. This book feels like it’s a celebration of finding your own individual creative voice.

What age would you say these books are for? They are all picture books, and at least two of them have flaps and other interactive features, but some of them are quite long.

It depends on the reading age of your child, because children have such different reading ages even if they’re the same age as each other. I would say the books I’ve chosen are for children age 5-9 or perhaps 4-9. I’ve mostly chosen books that can be enjoyed by adults as well as children. When I worked in publishing, I was really obsessed with a book being appropriate for a child and I used to feel sceptical of books that felt like they were made for an adult audience. But I’ve come full circle on that now, and I think that’s totally an appropriate market; why not have some children’s books for adults to enjoy?

You said that you would get absorbed in book illustrations when you were a child. I interviewed a preschool teacher who thinks that we tend to underestimate what children see when they look at pictures.

Yes, the children’s book illustration market often assumes that the child will only want bright colours and a cartoony style, which is a little bit patronising for children. If a child can enjoy looking at a Picasso, which I think they can, then I don’t see why they can’t enjoy being presented with something that they might need to look a bit harder at and spend some time over.

How did you end up moving from working in the publishing industry to becoming a children’s book illustrator?

Both my parents are artists, so I was brought up looking at art. A lot of the 20th-century artists were particularly influential for me. At home we were often painting and drawing and doing pottery and even carving, so it was a very creative household. I always thought I’d be an artist, and I did fine art painting for my first degree. When I graduated I realised that I couldn’t afford a studio and got a temporary job at Dorling Kindersley, and then a job at a company called Pinwheel where I was doing novelty book paper engineering — books with flaps, books with moving mechanisms, cloth books, bath books… It was a really creative outlet for me, and it captured me for a long time. I worked as a designer and art director for about 15 years.

When I got a job as head of Campbell Books, a novelty book imprint, it was a new experience for me, as I managed editors as well as designers and illustrators. I was responsible for the whole of the list of about 80 books a year, which was amazing but less hands-on creatively. I suddenly found myself in my early forties having an almost lightbulb moment of realising that I wanted to be an artist. So after over 20 years in publishing, I handed in my notice to become a children’s book illustrator. It was a really scary move.

This might sound a bit romantic, but illustration isn’t just a commercial endeavour for me, it goes much deeper. I had such meaningful connections with books as a child, I just can’t let them go. Also, my lifelong desire and intention to be an “artist” has extra meaning for me because of my 20-year detour into doing a “real job”, albeit a lovely one, so coming back to creative work feels like a true passion fulfilled. The books I have chosen in some ways reflect that. They are children’s books that feel like they are made by artists, and the pictures draw me in, in the same way as when I was a child. I feel very lucky!

The Folio Society has published a new edition of The Night Before Christmas with your artwork. How did you go about illustrating this classic?

When the art director first asked me to illustrate the book, all I could picture was the first sentence: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”. I decided that I wasn’t going to look at any of the other books because I didn’t want to copy something, even subconsciously. The main thing I wanted to do was to bring as much storytelling as I could into the poem, which is quite lyrical. It tells the story of Santa visiting the family from the perspective of the father. I thought about the children who would be reading the book and it felt right to bring the whole family into the story. As soon as I did that, the whole book came to life! I liked that although Santa doesn’t interact with the family (he doesn’t know they have seen him) he does interact with the family’s pets — a cat and a dog. That felt like it brought a bit of life and connection into the story. I also really enjoyed adding little details, like the food wrapped in foil in the kitchen, ready for the big day.

It was intimidating at first, to illustrate such an iconic poem, but as soon as I drew everyone, including Santa, they all became a little bit like family, and I found I lost myself in the work I created. It was very exciting, and a real privilege being entrusted with the project. It felt very special to work with The Folio Society, a publisher I had admired from afar for years. It still feels like a dream that I made a book with them!

The Folio Society edition of Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, illustrated by Ella Beech, is available exclusively from The Folio Society

Interview by Tuva Kahrs, Children's Editor

December 20, 2023

Art

The Best Art Books of 2023

recommended by Francesca Ramsay

From the latest research on what art does to the brain to how women in Renaissance times used cosmetics, this year saw a range of accessible and authoritative books about art. Art historian Francesca Ramsay recommends her best art books of 2023—and argues that for all the doom and gloom, it's an exciting time to be an artist.

Interview by Romas Viesulas

- Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

by Ivy Ross & Susan Magsamen

- How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

by Jill Burke

- Bring No Clothes : Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion

by Charlie Porter

- Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

by Lauren Elkin

- Talk Art The Interviews: Conversations on art, life and everything

by Robert Diament & Russell Tovey

Before we launch into the best art books of 2023 that you selected, tell me about your book Pinch Me. What prompted you to write this book, here and now?

It was a painting that prompted me, a modest work by Picasso, a still life with a jug and apples, in Paris. I was so struck by it, experiencing a kind of full-body presence. And it was especially surprising because it’s a very unassuming painting. I wasn’t expecting it to have this effect on me. That got me questioning why it would affect me in that way. What was going on in my brain? How could I get this feeling back?

This encounter actually took place quite a long time before I wrote the book. It stayed with me though, and then, of course, lockdown happened. Our lives became very unphysical, very screen based. We weren’t touching each other, we weren’t having these bodily experiences. In fact, we were living kind of outside of our bodies. I’m sure I’m not the only one who found myself becoming more and more disconnected, more dissociated from what was going on in the world. With the fear of death and the pandemic as a backdrop, I wasn’t feeling as present as I had been in the past.

And then I discovered that a lot of my friends were feeling exactly the same way. This started me questioning the moments that I had really felt embodied, and the moments I hadn’t. Which in turn started this journey of trying to bring more of that presence and connection into my life. It started with this painting by Picasso, but then as I looked closely, I began to discover all sorts of other things that brought me into my body: swimming in cold water, walking through a beautiful landscape, looking at amazing vistas. PINCH ME is a broad and personal exploration into connection. I’m an art historian, so naturally it’s really focusing on the arts. But I think it’s relevant beyond the arts, and hopefully my readers will go on their own journey to find connection themselves.

1

Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

by Ivy Ross & Susan Magsamen

You asked yourself about what goes on in the brain when you’re confronted by a painting that moves you. That’s a nice segue to the first on your list of best art books 2023, Your Brain on Art. Talk to us about this one.

This is a book on neuro-aesthetics, a search into what art literally does to the brain and how creativity can improve one’s mental health. Art can actually alter your neural pathways. GCSE science was as far as I got, so I’m definitely not a scientist myself. Nonetheless, I’ve had these really quite intense reactions to artworks for most of my life, and discovering a scientific backing behind my subjective, aesthetic experiences has been really fascinating. It’s a revelation to me that looking at art lights up the same neural pathways as if you’re falling in love, or if you’re touching a loved one. Looking at something beautiful has a very distinct physiological effect in the brain, very much on an objective level. It’s not just me being a whimsical art historian and calling everything beautiful!

We need creativity and beauty, on the scientific evidence, to lead a good life. There used to be no hard distinction between science and the arts. By insisting on a split between the two we’ve lost so much. Hopefully, and with the help of books like this, now we’re kind of going back to earlier, more holistic understanding, reconnecting and realising that our brains don’t see ‘aesthetic’ or ‘scientific’ experiences as necessarily different. On the contrary, we need this connection.

We’ve spoken previously at Five Books about drawing as thought. This book reminded me that the act of making something is a form of thinking, and a very engaged way of observing the world around us. Making art is a form of mental engagement with our surroundings.

When you look at a drawing, I believe that’s the closest you can get to an artist. It’s like seeing that process of thinking. The direct connection from their brain to their hand and onto the paper they’re drawing on, the immediacy is something you can feel. I find it really intimate.

2

How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

by Jill Burke

We also spoke recently on Five Books about Renaissance self-fashioning. You’ve chosen a book by Jill Burke that looks at how this applied to renaissance women. Let’s talk about the second of your best art books 2023.

I specialise in Renaissance art, very specifically, in Renaissance drawings of the nude. What I find so intriguing about the Renaissance is that there were these pockets of power and influence for women, even in what was a highly patriarchal society. I’d never considered that makeup and beauty would have been a way of showing your power and sharing your individuality.

“Art can actually alter your neural pathways”

Jill Burke, an exceptional Renaissance scholar, brings an incredibly important insight to this under-researched topic. Don’t get me wrong, this is not some kind of serious or high-minded academic history book. On the contrary, it’s written in a way that is really accessible and really entertaining, not to mention completely relevant to art history today.

Isn’t it fascinating, for example, that we are still thinking in much the same way today as we were 600 years ago, when self-image and public image were deemed to be all-important? We’re still looking at ourselves in the mirror and criticising our looks, looking for ways to improve our image. Let’s face it, we haven’t really changed as humans. This is an astonishing thing about art history, when you can look at a painting from the distant past and realise, ‘God, that could be me!’

3

Bring No Clothes : Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion

by Charlie Porter

As we’re talking about appearance and public image, that brings to mind Charlie Porter’s latest book, Bring No Clothes, another one of your picks for best art books 2023.

All of the books I’ve selected showcase different forms of creativity. They show the many ways in which we display to others who we are and how we experience the world. This can even be through different things like makeup, as we saw with the example of Renaissance women, or as Charlie Porter writes, through clothes. He focuses on the early 20th century Bloomsbury group of artists, six literary and artistic figures, and uses their example to open up a discussion about dress. What we wear is so linked to our creativity and how we’re getting ourselves across to others. The members of Bloomsbury were all artists, but they were showcasing their art also in the way they dressed, which was an important way of marking out who they were, and who they wanted to be in society.

I love the linkage between what artists create as their ‘product’, and how they present themselves to the public eye, which is an equally creative act. We featured What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter in our Best Art Books of 2022.

The Bloomsbury group weren’t the only artists engaged with creative expression through clothes. Think of the Surrealists, for example, and Dali taking his pet anteater for a walk. Whether visual artists or creatives of a different sort, dressing can be a form of performance art.

4

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

by Lauren Elkin

A very different form of creativity, perhaps, is monstrosity, the way that Laura Elkin describes it in her book, Art Monsters. What made this book stand out as one of the best art books 2023?

In exactly the same way as clothes, this is a book about using something unexpected as the artistic medium. In this case, it deals with artists using the body. The female body, specifically. I’m writing a lecture about the nude at the moment, so questions of the body are very much on my mind. The nude was re-appropriated from the late 19th and into the 20th century from the confines of historic representation.

Laura Elkin looks to a number of truly incredible women artists, highlighting a further evolution of ideas of the body. Many of them are performance artists, but what unifies all of them is a heritage of anti-patriarchy, using the female form to assert these ideas. It’s a really powerful, angry text. These artists put themselves inside the canvas, which in this case is the female form. It’s somewhat whimsical but also remarkable to remember that we’re walking around inside an artistic canvas!

What struck me about this and your other selections is how much they revolve around embodiment.

Absolutely. This book highlights the disconnection between the naked and the nude. A lot of these artists aren’t depicting themselves as nude, that is, as this rather idealised image of what the objective body should be. What they are showcasing is the physical experience of what it is to be inside a body, what it is to have a woman’s body, or whatever body in fact.

“Nakedness is a form of dress”, wrote John Berger.

Berger wrote about the nude and about how women in the history of art have been granted only an idealised form, which mostly doesn’t change. Why? Because the protagonist of art history has been the man looking at them, and depicting them, and that never changes. So the re-appropriated nude turns away from this objectification. These are artists who are questioning how to depict themselves and how to depict the female body without entering into historical cliche, conscious of the male gaze, but not catering to it, nor necessarily rejecting it, but coming up with a different way of looking at the female body. This way of being she calls ‘monstrous’, borrowing a line from a novel by Jenny Offill, Dept of Speculation: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.”

5

Talk Art The Interviews: Conversations on art, life and everything

by Robert Diament & Russell Tovey

Let’s talk about the final book in your selection, Talk Art.

This book is based on a fantastic podcast by Russell Taylor and Robert Diament. I got into it quite a few years ago, when it first started. It somehow hadn’t occurred to me until then as a Renaissance art historian that, well, all the artists I learned about are dead! There’s only so much that you can know about them, only so much they can tell us. For the art historian in me, this podcast and this book have been a real breath of fresh air, hearing directly from artists who are not being put on a pedestal, but behaving like makers, like real people, real practical living individuals.

The whole creative process is endlessly fascinating. Reading Your Brain on Art and learning about neurological states has been a great privilege because it’s given me a whole new way of understanding human making and human creativity. And in this book we can hear directly from creatives about that process. The interviews encompass established names like Grayson Perry or Tracy Emin, as well as new names. It’s not just visual artists, it also extends to other art forms, and includes conversations with the likes of Elton John, Paul Smith and Stephen Fry. All kinds of people making all kinds of art. In the end, it’s a glorification of simply being alive.

The podcast and the books emerging from it are almost like an encyclopaedia of contemporary voices in art. I think that’s why they’ve been so successful. The way they write and talk about art is not elitist, either. In spite of all of the disasters going on in the world, we live in a really exciting, creative time. It’s a world where we’re not blocked in by having to create religious art, for example, or art that’s not about sex, or whatever. People can be creating in whatever way they want. That’s a very significant element of positivity in our often dark times.

Interview by Romas Viesulas

December 19, 2023

World » Africa

The Best African Contemporary Writing

recommended by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

The emphasis in new African writing is away from politics towards how the individual responds to events, says South African novelist Mphuthumi Ntabeni, author of The Broken River Tent and The Wanderers. He picks out five outstanding books of African writing, including novels that paved the way for new genres, a book of short stories from across Africa, and a work of nonfiction that he recommends to "anybody who wants to know what is happening in South Africa."

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

- Season of Migration to the North

by Tayeb Salih

- The Land Is Ours: Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism in South Africa

by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi

- Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa

- A Library to Flee

by Etienne van Heerden

- A General Theory of Oblivion

by Daniel Hahn (translator) & José Eduardo Agualusa

For people who don’t know much about it, can you tell me a bit about African contemporary writing in general?

I think that African writing has mostly been postcolonial. Perhaps it started with Chinua Achebe, who was writing in reaction to aspects of colonialism. That has been quite popular in African writing. Now, at this stage, African writing is moving away from that colonial theme. It’s getting more into what I call historical fiction, because Africa is still trying to reckon with its own history, especially the recent history.

From Achebe, then, perhaps through the likes of Ngozi, you have African literature about the immigrant experience, whose roots are from Tayeb Salih. I like the new writing because now the emphasis is no longer too much on politics, the emphasis is on the individual, and how the individual reacts to historical events.

The thing I still complain about regarding African literature, even contemporary writing, is that we shy away from the novel of ideas. Our novels still neglect intellectual tensions, preferring dialectical drama.

Tell me how you chose these particular five, because there must have been a lot to choose from across the whole of Africa.

Yes! I consider myself a reader who has developed an opinion, because I read a lot. It was a very difficult task for me to decide which ones to choose. I wanted books that I thought were genre-defining books in African writing. For instance, Tayeb Salih is basically a founder of what we call African immigrant writing, stories that are very popular at this particular time.In my opinion, Season of Migration to the North is amazing. As far back as the 1960s, Tayeb Salih was already tackling, in a vivid manner, the issues migrants to the West are confronted by: it’s hard to integrate because of cultural and religious differences, xenophobia, and the difficulties of getting employment or housing for not-properly-documented immigrants. If you read most of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s books, The Leavers by Lisa Ko, The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Second Class Citizens by Buchi Emecheta, Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, etc.: they’re all haunted by the writing ghost of Salih. South Africa has been resisting the genre a little but I recently read Paperless by Buntu Siwisa about the experience of Africans in Oxford.

And then, if we go to José Eduardo Agualusa, he is a founder of what I call the African stream of consciousness and the mixture of genre structure. He likes to write in different tones and even in different perspectives in one book. You’ll see that he uses the first person, he uses the second person, and he uses the third person. That is quite popular now in African writing, especially since Damon Galgut’s book, The Promise.

I also chose a collection of short stories because I thought there was a lot of diversity in the voices there. I wanted people to get the most diverse voices in African writing.

I chose only one non-fiction book, which is Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s The Land is Ours. I like that book. I always recommend it to anybody who wants to know what is happening in South Africa, the historical context and how it is now, the status quo.

1

Season of Migration to the North

by Tayeb Salih

That’s a great introduction. Let’s go through the books individually. You’ve already mentioned Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih. I think it was written in Arabic and came out in 1966. Is there anything else to add?

As I mentioned, I chose that book because I feel that African contemporary writing is in an age of restless migration to the North. You know, those stories of how people go to the North for different reasons: economic, political upheavals, all those things, and the issues migrants to the West are confronted by. Almost all the themes that he put there are what most writers at this particular moment are talking about. You can read Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Most of his themes are based on that. It’s as if he is haunted by the ghost of Salih.

Then you can go to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from Nigeria. It’s a very popular genre now, but I found that Tayeb Salih was the one who established it, especially from the African perspective.

And is it a beautiful book to read?

Oh, it’s a very beautiful book because it’s poetic also. Another thing that I complain about most of the time, because I read a lot of African writing, is that most writers don’t pay enough attention to the language. He does. He pays a lot of attention. His prose has a quiet wisdom with tinges of poetic lyricism. I love that about his writing.

For people who don’t know it, it’s about a man who leaves his village, goes to the UK for a few years and gets a PhD, and comes back, and then becomes obsessed with someone called Mustafa. Was that his name?

Mustafa, yes! I think there was an element of autofiction to the book because Salih himself worked in the UK for the BBC for some time. He always felt he lent his experiences to his protagonists.

When the narrator comes back home, he finds that as much as he misses his culture, he can see how much he doesn’t fit into that culture anymore because he stayed too long in the West. But then, when he goes to the West, he finds that culturally and religiously he doesn’t fit there, either.

There are also the elements of xenophobia and so much difficulty. Initially, when he’s undocumented, he can’t get a job. It’s all the things that we’re experiencing most of the time, as Africans, when we go to Western countries. I mentioned Paperless, by Buntu Siwisa: it goes into depth on that topic.

2

The Land Is Ours: Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism in South Africa

by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi

Let’s go to the nonfiction book next: The Land is Ours: Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism in South Africa, by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi. He’s a lawyer and he’s written this book about the first Black lawyers in South Africa. Is it a group biography or more of a history, would you say?

I don’t want to call them biographies because they are too short. Let’s call them ‘personalised histories.’ He writes the personalised histories of the first Black lawyers, who he claims were founders of constitutionalism and the universal Bill of Rights in South Africa. He showcases how they were affected by their naivety of thinking this would deliver universal justice, political and otherwise during the British colonial era of our history. They were trained overseas in the West, and they came back with the notion that they were going to change things because of their misconception, despite everything, that the British Empire had respect for the law.

They had a rude awakening. They came to understand that not only did the British not respect the law when it came to people of colour, they manipulated it. They only respected it when it supported their purposes. So they were always kicking the can down the road. It’s so painful when you read about their personal histories because most of them died in shame. Out of the six of them, five died as alcoholics because they couldn’t even make money as lawyers. There was just no space for them as Black people in the system.

The system just couldn’t accommodate them. As a result, one of them, Henry Sylvester Williams, who was Caribbean, chose to go back to England rather than stay in South Africa because he could see that there was no way he could practise law and pursue justice. In the end, all of them came to the realisation that practising law where there’s no justice is pointless. This fight has to be political rather than legal. This is why they became foundational members of what became known as the ANC, the African National Congress, the current rulers of South Africa.

Is the book very relevant today? You said you recommend it to everybody who wants to understand South Africa.

Yes, for me, historically, it is relevant. I suppose it is also relevant, even today, because Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is, I think, the youngest senior counsel in the land. His success has been prominent, but he himself is an exception to the rule. For most of these professions, the culture is still not accommodative to the Black people. But I think most people will argue that things are much, much better than they were in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I hear the book is being turned into a TV series. It’s going to be interesting to watch that.

3

Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa

Let’s go on to Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa, edited by Jason Mykl Snyman, Karina M. Szczurek, and Rachel Zadok. Tell me a bit more about the kind of stories that are in there. I was reading the first one and my husband looked over my shoulder and was like, ‘Whoa!’

The thing I like about Disruption is the diversity of the voices. The voices themselves come from all over the African continent.

Another thing that interested me is that most of the stories in Disruptions chose the theme of climate change. It means that climate change is really a threat on the African continent. Most Africans, especially the rural ones, who are the majority, still live by the soil. Their self-sustenance is still from the soil, so climate change affects them directly more than any other person. That part fascinated me, to see that most of them indirectly chose the theme of climate change, whether from drought or floods.

Also, what I like about it is the way the stories themselves showcase that the Africans are not helpless, passive individuals. They are adapting to this changing world. They are coming up with solutions to make their world even better.

Unfortunately, I feel another theme that is common in all of the stories is how the African governments let the individuals down and let the communities down, by not giving them support, by corruption. That is another theme, but I like the stories themselves. They come together very well as a collection.

Some of them are sci-fi, some of them are fantasy, they might be any genre, right?

Yes, that’s what I was saying. The genres are very diverse, and they are different. I’m not too much into sci-fi myself, but I found the stories very interesting. I like that they put me out of my comfort zone. I found that I enjoyed them despite myself.

4

A Library to Flee

by Etienne van Heerden

Let’s go on to A Library to Flee, by Etienne Van Heerden. I think this was written in Afrikaans and then translated.

Yes, it was translated into English last year. There is something that we call here the UJ Prize for Translation, which is awarded by the University of Johannesburg. The translator, Henrietta Rose-Innes, won that prize this year. It’s quite exciting.

The genre of this book is the most popular one at the moment. Now, let me first make you understand what kind of a genre it is. There is this thing that is happening now, especially in South Africa, whereby stories are also set in some global cities outside of South Africa. And we’re no longer only looking west; apparently, we’re also looking east, so there are a lot of stories now that are set in China. This one is part of that movement: It’s partly set in China, and generally set in South Africa.

The most popular one in this genre at this particular moment is C. A. Davids’s How to Be a Revolutionary. I’m sure you would have heard of it because it’s published in the UK by Verso. It has won quite a lot of prizes in South Africa: the Sunday Times Literary Award and the UJ Prize for Writing in English.

But what I like more about Etienne Van Heerden’s one, A Library to Flee, is that I find it’s a little bit more nuanced and the prose has got more finesse to it. It follows a Black woman who comes across some kind of data harvesting business. She realises that her father is involved in this, and there’s some corruption because it involves the government during the Zuma years of our presidency. It follows the sniff of this corruption to China, and that’s where tragedy strikes.

What I love most about it also is that it’s got a lot of diverse characters: a Xhosa woman, an Afrikaner man, an English man. It mixes and intermixes these characters together and it all comes to a very beautiful ending – I can’t mention it, but it’s plotted very well. It’s got a very surprising ending. It’s a thick book, but actually, by the end, it rewards your patience.

It’s about 600 pages, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s a very long book. It helps that the prose is written in pleasing poetic flashes, so you hang in there. I can understand how readers might be discouraged because it’s got a lot going on initially, but if you have patience, the plot has got a very pleasing, rewarding end, where it brings everything together.

But you wouldn’t describe it as a crime novel, even though it starts with a murder?

It mixes a lot of genres. It’s a spy novel also; it eavesdrops on history. It’s got a lot of things going on. And then, it’s contemporary in the sense that it interrogates how AI will affect us, especially security clusters because of the cameras on the streets, the cameras in shopping malls. Also, it showcases – it’s almost a legal drama in itself – arguments about how ethical data harvesting itself is.

5

A General Theory of Oblivion

by Daniel Hahn (translator) & José Eduardo Agualusa

The last book you’ve recommended is A General Theory of Oblivion. The author, José Eduardo Agualusa, is an Angolan journalist and this book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I believe?

Yes, and it also won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017. This book is brilliant. It’s set during the time when Angola was getting its independence. One woman locks herself in a room and then she looks outside at the world as she meditates on the past, on the present, and on the future. That’s the plot, but the way it is written, in a wonderful stream of consciousness, you will not believe. And what she does is she plants vegetables on the balcony. She never goes out of the room. She never goes anywhere. She’s just waiting for everything to subside. Coming from the years of lockdowns due to the pandemic we relate very easily to her condition.

Initially, why I chose the book is because I wanted to introduce your readers, and even South African readers, to Lusophone literature because it’s not very popular here. Most people don’t know Portuguese literature and I think it’s one of the best books of Luso literature.

And then, the writing style of it – it’s so varied. Sometimes she writes journals; sometimes she writes letters. Sometimes it’s written in the first person; sometimes in the third person. I love the third person more because of the beautiful remove on it.

She suspects she’s not going to make it. You are rooting for her, but she does not care if she’s going to make it or not. She’s okay with whatever happens, which is where the ‘oblivion’ in the title comes from, I think.

Is it a comment on the history?

Oh yes, and not just Angolan history, also Portuguese history. She tries to show how the mess she’s trying to avoid came through the colonial history itself. But she also does not absolve the cruel actions of Angolan comrades who worked for the liberation, when they betrayed the people as they started to imitate their colonial masters.

It’s a beautiful book. It’s what I would call apocalyptic literature, about the end of the world. It’s got a surprising ending, also, that has a metafictional twist to it. I was trying to find a way of mentioning it without spoiling it. I decided that if I mention it, it will spoil it, but throughout the book, that is the thread that the book is pulling on. It gets tighter with every chapter, and it’s just so surprising at the end.

It’s funny because I usually don’t care about plots, but the books I’ve chosen for you are all very plot-driven. They’re also written in beautiful prose, which is my minimum requirement for enjoying a book. Ngcukayitobi, for instance, especially in his latest book, The Land Matters, comes close to the demands of James Baldwin that the prose must be clean as a bone. His thinking is very clear, which must be why he’s so successful as a lawyer.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

December 19, 2023

Fiction » Fantasy » Best Fantasy Books of 2023

The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2023: The Hugo Award Nominees

recommended by Sylvia Bishop

The Hugo Awards, first presented in 1953, were originally known as the 'Science Fiction Achievement Awards.' But, in practice, their shortlists encompass speculative fiction as a whole, including fantasy—and is considered one of that genre's most prestigious prizes. Here, Sylvia Bishop offers an overview of this year's nominees in the 'Best Novel' category, which represent the most popular sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023.

- Legends & Lattes

by Travis Baldree

- The Spare Man

by Mary Robinette Kowal

- The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

- Nona the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

- The Kaiju Preservation Society

by John Scalzi

- Nettle & Bone

by T. Kingfisher

For fans of fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction, the Hugo Awards shortlists offer an excellent way to find new favourite writers. There are award categories for novels (classed as stories of 40,000 words or more), novellas (17,500 to 40,000 words), novelettes (7,500 to 17,500 words), short stories, graphic novels, fanzines, and various other literary forms and roles. T. Kingfisher won the Best Novel category for her “dark fairytale” Nettle and Bone. And there’s another standout winner, not officially named: Tor Publishing, whose imprints published five of this year’s nominees in that category.

The shortlist this year was dominated by personal stories: a cosy fantasy, a murder mystery, the downfall of a secretive household, a domestic story from an otherwise epic trilogy, and an explicit exercise in pandemic escapism. Kingfisher’s winning book centres on one woman as she struggles through an indifferent and often cruel world. Here’s a brief overview of all the novels that made the final shortlist: the books that more than 1800 members of the World Science Fiction Society collectively declared the best sci-fi and fantasy novels of 2023.

1

Legends & Lattes

by Travis Baldree

Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes

Travis Baldree is the only debut author that made the shortlist for the title of ‘Best Novel’, and was also declared the winner in the ‘Best New Writer’ category. Legends and Lattes is a cosy low fantasy in a secondary world, in the cosmopolitan city of Thune, where magical inhabitants of all species are commonplace. We follow Viv, an ogre looking to change careers, as she opens a coffee shop and attempts to convert the denizens of Thune to the delights of coffee and cinnamon buns. Threats from personal vendettas fuel the tension, while a gentle romance and a cast of unlikely friends provide the real delight.

As Baldree told me, “I wrote this as someone who did the same job into their forties and decided they didn’t like it, moved to a new city, started a new career, and discovered a whole group of people.” This is a novel about ogres and succubae, but it is mostly about finding a balanced and meaningful life. And it’s funny. A warm hug of a book; must be read with baked goods. The audiobook is a particular treat, as Baldree—an audiobook narrator by trade—reads the book himself.

Legends and Lattes was acquired by Tor after initially being self-published, and it now has a sequel, Bookshops and Bonedust. (Seanan McGuire, when we spoke to her about the best urban fantasy books, confirmed that new book to be “delightful.”)

2

The Spare Man

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kawal’s The Spare Man

Mary Robinette Kawal won this award back in 2019 with The Calculating Stars, in which a meteorite strike forces colonisation of the moon and Mars. Here, in The Spare Man, space is already inhabited; the futurist technology of the spaceship setting is richly imagined, but it is a backdrop to the plot, which is entirely unconcerned with space exploration or species survival. Instead, The Spare Man is a murder mystery.

While some of the forward momentum derives from the need-to-know-who-dunnit, Kawal deftly holds readers’ interest through several mechanisms at once. The protagonist’s spouse is accused, building a powerful tension from the outset, and as the book unfolds the danger from both the true murderer and law enforcement mounts. This is intelligently crafted storytelling—as one might expect from one of the voices behind Writing Excuses, the writing podcast with a wealth of advice on plot and story drivers, which itself won a Hugo Award back in 2013 (for ‘Best Related Work’).

3

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Previously, Moreno-Garcia riffed on Edgar Allen Poe; here she takes her inspiration from H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. At least, this is the most obvious inspiration. Moreno-Garcia herself has explained:

I was not just looking at Wells—I was also very interested in the work of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano and his 1869 novel Clemencia. […] Altamirano and other Latin American writers were trying to create a different kind of book at this time, something that blends European Romanticism with Latin American specificities. I was looking back at Altamirano as much as I was looking at Wells.

Moreno-Garcia’s novel The Daughter of Doctor Moreau takes place in Yaxaktun, Mexico, and follows two voices: Doctor Moreau’s daughter Carlota, and his mayordomo (household manager) Montgomery. The doctor is creating human-animal hybrids, claiming that they offer hope of medical advances—but he is also beholden to a patron, who hopes the experiments will ultimately provide cheap labour. The moral uncertainty is well-drawn, but takes a back seat to the human (or part-human) relationships. These feel real; there are no simplistic character choices made to serve romance or villainy, and the resulting relationships are unpredictable and compelling.

The story also gains verisimilitude from its historical setting, with fact and fiction deftly woven together. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau feels plausible, set alongside the complex politics of indentured and immigrant labour. Moreno-Garcia has said that she likes grounding her work in historical fact “because the truth can be surreal. You can’t quite believe the things you find in footnotes.”

4

Nona the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth

Nona the Ninth is the third in Muir’s Locked Tomb series. Every installment so far has been nominated for a Hugo. Muir’s richly imaginative writing defies easy categorisation: of Gideon the Ninth, the Chicago Review of Books declared that “part of the delight of reading the novel is just how fearlessly it tosses together outlandish ideas with distinct elements from different genres. It’s a space opera about wizards; it shapes itself into cozy mystery; it slides into slasher-horror, then cuts its way free with musketeer-level swashbucklery.”

In Nona the Ninth, Muir steps seamlessly into more civilian, homely concerns. “Nona” has the body of Harrow, the titular character of the second book, and is suspected of having the mind of either Harrow or Gideon. Whoever she is, she is now amnesiac, and has a childlike mind in her older body. Forces far greater than Nona want her to be a weapon: she wants to play with a six-legged dog called Noodle. Family arguments and school days mix with necromancers and zombies, and with the potentially planet-destroying stakes that quite literally loom overhead.

The result, writes Paste Magazine, is that Muir’s ‘hilarious prose is full of dark subject matter… but tons of heart’. The terrifying stakes are part of child-like Nona’s normal world, and the close third-person voice relays them with a chilling innocence.

5

The Kaiju Preservation Society

by John Scalzi

John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society

Previous Hugo Award-winner (Redshirts, 2013) Scalzi returns with a sci-fi caper that begins in New York in the early days of the pandemic. The novel is, gleefully and explicitly, pandemic escapism – the book that Scalzi wrote when producing his intended brooding epic novel proved impossible. As Scalzi says in the author’s note: “It’s a pop song. It’s meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you’re done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face.”

Right before the pandemic, Jamie Gray loses his job. From this starting point, Scalzi deftly escalates the gravity of Gray’s situation, so that by the time he is offered a vague but potentially dangerous job with a highly secretive organisation, we are willing him to take it. This sets the stage for his induction into the Kaiju Preservation Society – the body responsible for researching the monstrous inhabitants of another dimension. And, importantly, ensuring that they stay in that other dimension. A very funny and enjoyable caper ensues.

Notably, no argument needs to be made here for an anti-extractive or environmentally cautious approach to the alien world. The good guys adopt this position as default; the bad guys are the bad guys precisely because they don’t, and the stupidity of this is treated as self-evident. The earlier arguments of writers like Ursula Le Guin have set the moral parameters.

6

Nettle & Bone

by T. Kingfisher

And the winner: T. Kingfisher’s Nettle and Bone

Ursula Vernon—writing under her pen name T. Kingfisher—scooped the title of ‘Best Novel’ for the first time this year, but has previously won awards in the Graphic Story, Short Story, Novelette, and Series categories.

Nettle and Bone follows Marra, the third and least important princess of a small kingdom, who is sent to a convent following her sister’s marriage to a powerful prince—he doesn’t want her producing any rivals to the throne. The tone is set: this man is trouble. When Marra understands just how much trouble, and how dire her sister’s situation is, she sets out to enforce justice. The journey is packed full of familiar motifs. She must accomplish three impossible tasks, visit a goblin market, encounter a necromancer-witch and a fairy godmother, and descend into labyrinthine tombs. Between these set-pieces and archetypal characters, we find a dazzling array of detail: a demon that is also, emphatically, a chicken; a woman voluntarily controlled by a horrifying wooden child; a crushing wheel of dead souls…

This is fairytale fantasy. The magic is chilling and under-explained, considered supernatural even within the uncanny world of the book. And, as in fairy tales, that world is not universally good or kind. As the Chicago Review of Books has observed, Kingfisher’s novels “stand out from the particular trend in the speculative publishing industry to push for narratives that are more optimistic, agentive, and hopeful.” But Nettle and Bone is also very funny; as noted in Strange Horizons, Kingfisher “understands that humour and horror are twins.” Kingfisher herself has written of the need for humour and hope in heavy themes: “If a book can make you feel better and stronger and wiser, instead of paralyzed, then you can do something with that.”

December 17, 2023

Fiction » Best Fiction of 2023

Award-Winnning Novels of 2023

recommended by Cal Flyn

The enormous variety of new, beautifully-blurbed books being published every month presents an agony of choice for the casual reader. Luckily, literary prize shortlists offer a shortcut to discovering some of the best novels of the year. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a helpful round-up of the award-winning novels of the 2023 season and a few notable runners-up.

- Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

- Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

- Blackouts

by Justin Torres

- Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

- Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History

by R. F. Kuang

Every month, dozens of new novels are born into the world. So many, it’s difficult for even a literary editor to keep a handle on the buzzy new debuts, the word-of-mouth bestsellers, the book club darlings, and the slowburn hits. One tried and tested method by which the publishing industry highlights the best books of the year—elevating them in the eyes of booksellers and the reading public—is via literary awards. Though no system is perfect (and, of course, the judging of literary quality is inherently subjective) we can assume that those who have given up their time to judge fiction prizes are unusually abreast of the recent publications, and have often ploughed through many dozens of new novels in search of their winner. Literary prizes are awarded throughout the year, and you may have missed some of the announcements; so here’s a quick round-up of the award-winning novels of 2023, plus a few personal highlights from among the finalists.

British and Irish Literary Awards

1

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

The Booker Prize is the biggest fiction award in the UK and Ireland. Paul Lynch won the £50,000 prize in 2023 for Prophet Song, a darkly prophetic novel set in a near-future Ireland that the New York Times described as “an unsettling dystopian parable.” In it, a biologist and mother of four must cope alone after the secret police take her husband into custody and the country descends into civil war. It’s earned comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, but Lynch has downplayed the ideological elements of the book: “My themes tend to be more metaphysical than political,” he commented. “A lot of political fiction begins with its own answer—it knows the problem and it knows the solution—and so therefore, it’s about grievance. And I think the work of serious fiction must instead be grief: grief for the things we cannot control, grief for what cannot be understood, grief for what lies beyond us.” Lynch, the author of four previous novels, has previously won several major literary awards, but was yet to have a major commercial breakthrough; the Booker win is likely to ensure his writing now finds a broad audience, both in Ireland and abroad.

The 2023 International Booker Prize judges compiled a “bold and subversive” shortlist of novels newly translated into English. I was particularly intrigued by The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé—translated by Richard Philcox—billed as “a retelling of the New Testament set in modern-day Martinique.” But the ultimate winner was Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from the original Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) in which a dementia clinic offering period-piece accommodation is embraced by unsettling political elements harking towards a nostalgic national past. The Times said it was “a genre-busting novel of ideas.”

2

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is, in my opinion, brilliant at highlighting those books that sit nicely in that intersection in the literary fiction/popular fiction Venn diagram—that is, the sort of book I’m looking for when I’m looking for an enjoyable and well-written book to lose myself in during a long journey, or while on holiday. This year’s winner was Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a modern retelling of David Copperfield set in an opioid-ravaged Appalachia, which has been a huge hit this year. Kingsolver previously won the same prize in 2010 with The Lacuna. Other shortlistees included Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel The Marriage Portrait and Louise Kennedy’s tale of infidelity during the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, Trespasses.

The shortlists for the inaugural Nero Book Awards were announced in November 2023. These prizes might loosely be considered a replacement for the Costa Awards (formerly known as the Whitbread Awards), which were scrapped rather unexpectedly last year after five decades. The top book in each category will take home £5,000, and the overall winner a further £30,000. They won’t be announced until January, but notable finalists include Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a comedic family drama that was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Eleanor Catton’s environmental thriller Birnam Wood.

And finally: the 2023 winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, a €100,000 annual prize, was German author Katja Oskamp and her translator Jo Heinrich for Marzahn, Mon Amour, a novel described by the Lord Mayor of Dublin as a “warm, witty, and moving portrait of older residents in Berlin.”

North American Literary Awards

Kingsolver’s beloved Demon Copperhead also triumphed in May when it shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with Hernan Diaz’s bestselling novel Trust, a cunning book built of four unreliable narratives set in early 20th-century Wall Street. He has explained:

The novel is about who has a voice: who, throughout history, has been given a megaphone. Who has been gagged? Rather than thematise that in an expository way, I thought it would be more vivid – and fun – for readers to be presented with this polyphonic arrangement of four voices in succession and gently ask them to question why we trust one over the other.

An adaptation for HBO, produced by Kate Winslet, is forthcoming.

3

Blackouts

by Justin Torres

At the 2023 National Book Awards, Justin Torres (We the Animals) won the fiction prize for Blackouts, an experimental novel in which an older gay man slowly dying in the desert converses with a younger, unnamed narrator who has come to care for him. It is “festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding endnotes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures,” as NPR has explained, and concerns the distortions, confessions, and erasures of queer history. (I suspect that, if you enjoy Blackouts, you will also enjoy Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X—another slippery creature that takes the form of a fictional biography, with semi-fictional source notes.)

Earlier in the year, Ling Ma (author of the brilliant post-pandemic novel Severance) triumphed at the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards with Bliss Montage, a highly acclaimed collection of eight short stories. “The collection guts and renovates the genre by refusing to draw a distinction between realism and fable,” noted the judges. “Freed from the constraints of allegory or standard-issue plot mechanics, readers are instead left to reflect on more essential things, most prominently, humanity’s ability to absorb and inflict harm.”

4

Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

And in Canada the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize was won by Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience, an eerie and unsettling tale of xenophobia set in an unnamed northern country, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier in the year. The Daily Telegraph declared it “a beautiful, riddling tale of a woman on the fringe of a rural community” that, though “philosophically opaque,” is both “elegant and electric.”

Australian and New Zealand Literary Awards

Human rights lawyer Shankari Chandran won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Award for her third novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, a book about a fictional nursing home in Sydney populated with elderly Sri Lankan residents. “Don’t be fooled by the cute premise or the twee title,” warns ABC News. “This story has Australian identity and colonial mythology in its crosshairs, and the author is a crack shot.”

Across the Tasman Sea, the 2023 winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction was The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, a novel set in the rural high country and narrated by an opinionated magpie. It is, said the judges, “poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.” Readers in the US and the UK will be able to get their hands on a copy from April, published by Europa Editions.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards

The 2023 Arthur C Clarke Award was won by Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker. When I spoke to the prize director Tom Hunter earlier this year, he described it as a “dark, satirical, deeply angry book about our species,” which is “also eminently readable, oddly hopeful at times, and very, very funny.” I also particularly enjoyed another Clarke-shortlisted title, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, which is a rather excellent amalgam of airport thriller and Oulipian experiment. It won France’s Prix de Goncourt back in 2020, but was only recently translated into English by Adriana Hunter. In it, a plane, including its passengers, is duplicated when it passes through a storm cloud. In a series of narratives, we explore how the various characters cope—or don’t—with their new, strange identity as a matching pair.

5

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History

by R. F. Kuang

At the Nebula Awards in May, R.F. Kuang won the prize for the best novel for Babel, a dark academia fantasy set in an alternate Oxford University where the study of translation and magic are closely intertwined. It’s an ambitious act of world-building and functions as a powerful postcolonial parable. Perfect for fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or for those who have aged out of Harry Potter and are looking for something similar but a bit meatier.

Historical Fiction

Lucy Caldwell won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for These Days, a novel set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. The judges noted that “the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war.” Other shortlisted titles included Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion, a story set in 17th-century New England, and Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen, a fictionalised account of Thomas Hardy’s marriage.

Crime, Mystery, and Thrillers

George Dawes Green received the Crime Writers Association’s Gold Dagger award for his long-awaited fourth novel The Kingdoms of Savannah, a Southern Gothic mystery. “His prose is languid, even luxurious, but at critical moments of suspense, he pares it back to ramp up the terror,” said the New York Times. John Brownlow won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, a prize for the best thriller, for Agent Seventeen, a riveting suspense novel that will shortly be followed up in April with the publication of Agent Eighteen.

The International Thriller Writers announced their annual awards in May. The title of ‘best hardback novel’ went to Sundial, a work of psychological horror from the author of The Last House on Needless Street, Catriona Ward. Sundial was also a finalist at the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards.

Of course, there are only so many spots on shortlists and that means that many brilliant books are unfairly passed over. If you have a firm favourite from the 2023 class of fiction, why not drop us a line on social media to let us know?

December 15, 2023

World » Asia » China

The Best China Books of 2023

recommended by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The rise of China has led to an ever broader range of books about the country becoming available in English. There’s also a greater focus on its diversity, which the country’s Communist leadership likes to downplay. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at UC Irvine, talks us through his favourite books of 2023, from painful historical episodes to the harsh policies targeting a largely Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang today—by way of two lighter books that focus on food and cooking.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

- Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future

by Ian Johnson

- Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

by Tania Branigan

- Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

- Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation (A Cookbook)

by Clarissa Wei

- Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

by Tahir Hamut Izgil and translated by Joshua Freeman

What was 2023 like for China books? Tell us a bit about how you made your selections.

It was an interesting year for books about China. For this list, I decided to think about it as the ‘best books’ to recommend to busy general readers, so I’m bracketing off books that are for specialist audiences.

There were some valuable books by specialists for specialists. There was The Sounds of Mandarin by Janet Y. Chen, which is about how the Communist and Nationalist parties both tried to figure out what standard Chinese should sound like. It’s a fascinating project to even wrap your mind around. Margaret Hillenbrand at Oxford has a wonderful new book about precarity in China. There are a lot of interesting scholarly works – I could go on and on.

For broad, general interest books, two stellar journalists with long-term China experience, Ian Johnson and Tania Branigan, have new books out, both of which are really well written and explore important issues. So I’m recommending those.

I also chose two charming, very different books about food. That probably balances out the fact that of a lot of my reading is about very dark and depressing subjects. There is a lot to be depressed about, related to the changes not only in the People’s Republic of China, but also in U.S.–China relations. There are a lot of interesting books about international relations, which I’ve steered clear of in this list.

There also continue to be good books coming out about Hong Kong, a place that I care deeply about. Among the Braves, which was published last month, for example, is an impressive book on protest there. But I steered away from it for this list because I have highlighted Hong Kong books pretty regularly in the past.

I did include the most beautifully written book about Xinjiang I’ve come across, not just during this year but ever, which is by a Uyghur poet. The repression in Xinjiang keeps seeming, finally, to be getting global attention, but then other crises come up and it gets shuffled to the back of people’s minds. There are reasons to try to keep bringing it to the front of them.

1

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future

by Ian Johnson

Let’s go through the books individually. As you’re a historian let’s start with the one about historians. This is Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future by journalist Ian Johnson. Tell me what the book is about and why it’s so appealing to read.

It’s not about formal historians, which I think is interesting given its title. This actually came up at one of Johnson’s book launch events, the one at UC Irvine where I teach. One of the questions from the audience was from my department’s historian of Vietnam and she wondered why Johnson didn’t talk about academic historians.

Johnson noted that he talks about a couple of historically minded academics, just ones in other disciplines. In a sense, he’s talking about a particular kind of documentarian, but that’s not as nice a word to use in a title. His book is about people who are trying to document things that have happened that the party-state is trying very hard to sweep under the rug and to get people to forget about. I’d also say that even though he skips over discussing historians per se, he has crafted a powerful book that definitely qualifies as a work of history as well as of journalism.

It’s about engagement with history. It’s about recent history, the period since the Communist Party took power, although there are also interesting stories to tell about the politics of history in earlier periods. It’s very focused, and what drives it, in part, is how compelling the profiles of the individuals involved are—people who are making these very risky moves to unearth stories from the past that deserve to be told. These people are not really what we think of as dissidents: they’re people who are trying to work within the system, but within the crevices in the system.

“I decided to think about it as the ‘best books’ to recommend to busy general readers”

One of the most important things about the book is the way it pushes back against any idea of a brainwashed population that has either completely accepted official lines or given up on the idea of being able to push back against them. It captures a sense of the struggle to keep alive alternative views of the past that’s happening inside of the PRC in these very daring ways. It also connects with efforts outside of the PRC, including by young people from China who are doing things like posting images of things that are banned on the internet inside their home country. Posting them outside of China allows them to filter back into the country.

At the end, he brings up the ‘White Paper’ protests that happened just over a year ago. Slogans were put up on a Beijing bridge in a lone act of protest in October 2022. The banners were taken down, but images of them were posted on the internet and on campuses outside China and then circulated back into China. Those slogans came up when people took part in the protests, which were specifically against a zero-COVID policy that had gone on too long and been accompanied by abuses but were also used to express other concerns about repressive and autocratic actions of many kinds. The book is very interesting about how even things that are almost suppressed and circulate in these underground ways can keep alternative visions from being extinguished.

Johnson includes some very interesting comparisons with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc in general, during the Cold War. He refers a lot to Central and Eastern European parallels and precedents. These are things that Chinese intellectuals think about as well: Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt and others are looked to as models.

In terms of the official narrative that the Chinese Communist Party puts out, can you give an example of how that differs from these underground historians’ accounts?

One is the acts of horrific violence in the 1950s that there’s no place for in the official record – things like the killings of not only landlords, but people who were connected to landlords’ families, or people who were presented as rightists.

When people talk about the suppression of memory in China, people outside of China often focus on the Cultural Revolution – a specific moment – and Tiananmen Square, the massacre of June 4th near there. Those are two different examples. With the June 4th massacre, there’s an effort to blot out the very fact that it took place. With the Cultural Revolution, there’s an effort to minimize the horrors of it to quite specific things and then move on.

The underground documentarians in Sparks are also interested in other periods that are suppressed: earlier purges and struggle sessions that ended up with people being beaten up or killed or pressured into suicide, which came before the Cultural Revolution. These get less attention from even critics of the Chinese Communist Party because they fall out of these few moments that loom large in foreign and exile historical accounts.

It’s not that there aren’t academic historians and others who are writing about those things outside of China, but to be inside of China and trying to keep alive the suffering of people in the 1950s is a key part of this.

I’ve never read about historiography in a Chinese context, so I liked that element, even though these are not formally historians. He does mention Sima Qian.

Yes, the grand tradition of the historian as a daring figure. Sima Qian was long before, but there are academic historians who’ve tried to carve out those spaces, too. If Johnson were going to bring in an academic historian, he could have written about Sun Peidong, who is a historian of the Cultural Revolution and taught courses at Fudan on the Cultural Revolution, presenting it as a complicated historical moment in China, for as long as she could. She was pressured to leave, in part by nationalistic students who objected to what she was doing, but also by the constricting space in China. She left to go to Paris and now is teaching at Cornell.

There are also examples of people who are using their fiction to do similar things. Fang Fang, the author of Wuhan Diary (which was nonfiction), has a novel coming out next year in translation (with the talented Michael Berry doing the honors)  that’s set in the early 1950s, about the violence of the land reform period. Yan Lianke has written novels–many available in English in very fine Carlos Rojas translations–about these kinds of things as well. Fiction is mentioned in passing in Johnson’s book, but it’s not a focus.

When I was listening to one of his talks, I thought a work of fiction that could fit into his book is Lu Xun’s classic short story “Diary of a Madman.” The madman, who may see things clearly, imagines the official record of the Chinese past – the Confucian, prettified version of the past – and interspersed within each line are horrific descriptions of people eating people. It’s this idea of a counter-history of brutality that gets left out of the sanitized version of a history. You have these competing versions of an official version of the past and a counter version.

It links up to a lot of interesting things in Chinese culture.

And does the Communist Party really object if you talk about horrible things that happened in the 1950s?

One of the recurring themes in official histories by new ruling groups, which we saw before the revolutionary period, is you want to emphasize the things that were done that caused suffering before you took power, and then figure out a way to emphasize the successes after that.

For the Communist Party, while there’s a willingness to accept that mistakes were made, there’s an attempt to say that’s not the main theme. Part of the goal of the underground historians is to show, just by presenting the sheer accumulation of suffering, that to present this as a minor theme in the history of post-1949 China is to make a mockery of any notion of a truthful account.

2

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

by Tania Branigan

On that note, let’s go on to Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, by Tania Branigan, which has really made waves this year, including the shortlist of the Baillie Gifford Prize, the UK’s premier nonfiction book prize. Tell me more about it and why you think this is an important book about China.

It’s another beautifully written book and it also deals with issues of contested memories. It has a much tighter focus, temporally. It goes up to the present, but it is continually going back to what is remembered and forgotten about the period from 1966 to 1976, which is now talked about as the Cultural Revolution decade. In that sense, it’s a micro study – it zeroes in on this one moment. It makes sense to read these two books together. Not surprisingly, they’re being reviewed together occasionally (a good example is Yangyang Cheng’s excellent essay in a new venue called China Books Review that is edited by someone you’ve worked with a lot, FiveBooks.com alum Alec Ash), or a review of one will bring up the other. There are overlaps and intersections between them.

Branigan’s book came out first in the UK and got a lot of review attention. It’s gotten less review attention in the United States, where it came out later. Not only has it been getting prize nominations in the UK, but in North America it won the prestigious Cundill History Prize. (The prize has been around for about a dozen years and is administered by McGill University in Montreal. Two books about China have won the prize before: Julia Lovell’s book on Maoism and Stephen Platt’s book on the Taipings).

Meanwhile, Ian Johnson’s book got a lot of review attention in the United States. It is partly a function of his being based in the United States and the book coming out at the same time in both countries.

But I’m struck that there’s a particular value of Branigan’s book within the UK for a very specific reason, which relates to Wild Swans. That’s a book that came out in 1991 and is about the suffering of the author’s family during the Cultural Revolution. It was a global bestseller, but it looms especially large in shaping the understanding of China within the UK where its author Jung Chang is based. People whose view of China was shaped by reading that family memoir have an idea that it’s possible to think of the Cultural Revolution as an event with a fairly simple dividing between people who were victims and people who were victimizers.

Other memoirs about the Cultural Revolution have had that impact as well. Life and Death in Shanghai is another one that reinforces the idea that you can think about it as a time when there were people who committed violence and those who suffered violence.

What Red Memory does very powerfully, as many specialist works on the Cultural Revolution have done before it, is to show that one of the deeply disturbing things about that decade was that people could begin on one side of the perpetrator-victim divide and end up on the other or flip back and forth between them.

It’s a real mistake to try to divide up the people who suffered and the people who caused suffering because it was often members of the same family who were affected in different ways, and there were individuals who were victims and victimizers during different parts of their lives. Efforts to simplify this complicated event creates real problems for understanding China.

We’re seeing official uses of a simplified version of the memory of the Cultural Revolution in officially promoted Xi Jinping biographies. They talk about his time in the countryside as a time that gave him a particular connection to ordinary Chinese. It’s another way of turning it into a simpler story than it is.

Do you agree with her statement that you can’t understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution?

I think it’s true. People who are reaching their seventies or eighties have lived through an incredible set of events, of extraordinary periods and changes in China during the course of their lifetimes. Younger people have also lived through incredible changes. They haven’t had a way to put it into a full perspective by the truncated version of any discussion of what happened during this decade. It really is a crucial decade to come to terms with.

You often hear that after the Holocaust, nobody wanted to talk about it. It’s not only a function of official repression; it’s so painful that the individuals themselves don’t want to talk about it. Whether they were victims or victimizers, it’s a subject to avoid.

With the Cultural Revolution, there are a small number of narratives that you are allowed to talk about briefly and then move on. It’s not this thing that you can’t even mention, but rather, there’s a desire not to dwell on it.

The one time I lived in China for an extended period was in 1986 through 1987. There would be foreign travelers I would meet, who would say in a hushed way, ‘My tour guide mentioned how his family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution.’ I’d say, ‘It’s not surprising that they mentioned it but didn’t go into the details. Tell me when somebody says their family did well during even part of the Cultural Revolution.’

The taboo is about talking about being swept up in it. It became okay to say, ‘That was a dark period. That was bad.’ However, to probe into the details and to get at the fact of how many people had something to feel ashamed about, something to be disturbed about – that’s where a richer perspective is needed, to give a sense of how the event affected people in many different ways, in many different places.

3

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

Let’s move on and talk about Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food. She’s written a number of books about Chinese food. What’s this one about and why is it special?

She calls it Invitation to a Banquet, and it has this sense of reveling in the pleasures of Chinese food, and also reveling in – and this is what I’m drawn to most about it – the variation within Chinese cuisines, a term that decidedly should at times be used in the plural even if there are situations in which it can be used in the singular as well. Some of her individual books have zeroed in on a region. I love her book about Jiangnan cooking. She’s famous for one about Sichuan food.

In each of those, implicitly, there’s this idea that it’s a problem to imagine there’s something called ‘Chinese food.’ It’s the same problem as if you say there’s something called ‘European food’ or ‘Western food.’ Sometimes, in China, you’ll see a menu that says ‘Western dishes.’ Your first reaction is to think, ‘But these dishes have nothing to do with each other!’ If you had gone into a Chinese restaurant in the US or in the UK before the rise of regional restaurants, you would have said, ‘These dishes don’t go together.’

Invitation to a Banquet moves across time, across thousands of years, and it moves across the country and goes outside of China. It begins with her talking about her first encounters with something called ‘Chinese food’ while growing up in England. This food was very different from anything that she encountered when she got to China.

In one way, this book is a celebration of food. This is a period when the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is celebrating anything about the country it can brag about, from its monuments and philosophers from the past to its recent technological accomplishments. You might imagine that this book, which celebrates a part of the culture, would fit in with that, but in a way it challenges it. Not directly, in the way that Johnson and Branigan’s books do, but because it emphasizes the diversity, the variation, and even the limitations of imagining that there is something enduring that you can put your finger on as Chinese-ness through the ages.

Dunlop writes about how dishes that have come to be thought of as quintessentially Chinese were influenced by flows from other parts of the world. You get an idea that the Silk Road wasn’t just about Chinese influences flowing out, but it was actually also about what we now think of as China being shaped by things flowing in from Central Asia. She talks about thinking of this cuisine as a cosmopolitan creation, the blending of influences from different parts of what we now think of as China with influences from places outside what we now think of as China.

It’s quite personal, isn’t it? She weaves in her personal experience of studying in Sichuan.

There’s a lot of memoir. This is somebody from outside of China, with a very simple idea about it, being awakened to its depths and spending a lot of time hanging out with and listening to people with expertise, which isn’t so different from what Ian Johnson did. Dunlop includes vignettes about Chinese chefs that she’s met or studied with, and blends these with travelogue and memoir.

In Isabel Hilton’s wonderful review of the book in the Financial Times, she said there’s an almost pornographic quality to some of it. Dunlop is so good at evoking the sensual experience of eating food that it becomes almost food writing as a form of erotica.

4

Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation (A Cookbook)

by Clarissa Wei

Let’s go on to Clarissa Wei’s Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation. This is ostensibly a book of recipes or a cookbook, but it’s also very much about Taiwanese identity.

What’s interesting about reading these two together, as I did, was that Clarissa Wei – who’s lived largely in Taiwan but grew up in California – writes that when she was a kid, people whose families had come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or mainland China could talk about a shared connection to Chinese culture, but that has changed over time. It’s become more politically fraught to identify with these different places, but also, there’s an awareness of how artificial the idea of a singular Chinese culture is.

Like Dunlop’s book, this book is a love letter to a cosmopolitan cuisine, but to a more specific one, associated with an often overlooked or underappreciated setting. It makes the case for appreciating Taiwanese food as something that can’t be thought of as a subset or distillation of Chinese food. It is a cuisine in which some dishes are heavily influenced by versions that existed in China, but for centuries Taiwan has had a separate historical trajectory, which has sometimes been tightly connected and sometimes at most only loosely connected to the Chinese mainland. It has been influenced by indigenous traditions and by other parts of the world, especially Japan, and includes versions of ingredients that aren’t found on the mainland.

You have a blending of influences from different parts of the Chinese mainland by immigrants who come from different places at different times. The end result is a radically distinctive cuisine, even if you think you recognize some of the dishes.

It shouldn’t be that hard a concept to recognize if you think about Europe and how different dishes that seem somewhat similar are when they’re made in places across different borders. There’s a blending of what we think of as Chinese food with all kinds of other dishes that have much more to do with local, Japanese or other influences.

Wei clearly has an interest in thinking about this as a story not only about food, but also as a gateway into thinking differently about Taiwan – not thinking of it as a place temporarily separated from China, but as a place with its own history going back for centuries and which has also been a self-ruled country since the late 1940s.

The subtitle of the book is “Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation,” and this is one reason that a mainland edition of this book would not work. It made me hunger for a comparable book about Hong Kong, using food to capture how different Hong Kong is than just something that’s a subset of China.

She does spend quite a bit of time at the beginning talking about how China and Taiwan have had separate histories for a very long time now.

I was waiting to see if she would refer to Din Tai Fung, which is a quintessentially Taiwan restaurant chain that has now become a global one. Its trademark dish is xiaolongbao – which I think of as Shanghai-style soup dumplings, though some claim they originated in other parts of the Yangzi Delta region. She has a nice way of talking about how that fits into the story of Taiwan cuisine.

She doesn’t say it, but it’s almost as if we were to say McDonald’s isn’t an American restaurant because the hamburger doesn’t originate in America, you can find its roots elsewhere. There’s a way in which the story of food is about flows between cultures, which are complicated. Whenever you’re talking about something that’s related to one place, you often can find a more interesting global story about it as it travels.

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Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

by Tahir Hamut Izgil and translated by Joshua Freeman

Let’s move now to Xinjiang. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is by Tahir Hamut Izgil, a Uyghur poet who eventually escaped to the United States. This is his memoir of when he was still living in Xinjiang. What story does Izgil tell in the book?

It’s a very personal story, framed partly around looking back at get-togethers that he had with other artists and intellectual figures involved with film and poetry, and the way that the space for them to live kept on narrowing. They had to become more and more cautious. And then, some of them began disappearing into camps. He is intensely aware that he was one of the lucky ones who managed, along with his family, to get out at a time when the space was disappearing.

He tells his story through these amazing vignettes. He talks about a group of poets and other intellectuals getting together, and there’s this intense watchfulness of any signs of any growing connection to Islam, which would then put them in a category of potential terrorists. They’re aware they’re being watched, and so they make a point of drinking alcohol during the get-together, just because simply to not drink alcohol starts to become interpreted, by people who are looking for any excuse to get you, as increased religiosity. It’s very strange.

When people talk about Xinjiang now, there are references to all kinds of dystopian fiction, and 1984 gets talked about a lot. Darren Byler, an anthropologist who worked there, talks about how one of the first people he met in Xinjiang brought up the Hunger Games. Another one is Minority Report, where people in an imagined dystopian future get arrested before they’ve done anything because of the imagined clues that they will be doing something. This memoir captures that in a very personal way. There’s a Minority Report side to the idea of that group saying, ‘Let’s make sure there are bottles of alcohol clearly visible at our meeting, so that people won’t put us in this other category.’

“A poet in exile is a poignant thing”

The rationale for the harsh detention camps created across Xinjiang was that they were ‘vocational’ institutions where people were being put so they could be offered skills, and they could be educated. If you look at the figures in this book, what you actually had was the intellectual and artistic and educational elite ending up in these places. That really undermines the official story about these detention camps being about education, something also undermined by the harsh treatment of leading Uyghur academics.

Joshua Freeman is the translator, and he wrote a wonderful introduction to the book. He’s translated a lot of Uyghur poets, including Tahir Hamut Izgil, the author of this memoir. Poetry has an important place in Uyghur culture; it’s a highly respected art form. I think there’s something very powerful about making the poetry from Xinjiang available to the world. It gets you out of the box of thinking of the population of a place only in terms of oppression and resistance. It gives us a sense of the real lives being led there, the dreams and aspirations.

Some of the poems have to do with oppression, some have to do with attachment to the landscape and things like that. A poet in exile is a poignant thing. If the poetry is rooted in a local language and meditations on a local landscape, and you’re set apart from there, it makes the human catastrophe relatable. I think the way that people relate to something comparable with Tibet is via the religion and the figure of the Dalai Lama and an idea of spiritualism. I think with this book, the power, in a sense, comes from having a poet’s life at the center of it.

Freeman begins by writing that if you had taken an Uber in Washington, D.C. a few years ago, you would have had no idea that the person driving it might well have been this extraordinary poet. When you hear about his life, and the lives of his friends – Izgil was involved with filmmaking, and he and others in his circle were studying modernist literature in Beijing and introducing the works of other writers to the Uyghur population – you are taken far away from the stereotypes of a faceless suffering, as well as far away from Beijing’s story of everybody in Xinjiang being a potential terrorist. It explodes both of those tropes.

Coming back to Red Memory, do you think that’s a good book to read if somebody hasn’t read about the Cultural Revolution before? Does it take it from the beginning or do you think it’s one to read if you’re already a bit further along?

That’s a challenge with both Sparks and Red Memory. Both authors try very hard to give you enough information that you can have a sense of what’s going on without having read anything else, but, in both cases, there’d be value in reading them together with something that gave you a brisk walkthrough. I’d suggest a book that I recommended in a previous interview: Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China. If you were going to read one book along with those, that would be valuable. That’s not the official version so it fits in, interpretively, with these others.

If anybody were very interested in US-China relations, has anything come out recently that you would recommend?

Susan Shirk’s Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise is very valuable. It’s an accessible book by a political scientist and came out in 2022.

A book that I was tempted to recommend but didn’t (in part because it’s co-authored by a student that I co-advised) is Taiwan: A Contested Democracy Under Threat, by Lev Nachman and John Sullivan. It’s short and accessible. It goes well with Made in Taiwan. It talks about the way that Taiwan often is approached as a geopolitical problem and gets beyond that.

If we’re talking not just about books, Evan Osnos had a long piece in the New Yorker recently about his return to China post-COVID that deals well with US-China relations. And though I’ve largely been focusing on Thailand and Hong Kong lately for a book project, I have a very short piece on US-China relations coming out any day now myself. It’s part of a Wall Street Journal year in review series. Historian that I am, though, I manage to talk not just about 2023, as I am supposed to, but also about an earlier year when it similarly looked like US-China relations were in free fall but then in the autumn heads of the two countries had a surprisingly cordial summit meet up.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

December 13, 2023

Fiction » Science Fiction

The Best Sci-Fi Horror Books

recommended by Aliya Whiteley

Some books frighten and thrill us in equal measure. If that sounds good to you, you will love novelist Aliya Whiteley's recommendations: five outstanding sci-fi horror books that, like the original Frankenstein, use dread and disgust to raise fascinating questions about science and what it means to be human.

Interview by Uri Bram

- The Rediscovery of Man

by Cordwainer Smith

- Blood Music

by Greg Bear

- 'Bloodchild' and Other Stories

by Octavia Butler

- Under the Skin

by Michel Faber

- Remina

How do the science fiction and horror book genres overlap? And can you explain the appeal of sci-fi horror, particularly body horror?

Mixing sci-fi and horror together goes back as far as sci-fi itself, maybe even beginning with Frankenstein. Through some of the books that I’m going to talk about today, I came to love the idea of exploring science fiction through the body, and through body horror in particular.

The appeal of body horror is the feeling of being both entranced and disgusted at the same time. It’s difficult to describe why that’s enjoyable, but you come across something that makes you feel strangely connected to being human. Sometimes science fiction can feel quite separate from the body, I think. For instance, there can be stories of space travel where humanity looks unchanged, in a way. I like it more when we get stuck in and get seriously altered, when it connects to the body and we think about what it means to be organic, to be alive and part of a science fictional universe.

That interests me because that’s going to have knock-on effects on the nature of being. What does it mean to be human and to be involved in science? Where might that take us in the future, or what effect can it have on us as living beings now? I think that’s a hugely exciting area to write about; certainly, it’s something I’ve been reading about for a long time.

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The Rediscovery of Man

by Cordwainer Smith

Let’s jump into the recommendations. Your first is a short story called ‘A Planet Named Shayol,’ published in The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith. Can you introduce us to this story?

It’s about a prison planet in the far, far future, when humanity has started traveling through the stars. This planet is one of the worst places you could possibly imagine. It’s a planet where humans start to grow extra limbs and organs, and those are then surgically removed from them and sent back via a donor process for organ transplantation. It is absolutely horrible.

It’s really the first time I can remember coming across sci-fi body horror, and I was fascinated. I would have been a late teenager when I read this story in an anthology. It stopped me in my tracks.

Cordwainer Smith is one of those writers who creates an amazing universe that’s incredibly vivid to the reader. He’s so imaginative. The idea of these extra fingers, toes, heads, limbs, and organs emerging from people in this terrible prison environment—I never forgot it. That’s why I chose this story.

“If you’re going to read all five of these books at once, make sure you take regular breaks!”

The strange thing is that when I first came across it in an anthology, I didn’t pay attention to who had written it. For many years, I’ve thought about it quite regularly as this example of something I found really upsetting and was entranced by: a nightmare of the future.

When you contacted me and asked me about the best science fiction horror writing, I thought: I would love to choose that story, but I can’t—I never found out who wrote it. But I asked around online, and somebody pointed me in the direction of Cordwainer Smith. It’s been only about two weeks that I’ve known the name of the story again. It’s been a lovely reconnection.

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Blood Music

by Greg Bear

We’re proud to have played a part in that rediscovery! Your next recommendation is Blood Music, by Greg Bear. This was a finalist for both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards in 1985; can you tell us what you love about this science fiction horror book?

I think this is the most scientifically based of the five stories that I’ve picked. It’s very much in the tradition of Frankenstein, in that some of the book is taken up with the story of a scientist who’s pushing the boundaries of morality and experimenting with using the body in new and strange ways, but this time on a cellular level.

The first third of the book is connected to his journey. Then, we witness the effects of what he has unleashed and the way humanity is changed by what he’s done. I wouldn’t want to spoil it by giving too much away, but I remember reading it and being so fascinated by this vision of complete change for humanity and for the planet. It goes to some very surprising places.

The book was released in 1985, and we’re dealing with a scientist who’s working on the cusp of areas of exploration at that time. When Frankenstein was released, galvanism and the exploration of electricity through the body were at the forefront of experimentation. I wonder if Greg Bear was dealing with an area of cellular exploration that was popular at the time. He expands on themes of ‘what’s at the boundary of modern science understanding, and what could that lead to?’

Similarly, at the moment, we’re seeing some brilliant science fiction being written that addresses climate change. Quite often, whatever we feel is at the vanguard of what we’re trying to understand or deal with, as a problem or as an area of exploration, bleeds into the science fiction that’s being written.

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'Bloodchild' and Other Stories

by Octavia Butler

That makes a lot of sense. Your next recommendation for us is Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. Butler was a multi-time Hugo and Nebula winner, of course, and the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship. Can you introduce us to this haunting science fiction novella?

Octavia Butler is one of my favourite writers. She’s had a huge influence on me. She writes about humanity and what it would have to offer to other species, to other ways of living, and what we’re prepared to trade to make a deal within ourselves or with other civilizations, if we ever met them. She’s very interested in the cost of trying to live together in harmony.

Bloodchild is a novella. It imagines a future in which humanity is traveling through the stars and has ended up on a planet where other aliens are living. Part of the trade to live peacefully with them is that humans let the aliens implant their eggs in our bodies.

It’s sensitively written and incredibly thoughtful about what that might mean and whether we’d be capable of doing that. At the same time, it’s stomach-churning to read some of the descriptions. It’s upsetting stuff, but it’s amazing, in terms of intelligently asking: What are we capable of trading? What are we capable of giving away about ourselves and what would we most want to protect about ourselves?

So we’re getting to deep issues around identity and values, here.

Absolutely, and she never suggests that there would be a straightforward solution or that everybody would feel comfortable. Everybody, including the aliens, has their own thoughts and feelings about these intermingled and cooperative ways of life and how that’s going to play out. It’s never simplistic, and I love that about her work.

Butler was an amazingly dedicated person. She was determined to write science fiction and to write what she wanted to write, at a time when that was very difficult to do for her. What’s good about this collection, about Bloodchild and the other short stories, is that you get a little bit of her own voice at the end, where she describes why she wrote those stories and what they mean to her. There’s even a little bit at the back of the book about her personal writing methods, which is really interesting to read. As I said, I just think she’s amazing.

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Under the Skin

by Michel Faber

I would never argue with that! Your next recommendation for us is Under the Skin by Michel Faber. This was Faber’s debut novel and it won a Whitbread Award. Can you tell us why you love this sci-fi horror book?

It’s a book that’s set on Earth—right now, I would say—and it’s imagining that the aliens are already here but have been surgically altered to look like us. On their home planet, they look a bit more like sheep, so they feel that they have more of a bond to sheep than they do to us. And they bring their preconceptions to our world, about how we can’t be very intelligent or important because we’re hairless, two-legged weirdos.

It’s a brilliant reflection of our preconceptions about bodies, and what we think other forms of life may be capable of or how important we think they are, in terms of whether or not they look like us. The novel is written from the point of view of an alien who has a particular job to do, which involves rounding up humans (while trying to fly under the radar and go unnoticed), and then processing them for a particular use back on her home planet. It’s about her struggle to decide whether humans have thoughts and feelings, and if we’re worth trying to save in any way at all.

That’s wonderful. I think something about that flipped perspective lets us understand ourselves and how we treat other creatures much better than a direct exploration could.

Yes. I really love the way Faber uses language in the book to do this: the alien refers to people of her own kind as human, and to us as animals. It’s just a great reflection within the language of how they think; it’s so beautifully written throughout.

There is a film adaptation, which I really like, but it doesn’t go into why the alien is collecting these lonely hitchhiking humans. The book goes into much more depth that brings it into the category of sci-fi body horror for me. What possible use could we be to them if we’re considered such a lesser form of life? It’s quite hard to take in its final pages, but it opens your mind so well to looking at the situation in a different way.

Challenging our preconceptions of what otherness looks like, of how it might act, is a big part of my own work. I’ve imagined aliens in all sorts of ways. If you make them like us, a mirror of us, that raises its own questions. If you make them very different, as in Butler’s Bloodchild, where they’re giant insects, then that’s a new level of repulsion that the reader has to deal with. It’s a question of deciding to what extent you want the reader to feel connected to or separate from those beings, and then, how you can play with the distance you have from them.

As you just mentioned, much of your own work has contained elements of body horror, but you’ve got a new book coming out early next year that’s a little bit different—can you please tell us about that?

Three Eight One is a fantasy adventure. A young woman has to embark on a quest and discover herself, and some very strange, weird things happen on the way. That’s what usually happens in my books, so it’s no different in that regard. But this was an attempt to try something quite different: all the sections of the book are 381 words long.

That’s wonderful. How was it working under such a tight constraint?

I really enjoyed it. I was surprised that it started to come naturally to me at some point. I would just read the word count at the end of each section and think, ‘Oh, I’m about right.’ It was loads of fun to do.

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Remina

I’m suitably impressed! Your last recommendation for us is Remina by Junji Ito. This is quite different from your previous selections; can you tell us what you appreciate about this book?

Junji Ito is a horror manga artist, so this is full-on body horror. When I read his books, I usually have to take a break at some point and put them down. I wouldn’t say he is necessarily a science fiction writer, but Remina is probably the closest he gets to that. I picked it because he plays with scale so amazingly well, in a way that feels like classic science fiction to me. This is not human body horror, but planetary body horror.

Remina is the name of a planet that is coming straight for Earth. It’s making a beeline for us in a very disturbing way. It’s wonderfully strange and organic. Remina is named after the daughter of the astronomer who first discovered it. As panic sets in on Earth and people start to think that something terrible is going to happen, groups of people all over the world decide that sacrificing the astronomer’s daughter might appease this weird giant planet god. I think this has more in common with Lovecraft, maybe.

It’s on a massive scale, and it’s so beautifully drawn and written. The sense of this planet hurtling towards us with its own agenda is incredibly scary. And the mayhem that breaks out on Earth is almost overwhelming. In deciding to tell this story as a graphic novel, he doesn’t give the reader any distance from what’s happening; you feel completely immersed within it.

I’ve noticed that when I read Junji Ito, I start by turning the pages quite slowly and really admiring all the beautiful work he’s done in drawing it. Then, I speed up because I become so involved. I’m just desperate to find out what happens next. And then, it’s almost like a comic strip effect, where I’m turning the pages so quickly that it almost seems to come to life. I love that effect in his work. But I do need to take breaks every now and again, because it can be overwhelming.

All the stories and novels I’ve recommended today are so vivid, so visual, so engaging and immersive, in terms of what it means to be human and what the body is capable of, and what can be done to bodies and envisaging futures around that. I would say if you’re going to read all five of these books at once, make sure you take regular breaks and rehydrate! I need to go away and read some fairly sedate books for a while now to get over that experience.

Interview by Uri Bram

December 11, 2023

Philosophy Books

The Best Philosophy Books of 2023

recommended by Nigel Warburton

The genre of philosophical biography is flourishing, as we pay attention not only to what philosophers said and wrote but also to how they lived and the intellectual context in which they developed their ideas. Nigel Warburton, our philosophy editor, picks out some of the best philosophy books of the year, from the man who lived in a storage jar in 5th century Athens to the latest contributions of cognitive science to our understanding of how we experience the world.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

- Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

- The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic

by Jean-Manuel Roubineau, Malcolm DeBevoise & Phillip Mitsis

- Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality

by David Edmonds

- The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

by Andy Clark

- For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun

by Rebecca Roache

Has 2023 been a good year for philosophy books? Have you noticed any particular trends?

I’m writing a book about philosophy at the moment, and I’m delighted it wasn’t published this year, because so many philosophy books have come out—many of them very good. It’s incredibly difficult to choose just five books this year. There’s a lot of competition.

One of the trends is a huge number of books about philosophers’ lives. I’ve chosen two for my list: first, Jean-Manuel Roubineau’s short biography of Diogenes, although I could equally have picked Robin Waterfield’s biography of Plato, Plato of Athens. That’s also a very good book. And I’ve chosen David Edmonds’ biography of Derek Parfit, but there was also Mark Rowe’s biography of another Oxford philosopher, J.L. Austin, which is excellent in many ways, but a different kind of book, perhaps a bit more niche. What’s fascinating about Rowe’s biography is that he doesn’t just tell the story of J.L. Austin the philosopher, but also that of J.L. Austin the military intelligence expert. Rowe shows he played a significant role in preparing for the D-Day landings. He was a major figure in British intelligence during the Second World War before returning to Oxford and becoming a significant figure in the world of Ordinary Language Philosophy.

On that same theme of Oxford philosophy, Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure is a kind of quirky history of Oxfod in the 20th century, and a very interesting book. Tom Stoppard recommended it recently. I think it’s very difficult to pull off group biographies—the only person I know who has done it completely successfully is Sarah Bakewell with her At the Existentialist Café—but this year we’ve also had Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries, a follow-up to his earlier group biography Time of the Magicians: this one features four women philosophers: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand. I found the inclusion of Rand slightly odd, and I think this one wasn’t quite as successful as his previous book, but it’s definitely worth reading.

“It’s incredibly difficult to choose just five books this year”

These are just a few of the interesting biographical books that have come my way. There’s a very strong vein of this kind of writing about philosophy at the moment. The history of that is that there were hardly any biographies of philosophers for many years, then Ray Monk published an absolutely superb biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, in 1991 and publishers realised there was a market for lives of philosophers. Gradually these have been coming through, but there’s a glut this year for some reason. I don’t know whether that’s going to continue.

Another book I almost included in my list was Daniel Dennett’s I’ve Been Thinking, which is his memoir, basically his life in philosophy. I reviewed it for the TLS. It’s a fun book to read and it has plenty of philosophy in it and some great anecdotes, but it didn’t quite make my top five.

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Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

Let’s have a look at that top five. First of all, Sarah Bakewell’s book Humanly Possible offers an overview of seven centuries of humanist thought. You were already looking forward to this book when we spoke last year; I take it it lived up to expectations?

I don’t know any other writer who could pull off something like this. I mentioned already that Sarah managed to write a compelling group biographical study of the existentialists, which was no mean feat. But this was an even more difficult writing task. She’s covering the long history of humanism, not just the kind of humanism we think of as an agnostic or atheistic approach to life—humanist funerals that kind of thing—although that’s there. She includes humanism in the sense of the regeneration of interest in the Classical world that was characteristic of some writers of the Renaissance, and the humanistic traditions that can also be found within a religious context. What she’s managed to do is uncover common threads. All these thinkers, though diverse, are passionate in their interest in human beings, rather than in the physical world or the idea of the divine. She tells an interesting story and manages to do it in a very accessible way with humour and colour. It’s memorable, enjoyable to read, and full of insight all along the way. It’s quite brilliant. A book to dip into and return to rather than to read once, I think.

One point of focus for her is that quotation from Terence: “I am human, and so nothing human is alien to me.” She points out that it was originally a kind of joke, the response of a character who is very nosy—‘the reason why I’m so nosy is that I’m human, I can’t help it.’ But it’s become a kind of motto for a certain type of interest in human beings, and the relationships between human beings. Bakewell’s not scared of taking on the darker, more disconcerting side of humans either, the side which is sometimes ignored by what I would call ‘happy clappy’ humanism, the optimistic, everything’s-going-to-turn-out-well view of the human predicament.

Her other motto is from E.M. Forster—“only connect”. What she sees her book doing is connecting up lots of different strands of humanism. She’s generous in her inclusivity and the way she traces complex patterns of influence in the various forms of humanism.

It sounds like an incredible achievement.

Yes, I think it’s superb. I’m a huge fan of Bakewell’s writing. She’s very modest and doesn’t show off, but everything is based on deep and serious scholarship. And she’s an absolutely brilliant writer. So this book is a joy.

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The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic

by Jean-Manuel Roubineau, Malcolm DeBevoise & Phillip Mitsis

Next up, you’ve selected The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic by Jean-Manuel Roubineau. Another book about Diogenes made your best-of list last year.

I don’t think Diogenes had been given enough airtime until very recently, and now that’s happening. I regret not including him in my Little History of Philosophy. I should have done, but perhaps in the back of my mind I felt he was a bit risqué for a younger readership—you know, he famously masturbated and defecated in public and was renowned for being provocative and obnoxious. He’s the great performative philosopher, up there in that respect with Socrates. But Socrates gets all the attention. He was sometimes known as the mad Socrates.

Socrates didn’t write anything down, but lived the life of a philosopher and died rather than compromise his conscience. Diogenes famously thought that human beings don’t need much to be happy, and owned just a cloak and a stick—he had a cup too at first, but he threw that away when he saw a boy drinking water with his hands and realised he didn’t really need it. Diogenes allegedly lived in a barrel at the edge of the city of Athens. One of the things I like about this very short book by Roubineau is that he has four or five pages discussing whether Diogenes did actually live in a barrel. It was more likely a big clay storage jar, and he wasn’t unusual in that, actually. There is a kind of resonance with contemporary Britain in the sense that homelessness became an issue in fifth-century Athens as a result of certain political decisions about going to war and the insistence that everyone lived within the city walls. A number of people were forced to live in very unsuitable accommodation, including these earthenware storage jars that—although smelly—offered protection from the elements.

I suppose the modern-day equivalent might be living out of your car.

Yes, or maybe sleeping in a skip or a wheelie bin. A car sounds a bit luxurious. Diogenes was not doing it because he had to, but as a kind of philosophical statement. He enacted his philosophy and was very critical of philosophers who didn’t. There’s a quotation from him:

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

So Plato, to Diogenes, was like a harp, because he didn’t really live his philosophy, he just talked about it. Whereas for Diogenes, the whole thing was that if you believe it, you should do it. He was an environmentalist too. He was also arguably the first cosmopolitan, the first to say that he was a ‘citizen of the world’ when people asked where he was from. And he tried to live consistently as his own person, not accepting the values of those around him.

Again, we know of him not from his own writings, but from the stories about him that other people wrote down. When asked about what should happen to him after he died, he basically said that he didn’t care, and the punchline implied that he would be just as happy to be torn apart by animals after death as buried. But Roubineau tells us that his wishes weren’t actually fulfilled—that there was a grave. All this really complements the book I recommended last year, How to Say No, which is more of a collection of anecdotes told by ancient authors of Diogenes; Roubineau’s book puts all that in the context of a life story, told in 106 pages. So it’s a good, quick read about somebody who embodied his philosophy.

Diogenes was a bit like Joseph Beuys. Do you know Joseph Beuys? For one of his performance art pieces, he shut himself in a room with a coyote. That’s the kind of thing I could imagine Diogenes doing. He famously walked about an Athenian marketplace with a lit lamp in daylight, inviting people by his actions to ask what on earth he was doing. His answer was that he was looking for an honest man in Athens and hadn’t yet found one. You could imagine someone doing this outside parliament. There’s a great anti-Brexit protester, Steve Bray, who stands outside and shouts at Tory politicians as they walk into parliament. That’s the same kind of anarchic spirit, a bit punk, a bit unexpected, as Diogenes displayed in the ancient world. And Diogenes clearly had a good sense of humour – a rarity amongst philosophers.

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Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality

by David Edmonds

Great. Thank you. Let’s move to your next 2023 philosophy book recommendation, which is David Edmonds’ biography of Derek Parfit, who died in 2017. It’s subtitled: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Could you tell us about the man and his mission?

So Derek Parfit was an unusual figure and David Edmonds has collected a lot of information about just how unusual he was. As a philosopher, he came to notice in the early 1970s with a couple of articles about personal identity—what it is to be a self over time. I remember reading these as an undergraduate student, and they were very different to the typical philosophical journal article. But his basic position was that there could be good reasons for thinking that we might have more in common with the people around us now than we might with our future selves. That’s a Buddhist-like concept of the self, and he did explicitly draw some analogies with Buddhism. It was an unusual position to take for a mainstream Oxford philosopher, though elements of it were in a tradition that stems from John Locke.

Then he went quiet for a bit before he produced, in the mid-1980s, under great pressure, a book called Reasons and Persons. It elaborated on what he thought about the nature of the self and how that impacts on morality and questions about altruism. Then he went on to the mission that occupied the rest of his life, which was that he thought he could and should prove conclusively the objectivity of morality—according to him what is right or wrong is not subjective, but absolutely objective. He wanted to do that without bringing in any kind of divine guarantee for this objectivity. He was very much an atheist, but as Edmonds’ biography makes clear, he followed a family tradition of being a missionary.

What do you mean?

His parents were literally missionaries. And Parfit had a sort of missionary zeal for proving and persuading people beyond doubt that morality was objective, meeting every possible objection and persuading his most eminent colleagues that this was so. Or at least trying to. He even said that his life would have been a waste if he didn’t succeed in showing that morality was objective.

I think it’s generally accepted that he didn’t succeed in that. But he became obsessed … when I say obsessed, I mean he was obsessive as well. Quite a lot of the biography charts the fascinating arc of his life—from the good-looking, intelligent, young man, a brilliant student, who had always been exceptional in his intelligence, and the transformation that happened in later life. He was somebody who was…neurodiverse, let’s put it that way. He had some OCD characteristics, would clean his teeth for hours, would work absolutely obsessively. He doesn’t seem to have had the same kinds of connections with people that you might have expected of someone who writes in such an elegant, sophisticated way.

I used to share an office with his wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards.

Prospect once described them as having “the world’s most cerebral marriage.”

She used to tell me some stories about him. He was always working—writing a paper, or reading a book, or commenting on other people’s writing. But he needed the fuel of coffee to keep him going. So rather than waste time making a decent cup of coffee he would use instant coffee and just turn on the hot tap. Janet said he sometimes didn’t even wait for the water to warm up. Parfit would be reading a book at the same time as making the coffee.

He was unusual in other ways too:  he could be incredibly generous with his time. For someone considered a high flyer—he had an All Souls fellowship, didn’t have to teach, could devote himself entirely to his research—he had a huge amount of time for anyone who wanted to discuss ideas with him. If somebody sent him an essay on something he’d written, he would return the next day with comments even longer than the essay. This was partly because he wanted to get everything right.

For exercise, he would happily sit on an exercise bike in his underpants in front of the main window overlooking the street, absolutely oblivious to people looking in. And maybe he didn’t always put underpants on. It just wouldn’t have occurred to him that this might be found offensive or disturbing.

Are there some parallels here with the Diogenes biography? Is there something in the genre of philosophical biography that explores the application of philosophy, praxis versus theory?

Well, Diogenes’ philosophy wasn’t a written philosophy. He was performing philosophy as a series of gags, really, some of them visual. Derek Parfit was all theory. It was philosophy through words not performances. All he did for most of his later life was theorise, talk philosophy, write philosophy, communicate about philosophy, talk, give talks, and so on.

Behind all this, there is an interesting question about what you’re doing when you’re writing a biography of a philosopher. There was a much-read profile of Parfit that appeared in his lifetime, by the New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar. Like all of those New Yorker pieces, it was a very elegantly constructed profile, and focused very much on how unusual he was as a man. The question is, how connected is that kind of obsessive behaviour with his philosophy? That’s a question that Edmonds had to address too.

And?

It’s difficult to say. There’s a risk that he just gets remembered as this odd guy, who did strange things, was neurodiverse, whatever. There was a critical piece about Edmonds’ biography in the London Review of Books that argued that he should have written more about Parfit’s philosophy and by implication perhaps less about his quirks. And I can sympathise with that to some extent. But someone else can write the definitive book about Parfit’s philosophy. This is a biography.

There’s a sense in which biography gives an opportunity to expound on somebody’s thought in historical context. Philosophers have philosophical ideas, and you have a duty to write about those in a biography. That’s what Ray Monk did so well in his biography of Wittgenstein. Edmonds did a great deal of research, talking to people who knew Derek Parfit well, and what lingers for them is just what an unusual man he was, as a man as well as a thinker. And that’s interesting for a wider readership as well, the mystery around how he developed into that obsessive workaholic from what he was as a young man. So once he’d done that research, Edmonds was right to tell that story. It’s very interesting.

Yes.

Many of the people who knew Derek Parfit well, (and there were a lot of them because he cultivated a network of philosophers who commented on what he wrote), really admire Edmonds’ book. It’s very difficult to achieve that when your subject has died so recently.

4

The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

by Andy Clark

Absolutely. Let’s talk about the fourth book on your list of 2023 philosophy books, Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine. He’s a cognitive philosopher.

So Andy Clark, with David Chalmers—whose book Reality+ was on my list last year—wrote a famous paper about ‘the extended mind’: the idea that something like a phone could be literally part of your mind. They argue it’s a mistake to think of the mind as necessarily contained within the skull or the skin, as people traditionally have. Together they put forward the argument that some things that we use as tools are integrated with our lives, and available to us, and are relied upon in similar ways to the memories in our brains. We might outsource the memory of phone numbers, for example, to our smartphones. And in cases like that, we can talk about literally extending our minds. There’s a long history of people doing just that, using all sorts of devices. But there’s a cut-off where you say, that’s just a tool, not part of the mind.

That idea is discussed in this book by Clark, but the broader aim of the book is to give accessible insight into some of the most interesting interdisciplinary research in the area of cognitive science, about how rather than being passive recipients of information,  we project expectations on the world. According to Clark, we should rethink everything about human beings in terms of predictive processing, the ways that our senses supply correctives of our projections, and don’t give us a reliable picture of reality that we receive passively.

This is an idea that Anil Seth discussed in very interesting ways in his book Being You. It’s very much in vogue, as it were. But Clark is a very accessible writer, like Seth, and  also like him a researcher in this area. The way he puts it is that potentially the prediction processing model of understanding our place in the world is something that can give us a unifying picture of the mind and its place in nature. It’s one of those hypotheses that has huge philosophical implications if we take it seriously. It’s not just about sensations, how we experience things, but our sense of self, how we relate to the universe, everything. Everything important will be transformed if we understand the world through this model, if we recognise that we’re not passive recipients of information but caught up in a range of hypotheses that we generate about the world. It’s almost as though we are hallucinating the world all the time. It’s one of those approaches to philosophy that is like that famous duck-rabbit illusion: you see the duck, then suddenly you see the rabbit. There’s a shift and you see the world differently. Clark’s book presents an accessible way into this different way of seeing the world. It’s a model of how to make complex ideas accessible to the general reader.

I had an interesting conversation with a cognitive scientist at Oxford called Dick Passingham a few years ago. He said that he essentially thought that neuroscience was making a lot of philosophy of mind obsolete. Coming at it from a different way, through observation: scientific advances meant there was no space for philosophy left.

I’m skeptical about that. It’s true that anybody who wants to understand the mind today has a very rich source of data in the sense that there’s an explosion of interesting discoveries in neuroscience. Computing power allows a much more refined understanding of the physiology of the active brain. There have been many counterintuitive discoveries. That has to be part of your understanding if you’re a philosopher of mind. There are people who don’t keep up with the science, who ignore it and go back to Descartes or other philosophers instead. But it seems very strange to turn away from real discoveries about the neuroscience of consciousness. But even with all this empirical research, philosophical questions about how to interpret and integrate those sorts of theories remain.

Many of the best philosophers of mind, like Andy Clark, are immersed in the world of philosophy and that of neuroscience.  There are plenty of philosophers who don’t carve up their way of thinking about the mind into ‘philosophy’ and ‘neuroscience’; we just want a picture of what the mind is like, and any sources of information about that are relevant. There are big questions about where consciousness comes from, how it evolved, what it is, and how we experience the world. There’s a cluster of unresolved issues, and plenty of them still have a philosophical flavour.

The neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell just published a book about the nature of free will: Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. It’s impossible to write intelligently about that as a neuroscientist, I think, without touching on the long philosophical history around that topic. And even if you want to be a hardcore neuroscientist saying, well, philosophy has nothing for me, moral issues don’t go away just by looking at the brain. Or, if they seem to, you end up with a very strange moral philosophy.

5

For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun

by Rebecca Roache

Let’s tackle your final 2023 book recommendation, Rebecca Roache’s For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun. It’s described as “a new theory of why swearing offends.” Why should we read a philosophy of profanity?

So this is a fun book, but also a serious book. Rebecca Roache is very much a philosopher, and this is really a book on the philosophy of language. It actually draws upon some of the ideas of J.L. Austin, who we’ve already mentioned, the ordinary language philosopher who talked about performative utterances, acts which are performed by saying words—so, for instance, launching a ship by saying ‘I launch this ship’. Or the words ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony. These are linguistic acts. And one of the themes in Rebecca’s book is how linguistic acts are performed when people utter swear words in different contexts.

It’s a very wide-ranging book, but underlying it is serious philosophy about how we communicate with one another and the value we give to different sorts of words, which might be considered taboo in one context, or maybe just commonplace and expected in other contexts. I remember when I worked in a flour mill in Crayford, years ago, the toaster broke and this old guy said, ‘oh fuck, the fucking fucker’s gone and fucking well fucked itself again.’ It was incredibly expressive and creative, an almost baroque sentence that came out very naturally and perfectly communicated what he felt.

So this is a book about offensiveness, partly, and it’s a book about particular words as well. Chapter thirteen is called ‘Cunt and ‘Cunt’’—so Roache’s not shying away from using taboo words: the fact there’s an asterisk on the front doesn’t mean this and other words are asterisked all the way through. I think it’s a great book because it combines Rebecca’s obvious joy in using swear words with serious philosophy about an issue that is all around us. And I think it’s highly original, because it’s not a topic that philosophers usually address.

There’s an endorsement from Stephen Fry on the back: “Finally, a book that rips the fuck out of the arseholes who claim that swearing is the sign of a poor vocabulary or unnecessary. Bollocks to them.” Many people take great joy in swearing. It reveals all kinds of things about how we relate to people and the different ways in which we can communicate, threaten, or tease. I love this book, and I’m really delighted that she’s written it.

That sounds like a fun way into some meaty subject matter.

There’s no sense in which she’s straining to include philosophy – it explains so much. Indirectly, she’s made a great case for there being much more philosophy about swearing, she  has shown how swearing touches on all kinds of important questions. This would make a great Christmas present for your grandparents or parents-in-law…

To close, perhaps you’d advise us whether any new books are coming out that should be on our radar.

There are. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book on Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World, will be out early next year. Philip Goff, who wrote a book about panpsychism that got a lot of attention, has just followed that up with Why? The Purpose of the Universe, an argument for belief in a kind of cosmic shaping force to the universe, based on something known as the fine tuning argument. I don’t agree with him, but it’s another example of good accessible public philosophy.

Another biographically-driven book that will be coming out before too long is Emily Herring’s – she’s writing a biography of Henri Bergson. This will be excellent, I’m sure. And in the further future, David Bather Woods is writing a book about Schopenhauer. So these are two books in the pipeline by outstanding younger writers turning their attention to this combination of biography and philosophy, the flourishing genre of the moment.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

December 8, 2023

Fiction » Fantasy

The Best High Fantasy Novels

recommended by Richard Swan

High fantasy, also known as epic fantasy, has been on a long journey since J.R.R. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings. Richard Swan introduces us to the breadth of the genre – and how it embraces social commentary, political realism, and deeply personal stories.

Interview by Sylvia Bishop

- The Way of Unity

by Sarah Balstrup

- Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

- The Hand of the Sun King

by J.T. Greathouse

- The Scar

by China Miéville

- Jade War

by Fonda Lee

High fantasy books tell epic stories in secondary worlds. The Lord of the Rings is of course the giant of the genre, but it still tops bestseller lists today, with authors like Brandon Sanderson and George R R Martin. Why do you think we love to read these often-harrowing tales?

One of the things I love about fantasy is it’s such a wonderful way of holding a mirror up to modern society. I think it’s a really effective genre for taking socio-political problems or issues that we’re facing in the modern world, and filtering them through the lens of sociologically and technologically less developed societies that we invent. There are all sorts of contrivances that we can add into that world building, to really focus and drill down on certain issues and make quite stark and compelling points. A good specific example of this is the way N K Jemisin examined themes of racial injustice and climate change in her Broken Earth series; a broader example is the way fantasy authors are increasingly making their worlds queernormative and removing homo- and transphobia as antagonistic forces from their books entirely.  You think, “Well, if a medieval-esque society can get this right, or they can do a certain thing in a certain way, what’s stopping us from doing it?”.

1

The Way of Unity

by Sarah Balstrup

There’s certainly some interesting politics in your first choice. Could you introduce us to The Way of Unity by Sarah Balstrup?

The Way of Unity is a really interesting book. Sarah is an Australian writer. She read my first book a little while ago, and left a nice review on Goodreads for it. I looked on her profile, and noticed that she was an author as well – and she was a religious studies scholar as well, an academic. I really enjoy religious themes in my books. Religion is almost always a theme or an element in fantasy novels, as in real life – and fantasy mirrors real life.

It turned out to be one of my favourite books of this year. It was brilliant. It’s from the perspective of a young woman called Sybilla, the daughter of a husband-and-wife pair of rulers called the Skalens. There are seven sets of Skalens around this seven-nation land of Velspar, which forms a religious confederation. And going around the land of Velspar is a psychic priesthood called the Intercessors, who take away what they call ‘red thoughts’: any criminal thoughts you have, or just anything that’s kind-of bad. They physically extract it from your brain, and they make you all nice and chilled out and sanguine. They worship these animals – in my head it’s a bit like a pterodactyl, but it probably isn’t, it’s probably like a massive eagle – that’s the god-father, Kshidol. Then they have Siatka, who’s the god-mother, and a sea serpent. They’ve taken these two real creatures and woven them into the story of their religion.

That’s the premise. Then, in about the first ten pages, the Intercessors burn down Sybilla’s house with her family inside and kill all of them. Sybilla manages to escape. Her father had been quietly planning to purge the Intercessors – which is probably why they got murdered, to be fair – so Sybilla takes up the mantle, and she leads a pogrom of the Intercessors, and they’re all butchered.

So this psychic priesthood evaporates. This all happens in the first twenty or thirty pages of the book. You don’t see this often in fantasy, because often what we’re concerned with is the big battle – especially in a series, you’ll have the antagonist and the good guys fighting and sparring and clashing and, eventually, you have the big denouement at the end in book three: the big climax. Then you always wonder, what happens after that? What happens after the big battle? Presumably, there’s a massive administrative burden that follows in the wake of it. What I really loved about this book was that we start at the end – they have this pogrom of all the Intercessors, it’s all very gruesome, and then suddenly they’re all gone. And what do we do now? Sybilla inherits this nation, which has hitherto had a very present, very visible priesthood, often close to members of the society or the village, who have performed acts of intercession and led them in worship. And people have gleefully slaughtered them. Everybody starts to think, “Oh… maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Actually, there are aspects of it I miss.” And of course, it’s all completely forbidden now on pain of death.

It’s such a brilliant examination of a post-religious society in which they’ve had a bloodbath, and now have all the festering pockets of resentment. The author is brilliant, she’s thought of everything. The trade suffers – because they’ve killed off the priests, but they’ve also killed off all the people who still believed in the religion as well – so it’s a hugely decimated population. Trade is down because all the farm labourers have been killed, because they wouldn’t renounce. It’s a really skilfully considered novel. It managed the topic of religion in such a clever and nuanced way, and also made aspects of the religion very real and tangible. It wasn’t all just based on faith. There was a very real element to it, obviously fantastical, but the Intercessors could literally read and extract thoughts – so it was both about that, and about the power of belief.

2

Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

Your next choice also features religion, but the battle lines are now not just between priesthood and secular power, but between angels and demons. Could you tell us about Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman?

Chris Buehlman is an American author. He’s very, very well known for a book called The Blacktongue Thief, which did phenomenally well. Everybody knows him for that book, and he’s writing a prequel to that, I think, as we speak. I don’t quite remember how I stumbled across Between Two Fires. It was his second book – well before The Blacktongue Thief, which was his sixth – and at the time I believe it didn’t land very well, it didn’t hit the market in quite the right way. The rights reverted to him, and he self-published it. And I picked it up because it had, again, religious themes.

It’s about a man called Thomas. He’s wounded at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, part of the Hundred Years’ War. And he gets an arrow in the face – in his jaw. During the course of his convalescence, he’s divested of all his land holdings by a rogue lord. So he resorts to a life of brigandage and is pillaging the countryside, when he comes across this young girl – I think she’s probably about twelve or thirteen. The band of brigands, they’re going to do awful things to her, so he kills all of them and saves her; and she says, “I need to get to Avignon” – where the Pope was based at that time.

So he ends up taking her across France. At this time, France is in the throes of bubonic plague. There’s a really good book which has a chapter on the bubonic plague, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, who’s a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He talks about how it killed three-fifths of the population of Europe, and takes two or three paragraphs to sit back and say, “Actually imagine what a profound horror that would have been. Your friends are dying, your family’s dying, and you have absolutely no idea why, because the medical science just wasn’t there.” One of the things he talked about was how incredibly evangelical people would have been in 14th-century England – they would have been extremely, extremely devout. A lot of them would have believed very strongly and tangibly that the bubonic plague was divine judgment, and it would have been utterly terrifying for them.

“One of the things I love about fantasy is it’s such a wonderful way of holding a mirror up to modern society”

So Between Two Fires takes place against this dismal backdrop. We’re moving through France, and it’s obviously all very frightening and there are corpses everywhere. I didn’t really realise this when I was first reading the book, but it’s actually a horror novel as well –  a medieval fantasy horror. The first inkling we have of this is when they reach a river, and the locals say, “There’s a demon in the river. If you sort it out, we’ll reward you.” And I was like, “Oh! There is literally a monster!” – and it just gets worse and worse from there. What Chris does really well is very biblical monsters and demons: they have things like eyes on their chests and hands for feet and so on, like the creatures on an illuminated medieval manuscript. He’s been quite faithful to that aesthetic.

They pick up a priest who is gay and closeted, so he’s fighting his own ordeal – as a consequence, he’s a drunk – and the three of them traipse across plague-ravaged France. At the same time, it’s the War in Heaven—literally—so there’s this big Divine Comedy or Dr Faustus vibe to it.

The horror is both subtle and very, very overt. For example, there’s a bit where everybody hides at night because all the church statues have come to life, and they’re wandering the streets murdering people. The statues have their sceptres and they’re smashing the doors in and killing people. It’s a very, very frightening book! At the end, Thomas literally goes to hell for a stint, and that’s also very well done and very horrible.

It’s a brilliant, brilliant book. And I just hadn’t heard of it. I was utterly enthralled; it was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I think it’s finding its audience now, and very quietly it’s becoming much more popular.

In this book, we’ve got a battle that’s literally inhuman, but any high politics can feel very remote. What’s Buehlman doing to give us a sense of personal connection?

You get different types of fantasy novel. Obviously, you get different types of every sort of novel. But I think within fantasy you tend to get either the big sweeping plot-driven books – for example, to come back to The Lord of the Rings, there’s very little internality. You never get a few paragraphs of Gimli ruminating on something. It’s all very much: Gimli and Legolas did this, then they went there, then they did this, and then Aragorn said this to this bloke. It’s just a sequence of events.

It’s a bit reductive to say that, but if we compare it to a lot of modern fantasy, we now see a lot more internality. We’re interested in the characters, what they’re thinking and feeling, the dynamics between them. Ultimately, I think that’s the engine that drives all fiction and makes it interesting.

I think what Chris, and a lot of these books that I read now, do very well is that character internality. Everyone is given their own head, they think and reflect. And it’s not just about, “Oh, it’s cold, so therefore I’m miserable.” It’s also very existential reflection. I think that’s what makes a lot of modern fantasy and a lot of modern fiction more generally much more compelling, and I think the genre is moving in the right direction in that respect.

3

The Hand of the Sun King

by J.T. Greathouse

We return to human politics with your next choice, featuring empire and its dissidents. Could you tell us about The Hand of the Sun King by J T Greathouse?

I’m on a discord with a bunch of other authors and Jeremy is one of them. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when you read a book by someone that you know, because there’s a risk that it’s bad! But luckily, it was brilliant.

The Hand of the Sun King is about Wen Alder, a young man caught between two worlds. His grandmother comes from a pagan black magic clan in the hills, and his uncle led a rebellion against the empire; so he comes from this rebellious province, and there are lots of occupying forces trying to keep it all on the level. At the same time, he is tutored in the imperial arts. His father is a merchant, an aspirational upper-middle-class merchant, in a very socially stratified society. He hires a tutor for Wen, for what is essentially a college entrance exam – if you can afford it and you’re intelligent enough, you take this test in logic and reasoning and mathematics and philosophy and poetry. It’s a bit like PPE at Oxford, that kind of idea – the medieval Chinese equivalent. And if you pass it, depending how well you do, it puts you in a certain stratum within the imperial civil service. The civil servants have magical powers. They’re like very powerful mages, essentially.

So, on the one hand, Wen’s grandmother teaches him this black magic, a kind of rustic sorcery, that’s very much a secret. And on the other hand, he’s being tutored in imperial arts, and he takes the exam and does extremely well, and gets admitted. He’s the first from this rebellious province to be admitted, so there are lots of people who are quite leery about it – “These are the barbarians, and you’re going to let one of them in?”

So he’s very, very powerful – and he basically then screws it all up. One of the things I really liked was that Jeremy made Alder very fallible. He acts exactly how you’d expect an adolescent boy to act –  an adolescent boy who’s imbued with an incredible amount of magical power as well. Long story short, he ends up leading a rebellion. It’s like –  I leave you alone for five minutes, and you’re leading a rebellion? It’s a character study as much as anything else. A lot of fantasy novels of the ’80s and ’90s were focused on the hero and the hero’s journey, and you would get these Mary-Sue characters who are perfect. They were immediately good at everything, very virtuous, very morally black and white, and there was no problem that they couldn’t solve. Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth is an excellent example of that. But Alder is just slouching from one catastrophe to the next and inevitably making everything worse. He wants to do good, but he has a teenage boy’s arrogance as well. If he’s angry, he’ll think, “I’m feeling righteous, I’m going to kill this person”; and he’ll kill that person, and not think about the butterfly effect of that death, how it closes doors, how it angers people.

I read the sequel this year, The Garden of Empire, which was also very good. It broadened out – massive elemental gods come out of the woodwork. It’s a brilliant series.

Both empire and religious power feature in your own work, as well as the judiciary, borrowing from your legal background. How did you develop convincing politics for The Justice of Kings?

When I started writing The Justice of Kings I had the kernel of an idea. I was a litigator in London and I just had this thought one day: what if there were fantasy lawyers? I had read Imperium by Robert Harris, which is brilliant, about the life of Cicero. It covers Cicero when he was still a lawyer in ancient Rome – solving a case, orating, doing a bit of oration in court. And then as the trilogy progresses, the stakes become a bit more empire-ending – or rather republic-ending.

Initially, I had this idea of ‘legomancy’, using magical words and arguments in court. That never made the cut, but the seed was planted. The Justice of Kings is based on the idea of a traveling magistrate: they’re a judge, jury, executioner, and also an investigator – and a bit of a wizard, all wrapped into one itinerant mage-policeman. They go from village to town to village to town to city, often beyond the official infrastructure of the Sovan state – we’re in the Sovan Empire, a late medieval or early renaissance-style empire. They have very firm beliefs in the rule of law: they’ve conquered all these territories, they’ve imposed a legal system on them, and they send down these judges. The judges can speak to the dead, which is very useful if you’re trying to solve a murder. And they have the power of ‘the Emperor’s voice’, which is the ability to extract a confession from somebody.

I love being as reductive as possible about the book because it amuses me: the first book is essentially a maritime insurance fraud investigation. Well – it’s a murder mystery, which is tangentially related to insurance fraud, which is the inciting incident. And as it goes on, it’s revealed that it’s part of a much larger conspiracy, a much larger conflict between the church and state.

To explain that conflict… As I said, the judges have magical powers, called ‘the arcana’. In the Empire of the Wolf trilogy, the afterlife is a real place, where our souls or our life essences go after we die; and it’s a weird and frightening place. There are very real entities – we taxonomize them in the book as angels and demons, but the jury is out on what exactly the precise nature of them is. In the centuries before the events of the first book, the arcana used to be the preserve of the church, who worshipped these entities and practiced the arts of seance and necromancy, and drew energies from the afterlife to perform certain rites. Then the Sovans came along and said, “No, we’re taking all that away from you and we’re going to give it to the judiciary instead.  We’re going to use these magics to enforce the secular common law.” And in so doing, they created a rift between the church and state. The main antagonist in the Empire of the Wolf has the inherited grievance of two centuries of churchmen complaining about having the arcana stolen from them, and his stated aim is to repatriate the magic back to the church. This church-state conflict is the core of the overarching storyline in the trilogy.

As for how I approached that politics… One of the things I don’t like in fantasy is when we deal with quite monolithic entities. The good guys and the bad guys, and the good guys are these people, and the bad guys are these people, and they hate each other for whatever reason. And there’s no factionalism. You look at any given organization today, or a political party, or a church… It’s not like we have the one Christian church. There are a hundred denominations, probably more, and none of them can agree on the precise interpretation of any given thing. You look at a political party: you have your moderates and your extremists. So it was really important to me that within every faction, there were sub-factions. That fleshes the world out. It makes it feel more real, more lived in. Everybody’s looking out for their own interests. In the second book, they go to the Senate and they watch a debate in progress. I wanted to make sure that I had, within that debate, different factions. Some of them were for the Emperor, some of them were for the church, some of them were intermediaries.

To make it realistic, I just drew on modern shabby political practice – specifically, saying increasingly offensive rubbish. You know, the problem with that – well, there’s a great many problems with it – but one of the problems is that even if it’s total nonsense, even if it’s a complete lie, a total confection, even if you then subsequently retract it! – it catches on. Say a hundred people heard the initial lie, and then you retract it: fifty people who saw the lie thought, that’s obviously a lie. And of the remaining fifty, twenty of them saw the retraction and so now know it’s a lie. You’ve still got thirty who believe it. And so in saying the lie, in saying lots of lies, you incrementally shift public opinion – in political studies we have the idea of the Overton window, the politically acceptable discourse at a given time, and incrementally you shift it. What was too politically incorrect to talk about has suddenly become acceptable dinner-time conversation. And that’s what I find most galling and frustrating: it feels like we’ve backslid a little bit the last five or ten years on what it’s okay to talk about now, which before was correctly taboo.

I vented my spleen a little bit over the course of the trilogy. I think, when I was younger, I never really wanted to make any sort of statement. The older I’ve got, the more I actually think in many ways it’s incumbent on you as a writer to say something. I feel like I’ve got a platform and I’ve got a readership, and I’m going to subtly fight back: I’m going to shift the window back to the left, so help me!

So the verisimilitude comes from just lifting this stuff wholesale from what you read in the newspaper, ultimately.

4

The Scar

by China Miéville

Geopolitics becomes fantastical in your next choice, with a floating city of ships: could you tell us about The Scar by China Miéville?

China Miéville is a really interesting writer. He hasn’t done anything for a long time. But in the late 00s, early 2010s, there was this wave of fiction – science fiction, or fantasy /science fiction, somewhere in the middle really – and it was called ‘The New Weird’. It was a kind of sub-genre of fantasy, but it hit the mainstream. And China Miéville led the charge on it. First came Perdido Street Station, which is the book that predates The Scar. There’s a third, The Iron Council; three very, very large books all set within the same world.

He created this world called Bas Lag, within which exists a massive city called New Crobuzon, which is like a mad fantastical London. It’s an enormous amalgamation of different races of people. He’s got such a fecund imagination, it’s almost like he’s got about a hundred books’ worth of ideas crammed into these novels.

The first book concerns this mind-eating moth called a slake moth. The protagonist discovers them by accident, because their excrement is psychoactive. If you eat it, you have an incredible trip; but what he doesn’t realize is the moths are consuming people’s minds, their consciousness. And it was funny, because Perdido Street Station has been around for fifteen, maybe twenty years – it’s a very well read, very successful, beloved book. And a little while ago, just as the pandemic was really kicking off, I had this idea about an alien creature who consumed minds… Then I started reading Perdido, and I was like, “That’s my idea! He’s done my idea!”. So it was quite frustrating in that respect! But it was a really good book.

The Scar is the sequel to Perdido and it’s only very tangentially related, so really it is a standalone. It follows the lover of the protagonist from Book One as she flees New Crobuzon and ends up on a huge flotilla of ships that have been bound together. It’s become a city, and the city is trying to harness the power of an enormous whale-like creature called an Avanc. The Avanc is going to tow them to a place called the Scar, which is a huge rip in the reality of the fabric of the world. The legends have it that you can harness energy there. It’s the energy of possibility – it’s almost like potential energy – and the closer they get to the Scar, the weirder the stuff that starts to happen.

One thing I really love about China Miéville’s writing is the hybrid peoples he creates. It’s like he’s deliberately avoided using elves and dwarves and goblins; instead he’s said, “You know what, I’m going to go right back to the drawing board. I’m just going to make up loads of different races of people.” So he’s got the Khepri, beetle people, with sarcophagus-beetle heads… one of the main characters in the first book is one of these, and they have sensory organs within the beetle carapace on their heads that are almost like a sexual organ. It’s a bit weird – this beetle woman has sex, and he’s touching her with beetle bits on her head – Miéville loves doing that sort of weird stuff. There are cactus people, and people who live in the river in the city, and there’s a bird person as well. And not only do you have these different types of creatures, these different sentient beings, but also this impacts the way they interact socially and politically with one another. So the cactus people are naturally very big and strong, and they’re very left-leaning and they unionize a lot. Some of it’s a bit caricature, but it’s very well done.

He’s a tremendously gifted writer. I think if I could choose to write like anybody, it would probably be him.

5

Jade War

by Fonda Lee

Your final choice is also the second book in a world: Jade War by Fonda Lee. Tell us a little about that.

I chose Jade War because that’s what I read most recently, but I think it’s probably worth just talking about the whole series, which is three books. I’ve got Jade Legacy on my desk to read next. It starts with Jade City, which totally hooked me in when I was in a bit of a slump with genre reading – which obviously happens when you read nothing but genre stuff for a long time. I was utterly enthralled by it.

Jade City is in a fantastical version of Hong Kong, or maybe Singapore – an island East Asian nation called Kekon. It’s about gangsters: it’s a crime family drama. The gangsters take their power from jade. Jade stone has magical properties in this world, and they fashion it into jewellery: necklaces and bangles and earrings. The higher you ascend within the crime family, the more jade you get. If you kill someone, you get their jade by right. It’s a very strict moral code amongst the clans; even within the rival gang families, you’re entitled to the jade of your vanquished opponent, and then you get stronger.

It’s a bit like in Game of Thrones – where the Starks are the good guys, the Lannisters are the bad guys, but that becomes a bit more murky and grey as time goes on, as these things always do. You start off following the Kauls, and the head of the family called Kaul Lan. He’s a level-headed, honourable guy in his forties. He’s getting a bit sick and tired of the clan fighting. His head of operations is out on the street, cracking skulls; he’s a hot head and a liability. His sister is the brains of the operation, and together they manage the family.

What Fonda does brilliantly is make you care about them. This is what all good fiction does. If you think of all the books that you’ve enjoyed, I guarantee they’ll have one thing in common: the author will spend time, often quite a lot of time, in a relatively conflict-free opening quarter of the novel, building up the characters and their relationships. Game of Thrones did this really, really well. In the first TV season of Game of Thrones, nothing really happens in the first four episodes. But you spend time with the Starks and you spend time with the Lannisters, and you get introduced to the characters in the world. And so by the time something happens, that first duel between Ned Stark and Jaime Lannister in King’s Landing, it feels very impactful and very stressful to watch.

In Jade City, we’re so invested in the characters, you can almost just read happily about the status quo. If nothing happened, that’d be a very pleasant reading experience. So when the fights start to kick off and people start to die and the clans and the crime families go to war with one another, it actually becomes a very stressful reading experience! It’s so utterly compelling though, you have to find out what happens, and she does it so skilfully. I just couldn’t put it down.

It was such a unique setting as well. When people think of fantasy, they sometimes think of knights on horseback and dragons. It isn’t that at all. There’s a massive breadth. Modern fantasy is a different animal to the fantasy of fifty or sixty years ago.

And there’s much more yet to come, we hope! Thanks for being our guide to these new secondary worlds, and their epic tales.

Interview by Sylvia Bishop

December 7, 2023

Books for Teens and Young Adults

The Best Thrillers for Teens

recommended by Kathryn Foxfield

Thrillers for teens have to be fast paced, exciting and entertaining, argues Kathryn Foxfield, author of YA thriller Good Girls Die First. She recommends some of her favourite teen thrillers, from books published this year to classics of the genre.

Interview by Tuva Kahrs, Children's Editor

- How to Die Famous

by Benjamin Dean

- The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

- A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

by Holly Jackson

- The Agathas

by Kathleen Glasgow & Liz Lawson

- And Then There Were None

by Agatha Christie

Before we get to the books themselves, can you define what you mean by thrillers, as opposed to mysteries or crime fiction?

These categories are so blurred together. All the books I’ve recommended have really strong mystery elements, which I love in a book. I think mysteries tend to revolve around something that happened in the past, while thrillers are focused on something that’s going to happen in the future. A thriller needs a ticking clock, where you have to try and solve the problem before you run out of time. They don’t have to be full of peril, but there has to be a little bit of danger which the characters are being followed around by, and if they don’t work out who the baddie is then the danger might be coming for them next.

So it can be less of a whodunit and more about the interplay between the villain and the main characters?

Yes, I love when the characters personally know the murderer, when it’s someone who is close to them and they’re going to end up clashing with some of their own feelings along the way. With a crime novel you’ve got a detective who can be quite removed from the whole thing. With a thriller it tends to be more personal because you’re trying to solve a mystery often to save someone who matters to you, or you’re trying to save yourself.

I enjoy it in a thriller where the main character is a normal person who suddenly has to react to a situation totally outside their experience.

Yes, a thriller is often all about someone having a really bad day. I’d be terrible in that sort of situation. I would survive about five minutes in any of my own books. I’d either die, or I’d be calling the police, saying: “I’m sensible, I’m not doing this, come and sort it out”.

Obviously, the page-turning and suspense elements have to be there in a thriller, whether for teens or adults. Other than the age of the protagonist, do you think there is anything specific to thrillers for teens?

With any book for teenagers you have to get to the point pretty quickly. It has to be fast-paced and exciting and entertaining, because I don’t think a lot of teenagers have the patience to sit around and wait for a book to get going. A thriller for teens needs to also deal with teen characters and teen issues along the way. Often you’ve got this interplay between all of the cliques at school and romantic relationships and friendship troubles and big feelings. I love that teenage characters are still deciding who they want to be whereas we adults can sometimes get stuck in our ways.

I suppose there is more overlap between thrillers and other genres for teens — romance, for example.

Yes, adult genres can have quite rigid reader expectations, whereas for teens it’s a lot more fluid. All of my books for teens have elements of horror in them, but they’re not horror novels. And they have thriller elements, but I’m not sure they’d be classed as thrillers in the adult sphere. I think it’s more exciting to write for teens because you can mix and match elements you enjoy from different genres.

1

How to Die Famous

by Benjamin Dean

Let’s talk about your first pick of thrillers for teens, How to Die Famous by Benjamin Dean.

I really like this book, which came out earlier this year. Of all of the books I’ve chosen, I think it’s the one that’s closest to the sort of book that I write. It’s about a teenage boy called Abel who gets a part in a popular TV drama. He’s doing it so that he can, on the sly, investigate the death of his brother who died under mysterious circumstances. He’s from England, and when he gets to Los Angeles he’s drawn into this glittering world of fame and riches and privilege. But he discovers that there’s a much darker side to the TV show, and that it has destroyed more than one life already. He’s at risk of it destroying his life, too, if he’s not careful.

It’s a really interesting book, because the author used to be a celebrity journalist so he knows all about this world. You can really sense his love for fame and stardom coming through in this book, but at the same time he explores the darker side of celebrity. In the book, you’ve got this TV show that’s taking kids who have nothing and promising them the world, and then using them and controlling them and moulding them into whoever they want them to be. One of the characters remarks that they have so much that they don’t feel like they can complain, even when they’re uncomfortable about what’s going on. There’s a really interesting juxtaposition of these amazing settings — the beauty of it all and the fame and all the parties — and this much darker side where these teenagers are being used by the adults in control, and then tossed away if they won’t do what they’re told.

It’s very chilling, that environment where you measure people’s worth by what they can do for you, and manipulate them so deliberately.

Yes. One of the characters has an interesting relationship with her mother, who’s pushed her into this life and is very controlling and has such high expectations for her. And you can see the character, Ella, rebelling against it, thinking: “I don’t know if this is me”.

In the book, there are four main characters, with four points of view. It’s great because everyone’s playing a role on several different levels. You’ve got the parts they’re playing on the TV, and the parts that the TV company are forcing them to play for the media and the press. Then you’ve also got the versions of themselves that they reveal through their narration, but you don’t know how much of the real them they’re holding back because they’re not sure how people are going to react to them. So that’s really interesting. Benjamin Dean has such a distinctive voice in his books and this one has a really clever ending. He also ended his last book, The King Is Dead, on an unanswered question like in this one.

2

The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

Let’s move on to your next teen thriller book pick, The Girls I’ve Been by Tess Sharpe.

Tess Sharpe’s books are brilliant, she’s such an amazing writer. This one is about Nora, who is the daughter of a con artist. She’s grown up being used as a pawn in all of her mother’s schemes, to con various criminal men out of their money. Throughout her life, she has been forced to become all of these different girls to play a part in her mom’s cons. Each one of them has come with its own trauma and its own lessons for Nora, and she’s taken something from every one of the girls she’s been. So when she finds herself taken hostage in a bank raid, she can draw on her past to find a way out and save herself and the lives of her friends, and hopefully turn it all in her own favour.

It’s quite a dark book, because it deals with a lot of trauma, but in such a sensitive, kind and caring way. Even though all the characters in it have a lot of damage from their past, you can really see them healing. Throughout the story, you’ve got flashbacks to all of Nora’s past lives as different girls, and you learn what it was that she went through and what made her into the person she is today. The book talks about therapy as well. I don’t read many Young Adult novels where the characters actually go to therapy and try and work on themselves, so from a mental health perspective it’s a really good book. The book has a good line in it, where the character says: “What didn’t kill me didn’t make me stronger; what didn’t kill me made me a victim. But I made me stronger. I made me a survivor.” That’s a big vibe throughout the book, that Nora is going to survive and she’s going to save her friends, who are basically her found family who she would literally die for. It’s a really tightly plotted book, and the dark subject matter is handled carefully, which I really like. I think Tess Sharpe did an amazing job.

3

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

by Holly Jackson

Your next thriller for teens is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, an award-winning book by Holly Jackson. It has an acclaimed audio version as well.

This book was a game changer for the Young Adult mystery thriller genre. I remember reading it and thinking: “Oh, my goodness, it’s so well-plotted”. It uses online articles and interview transcripts, and it’s got this really clever web of different characters, motives, and red herrings. It’s about a girl called Pip, who — for her final year project at school — decides to investigate the disappearance of local sweetheart Andie Bell, who vanished five years before the story takes place. The case has been closed because everyone in her small town believes that Andy was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal. But Pip isn’t convinced. She teams up with Sal’s younger brother Ravi, and starts to uncover secrets that a lot of people want to stay hidden.

Pip is such a determined, some would say obsessive, character. She is adamant that she is going to find out the truth without letting any of the stories that people tell about others get in the way. There’s a theme of how people create narratives about others, who often aren’t there to defend themselves, based on the stories they’ve experienced before, their internal biases and prejudices, and what they read in the media. There is a really horrible reporter character in the book who is extremely racist, and he’s worked hard to build Sal up as a monster in the press. He’s used Sal’s Indian heritage as a way to mark him out as a bad guy, and the people in the small town have bought into this. Pip wants to make sure that she follows the actual evidence to discover the truth. The book is all about how revealing the truth can be freeing and can help people, while false “truths” can ruin lives if enough people believe them.

It’s such an important point, to focus on facts and evidence to filter what’s true.

This book has a lot of good messages in it, and good people. You also get to know the victim as you read, and you learn that even though she was beautiful and popular and everybody thought she was the perfect girl, she actually wasn’t always a very nice person. She’s a very nuanced character, because the reason that she wasn’t very nice is that she had a pretty terrible father, who pitted her against her sister. It’s really cleverly done, and shows how outward impressions of people aren’t always the right ones. I think if any teenager hasn’t read anything in the mystery thriller genre, this book is a really good one to begin with. The characters start off just investigating, but then it becomes personal and their own lives end up in danger, so it’s quite exciting. It’s the first book in a series of three, and they’re all really good.

4

The Agathas

by Kathleen Glasgow & Liz Lawson

Let’s talk about your next pick of thrillers for teens, the bestselling The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.

This story is told from two points of view written by two different authors. This brings something really interesting to the book and I enjoyed the chemistry between the two main characters. Agatha Christie features heavily in the book and I really liked how one of the main characters has this whole storyline where she once disappeared for five days. This is a nod to Agatha Christie who disappeared for 11 days in real life, and nobody ever found out exactly what happened.

The book is about two teenage girls who team up to investigate the disappearance of a girl from their school. The first main character, Alice, used to be best friends with the missing girl, whereas the second point of view character, Iris, is motivated by wanting to use the reward money to escape town and start a new life. They want to solve the disappearance for different reasons, and they’re also very different people. Alice is from the top end of the socioeconomic spectrum. On paper she has everything, but she’s actually really lonely because her parents are never around. Iris is from a much poorer background, and she has some dark reasons for wanting to leave the town. I liked that everyone has their secrets in this book. At first the girls aren’t fully honest about who they are, but then they gradually open up to each other as the book goes along.

It’s one of the easier reads of the books that I’ve chosen, the reading equivalent of wrapping yourself in a big warm blanket and drinking a cup of hot chocolate. It feels familiar — not in the sense that it feels like it’s been done lots of times before, but that it was what I hoped it would be when I picked the book up. It’s clever and interesting and I really enjoyed it.

There is a very obvious nod to Agatha Christie in the title, but also perhaps in the way the policemen are completely useless. Instead of trying to understand what motivates a character, they assume that all teenage girls are the same.

Yes, that’s a very Agatha Christie thing, to have amateur detectives solving crimes while the police force does nothing useful. In this book, a pair of teenage girls do a better job of investigating a disappearance than the police, because they don’t get tied up with all kinds of prejudices. There is a sequel out now, The Night in Question, which I really want to read.

5

And Then There Were None

by Agatha Christie

Your final book pick is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, one of the bestselling novels of all time. This murder mystery thriller is not specifically for teens, but I remember enjoying her books in my early teens. Did you?

Yes, I loved Agatha Christie when I was a teenager, and she is one of the reasons I became a mystery thriller writer. I still think that her books have a lot in them that a teenager would enjoy today. The characters in Agatha Christie’s novels are brilliantly drawn and very clever. None of them are ever fully good or bad, they’re all extremely complex and interesting.

In And Then There Were None, you’ve got 10 strangers who are invited to stay on an isolated island off the Devon coast, which immediately makes you think bad things are probably going to happen. When they arrive, they all find themselves accused of murder, and they have no idea who is behind all these accusations or what their accuser wants from them. Then, when one of the 10 dies, they realise that someone on the island really is a murderer who is trying to make them pay for their past crimes. It’s a great book because a lot of the conflict comes from the characters turning on each other. They’re all horrible people so they don’t trust anyone else, and then their secrets start being revealed. I love this as a premise. One of the characters who dies near the end of the book at first comes across as the most reasonable, nicest character, but when you find out what they did to end up on the island, you realise that your first impression was completely wrong. They’re hiding something really dark and it reminds you that you can never really tell who anyone is on the inside.

There is a lot about the dark side of human nature in Agatha Christie’s novels.

Yes. I think this is my favourite book of hers. It has the tightest plotting of all of them, and it’s very clever. You’ve got fake deaths and red herrings thrown in everywhere. You don’t know who the killer is, and it doesn’t even really matter as you’re reading because you’re so invested in learning more about the characters themselves.

The confined space, the island, is the perfect setting for the atmosphere of fear and guilt.

Yes, the characters are isolated and can’t get away from each other or from their own secrets, so some of them start to lose their minds through guilt. I really like books that deal with guilt as a theme, and whether someone’s personal guilt is a greater punishment than legal recourse. The book is a very interesting character study and there is also an amazing TV miniseries from 2015.

Did it influence your own book Good Girls Die First?

Yes, it heavily inspired my book, in which 10 teenagers are blackmailed onto a carnival pier by a guilt-eating monster. There’s a big nod to And Then There Were None in that these 10 teenagers are all horrible characters who end up turning on each other. But that’s where the similarities end as my book also contains a lot of supernatural elements.

Much of the appeal of a thriller is escapism, but you have picked books that touch on various serious issues as well. More than one of the books features domestic violence, for example.

I like books that have a deeper message. All the books I’ve picked, even though they are a lot of fun on the surface, also deal with issues that actually matter to real teenagers.

Most of the teen characters in the books we have discussed are girls. Can you recommend any more teen thrillers with male protagonists?

Benjamin Dean’s books have some brilliant male protagonists, but the other Young Adult books I’ve recommended are narrated by girls. I think part of the reason for this is that a lot of authors writing for teens tend to be women, and I think a lot of us grew up in an era when there weren’t many girls starring in the books we had available to us. I personally went straight from reading children’s books to reading Stephen King and other authors like him, and the women weren’t always represented in a way that resonated with me. Those books didn’t feel like they were about me. So when I started writing, I wrote the books and characters I wished I had been exposed to as a teenager. But I do think there is a big gap in the market for more male characters to be having all of these adventures as well. A few thrillers I’ve enjoyed with boy protagonists include Whiteout by Gabriel Dylan, Wranglestone by Darren Charlton and Secrets Never Die by Vincent Ralph.

Is there anything else you would like to add about thrillers for teens?

It’s such a diverse genre, with books for everyone. You’ve got books like Tess Sharpe’s, which can be heavy at times. Sometimes that’s the kind of book I want to read, because it challenges me and makes me cry and changes my perspective on the world. Then there are books like Benjamin Dean’s, which are really humorous and fun but are also hiding a dark side and have an important message. The sort of books I write are all about the escapism. They are fun and often silly and rely heavily on tropes, because lots of people like tropes. I think there’s something for everyone in thrillers for teens.

Interview by Tuva Kahrs, Children's Editor

December 6, 2023

Fiction » Comics & Graphic Novels

The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies

recommended by Walt Hickey

Transforming a graphic novel into a movie might seem straightforward, but not everything that works on the page makes sense on the screen. Walt Hickey, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting, recommends five outstanding comics that were turned into films—with varying degrees of fidelity, and varying degrees of success.

Interview by Uri Bram

- Watchmen

by Alan Moore

- Heartstopper

by Alice Oseman

- I Kill Giants

by J.M. Ken Niimura & Joe Kelly

- Nimona

by ND Stevenson

- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

by Hayao Miyazaki

What determines whether a graphic novel is suitable for screen adaptation?

To make a graphic novel into a good movie requires an excellent graphic novel, and also requires the person who is adapting it to be willing to make really strong choices.

Lots of people who are casually looking at the space will look at a comic and think, ‘Perfect. They’ve made an excellent shot list with which I can make a movie.’ Oftentimes, movies that are filmed by viewing the comic as the pre-visualization will flop because the graphic novel is a fundamentally unique and imaginative medium that can do things with color that a director can only dream of.

Adapting a graphic novel or a comic into a film requires the audacity to maintain the heart of the story, to maintain the characters and understand what made people love them to begin with, and the willingness to take the necessary choices to make it suit a significantly shorter runtime, a significantly less complicated plot, and a visual medium where one’s hands are tied, compared to what can be done on the page.

You’ve worked on comics yourself; specifically, in 2022, you and your colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize for your graphic reportage on the plight of the Uyghur community in China. Can you tell us more about that project?

In 2021, I worked on, reported, and edited a comic profiling Zumrat Dawut, a Uyghur woman who, during her life in Western China, was arrested, sent to a detention facility, and tortured. Thanks to some dogged work from her husband, she was empowered to escape, and was able to flee the country and get to safety. A detention camp is not exactly an easy place to get a camera into. As a result, there was very little visual representation of the conditions and the difficulties that people faced in this system in Xinjiang province.

We adapted her story in a comic book format as a way to illuminate a very big problem that hadn’t been sufficiently illustrated in the press through traditional visual means, and to tell an incredibly searing and touching story about a woman who endured a lot and, I’m very glad to say, eventually made it to a safe place.

1

Watchmen

by Alan Moore

I’m really glad to hear that. Let’s talk about your recommendations: the first is Alan Moore’s groundbreaking 1980s comic Watchmen, can you please introduce us to this work?

I picked Watchmen for a lot of reasons. It’s arguably the most important comic book ever made. It fundamentally changed the way that the entire world viewed comic books and what they could accomplish, and everything that came after it is fundamentally different than all that came before it. The other reason I picked it is because if I did not pick it for this list, there would be pitchforks outside of my apartment, and I did not want that.

Typically, Silver Age comic books tended to be formulaic. We were very much at the start of something. We were watching people tackle a new medium and find how we can tell superhero stories within it.

Then, you get to the 70s and 80s, and you can watch the generation that was raised on comics come into its own. They take on those comic books and make them into plotlines more ambitious than anything you’d ever seen. Good examples of that are what Walt Simonson was doing with the Thor comics, and what Chris Claremont was doing with the X-Men comics. They took characters that had been established for mythology or ripped as genetic freaks, and they turned them into bold and audacious stories about enormous mythological consequences, consequential people’s lives, and day-to-day experiences of discrimination at the time, and adapted it for the era of LGBTQIA+ rights.

In the 1980s, you saw the comic medium get stocked with more talent than it’s ever had before, including people who were taking a somewhat critical or reactive eye to everything that had come before, and that’s when you get to Watchmen.

“We’re fundamentally visual creatures”

Watchmen is a revelation. It takes the characters that had been left in the dustbin of comic book history, reinvigorates them, and tells a story of realism and verisimilitude. What would actually genuinely happen if Superman was real? What would happen if God was American? What would happen if you had vigilantes roaming the streets? What if these people accumulated some degree of celebrity?

For a while, it was considered to be definitively, absolutely, no questions asked, un-remake-able. You could not make a film out of it; you could not make a television show out of it. This was held to be the gold standard of inability to adapt. Now we have two adaptations.

We have the 2009 Zack Snyder Watchmen film, which is very true to the comic illustration. He takes lots of the illustrations from the comic and very directly adapts them. And, we have the recent HBO, Damon Lindelof-led miniseries, which takes this as an inspiration. This is a world in which the events of Watchmen have happened. Necessarily, the world has changed as a result, and here are the people who are within it. It’s a world that explores some of the themes that are unexplored and explored within Watchmen itself.

This is my list of the best comics that have ever been adapted; not the best comic adaptations, necessarily. As far as graphic novels go—just in terms of historical import, its quality, the fact that the entire comic book world is unrecognizable after its creation, and the fact that to this day we’re still reconciling what this comic started, in terms of more nuanced portrayals of comic book heroism—you have to start the list with this one. Again, I’m begging people to leave their pitchforks at home.

You say the world was different before and after Watchmen—how so?

Watchmen introduces a new degree of moral complication. Not only had it never been imagined in comics before this, it was not printable. In many cases, these heroes are terrible people. They’re essentially archetypal figures that, in any of the pages that came before, would have been celebrated or had their edges sanded off. They are turned into monsters.

It forces us to contemplate the implications of a superpowered world in a way that has become very popular these days. You can look at shows like Invincible and The Boys. You can look at any of these postmodern takes. Some groups of people having significant amounts of power over other groups of people has ramifications that hadn’t been explored. You had the specific elements of it, such as with great power comes great responsibility, and you had different motivations and empathies for different kinds of characters.

The idea is that if the world was as it appears in the comic books we all know and love and contained the heroes that we all know and love, this world would be terrible; it would be worse. It would give power to terrible people and then celebrate them as heroes. That was a question for the entire format that only Alan Moore could pursue.

I’m talking about it at surface level because Watchmen needs to be read to be beheld. It’s fair to say that it was asking questions that not only hadn’t been asked before but hadn’t even been in the lexicon of superhero comics before then.

2

Heartstopper

by Alice Oseman

Your next recommendation for us is Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman, which started as a Tumblr webcomic. Can you tell us more about this work?

Let’s jump to the present. Heartstopper is an ongoing, bestselling graphic novel series and is extremely popular. If you walk into Barnes and Noble, they will practically hit you in the head with it immediately. You might know it because it is a massive Netflix hit. The reasons I wanted to talk about Heartstopper are some of its content, as well as what it means for our current era.

You came to me asking about graphic novels, and this is a very strange term that, at some point, meant a very specific novel designed to reach a very specific audience and write one single, defined story. Over time, it came to mean the collected editions of a larger comic book, whether or not they were conceived of as a novel in and of themselves.

Heartstopper started out as a webcomic. It was part of a new wave of comics— the vertical-scrolling comic that was innovated in South Korea and spread to the United States, specifically through platforms like Webtoon and Tapas (formerly known as Tapastic, originally as Comic Panda).

It is the most successful of its generation at this point, I would argue. There are a number of other comics that are extremely good and competitive, and some of them are in various different states of adaptation; but, as we speak in 2023, it is undeniable that Alex Oseman’s Heartstopper has been one of the most commercially and critically successful comics of this entire decade.

Heartstopper takes place in England at a public school (UK equivalent of prep school). It’s a gay romantic story between a somewhat geekier kid and a guy on the rugby team. It shows how the two protagonists, Nick and Charlie, confront the world around them, and the latent homophobia around them, but it’s a very pleasant read. ‘Cozy’ is a word that many would use to describe it.

While its plot—and this is not intended to diminish it—is not necessarily breaking any new ground; the manner in which it’s told is extremely compelling. Oseman’s art style has a reality to it that people really gravitate towards.

The series has been ongoing for a number of years now. It started in 2016. The understanding is that it’s in its final act now. The comics that are going to be coming out on the internet, and then published and aggregated, are winding towards their conclusion. It is impossible to think of a webcomic that has been more explosively successful as an adaptation than Heartstopper has been.

It is a sign of the times that even as we have countless superhero movies and dramas, and superheroes are becoming the definitive genre of our time, the comic that is arguably the most successful right now is Heartstopper. It is doing bananas numbers on Netflix. It was in the top 10 English language titles almost immediately. Based on Netflix’s methodology, within the first week, it got 24 million hours viewed. It is a juggernaut, in a way that is fundamentally difficult to comprehend.

One of the things that I enjoy about this in particular is that I have a very special place in my heart for LGBTQIA+ comics. There’s been a renaissance on the Web when it comes to the ability to tell stories about gay and lesbian and trans people, in a way that has never been offered through mainstream channels. Some of the most vibrant and exciting communities and conversations online around comics take place inside these communities.

This is, bar none, the most successful comic, but also the most successful of that world. It is a mainstream moment for a subculture that I have long been very fond of. That there’s an incredible amount of good work going on is very cool to see.

3

I Kill Giants

by J.M. Ken Niimura & Joe Kelly

Your next recommendation for us is I Kill Giants, by writer Joe Kelly and artist J. M. Ken Niimura. Can you tell us more about this work?

I Kill Giants was published by Image Comics in 2008 and was adapted into a feature film, which came out in 2017 and starred Zoe Saldana. I will be the first to say I did not care for the film very much at all. We have talked about what makes a successful adaptation and what makes an unsuccessful one. I think that the work that they were adapting may not have been the best suited for the film. Comics can do things visually that movies can’t, and this is an example of a book where I think the silver screen just came up short compared to the visuals of the book.

I will tell you straight up right now, of all the things that I am recommending on this list, this is one of the most searing and beautiful and compelling and interesting short stories that I have ever read. It is a magnificently drawn, beautiful limited series. There’s a genuine chance that as I describe some of the plot elements to you, I’m going to cry.

It’s about a girl who lives by the sea. She is a bit of an outsider. Every night she takes her big hammer and goes out to the sea and fights and kills giants. It’s very much a fantasy construction that is getting her through some interesting and difficult times. My voice is cracking because this is one of the best and most emotionally resonant books that I’ve ever read.

I am very happy that the people who made it got paid for the movie rights. I wish that the movie was as good as this. When we were talking about what you can do in the comic book medium in such a short amount of time, in such a parsimonious space, across just seven issues, this is a really good read. It is genuinely a remarkable book, and it’s definitely worth reading.

You make me want to read it. When you say comics can do things visually that movies can’t, what do you have in mind?

Limitations do exist within comics, but the visual language and the mechanisms with which you can tell stories in comics are unmatched by any other medium. You can get some more verisimilitude with film, but with film you can’t get the degree of imagination, visual flourish, and ambition of what you can represent, that you can on a two-page spread in a comic book. You can draw what you know.

With enough work, anything can be drawn and illustrated. When it comes to how you are able to tell stories by blending the visual with action and words, graphic novels are fundamentally different creatures from traditional novels. You’ll feel empathy far more readily with the protagonist of a graphic novel than you will with the protagonist of a novel.

I know that because I’ve worked in comic book storytelling when it comes to adapting news stories, such as the profile of Zumrat Dawut that we discussed earlier. We’ve seen stories of people that, when they’re in print, don’t necessarily resonate. You’re able to bring new perspectives to stories when you have a character that people can identify and see and fall in love with.

We’re fundamentally visual creatures. There is really no way around it. Comic books are not simply screenplays for eventual movie adaptations, and they are not just books that have pictures in them. In and of themselves, they are a truly exciting art form that allows you to tell stories that you can never tell otherwise.

4

Nimona

by ND Stevenson

That resonates for me. But you’ve mentioned that some movie adaptations of comics do work out well, and on that note your next selection for us is Nimona, by Eisner Award winner ND Stevenson. Can you tell us more about this science fantasy graphic novel and its film adaptation?

Nimona is the work of ND Stevenson, who went on to co-create Lumberjanes. He is extremely talented. He has been the showrunner, developer, and executive producer of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. He’s a classic rising star within art and animation.

Nimona was his first book. He did it as a thesis. This is such a cool thing about how creative work is done today: you can go back on ND Stevenson’s Tumblr from 2012 through 2014 and see him come up with the idea for this book, develop these characters, sketch them out, and develop a comic about them.

It’s a compelling book. It’s a little bit about queerness; it’s about identity. The main character is a shapeshifter and works with people who potentially have different morals and values than she does to take on the Institute, a big bad imperial and fascist apparatus. It is a charming, pretty, very good-looking book. It is visually innovative and it’s visually striking.

Nimona was adapted into a film. It was the last production of Blue Sky Studios, which was the computer animation studio that had been owned by Fox. When Fox was bought by Disney, Disney killed Blue Sky Studios. For a while, it looked like this film, which had so much heart put into it, was not going to get released. Eventually, they were able to cut a deal and sell it to Netflix.

The film has some serious Oscar juice behind it. It has received a lot of attention. It’s a lovingly crafted film. The animation style is very aligned with the comic itself. I think that this is an example of a really successful adaptation. In taking a webcomic and adapting it into a television show, you are taking some liberties, you are compressing character arcs, and doing all that kind of stuff.

Watchmen, somewhat notoriously, had a unique experience with adaptation despite being considered impossible to adapt. I Kill Giants, I think, was slightly botched. Nimona is a really good adaptation that, out of anything that we’re going to talk about today, best nails the source material.

5

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

by Hayao Miyazaki

Your last recommendation for us is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. Can you tell us more about this classic manga comic that became a beloved movie?

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a manga comic written in the eighties by Hayao Miyazaki, who would go on to become an acclaimed director. It would inspire his early feature-length film of the same name, which would go on to lay the groundwork not just for Studio Ghibli, not just for Japanese animation, but, I would argue, for animation in general, and for so much of what we’ve been able to see that medium accomplish over time.

If you want to tease it back to where it all began, the Nausicaä manga is where he was understanding how stories worked. You can see he always had a very intuitive sense of how these things proceeded, but I think you can see him becoming more and more imaginative as he writes this manga. You can see him working with different ideas that eventually show up in other places.

There’s a book called Shuna’s Journey, first published in 1983, that came out in English recently. You can see so many of the visual elements that he was working through in real time in Shuna’s Journey appearing in Nausicaä and in some of his later films.

Nausicaä was a big hit. The 1984 film adaptation was a big deal for many reasons, both for film and for the entire industry within Japan. Just in terms of these graphic novel series that can sometimes see an adaptation happen, it is genuinely worth a read.

It is charming. It reads very well. It is a little bit of its time, but you can tell that this is a guy who wanted to do his version of the Odyssey, just as he was developing. I think he’s at the height of his creative talents now, but you can tell that he already had a mastery of the craft back then. It has all the elements of what would become his career: his fascination with visually striking objects, his staunch environmentalism, flight. You can see it all here. It’s the blueprint for everything that he’d be doing for the next three decades.

The influence of his films and his aesthetics in general are everywhere, particularly within American comics, which are trying to evoke some of the Japanese perspective. I think that the entire world would be unrecognizable without this specific comic existing.

Speaking of the influence of comics on our world, your new book You Are What You Watch talks about how pop culture more broadly affects everything we do — can you tell us more about the book?

You Are What You Watch is all about the science of how pop culture impacts the world as a whole—whether that’s our society, our minds, our identities. Whether seeing somebody have a gay relationship in Heartstopper sparks something in you, whether I Kill Giants allows you to cope with grief or stress, these things leave us fundamentally changed in a way that, historically, we haven’t given them enough credit for.

In the book, I try to explore all the different ways in which our society—our science, our military, our minds, our bodies, our psychology, how we see the world and the people within it—is affected by things like this.

Time and time again, we have seen movies act as mechanisms for empathy. Various studies have been conducted in individual capacities showing that. For instance, people who had a very strong relationship with Harry Potter books while they were growing up tended to have a more favorable attitude towards immigrants, refugees and people who were potentially in a state of difficulty in their lives.

One of the things that I mention in You Are What You Watch is tourism. I think that people’s worlds really are broadened by reading because they will oftentimes embark to the very places that they see. The Lord of the Rings movies were a gigantic motivation for a ton of people to start traveling to New Zealand.

For a decade now, Japan has seen a surge in tourism, based on the Pokémon films and the Miyazaki movies. Americans want to visit the country that has produced so many of these interesting and beautiful objects that we’ve come to love. You can see people’s perceptions of the world around them consistently adapt, based on what they see in books.

Interview by Uri Bram

December 2, 2023

Nonfiction Books » Best Nonfiction of 2023

The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

recommended by Andrew Hill

If you like nonfiction books that will get you up to speed with what's going on in the world, the Financial Times annual book prize is a great place to start. If you run a business, one or two useful books also feature. Andrew Hill, the newspaper's senior business writer, talks us through the books that made the 2023 shortlist, from cobalt extraction in the Congo to how to manage the AI genie that's out of the bottle and coming towards us at speed.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

- Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

- Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive

by Amy Edmondson

- How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner

- Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

- Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

- The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

by Michael Bhaskar & Mustafa Suleyman

Before we get to the books, tell me a bit about this year’s Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. What were the highlights of 2023?

This year the prize had over 500 entries. That wasn’t a record. I never know quite how to gauge that: whether that means that some publishers didn’t submit as many books or whether there weren’t as many books published.

For only the second time that I can remember, we had a book that the judges called in and put directly onto the shortlist. This was Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. As the person who administers the prize, I would want it to be as rare as once a decade, because you want books to have gone through the longlist process. Isaacson’s book muscled its way onto the shortlist on the basis of being the newsy new book. That’s unusual but doesn’t say anything about its prospects to come out as a winner.

It’s an interesting shortlist because it divides into three pairs. One is natural resources and the environment – not so much climate change (although there was a climate change book on the longlist). Two of the books are about extractive natural resources. Those are Material World by Ed Conway and Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara.

Another theme was technology and AI. I didn’t think we would have any books about generative AI, because the big ChatGPT breakthrough that seemed to revolutionise everything didn’t happen until November of last year. But we had a couple of books on the longlist and Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, which is about technology advances, got through to the shortlist. A lot of books on the longlist addressed the effect of technology and automation on jobs and people. I guess one could put the Musk biography into that category because of the various technologies that he’s worked on.

Finally, speaking as the former management editor of the Financial Times and someone who’s been working on the prize for decades, I’ve always been not necessarily disappointed, but surprised that management books don’t get further. I think it’s because they’re written in a ‘this is a tool that you can use’ way and that doesn’t quite appeal to the judges. But this year there are two books on the shortlist which I consider to be management-y books: Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson and How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Interestingly, both are books about failing. How Big Things Get Done is about big projects, how they generally fail, and how to prevent them from failing. Right Kind of Wrong is about how to fail better.

1

Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

Let’s go through the books individually. Shall we start with Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future, by Ed Conway? I remember reading the beginning and being quite struck by it. He is watching gold being extracted and thinking, ‘I wonder whether I really needed that gold wedding ring, now that I’ve seen what has to happen in order for it to come into existence.’

What I like about this book—and he makes this point very clearly—is that this is stuff that you can see. Ed Conway is a journalist for Sky News and of course TV journalists are always looking for things that can be filmed. Our review of the book pointed out that it’s a shame that there aren’t more pictures in it. He’s trying to paint a picture, and you want to see what he’s seeing, which is the extraordinary effort that goes into mining the six vital materials that he focuses on: salt, sand, iron, copper, oil, and lithium.

He doesn’t underplay the environmental risks being run in order to get the materials that make up our daily lives, but this is a book that says, ‘Yay! Capitalism does things that actually make the world work.’ He’s clearly in awe, if you like, of the extraordinary human ingenuity that goes into producing these materials and then transmuting them into the things that we use day to day. From that point of view, if there’s a book on this list that doesn’t fit the template of outright scepticism about the world of business, this is probably it. This is the one that says, ‘There are risks here, and these need to be handled, but look at human ingenuity!’

2

Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive

by Amy Edmondson

Let’s turn to Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive, by Amy Edmondson, one of the two books about failing you mentioned. In recent years, I’ve read quite a bit about failure being good for you. What does this book bring to the picture?

Amy Edmondson is a very distinguished Harvard researcher, best known for having explored the concept of ‘psychological safety.’ This is the idea, which she pursues further in this book, that you can only advance and become more successful if you are in an environment where you can safely admit—and indeed call out—errors and mistakes being made.

She did a lot of work, which recurs in this book, in the healthcare sector. That’s where she started and where she discovered—slightly to her astonishment—that it wasn’t the teams that were making the fewest errors that were the most successful. It was the teams that were admitting to the most errors, because they were then able to correct and work together to improve.

That is the fundamental underpinning of her research and that of others in this area. She bases this on a fundamental point: that if we’re not able to admit to failure and to approach failure in a constructive way, we’re never going to want to take any risks. We’re not going to be able to make the smarter and more adventurous decisions that lead us to advance.

I find it a very compelling hypothesis, well backed up by research and interesting tales – everything from the Columbia shuttle disaster to open heart surgery – to show how we reached the level of sophistication that we now have in some of these vital areas. I think it’s an important book from an important researcher.

So it’s not so much a self-help book about me, personally, failing in my daily life and learning from that — it’s more about society at large?

Yes, but I think there are individual lessons here. There are some important workplace lessons. I interviewed Amy last year about psychological safety. I put her in touch with one of the CEOs I’d interviewed who runs a ‘failure Friday’, where you admit to what went wrong and you talk about it with your colleagues. So these sorts of ideas do have a practical, personal effect, but the book is not self-help. It’s at a more elevated level than that.

3

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner

Let’s go on to the other failure book: How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration, by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. That sounds exciting, it’d be nice to get some big things done right now.

This book is exceptionally interesting. Bent Flyvbjerg is an Oxford-based Danish academic. He is the main writer and it’s mainly based on his work, with Dan Gardner as co-author. Flyvbjerg’s work is to look at megaprojects and he poses a law of megaprojects: that they generally go over budget and over time and why this is bad.

In the current circumstances, in the UK, there’s HS2, which Flyvbjerg has written about and talked about, but there are lots of great examples. He’s very fond of the Sydney Opera House debacle because it was a Danish architect who designed it. He points out that it essentially deprived the world of this architect’s future work because he was in such despair at the portrayal of the Sydney Opera House as a failure that he didn’t design anything much after that.

There is a dictum in publishing that you don’t put the word ‘failure’ into your title because people find it depressing. But what’s great about reading about failure is the schadenfreude that readers can bring to it. This book is full of things going wrong that are great to read about. Not only Sydney Opera House-sized disasters, but also some slightly more recognisable ones. There’s a great account of a kitchen refurbishment – admittedly, a high-end one in New York – that went disastrously wrong. They draw a lot of personal lessons from this that make this book a really interesting read.

4

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Let’s move on to Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. I’m not generally drawn to biographies of tech gurus, but I read Isaacson’s book about Steve Jobs to prepare for a Five Books interview, and I was blown away by it. I was expecting great things from his Elon Musk book, but the reviews have been mixed. What’s your impression of the book?

The first thing to mention is that this is the second Elon Musk biography that has been on the short or longlist of the award. A few years ago, Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, was on the longlist. Everybody thought it was great, but obviously Elon Musk was in an earlier phase of his rise to multibillionaire-dom.

This book is at a later phase, but it still isn’t done, as the book makes clear. Inevitably, you’ve got to put a full stop somewhere. The Steve Jobs biography came out just after Jobs had died, so, in a sense, there was a roundness to it that any Musk biography that comes out now isn’t going to achieve.

Isaacson sat at the feet of Musk – literally, in the same room as Musk – for two or three years, I think. The whole second half of the book is about the last three years, so it’s very detailed. It’s very much reporting. He doesn’t step back except right at the end, and then to make a rather general point about how you need the good and the bad in order to have a genius (which was similar to the Steve Jobs conclusion, if I remember correctly). Isaacson doesn’t say, ‘I’m now going to make a judgment on what’s happened.’ It’s very much an account of being with this extraordinary, tempestuous entrepreneur.

From that point of view, it fits into the historical record. Some of the things that have happened in the last few years, including the Twitter takeover, SpaceX, and Tesla — all the events that we’ve read about — are recounted from the Musk point of view in quite a lot of detail.

It’s a long book with very short chapters. It’s quite punchy, in that sense of ‘OK now we’re moving on’ which gives you a bit of an impression of what it must be like to live with or work with Elon Musk. But it doesn’t then step back and say how significant it is.

And, surprisingly, as somebody else pointed out recently, it’s not much about his businesses, as you might expect. There’s not a whole lot about ‘how has he managed to build this?’ It’s very much about the entrepreneurial leader.

Is there anything about Elon Musk that perhaps we don’t know that we’ll learn from this biography?

I think one of the revelations is that he has more children than we thought.

Putting my management hat back on, you get a bit more of an impression of this dynamo who is driving everything. One thing that stuck with me was this idea that he’ll take what had been, until Musk came along, a bureaucratic process, like launching a rocket, a lot of which is to do with safety and protocols, and he will tear it down to its bare essentials.

There’s a point where he says, ‘other than safety, I don’t want any codes or protocols or specifications that are going to get in the way of making this more efficient and simpler’, which is an interesting approach. He’s clearly a huge risk taker. That’s obvious already, but you see quite a lot of him saying, ‘We could do this quicker’ or ‘We could do this bigger.’ He takes these decisions – to the astonishment and, at times, panic of his staff – to push it to the limit.

5

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

Let’s turn to Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara. At the beginning of the book, the author goes to the mining region of Katanga. It’s like scenes from the 19th century, with people working for very little money in horrible conditions.

Yes. I’ve been reading it on an iPad and it does make you put down your iPad and think, ‘What is in this thing that I am reading from?’ It’s about cobalt, a vital raw material and one that probably could have made it into Ed Conway’s Material World as a seventh critical material. It’s vital, particularly for rechargeable batteries, and therefore hugely in demand.

Siddharth Kara goes, literally, deep into the holes being dug, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by artisan miners who are pulling rocks from the ground in the most extraordinary circumstances. Kara interviews the workers and the traders who are buying it and, he alleges, putting it into the formal supply chain. There’s a shocking moment where he just throws in that none of them has ever held a mobile phone. And yet, they’re at the very end of the chain that leads to our iPhones and our electric cars.

It is a shocking account, and he sets it in the context of the terrible history of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – previously Zaire, and before that the Belgian Congo – as a place that has been exploited, from the word go, for these minerals, which could have made its people wealthy and prosperous and well looked after.

It’s a shocking indictment and his underlying polemical point is that there are big companies who are whitewashing this out of the record, who are claiming to have a clean supply chain. His essential contention is there is no such thing as clean cobalt.

What’s upsetting is that this is a country of nearly 100 million people.

Yes, and his point is that at the top end – the bottom end, ethically speaking – of the DRC, there are people making out like bandits. There are literal bandits in this book, and there are also politicians who are creaming off an extraordinary amount of money.

The other interesting point that comes out in the book is the involvement of China. These artisan miners are almost exclusively selling their product to Chinese traders. And so, clearly, the Chinese and China, as a state, are deeply embedded in this supply chain. He recounts appalling racist comments from one of the traders, talking about the unwillingness of the Congolese to work hard and organise themselves. This Chinese gentleman suggests that only the Chinese can organise them to make money. But all the money is going somewhere else. It’s pretty shocking.

6

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

by Michael Bhaskar & Mustafa Suleyman

Let’s turn to the final book on the 2023 Business Book of the Year shortlist: The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar. Tell me about this book.

The Coming Wave is in that category of books I mentioned about technological progress and its consequences. It sets the advances in automation and in synthetic biology (e.g., gene splicing and DNA printing) and in quantum computing—these current waves of technology—in the context of what happened with past waves, including the Industrial Revolution, and the Luddites, who, bizarrely, crop up in three of this year’s longlisted books. (One of the longlisted books that didn’t make the shortlist – Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant – is actually about the Luddites).

In the context of the history of technological advances, it’s asking, ‘What can we expect?’ It poses the question: ‘Can we contain the bad consequences of fast-moving technological advance and if so how?’

The main author, Mustafa Suleyman, who worked with Michael Bhaskar on the book, is a co-founder of DeepMind, which is now owned by Google. Google and DeepMind are at the heart of some of the technologies mentioned here that are being developed.

In the book, he points out that he started out thinking he was going to write a very optimistic book, as a techno optimist himself, and became more pessimistic. It ends with the anguished idea that we’re trying to contain the uncontainable. Suleyman thinks containment is the way to approach this. It can’t be regulated away: there isn’t enough that any individual regulator can do. But he lays out some ways in which he thinks that the potentially lethal consequences of some of these advances might be contained and channelled.

He makes a lot out of the positive aspects as well, all the amazing things that you can do by combining AI, quantum computing, and synthetic biology, in terms of preserving and extending life, and making life better.

But the overall impression I got from the book is that it’s a warning. We’ve got to work now to think about ways in which we can at least impose some guardrails that prevent this becoming a disaster for humanity. And that, as I say, is slightly echoed in some of the other books that made it to the longlist this year.

What is the worst-case scenario, then, if everything goes wrong, and we don’t manage to put in those guardrails?

There are various ways in which he thinks we could get this wrong. In AI, there’s the possibility that you end up with self-generating solutions that turn out not to be beneficial for wider humanity, a race to the bottom between AI-fuelled machines or the risk of weaponisation – it could be literal weaponisation – of these tools to go after somebody else or another state. Part of his warning is that accidents happen when humans are involved in doing this stuff. We do not necessarily get things right all the time, which brings us back to our books on failure.

What he’s suggesting is that you need to have some context around this, involving regulators and governments and some of the private sector actors working together to prevent those things happening, or, at least, to have a game plan for if they do. I didn’t come out of this book whistling a happy tune, but it’s a contribution to the way in which that worst-case scenario can be mitigated or even avoided.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

November 30, 2023

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Nonfiction Books

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

recommended by Frederick Studemann

If you're looking for compelling stories that also happen to be true, the UK's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction is a great place to start. Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times, talks us through the six brilliant books that made the 2023 shortlist, from a gripping account of a 2016 firestorm in Alberta to the shadow the Cultural Revolution continues to cast over today's China.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

- Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

by John Vaillant

- Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century

by Jennifer Homans

- Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

by Jeremy Eichler

- Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849

by Christopher Clark

- Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

by Tania Branigan

- Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children

by Hannah Barnes

For people who haven’t come across the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction before, could you start by telling us what kind of books you, as judges, were looking for?

We aren’t looking for any one type of book, it doesn’t have to be (say) memoir or about the news—about war or climate change. What we were going for—the criteria which we established right at the outset—were originality of topic and of approach. Has someone gone for a different, interesting way of getting into a subject? That then leads into how well it is executed, which is a different way of saying how well it is written.

Another criterion was relevance. Is this book something we all should be thinking about now? ‘Now’ could be quite long. It doesn’t have to be all about Gaza. It could be about long-term or deeper things that are playing out that we’re living through.

Also, very crudely, how enjoyable is the book? Or entertaining, even? For instance, on the longlist, we had a wonderful book called The Wager. The author certainly made a decent case that the book was exploring the early period of globalisation, empire, and colonisation, and the economic and social underpinnings of that. But it was also a great adventure story, about a group of British ships that set sail as a diversionary tactic in a bigger conflict with Spain. One ship, the Wager, which was cursed almost from the start, had a very strange crew of people, including Byron’s grandfather on it. They were shipwrecked in South America, and it’s an extraordinary story of rebellion, mutiny, and—almost—cannibalism and how they somehow get home.

If you take all those things, no single one is going to trump everything else, but it’s how they all interplay.

1

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

by John Vaillant

Let’s start with Fire Weather by author and journalist John Vaillant. This is a climate change book, about a wildfire that wreaked havoc in 2016 in Alberta, Canada. Could you tell me a bit about the book and what you liked about it?

This book comes out of that fine North American tradition of nonfiction writing—a deeply researched and meticulously told account of a real event. It’s about a fire that happened up in the subarctic region of Canada, which is, by definition, very remote.

It’s a very hard place to earn a living and it tells you a lot about human beings that tens of thousands of people have moved up there to work in the tar sands industry. This is a part of the oil industry that should be marginal because it’s very difficult to get the oil out. You have to expend huge amounts of electricity and natural gas to lift the sands and then to melt and render out the oil. That, in itself, is a remarkable thing.

Fire Weather tells the story of what happens when everything goes wrong and the unthinkable happens. It’s the boreal forest up there, and forest fires are nothing new—they happen quite regularly. It’s a way that nature cleans up a bit, to put it simplistically. But this fire in 2016 went completely out of control. There are various reasons for that, but it points to a bigger issue around changes in the climate. The author gives you a very vivid account of that extraordinary event, which affected 90,000. It destroyed much of this place, Fort McMurray, and made a lot of people homeless. 2,400 structures were destroyed and 1,000 more were damaged.

The physics he describes is extraordinary. The fire gets up to a level where nothing can resist it. Things that you would think are indestructible just go. Metal goes, solid structures go. It’s out of control. Some of the almost poetic parts of the book are how he describes fire as this thing in itself: how it operates on its own laws, and what it needs to keep going. That includes oxygen, of course, but also everything to do with fossil fuels. It is not just the tar sands or bunkers of petrol: much of our houses is now made of things that come from fossil fuels. Plastics are the obvious one, but there are lots of others. Once a fire gets going, these are just kindling and further fuel for the fire.

It’s one of those stories that goes from utterly focused, diligent reporting—minute-by-minute tracking people as they’re fleeing from their homes and trying to take their pets and the house is blowing up—through to the bigger picture of the oil industry, going to the most remote places on earth to engage in the most insanely arduous processes to extract oil and pump it out because there’s some money to be made. It’s about all the political dynamics around that, who is in charge of those industries in that part of the world and then, into the bigger picture of the environment. It’s about the economics, the environmental state and the changes that we’re living through.

It covers this extraordinary canvas. It makes you think about an issue that we hear a lot about and puts it into a very real moment.

Judging from the reviews, it’s also very gripping.

Totally. That comes out of that tradition I mentioned. It’s that intense detail—all the eyewitnesses’ quotes feeding in. There’s the blow-by-blow account of what the local radio station is putting out as they themselves are facing the decision of whether to keep broadcasting or to make a run for it. It’s very alive.

2

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century

by Jennifer Homans

Let’s move on to the next book. This is Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans. I always associate the name Balanchine with The Nutcracker because when I lived in New York, I would go and see that version of the ballet at Christmas. Tell me about this book.

This is a book about George Balanchine, the great choreographer. This book slightly snuck up on a few of us because ballet is not something I’m that interested in: I spent time taking our daughter to ballet classes for several years, but it’s not an area I’m totally familiar with.

It’s a big book. It’s a biography of a man who almost walks with the 20th century, so you get all that history. Balanchine was of Georgian heritage and grew up in Tsarist Russia. Early on, he was selected to go into the Imperial Ballet School, so he’s on that track. Then, the Russian Revolution happens and everything falls into turmoil on all fronts. There’s a lot of hunger, violence, and chaos.

Interestingly, the Communists decided that their approach to culture was not going to be totally avant garde and progressive. They assume a lot of the culture from the imperial period but give it a people’s interpretation. The ballet becomes what it became throughout the Soviet decades—a showcase. Within the Soviet system, a very elitist high art form was adopted.

Balanchine parts company with that, as a young man, as do a lot of others. They come on a wandering journey via Berlin and Paris and London. So many of those Russian emigres—Nabokov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky—get out of Russia.

Balanchine eventually winds up in America, where he meets well-connected benefactors and cultural managers. They feel that American ballet hadn’t yet achieved the same level of institutional high standing as Europe. They have the ambition to rectify that and are keen to use people like Balanchine and others who had come over to the US. Eventually, Balanchine sets up the New York City Ballet Company, which, in effect, becomes the country’s national ballet.

It is an extraordinary story with lots of incidents. It covers what he did through the decades in the States. In his final years, a very moving period, he goes back to the Soviet Union as a Westerner. He’s still got family there, and we see how he negotiates that.

The parts I read were quite magical, which fits: as a choreographer, Balanchine was selling magic.

The book works, I think, because it’s written by a ballet critic. Dance is a difficult thing to write about. Homans manages that while putting it within this extraordinary context. It’s a particular cultural history of the 20th century. Even though it’s quite long, it is written in a way that carries you with it.

3

Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

by Jeremy Eichler

Next up is another fascinating and quite unexpected book. This is Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance. Tell me about this one.

This is one of the most ambitious books that I’ve read recently. Jeremy Eichler looks at four composers—Strauss, Shostakovich, Britten, and Schoenberg—who were witness to some of the most shocking events of the 20th century. These are events like the Holocaust, the terror in the Soviet Union, and the bombing of Coventry and he looks at how they are reflected in their music. How did these composers incorporate them or address them through music?

The book then looks at how music can be a medium of memory. These composers were there, they were able to have an immediate reaction. By nailing it, we, coming a lot later, can get close to those events by listening to the music. In essence, the music is almost like a time portal: it cuts through the decades—centuries, even, by now—to bring you back to an experience, which, in these cases, was truly terrifying.

Eichler is a North American music critic. This book is a life’s work and draws on years of research, of knowledge, of thinking. It’s told in a way that is very learned. It tries to move in various registers and tell the story as you go along.

We see the siege of Leningrad via Shostakovich. The Benjamin Britten sections cover everything from the obliteration of Coventry to his own experience of going into the concentration camps when they were liberated. Britten was able to attach himself to a cultural corps that was going in to witness what was happening.

It’s a remarkable book because it challenges you to think about how you remember things, and where memory lives. Coming at it through the aural sense—how you hear—is quite original. The book is throwing an idea at you that you didn’t necessarily expect.

And, as you’d expect from a book shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, he draws you in right from the beginning. It opens with a description of Goethe’s mythical tree at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

Yes. What you learn about European cultural and intellectual history along the way is quite something.

4

Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849

by Christopher Clark

Next up we have a history book about the 1848 revolutions. This is Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring. It’s quite a long book, so not one to go for if you want a quick summary.

Christopher Clark is one of the great historians of our moment. He writes very elegantly and smoothly, so even though it’s long, you could read shorter books that would be more of a struggle. You might instinctively lean towards saying it’s a traditional big history book. He takes a topic and goes at it to tell you a big story.  He’s very learned, has read everything and thought about everything.

He does find original avenues of approach to events that, he claims, are largely forgotten. If you studied 1848 at school, you might have a vague notion that Marx reflected on it. Other than that, it’s not really in the canon: it’s not the French Revolution, or the First or Second World War. It’s somehow lost. He’s saying, ‘Hang on! This was an extraordinary moment because across pretty much the whole of Europe, there was a form of uprising or revolution.’

It happened in spring, they’d fallen out with each other by the summer, and by the autumn the counter-revolution kicked in and the whole thing was “over.” But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see here. It had profound influences that we still feel today.

Clark goes back and describes—and I thought these were the most interesting parts of the book—the Europe of the early and mid-19th century. What you see there are lots of conflicting movements and tides—some of them quite dynamic, some of them quite static—driven by industrialisation, the collapse of the old order, new ideas about how society should be organised etc. Something is bubbling up. It’s not one thing: lots of things are interacting that are quite complex.

He draws an analogy and asks, ‘Does any of this sound familiar?’ In the world we’re living in now, there are these new developments. In our age, a lot of it is around technology and what that is doing to all our societies, from personal relationships to whether you’re going to have a job to who has the most money.

He organises that all quite well into a big picture, then tells you about the revolutions themselves as you go through the year. He then reflects on what their legacy was. He says that every country in continental Europe was, in some form, reconstituted after that event and re-tuned for the modern era.

It’s a work of history that drags your perspective to somewhere you didn’t expect. It causes you to pause. Where Christopher Clark is really good is that he brings to life that world as a historian. He goes through the annual bills for a weaver in Lyon, and says, ‘This is how much you got paid. This is how much your rent was. This is how much bread cost.’ You realise the social distress for many people at a very basic level: something was going to give.

5

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

by Tania Branigan

We’re now at Red Memory by Tania Branigan, about the Cultural Revolution. I’ve read quite a few memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. It even featured in a Chinese crime novel I was reading recently. I’m interested to hear what this book brings to the picture.

Yes, it’s not totally uncovered territory, and you could also point to important works by historians like Frank Dikötter.

Tania Branigan was a journalist for The Guardian in China and what she realised is that there was this spectre she kept encountering, which was the unspoken legacy of the Cultural Revolution. It was obvious everyone knew, but no one wanted to dwell on it, or talk too much about it. It was a mass, collective experience, so most people she was encountering had either been through it themselves or their parents had been through it. Essentially, it has deformed Chinese society.

The book goes right through to President Xi, whose father had been a big wheel in the Communist Party. He then fell from favour and was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, as was Xi himself. Now he’s behaving with ever-increasing authoritarian tendencies, which is quite strange.

What Tania Branigan does very elegantly and assuredly is tell the story in a very human way. We meet people, and then she goes back and tells the whole story. The violence is appalling—it’s just unbelievable. Schoolchildren were kicking their teachers to death. It’s about how everyone has buried that or reconfigured the story to tell it differently.

We all felt that the book was very well written, very vivid, and pertinent to China which is, obviously, one of the big stories of our time. There are many ways to understand China, and this is one way to understand Chinese society today, if you’re looking at it from the outside with not a lot of knowledge. You come away learning a lot about it.

At a broader level, again this book is about memory, trauma, and history. Look at what’s going on right now. How do you deal with evil behaviour that has happened in your midst? You may even be responsible for it. It might be within your family, or it’s your next-door neighbour.

6

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children

by Hannah Barnes

The last book to discuss on this year’s shortlist is Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, by Hannah Barnes. Could you explain what this book is about, bearing in mind that some of our readers aren’t in the UK and might not have heard of this clinic.

The Tavistock Clinic was—it’s in the process of being shut down or reconstituted—a pioneering institution for the study and treatment of gender dysphoria. When it was set up, it was if not unique, one of very few places where these treatments were offered for children.

Hannah Barnes is a journalist with BBC’s Newsnight. In this book she tracks the story of how an institution that was set up with very good intentions to do necessary work lost the run of it, you might say. Things went awry to the point where it was overwhelmed by demand. That may have been a significant factor in why they then started to attract criticism about treatments not being appropriate, in terms of who was getting them, and how when certain things were red flagged—that maybe certain treatments weren’t appropriate or had gone wrong—that there wasn’t the mechanism within the system to acknowledge and address that. There was a culture of covering up because the clinic was operating in a societal context where the whole issue around gender and transitioning had become very charged, with deeply and fervently held views in the debate.

This is not an easy subject to write about, in the UK or anywhere else, but particularly in Britain  at the moment. There have been a number of books that have sought to address the trans issue, coming at it from different perspectives. Some are pro and some are more critical and, very quickly, the authors and the books  attract quite savage criticism.

Barnes manages to give a very calm, well-researched account. She’s not taking sides about any policies, but she is talking about institutional failure. It’s about how you can start in a good place and how things can go wrong. The management breaks down and then there are bad consequences for everyone, both for the patients and for the clinic which has effectively been shut down. The services will still be available, but it’s been reconstituted and it will be organized differently.

Beyond the trans issue, the book tells you something about the inner workings of the NHS, one of the biggest institutions in the world that employs well over one million people.

It’s an extraordinary beast and running it must be a nightmare. Recently, there have been a number of scandals in Britain. There’ve been terrible stories about neglect or even killing of children. Everyone goes, ‘How could this happen?’ With this book, you can see how within this complex organisation, the management of certain things gets lost. It’s too unwieldly, almost. On a micro level, Barnes illuminates how money and resources and attention get divvied up. It’s a complicated piece of journalism to get right. The book is quite a brave endeavour, in that it could attract quite a lot of criticism. She manages it by not being polemical. She shows her workings. There’s lots of data, people on the record, and documents that she puts out there.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

November 15, 2023

Fiction » Best Fiction of 2023

The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist

recommended by Cal Flyn

Every year, the judges for the Booker Prize read more than a hundred books that have been submitted by their publishers in the hope of being recognised by one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. The 2023 shortlist features a novel-in-stories, an Irish dystopia, and plenty of family drama.

- Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

- The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

- If I Survive You

by Jonathan Escoffery

- Western Lane

by Chetna Maroo

- This Other Eden

by Paul Harding

- Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

This year’s Booker Prize judging panel was headed by Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, a past Five Books interviewee who has herself been twice-shortlisted for the prize. She was assisted by the actress Adjoa Andoh, poet and critic Mary Jean Chan, the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, and the actor Robert Webb. Here’s a brief round-up of the six books they have selected as the best novels of 2023.

1

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song

The winner of the Booker Prize is notoriously difficult to predict, but this year’s favourite was always Paul Lynch’s darkly foreboding novel set in a dystopian, semi-familiar Ireland. It opens with a knock on the door from the newly formed secret police—and soon our protagonist’s husband, a trade unionist, has disappeared and she is left to face her family’s uncertain future alone. Lynch has explained that the novel grew out of his anxieties in the post-Trump, ‘post-truth’ era: “I wondered about how the real is no longer real, how misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority. I wanted to understand where all this might lead,” he said. “Prophet Song took shape as a dystopian ruse that seeks to explode the form. How can such a novel be speculative when what is happening on these pages belongs to the here and now?” The Booker judges said it was “a shocking, at times tender novel that is not soon forgotten”; it has “one of the most haunting endings you will ever read.”

Lynch, an Irish novelist based in Dublin, has published four previous novels and has won several major awards, including the Kerry Irish Novel of the Year for Grace (2017) and France’s Prix Gens de Mers for a translation of Beyond the Sea (2019). Prophet Song reportedly took him four years to write: it is presented as a block of text, without paragraph breaks, and the prose has a propulsive, lyrical quality that is challenging but readable. One for fans of Cormac McCarthy‘s bleaker work—an excerpt from The Crossing appears as an epigraph.

2

The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting

Informed observers also had their eyes on Paul Murray’s tragicomic family saga The Bee Sting, in which we view the world through the eyes of four members of the Barnes family in a revolving carousel of perspective that has seen the novel compared to the work of Jonathan Franzen. Imelda’s first love died tragically in a car accident; heartbroken, she found herself marrying his brother in his place. Dickie assumed the role of his dead sibling in other ways too, taking on the family business and living in denial his homosexual identity. Cass and PJ, their teenage children, are busy with their own identity crises as their bewildered parents break down. “The characters are unforgettable,” declared the Booker judges. “They persist with hope and are capable of startling moments of love and generosity, despite their myriad flaws and problems.” The Guardian declared that “you won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.”

The Bee Sting is Murray’s fourth novel, and channels the same riotous teenage angst of his 2010 bestseller Skippy Dies, an unruly mystery set in an elite boy’s boarding school. That too was longlisted for the Booker. 2023 wasn’t Paul Murray’s year, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in the running again in future.

3

If I Survive You

by Jonathan Escoffery

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You

This much-buzzed book of interlinked short stories that has already been nominated for a host of other prizes including America’s National Book Award, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. If I Survive You portrays members of a Jamaican family making their lives in Miami from the 1970s onwards; its eight-part structure makes it more of a fictional mosaic than a straightforward story. This prompted a little grousing over the book’s eligibility, although the Booker rules simply state that books under consideration should be “unified and substantial”—the family is the thread that binds Escoffery’s episodes together.

Despite its sometimes heavy subject matter—characters face poverty, racism, and tricky family dynamics—it has a “peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism”, said The New Yorker: Escoffery’s inventive and experimental approach to fiction “is marked by ingenuity.” If you’d like to get more of a sense of the style, his story Pestilence is available online at Electric Literature.

4

Western Lane

by Chetna Maroo

Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane

The book that jumped out at me, personally, from the shortlist this year was Chetna Maroo’s strange, sparse little novel about a Jain family living in Luton, England. In the aftermath of their mother’s death, the youngest of three daughters become fixated on the sport squash, spending hours training at a local sports centre with her father every day. Together they drive troubling thoughts of death from their minds with a regimen of drills, ‘ghosting’, sprints, and increasingly desperate matches. Although I’m not particularly athletic, I do have a soft spot for sporting novels—which tend to feature singular characters with obsessive mindsets and near-mystical descriptions of physical exertion. Though very different in terms of content, in style it reminded me of Sally Rooney thanks to its restrained evocation of complex emotions and fraught interactions.

In Western Lane, Maroo’s debut, we see squash as an act of sublimation. “In many ways, this intimate sport is loneliness itself,” noted Ivy Pochoda, former US squash champion and New York Times reviewer: “The game of squash becomes a way into Gopi’s grief and her attempts to process it. Only on the court does she have space to grieve alone, independent of her sisters, to submit to the void and find her footing within it.”

5

This Other Eden

by Paul Harding

Paul Harding’s This Other Eden

There were three Pauls on the shortlist this year—what are the chances? Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 debut Tinkers. This new book, his third, is a work of historical fiction inspired by the true story of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine where former slaves made their homes alongside Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The self-sufficient, racially-integrated community was disbanded by the US government in 1911 when the residents were evicted in the name of public health. “Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time,” as one character observes, prophetically—and sure enough this unique, rag-tag community is soon no more.

The Washington Post praised it as a “beautiful, brooding” book of “determined hope”: its “rich, unvarnished” portrait of island life is shaped by “long, cascading sentences [that] rush forward to encapsulate as much complexity as they can.” The judges said it was a “heartbreakingly beautiful” novel, noting that they were moved by Harding’s “the delicate symphony of language, land, and narrative.”

6

Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience

Rounding off the 2023 Booker Prize shortlist is Scottish Canadian writer and literary scholar Sarah Bernstein’s unsettling, enigmatic second novel about a woman who moves to an isolated, northern town in another country to look after her brother after his wife leaves him. Soon the brother departs too, leaving her in a town where nobody likes her and where she does not speak the language. “I was not from the place,” the unnamed, unreliable narrator notes, “and so I was not anything.” It’s an allusive book that will reward the reader who does not seek hard answers to the uncomfortable questions that haunt this atmospheric text.

In mid-November, Study for Obedience won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious prize for fiction. Bernstein was also recently flagged by Granta as one of Britain’s best young novelists; you can also find a short extract from this book on the Granta website, if you’d like to get a flavour of the book before committing.

November 25, 2023

History Books » Historical Figures

The best books on Napoleon

recommended by Andrew Roberts

How did Napoleon Bonaparte, an upstart Corsican, go on to conquer half of Europe in the 16 years of his rule? Was he a military genius? And was he really that short? Historian Andrew Roberts, author of a bestselling biography of Napoleon, introduces us to the books that shaped how he sees l'Empereur—including little-known sources from those who knew Napoleon personally.

Interview by Charles J. Styles

- The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

- Talleyrand

by Duff Cooper

- With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign

by John H Gill

- Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon

by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort

- With Napoleon in Russia: Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza

by Armand de Caulaincourt

If you were to explain the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) to someone who knew nothing about him, what would you say?

I’d set aside his military achievements—conquering half of Europe in the 16 years of his rule between 1799 and 1815—as all of those had completely disappeared by the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Instead, I’d concentrate on those aspects of his rule that can still be seen in France and in much of Western Europe today.

I argue that although he didn’t have much to do with the French Revolution itself, as he was too young, he nonetheless kept the best bits of the Revolution—equality before the law, religious tolerance, meritocracy—for France and the countries that France conquered. The Code Napoleon was still in effect in the Rhineland until 1900, for example, and it underlies modern European legal systems to this day.

He got rid of the worst bits, like the mass guillotining, the Reign of Terror, the various mad ideas they had like the ten-day week, abolishing Christianity, and so on. He was the person who brought France into the 19th century with huge reforms of administration and finance. He was a moderniser.

You mentioned his relationship with the Revolution. I think there’s something paradoxical about it. He’d declare things like “I am the Revolution”, and the Napoleonic Code did enshrine revolutionary principles like civic equality into law. But didn’t he also curtail the rights of women and reinstate slavery in the Caribbean sugar colonies? Some would argue that the main constitution itself was structurally undemocratic, with an unelected senate, even if it was put to the people in a plebiscite.

The Code Napoleon was not good for women, but then they were hardly over-endowed with rights before the Revolution. He went on to abolish slavery, of course, not once but twice. He did reinstitute it in 1802, but abolished it again in 1814. So, he had an in-out/in-out policy with slavery. When I say a ‘moderniser’, I mean a moderniser in the context of the times, not a moderniser in the context of Tony Blair.

Joining the dots between the French Revolution and Napoleon’s ascendency, how did France go from establishing a Republic and executing their king to welcoming an emperor barely a decade later?

I think his military successes first in Italy in 1796 and also in 1800 as well as his creation of the civil code were essential to understanding how they able to recognise that he wasn’t a king. Being an emperor and being a king were very different things. They were perfectly happy to have an empire, which they saw as being based on republican principles, with a Napoleon rather than Bourbon at the top of the tree.

So, there wasn’t any lingering republican resistance?

No, there was—especially in the army. The French army was considered to be highly republican. There was resistance from people like Marshal Bernadotte to Napoleon calling himself an emperor in December 1804. But it was not unpopular in the rest of the country.

I really enjoyed your own biography of Napoleon, which was awarded the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon. It’s an excellent read and continues to be an international bestseller in both UK and US editions. It was also one of the first books to build upon the publication of some 33,000 of Napoleon’s letters. I’m curious to know what you found to be the most striking revelations from them. Did they overturn any major myths?

There are still dozens of myths and misconceptions about Napoleon. But what I came across most powerfully among the letters was his capacity for compartmentalising his mind. He could completely ignore what was happening at the time, even during or after battles or when the Kremlin was burning, and concentrate on running parts of his empire, or on setting up the rules of a girls’ school, or on telling a prefect that he shouldn’t be seen at the opera with his mistress. He had this incredible capacity for, as he put it, pulling out a drawer in his mind, dealing with whatever was in it, and then closing it again.

If we’re talking about myths, I suppose the main one to get out of the way is his height!

Yes, he was the average height of a Frenchman of the day. He was not small. The way in which he was portrayed by Gillray and Rowlandson and the other British caricaturists of the day was to make him look small for political reasons. He was precisely my height, actually; he was five feet, six inches. The French inch is ever so slightly different from the English inch, which was another reason why he was thought to be small. But when his corpse was measured by however many doctors there were, it was recognised that he was a perfectly normal, average height.

1

The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

Your first book choice is The Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler. Can you tell us about this one and why you’ve recommended it?

It’s a totally comprehensive history of all of Napoleon’s campaigns. Chandler wrote it, I think, in the late 60s, and yet it still holds up very well as an overall history of Napoleon’s fighting. Perfectly understandably, it doesn’t include everything else about Napoleon—the politics, the personality, the 27 mistresses and all the rest of it—nor is it intending to do that. It’s just doing the military side of it all. But it is an absolutely encyclopaedic run-through of all of Napoleon’s battles.

So, this is a must-have for military history buffs?

It is indeed. David Chandler reissued it several times and updated it with the latest thought on Napoleon’s battles. If there was something new said on the Battle of Austerlitz or something like that, he would then reissue the book with that new information in it. So, you want to buy the last iteration of it before David died.

Napoleon is often labelled a “military genius”. Notwithstanding his ultimate defeat, what is the best way to support that judgement?

I think the fact that he was able to fight so many different kinds of battles. The reason that he’s a genius is that he managed to win battles whether he outnumbered the enemy or was outnumbered by the enemy, whether he was moving forwards or backwards, whether or not he was having his right or left flank enveloped, or whether he was enveloping the enemies. Or sometimes he could do a double-envelopment, which is one of the most difficult manoeuvres in warfare. He managed to pull that off.

“It is an absolutely encyclopaedic run through of all of Napoleon’s battles”

Napoleon had equal dexterity when it came to commanding infantry, cavalry, and artillery, even though he was himself educated as an artilleryman. He’s also extremely good in coalition warfare—in striking at the hinge between his enemies but also keeping his own coalitions in order. His invasion of Russia involved something like 20 countries. You have, therefore, a commander who is incredibly dextrous and capable of adapting to whatever military circumstance he’s facing.

In terms of his military weaknesses, we undoubtedly have naval warfare, but he also had difficulty with guerrilla insurgencies in the Peninsular War.

That’s right and, of course, the guerrilla insurgencies in the Russian campaign as well. He was no good at sea. At all. He just didn’t understand how ships worked. That was a huge lacuna in his capacity and his knowledge. As is what we now call “asymmetrical warfare”, where the enemy doesn’t actually put up an army in the field.

Would you say Napoleon was deluded about his own naval capabilities?

Yes. He didn’t recognise that he was rubbish at sea at all. He thought that you could tell an admiral to do things at sea in much the same way that you could tell a general to do things on land. But, of course, the whole process is very very different—not least because of the wind!

There were various points in your book where Napoleon is still trying to fund naval expansion and is putting men out in ships for warfare despite them never having been at sea before.

That’s right. To give him his due, though, he was up against the Royal Navy which was at the peak of its efficiency. Britain was putting one third of its national spend into the navy. With admirals like the Earl of St Vincent and Collingwood and obviously Nelson, they had endless extremely talented admirals and an extremely can-do attitude towards maritime fighting in the period of fighting sail. Napoleon was really up against an absolutely superb organisation in the Royal Navy. One has to give him his due, but there are no Napoleonic naval victories.

The Napoleonic Wars are very complex and involve coalitions taking on Napoleon at different points. How much can we say with generality about what provoked them?

Here was somebody who was a profoundly radical force that each of these legitimist monarchies like the Hapsburgs of Austria and the Romanovs of Russia and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia were extremely nervous about. They saw what had happened to the Bourbons in France, and they didn’t want it to happen at home. So, this cold wind of modernisation that Napoleon unleashed on Europe was something that they were very keen to try to . . . whatever you do to a wind. That’s the reason.

So, he has inherited international hostility already because of the Revolution?

That’s right, yes. But also, they didn’t see him as a legitimate monarch. There were no ‘Bonapartes’ before him. His statement that he wanted to be the Rudolf of his dynasty, i.e. the founding father like Rudolf Hapsburg had been, was seen to be impossibly pretentious—not least because Rudolf came from the 13th century and they were in the 18th century.

There are two cases of Napoleon launching an offensive war. The rest of the time, people are declaring war on him. So, would you say this image of Napoleon stomping across Europe, declaring war on everybody, annexing their territory and so on, is completely wrong?

Yes, completely wrong. He started the Peninsular War and he started the 1812 Russian campaign. Other than that, each of the wars was started by the coalitions against him.

And the cases where Napoleon does initiate a war seem largely to do with enforcing the ‘Continental System’—his attempt to weaken Britain economically by blocking trade—rather than building an empire for empire’s sake.

Precisely, yes. He didn’t believe in empire for empire’s sake; he recognised that he could overstretch French resources very dangerously and very easily. But he did want to try to force England to the negotiating table. The way he thought he could do that was to hit us in our pocket and try to cut us off from all European markets.

That’s why he invaded Portugal, which was unwilling to take part in the Continental System—being a very old ally of England’s, going back to 1383—and it’s also why, ultimately, he invaded Russia after the tsar ripped up the Tilsit agreement and started trading openly with Britain. It’s a fascinating thing that, as you say, the two aggressive wars that Napoleon started began for mercantile protectionist reasons. It was to try to force the merchants of London to put pressure on the Whig and Tory governments to make peace with him.

But the problem with enforcing this policy of economic strangulation against the Brits was their sea power.

Exactly. When you can land anywhere at all, when you can set up various places off the coast of Italy and off the coast of Germany which are effectively massive freebooting piracy operations of free-trade in everything, it’s just something that is not going to work. His attempt to stimulate local production and an industrial revolution in France was also something that never truly got off the ground.

Britain and France are continuously at war from 1803 onwards until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a period of war unmatched in any of the other coalitions. What do you think is the main motivation for why the Brits are so uncompromising?

That’s right. They had been at war since 1793; it was only the Peace of Amiens in 1802–1803 that interrupted that very long period from 1793–1815. And it’s the same reason that we’ve fought against Philip II of Spain or Louis XIV of France before, and then after that with the Kaiser and Hitler. You can’t have the European balance of power so badly hegemonized by one power that they’re able to control the channel ports, because that’s a constant invasion threat to us.

2

Talleyrand

by Duff Cooper

Let’s move on to your next book. This is Duff Cooper’s biography of the diplomat Talleyrand, whose political life encompasses the rise and fall of Napoleon and beyond.

Talleyrand had a totally extraordinary political life. He supported six different separate regimes in his career and, naturally, got a reputation for being a turncoat. Some people have argued, including Duff Cooper in this brilliant biography, that he did have some central messages that he believed all his life—like liberalism and an affection for the English-style constitution. But the key reason to read this book is that it’s literature as much as history. It’s a beautifully written evocation of an era that Duff Cooper, having been British ambassador to Paris, knew well and actually saw the last glimmers of.

It’s incredible that Talleyrand flees the Reign of Terror, goes to England and then to America, returns to France in 1796 and manages to become foreign minister within a year.

And stays foreign minister or in the diplomatic sphere in some way or another for the rest of his life. He thereby met almost all the important people in Europe and was at the table when all the great decisions were made. He was born an aristocrat and was later an unfrocked bishop. He had a lame foot rather like Byron and Goebbels which apparently turns you into a sex maniac; he turned his niece into his mistress which I think today would have him defenestrated but, nonetheless, no one seemed to hold that against him either.

What does the book tell us about the relation between Talleyrand and Napoleon? What are the main ways we can trace his influence on Napoleon as foreign minister or vice-elector?

It tells us that it was always rocky. Napoleon, quite rightly, didn’t trust him. Talleyrand was working especially with the Russians behind Napoleon’s back. Despite being extremely witty and obviously wonderful company, he was a dangerous person to have working for you. Talleyrand generally thought that France should be at peace and, of course, that’s very difficult when you’re the foreign minister of a conqueror.

I don’t see that you can call Napoleon a warmonger given that, as we’ve said, of the seven wars of the coalitions he only started two. But I think there was a legitimist jihad against him and against the French Revolution. And he had to fight those. But, overall, Talleyrand was someone who, as a good negotiator and a diplomat, wanted peace.

And was willing to betray Napoleon’s military secrets in the process?

He was willing to betray absolutely everybody in the process. It wasn’t just Napoleon; he betrayed five different regimes in the course of his life. I’m certain that had he lived any longer, he would have betrayed the July Monarchy as well.

It’s surprising that when Napoleon found out Talleyrand was selling military secrets to his enemies, he didn’t exile or execute him.

This is another reason to recognise that Napoleon is not a proto-Hitler in the way he’s been portrayed by many British historians. If he were a proto-Hitler, he would have shot Talleyrand and Fouché (his police minister) years before. Napoleon was a dictator politically, in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators like Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.

But what about atrocities like executing thousands of prisoners of war in Jaffa, for instance?

When you say “for instance”, that implies that there were 20 or 30 Jaffas but there weren’t. There’s one at Jaffa and then, after that, in 1796 in Padua, Italy, he also let the troops run riot. But other than that, there just aren’t the mass executions. There aren’t the 40,000 people who died during the Reign of Terror, for example.

“Napoleon was a dictator politically in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators”

I go into Jaffa in some detail in my book about how the men who he executed had earlier promised to fight against France. And then, six weeks later, they were captured fighting against France. According to the very harsh rules of law in the late eighteenth century, they forfeited their lives.

There’s a stereotype about Napoleon being indifferent to the immense human cost incurred by trying to establish French hegemony in Europe. Do you think this is misguided?

Yes, I think it’s hugely misguided. I think that commanders throughout history have had to harden their hearts to the inevitable losses made, but I don’t think he ever threw men into battle willy-nilly. He was one of the great commanders in history and one of the great soldiers of all time. Great soldiers don’t do that. And he was personally affected. There are times when he’s in tears in his tent after a battle, in the same way that Wellington was.

The idea of him being some cold-hearted unemotional figure profoundly misunderstands him, as does the idea of him being humourless. Throughout my book, there are something like 80 or 90 Napoleon jokes. He was constantly making humorous remarks that even 200 years later remain extremely funny.

I enjoyed the one where, in the midst of battle, an officer has his helmet thrown off by the impact of a cannonball, only for Napoleon to casually remark “It’s a good job you’re not any taller.”

That’s very good. There’s also the one with the cardinal archbishop of Paris who writes this oleaginous letter to him before the coronation. Napoleon makes a note on a piece of paper which says “please pay 12,000 francs to the archbishop out of the theatrical fund.”

3

With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign

by John H Gill

Let’s move on to your third book. This is With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign by John H. Gill.

This is a tremendously detailed military history of the Danube campaign of 1809. This was a very important campaign because it knocked the Austrians out of the Napoleonic Wars for the third time. The only way for them to deal with Napoleon after that was for the archduchess Marie-Louise to marry Napoleon and try to bring him into the system like that. He fought a lightning campaign up the Danube, capturing Vienna, fighting battles such as Aspern-Essling and Wagram. This is Napoleon at his classic best. You can see him in this book just outmaneuvering the Austrian army again and again.

One of the distinctive things about this book is that it drew a lot of attention to the 30,000 German troops fighting on behalf of Napoleon.

Yes, this book is an important corrective to the idea that Napoleon’s forces were all French. They certainly weren’t. When Napoleon invaded Russia, only something like 55% of his army were French. He invaded Russia with 615,000 men which was the same size as Paris at the time. It’s very important to see the Napoleonic Wars as coalition wars, both on his side and against him. The book does lots of other things as well, but it certainly underlines that very important factor about Napoleon’s wars.

These soldiers were all supplied from the Confederation of the Rhine. Can you tell us about that and when it was established?

It was established at the time of the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806. After the Holy Roman Empire vaporised out of existence, it became Napoleon’s tool—his vehicle—for bringing together the north German states. He called himself the “Protector” of the Confederation. They stayed as such for nine years or so before it itself collapsed at the time of the 1813 campaign. The battles of Leipzig and Dresden were pretty much the death-knell for the Confederation of the Rhine.

I want to ask about military culture and attitudes towards Napoleon among soldiers from the client states. Presumably the German troops didn’t have the same patriotic fervour motivating them as French soldiers, but they weren’t indifferent either.

There’s a huge difference. Some of them some of the time are just as enthusiastic about Napoleon as the French. The Polish lancers, for example, believed that Napoleon was going to make Poland an independent state and give it its own sovereignty for the first time since it had been sliced up in the partitions. And so, they were incredibly excited about fighting for Napoleon. In fact, Napoleon is the only individual named in the Polish national anthem. That’s a good one for a pub quiz!

Whereas others, like the Westphalians and certainly the people who came from Hannover, whose actual legal head of state was George III, were an awfully lot less excited about being effectively pressganged into fighting for a foreign leader. So, you have this huge difference between people. And, of course, as well as changing from country to country, it changed from year to year and unit to unit. What Gill does very well in this book is to investigate that. 30,000 men is no small number.

4

Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon

by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort

Your last two books are written by people who had great proximity to Napoleon. Let’s look at Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort. This seems a fairly unknown book.

Yes, it’s a very little-known book but an extremely interesting one. Bausset was Napoleon’s palace chamberlain who followed him around the campaigns and lived in his palaces. He knew the family very well indeed and wrote these memoirs even though it was dangerous to do that once the Bourbons had been restored. He was still an admirer of Napoleon and is the living personification of the untruth of the epithet that “no man is a hero to his valet.”

Bausset definitely did admire Napoleon—not blind hero-worship by any means, but he was somebody who saw Napoleon for what he was. This book explodes many of the myths about Napoleon being a vicious and unpleasant individual. Instead, he comes across as a good employer, a witty man, and someone who had normal human emotions.

I suppose it says a lot about a person when all of your personal servants are begging to go into exile with you.

Well, exactly. And not just any old exile. One could understand why they might have wanted to go to Elba, which is a perfectly nice, warm, pleasant place. One would go on holiday to Elba, but nobody would go on holiday to Saint Helena. This is a windswept, godforsaken, tiny, eight-by-ten-mile island plopped bang in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It takes six days by boat to get there from Cape Town, or at least it did before the airport came in. And a very boring journey it is too, I can tell you. And these 21 servants were basically fighting each other for the right to accompany into exile. It shows the charisma of the man.

You mentioned that Bausset goes with him on the campaigns, but what do we find out about Napoleon in a more domestic setting?

That he was a kind husband and a loving father. He was not the domestic monster that the Bourbon literature has been so keen to present him as; many books, I’m afraid, have taken it for granted to be true.

There are some quite eccentric arrangements in Napoleon’s imperial household as well. I’m thinking of his first wife Josephine’s menagerie.

Yes, having orangutans around at lunchtime, zebras in the fields, and black swans at Malmaison. That was her idea, of course, but he indulged it and paid for it. But having exotic animals at that time was very much a royal pursuit and it had been for years. I think Cosimo III de’ Medici had a hippopotamus or something along those lines. It was a way of proving your wealth and status to have unusual animals around. Josephine did actually dress the orangutan in a chemise and have it come to tea parties.

You mentioned that this was to flaunt wealth and status. Was that a slightly sore thing to do considering the tensions building up to the Revolution?

Napoleon saw it as part and parcel with being an emperor. He wanted to present a glorious image to the people, although, when it came to his domestic interests, he wasn’t flamboyant at all. He’d wear a colonel’s uniform most days and didn’t like to spend more than half an hour at lunch or dinner, which was very unusual for a French monarch. He was pretty ascetic; he never got drunk. He wasn’t constantly wearing those clothes that you see in the coronation painting by Ingres.

5

With Napoleon in Russia: Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza

by Armand de Caulaincourt

Let’s go on to your final choice. This is the Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza.

These are fascinating. Caulaincourt was the ambassador to Russia and was also Napoleon’s master of the horse. He was an aristocrat, born and bred. At least according to his memoirs, he was the person who informed Napoleon not to invade Russia. The memoirs were only published in 1935, and there’s no reason why he should have lied in them, owing to the fact that they were never going to be published in his lifetime.

Once he had warned Napoleon, he came with him and was the only person on the sledge that accompanied Napoleon back to France from the catastrophe of the 1812 campaign. It’s in his sledge that we get Napoleon saying “from the sublime to the ridiculous is just one small step.” The memoirs are immensely well-written, encapsulating and pretty crushing for Napoleon’s reputation with regard to the 1812 campaign.

So, it’s not a panegyric?

Not in the slightest. But equally it’s not a denunciation. Caulaincourt stayed with Napoleon up until the 1814 abdication and is a trustworthy source. He’s not anti-Napoleon. It seems that he kept scraps of paper that he used as his notes for this book. It’s a pretty fabulous and invaluable source for the period.

The Russia campaign is regarded as one of the worst defeats in military history. Can you give an outline of the factors that made it so catastrophic?

Napoleon went into Russia on June 21, 1812 with 615,000 men, and by the time he crossed the river Niemen back in the other direction in December, he had lost over half a million of those men. In that sense, you have to go back to the ancient world to see such an enormous military catastrophe.

“Napoleon went into Russia on 21 June 1812 with 615,000 men. By the time he crossed the river Niemen back in the other direction in December, he had lost over half a million of those men”

In a nutshell, the reason was that he was drawn further and further into Russia. He captured Moscow, something that Hitler never did, but he stayed there too long. He won a battle called Maloyaroslavets and decided the next day to retreat back via Borodino, which was a big battle that he’d won on 7 September. It turned out to be the wrong route back and his army was encompassed by blizzards. Although he won each of the formal engagements, the army was swallowed up by the snows of Russia. It’s a story of cannibalism and utter despair and disaster, with a few flashes of redemption such as the crossing of the Berezina river. Otherwise, it’s up there with Xenophon.

We’ve mentioned it already, but it’s important to keep in mind that Napoleon wasn’t marching on Russia to try and annex it. He was trying to force Russia’s compliance with the Continental System.

Yes, he had no territorial desires. He had an army twice the size of the Russian one, and had defeated the Russians twice before. Napoleon only intended to fight on the outskirts; he only intended to go in 50 miles or so and wanted a three-week campaign. Instead, it turned out to be a six-month campaign and carried on for literally thousands of miles there and back. It’s a classic example of mission creep.

The Russians also pursued a scorched earth policy, rather like they did in 1941 and 1942, which meant that there was mass starvation. Napoleon lost 100,000 of the troops of his central thrust to typhus—a horrible disease where a louse will bury itself into your skin and then defecate in your skin and then die. You then die about four days later in immense pain. It’s a horrible way to go.

With armies in those days, everyone had lice. If the weather’s too cold for you to change your clothes more than once every six weeks or so, then you’re going to get lice. The soldiers all huddled together, very close to one another, because it was so cold outside. So, their lice jumped from one soldier to another. There wasn’t a single person, including the emperor, who didn’t have lice. They didn’t work out a cure for typhus until 1911; it wasn’t properly diagnosed until over a century later. It was, in every way, an absolute nightmare of a campaign.

It’s largely remembered for the merciless winter, but the immense heat of the summer advance was almost as damaging.

That killed a lot of horses. And, of course, it’s almost entirely a horse-and-bullock-drawn invasion. The heat and the thirst were appalling on the way into Russia, yes. It was biblical.

There are three more years before Waterloo in 1815 but, in your view, was the Russian campaign the turning point?

Yes. Up until 1811, Napoleon was the master of Europe. From December 1812 onwards, he was on the skids. You can’t lose half a million men and not expect your throne to topple.

But he went out fighting.

He did. The 1814 campaign involved small numbers of men but, nonetheless, he won four battles in five days there. He was back to his old form. These were significant, rather brilliant military victories. But, in the end, with the whole of Europe against him and invading, he was fought to a standstill and then very comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

Just to end, what do you consider to be Napoleon’s greatest achievements that have endured?

I think the beauty of Paris is very largely down to him. He rebuilt Paris. We love going and taking our loved ones there and crossing the four bridges that he built and seeing the fountains and great buildings like the Madeleine Church. That’s a testament to him. He designed the Arc de Triomphe, but it was only built after his death. Although as an Englishman I prefer English common law, nonetheless the whole of French and European law is much more closely built on the Napoleonic Code than anything that had gone before, including Roman law. Napoleon is someone who every Frenchman should be proud of. Other things like the Légion d’honneur and the Conseil d’État are still around. In fact, the numbering of its houses in its streets from the Seine outwards is all down to him. There are also the reservoirs. Even 200 years after his death, it’s difficult to imagine Paris or France without the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Interview by Charles J. Styles

October 28, 2019

Nonfiction Books » Best Nonfiction of 2023

The Best History Books of 2023: The Wolfson History Prize

recommended by Sudhir Hazareesingh

The Wolfson History Prize is the UK's most prestigious history book prize. The judges, all professional historians, pick out books that combine excellence in research with readability. Oxford University historian Sudhir Hazareesingh, one of the Wolfson judges and author of Black Spartacus, talks us through the six terrific books that made the 2023 shortlist, from the Black Death and its critical impact on economic development to the magic of our relationship with books.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

- The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe

by James Belich

- Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945

by Halik Kochanski

- Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

by Emma Smith

- The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire

by Henrietta Harrison

- African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History

by Hakim Adi

- Vagabonds

by Oskar Jensen

Before we get to the books, can you tell me a bit about the criteria for the Wolfson History Prize in general? What kind of books were you and the other judges looking for?

The general criteria are that these books should combine excellence in research with readability. Those are the two main criteria, and then, of course individual judges bring their own preferences and predilections to the table. My own being—but this is something that all the other judges share—that you want a set of books that are going to broaden our intellectual and cultural horizons.

Broadening doesn’t necessarily mean traveling far away. Some of the books that we have on the shortlist this year take us to wonderful places in space and in time, but two of the books are about Britain. One of them is about Victorian England, as seen from street level, and the other is about the African and Caribbean presence in Britain. Sometimes you don’t have to go very far to see things differently. It’s just about looking  in a different way.

1

The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe

by James Belich

Let’s start with the most global book on the list. The World the Plague Made by James Belich is about the economic impact of the Black Death. He says in the book that where the plague struck in the mid-14th century it probably killed as much as 50 percent of the population. Will you tell me a bit about the book and why it’s on the shortlist?

This is a wonderfully ambitious book. It’s meticulously researched, which is one of the criteria for the prize. It’s also very well written, which often isn’t the case when you’re dealing with subjects like this, which are quite technical and where some of the material is quite dry. Jamie Belich has done a phenomenal amount of research and written it out in a very engaging way—or as engaging as one can be when one is talking about the Black Death.

Is he an economic historian?

No, he’s a Professor of Imperial and Global history—that’s the chair he holds here at the University of Oxford. But I think it’s in the nature of that kind of research that you have to have a good command of economic material and economic data. That is one of the other things that attracted our attention. Although it is very much centred on economic history, it’s also a book about the plague, and he discusses it at some considerable length. The book’s capacity to draw on different disciplines is something that we thought was very impressive.

Then there’s the grand sweep. With history books, sometimes you say they’re ambitious when they cover fifty or a hundred years. This is a book that starts in 1346 and makes an argument about the impact on the globe that stretches right into and up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. This really is grand history, in the good old-fashioned sense of the term.

What he’s focusing on, in my understanding, is the Great Divergence, and finding an explanatory factor for why Europe drew ahead of Asia in the early modern period. As he says in the introduction, he’s testing out a new answer “to an old two-word question: Why Europe?”

Yes, and the reason why this is important in a wider sense is that one of the things that global history has tried to do, since its emergence, is to move away from the obsession with Europe and the idea that everything that has been important and significant in the world has been important and significant because it happened in Europe or has come from Europe.

One of the striking things about this book is that, in talking about the Great Divergence, he acknowledges that part of Europe does end up pulling ahead. But it’s not just Europe. There’s also what he calls the Muslim South—the Middle East and North Africa—and they are part of this movement too. And it’s not for any institutional or cultural reason, but simply by the arbitrary fact that those were also the places where the plague struck very hard.

To put it starkly, the argument of the book is that wherever the plague hit, these are the parts of the world that eventually benefited and prospered, and those places where the plague didn’t strike—India and China—ended up falling behind. He’s saying this is not about culture, this is not about institutions, this is not about religion—it’s the plague.

Do you think it’s a convincing argument?

He’s laid out the argument in as convincing a way as he can. If you push him—and there are places in the book where he acknowledges it—he accepts that the plague is not the only factor. What he’s really arguing, if one had to summarise it in a schematic way, is that while all these other variables mattered, the plague is the only thing that is common across the board, and therefore, the plague is the most significant factor.

“You want a set of books that are going to broaden our intellectual and cultural horizons”

The book is in four parts. I’m not a specialist in this period, but the bits that were illuminating for me were Parts Three and Four, where he’s talking about the Middle East and North Africa. Forgetting about the plague, just the way in which he demonstrates that these areas were also growing at that time, is very impressive and innovative. That’s where the major contribution of the book comes and Parts One and Two were just necessary to build that up. That’s also why it’s so long. What did they say about Schubert’s Ninth Symphony – ‘the heavenly length’? It does go on, but that’s what it takes to make and sustain this thesis.

2

Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945

by Halik Kochanski

Let’s go on to the next book, which is also a long one. Resistance by Halik Kochanski is about World War II, which is often written about, but this book covers the resistance in every country that was occupied by an Axis power, so it’s about a lot of different places. I also liked that it opens with Czechoslovakia: I found it refreshing to start the story in a non-Western European country. Tell me why you liked it.

We liked it for the same reasons you did! It’s comprehensive, and that’s very important because a problem with history writing in general, but particularly with resistance, is that it tends to be written from a nation-centric point of view. Everybody wants to tell “their” story and how great they were or how terrible things were for them. That’s the framework through which most of these stories get told. Certainly, the Resistance memoir literature, which is vast, is almost all nation-centred.

But this was a pan-European movement and what she does really well is to identify first of all the commonalities. In all of these countries, when you look at underground resistance movements, similar things happened. They had clandestine literature, they collected intelligence, later on they started engaging in sabotage and armed conflict. All of this is happening at different moments and in different ways, but it is happening across Europe.

But looking at it across Europe gives you a sense that geography, too, matters. What happens in Eastern Europe is different from Western Europe. That’s the other big takeaway from the book. The Nazis, beyond a certain point in the East, simply regarded these territories as fodder. They wanted to enslave the local populations. It was an incredibly dumb strategy because one of its consequences was to render any kind of collaboration impossible. In Western Europe, the regime was different. They didn’t treat these countries in the same manner. They were brutal but not genocidal. That difference also has an impact on the kinds of resistance movements which emerged in different parts of Europe.

It’s also the remarkable feat of reading all this material in so many different languages. The book is an extraordinary achievement in that respect.

Speaking personally, I think it’s also a topical book because we’re talking about resistance at the moment. This is a book that helps us think about some of the obvious issues and also some of the awkward ones. We need to think carefully, because some of the organisations that in recent times we’ve called terrorists go on to become seen as freedom fighters. That was what was happening in Europe in the Second World War. The Nazis were calling all of these resistance organisations terrorists, and now we think of them differently.

Although it’s over 800 pages of quite dense print, I found it very readable. The writing is very accessible.

Yes, and here I can speak with a little bit more authority. A lot of it is about France, and because I’ve studied this period in detail, I know what a phenomenally complicated story it is. The French Resistance is three things: it’s Gaullism, it’s communism, and it’s the so-called internal resistance. The relationship among them is complex at any one time and over the six-year period, and at no point in the book does she put a foot wrong in writing about it. That she is able to get everything right in that way is very impressive and I am sure it’s the same for the other countries she is writing about.

3

Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

by Emma Smith

Should we talk about Portable Magic by Emma Smith now? This is a book about books and the title references the horror writer Stephen King, who in his memoir called books “a uniquely portable magic”, which I love. Why is this a Wolfson Prize-shortlisted book?

The history of books has now become, quite rightly, an important subject in its own right. Given the remit of the Wolfson Prize, books about books feature prominently in the line-up. The year that I was in contention, Richard Ovenden’s excellent work about the history of book burning was on the shortlist.

Emma Smith’s book brings a lot of pleasure. It’s very enjoyable. There are lots of juicy, tasty, and heart-warming anecdotes. We liked the way in which the stories are woven together. You’re moving around from the 12th century to the present. It’s not in a random way because there is an overall movement and sense of direction, and the sixteen chapters have particular themes to them.

You get a sense of the power of books. There’s power in a positive sense, but the Stephen King quotation is also about the potential for books to be, as Emma Smith says, sickening, disturbing and enraging. Books have that negative capacity, too. One of the chapters is about Mein Kampf. That chapter is topical because it’s all about freedom of expression, which is an important issue for us all at the moment.

This is a book that, in a very mild way, takes you to those big, important questions. I like the unassuming way in which she does that—not in a thumping-the-table, ‘this is what I think, therefore this is what we must all think’ way but opening issues up as questions to address. In fact, she doesn’t give answers. That’s what I like about her. She identifies the important things that we need to think about.

The other thing I liked was the notion of the physicality of books—what she calls “bookhood”—and the relationship that you develop with them. As we are having this conversation on Zoom, I see books behind you, you see books behind me here. We’re surrounded by them. We do all kinds of things with them: they’re like props. We live in a small flat in north Oxford which is completely overflowing and we don’t know what to do with them. We despair. That whole relationship with books is something she talks about in a very intelligent, subtle, and often touching way. For all of those reasons, we thought this book should be on the shortlist.

4

The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire

by Henrietta Harrison

Let’s move on to Henrietta Harrison’s The Perils of Interpreting, which is about a key episode in Chinese history when, in 1793, the British envoy Lord Macartney was rebuffed by the Qianlong emperor. Tell me about this book, what it’s about, and why the judges liked it.

In a narrow sense, this is a twin biography. It’s about two translators who are actors in this big drama of the encounter between the British and Chinese empires in the late 18th and early 19th century—from the 1790s through to the Opium Wars in the late 1830s.

One of these two figures is George Staunton, who’s a child prodigy. He learns to speak Chinese when he’s very young and meets the emperor when he’s twelve years old. He must have been insufferable! He stays on in China and becomes an interpreter for the East India Company.

Then we have this remarkable character, Li Zibiao, who’s part of the Catholic tradition in China. A lot of people will discover the existence of this because there’s a general assumption that China in that period is completely inward-looking, and largely closed to the world. The fact that Li Zibiao goes to Naples, becomes a Catholic priest, and learns Latin doesn’t help his career. But at this particular moment, and in this encounter, he plays a very important role.

The slightly larger story Henrietta Harrison is telling is about the role of these two translators in mediating the encounter between these two powers that are trying to reach some kind of accommodation. It’s a wonderfully subtle book because when you look at the diplomatic history, the way in which this encounter is normally written about, it’s about clashes, about oppositions. It’s generally written in a binary way. What she’s trying to do is go beyond those oppositions and find, through these two people, the spaces where compromise and mutual understanding could be reached.

Translation is one critical way in which this could happen. She has wonderful examples. How you translate the Chinese word yi makes a huge difference: whether you’re calling the British ‘foreigners’ or ‘barbarians.’ You could translate it with either word. If you use one, it has one set of consequences; and if you do the other, it has a different set of consequences. That whole part of the book where she dwells on the skills that these interpreters bring to bear is fascinating.

In overall terms, the interpreters are not strong enough to be able to control the outcome, so, in the end, the two sides clash. But what the book implies—and she more or less says it—is that had they listened to their interpreters or taken them a bit more seriously, then the Opium Wars might not have happened in the way that they did.

When you study Chinese history, that meeting is such a caricature—the Qianlong emperor rejects the goods the British are offering as useless trinkets and that leads to the Opium Wars. But reading this book, it all comes to life. Lord Macartney spoke in Italian, which he’d learned in Italy, and then Li Zibiao translated from Italian into Chinese. All these details I found fascinating.

Also, one of the things that she digs out really impressively is the understanding that we now have of how badly this encounter went was created later on. It made me think of a more general point, which is that a lot of information we have about these landmark historical moments often come to us through understandings that we think are based on fact, but they aren’t at all. History is based on facts, but these facts are also social constructions.

The Chinese nationalists in the early 20th century absolutely had an agenda—a perfectly understandable one, which was to pump up China and bash the West—and therefore, they ended up providing this account, which more or less erased the role of more consensual approaches. That’s how history gets written.

5

African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History

by Hakim Adi

The last two books on the shortlist are very much focused on Britain. The first one is African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History, by Hakim Adi. This one is really interesting. It’s mindblowing that DNA is making that early history, which you would think was completely lost, accessible. Tell me about the book and why you liked it.

This one is taking a subject that we thought we knew a little bit about and giving it the full treatment. The classic work on this subject was written by Peter Fryer in the 1980s. It was called Staying Power, and it was a very good book. It was the first book that tried to tell the story of Black—Adi prefers to say African and Caribbean—people in Britain.

Since then, a lot more material has emerged, and Adi brings all of this new material together and also gives this panoptic view of the—I’ll say Black, just for shorthand—presence in the British Isles. It’s 10,000 years from Cheddar Man to Black Lives Matter. It’s remarkable. You see Black people here in Roman times: the Black emperor, and the Black legionaries. You see African explorers alongside Francis Drake. You see Black people here in Tudor times.

This is all pre-slavery. The Black presence before slavery is one of the many huge contributions of this book.

Adi is a specialist of Pan-Africanism and he also has fascinating things to say about that story in the 20th century and the numerous contributions that Black people have made to British institutions like the NHS.

It’s a book that is sweeping and comprehensive and, quite apart from anything else, destroys the myth, insofar as it needed to be destroyed, of white Britain—the idea that there was a point back in time when these islands were inhabited only by white people. You just can’t hold onto that view anymore, once you’ve read this book.

He opens with a dispute in the Daily Mail. It isn’t just history, it’s very much alive as a topic.

Absolutely, and he has some really good and important things to say—even though it isn’t his subject—about race. You can’t write a book like this without talking about the history of racism in Britain. He shows two things. One is that racism—you’d be surprised if it wasn’t there—turns out to have been there from the time of slavery onwards. He connects it very much to the institution of slavery. He also shows, very effectively, that racism and beliefs in racial inequality were always part of the argument used by the powerful and those elites who depended on enslavement for their success.

Once you get into the 18th century, however, you also start to see people mobilising against slavery. He shows that this is something that is done not only by Black people. A lot of other social groups are part of these campaigns. When you look at the late 18th and early 19th century, all the social protests that led to abolition happen partly because slaves are in revolt in the colonies (that isn’t part of his story, although he mentions it) but crucially, because of ordinary men and women. Women in particular pushed really hard, particularly in the 1820s, to get Wilberforce to embrace the immediate abolition of slavery. Wilberforce believed in gradual abolition: he thought it was something that would happen spontaneously and in the fullness of time. It’s this campaign of Black and other working men and women that makes the abolitionists in Britain finally embrace immediate abolition. That’s an important part of the story and just one example of how Black people contribute to the promotion of greater equality in Britain.

6

Vagabonds

by Oskar Jensen

Lastly, let’s move on to Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London, by Oskar Jensen. Tell me what it’s about and why it’s so interesting.

What’s original about this book is that it tells us the story of Victorian London from 1780 to about 1870, but not through the voices of the people that we normally know or are familiar with, like Charles Dickens. What Jensen is trying to do in this book—and I think he pulls it off really effectively—is to do it from street level.

He tries to recapture the first-hand accounts of the beggars, the thieves, the musicians, the sex workers, the porters. There are all these occupations I didn’t even know about – road-crossing sweeper, for example; we encounter one of them, Margaret Cochrane, in the book. Unfortunately, because the material isn’t there to allow for a sustained engagement with them, you get only glimpses, but because he’s holding on to this one theme, you get a clear picture, over the aggregate of the book, of what life was like for people who were living in these precarious circumstances, like Mahomet Abraham, the blind sailor from Calcutta who begs on the streets with his dog.

What is very impressive and touching is that this is a world full of poverty, violence and arbitrariness, but people do extraordinary things as well. That’s what’s so great about this book: you see all the sides. You see what a struggle it is just to eke out an existence. Sometimes, life in the Victorian era is sugar-coated. Until recently, people were talking about Victorian values as if it was a great thing to go back to that time. This dispels that myth, but it also isn’t a book that simply looks at poor people as victims. It shows that they are capable—under certain, very limited circumstances—of doing something wonderful with their lives, even if it’s just for a fleeting instance.

What sources does he use to reconstruct those lives?

You have to jump around. There are a lot of Old Bailey trial records because, for a lot of these people, the only moments when their voices end up being heard is when they break the law. That is problematic as well, because what they’re saying isn’t necessarily what they would say if they were being interviewed. But you have to take what you’ve got.

I’m working on a book about the resistance of the slaves and there it’s the same problem. They didn’t write books. They were, for the most part, illiterate people. The few times when they appear in the records is when they carry out an insurrection, they get arrested, and then they’re interviewed before they go on trial. But what they say there doesn’t necessarily reflect what they would say in other circumstances.

The book draws from a wide range of sources, including also personal diaries and newspaper articles; this gives the text a real sense of immediacy, which is reinforced by his use of the present tense—a very effective narrative technique. Oskar Jensen has done a really comprehensive trawl of all the available material and come up with an impressive and evocative set of stories.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

November 12, 2023

Science

The Best Science Books of 2023: The Royal Society Book Prize

recommended by Rebecca Henry

The Royal Society, set up in the 1660s, is a fellowship of some of the world's most eminent scientists. It also has an annual book prize, celebrating the best popular science writing. Neuroscientist Rebecca Henry, one of this year's judges, talks us through the fabulous books that made the 2023 shortlist—and explains how good science writing can change the way you see the world around you.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

- An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong

- Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

- Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature's Secrets to Longevity

by Nicklas Brendborg

- Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way

by Roma Agrawal

- Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing

by Lev Parikian

- The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science

by Kate Zernike

For people who don’t know the prize, can you say a bit about it and what kind of books you, as judges, were looking for?

The Royal Society Book Prize is an annual award that’s been ongoing for the past 30 years. It’s had some notable winners, including Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson. Each year, the award celebrates excellent popular science writing over a broad range of topics.

Topics include physics, geology,  neuroscience, psychology, evolution, engineering, and mathematics, among others. The type of science that judges are typically looking for is not overly specific but what we are looking for is a topic that’s written in a compelling way, that can appeal to the general public and excite people about that particular topic.

1

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong

Let’s start with An Immense World by American science writer Ed Yong. This sounds like an amazing book. Tell me about it and why you liked it.

This was a book I was very excited about when I first saw it. I thought, ‘I must read this!’ It really is an absolutely marvelous read, from start to finish. It’s just very intriguing. It focuses on animal senses—including smell, sight, hearing, and echolocation, among others.

It’s written in a way that truly defines what a great science book is, in that it takes a topic and describes it in a clear scientific manner, but also in a way that really makes the reader think. It really makes you think about all the different senses and all these animals with their amazing senses all around us.

The book opens up the reader to a whole new world. As humans, we use sight as our main sense to interpret the world around us. But for dogs, for example, their main sense is smell. Learning how a dog, and all the other animals discussed in the book, interpret the world around them was truly intriguing.

I also learned about animals that I’d never heard about before. I learned about the star-nosed mole and the fire-chaser beetle, which is really quite amazing. Fire-chaser beetles sense forest fires from miles away and go there to lay their eggs. I really went ‘Wow!’ learning about that.

After finishing the book, I felt I had a new appreciation for the world around me and all the species of animals that inhabit it. It really made me think and understand that we are not the only ones here. It’s quite special.

2

Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

Let’s turn to Breathless by David Quammen, which is about COVID. Tell me more.

This is a book about the COVID-19 pandemic, but what makes this read unique is that it doesn’t go into the preparedness of countries or how they dealt with COVID-19. Rather, it takes you on a detective-like journey through the science of COVID-19. It looks at the theories on its origins and the scientists who worked relentlessly on understanding the biology of the virus itself and then the development of the vaccines against it. A lot of people think that the vaccine development happened quite fast, me included. However, in reality, RNA-type vaccine technology has been in the works for years. Scientists have been working on mRNA vaccine technology for decades and were then able to take that technology and effectively apply it to COVID-19.

One thing the author does that I found enjoyable is that he includes interviews and conversations with eminent scientists in the field throughout the world. This allows the reader to get their expert opinion on COVID-19.

Again, it’s a very complex topic. He’s talking about the origins and the biology of COVID-19, but the author is able to break that down for the reader. It’s written in a way that’s easily understood which I believe makes this read quite appealing.

The author also writes about the inequality in the world regarding the vaccine and its availability. In the Western world, we were lucky to have access to this vaccine. However, there are a lot of countries that didn’t have that access. The book emphasizes that until the whole world is vaccinated and protected from COVID-19—or any other type of virus—really none of us are because the way these viruses are able to spread is quite scary. I liked that he brought that to our attention.

Does he nail down the origins of COVID-19? Because that’s quite contentious.

No. Based on expert science opinion, it is most likely that the virus had a zoonotic origin in bats, possibly via an intermediate host, but there’s no conclusive answer.

3

Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature's Secrets to Longevity

by Nicklas Brendborg

Let’s go on to Jellyfish Age Backwards by Nicklas Brendborg. This is a book about longevity, I think.

The title of the book is what initially grabbed my attention. The idea is that when jellyfish are exposed to any type of stressor, they go back to their polyp form, eventually budding again to produce a genetically identical jellyfish. Essentially, they can retreat back to their former self and hide in response to stressors and then regrow again into their adult form when the time is right. This is quite amazing. The author uses this premise to talk about the process of aging. There’s a lot of research going on nowadays, about how we can slow down the aging process and what we can do to advance our lives.

It’s great. He’s a young author who is, I believe, a PhD student in Denmark. He really brings in a lot of humor throughout the book as he writes about some of the nonsense science that has been put out there about anti-aging.

He talks about hormesis. This is defined as a phenomenon in which exposing your body to harmful stimuli, including stress, can actually be beneficial. Our body almost becomes trained and develops defenses to protect us from the different stressors. This is the idea behind ice baths, which induce cold water hormesis, which may allow for better recovery etc. He talks about different types of diets, such as intermittent fasting and how that may be protective. He looks at the different studies that have shown the protective effects of diet on anti-aging.

This book is presented in a very clear manner. It’s a very easy read and introduces the reader to the different advances in research on anti-aging. I think it’s a book that will appeal to everyone. The title will make you pick it up and go, ‘Oh, what’s this about?’ and then: ‘Oh! This theme is interesting!’

4

Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way

by Roma Agrawal

Now we’re at Nuts and Bolts by Roma Agrawal. This is about engineering, which I was pleased to see because it’s a subject that can be neglected.

Yes, and that’s partly why this book grabbed the attention of the judges. The number of books about engineering on the longlist was very sparse. It’s also by a woman engineer, which is exciting.

What she looks at is apparently quite mundane types of engineering developments over the centuries or even millennia. There is one chapter on the nail and another one on the wheel. You think, ‘How am I going to read a chapter about a nail?’ but the author discusses how many objects we use all the time couldn’t actually function without the discovery of the nail.

She discusses seven of these engineering developments that we never think about, and makes you as a reader go, ‘Oh, my gosh! Society as we know it would not be the same without these discoveries.’

It was a captivating read. I also really enjoyed how the author brought in her own personal experiences, and how some of these discoveries impacted her life. For example, she has a chapter on the discovery of the lens, which in turn allowed for the development and advancement of IVF. I thought that was quite amazing. She showed how something so simple has such huge implications for individuals.

She adds a lot of humor and bits of food for thought for the reader in each of the chapters. There are also cool little graphical images scattered throughout. This enables a nice visualization of the different objects being described. My take-home message is that this is a book that everybody should read if they’re interested in learning about the world around us. For me personally, I feel I have a greater appreciation for these so-called mundane objects that allow us to function in our daily lives.

5

Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing

by Lev Parikian

Next, tell me about Taking Flight by Lev Parikian.

This was another one that caught the attention of all the judges. It’s a book about the evolution of flying. From a scientific point of view, it’s a really interesting topic and the author communicates it in a very educational, but also an entertaining and engaging manner.

Each chapter focuses on a different type of bird or flying mammal. For example, there’s one chapter on bats and another on hummingbirds. One interesting thing that I learned about the hummingbird that I didn’t know before, is that it has a hippocampus—the part of the brain that is involved in our ability to store memories—and uses it to remember the flowers with the best pollen. They fly around to the different flowers and memorize which ones are good and which ones less so.

The book reminds you that we’re not the only ones here on the planet. There are other animals and creatures out there that are living their lives. As a result of reading this book, I’m more aware of, and will take more time to appreciate, all the flying birds, insects and creatures around us.

And for anyone who wants to learn a bit more about all these different birds and creatures, this book will present it to you in a very clear, scientific manner, which is very important. The author also adds in lots of bits of humor throughout, which makes it an easy read, because if it were just a completely scientific read about the evolution of flying that could be quite difficult to get through. But this book really is a page-turner, actually.

6

The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science

by Kate Zernike

Let’s turn to the last book, The Exceptions by Kate Zernike, which tells a tale of the challenges facing women in science.

This book is about the life and work of Nancy Hopkins, who is a molecular biology professor in the United States. It focuses on the discrimination that she went through as a young woman scientist in the 1960s and 70s in the United States. It’s specifically focused on MIT/Harvard, because that’s where she did most of her work.

This book really struck me on a personal level, reading it and learning about the struggles of women in science, because I’m a woman in science too. There were many hard-won—and hard-lost—battles for women in research to get recognition and equal treatment with men.

The book focuses on Nancy Hopkins but also describes the work and lives of other women she worked with, who really fought to get equal treatment for women in science. The groundwork they did at MIT transferred to other universities in the United States and from there around the world.

It was really a book that I didn’t want to put down. It’s a very exciting, easy read. It’s written in a very elegant way. There are personal accounts, there are historical aspects and also different scientific aspects all interwoven throughout the chapters. It’s a book that will appeal to everyone and I don’t think you have to have a particular interest in science to enjoy this book.

The end is quite topical. The last chapter mentions Katalin Karikó, who is the Hungarian-American scientist whose work on messenger RNA helped pave the way for the COVID-19 vaccine. She worked for years in research institutes in America. She didn’t get tenure, she got fired, she didn’t get equal treatment with men, but she continued to preserve. She now is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

This book really sums up the perseverance of these women to get the recognition that they deserve within their work, while also paving the way for other young women scientists out there. It would be an important read, for young girls and women. For me, these are the women who should be the true role models for young girls and women out there. It’s a truly powerful book.

Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor

November 21, 2023

Fiction » Romance

The Best Romance Books of 2023

recommended by Katherine D. Morgan

Looking for a love story that will make you swoon, wince, whoop, and cheer? We have some suggestions for you. Guest editor Katherine D. Morgan rounds up the best romance books of  2023: five emotional and entertaining novels that will really hit you where it hurts.

- The Fiancée Farce

by Alexandria Bellefleur

- Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling

by Elise Bryant

- You, Again

by Kate Goldbeck

- Kiss and Spell

by Celestine Martin

- New Adult

by Timothy Janovsky

Thank you for compiling this list of the best romance books of 2023. Did you approach your reading any differently to last year?

You know, it’s funny that you asked me that, because I did have a few realizations about my reading this year that made me feel both excited and embarrassed. Embarrassed, because I thought that I had been reading more diversely than I had been; after counting the numbers, I was shocked to see that that wasn’t the case at all. I was also a little embarrassed because I have been focusing on contemporary romances for the past few years since, well, that’s what I work with and hand-sell the most as a bookseller at Powell’s Books in Portland. But I don’t want that to always be the case, so I have set myself a goal to read more sub-categories of romance next year.

I started reading ‘dark romances’ this year, and it’s been such a hoot. I’ve been screenshotting a lot of images from TikTok, and I have been enjoying everything that I could get my hands on. I’ve also been buying historical romances—yes, the ones that people jokingly refer to as ‘bodice rippers’; there’s even a romance bookstore called The Ripped Bodice named after those types of books—like crazy because the plots sound good and the covers are beautiful. Bring back more of those covers please!

I would say that, this year, I did try to read more diversely and I was eager to branch out on categories too. I tried to be less worried about how many romance books I read and more worried about how they made me feel. The five books mentioned in this list made me feel everything.

1

The Fiancée Farce

by Alexandria Bellefleur

Sounds great. The first novel that made your list is The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur, which also appeared in your summer round-up earlier this year. What made it one of the best romance books of 2023?

I read this book when it came out in April, and it has been one of the easiest books for me to recommend to customers. Do you love sapphic romances? Fiancée Farce. Do you enjoy the ‘fake dating’ or ‘marriage of convenience’ trope? Fiancée Farce. Do you want to be wooed but also dream of getting frisky in a library? Well, well, I have the book for you!

As soon as I finished this book, I knew that it was going to be one of my favorite books of the year. I immediately bought the rest of Bellefleur’s books. I smile whenever I think of this one, and sometimes, when I see a customer picking it up, I simply walk over and say: ‘Buy it.’ Once I told a customer, ‘It’s so romantic and so sexy,’ and she said, ‘Say no more,’ and slipped it into her cart. Am I that good? Absolutely, but it does make my job easier when writers like Bellefleur exist.

2

Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling

by Elise Bryant

That’s what we like to hear. Your next recommendation is Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling by Elise Bryant. It’s billed as a “heartwarming YA romance.”

I have loved Bryant’s books since her debut, Happily Ever Afters, which you should also read. I know, I know, people might judge me for reading young adult novels when my 30th birthday is in a few months, but I can’t help it. Being an adult is hard and expensive and frustrating, and sometimes, you want to go back to a time that was a bit simpler and you were a little less bitter.

Fair enough. So what’s this book about?

Reggie and Delilah seem to always bump into each other on holidays: New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, et cetera. Over the course of a year, the reader follows them as a friendship develops into something more. Both characters have their own issues: Delilah is shy and worries about being liked, and she has a crush on a guy who is so frustratingly annoying that you want him to walk around in wet socks for the rest of his life. Reggie believes that his family is embarrassed by him because he enjoys all things Dungeons & Dragons, including writing essays criticizing the game and the issues behind it. Both of them are putting on a front, which leads to the two of them admiring each other for the wrong reasons.

I truly loved this one. That cover design is adorable and all three of Bryant’s books look very pretty on my bookshelves. If you need another reason to enjoy this title, then I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m the Katherine that Bryant thanks in the acknowledgments. I had zero chill and told all of my coworkers about it!

3

You, Again

by Kate Goldbeck

Ha! Quite right. What’s next on your list of the best romance books of 2023?

I think that this year, I am required to put You, Again by Kate Goldbeck on the list. I saw this one everywhere, and I am nothing if not easily influenced—and thank God, I was. I am a big Nora Ephron fan, so getting the chance to read a romance that reminded me of When Harry Met Sally pleased me. It was a serious ode to New York.

It was funny and refreshing, even when Josh and Ari got on my nerves, which they did…frequently. They were so frustrating, Ari especially, but it only made me root for their happily ever after more. Actually, it even made me love Ari more, because I know what it’s like to be scared to put my heart on the line, especially when I’ve been alone for a long time or had my heart broken by someone that I thought that I could go the distance with. These two were messy and I loved it. It was wonderful to watch them grow up and develop a real friendship. The countless text messages. The scenes where they watched movies over the phone together (yes, that really did happen in When Harry Met Sally). The Strand’s guest appearance in the book. It all worked. It was a delicious little treat and I need Goldbeck to write something again soon.

4

Kiss and Spell

by Celestine Martin

The fourth 2023 romance book on your list is Kiss and Spell by Celestine Martin. What did you enjoy about this one?

I the first book in the series, Witchful Thinking, last month because I wanted a fall, witchy vibe, without realising that it’s set in the summer in New Jersey. The timeframe didn’t matter, however, because it was a perfect treat. That book focused on Lucy. Martin’s new book, Kiss and Spell, focused on Lucy’s type-A cousin, Ursula, who I didn’t really like in the first book. However, by the time I finished this one, Ursula and I were two peas in a pod.

It’s a charming paranormal romance about a Black witch who falls in love with a sexy prince who needs a perfect kiss to break an enchantment. I don’t know why, but Martin’s dialogue reminds me of historical romances. Perhaps because the main male characters say things that make your heart beat fast and your legs shake. I shared a screenshot of what Prince Xavier says to Ursula when he finds out that her last boyfriend broke her heart and I had so many women direct messaging me to find out the name of the book. It made me chuckle! I finished Kiss and Spell on a solo brunch date last week, and it was the perfect side to my biscuits and gravy.

5

New Adult

by Timothy Janovsky

Sadly, we only have one more book on the list. What’s your fifth and final 2023 romance book recommendation?

When I think about the romances that I loved this year, I knew that I had to talk about New Adult by Timothy Janovsky. It’s billed as 13 Going on 30 meets One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, but I’d argue that this one is in a class of its own. It was so charming, and it made me cry. It follows 23-year-old Nolan, who wants to be a famous comedian and will do anything to get there, including missing important moments of his sister’s wedding and hurting his best friend-slash-love interest in the process. With the help of some magic crystals and a wish, Nolan wakes up living the lifestyle that showcases everything that he has ever wanted: Fame! Fortune! A cute dog named Milkshake! However, none of his family and family will talk to him, and Nolan has no idea why. He turns to Drew, his former roommate and best friend to get to the bottom of everything, and, well, let’s just say that feelings can only be buried for so long. I think that so many of us feel pressured to dream bigger and brighter, and we don’t always open our eyes to see that sometimes, we’re right where we should be. I loved the romance in this one—and the life lessons.

Were there other romances that you discovered and loved this year?

Oh, boy, where do I begin? From #BookTok alone, I discovered Only for the Week by Natasha Bishop, which I have been handselling as: “If you’ve ever wanted to sleep with his best friend! #NoRegrets.” It was so fun and sexy and people are loving it! I also discovered S. J. Tilly and her romance novels. I finished Nero, which is the first book in her Alliance series. I then immediately bought book two, King, which I plan to take on a trip with me to Seattle this week. My favorite thing about working in a bookstore and being great at my job—am I tooting my own horn? Probably, but others have said the same thing to me, so well, I’m right about this—is that I can email the woman who buys for my section and simply say: “Can I get copies of this book?” There’s no second-guessing me, and it’s why I love buying for this section. It’s been an honor to bring in new books and authors into a famous bookstore like Powell’s.

Oh, and I also enjoyed Dealbreakers by Lauren Forsythe! I think that people can be so quick to reject others instead of getting to know them, and this book made me reflect on my own time spent in the online dating trenches. Lucky for me, I’ve been dating a great guy for over two years—hi Evan!—so have fun out there. I’ve talked about Behind the Scenes by Karelia Stetz-Waters before, but I adored that one too. Finally, if you haven’t read Honey and Spice by Bolu Babalola, then you need to. It was so funny!

Finally, we’ve got to know: what romance books are you looking forward to in 2024?

Well, Megan Bannen, the author of The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, is releasing a new book next year on my sister’s birthday, but I have joked that it’s really a gift for me. It’s called The Undermining of Twyla and Frank. Funny enough, her first book, Undertaking, had a You’ve Got Mail twist. This one? When Harry Met Sally!

And how can I forget Kennedy Ryan’s new book, This Could Be Us? It’s the second in her Skyland series, the first of which was Before I Let Go, which took #BookTok by storm. I read that book this year, and I loved it so much, but since it came out in 2022, I didn’t get the chance to highlight it. In my opinion, it is a perfect second-chance romance. I pre-ordered This Could Be Us with the quickness. Amy Lea is another writer that I’ve grown fond of, and her fourth book, The Catch, will finish out her Influencers trilogy that I’ve truly enjoyed. Also, the main love interest is named Evan, so I have to buy it for that alone. Most rom-com men named Evan please!

November 23, 2023

Fiction » Best Fiction of 2023

The Funniest Books of 2023

recommended by Peter Florence

Comedy comes in many flavours, explains Peter Florence—chair of the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Here, he talks us through the varied shortlist for this year's prize: the six funniest books of 2023.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

- Darling

by India Knight

- Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

by James Hannaham

- Mother Hens

by Sophie McCartney

- Murder at Crime Manor

by Fergus Craig

- Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors

by Aravind Jayan

- The Satsuma Complex

by Bob Mortimer

Thanks for talking to me about the six funniest books of 2023, as shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Has it been, in your opinion, a good year for comic fiction?

It has been a great year. There were another six books after this that were in contention for the shortlist, so yes, a bumper year. Sometimes it happens like that, you get very lucky with the entries.

You’ve judged a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize. Would you say it’s particularly difficult to judge comedy?

I think it’s particularly difficult to write comedy. But judging it is easier because there’s a straightforward laugh test. And the laugh test can be met in different ways; what we’ve learned over the years is that there is such a broad spectrum of funny—from laugh-out-loud, knockabout slapstick, to a subtler, gentler, teasing humour. All are equally satisfying.

When you read great literature, there’s a recognition that great writers tend towards linguistic playfulness, which is both funny and, in the proper sense of the word, comedic. Often the most coruscating political satires are couched in really savage humour, using the weapon of comedy. But a straight-forwarded, good-natured smile to meet a reader is also very effective.

“Great writers tend towards linguistic playfulness”

I remember when we were doing the Booker Prize, all the shortlisted and longlisted books had a great deal of humour. Part of that is your relationship with the writer that develops your pleasure in their language. I found myself smiling at such elegant turns of phrase. So, yes, there are many ways to enjoy and judge comedy.

One of the real joys of judging this prize is that we have two professional comedians on the panel who can tell us how the writer does it, and what’s unusually surprising or clever. Pippa Evans and Sindhu Vee are such super-close readers, both of them, so that’s very interesting as well.

1

Darling

by India Knight

Yes, I love the idea of getting your head around the mechanics of comedy itself. Let’s talk about the books themselves. India Knight’s Darling is first on our list. It’s a retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Why is it one of the funniest books of 2023?

India is reliably funny in everything she writes. There’s pleasure in her voice, and her love of these characters which you can share and revel in. The other special thing is her relationship with the original material; if you’ve got something predicated upon another book, you must look very carefully at what they are bringing, what’s innovative and new and dynamic between the new book and the classic. And India lands it completely. It reminds me in some ways of what Julian Barnes did with Flaubert’s Parrot. There’s such a sweet conversation between India and The Pursuit of Love, and the book is doubly pleasurable for that. It’s such a joy.

Absolutely. There was a rather brilliant BBC adaptation of The Pursuit of Love recently, which brought a new audience to Mitford—myself included. But it can be risky, I suppose, reinterpreting an old favourite. Recently I had a very strong, negative reaction to Curtis Sittenfeld’s take on Pride & Prejudice, which reflected an unconditional love for the source material and therefore my belief that it can’t be improved.

India draws a careful line between homage and appreciation, and also creating something that’s absolutely new. Literature is full of rewrites, adaptations, and the re-spinning of old tales. If you’ve never read The Pursuit of Love, you can still really like Darling. It’s just another level of appreciation you could bring to it.

2

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

by James Hannaham

Next on your shortlist of 2023’s funniest books is Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham, which is the story of a trans woman returning to life after prison. What did you like about it?

Oh, everything. I mean, the language is just spectacular. It’s clever, it’s beautiful, it makes you look at things through her eyes and hear her voice. You have to read it slowly and attentively because the poetry of the writing demands you pay attention to each phrase. A complete delight. And it’s profoundly, properly shocking in all the right ways—there’s very, very dark humour here.

It’s a study of contemporary America and a revelation of all sorts of issues of identity and prejudice and what it means to struggle. I just loved it. Principally, it’s the voice. It’s very powerful. It’s a totally realised bit of writing, sensational.

I don’t want to tell the story, because that’s part of the delight, the way he tells it. But it is one of those books where whoever you are, whatever your reading experience, this will feel dynamic and thrilling in many ways. The closest comparator I can think of is Percival Everett’s The Trees, which won last year.

Oh, I loved that book. He took such harrowing subject matter and yet wrote a book that made me laugh out loud.

That had some of the same, socially vital, musculature about it. But I don’t want to reduce it to its subject matter, because it’s a really enjoyable read. Every page gives you a fresh turn of phrase, a fresh idea or a fresh line that makes you question language, or all your assumptions, your place—whatever your place might be. So it’s a really extraordinary book.

Will everyone find it as funny as the jury did? I hope so. It’s dynamic, it has a real energy and it is whipcrack funny in the places where you are most shocked. So, yes, I love it.

3

Mother Hens

by Sophie McCartney

Your next book represents a bit of a change in tone, I think. This is Mother Hens by Sophie McCartney, about a very messy hen do in Ibiza—that is, a bachelorette party, for the benefit of our American readers. It sounds a bit like Bridesmaids or The Hangover. Does that sound right to you?

I think so. Again, this is laugh-out-loud funny. Just the level of intimacy and exposure… laughter is the only possible response to some of what happens and how it makes you feel. I think it’s really beautifully done. There are four or five beautiful set-pieces, and some great gags. It’s a very good-natured book. It’s the sort of book to take on holiday, or to give to someone in need of cheering up. So, a treat.

“What we’ve learned over the years is that there is such a broad spectrum of funny”

Yes, it’s different in tone and impact to the first books that we’ve talked about, and it’s hard to judge them against each other. And part of me wants to say, look, just read the whole shortlist. There will be a winner or winners, but all of them are so funny and complementary that the shortlist would keep you happy for quite a while.

4

Murder at Crime Manor

by Fergus Craig

Great. I have a long journey next week. Maybe this can keep me company. Or how about Murder at Crime Manor by Fergus Craig? I’ve seen it described as a ‘Wodehousian murder mystery’; why is it one of the funniest books of 2023?

This verges into parody—taking very established, familiar archetypes, spinning them around, playing them around and both celebrating gags that you will recognise then doubling down and spinning them again in a new way. So, yes, if you’ve ever read or watched an Agatha Christie, or if you’ve ever read any Wodehouse.. well, I’m not saying he’s in Wodehouse’s league, because, frankly, nobody is. But he’s got some of that spirit and he plays with the idea of what’s funny, satirises both the literary form and the political subjects within the story. It’s very appealing.

I read it straight after Carlotta, and they should almost be read as companion pieces because they are so different, but in their different ways so pleasurable. And a bit like India Knight, Fergus Craig takes period language and gives it a contemporary spin, which is in itself rather clever. Sometimes the jokes are even in the vocabulary.

Sometimes people say that Casablanca is the greatest movie of all time, but also that it’s the greatest B movie. Well, this is like that—it’s a great popular fiction book that plays with the idea of popular fiction, plays with the idea of plot. Can a plot be funny? Yes, it can actually. There’s lots to love about this book: it’s a light read, and a very, very entertaining one.

5

Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors

by Aravind Jayan

Next I’d like us to talk about Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan. It’s the story of a young Indian couple who find themselves featured on a porn site. It doesn’t sound like a funny premise! How does it work?

This was in Sindhu’s original section of the submissions. She said she was reading it on an aeroplane and snorting, while everyone else around was looking at her, like: what are you on? That’s when we all decided to read it. Even if you don’t pick up all the many, many subtleties of in-jokes that are clearly in there, it’s just hilarious line for line. There isn’t an unfunny line in the book! So I think the writer is a comic genius, actually.

It’s funny about the conservatism of parents. It’s funny about what it is to be young. It’s funny about sex—and being funny about sex is quite hard. Very few people pull that off. So I’m thrilled it was submitted, as I loved reading it and it was a complete discovery. I’ve read India before—she’s been shortlisted before—and, obviously, Bob Mortimer is one of the country’s greatest living performers. But this came, to me, from nowhere and I just loved it. I think we all did. I can’t imagine anybody not finding this book laugh-out-loud funny.

It’s also quite short. Quite a few of the shortlisted books are, this year. So I’ve read it two or three times and laughed with new delight each time at things that I missed the last time. It was also a wonderful reminder of what it is to be young again.

6

The Satsuma Complex

by Bob Mortimer

Okay, I think you’ve convinced me. And, yes, that does bring us to Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex. He’s an established comedian and previously published a bestselling memoir, but this is his first novel. Tell us why it’s one of 2023’s funniest books.

He approaches the world with a wicked, mischievous smile. I guess this is what happens when you turn a brilliant, oblique comedic attention to life. He can really write. Obviously we know he knows how to tell a joke, but he also knows the difference between delivering comedy orally and writing something which will still hook and deliver. He can absolutely do it, and you find yourself complicit with him in the way the story turns into comedy. It’s a joy actually, because then you go out into the world with a bit more warmth in your soul. And you think the world is hilarious, that we are all completely ludicrous.

Yes, there are very good jokes in it. But it’s also just a humorous way of approaching the world that feels like a beautiful infusion of sanity. It’s easy to be anxious, concerned, traumatised, disrupted… the world is really difficult. But a bit of Mortimer makes it bearable and amusing, and he reminds you of the joy of talking and telling stories. It’s quite difficult not to hear it in his voice. But it’s like having a new pair of orange-tinted glasses, which makes everything quite strange and glowy—and you realise that the world can look totally different, if you look at it with a squint and from the side. It can be enchanting and funny.

So he makes you laugh, they all do. They all give delight, which is comedy’s greatest gift, and remind us that with good nature and generosity and by embracing human vulnerability and fallibility, you don’t have to see everything in that tragic, melodramatic way the news tells us—but that there is a way to read the world that will be good for you, good for your soul.

That seems like a natural and pleasing place for us to close.

I would say one more thing. These books are all brilliantly edited, which isn’t always the case, and beautifully published. And I love that there were so many others who, in another year, might have made the shortlist. Maybe comedy is the answer—No, that’s too cheap. Maybe comedy is an answer to some of the world’s greatest puzzles.

The winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2023 will be announced on Monday 20th November at The Goring Hotel in London.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

November 17, 2023

Fiction » Science Fiction

The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist

recommended by Tom Hunter

Every year, the judges of the Arthur C Clarke Award select the best sci-fi novels of the previous twelve months. We asked prize director Tom Hunter to talk us through the six science fiction books that made the 2023 shortlist—including a space opera romance and a high-concept action thriller that has already won the most prestigious award in Francophone literature.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

- Venomous Lumpsucker: A Novel

by Ned Beauman

- The Red Scholar's Wake

by Aliette de Bodard

- Plutoshine

by Lucy Kissick

- The Anomaly

by Hervé le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter

- The Coral Bones

by E.J. Swift

- Metronome

by Tom Watson

Has 2023 been a good year for science fiction?

I think it has. In fact, I might go further and suggest that it has been a good few years for science fiction literature, both from a Clarke Award perspective and more broadly. Using the range of science fiction awards as a measure, we can see a strong current of diversity running across the genre, and a range and scope of storytelling that is truly inspiring; and, of course, you only have to look back to our winning novel of 2022, Deep Wheel Orcadia, a verse-novel written in English and the Orkney dialect, to see precisely how original and creative contemporary science fiction can be.

Looking specifically at our own shortlist for 2023, all six of our nominated authors are new to our lists. Two of them, Lucy Kissick and Tom Watson, are debut novelists, and books have been submitted to our judging panel from across the publishing industry. I think this last point is especially important for measuring the health of the field as more imprints bring their own specialisms and interests into the mix. Editors have more comparisons for the purposes of pitching new books and authors to their own sales teams and book buyers, and the opportunity for readers to find great science fiction expands from a specific section of a bookstore to literature at large.

If you’re reading this article as someone new to science fiction I don’t think you could have timed your arrival any better than right now!

Did the judges notice any trends among this year’s submissions? What’s fashionable in science fiction in 2023?

We’re always cautious about talking about trends for several reasons. First, our judging panel is different every year, so not only are we receiving a lot of very different books every year, they are also being reviewed and discussed by a different cohort of award judges. That said, I think this year’s shortlist is a good introduction to some of the bigger themes and conversations underway within the science fiction space, and I’ll aim to talk to some of those points as we discuss each book.

More broadly, though, one major project we have is the public release of all of our submissions data every year, so people can get a full sense of the year in UK science fiction publishing for themselves. This is all available online via our Medium blog. We can use the diversity of authors being submitted as a lens to look at equity, diversity and inclusion issues within the publishing industry, and reflect that in our own efforts to call in books from across the full spectrum of the field.

“This year’s shortlist is a good introduction to some of the bigger themes and conversations underway within the science fiction space”

You’ll also be able to get a sense of the challenge our judges face from these submission lists. This year for example, with just under 100 books received, there were over 988 million possible different combinations of titles that could have come together to make our final shortlist.

It always makes me smile when commentators talk about such-and-such a shortlist decision being ‘obvious’ or ‘crowd-pleasing’ or deliberately aiming for controversy to gain publicity (not something we’ve ever done and also very, very hard to do anyway, by the way) when I know that even I have rarely been right in my predictions for the final shortlist, and I get to sit in the room where it happens!

1

Venomous Lumpsucker: A Novel

by Ned Beauman

Walk us through the books shortlisted for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, starting with Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman. What is it about, and why do you admire it?

So, this is where I can start talking about trends in depth. This book is set in a near future where human-led environmental degradation and climate catastrophe are the central focus of the plot, and the eponymous lumpsucker is just one of the many critically endangered species being ruthlessly traded for extinction credits (a tradable stock-like asset companies acquire specifically in order to legally cover themselves should their resource extraction terminate a species).

If that brief description sounds brutal, I can only agree. This is a dark, satirical, deeply angry book about our species. This is a book where the characters are deliciously unlikeable, the contempt for our powers-that-be is palpable, and the prospects for the future of our planet negligible; at least in terms of that narrow goldilocks zone required for sustaining the civilisations of carbon-based bipeds like ourselves.

It’s also eminently readable, oddly hopeful at times, and very, very funny. I’d be tempted to compare Ned Beauman’s humour here to our sci-fi satirist grandmaster Douglas Adams, or maybe his evil twin.

Beauman was longlisted for the Booker Prize for an earlier novel, The Teleportation Accident, and was picked out as one of Granta’s best young British novelists in 2013. Is Venomous Lumpsucker a work of literary fiction as well as science fiction?

Science fiction is often called the literature of ideas, so yes absolutely I think we can make that claim. That said, however, I also think the conversation or clash between what is ‘literary’ and what is ‘science fiction’ is an argument that has raged as long as our genre has existed, and is perhaps one we should strive to evolve beyond wherever we can. When I first became involved with the Clarke Award, a big part of the conversation around our shortlists every year was precisely located in that tension between the literary and the core of the genre. While that conversation is likely to keep going in various human outposts until some point around the heat-death of the universe, I also genuinely think it has moved on.

One sign of that is the publishing industry’s own willingness to cross-categorise books more—a decision that is doubtless as commercial as it is editorial if it means more book sales!—which is one of the reasons we’ve seen our submissions double in the past ten years or so. Put simply, more publishers are happy for their books to be considered science fiction, and you can see that in those shortlisted and winning titles from recent years proudly displaying the Clarke Award sigil on their covers and in their marketing blurbs.

And coming back to trends again for a moment, I think that convergence is only going to continue and that the global challenges of human-led climate crisis, viral pandemics, resource scarcity, migration, and so forth are all topics we’re increasingly seeing explored by authors of every kind. They say write what you know, and so much of what we know now is on this—hopefully reversible—trend.

And, of course, the minute you set your work even a few moments into the future, you are writing a form of science fiction!

2

The Red Scholar's Wake

by Aliette de Bodard

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard is the next science fiction book that made the 2023 shortlist; it sounds like a lot of fun. Space pirates, a marriage of convenience, interstellar war—there’s a lot going on. Tell us more.

So, first I wanted to go back to an earlier point I made about this being the first time all six of these authors have been shortlisted for the Clarke Award, which is true but doesn’t mean that they are new to science fiction, or indeed other awards. Aliette is a fantastic author, and one I have long expected to see shortlisted here by the Clarke Award, and the fact she hasn’t been already perhaps speaks more to how much she moves across the breadth of science fiction and fantasy in her work.

This book though, as you say, is absolutely all-caps SCIENCE FICTION. It is space opera, with an emphasis on the operatic although it has a very human centre.

What do you mean by that?

A convenient criticism of science fiction is that it often sacrifices the human in favour of the grand sweep of ‘big events’ or long explanations of warp drives, worm holes, parallel universes, and the like. I’m not sure those criticisms are based on any science fiction actually being written or read these days, but what a book like The Red Scholar’s Wake tells us more than anything is that science fiction can be fun and thematically serious and well-crafted while easy to lose yourself in all at the same time.

If there’s one book on this year’s list that really speaks to the joy of contemporary science fiction, and remind us why we first fell in love with the genre and all its most popular tropes while still being highly original and distinctly voiced, this is that book.

Is it unusual to combine sci-fi with romance?

This is a great question, and an important one as well, I think, as we consider all of the different modes that science fiction can potentially take.

It’s worth noting that before the term science fiction became the popular way to define our field, a previous term was ‘science-‘ or ‘scientific romance’. It’s also worth noting that the term romance had different contextual meanings then as well, so I don’t want to overlabour this point to the err of real sci-fi historians, but no I don’t think it is unusual to see science fiction combining with romance or other genre tropes at all. Science fiction is a vigorously hybrid genre, which perhaps explains its continued success, and is very capable of having its tropes adapt and merge with other narrative approaches. Just think of how many of our classic science fiction narratives are built upon the plots of other genres—for example, detective fiction.

Ah yes, I love China Miéville’s The City and the City. That’s a proper noir, a moody murder investigation in a strange world.

Jumping forward to present day, I also think we are seeing something of a trend towards more science fiction books wearing their romance elements on their sleeves (and their cover jackets). For me, this connects with the ongoing diversification of voices writing science fiction and the call from readers, echoed by editors, for stories where they can see themselves represented. This goes beyond romance, of course, but I might suggest a growing interest from readers in stories that are set on the intergalactic stage but where plots are driven by interpersonal considerations and relationships rather than the machinations of evil empires or invading aliens. The message really is that good science fiction is always more than the sum of its component parts!

3

Plutoshine

by Lucy Kissick

Great, yes. Let’s talk about Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick, the third book on your 2023 science fiction shortlist.

So, when we’re in the call for submissions phase of the award asking publishers for books, we pay a lot of attention to what’s out there, who’s talking about what, to make sure we get every book we possibly can for our judges. One thing I’ve learnt is that the more people from different parts of the science fiction community enthuse about a book to me, the more likely it is to also appeal to our judges. I saw this in the early days of publication for Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which of course went on to win not only the Clarke Award but a whole slew of other major science fiction prizes as well.

I can’t guarantee that we’ll see the same for Plutoshine, of course, but I would say that the enthusiasm for Lucy’s book that I’ve seen took me right back to that moment with Ann in 2013 and 2014, and I’m already looking forward to her future books!

The New Scientist said that it was “worth the admission fee for the fantastical depictions of Pluto alone.” Is there a lot of rich, descriptive writing?

And now we get to the ‘why’ of why this book has some great buzz about it! It’s surprising, given science fiction’s identification with space, that more of it isn’t set within our home solar system. Or maybe it isn’t as the pace of scientific discovery around those worlds most immediately beyond our own is now so advanced it’s a brave author who is going to hinge their plot on a world that might be redefined in real life before their book even hits the shelves.

Either way, when a book like Plutoshine does comes out I think people automatically notice it more both because of that relative difference to so much intergalactic science fiction and also because our human curiosity about our solar system remains even if outside of the realms of fiction its more usually the robots who get to do all the actual space exploring right now!

I think Pluto has also held a unique place in our planetary—or dwarf planetary—fascination precisely because of its distance from us and its unstable categorisation as a celestial body. For writers, I can only imagine how much resonance there must be with it being the namesake of the Roman god of the underworld.

So, you have here a twin challenge of a world that exists and we are learning more about all the time alongside a readership who is not only keen to read solar system-based science fiction and is, in all likelihood, going to be just as up on the research as you are. What to do?

Science fiction historically has often been criticised for its cardboard characters and emphasis on technical plotting—the infodump—versus other modes of fiction. Now, we might say that’s unfair, but as creators, editors and fans we also learn from that conversation, and just as with any Earth-bound literary work, the world we create and the characters we populate it with hinges on the connection a writer can make to the imagination of their readers. The spell that makes it real, as it were. Here Lucy makes her Pluto every bit as much a rich and evocative character as Dickens’ London, Atwood’s Gilead or, looking beyond our own planet once again, Herbert’s Arrakis.

4

The Anomaly

by Hervé le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter

Next, let’s turn to The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter. This book has quite the reputation; it won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2020, and has since sold over a million copies on the continent. I just read it myself during a summer holiday—it unfolds like a Hollywood action movie.

Right, so I’ve tried to talk about all of our shortlisted books in ways that will give readers an insight into the kinds of books they are and what made them appealing to our judges without moving into spoiler territory, and I’m going to have to be extra careful with these next three books!

There’s a high-concept plot trigger here which I can talk about: the ‘anomaly’ of the title relates to an inexplicable event whereby a plane and all onboard are duplicated. One plane lands as normal, the other three months later, but other than that small fact they are identical. The repercussions from this, told across a multi-viewpoint narrative, the attempts to understand what happened and to uncover if indeed such an anomaly may have occurred before, are what drives this book, and indeed its million-plus readers to find out what happened.

To say more would be to say too much, but I can say this is a book that garnered a lot of discussion from our judging panel just as it has driven conversations all around the world.

How often have you seen translated fiction on your shortlists? Is it common for sci-fi to find foreign-language audiences?

There is a huge global appetite for science fiction and whole scenes we are barely aware of here in the English-speaking parts of the world, although I am glad that this is another trend that is definitely shifting. Shout out to all those editors, anthologists, translators, and authors working to make that happen. Another recent work in translation from our own shortlists I would wholeheartedly recommend is Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, and I’d also encourage readers to seek out an increasing range of short fiction anthologies focusing on either works in translation or original works in English from international authors in China, the African continent and elsewhere on Planet Earth.

5

The Coral Bones

by E.J. Swift

The Coral Bones by E. J. Swift, the next book on the shortlist for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, is also an environmental book about extinction. This one is set around the Great Barrier Reef, over three distinct time periods.

This might sound strange, but I had a feeling this book might be shortlisted even before it was written or I’d ever heard of it. Let me explain: E.J. Swift is a UK author who has been on the Clarke Award radar since she first began her career, and her books have been discussed and praised by many of our previous judging panels.

Now, the members of our judging panel change every year so you can never predict exactly how they might make their decisions from one year to the next, but when you’ve been doing this award thing as long as I have, you can sometimes make good on the odd prediction or two. To that end, I’ve long suspected it was only a matter of time until E.J graced our shortlists. When you combine that with this novel being such a powerful evocation of our current global climate crisis, you can see why I might have been on the money just this once.

If that’s not enough of a personal recommendation for you, the multiple time periods aspect of this novel you mentioned is one that many people have spoken about in the same way they did with novels such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (itself a Clarke Award shortlist alum) and I can’t wait to see where E.J. takes us next.

I was sad to see that the small press that published this book will shortly be closing down. I suppose that indicates one value of a shortlist like this—to give extra airtime to books that might otherwise have flown under the radar, for one reason or another.

Small presses are a vital part of the science fiction ecosystem, and we’re always the poorer for their absence. It’s always a pleasure to see a small press title make the shortlists, and we always work hard to make sure this kind of title is submitted. Unsung Stories exemplified the best of the small press world. Utterly professional, a delight to work with and have brought us not one but two shortlisted authors in recent years: the other being Aliya Whiteley.

Cheerleading for small presses is one thing, but of course what they really need is our book-buying. Our shortlists work as recommendations, not definitive statements—no matter how much we believe in them ourselves. Reading is a pleasure, so I would much rather people came to one of two of our shortlisted titles rather than read all six out of a sense of obligation.

How then to square the circle of buying books to support the publishing ecosystem and boost more diverse authors, while also pursuing our own individual passions and tastes?

First, I’d suggest making a point to seek out new voices as part of your reading diet is only going to lead to more enjoyment and discovery in the long term. One thing I often do is ask for new voices as gifts—I am notorious hard to buy for, so wilfully opening myself up to something new is fun and I’d also suggest that gifting works to others is a great way of spreading the love (and the cash) as part of a bigger signal boost to new writers and imprints. After all, a gift will often be more treasured than something you picked up yourself and just plopped down in your to-be-read pile for ‘later.’

6

Metronome

by Tom Watson

That’s a nice way to think about it. That brings us to Metronome by Tom Watson—might you call this a ‘feminist dystopia’, in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, Blue Ticket, and the like? Tell us about it.

I think it’s fair to say that, ever since Margaret Atwood won our inaugural prize for The Handmaid’s Tale, that dystopian fiction has loomed darkly over the Clarke Award—although I for one always welcome a good dystopia to our shortlists!

As well as the books you’ve mentioned above, I would also point to recent Clarke titles such as Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed. That’s also set on an island. There is something distinctly dystopic about island settings I feel. I’m sure there’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere for someone, if indeed this topic hasn’t already been explored by brighter minds than mine already. I’m also hearing lots of people use Emily St. John Mandel’s name in comparison to this book as well.

Tom Watson is one of our other shortlisted debut novelists, and to find yourself in the kind of comparative company of Atwood or Mandel must be hugely inspiring for him and hopefully recommendation enough to have people adding this book to their shopping carts now. But for those craving more, here’s a little extra, spoiler-free, flavour:

This is a tight, intimate, book, focusing primarily on just two characters exiled to the aforementioned island and surviving well enough, at least until we move past page one. It’s not a lockdown book, but the recent experience of that that so many of us shared will doubtless inform many a reading. We follow lead character Alina’s increasing conviction that she is trapped, not all is as it seems and that escape is the only solution—but how, and to where?

You might think you know where this is heading, but it’s surprisingly difficult to second-guess. Our judges this year found themselves compelled by this novel, and inflict it on you all in turn, dear readers. Enjoy!

Did you come away from the judging process optimistic about the state of science fiction in 2023?

One of the joys of being an organiser for the Clarke Award is getting to sit like a fly on the wall and listen in as our judges deliberate.

What makes me optimistic more than anything is that, after reading 100 or more books, our judges are still finding new ideas and themes and authors to enthuse about. It’s always my pleasure to receive a new shortlist and have the opportunity to recommend new books to people.

I would love for everyone to go out and read all six of our shortlisted titles immediately so you can get your own sense of just how vibrant and diverse contemporary science fiction can be.

I’d also like to thank all of your judges for this year, and our supporting organisations, The British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival, who nominate them to us each year. These organisations are three more reasons to be optimistic about science fiction today, and I recommend them all to you as well.

Whoever our winner is this year, I wanted to offer my personal congratulations once again to all of our shortlisted authors. It’s been a pleasure to welcome six new authors to the Clarke Award, and I look forward to all of their future works with monolith-sized anticipation.

Part of our best books of 2023 series.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

August 6, 2023

Philosophy Books

The best books on Critical Thinking

recommended by Nigel Warburton

Do you know your straw man arguments from your weasel words? Nigel Warburton, Five Books philosophy editor and author of Thinking from A to Z, selects some of the best books on critical thinking—and explains how they will help us make better-informed decisions and construct more valid arguments.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

- Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

- Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

- Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

- Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

by Matthew Syed

- The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

- Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study

by Tom Chatfield

It’s been just over two years since you explained to us what critical thinking is all about. Could you update us on any books that have come out since we first spoke?

There are two recent books that I’d like to add to my critical thinking reading list.

1

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

Calling Bullshit by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West started life as a course at the University of Washington. It is a book—a handbook really—written with the conviction that bullshit, particularly the kind that is circulated on the Internet, is damaging democracy, and that misinformation and disinformation can have very serious consequences. Bullshitters don’t care about truth. But truth is important, and this book shows why. It is focussed on examples from science and medicine, but ranges more widely too. It’s a lively read. It covers not just verbal bullshit, bullshit with statistics (particularly in relation to big data) and about causation, but also has a chapter on bullshit data visualisations that distract from the content they are about, or present that data in misleading ways. Like all good books on critical thinking this one includes some discussion of the psychology of being taken in by misleading contributions to public debate.

In How To Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford gives us ten rules for thinking better about numbers, together with a Golden Rule (‘Be curious’). Anyone who has listened to his long-running radio series More or Less will know how brilliant Tim is at explaining number-based claims – as I read it, I hallucinated Tim’s reassuring, sceptical, reasonable, amused, and  patient voice. He draws on a rich and fascinating range of examples to teach us (gently) how not to be taken in by statistics and poorly supported claims. There is some overlap with Calling Bullshit, but they complement each other. Together they provide an excellent training in how not to be bamboozled by data-based claims.

[end of update. The original interview appears below]

___________________________

We’re here to talk about critical thinking. Before we discuss your book recommendations, I wonder if you would first explain: What exactly is critical thinking, and when should we be using it?

There’s a whole cluster of things that go under the label ‘critical thinking’. There’s what you might call formal logic, the most extreme case of abstractions. For example take the syllogism: if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, you can deduce from that structure of arguments that Socrates is mortal. You could put anything in the slots of ‘men,’ ‘Socrates,’ ‘mortal’, and whatever you put in, the argument structure remains valid. If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. That kind of logic, which can be represented using letters and signs rather than words, has its place. Formal logic is a quasi-mathematical (some would say mathematical) subject.

But that’s just one element of critical thinking. Critical thinking is broader, though it encompasses that. In recent years, it’s been very common to include discussion of cognitive biases—the psychological mistakes we make in reasoning and the tendencies we have to think in certain patterns which don’t give us reliably good results. That’s another aspect: focussing on the cognitive biases is a part of what’s sometimes called ‘informal logic’, the sorts of reasoning errors that people make, which can be described as fallacious. They’re not, strictly speaking, logical fallacies, always. Some of them are simply psychological tendencies that give us unreliable results.

The gambler’s fallacy is a famous one: somebody throwing a die that isn’t loaded has thrown it three times without getting a six, and then imagines that, by some kind of law of averages, the fourth time they’re more likely to get a six, because they haven’t yet got one yet. That’s just a bad kind of reasoning, because each time that you roll the dice, the odds are the same: there’s a one in six chance of throwing a six. There’s no cumulative effect and a dice doesn’t have a memory. But we have this tendency, or certainly gamblers often do, to think that somehow the world will even things out and give you a win if you’ve had a series of losses. That’s a kind of informal reasoning error that many of us make, and there are lots of examples like that.

I wrote a little book called Thinking from A to Z which was meant to name and explain a whole series of moves and mistakes in thinking. I included logic, some cognitive biases, some rhetorical moves, and also (for instance) the topic of pseudo-profundity, whereby people make seemingly deep statements that are in fact shallow. The classical example is to give a seeming paradox—to say, for example ‘knowledge is just a kind of ignorance,’ or ‘virtue is only achieved through vice.’ Actually, that’s just a rhetorical trick, and once you see it, you can generate any number of such ‘profundities’. I suppose that would fall under rhetoric, the art of persuasion: persuading people that you are a deeper thinker than you are. Good reasoning isn’t necessarily the best way to persuade somebody of something, and there are many devious tricks that people use within discussion to persuade people of a particular position. The critical thinker is someone who recognises the moves, can anatomise the arguments, and call them to attention.

So, in answer to your question: critical thinking is not just pure logic. It’s a cluster of things. But its aim is to be clear about what is being argued, what follows from the given evidence and arguments, and to detect any cognitive biases or rhetorical moves that may lead us astray.

Many of the terms you define and illustrate in Thinking from A to Z—things like ‘straw man’ arguments and ‘weasel words’—have been creeping into general usage. I see them thrown around on Twitter. Do you think that our increased familiarity with debate, thanks to platforms like Twitter, has improved people’s critical thinking or made it worse?

I think that improving your critical thinking can be quite difficult. But one of the ways of doing it is to have memorable labels, which can describe the kind of move that somebody’s making, or the kind of reasoning error, or the kind of persuasive technique they’re using.

For example, you can step back from a particular case and see that somebody’s using a ‘weak analogy’. Once you’re familiar with the notion of a weak analogy, it’s a term that you can use to draw attention to a comparison between two things which aren’t actually alike in the respects that somebody is implying they are. Then the next move of a critical thinker would be to point out the respects in which this analogy doesn’t hold, and so demonstrate how poor it is at supporting the conclusion provided. Or, to use the example of weasel words—once you know that concept, it’s easier to spot them and to speak about them.

Social media, particularly Twitter, is quite combative. People are often looking for critical angles on things that people have said, and you’re limited in words. I suspect that labels are probably in use there as a form of shorthand. As long as they’re used in a precise way, this can be a good thing. But remember that responding to someone’s argument with ‘that’s a fallacy’, without actually spelling out what sort of fallacy it is supposed to be, is a form of dismissive rhetoric itself.

There are also a huge number of resources online now which allow people to discover definitions of critical thinking terms. When I first wrote Thinking from A to Z, there weren’t the same number of resources available. I wrote it in ‘A to Z’ form, partly just as a fun device that allows for lots of cross references, but partly because I wanted to draw attention to the names of things. Naming the moves is important.

“People seem to get a kick out of the idea of sharing irrelevant features—it might be a birthday or it might be a hometown—with somebody famous. But so what?”

The process of writing the book improved my critical thinking quite a lot, because I had to think more precisely about what particular terms meant and find examples of them that were unambiguous. That was the hardest thing, to find clear-cut examples of the various moves, to illustrate them. I coined some of the names myself: there’s one in there which is called the ‘Van Gogh fallacy,’ which is the pattern of thought when people say: ‘Well, Van Gogh had red hair, was a bit crazy, was left-handed, was born on the 30th of March, and, what do you know, I share all those things’—which I do happen to do—‘and therefore I must be a great genius too.’

That’s an obviously erroneous way of thinking, but it’s very common. I was originally going to call it the ‘Mick Jagger fallacy,’ because I went to the same primary school as Mick Jagger (albeit not at the same time). People seem to get a kick out of the idea of sharing irrelevant features—it might be a birthday or it might be a hometown—with somebody famous. But so what? It doesn’t mean you’re going to be Mick Jagger, just because you went to the same primary school. In the end I called it the Van Gogh fallacy, and it’s quite amusing to see that it’s actually now got some currency online and elsewhere. People use it as if it were an established term, which I guess it is now.

2

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

I love that. Well, another title that deals with psychological biases is the first critical thinking book that you want to discuss, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Why did you choose this one?

This is an international bestseller by the Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist—although he’s principally a psychologist—Daniel Kahneman. He developed research with Amos Tversky, who unfortunately died young. I think it would have been a co-written book otherwise. It’s a brilliant book that summarizes their psychological research on cognitive biases (or its patterns of thinking) which all of us are prone to, which aren’t reliable.

There is a huge amount of detail in the book. It summarizes a lifetime of research—two lifetimes, really. But Kahneman is very clear about the way he describes patterns of thought: as using either ‘System One’ or ‘System Two.’ System One is the fast, intuitive, emotional response to situations where we jump to a conclusion very quickly. You know: 2 + 2 is 4. You don’t think about it.

System Two is more analytical, conscious, slower, methodical, deliberative. A more logical process, which is much more energy consuming. We stop and think. How would you answer 27 × 17? You’d have to think really hard, and do a calculation using the System Two kind of thinking. The problem is that we rely on this System One—this almost instinctive response to situations—and often come out with bad answers as a result. That’s a framework within which a lot of his analysis is set.

I chose this book because it’s a good read, and it’s a book you can keep coming back to—but also because it’s written by a very important researcher in the area. So it’s got the authority of the person who did the actual psychological research. But it’s got some great descriptions of the phenomena he researches, I think. Anchoring, for instance. Do you know about anchoring?

I think so. Is that when you provide an initial example that shapes future responses? Perhaps you’d better explain it.

That’s more or less it. If you present somebody with an arbitrary number, psychologically, most people seem prone when you ask them a question to move in the direction of that number. For instance, there’s an experiment with judges. They were being asked off the cuff: What would be a good sentence for a particular crime, say shoplifting? Maybe they’d say it would be a six-month sentence for a persistent shoplifter.

But if you prime a judge by giving an anchoring number—if you ask, ‘Should the sentence for shoplifting be more than nine months?’ They’re more like to say on average that the sentence should be eight months than they would have been otherwise. And if you say, ‘Should it be punished by a sentence of longer than three months?’ they’re more likely to come down in the area of five, than they would otherwise.

So the way you phrase a question, by introducing these numbers, you give an anchoring effect. It sways people’s thinking towards that number. If you ask people if Gandhi was older than 114 years old when he died, people give a higher answer than if you just asked them: ‘How old was Gandhi when he died?’

I’ve heard this discussed in the context of charity donations. Asking if people will donate, say, £20 a month returns a higher average pledge than asking for £1 a month.

People use this anchoring technique often with selling wine on a list too. If there’s a higher-priced wine for £75, then somehow people are more drawn to one that costs £40 than they would otherwise have been. If  that was the most expensive one on the menu, they wouldn’t have been drawn to the £40 bottle, but just having seen the higher price, they seem to be drawn to a higher number. This phenomenon occurs in many areas.

And there are so many things that Kahneman covers. There’s the sunk cost fallacy, this tendency that we have when we give our energy, or money, or time to a project—we’re very reluctant to stop, even when it’s irrational to carry on. You see this a lot in descriptions of withdrawal from war situations. We say: ‘We’ve given all those people’s lives, all that money, surely we’re not going to stop this campaign now.’ But it might be the rational thing to do. All that money being thrown there, doesn’t mean that throwing more in that direction will get a good result. It seems that we have a fear of future regret that outweighs everything else. This dominates our thinking.

What Kahneman emphasizes is that System One thinking produces overconfidence based on what’s often an erroneous assessment of a situation. All of us are subject to these cognitive biases, and that they’re extremely difficult to remove. Kahneman’s a deeply pessimistic thinker in some respects; he recognizes that even after years of studying these phenomena he can’t eliminate them from his own thinking. I interviewed him for a podcast once, and said to him: ‘Surely, if you teach people critical thinking, they can get better at eliminating some of these biases.’ He was not optimistic about that. I’m much more optimistic than him. I don’t know whether he had empirical evidence to back that up, about whether studying critical thinking can increase your thinking abilities. But I was surprised how pessimistic he was.

Interesting.

Unlike some of the other authors that we’re going to discuss . . .

Staying on Kahneman for a moment, you mentioned that he’d won a Nobel Prize, not for his research in psychology per se but for his influence on the field of economics. His and Tversky’s ground-breaking work on the irrationality of human behaviour and thinking forms the spine of a new field.

There has been a significant tendency in economics to talk about an ideal subject, making rational decisions for him or herself, and that didn’t take into account the kinds of cognitive biases that we’ve been discussing. The discipline of behavioural economics, which is very firmly established now, is kind of the antidote to that. You factor in these patterns of behaviour actual people have, rather than these idealized individuals making rational assessments about how they satisfy their desires. That’s probably a caricature of economics, but that’s the gist of it.

3

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

Let’s look at Hans Rosling’s book next, this is Factfulness. What does it tell us about critical thinking?

Rosling was a Swedish statistician and physician, who, amongst other things, gave some very popular TED talks. His book Factfulness, which was published posthumously—his son and daughter-in-law completed the book—is very optimistic, so completely different in tone from Kahneman’s. But he focuses in a similar way on the ways that people make mistakes.

We make mistakes, classically, in being overly pessimistic about things that are changing in the world. In one of Rosling’s examples he asks what percentage of the world population is living on less than $2 a day. People almost always overestimate that number, and also the direction in which things are moving, and the speed in which they’re moving. Actually, in 1966, half of the world’s population was in extreme poverty by that measure, but by 2017 it was only 9%, so there’s been a dramatic reduction in global poverty. But most people don’t realise this because they don’t focus on the facts, and are possibly influenced by what they may have known about the situation in the 1960s.

If people are asked what percentage of children are vaccinated against common diseases, they almost always underestimate it. The correct answer is a very high proportion, something like 80%. Ask people what the life expectancy for every child born today is, the global average, and again they get it wrong. It’s over 70 now, another surprisingly high figure. What Rosling’s done as a statistician is he’s looked carefully at the way the world is.

“Pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better”

People assume that the present is like the past, so when they’ve learnt something about the state of world poverty or they’ve learnt about health, they often neglect to take a second reading and see the direction in which things are moving, and the speed with which things are changing. That’s the message of this book.

It’s an interesting book; it’s very challenging. It may be over-optimistic. But it does have this startling effect on the readers of challenging widely held assumptions, much as Steven Pinker‘s The Better Angels of Our Nature has done. It’s a plea to look at the empirical data, and not just assume that you know how things are now. But pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better. In many ways, though clearly not in relation to global warming and climate catastrophe, the statistics are actually very good for humanity.

That’s reassuring.

So this is critical thinking of a numerical, statistical kind. It’s a bit different from the more verbally-based critical thinking that I’ve been involved with. I’m really interested to have my my assumptions challenged, and Factfulness is a very readable book. It’s lively and thought-provoking.

Coming back to what you said about formal logic earlier, statistics is another dense subject which needs specialist training. But it’s one that has a lot in common with critical thinking and a lot of people find very difficult—by which I mean, it’s often counter-intuitive.

One of the big problems for an ordinary reader looking at this kind of book is that we are not equipped to judge the reliability of his sources, and so the reliability of the conclusions that he draws. I think we have to take it on trust and authority and hope that, given the division of intellectual labour, there are other statisticians looking at his work and seeing whether he was actually justified in drawing the conclusions that he drew. He made these sorts of public pronouncements for a long time and responded to critics.

But you’re right that there is a problem here. I believe that most people can equip themselves with tools for critical thinking that work in everyday life. They can learn something about cognitive biases; they can learn about reasoning and rhetoric, and I believe that we can put ourselves as members of a democracy in a position where we think critically about the evidence and arguments that are being presented to us, politically and in the press. That should be open to all intelligent people, I think. It is not a particularly onerous task to equip yourself with a basic tools of thinking clearly.

But statistics requires a kind of numerical dexterity, a comfort working with numbers, and for some people it’s a difficult thing to get to a level where you can think critically about statistics. But it’s interesting to observe it being done, and that’s what I think you’re being invited to do with this book, to see somebody think critically about statistics, on a number of measures.

4

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

by Matthew Syed

Absolutely. Next you wanted to talk about Five Books alumnus Matthew Syed‘s Black Box Thinking.

Yes, quite a different book. Matthew Syed is famous as a former international table tennis player, but—most people probably don’t know this—he has a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford as well.

This book is really interesting. It’s an invitation to think differently about failure. The title, Black Box Thinking, comes from the black boxes which are standardly included in every passenger aircraft, so that if an accident occurs there’s a recording of the flight data and a recording of the audio communications as the plane goes down. When there’s a crash, rescuers always aim to recover these two black boxes. The data is then analysed, the causes of the crash, dissected and scrutinized, and the information shared across the aeronautic industry and beyond.

“This is a model of an industry where, when there is a failure, it’s treated as a very significant learning experience”

Obviously, everybody wants to avoid aviation disasters because they’re so costly in terms of loss of human life. They undermine trust in the whole industry. There’s almost always some kind of technical or human error that can be identified, and everybody can learn from particular crashes. This is a model of an industry where, when there is a failure, it’s treated as a very significant learning experience, with the result that airline travel has become a very safe form of transport.

This contrasts with some other areas of human endeavour, such as, sadly, much of healthcare, where the information about failures often isn’t widely shared. This can be for a number of reasons: there may be a fear of litigation—so if a surgeon does something unorthodox, or makes a mistake, and somebody as a result doesn’t survive an operation, the details of exactly what happened on the operating table will not be widely shared, typically, because there is this great fear of legal comeback.

The hierarchical aspects of the medical profession may have a part to play here, too. People higher up in the profession are able to keep a closed book, and not share their mistakes with others, because it might be damaging to their careers for people to know about their errors. There has been, historically anyway, a tendency for medical negligence and medical error, to be kept very quiet, kept hidden, hard to investigate.

“You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it”

What Matthew Syed is arguing is that we need to take a different attitude to failure and see it as the aviation industry does. He’s particularly interested in this being done within the healthcare field, but more broadly too. It’s an idea that’s come partly from his reading of the philosopher Karl Popper, who described how science progresses not by proving theories true, but by trying to disprove them. You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it. So, in a sense, the failure of the hypothesis is the way by which science progresses: conjecture followed by refutation, not hypothesis followed by confirmation.

As Syed argues, we progress in all kinds of areas is by making mistakes. He was a superb table-tennis player, and he knows that every mistake that he made was a learning experience, at least potentially, a chance to improve. I think you’d find the same attitude among musicians, or in areas where practitioners are very attentive to the mistakes that they make, and how those failures can teach them in a way that allows them to make a leap forward. The book has a whole range of examples, many from industry, about how different ways of thinking about failure can improve the process and the output of particular practices.

When we think of bringing up kids to succeed, and put emphasis on avoiding failure, we may not be helping them develop. Syed’s argument is that we should make failure a more positive experience, rather than treat it as something that’s terrifying, and always to be shied away from. If you’re trying to achieve success, and you think, ‘I have to achieve that by accumulating other successes,’ perhaps that’s the wrong mindset to achieve success at the higher levels. Perhaps you need to think, ‘Okay, I’m going to make some mistakes, how can I learn from this, how can I share these mistakes, and how can other people learn from them too?’

That’s interesting. In fact, just yesterday I was discussing a book by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and New Yorker writer, called The Checklist Manifesto. In that, Gawande also argues that we should draw from the success of aviation, in that case, the checklists that they run through before take-off and so on, and apply it to other fields like medicine. A system like this is aiming to get rid of human error, and I suppose that’s what critical thinking tries to do, too: rid us of the gremlins in machine.

Well, it’s also acknowledging that when you make an error, it can have disastrous consequence. But you don’t eliminate errors just by pretending they didn’t occur. With the Chernobyl disaster, for instance, there was an initial unwillingness to accept the evidence in front of people’s eyes that a disaster had occurred, combined with a fear of being seen to have messed up. There’s that tendency to think that everything’s going well, a kind of cognitive bias towards optimism and a fear of being responsible for error, but it’s also this unwillingness to see that in certain areas, admission of failure and sharing of the knowledge that mistakes have occurred is the best way to minimize failure in the future.

Very Beckettian. “Fail again. Fail better.”

I guess. But that’s a kind of pessimism—that you’re never going to achieve anything. Whereas I think Matthew Syed is a very optimistic person who believes that actually things can be a lot better, and the way they’ll get a lot better is by thinking critically about how we achieve things, about the best way to achieve success. Not to follow established practices which hide failure, but to see failure as probably a condition of success, not just a prelude to more failure. Though, in a way the Popperian line is that progress is a process of failing better, so perhaps you’re right.

5

The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

Absolutely. Well, shall we move onto to Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly?

Yes. This is quite a light book in comparison with the others. It’s really a summary of 99 moves in thinking, some of them psychological, some of them logical, some of them social. What I like about it is that he uses lots of examples. Each of the 99 entries is pretty short, and it’s the kind of book you can dip into. I would think it would be very indigestible to read it from cover to cover, but it’s a book to keep going back to.

I included it because it suggests you can you improve your critical thinking by having labels for things, recognising the moves, but also by having examples which are memorable, through which you can learn. This is an unpretentious book. Dobelli doesn’t claim to be an original thinker himself; he’s a summariser of other people’s thoughts. What he’s done is brought lots of different things together in one place.

Just to give a flavour of the book: he’s got a chapter on the paradox of choice that’s three pages long called ‘Less is More,’ and it’s the very simple idea that if you present somebody with too many choices, rather than freeing them and improving their life and making them happier, it wastes a lot of their time, even destroys the quality of their life.

“If you present somebody with too many choices, it wastes a lot of their time”

I saw an example of this the other day in the supermarket. I bumped into a friend who was standing in front of about 20 different types of coffee. The type that he usually buys wasn’t available, and he was just frozen in this inability to make a decision between all the other brands that were in front of him. If there’d only been one or two, he’d have just gone for one of those quickly.

Dobelli here is summarising the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz who concluded that generally, a broader selection leads people to make poorer decisions for themselves. We think going into the world that what we need is more choice, because that’ll allow us to do the thing we want to do, acquire just the right consumable, or whatever. But perhaps just raising that possibility, the increased number of choices will lead us to make poorer choices than if we had fewer to choose between.

Now, that’s the descriptive bit, but at the end of this short summary, he asks ‘So what can you do about this practically?’ His answer is that you should think carefully about what you want before you look at what’s on offer. Write down the things you think you want and stick to them. Don’t let yourself be swayed by further choices. And don’t get caught up in a kind of irrational perfectionism. This is not profound advice, but it’s stimulating. And that’s typical of the book.

You can flip through these entries and you can take them or leave them. It’s a kind of self-help manual.

Oh, I love that. A critical thinking self-help book.

It really is in that self-help genre, and it’s nicely done. He gets in and out in a couple of pages for each of these. I wouldn’t expect this to be on a philosophy reading list or anything like that, but it’s been an international bestseller. It’s a clever book, and I think it’s definitely worth dipping into and coming back to. The author is not claiming that it is the greatest or most original book in the world; rather, it’s just a book that’s going to help you think clearly. That’s the point.

He’s optimistic too, unlike Kahneman. Dobelli’s not saying you’re caught up in all these biases and there’s nothing you can do about it. He’s saying there is a sense in which you can do something about all this. That may be just another cognitive bias, an illusion, but I’m biased towards thinking that thinking about things can change the way we behave. It might be difficult, but reflecting on the things that you’re doing is, I believe, the first step towards thinking more clearly.

6

Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study

by Tom Chatfield

Absolutely. Let’s move to the final title, Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study. We had Tom on Five Books many moons ago to discuss books about computer games. This is rather different. What makes it so good?

Well, this is a different kind of book. I was trying to think about somebody reading this interview who wants to improve their thinking. Of the books I’ve discussed, the ones that are most obviously aimed at that are Black Box Thinking, the Dobelli book, and Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking. The others are more descriptive or academic. But this book is quite a contrast with the Dobelli’s. The Art of Thinking Clearly is a very short and punchy book, while Tom’s is longer, and more of a textbook. It includes exercises, with summaries in the margins, it’s printed in textbook format. But that shouldn’t put a general reader off, because I think it’s the kind of thing you can work through yourself and dip into.

It’s clearly written and accessible, but it is designed to be used on courses as well. Chatfield teaches a point, then asks you to test yourself to see whether you’ve learnt the moves that he’s described. It’s very wide-ranging: it includes material on cognitive biases as well as more logical moves and arguments. His aim is not simply to help you think better, and to structure arguments better, but also to write better. It’s the kind of book that you might expect a good university to present to the whole first year intake, across a whole array of courses. But I’m including it here more as a recommendation for the autodidact. If you want to learn to think better: here is a course in the form of a book. You can work through this on your own.

Fantastic.

It’s a contrast with the other books as well, so that’s part of my reason for putting it in there, so there’s a range of books on this list.

Definitely. I think Five Books readers, almost by definition, tend towards autodidacticism, so this is a perfect book recommendation. And, finally, to close: do you think that critical thinking is something that more people should make an effort to learn? I suppose the lack of it might help to explain the rise of post-truth politics.

It’s actually quite difficult to teach critical thinking in isolation. In the Open University’s philosophy department, when I worked there writing and designing course materials, we decided in the end to teach critical thinking as it arose in teaching other content: by stepping back from time to time to look at the critical thinking moves being made by philosophers, and the critical thinking moves a good student might make in response to them. Pedagogically, that often works much better than attempting to teach critical thinking as a separate subject in isolation.

This approach can work in scientific areas too. A friend of mine has run a successful university course for zoologists on critical thinking, looking at correlation and cause, particular types of rhetoric that are used in write ups and experiments, and so on, but all the time driven by real examples from zoology. If you’ve got some subject matter, and you’ve got examples of people reasoning, and you can step back from it, I think this approach can work very well.

But in answer to your question, I think that having some basic critical thinking skills is a prerequisite of being a good citizen in a democracy. If you are too easily swayed by rhetoric, weak at analysing arguments and the ways that people use evidence, and prone to all kinds of biases that you are unaware of, how can you engage politically? So yes, all of us can improve our critical thinking skills, and I do believe that that is an aspect of living the examined life that Socrates was so keen we all should do.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

December 4, 2020

Philosophy Books

The best books on Stoicism

recommended by Massimo Pigliucci

The Stoics offer us valuable strategies of thinking about and dealing with hardships that remain relevant for modern society, Massimo Pigliucci, Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York and practising Stoic, told us in 2016. We were interviewing him about the best books to read to get a better idea of what Stoicism is all about and why some people find the ancient philosophy, famously practised by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, comforting today. This week our philosophy editor, Nigel Warburton, caught up with Massimo and asked him about new Stoicism books that have come out since they first spoke–and why the philosophy remains so popular.

Interview by Nigel Warburton

- The Discourses of Epictetus

by Epictetus

- A Guide to the Good Life

by William B Irvine

- Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

- Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius

by Seneca

- A New Stoicism

by Laurence Becker

It’s over four years since I interviewed you about Stoicism, and there have been quite a few new books published on this topic since then. Why do you think Stoicism is proving so popular?

It’s hard to tell for sure, of course. Someone should do a sociology thesis on this! My guess is that it has to do with a combination of factors.

First off, Stoicism is a solid philosophy of life, analogous to, say, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. So it is no surprise that at a time when mainstream religion is losing its appeal people turn to secular or at least theologically neutral approaches to living a good life.

Second, Stoicism originated and became popular — back during the Hellenistic period — at a time of turmoil, where society was changing in dramatic ways, and people felt they had no control over what was happening. This is the situation we are living now, in the second decade of the 21th century. Although our focus currently is on a pandemic, we shouldn’t forget that we still face the possibility of climate collapse, are under the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon, and we keep experiencing dramatic political upheavals and civil unrest. People need some sort of ethical compass to live and perhaps even thrive through these sorts of things.

Third, for all the negative comments we can rattle out about social media, they are making it much easier to discover new ideas and especially to share them with others. The major Stoic interest group on Facebook now has over 82,000 members, and a number of other such groups have sprung up either for people interested in practising Stoicism locally (Italy, France, Portugal, Brazil, India, etc.), or for those wishing to pursue particular aspects or applications of the philosophy (Stoicism and the military, politically progressive Stoicism, and of course Stoic dating!).

Finally, there has been the deliberate, concerted effort of a relatively small number of people, largely coalescing around two organizations: Modern Stoicism and the Stoic Fellowship. The first group organizes the annual Stoic Week and Stoicon events, and has been fostering a number of local, smaller “Stoicon-X” gatherings; the second one has the goal of helping people create local “Stoas,” connecting in person, as much as it is currently possible because of Covid, of course.

Are there any new books about Stoicism that stand out for you as particularly interesting?

Yes, the past few years have seem quite a number of new entries! I’d start by mentioning Donald Robertson’s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, a philosophical biography of Marcus Aurelius, using key moments in the emperor’s life to introduce readers to the principles and practice of Stoicism, updated on the basis of the author’s experience as a cognitive behavioural therapist.

Then there is William Irvine’s The Stoic Challenge, which uses a crucial tool in Stoicism — what modern psychologists call the framing effect — to change the way we think about setbacks. When something happens that is not according to your plans, like, you know, being stuck for months in your house because of a pandemic, reformulate the situation in your mind as a challenge issued to you by the universe. Keep track of how well you respond to the challenge, even using a self-scoring rubric, and when you judge the challenge to be over give yourself a thorough evaluation. There is very good empirical evidence that this actually helps significantly.

A third book I’d like to mention is John Sellars’s Lessons in Stoicism, written by one of the foremost scholars in ancient and modern Stoic philosophy. It’s short and organized around seven basic and highly useful concepts: the philosopher as doctor, what we control, the problem of emotions, dealing with adversity, our place in nature, life and death, and how to live together.

You’ve also published a couple of books that deal with Stoic themes. What are they, and how would you describe your books?

Yes, I’ve been rather active myself. After my first book, How to Be a Stoic, I co-wrote with Gregory Lopez A Handbook for New Stoics (UK title: Live Like a Stoic), which is a rather unique entry in the modern canon. It presents 52 exercises for practising Stoicism, from which people can sample in order to tailor their practice to their specific needs. It’s a hands-on book, meant to be written on, and the exercises are grouped according to the three “disciplines” of the second century Stoic Epictetus: desire (i.e., how to reorient our priorities), action (i.e., how to deal with other people), and assent (i.e., how to improve our judgment).

And speaking of Epictetus, my newest book is coming out in the UK on 9/17, with the title The Stoic Guide to a Happy Life  (American title: A Field Guide to a Happy Life), and it is a complete rewrite of one of ancient Stoicism’s most important texts, Epictetus’s Enchiridion (or Manual). The idea is that Stoicism is now 23 centuries old, and that just like modern Christians or Buddhists are not sticking necessarily to the original version of their philosophies, so Stoics need to update things for the 21st century, taking into account the progress incurred in the meantime by both science and philosophy.

So yes, Stoicism is getting more popular, and it seems to be here to stay. And I think that’s a good thing. This particular philosophy may not be for everyone, and it certainly isn’t the only way to live a good life. But one of the most rewarding things that has happened to me since I started writing about it is the constant flow of testimonies to the fact that it really helps people. Just like it did back in Athens around 300 BCE, when Zeno of Citium got things started.

[End of our 2020 update. The original 2016 interview appears below]

___________________________

Stoicism, in contrast with a lot of contemporary philosophy, puts a great emphasis on living well: the person who studies Stoicism, if sincere, will also practise it. I know you’re both a theorist and a practitioner. Could you say a little bit about how you came to Stoicism?

We’ll get back to the theorist part because I’m definitely not an ancient philosophy scholar, so I’m not a theorist in that sense, but I’m interested in Stoicism as both theory and practice for today’s world. How did I come to it? It was a long circuitous route. A few years ago I went through a midlife crisis and switched from my first academic career as an evolutionary biologist to become a philosopher. Within philosophy I’m interested mostly in the philosophy of science, but you can’t switch to philosophy and start studying it seriously and just be limited to your own technical field of expertise; at least you can, but I don’t think you should.

I began reading more broadly, and—coming to philosophy in the second half of my life—I had a lot to catch up with. I started reading about ethics. I read Kant and Mill, and looked at modern ethics in terms of deontology and utilitarianism in all their forms. I found those ways of understanding ethics wanting. They are wonderful authors, but it didn’t click with me. Then I remembered studying philosophy back in high school – I grew up in Italy where it is mandatory to study three years of history of philosophy. I remembered reading about the ancient Greeks and Romans, and had vague recollections that these people had a very different conception of ethics.

The first stop there was obviously Aristotle. I rediscovered virtue ethics, and that really did appeal to me immediately. Then I went beyond Aristotle and read what little there is available on Epicureanism and some of the other Hellenistic schools of virtue ethics. All this interested me because it clearly embodied a much broader conception of ethics. Most contemporary ethics is focused on answering narrower questions such as: ‘Is this action right or wrong?’ and: ‘Under what circumstances is this permissible or not permissible?’

“For the ancients, ethics was the study of how to live a good life”

The ancients had a much broader conception of ethics. Ethics, for them, was the study of how to live a good life. That is what really appealed to me. After reading Aristotle, I moved on to explore other post-Socratic philosophers. Of course I also went back and read the Platonic dialogues to look at the source of all of this. Then I heard about an event that takes place in the UK called Stoic Week; I remembered Stoicism from studying it in high school. In fact, I grew up with that tradition because Stoicism was the dominant philosophy in ancient Rome, and I studied Roman history at school.

I had a vague idea that it was the attitude Mr Spock takes in Star Trek: going around life with a stiff upper lip, or something like that. So the first time I heard about Stoic Week I thought, ‘that’s weird’, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. I read an article about it. The following year, the same thing happened, and in the meantime of course I kept reading about virtue ethics. Eventually I said to myself, ‘you know, maybe it’s time to take a second look at Stoicism and see what it is that these people are actually doing. Why did they choose to hold Stoic Week as opposed to Epicurean Week, or Aristotelian Week, or whatever?’ Then I got hooked.

As soon as I read the Modern Stoicism blog on the University of Exeter site, I started exploring on my own, and all of a sudden things started clicking and fitting in, and the puzzle was coming together. So that’s how I got started. The very first book that I read after this renewed interest in Stoicism was The Discourses of Epictetus.

1

The Discourses of Epictetus

by Epictetus

That’s your first choice of books. Epictetus, famously, was a slave in his early life, wasn’t he?

Yes. He was a very interesting figure. He was a slave, born in Hierapolis, which is modern Pamukkale in Turkey, which at that time was a Greek city and became a Roman colony in the late 1st century/early 2nd century. He was born a slave and badly treated when he was young: his master, through either carelessness or viciousness, broke his leg, and as a result he was crippled throughout his life. Then, at around age 15, he was bought by a much better master, who turned out to be Nero’s personal secretary.

Epictetus was brought to Rome, and for a while lived at Nero’s court. Then Nero became more unhinged both in life and in the way in which he was running the business of the empire, and eventually that led to revolt. Nero committed suicide—well, in fact Nero botched his attempted suicide and it was his secretary, Epictetus’ master, who helped him in the end, so he’s the one who killed Nero.

“Domitian kicked out all philosophers from Rome and sent them into exile”

As a result of those events, Epictetus then started having his own quasi-independent life in Rome. Eventually he became a freedman, which was not unusual for bright slaves in ancient Rome. In the meantime he had, under the tutelage of his second master, started reading and learning about philosophy, and became the pupil of Musonius Rufus. Musonius was a major Stoic philosopher in ancient Rome. Epictetus studied with him for a number of years, and eventually started teaching on his own.

In the meantime, several political events happened in Rome: there was one emperor after another. One was Domitian, who was a little unhinged himself and wasn’t particularly fond of philosophers: all this talk about virtue and how you should do things as opposed to how you actually do things I guess didn’t agree with him. Domitian kicked out all philosophers from Rome and sent them into exile.

Really? I’d never heard that.

Yes, this is something that few people hear about. When we think about Rome, we think about persecution of the Christians, but actually philosophers, and in particular the Stoics, were persecuted by several Roman emperors because they really didn’t like this constant reminder that you should be doing better than you are doing. A number of philosophers were put to death and a number exiled. Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’ teacher, was twice exiled. Epictetus was also exiled by Domitian. He went to North West Greece to a place called Nicopolis and he established his new school there. He was about 40 by that time. Later on he was recalled to Rome, but refused to leave. He lived in Nicopolis to a ripe age of 80, which for the time was remarkable.

That’s the equivalent of 200 today presumably.

Yes. It was really amazing. He kept teaching and he built a reputation so that fairly wealthy people sent their kids to Nicopolis to study with Epictetus and one of the later emperors, Hadrian, became a good friend of his. Hadrian was impressed by Epictetus and went to visit him, and they met a few times and became friends. Epictetus, by the end of his life took a wife of about his own age, apparently so she could help him raise a child fathered by a friend of Epictetus’. The child was destined to be exposed—which was the euphemism in Rome for being left to fend for himself in the elements, and probably die.

“Epictetus was a slave who became a prominent philosopher and teacher, and became a friend of emperors”

Epictetus’ was an interesting life: a slave who turns prominent philosopher and teacher, who becomes friends with emperors and is kicked out by other emperors: it’s fascinating. Epictetus didn’t write any books; he was a teacher, in the same vein as Socrates, who made a point of not writing his ideas down. The two books we have by Epictetus are called the Discourses, and the Enchiridion—‘enchiridion’ means ‘handbook.’

Both the Discourses and the Handbook were put together by one of Epictetus’ most brilliant students, Arrian. Arrian was probably about 23 or so when he did this. After a few years as Epictetus’ student, he became a historian and a writer in his own right. He wrote the definitive account of Alexander the Great’s expedition. Arrian was very well known in the ancient world.

Do many of his works survive?

Some of his works survive. He put together eight volumes of the Discourses—basically these are his handwritten notes from Epictetus’ lectures. Of those eight books, unfortunately only four remain. The other four got lost somewhere during the Middle Ages. The Enchiridion, the Handbook, is the short version that Arrian put together by picking the best bits from the Discourses. So that’s all we have from Epictetus today: the surviving four volumes of the Discourses and then the Enchiridion, which is very short.

What’s the main thesis of the Discourses? Why is it so interesting?

It’s interesting because it guides you on how to live your life from a Stoic perspective. The chapter titles are topics that Epictetus debated with his students, and these topics were often very practical. There’s very little theoretical philosophy in Epictetus. He wasn’t interested in metaphysics. In fact, he explicitly told his students that whatever the nature of the world turns out to be doesn’t make any difference to human life. If the universe is made up of atoms, or it’s made up of something else, those are interesting questions but they’re not going to affect your life. In that sense he’s an unusual Stoic because most Stoics were into system-building, especially the early ones: the Greek Stoics before the philosophy moved to Rome, made major contributions to logic, they wrote a lot about metaphysics. Epictetus was focused on ethics, which is the third Stoic concern.

So he’s agnostic on metaphysics?

That’s right. He says whatever turns out to be turns out to be. There are people interested in that stuff and they’ll figure it out, but really when you have to deal with your daily life and the challenges that it brings, that’s not going to be particularly helpful.

Am I right that many of the Stoics grounded their ethics on metaphysics, so the metaphysics actually shaped the ethics?

Yes. That’s an interesting question. The early Stoics thought that there were three areas of philosophical inquiry. What they called ‘physics’ is what today we would describe as a combination of metaphysics and natural science. Their ‘logic’ we would still call logic today, but for them it included epistemology, cognitive science, and psychology. And then there was the ‘ethics’, which was the study of how to live your life. Their idea was that in order to figure out how to live your life, you needed to understand how the universe works and what your place in it was—that would be the ‘physics’—and you also needed to understand how human beings reason and fail to reason well; that’s where the ‘logic’ came in.

Now, Epictetus didn’t necessarily reject this, he just said there were many different alternatives, many different ways of doing or understanding physics and understanding logic that would support the same way of living your life. So, in modern terms, we would say that Epictetus thought that the physics and the logic were relevant at some level to the ethics, but they underdetermine it. It’s not as if you need to know all the details about how the world works in order to figure out how to live your life.

Is that almost an injunction not to get het up about metaphysical questions at the expense of living well?

Correct. Exactly. In fact Epictetus says just this in several places in the Discourses. There are a couple of places, for instance, where he says that we can have interesting discussions about metaphysics or logic, but those discussions have to bear on specific ethical issues. If you’re just going off splitting hairs in logic, then you’re doing something different that’s not particularly interesting or particularly relevant to living your life.

“Some things are under your control and other things are not under your control”

Broadly speaking the Discourses are about how to live your life: they present the basic principles of Stoicism over and over, from different angles and exploring the consequences in different contexts. Arguably the most basic one, which Epictetus insists on several times, and is also how the Enchiridion starts, is his famous dichotomy of control: he says, some things are under your control and other things are not under your control. Then he lists the kinds of things that are under your control and those that are not: things under your control are your behaviour, your decisions, your rational thinking processes; the things that are not under your control are all the externalities: your health, your wealth, your education, your stature in life, your reputation. It’s not that you can’t influence the things not under your control, of course you can. He says so explicitly. But they’re not entirely under your control. You can only try to be healthy, and wealthy, and educated, and have a good life in the sense of externalities, but, you know, shit happens, so to speak—that’s not a direct quote—and Stoicism in the great part, especially Epictetus’ Stoicism, is about how to deal with situation where shit does actually happen. What do you do then? How do you react in life when things don’t go your way? The dichotomy of control is crucial in Stoicism, particularly to Epictetus’ philosophy.

When I began reading Stoic works I started making furious notes and highlighting things and then going back to quotations one after another. I just want to read you one which is right at the beginning of the Discourses, volume 1, chapter 1.32, it’s an example of the dichotomy of control, but it’s also an example of something that immediately endeared Epictetus to me: his sense of humour. He has a very wicked sense of humour, a very interesting sense of humour. Here’s the quotation:

I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived – and dying I will tend to later.

When I read that I started laughing. Ok, sure—death is inevitable. Is it coming now? If it’s now then I’m ready, let’s go, let’s do it, because everybody has to die; but if not now, then I’m going to do other things, and of course when death comes, it’s not under your control, so you just accept it, whenever it is.

It could be under your control if you commit suicide, couldn’t it?

Yes. Suicide is a big deal for the Stoics, and for Epictetus in particular. Epictetus referred to it as “the open door.” He says to his students several times not to take it lightly: suicide for the Stoics was a serious business and he was not saying jump out of the window at the first problem; but, he says, if you do get yourself into a situation where there really is no way out and life really does become insufferable, or so painful, or you realise that you cannot contribute any longer to society in any meaningful way, then the door is open, you can leave of your own accord. He also adds, which is crucial I think to understanding the whole thing, that it is that fact that the door is open that gives meaning to what you do. The very reason why you can keep on going, struggling on, and living your life, and trying to do your best, is precisely because you know that if it becomes unbearable, you do have another option.

I can see why Epictetus is so attractive. He led a fascinating life, and put forward a very interesting practical philosophy. But what about this caricature of Stoicism that the way you achieve independence from the contingencies of life is by somehow extirpating your emotions?

2

A Guide to the Good Life

by William B Irvine

That is, as you say, a caricature of Stoicism; but it’s a very common one, and it’s not going to go away anytime soon. The second book that I recommend, William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life, deals with this in some detail. There are several chapters in which Irvine goes into these ideas about the Stoics and emotions. The basic idea is this: yes, Stoics do have that reputation, but if you look at what they wrote and the way they actually behaved in life, they were far from emotionless.

We have excellent accounts of the lives of ancient Stoics: we know a lot about the Greek Stoics, beginning from Zeno, the founder of the philosophy, through Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which includes several mini-biographies of Stoics; and of course we also know a lot about Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and others too. We know what these people did, and how they practised their philosophies. There is nothing in any of these biographies or in any of their writings that suggests that they behaved in a Spock-like way and suppressed their emotions in order to think about things rationally. What they did, and they were very explicit about this, was recognise that there are different types of human emotions.

“Epictetus referred to suicide as “the open door””

The first emotional reaction you have to something, they called an impression. So for instance let’s say that you are walking in the street by yourself at night and you hear a sound that doesn’t feel right. Your first impression, your first reaction might be one of fear, and the Stoics said there’s nothing you can do about that. There are natural reactions, and you cannot and you should not, in fact, suppress them. But what you should do, if it is at all possible, is examine them, step back for a second and say: ‘Why am I afraid? Is there really something to be afraid of, or not?’ If there is something to be afraid of, a real danger, by all means deal with the danger; but a lot of the time the first impression is actually misleading. If you get angry, for instance, at something, think: ‘Why am I getting angry here? Am I being insulted? What is an insult? What is this person who is insulting me trying to tell me? Is there some truth perhaps in what he’s saying? Should I even pay attention to an insult to begin with? Why am I reacting this way?’ The aim was to examine your emotion and to manage or gradually eliminate the negative, destructive ones. The obvious example of a destructive emotion, particularly in Seneca’s writing, was anger. Seneca calls it a ‘temporary madness’. If you do things in anger, you’re very likely going to do things that you regret.

Even if you have anger and indignation at injustice?

I’m so glad you brought that up because indignation at injustice, a sense of injustice, those are positive emotions. The Stoics believed that good character is made of the practice of four fundamental virtues, we call them the cardinal virtues. One of those virtues is justice, and yes, a sense of justice needs to be cultivated because it is a positive emotion. The contrast between anger and justice is exactly this: that anger will cloud your judgement, even if it is justifiable anger, even if there is a good reason to be angry at something. If you react just on the basis of anger, you’re very likely going to make wrong decisions or act rashly; but on the other hand there are situations where you do want to cultivate a sense of indignation, a sense of justice being violated, and you do want to do something about it, and that’s a positive emotion—that’s something that the Stoics would definitely say you should do.

William Irvine’s book is part of the recent resurrection of Stoicism. It strikes me that there was this big movement in philosophy to reinstate virtue ethics, starting in the 1950s with Elizabeth Anscombe and various others saying that we’ve been caught up in an impoverished view of what ethics is, so let’s go back to the ancient Greeks, and particularly to Aristotle.

But it strikes me that the virtue ethicists, although they’ve theorised virtue, aren’t necessarily striving to be more virtuous. It’s not obvious that there’s a school of neo-Aristotelian people practically trying to be more virtuous. The really interesting thing about Stoicism is that, in its modern form, there are large numbers of people trying to practise Stoicism with a view to becoming better people. I may be doing virtue theory an injustice here, but I haven’t been aware of an increase in the number of virtuous people as a result of this philosophical study, but there are definitely people behaving stoically now.

I think what you’re getting at there is this separation between academic philosophy and practical philosophy. There was a series of studies a few years ago showing that academic moral philosophers are actually no more moral than the average academic.

They’re less moral when judged by a set of conventional critiera. Eric Schwitzgebel did that research.

So there’s solid empirical evidence that that’s the case. The response by many academic philosophers has been: ‘What did you expect?’ But that’s like a mathematician, let’s say, or an economist, who’s caught badly managing his bank account and his personal finances, and who responds when challenged about this incompetence: ‘I’m interested in the theory here, not the practice’.

My response would be: well, maybe you should be interested in the practice, to some extent. I find that sort of study very disturbing. As I said before, I came to philosophy late in life, other than my early bout in high school, and I love the field. I’m very happy that I switched and I’m very interested in what I’m doing, but it is disturbing when you hear things like that, especially the rationalisation. You would hope that somebody would think it’s time to do something about this.

“It’s a sort of philosophical judo, what Bill practises”

One of the things I find interesting about the modern Stoic authors is that those people really do try to live their life that way. They’re not just writing about it; they’re not just theorising about it; they really practise it. Bill Irvine has become an expert, a virtuoso I would say, in dealing with insults, which is one thing that Stoics receive a lot. Let me give you an example: one day he was in his department and he met a colleague who said ‘Oh Bill, hi, I was thinking of citing one of your papers in my book’, and Bill was thinking, ‘Oh, that’s interesting—I’m glad that one of my colleagues thinks my work is worth citing’. But the colleague immediately added ‘Yes, I’m trying to decide on whether your work is just mistaken or downright evil’. Obviously that’s not a compliment. The way that Bill responded was straight out of Epictetus: he almost quoted Epictetus verbatim. He said: ‘Oh, well that’s because you only read one of my papers: if you’d read the other ones you’d see that I’m really evil.’ So he turned things around; that’s exactly what Epictetus did.

There is an anecdote in the Discourses where somebody, one of his students, tells him: ‘I heard so-and-so speaking ill of you.’ And Epictetus’ response is: ‘Well, that’s because he doesn’t know me well, because otherwise he would be saying much, much worse things.’

That’s like a kind of martial art: if you imagine in judo, somebody moving in a certain direction, well you help them carry on a bit and trip them up in the process.

Exactly, it’s a sort of philosophical judo, what Bill practises. As a result, he tells me, he’s been a much happier person, because a lot of things that were stressful for him, like his colleagues not thinking well of his work now just washes over him, and he’s even amused by it. Now, that comes with a caveat, because whenever I tell this kind of story, the objection is: ‘Ah, but that way you run the risk of not actually learning from criticism’. That’s not the point. The point is to ignore the insult, not the criticism. So the intelligent Stoic would react with humour or simply just ignore the insult, but then he or she would go back and think: ‘Why did my colleague object to that paper? What can I learn from that reaction?’

Epictetus is very specific about this, that you should do this, that you should analyse the problem with a calm eye; but what you shouldn’t do is react to the insult, because reacting to an insult is something that is under your control. The insult itself is not, but how you react to it is up to you. You can step back and say, ‘Well this guy is trying to hurt me, I’m not going to let him, I’m just walking away.’

Or you could just walk away altogether… You suggested that Bill is much happier as a Stoic, but is that the purpose of Stoicism, individual happiness? Is that the driving motivation for this kind of behaviour?

Excellent question. So, here’s the thing, the reason there was a shift between Greek Stoicism and Roman Stoicism. Just briefly, from a historical perspective: Stoicism started in Athens in the year 300, or 301 BCE in a school established by Zeno. It thrived in Athens until the Athenians made what turned out to be a fundamental political mistake siding with Mithridates against the Romans. As a result of that the Roman general Sulla marched on Athens and laid siege to the city, destroying both Mithridates and many of the Greeks. Now, after that event, we are talking about 1st century BCE here, there was no relevant school of philosophy left in Athens. The philosophers left.

This is referred to as the ancient philosophy diaspora: the philosophers from different schools went out into different places. Some of them went to Alexandria, some of them went to Rhodes, many of them went to Rome, including most of the Stoics we know from afterwards. This is referred to as the Early Stoa, which is the Greek version, and then the Late Stoa, which is the Roman version—there is also the Middle Stoa, which is the transitional period.

They went to Rome which was basically the enemy headquarters. Did they go as prisoners?

No they went of their own accord. They figured out that the heyday of Athens was over and the new power was Rome. So the reason I am telling you this is because it does go back to your question about the purpose of Stoicism, whether it is to live a happy life. For the early Stoics, the emphasis was on what the Greeks called the eudaimonic life. The eudaimonic life, which is often translated as ‘the happy life’, doesn’t really translate very well—it’s more like ‘the flourishing life’. For the Stoics in particular the eudaimonic life was a moral life. It was the kind of life where you are on your deathbed, you look back and you say: ‘Yes, that was worth it: there is not much that I’m ashamed of, that was a life well-lived, not just in the sense that I thrived in terms of material possessions, but mostly I was a good person.’

So that puts the emphasis on the virtues. Externalities, practical goods and things like that, are OK. There is nothing in Stoicism that says you cannot pursue wealth, health, education and all those sorts of things. There was nothing wrong with material possessions, as long as you never, ever traded those for virtue. So if, in order to acquire or attain health, or wealth, or education, you did something that was morally questionable, morally wrong, then you would be doing the wrong thing from a Stoic perspective. That was the view of early Stoics.

“There is nothing in Stoicism that says you cannot pursue wealth, health and education”

The later Stoics, such as Epictetus, based in Rome, added a second component to this. They retained this fundamental idea that it’s about practising virtue, it’s about having the good moral life, but they also added what they call apatheia, which of course is the Greek root for the English word ‘apathy’, and yet has nothing to do with it. They didn’t counsel apathy. What they did counsel was apatheia. The best way to translate this word is as ‘magnanimity’ or ‘great soul-ness’. So the idea was that you achieved tranquillity in life, you achieved what the Epicureans, who were rivals of the Stoics, called ataraxia or tranquility of mind, if you developed a magnanimous attitude towards the world. That’s why I gave you the example of the way Bill Irvine responds to insults. Bill’s response to insults is magnanimous. If someone insults him he uses humour to deflect the insult, and through this achieves inner calmness.

Just in passing, that strategy of turning insults into humour could result in a broken nose in certain contexts.

Yes. Funny you should say so. Epictetus says exactly this in the Discourses, he says: ‘I used to go round responding humorously to people and then I got my nose broken.’ And he adds: ‘— so I don’t do it anymore, I just walk away.’

3

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

We’ve been talking about Roman Stoics, the most famous by far of the Stoic works is Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which is your third book choice.

This is probably the most famous book written by a Stoic. It has been in print ever since there have been printing presses. The same can be said about Epictetus’ Enchiridion incidentally, though Epictetus is far less well known than Marcus.

You could study philosophy to a high level without studying Epictetus. You could do two or three degrees in philosophy and never hear his name mentioned—in fact I think I did.

This is a recent thing, a 20th century phenomenon. Up until the 19th century, Epictetus was one of the most prominent philosophers studied. You’d find references to him everywhere: Descartes, Spinoza, many of the major philosophers you can think of were influenced by the Stoics and particularly by Epictetus and by Seneca, and the Enchiridion was used as a training manual in Christian monasteries throughout the Middle Ages.

Going back to Marcus’ Meditations, that book was never meant for publication. The Meditations initially did not have a title at all and it was known during the Middle Ages by the title To Myself because this was the Roman emperor’s personal diary.

That’s a better title.

Yes, it is a better title, I agree. It later became known as the Meditations, but it really was his personal philosophical diary. Marcus Aurelius had studied philosophy when he was young and in particular Stoicism. He had a major Stoic for a teacher who gave him a copy of Epictetus’ Discourses. You can see Epictetus’s influence in the Meditations. The Meditations consists of twelve short books. If you read them through you will see that there’s a lot of redundancy there. He comes back over and over to the same themes, and he repeats the same sorts of concept again and again. It is not so great to read through from beginning to end for this reason. Marcus wrote this over the course of a few years when he was on the German frontier fighting the Marcomanni revolt against Rome.

“Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, yet his wife was cheating on him, and his advisers were treacherous”

The reason the Meditations have endured is because you really get a very clear sense of an interesting man who is struggling with his own limitations, as well as with the environment that’s surrounding him. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, and yet he was dealing not only with major events like revolts throughout the Roman Empire, but also with his wife who was cheating on him, and with some of his advisers who were treacherous. Yet the first book of the Meditations opens with a long list of people whom he thanks. It’s an exercise in gratitude which is a basic Stoic practice: you have to remind yourself of the people you are grateful to because they are important in your life. The very first person he thanks is his grandfather: “From my grandfather Verus I learnt good morals and the government of my emperor,” and then he goes on to thank his mother, his teachers, his brother, and so on. If you read this the first time, you don’t really expect it. But then if you bear in mind that it is the most powerful person in the world writing this, and in his own personal diary—not done for show to other people—he starts out by thanking people who had made a good impact on his own life: it’s a very humbling exercise.

Often people say that the Meditations come across as preachy—and that’s true to some extent—but they forget that he is preaching to himself. He is not telling other people here’s what you should do and should not do; he’s telling himself, he’s reproaching himself. For instance, he says—this is one of my favourite quotations from the Meditations, from book two, chapter one:

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil… I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him

This struck me as really profound. A lot of people who surrounded the emperor would have wanted favours, and many were treacherous; but he says: ‘Remember, they do this because they don’t know better. They don’t have the advantage of your education, they don’t have the advantage of your self-reflection so they’re just doing this out of ignorance, ignorance of what is good for them or what is good to do: ignorance of virtue.’ And then he goes on, ‘but I cannot be injured by them, and nor can I actually hate them because they’re my fellow human beings, I am just as imperfect as they are: I also lose my temper, I also do things that I may regret or I’m not proud of, and we are all in the same boat together.’ I find these very down to earth observations of human nature and Marcus’ way of dealing with it both very refreshing, and at the same time actually very insightful.

But isn’t this an incredibly high ideal to live up to? The way you’ve described Marcus Aurelius, he’s trying to tell himself that he’s not going to be bothered by these people, but you sense, reading between the lines, that he probably will be.

That’s an interesting point about Stoicism: is it an impossible ideal? There, I think, a good comparison can be made between Stoicism and Christianity. Despite the fact that Christianity, early Christianity, adopted quite a bit of Stoicism, the early Christians rejected Epicurus because of his emphasis on pleasure—that’s why still today the word ‘epicurean’ is almost an insult: simply because the Christians completely rejected this worldview, and we have inherited the Christian disdain for Epicurus. But Christians did learn from Stoicism—not only from Epictetus’ Enchiridion but also Saint Paul knew Seneca’s brother, Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, and so was aware of Stoic writing.

That’s really fascinating.

There was even a medieval forgery of an alleged correspondence between Seneca and Paul. You can find reactions to Stoicism in all the major Christian Church fathers beginning with Augustine, too, and then all the way to Thomas Aquinas. Now, the reason I’m bringing this up, in answer to your question, is because there is a good, interesting distinction between Christianity and the Stoic approach. For Christians, if you think about it, they have their role model—Jesus—who is, by definition, an impossible role model to emulate: he’s a god. I can aspire to behave as much as possible like him, but I’m never going to achieve that fully because he’s an immortal and I am not the son of God. I simply cannot be perfect, and that of course is part of the Christian doctrine of repentance for your sins.

For the Stoics, in contrast, they have a similar figure, a role model to whom they aspire and they call him the ‘sage’. The sage represents an ideal to aspire to, but is an achievable role model. The sage is a human being. It’s difficult, but not impossible to emulate the sage. Stoics are clear that there haven’t been many sages throughout history, but there have been some, and they point to some examples, the obvious one being Socrates, who was not a Stoic because he pre-dated the school. Many of the Stoics referred to Socrates as a sage. There were other examples too: Cato the Younger, for example, who was a famous political opponent of Julius Caesar during the Roman Republic; Seneca refers to him as a sage and as a role model. The Stoics also had fictional role models, ancient heroes and demigods like Hercules.

They may not have thought of them as fictional…

That’s debatable, though a good point. It’s hard to imagine that Seneca actually took stories about the Olympian gods seriously.

Well, it’s also hard to imagine that people do that in the contemporary world, but they do.

True, but the basic point is that even when the Stoics refer to demigods, if you look at the story of Hercules, for instance, the actual ancient myth, it doesn’t end well: for one thing, Hercules ends up dying of a horrible death. He makes mistakes, he’s a human figure, he’s somebody you can relate to but who constantly strives to do better: he constantly strives to do the right thing. This is the Stoic idea of a sage, which has some affinities with Buddhism. Buddha allegedly achieved enlightenment in his lifetime. In the Buddhist tradition that’s not easy. It’s not something that everybody can do—the fact that he as a man achieved enlightenment, however, shows that it is achievable. In Stoicism you have an ideal model, and, yes, most of us will fall short of that, but it is an achievable model. Seneca explicitly addresses this in his letter to a friend ‘On the Firmness of the Sage’ where he writes: ‘Don’t think that we mean by this just an unachievable ideal, just a theoretical thing. We think there are people who actually are sages, and those are our role models, and we try to do as they did’.

4

Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius

by Seneca

Now since you’ve mentioned Seneca, maybe we should move onto book four? This is described as Letters to Lucilius. Were they literally letters?

They literally were letters. The reason I picked this book is because a great deal of writing by Seneca has survived, more than that of other Stoics. Seneca was a playwright: he wrote tragedies, and even influenced Shakespeare. He also wrote long essays and epistles—a lot of epistles. There is a particular collection of epistles, normally referred to as either The Moral Epistles or the Letters to Lucilius. This book consists of more than a hundred letters. Many of them are short, just a few pages long. We know that Seneca wrote them late in life, during the last two or three years before he was ‘invited’ to commit suicide by Nero after he had fallen out of favour with the emperor. They’re written to his friend Lucilius, who was probably a real person living in Sicily at the time.

But they were written to be published, weren’t they?

Yes, they were.

So in that respect this book is very different from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

Yes. Unlike the Meditations, these were not meant just as personal correspondence. They were personal correspondence, but when scholars look at the way the text is structured, they are convinced they were meant for publication. A lot of people, not just Seneca, wrote letters that were meant both as personal letters to friends or acquaintances, but also for broader circulation. The Moral Epistles is in some ways Seneca’s philosophical testament because it conveys his mature thought. Of course he didn’t know he was about to die prematurely, but he was an old man already, he was in his sixties, and he knew he wouldn’t live that much longer and was frank about it.

Seneca is often criticised, even by modern Stoics, as a somewhat ambiguous figure because despite being a self-professed Stoic he was preaching virtue at the same time that he oversaw Nero’s first five years in power. It was during those years that Nero became unhinged: he killed his mother, several of his wives, and his stepbrother.

So Seneca had dirty hands?

Exactly. Not just because he was there, but because he was Nero’s principal advisor, and in a couple of cases he wrote public letters defending some of Nero’s actions. On top of that he was immensely wealthy. He was a senator, and owned land all over the Roman Empire. As I mentioned earlier, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that for a Stoic. Stoics are not Cynics (in the ancient sense), so they’re not against wealth. But, one can make an argument, as Seneca himself does, that too much wealth becomes obscene because you become focused on the externalities at the expense of virtue. If you can use your wealth for good, you’re fine from a Stoic perspective, there’s nothing wrong with that; but if you keep accumulating wealth for the sake of it, then you’re definitely not a good Stoic.

“Throughout the Renaissance, for example, Seneca was thought of as close to being a secular saint”

These are some of the reasons why Seneca is criticised even by modern Stoics. There are two recent biographies of Seneca that take that kind of attitude towards the man. But there’s more to be said. First of all, this is all very debatable, since we don’t really have a lot of independent historical evidence on his life; and secondly, it’s a very recent development in the way we look at Seneca. Throughout the Renaissance, for example, Seneca was thought of as close to being a secular saint because he tried to do the best that he could do in the impossible situation of having to deal with Nero, and because in the end he did the right thing, by committing suicide, partly to save some of his properties for his family. If he’d refused to commit suicide then he’d have been killed anyway, and on top of that his family would have lost his property.

So that was quite a practical decision.

It was a practical decision, but on behalf of others. I’m talking to you from Rome where I’m on my sabbatical, and I’m writing a book on how to be a Stoic, which will be published next year by Basic Books. One of the things that I do, the reason I’m here in Rome, other than that my family is here and it’s a nice place to visit, is because I wanted to be in a place that would inspire me—I’m literally next door to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Whenever I need a break, like after our conversation today, I’ll just go down and walk by the Forum.

One of the things that I have done while here was to visit the Domus Aurea. This was Nero’s huge villa that he had built, as it turns out not for himself but mostly for public gatherings and diplomatic purposes. I’d never seen the Domus Aurea because when I was living in Rome, it was underground. Over the last few years archaeologists here in Rome have opened it up. It is right in front of the Colosseum, but it’s several metres below ground. You can visit now, but you have to make an appointment, and there is a nice guide from the Ministry of Cultural Goods, who walks you through for an hour or so. So I did this, and the woman that was leading the excursion of course talked a lot about Nero, and she also talked a lot about Seneca. I was surprised that her take on Seneca, which she says reflects the angle taken by many Italian historians and archaeologists, was much more positive than anything I had read in the English-speaking literature.

The reason for this is interesting. She said that if you examine the historical records, Seneca did a good job in the first five years of Nero’s reign. The first five years of Nero’s reign were a very good time for Rome and for the Empire, precisely because, she argued, Seneca and a colleague of his who was the chief of the Praetorian Guard managed to counsel Nero and restrain him to some degree. He would have been much worse without Seneca’s advice. When Seneca saw that Nero was going too far and was definitely going off the rails, Seneca tried several times to retire. He said: ‘This is it. I can’t do this any more. I can’t handle Nero, I can’t do any more good. So I’d rather retire outside of Rome in my own villa.’ He used some of his great wealth to try to bribe Nero to let him retire, offering two thirds of his lands to the emperor. Now I don’t know exactly how much money we are talking about, but it would have been a substantial offer. Nero refused it.

Presumably Nero could have just taken the property if he’d wanted it anyway.

Exactly. Nero refused and tried to keep Seneca in his entourage. Seneca eventually managed to achieve a sort of semi-retirement anyway. He started spending more time outside of Rome, and that’s when he wrote the Epistles to Lucilius.

And these are very practical pieces—they contain practical advice about dealing with situations where your emotions might lead you astray.

That’s right. If you look at just the titles of the letters, that’s revealing, titles such as: ‘On true and false friendship’. This was a crucial Stoic principle, the idea that you really should surround yourself with good people, ideally people who are better than you, because that’s the way you learn, that’s the way you challenge yourself.

That’s easier for some of us than others.

I know, right. Then there’s: ‘On the terrors of death.’ Death was a constant Stoic theme. Seneca famously said that ‘we die every day of our life,’ by which he meant that our entire life is a preparation for the ultimate test: how you handle death.

When he said we die every day, did he mean we die because we sleep? Or we die because we have fear of death, or something different?

No. Seneca meant that every day that passes brings us one step closer to the end of our lives. For the Stoics, what makes our life worth living is precisely the fact that it’s finite, and it is something that we need to be aware of.

So actually the translation might be better: ‘we are dying every day’?

Exactly, and in fact that is the title of one of the two recent biographies I mentioned of Seneca: Dying Every Day. Then there is an essay on old age, for instance, on how to age gracefully and deal with it if you’re lucky enough to live to experience that.

So you think it’s lucky to experience that? From what I’ve seen of it, plenty of people are unlucky enough to live to old age.

That’s right, it depends on how you look at it, on your attitude. There are so many topics that Seneca covers. Another one I like is called, ‘On festivals and fasting’. Seneca wasn’t fond of the Roman games and festivals: he thought they produced a lot of noise and a lot of confusion. He uses that starting point as a way to counsel his friend Lucilius, and therefore his audience at large, about moderation. He writes, for instance, that it’s good to fast every now and then, because these moderate exercises of self-deprivation, a day or two without eating, remind you that you can deal with not being fed. If in fact one of these days, as a result of externalities or adversity, you really do find yourself starving, you will be psychologically prepared. You know that you can handle it, within physiological limits.

That’s one benefit, but the other one, and this is something that Bill Irvine in one of the other books that I mentioned also emphasises, is that the psychological effect of these exercises in self-deprivation is that when you come out of them you enjoy what you have much more: the self-deprivation reminds you of just how good it is even to eat some simple food. You don’t need to go for a gourmet meal, you don’t need to go for really fancy cuisine, you can appreciate some good bread, or good wine and recognise that this is an incredibly enjoyable experience.

But carrying on with that style of thinking, you could end up getting someone to water-board you for a little bit, so you realise how lucky you are to be able to breathe.

That would be pushing it. I think the Romans would definitely not go that far. Seneca and the other Stoics are very careful to remind you that you don’t do these things in order to punish yourself, something that, again, some of the late medieval Christians actually did.

Through self-flagellation and the like.

Yes. There’s nothing like self-flagellation in Stoicism. In fact one of the four Stoic virtues is temperance—self-control, so that you do everything in moderation, including, of course, these Stoic exercises of self-deprivation. One of my favourite exercises which does come straight out of Seneca’s writing and the ancient Roman tradition is this idea of taking a hot shower and then during the last few seconds turning it completely cold. This shocks your system.

“The psychological effect of these exercises in self-deprivation is that when you come out of them you enjoy what you have much more”

The Romans did this on a regular basis. They went to the thermal baths, starting with a hot sauna; then they went into hot water, what they called a calidarium; and then they jumped into what they called the frigidarium, which was this pool of really, really cold water. This cold shock has a number of effects. First of all, interestingly, there is modern research that shows that this really does have physical benefits: it helps to boost your immune system, and things like that. Obviously the Romans didn’t know that. Beyond that, it reminds you that you can deal with these kind of things. A hot shower is a luxury. Most people throughout most of history didn’t have hot showers, didn’t have hot baths.

This is an interesting aspect of Stoicism because some people think that many elements of the British public school system, the private school system, were modelled on Stoicism: that a certain amount of deprivation, quite a few cold showers, cold baths, early morning runs and so on, built character. For some people, though, these sorts of enforced deprivation have been quite psychologically damaging.

That’s a good point. Think about it this way. What you’re describing seems to me to be a perversion of the Stoic idea. One of the things that I learned very early on, both from reading the ancient Stoics and also from modern Stoics, is that Stoicism is not supposed to be something that you impose on other people. It comes from within. It’s your own discipline. You shouldn’t go around with either a metaphorical or an actual stick beating people and saying, ‘you’re not virtuous enough.’

Really, so you shouldn’t proselytise for Stoicism?

There’s no tradition of proselytising for Stoicism. The ancients simply opened schools, and competed with other schools. This was a time in ancient Rome where philosophy was all over the place: Stoicism had to compete with Epicureanism, with Cynicism, with the Platonic Academy, with the Peripatetics, followers of Aristotle, and so on. There was an open market of philosophical ideas, and to some extent, people just gravitated to one school or another depending on either the fame of the teacher or the appeal of the teaching.

Back in Athens, Cleanthes (the second head of the Stoa) was apparently a good philosopher, but not a particularly engaging teacher and by the end of his career the number of students dropped off significantly. Then Chrysippus, a charismatic figure, took over, and students returned. The idea is that you should just live your life as a Stoic and lead by example, not going round telling people, ‘Hey, I’m a Stoic, look at me, come and join us!’

Did the Stoics believe it was just one route to a good life, or was it the only way to achieve that?

I think the ancient Stoics believed it was the only way. You can see that from the fact that they spent a certain amount of time—not a lot, but a certain amount of time—arguing against other schools.

Cicero was not a Stoic; rather he was a Platonic and academic sceptic. But he was very sympathetic to Stoicism. He presents Stoicism in good light. If you read Cicero, and if you read Epictetus himself, it becomes clear that many Stoics did believe that they had the best way, if not the only way, certainly the best way of achieving eudaimonia. In contrast, in the Letters to Lucilius, Seneca recognised that good ideas for living can come from diverse sources. In the early letters, over and over he ends with what he calls a gift for Lucilius, and it’s always a quotation from somebody else, a quotation from Epicurus, or whoever. At a certain point he felt like he had to justify doing this. So he says: ‘My dear Lucilius, you might wonder why am I quoting our competitor’; his answer in Latin is ‘quod verum est meum est’ which means ‘that which is true is mine’. As he put it: ‘I do occasionally wander into the enemies’ camp and I pay attention to what they’re saying, and if there is something good, I will use it’.

5

A New Stoicism

by Laurence Becker

Lets move to your final choice A New Stoicism by Lawrence Becker. This is a more academic book than your other choices.

Lawrence Becker is a retired philosophy professor. The first time I encountered A New Stoicism was in the context of a book group discussion in New York. It’s quite a difficult book to read in some ways; if you don’t have a certain amount of background in philosophy, you’re probably not going to get as much out of it as you should, although Becker himself is aware of this. The book is structured so that at the end of each chapter there is a commentary, and the commentary is very technical and is where he goes back to the original sources and says things like, ‘I made this point in the chapter because it’s relevant to these other thinkers, these other quotations’. It’s very academic in that sense. But the main sections of each chapter can be read, can be understood, by somebody with little or no background in philosophy.

“Becker wants to explore how much Stoicism can be updated to be compatible with modern science, with modern philosophy”

One slightly odd feature of the book is that when he writes about Stoics, he writes in the first person plural. So he says ‘we’ do certain things, or this is something that happened to ‘us’. He reminds the reader throughout that he is a Stoic, not just a scholar of Stoic philosophy. The reason it’s called A New Stoicism is because unlike, for example, the Buddhist tradition, or even the Christian tradition, Stoicism was interrupted by the fall of the Roman Empire. The golden years for Stoic philosophy was five centuries, give or take, from 300 BCE to the second century. The last major Stoic was Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism as a philosophy kept on in the Roman Empire for a little longer, but then eventually, the Byzantine emperor Justinian closed down the last philosophical school and basically imposed Christianity on everybody. That was the end of all Hellenistic philosophy, not just Stoicism. For many centuries there was no school of Stoicism, no practice, there was no theory going on.

Becker’s point is that there is a resurgence of Stoicism in modern times, that there are people interested in Stoicism as both theory and especially as practice. Becker is interested in updating Stoic philosophy for today. We now have sophisticated cognitive sciences, logic, and so on, and he wants to explore how much Stoicism can be updated to be compatible with modern science, with modern philosophy, and still be called Stoicism.

And is there a core of Stoic belief, Stoic teaching, that can flourish today?

His answer, of course, is ‘yes’, and I tend to agree. He updates a number of aspects of Stoic philosophy. So, let me give you just one example to give you a flavour: remember we started out this conversation by talking about Epictetus’ dichotomy of control—some things are up to me; some things are not up to me. Now, Epictetus and the ancient Stoics had a somewhat optimistic view of what is up to us, as it turns out, because of course a lot of modern cognitive science tells us that much human thinking is not conscious, and that a lot of the time we engage in rationalising about things more than in proper rational thinking.

Most of the time, I suspect.

Exactly. Becker takes that into account, and says, ‘Look, we need to understand that even the dichotomy of control has to be revised and updated as it turns out there are fewer things that are completely under our control.’ If you were to go with the most extreme view that I’ve seen coming from cognitive science, which is the idea that conscious thinking is entirely an illusion, it’s all about rationalisations, then Stoicism would collapse.

So do most of our analyses of what we’re doing in life. There’s not much point in ethics after that, just to take one example.

Yes, and not only that, but science itself would be threatened, because then I could just turn the table and say, ‘Oh, you cognitive scientists, you think that you’re the only ones not rationalising’ and the whole damn thing collapses. Becker doesn’t go that far, fortunately. And I don’t either. His idea is that you need to take seriously the findings of cognitive science, and update some things, and have a more modest view of human rationality; but as long as there’s a core of your rationality, as long as it’s possible for human beings to think rationally and engage in the kind of reflective exercises that Epictetus was teaching to his students, then an updated version of Stoicism is possible and desirable. That’s the sort of project Becker is engaged in.

“Larry Baker and James Stockdale are show just how much a human being can actually deal with”

I also want to say something about Becker himself as a man. I met him through a common friend, and this common friend told me stories about Larry that put everything in a different perspective for me. Before I met him, I thought of him as just the author of an academic book on Stoicism. Well, it turns out Larry was hit by polio when he was young, and this crippled him, and for three years he was in rehabilitation. He completely lost the use of both legs and arms. Then, eventually, he recovered the use of his legs to some extent, though never his arms or hands; and then for several years he has been living in a wheelchair. Despite this he had a successful career as a university professor, and would grade his students’ papers by writing with his foot. In fact his foot writing was much neater than my friends’ handwriting, apparently. Becker had a dedication to his students and to his career and didn’t allow his physical problems to stand in his way. For me this made it clear that he had lived the philosophy of Stoicism—talk about having no control over external circumstances! When I met him I did a long interview with him which is available on my website, and we discussed his experience in life and how it related to his Stoicism.

I’ve read an account by James Stockdale who survived torture and solitary confinement during the Vietnam War after his plane was shot down without breaking down through Stoic techniques, based on his memories of having studied Epictetus. I can understand why this is a useful philosophy to hold in adversity because it could give you a focus and a strength to discount external obstacles, but in ordinary life do we really need it?

Yes, I think we do. People like Larry Baker and James Stockdale are obviously fascinating because they show you just how much a human being can actually deal with. But most of our lives do present us with challenges, even minor challenges, for which I think Stoicism is perfectly appropriate. Let me give you an example, I have a very good friend, who is both a practising Stoic and a practising Buddhist. He says Stoicism has helped him cope with moderate inconveniences, like getting on the subway in the morning to go to work in New York City and having to deal with the obnoxious behaviour of some people. He told me: ‘It used to be that I got irritated, it used to be that I started my day miserably because of somebody doing something obnoxious on the subway, but once I started practising these things and sort of readjusting my mental expectations, I just saw these things as the kind of behaviour that really cannot touch me.’

So these are psychological tricks aren’t they? Is it really philosophy any more at that point?

Well, it is in this sense. One of the reasons Stoicism came back in modern times is because these ‘tricks’ are useful. Some of them have been elaborated into fully-fledged psychotherapeutic approaches, such as Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy; cognitive behavioural therapy; Albert Ellis’ rational emotive behaviour therapy, and others. All of these therapies bear traces of Stoicism. Ellis and Frankl both read the Stoics, and used their ideas as a starting point. So in some sense, yes, it’s a bag of psychological tricks—but the reason it’s a philosophy is because this bag of tricks is put into a more general context and framework, and this is the idea that the good life is the moral life, and that the moral life is the life where you practise the four fundamental virtues: temperance, justice, courage, and wisdom.

Interview by Nigel Warburton

September 1, 2020

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