A very warm welcome to my new readers, it’s a pleasure to have you here and I hope you enjoy what you read. To get you up to speed with the format, I publish two things:

1. A short story, or part of a serialised story, every other Wednesday

2. A monthly round-up of what I’ve been reading (this post)

If you want to go back and read some stories, click here. If you want to read last month’s round-up, click here.

Now, here’s everything I read in February.

Book Round-Up #02

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a short memoir by Murakami all centred - as you might guess - around the act of running. It’s spread over a couple of years and written in the present tense in the build-up to running the New York marathon.

At the time of writing in the mid-2000s, Murakami is approaching sixty, and so part of what he is grappling with in the memoir, which is really fascinating in the context of the New York marathon, is the physical decline that comes with age.

For context, Murakami - one of the most celebrated literary authors of our time, and the most famous living Japanese author - is a serial runner. Before being an author, he had his own Jazz club in Japan and then, one day, watching his local baseball team, he had an idea for a novel. Around the same time as writing his first novel, Murakami took up running. He found running and writing to be similar in many ways - the endurance required, the mental toughness, the meticulous training and the required personality traits. Since the early eighties, when he started running, he has run a marathon every year. Every. Year.

That’s almost unheard of.

At least with the people I know.

So in the book, Murakami reflects on some of the toughest runs he’s done - such as the time he ran from Athens to Marathon, the journey which gave the event its name, or the marathon around a lake in Northern Japan.

At the same time, he writes eloquently about the labour of love he has with running, how it helps him in his writing, and what it is he finds so obsessive about the sport - compared with other sports like squash, swimming or cycling.

To sum it up for you; Murakami writes:

"Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as whole."

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

I first came across Amor Towles, like many people, by reading A Gentleman In Moscow, the story of a cultured Russian gentleman, held hostage in a posh Moscow hotel by Stalin’s Soviet government. It’s hard not to fall in love with his writing: either because, as a writer, it makes you unfathomably jealous of his ability to write with both gravity and levity, to be both gripping but not complex, and to bring his characters to life; or because, as a reader, he has that masterful trait of delightfully remaining one step ahead of you, so you truly never know what is going to happen next.

While being a very different book, The Lincoln Highway, delivers the very same feelings.

This is the story - set in the 1950s - of Emmett, a teen boy who’s just been released from juvenile prison for accidentally killing a bully by knocking his lights out, his brother Billy and their friends Duchess, Woolly and Sally. The story takes its name from the first ever road to stretch the width of the United States, from Times Square all the way to the beach in California - where Emmett and Billy decide to journey in their old Studebaker motor to find a “fresh start”.

However, this particular road trip is thrown completely off course by the arrival of Duchess and Woolly - two friends of Emmett’s he really didn’t think he’d be seeing ever again.

Towles takes the reader on a ten day journey that is so genuinely unpredictable but also believable that you cannot help but keep turning the pages. And while it looks like a big, long read, it really isn’t. The chapters are punchy and gripping, some are just a couple pages long, and the writing is natural and believable, void of literary flourishes and vast descriptions. It’s alive from the first page to the last.

With that noted, the book still manages to convey a profoundness in the desire of the characters for their fresh starts, it has a real sense of compassion for the justice and injustice that brought the characters to their present predicaments, and it speaks to a particular time period where self-identity, discovery and a kind of rebelliousness against the old ways was bubbling around the psyche of millions of Americans - or at least was present in the popular literature of the time.

Before reading, I had a slight nervousness, a scepticism, that this book would live up to my love for A Gentleman In Moscow, but I have to say that it has matched it and is well worth a read.

Thank you very much for reading! As you can see I only managed two books in February, as I’ve been so busy, but it’s quite enjoyable to write about these books.

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and I have included links to the goodreads pages for all the books, where you can find a place to buy them. I recommend, if you can, buying independently rather than through Amazon. In the UK, I use hive.co.uk to buy through independent booksellers.

I want to start providing some wider content for your all that isn’t just the short fiction I’m writing, but some thoughts on the books that I am reading. Some snappy reviews so that you can get to grips with what’s inspiring me, get some good recommendations, and just have a conversation about reading.

Treat it like a book club, and I hope you’ll share as much with me as I do with you.

I’ll post these in the first week of every month, covering the books (or book, depending on my reading productivity) I read in the previous month and keep them on a different section of the website so as not to make it confusing.

If you only want to read my fiction, head here for the archive - I won’t blame you.

Last but not least, a really warm welcome to all the new subscribers! We’ve really exploded since the New Year, with over 50 people joining the club in the last week alone.

Okay, enough of that.

Here’s everything I read in January.

Book Round-Up #01

The Best Short Stories 2021 - The O. Henry Prize Winners, Edited By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The first book I read in 2022 was this collection of short stories, winners of one of the most prestigious short fiction prizes. The stories, twenty in total, were selected from over one thousand submissions, by the series editor, Jenny Quigley and Adichie. Their subjects stretch from race to astronomers’ romances, from the sexual abuse of Harvey Weinstein to a dramatisation of true events in which a fire burned an orphanage to the ground in 1943. It’s wide-ranging. You get the picture.

The emotional reaction is equally wide-ranging. They are immensely funny, profoundly sad, moving and anger-invoking. I can’t cover all the stories in the book, but a couple of my favourites include:

Two Nurses, Smoking by David Means - an account of conversations between two nurses over their fag breaks. The story develops as the two grow closer together, bonding over their experiences, and a climax in which one nurse makes a horrifying but utterly believable revelation about their past.

And then bursts into tears.

What more could you want?

From Far Around They Saw Us Burn by Alice Jolly - that story I mentioned about the orphanage. Yeah, it’s powerful. Imagine a life in which you are too scared to flee a burning building because your religious beliefs dictate that nobody - not even someone saving you from a hellish, fiery death - should see your naked body. It evokes a sense of the oppression of religion without theorising on the subject in any way whatsoever. It’s just filled with life.

Anthony Doerr’s The Master’s Castle - a hilarious account of life as an astronomer, and an idea of romance twisted all out of proportion by an obsession with the stars. It’s very creative. It’s fun. It’s got the same sense of the unfulfilled life as the timeless Stoner by John Williams. And it’s different. It’s just different.

And Color and Light by Sally Rooney - I have to confess to having never read anything by Sally Rooney until now. Not Normal People. Not the new one, whatever that’s called. Never even considered it, for no particular reason. But this story, I absolutely loved. It’s about a teen boy who works in a hotel in some far-flung town, and a girl, introduced to him by his older brother, who finds him intriguing. The girl escapes him in many ways with her somewhat erratic decisions in her life. It has an amazing sense of new, enigmatic romance and a great understanding of expectation, of what could be in the story, without delivering exactly what the reader wants, when they want it. Exceptional awareness and understanding of her readers.

Oh, and before we move on, the book’s worth reading for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s introduction alone. She writes in the wake of her father’s death, and what unfolds in just a couple of pages is an explanation of what makes fiction great, its life-giving qualities, and its way of helping us through grief.

Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

After the collection of modern shorts, I delved back to the sixties with Joan Didion’s novel set in the backdrop of the hippy world we have all seen in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Inherent Vice (just me?), Mad Men, and all the millions of other things set in that period, with its loosened morals, drug-induced vendettas and a Hollywood world of doing before thinking and living purely within the moment.

I read this after learning of Didion’s death, which came just a handful of days before Christmas. The book shows a tiredness and sickliness left in the hearts of the people who came through the sixties without an idea of what comes next - realising that their now isn’t a now on its own, but a now that is the result of yesterday. Or put more plainly: the people in this world are dealing with the consequences of their often reckless decisions in the past. It paints a picture of glamour fading, like a shiny studded suit that looks cool on stage but tacky and shredded in the backstage rooms after the show. It covers a lot of interesting political issues about women and their relationship with ‘powerful’ men, and their roles in societies - of which the idea was clearly changing during that time.

A must-read if these topics are for you.

Even if the cover art might raise a few eyebrows on the train…

Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties

Having finished Didion’s novel, I wanted to get back to short fiction. After all, that’s what I’m publishing here for you all twice a month. So, I figured, there’s no better education.

If any of you have read anything by George Saunders (who also publishes a wonderful newsletter on writing, called Story Club), like Lincoln In The Bardo, you will know he’s an excellent writer. World-class. Anthony Veasna So, the author of the short collection Afterparties, was a student of Saunders’s at Syracuse University - a very highly-regarded creative writing programme in the United States. Many of its students go on to become published writers. So’s first publication is a collection centered on what it means to be Cambodian-American, how Cambodia’s history affects the lives of its descendants growing up in California, as well as what it’s like being gay in the modern world, and family politics.

It’s an extremely humanising collection of stories, as well as profoundly funny, surprising, and witty. The book could almost be a novel, as though all the stories were drawn from one life, and there does seem to be some sense of progression and development among the characters in the book. You feel this is an author seeking answers about himself - about who he is and what has made him - as well as communicating to the outer world.

There’s an added sense of importance in the work that comes from the knowledge that So died of a drug overdose in December, 2020. His literary talent will linger for a while yet, but his works will be limited to this collection and a few other pieces that may be published posthumously. You can’t help but feel it’s a real loss for literature.

It definitely speaks to the generation of Instagram, of tech bros living in the Bay Area, and some of the issues being grappled with by young people across the world.

If that’s your bag, then get involved.

Dune, Frank Herbert

Last but by no means least, I read Dune in January. I saw the film last year having not engaged with the series before (I’m not, generally, a big fan of Sci-Fi). I picked this up on a recommendation from a few friends in discussion about the film, and felt it was something worth giving some time to.

I think, and I don’t say this lightly, this is my favourite of all the books I read in January, and my favourite read for a good six months (I can’t remember a book I was gripped by this much since A Gentleman In Moscow).

In terms of Sci-Fi, it has everything: spaceships, travelling between worlds, curious people with special powers (like seeing the future), a powerful and enigmatic emperor, and weapons that do really cool, lasery things.

Sure, that’s fun.

But it definitely has something more. I know that, because I’m generally a skeptic and this got me. There is a lot of meaning to be found in it depending on the lens through which it is consumed. Reading the book through a religious lens: there is a fascinating sense of religiosity about the Fremen population, the politics of religion, tribalism and fanaticism, and the way leaders can bring whole populations to actions they may never have pursued otherwise. Through a socioeconomic lens, it has great geopolitical dynamics: the battle over the scarce resource in the spice, the value of water in a place where it is rare, and the symbolism attached to that rarity; the archaic and monarchic obsession with bloodlines...

These are themes that could be drawn out in any contemporary work or historical fiction.

It really transcends genre while also typifying one.

I didn’t even know that was possible.

I cantered through the whole book in a week, and would gladly pick up Dune Messiah and all the other books tomorrow if I had them at home!

So, that’s everything I read in January. Have you read any of these? Do you agree with my assessment or deeply disagree? (I’d much prefer the latter response.)

If you haven’t read any, will you? Let me know! The comments section awaits.

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