78 Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham
Picked this up on a whim, as I’ve got no real interest in glaciers. Or didn’t at least. This is a memoir and science book – the science (of glaciers!) was a lot more interesting to me than Wadham’s personal story, partly because the bits that were interesting got slightly underplayed and the bits that weren’t got equal airtime. She’d have been better off writing a book about glaciers, and her experiences as a glaciologist, rather than trying to do the personal reflection bit too.
But anyway, glaciers. Surprisingly complex, we don’t know much about them but what we do know involves quite dangerous and uncomfortable periods of working in very remote places and they are absolutely crucial to stablising climate and terrifyingly no one really knows what is going to happen when they start to move beyond tipping points that they are fast approaching. I took the children to see a (rapidly receding) glacier in Iceland a few years ago and it was magnificent. Losing them would be a tragedy for humanity and for the natural world.
79 Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
I listened to this on Audible, and think it was better for that. I think a celebrity memoir is always best read by the celebrity and although Perry has moved on from Chandler-speak for the most part, there was enough of that there for this to be very clearly the Perry we know from Friends. Although there is not as much Friends chat as one might hope, although I did like the way he so clearly admires and loves his fellow actors.
He’s had quite a ride. I knew – as most people did – that he’d struggled with addiction but had filed it in the “a bit of a problem with pills”, not having a clue about the extent of the challenges he’s faced with alcohol and prescription drugs. There’s a lot not to like about him – he really really wants us to know how rich he is, some of his comments are just very odd indeed (I don’t know if the comment about Keanu Reeves was meant to be funny, or not) and he’s clearly been an absolute nightmare of a partner, son, brother, friend and co-worker. And there is a LOT of rehab chat. I could have done with a bit less – I read a review that said it feels like a TripAdvisor guide to the rehab facilities of the United States, and it’s true there is a lot of it. On the other hand, he's spent a lot of time in rehab, so perhaps that’s unsurprising.
He's clean now, though one wonders how long that will last. He’s also single and that is clearly a source of great sadness to him. I’m assuming a flood of misguided women will flock to him on reading this offering to save him – I wonder if that’s actually what he hoped, on writing that. It does read like an extended and somewhat painful online dating application at times.
Have seen it described as “grimly fascinating” which is probably accurate. Not sure I loved it, or enjoyed it, but I was certainly gripped by it.
80 Feminist City by Leslie Kern
This was a waste of time and money. We all know cities aren’t designed to make life easy for women who need to drop children in daycare on their way to work, and that public transport systems are unsafe in many situations for women, and that policing can make things more rather than less equitable. Cities are designed by men, for men, and therefore they suck for women. But things got really messy quite quickly, because she also argues that cities don’t work for people of colour or disabilities, which is also true in many ways but not what she set out to write about, and the chapter on protest in particular had some good insights and observations but didn’t feel like the book she thought she was writing.
I didn’t need to be lectured repeatedly on intersectional feminism (chances are if I’m picking up this book, I get it, and once or twice would have been plenty) and the endless checking of her privilege was also a bit wearying – perhaps if she’d been a bit more objective and inclusive in her approach and less focused on her own experiences she could have avoided it all. I didn’t CARE about the time she and a friend stayed out all night in Toronto the first time and certainly not the third or fourth time she told the story.
I then got increasingly irritated about the fact that she seemed to think that cities needed to change to fit around women’s lives rather than – perhaps more radically – that some of the structures that create the issues could be challenged. Perhaps rather than fretting that cities make it hard for women to pick up food for dinner on their way to collect their children from childcare she could ask why the fuck the men don’t do some (OR ALL) of the chores on the way back from their place of work. To be entirely fair to her, she does, occasionally – the sentence “no amount of street lighting is going to abolish the patriarchy” made me chuckle – but I’d have liked something that felt less like a litany of complaints about how hard things were for her, and a lot more thought about why that might be the case for women in general, and what we as a society can do about it.