24. Less, Andrew Sean Greer
Gentle, satirical comedy about Arthur Less, a middle-aged American writer, published but obscure. Arthur receives a wedding invitation from an ex who has broken his heart after a nine-year relationship; unable to face either attending or missing out, he takes a third option and runs away, accepting a series of invitations to "half-baked literary events around the world" (in the words of the blurb). These include a stint of teaching in Berlin, an award ceremony in Italy and a writers retreat in India. Various mishaps inevitably ensue during his travels, along with a lot of introspection as we wait to see whether Arthur can find his way to a happy ending.
I liked this, although not as much as the scores of august writers who queued up to give gushing quotes for the cover. It's a book about a rich white American man, but it's a funny, humane, gently self-mocking and well-written book about a rich white American man so while it's hardly breaking new ground, it was an enjoyable read.
25. Sex Power Money, Sara Pascoe
I like Sara Pascoe, I think she's both funny and clever, which is why she usually does well on QI. This is a book about human sexual behaviour, with a heavy emphasis on evolutionary biology, but as she remarks, a lot of the questions that she asks about sex come down to power (who mates with who and why? and who actually gets to choose who they mate with?). This journey through sexual economics takes a good long look at sex work, pornography and online misogyny, along with a variety of other topics including an excellent dissection of Indecent Proposal.
I'm really not a scientist, and I'm not sure how convinced I was by the "early human women would have had to do x and y in order to have the best chances of getting pregnant, and that's why we still do x and y today" stuff, although Pascoe is well aware that biological impulses are just one of the many influences that cause our behaviour. She talks about reading a book about "wife-beating being an evolutionary tactic before going to speak to volunteers at Standing Together Against Domestic Violence.... I excitedly told these women, who saw first-hand the effects of violence, what I'd been learning..... A woman politely but emotionally told me that people are not animals. Another explained that she had no interest in these kinds of theories while we live in a society that does little to support the vulnerable victims"
The places where science meets feminism can be fractious in all kinds of ways, and I thought that Pascoe did a decent job exploring the issues. She finds a good balance between humour and seriousness, and while I did wish sometimes for a bit more rigour, a few more statistics, she's obviously not an idiot; she can usually spot an unrepresentative sample or a dodgy bit of pseudoscience. Ultimately, for me, the book's strength was also its weakness- it's open-minded. She respects research even when it challenges her beliefs, and she explores social issues even when they go against the science. The result is that the conclusions can be rather woolly, but it makes a refreshing change from the divisive, binary discourse that can be too prevalent elsewhere, where saying that you support A is proof that you must hate B, and vice versa. For this reason I'd say that while this isn't a particularly weighty book, it's a grown up one.
26. The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, Wendy McClure
Read this in a day while lying in bed recovering from my Covid jab (48 hours of a temperature and general malaise - or Fever and Ague as any LHOTP fans might know it, although TBF when the Ingalls family had that it was actually Malaria, rather more serious than a vaccine side effect).
This is a book about a period in McClure's adult life when she rediscovers the Laura Ingalls Wilder books she loved as a little girl - and by "rediscovers" I mean "becomes strangely obsessed by". She re-reads the books, then reads anything she can lay her hands on that touches on the lives of Laura and her family. She orders a traditional churn to make her own butter, and uses the instructions from The Long Winter to make her own sourdough bread (the Ingallses would have bossed 2020). She then sets out on a series of roadtrips to the various Ingalls/Wilder sites across the Midwest - places mentioned in the book and other spots where Laura and her family lived. Some of these sites have been well-preserved and transformed into visitor centres, some are marked in a low-key way with smaller and more eccentric museums, and some are empty, run-down or only to be glimpsed through someone else's backyard.
Some of this book is about Laura Ingalls, and her family - McClure knew the books well but hadn't "read around", so I was able to discover with her some of the wider context, including the fact that Pa probably settled the family on disputed Indian lands because it was cheaper than buying a legal plot of land. She finds out more about Laura's life after marriage, building a context around the (published but very different in style) accounts that Laura wrote of her travels with her husband and daughter. Lots of the book is about McClure, and fortunately I liked her - she starts to realise as she gets deeper into this mission that it's quite an odd thing to do, and to think about why she's there and what she's trying to get out of it.
The most fascinating element for me, though, was what McClure tells us about the people she meets - the other people who are trying to live in
"Laura World". She meets re-enactors, separatists and survivalists, prairie geeks, fans of the TV show who don't even know that the books exist, and evangelical Christians who claim a level of religiosity for the Ingalls family which the books don't support. I like the way she writes about the people she meets - her touch is light, and while shecan be amusingly snarky, she's not judgemental IMHO. It's been interesting reading the Goodreads reviews though: loving all of the "how can she call herself a LHOTP fan, she doesn't even know anything about Laura, she doesn't take her
visits seriously, she admits herself that she didn't even bother to go and see Almanzo's shoe in Padiddlyboing Idaho" - certainly give you a taste of what the Laura fandom can be like on its fringes.
Thanks to Biblio for the inspiration to check out my local library for Ingalls books - I'm sad not to have a copy of any of the actual Little House books here now, but I do have Prairie Fires on a transfer request and am looking forward to it.