46 Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong
Was this a recommendation on here recently? I don’t remember where I came across it, but the library had a copy of it, so I thought I would give it a go. A shining example of nun fiction – Armstrong joined a strict order in the 1960s, just before Vatican II changed a lot of the ways in which such orders ran. As a result her experience was of an incredibly strict and restrictive environment where instant and unquestioning obedience was assumed and where nuns lived in near complete isolation and in austere conditions. She embraced this initially before she got a place to study at Oxford, where she began to question her vocation. I found this absolutely fascinating – it was sparse and moving and a particularly good insight into both the sublime beauty of convent life at its best, and the misery and tedium of it at its worst.
47 Feral City by Jeremiah Moss
Well, thank you @noodlezoodle for recommending what I am sure when the year end reckoning comes around will be my “book I most loved to hate, and love”. I am still thinking about this and will be for some time, because I am torn between thinking it was absolutely wonderful and utterly infuriating. I have some sympathy with many of Moss’s views: essentially, a strong dislike the bland homogenisation of cities and the way in which policing – in particular – discriminates against anyone who isn’t straight, white and “hyper normal”. I live in a part of London that is being slowly gentrified and of course the Met hardly covers itself in glory, so this account of New York during the early stages of the pandemic when the monied classes fled from the city, and the latter stages when the Black Lives Matter protests turned the city upside down struck a chord.
He knows how to paint a picture with words – I could really see myself in the East Village in a nearly deserted April 2020 street going through the piles of furniture abandoned by people handing their keys back to the landlords and returning to their parents’ homes, and he is really good at conveying the weird emptiness of cities at that point in time. So I give his writing 10/10.
But he really does know how to wind his readers up when they want to be in his corner – the unceasing whinging about people in his city, the absolute distinction between good people (essentially, queer and/or people of colour, all of whom wear masks all of the time) and bad people (anyone who is paying market rent for an apartment, posting on Instagram or ignoring Covid risk) and what I thought were just weird tone deaf complaints (he gets very angry with restaurant owners objecting to protestors when those protestors disrupt people’s meals, without any real acknowledgment of the fact that these are people who have been without any income for months by this point – Moss was able to continue with his psychotherapy practice online without any loss in income, and there’s a whole section where he visits a near empty Met and gets incredibly grumpy about how it is in “normal” times, overlooking the obvious point that if it remained empty for long, the whole thing would become untenable).
He longs for the New York of the 1970s and early 1980s – edgy, colourful, no chain stores or Instagrammable corners – without really taking into account the fact that it was dangerous, dirty and poor, all of which he isn’t a big fan of. I suspect he’s a lot more self-aware than he allows himself to appear here, and it’s possible that if I’d read it, rather than listened to the audiobook (well narrated by Moss) I would have picked up more of that.
This would make a great book club choice – there’s a lot to unpack and discuss.
48 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I really loved this, even though I’m not much of a gamer, and I don’t think you have to be to enjoy this. I found this charming and engaging and really moving, and while I wasn’t the biggest fan of Sadie or Sam, I don’t think that was the point of this book because people are flawed, and they are flawed. I can see this being something that both my teenagers would really enjoy (one is a gamer and would love the games geek detail, and the other likes a good engrossing novel despite never having played a video game in her life), and there aren’t many books that all three of us would agree on, so that in itself is notable.
49 The It Girl by Ruth Ware
I like what I know now is called dark academia, and a half decent thriller. So almost hit the spot, but I found the protagonist almost unbearably insipid, which slightly distracted me all the way through. I have known plenty of girls like April – who our “heroine” Hannah finds murdered in their shared sitting room at Oxford, and they really do not tend to hang out with people like Hannah. And I worked out very early on who did it (and who didn’t do it, which without being overly spoilery because it’s pretty obvious that he didn’t right from the start, seemed to be a really lazy plot device that Ware never really did anything with).