89 Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
This is the lifespan we can expect if we live to 77. That alone was a bit of a wake up call, and this is a book I will go back to again and again. Essentially, why don’t time management and productivity systems work and how do we make better decisions about where to spend our time. Seeing a lot of what I spend my time on for what it is – slightly pointless stuff that is never going to be “done” – has been an eye opener. I haven’t quite figured out how to use it to revolutionise my life but it’s made me think carefully about what I do with my free time, such as it is, and whether some of the choices I’ve been making are the right ones. First on my list has been making time to see friends I don’t see that much of. I’m also trying to make my peace with a never ending to do list, because that’s the nature of to do lists – there is always something else to do and the more you do, the more there is to do. I also plan to not spend time on things I don’t really care about – am particularly hoping this will help with choosing what to read. Unfortunately, I was 90% of the way through book 90 before I finished this so felt compelled to finish number 90.
90 Spring by Ali Smith
Sorry, Ali Smith. I suspect you’re extremely talented and that you write exceptionally good novels but from this point on, I’m not going to spend any more of what remains of my 4000 weeks on reading your books. I’m sure other people will continue to, and to enjoy them.
91 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
This on the other hand was well worth my time. I know lots of you have read and reviewed this – essentially, David Copperfield gets an OxyContin habit in the Appalachians. I didn’t go in to this expecting to enjoy it but I couldn’t put it down. Kingsolver writes about addiction in a way I’ve never encountered before, and it was a really powerful fictional counterpart to Empire of Pain which tells the story of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma’s creation of the Oxy epidemic. It’s about a lot more than addiction though – love, family, adversity and friendship.
92 Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City by Andrea Elliott
I knew nothing about this when I picked it up off a table in Waterstones, and I’m surprised it isn’t being talked about more. Elliott is a journalist writing for the New York Times who covered the story of a teenage girl called Dasani and her family over the period of a few years, then turned the articles into this book. It reads like a novel though it’s a work of non-fiction – one of the most interesting bits for me was the Afterword where Elliott explains exactly how she worked with Dasani and her family, and how she tried to balance objectivity against how she inevitably became invested in the family and their fortunes. It’s a story about race, gentrification, bureaucracy, addiction, the impact of the AIDS epidemic, urban violence and family. At the start of the book, Dasani and her family are living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Over the course of the next few years, the family is split up, children are moved to foster carers, family members, other schools and in and out of the shelter as their parents struggle to keep jobs, stay out of jail and navigate an impersonal and unfair welfare system. Dasani is the focus of the book but all the family members are given a chance to tell their story one way or another. You want Dasani and her siblings to succeed despite and because of their circumstances, while realising the extent to which the odds are stacked against them from the start. I suspect that the same story plays out across the US (albeit with even worse welfare support than in NYC) and – in different forms – in this country as well. A contender for my book of the year.