When I started reading “4321” Paul Auster was still alive. By the time I finished it he had passed away. That does add an element of difficulty when discussing a work that is far from perfect – one feels that it’s somehow rude to point out the flaws in a recently deceased author’s works.
Nevertheless, here’s my review:
“4321” is doorstop of a book, a massive tome that demands quite a lot of time but not a lot of effort to read. Auster is good writer and he is very capable of writing very readable books. At no point during “4321” will you feel that the writing drags or that you’re struggling to understand what’s going on. In his telling and retelling of Archie Ferguson’s life in all four variations of it, Auster very adeptly makes sure that you don’t lose sight of the plot and get confused wondering which version of Archie are you tracking now.
That’s the highlight of this book, and it may also be its downfall. “4321” is Auster in his most polished, most controlled, and most repetitive. It’s all the previous themes that you’ve met in previous Auster novels, coupled with Auster’s own biography and his love for certain types of characters and relationships. It’s like watching Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” – a work of supreme technical difficulty and accomplishment, polished to a mirror-like quality, and reflecting only the creator himself. Somehow after more than 900 pages you realize that there’s no there there.
The most interesting characters are the ones that Auster glosses over, slotting them into their role in Archie’s narrative (his mother Rose is perhaps the most glaring example of this), and the characters he does care about are… uninteresting. Archie, through his 4 turns in life, never evolves. He’s always a detached, not very interesting young man that looks at the events of the century from the sidelines. His friends also never evolve, and while his path to becoming a writer might be fascinating to Auster, it wasn’t very interesting to me. It was too neat, too clean, too uncomplicated. The whole thing was rather bloodless, the rank opposite of Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” which is a messy but punchy and lively affair.
You spend over 900 pages of uncomplicated, almost light reading, and get to… not a lot really. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been written about elsewhere and much better about love, life, creation and the creative mind. What you do get is to view the supreme craftsmanship of a very good storyteller. Maybe that’s enough. For me it wasn’t.
I read four books in March (and started reading Paul Auster’s mammoth of a book 4321). Three of them were very good (Prospero’s Cell, The Sisters Brothers and Blood) and one that was a bit of a disappointment (Slow Productivity) mostly because I was already familiar with the concepts in it. All in all not a bad reading record for the month.
Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu, Lawrence Durrell
This isn’t a guidebook, nor a travel book, nor purely a work of non-fiction. Durrell lived in Corfu for a few years before WWII (his brother, Gerald Durrell wrote several books about their time there, the most famous of which is the wonderful “My Family and Other Animals”. I’ve read that book so many times I know parts of it by heart) with his wife Nancy and a group of artistically minded friends. This book pretends to be a guide to the island only in its title and a few peculiar appendixes in the end. In reality it’s a stylized diary of a year and a half of Durrell’s time there, just before the war broke out. Durrell is a master of description, and for that alone the book is worth the read. It’s a sliver of a book that captures in a pile of amber words a time, a place and a community that now no longer exist. It was written while Durrell was exiled in Alexandria, and you can feel the melancholy and mourning for a golden age that was once his and is now lost.
The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
I’ve had this book for so long on my reading list I managed to buy both a digital and physical copy of it. The design of the paperback is wonderful, by the way, so I recommend getting it if you can (that’s the edition I ended up reading).
Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers and professional killers in 1851 frontier America. They’ve been sent to California to kill an elusive prospector, Hermann Kermit Warm, at the request of their employer, the enigmatic, powerful and cruel Commodore. The novel is a sort of Noir Don Quixote/Cohen Brothers telling of the story of their trip there and back, from the point of view of Eli Sisters, the younger brother. Eli is a fascinating character, and much of the interest in the story is seeing him grow more self-aware and conscious of his life and choices. The novel manages to be funny and tragic, cruel and heartwarming at the same time. It has a lot to say about agency, morality, violence and the rush for gold vs quality of life, and it goes about it without preaching to the reader.
A truly original novel that is hard to put down, and manages to be both entertaining and illuminating. Well worth the read.
Slow Productivity:The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport
I’ve read Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, which I liked and utilized to great effect, and his So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which isn’t as good as the others. I also listen to his excellent podcast, Deep Questions, and so I pre-ordered this book the minute he started talking about it.
Herein lies the paradox of this book. If you’re a regular listener of Newport’s podcast there’s very little in this book for you beyond a few anecdotes. Newport has basically workshopped and talked about all the ideas in Slow Productivity for months on his podcast, going into much more depth and implementation specifics than he does in this book.
If you aren’t a listener of his podcast, AND you’re a knowledge worker with some level of control over your schedule and tasks, then Slow Productivity is worth reading. You’ll learn about pseudo-productivity, its origin and its breaking point, and you’ll learn about an alternative framework: slow productivity. “Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality”.
Where the book fails and podcast triumphs is in the implementation of these ideas. The book does give you a few ideas to try out, but through a much lengthier discussion in the podcast, plus real-world questions that listeners asked you get a better idea of how this would work in real life.
As I’ve been listening to the podcast for a few months, I already started implementing these ideas at my job (before the book was published). I work on only one project at a time, the rest stays in the backlog. I was told to cut corners and do a mediocre job on my current project in an attempt to rush it, but I deflected that request. Once I presented my initial results, the tune changed – this was high quality work! Totally worth the work and the wait, keep it up!
Bottom line: skip if you’re a podcast listener/viewer, read if you feel overwhelmed at your job and want an introduction to an alternative productivity framework that’s not as frenetic as the normal knowledge worker’s fare.
Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation, Dr Jen Gunter
Like many other readers that reviewed this book, I wish I had access to it when I started menstruating. Dr Gunter is as usual informative, caring and entertaining at the same time, which is quite an accomplishment. Complex medical processes are explained with great clarity and compassion, and the reader is left with a LOT of very useful information to use when making medical choices or advocating for themselves in medical settings. This and Dr Gunter’s The Menopause Manifesto are must reads and treasure mines of solid, well-researched and vetted medical information in a world full of medical disinformation and misinformation. There are a few pages here that would have saved me months of needless anguish during chemo.
An absolute gem of a book, one to read cover to cover and then reference in times of need.
Have you read anything good or interesting last month?
The second of the Alexandria Quartet this book is much easier to read than the first one, Justine. While it is written from the point of view of the same narrator as Justine was, Balthazar undoes and rewrites significant parts of the previous narrative. This isn’t an accident, but a very deliberate, very well thought out move by Durrell. He’s not merely creating an unreliable narrator, he’s creating a narrator that doesn’t see the full extent of the reality he’s living in, and then has a trusted friend come in and fill in the gaps, correct him, reveal truths he had no way of knowing. As Balthazar’s insights force the narrator to reflect again on what happened in Alexandria at the time, more memories begin to surface and so a few new characters join us (chief among them the enigmatic Mountolive) and a few others get revealed in surprising ways. Nessim becomes fleshed out and more human and relatable as we see him with his brother and mother at the family estate. Scobie shows hidden parts of himself that make him tragically human, and not just a comic relief. Justine too becomes less of a fable and more of an actual person, and Clea gets a bit more depth (though she’s still something of a mythical creature here). Nessim’s brother Narouz and his mother Leila are fantastic characters in and of themselves, and the narrative comes to life with their addition and with the fact that we get some distance from the overly cerebral and neurotic narrator. Balthazar brings high romance to the story, an air of a Victor Hugo novel at times, and so this book flows more easily, is much kinder in its demands from the reader than Justine was.
Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell
The third novel in the Alexandria Quartet and the one I was most looking forward to reading. While Justine set the basic story and introduced the main characters, and Balthazar gave new depth, perspective and meaning to their actions, Mountolive overturns them both by giving the characters motives and political context.
Without spoiling the novel, Mountolive introduces David Mountolive, the new British Ambassador to Egypt and Leila’s former lover. Leila is Nessim and Narouz’s mother, and she and her family become the heart of the story, with Darley (the narrator and protagonist of the previous two novels) barely appearing in Mountolive. The narrator changes, pace changes, the love story changes, even the genre changes in this novel compared to the other two, and Durrell has done a magnificent job with this switch. You don’t see it coming, but once he starts revealing what really took place you see that he’s very quietly laid all the groundwork for it there.
Mountolive himself is a fantastic character, and Narouz… I tip my hat to Durrell for creating a larger than life character that could be at home in a Victor Hugo novel and yet is completely believable.
It’s worth reading Justine and Balthazar just to read Mountolive, and no, you can’t skip them just to read this.
Clea, Lawrence Durrell
The fourth and final book of the Alexandria Quartet Clea takes place a few years after the events in the first three books (which happen simultaneously), during and immediately after WWII. It’s the final layer of a multi-layered narrative, one that reveals more about the characters, allows them to mature, evolve, create new ties and explore old ones. Scobie gains a deserved mythical status, Darley grows up, Clea becomes more human and less of an angel in the shape of a woman, and Justine, Nessim and even Narouz get their final say. Above all this is a farewell to Alexandria, which is arguably the main character in this quartet. The city looms large over the life and events of these novels, providing much more than a setting. Durrell is a master at evoking the spirit of place, and here he is at the heights of his powers, writing what is likely one of the most nuanced, multi-layered, tormented and transcendent boy-meets-girl stories ever written.
The Alexandria Quartet
The Alexandria Quartet as a whole is a difficult and demanding set of novels to read – it makes demands on the reader, and some of the content is hard for both contemporary and current audiences. Yet Durrell isn’t creating a picture postcard of a city, or of his characters. They both have teeth and a significant underbelly and have no problem showing either one. Characters you like show mean, petty and intolerant streaks, and the city is both magnificently charming and a seat of horrors beyond description at the same time.
When it comes to reading demanding books, the question always is “was it worth it”? In the case of The Alexandria Quartet it most certainly is. The dizzying narrative of Justine, that gives to credence to the linear narrative, is overturned by Balthazar, which adds order, depth, insight to it, and a multitude of various contexts. Mountolive adds political and social context and depth over what Balthazar provided, and another set of love stories, this time ones coloured by tragedy. Then Clea breathes time over the trilogy, allowing characters to mature, evolve, reinvent themselves. The artist lost in Mountolive inspires a wedding and two artists found in Clea, and Justine finds her true calling once again.
My only regret with this quartet is that I read it on a kindle. These books require paging backwards and forwards (especially Justine), and they need deep reading not fast reading. I have several more of Durrell’s books that I plan on reading, and all of them are in print format. He is a writer to savour, not to rush through.
I decided to try and create monthly reading reviews of what I read instead of individual reviews or a giant yearly reading list post. Here’s what I read this January:
Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, by Mollie Panter-Downes
A collection of very well written realistic short stories mostly about British women during WWII. Mollie Panter-Downes was a prolific and long time contributor to the New Yorker, and wrote both fiction and non fiction pieces for the magazine. This collection is bookended by two of her “Letter from London” non-fiction pieces, one from the beginning of WWII and one from the end. In between are 21 gems of short stories, all very realistic, all showing aspects of the war rarely discussed. Panter-Downes shows the great upheaval in British society at the time, both in the role of women and in the class system. She is sympathetic to her characters with all their flaws and foibles, and you grow to love them over their brief appearances. There are hints of dry humour, wonderful characterization, and an exploration of character that is both tied to Britain during WWII, and yet still universal. Highly recommended, even if you’re not a fan of short stories or historical fiction.
White Eagles Over Serbia, Laurence Durrell
Laurence Durrell started his career as a writer writing poetry, and it shows. The descriptions of landscape and character here are stunning. Never have I read a spy thriller that is written like a Literature with a capital L on the one hand, yet is still supremely entertaining and exciting to read – and very realistic.
Durrell is an excellent writer, and White Eagles is based on his experiences working for the British Foreign Office. The book is not flashy, it’s not high stakes, and it reads like something that could actually happen. The main character, Methuen, is a reluctant, tired hero spurred to action by his love of fishing more than his love of danger and intrigue. The descriptions read like poetry, and the characters are all individual gems – none of them are perfect, none of them are heroic, they are real people in very real situations. I wish there was a series of Methuen books (there isn’t), and I recommend this even to those who normally don’t read Cold War era spy thrillers.
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
Set in the New York area at the turn of the 20th century to the syncopated beats of ragtime, Ragtime is a tour de force of modern writing. The first part of the book is slightly overwhelming, as Doctorow takes us with lightening speed and fast cuts through many luminaries of New York city during the early 20th century, and intersperses them with the story of a wealthy WASP family, a Jewish immigrant family and a black family to be. The cuts remind me of a Wes Anderson movie, and it takes a while to realize that the narrator is actually creating a ragtime with his description of the events: the emphasis on seeming minutiae is deliberate, and the juxtaposition of things that don’t go together is purposeful. You feel like all the books you’ve read so far have been horse drawn in comparison to this piece, and suddenly you’re speeding your way on a model-T.
Very original, not an easy read, but highly recommended.
Note: the narrator speaks in the voice of a reporter from that era, and hence there’s a lot of the N-word (and worse) in this book.
Justine, Lawrence Durrell
The first of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet of novels.
Some books are easy to review, but this one isn’t. I’ll try to do it justice, but reading Justine was an experience difficult to summarize in words.
The good – the writing is exquisite. Durrell is a phenomenally good writer, and he’s at his best when bringing Alexandria to life. Alexandria itself appears to be the main character here, and it’s a fascinating portrait of the city during the ’30s. Durrell is doing interesting things with narrative structure here, and while it makes following along difficult at the start, the narrative builds up in layers over time. You aren’t viewing the story of the four lovers chronologically, but rather through the reminiscences of the narrator, as things come to his mind and gain importance. Thus you survey the scene several times from different angles, through the growing understanding of the narrator. It’s a fascinating narrative structure, and it adds nuance and interest to the story, and fits well with Durrell’s evocation of Alexandria.
The bad – the characters aren’t quite there. They remain ghosts of themselves, mythical creatures, never becoming palpably real. The only exception is Scobie, a character that seems to have been created as a caricature of sorts, a comic relief, and yet is the most fully realized character in the novel. My guess is that as we are returning to the same characters from different points of view in the following novels of the quartet, that this issue may be resolved.
The ugly – whether these are Durrell’s views or his narrator’s views, Justine is rife with misogyny, homophobia and whiffs of racism and antisemitism. The novel was written in the ’50s and its views on homosexuals were likely advanced for the time, but they’re still terrible. There’s also depictions of child prostitution, prostitution, and mentions of slavery that seem perfectly fine with the narrator and the people around him.
Justine is a difficult book to read, both for the narrative structure, which is disorienting at first, and the way it jars on modern sensibilities. It is well written and intriguing enough for me to give the rest of the Alexandria Quartet a chance.
A Modern Detective, Edgar Allan Poe
This is a mini collection of two short detective stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, the first fictional detective.
Poe is pretty talkative here, and his detective, Dupin, is a long-winded, charmless, cerebral Sherlock Holmes type. The cases discussed are interesting, and the second story in this collection was inspired by a real unsolved murder case. The characters, though, lack charisma, mystery or charm, and the reader is left wondering why they ended up spending time with them.
The detecting techniques are more primitive than those portrayed by Conan Doyle, and they are magnificently padded with paragraph upon paragraph of Poe delighting at his protagonist’s cleverness. A full third of the first story is skippable without missing a beat, and the second one fares much the same. What Poe does do well is evoke an atmosphere of gothic horror around both cases. What he utterly fails to understand (but Agatha Christie knew so well) is that the heart and interest of a detective story is the characters in it, not so much the analytical prowess of the detective at large. Holmes, Marpel, Poirot, and Father Brown are all first and foremost compelling characters. Dupin has not earned his place among them, and is remembered merely for being the first, not (as Poe would have you think) for being the best.
Dull, overly wordy, not worth reading, despite its historical importance.
That’s it for January 2024. What interesting books did you read this month?
“M Train” by Patti Smith is a book about drinking black coffee in various cafe’s around the world, and watching serial crime dramas. That’s a factual if somewhat facetious review of “M Train,” and if that premise appeals to you, then by all means, I highly recommend this book.
But wait, there’s more to “M Train” than that. Smith wrote a book about loss and dealing with loss, memory, and the crushing passage of time. The prose is beautiful: if Joan Didion would have used more drugs I imagine that this is exactly how she would sound like. There are vivid and impactful descriptions of places and objects, interspersed with a dream sequences, symbolic moments and sentimentality. Smith does fall short when it comes to bringing other people to life, something Didion excelled at. The other people in “M Train” remain fleeting shadows, insubstantial vignettes of themselves.
And this is what I felt detracts from the book: despite all the loss described in it, it lacked substance. The most vivid things about it are the dream sequences and the internal monologues, which makes the book a bit of a featherweight. Somehow in the end you are left with the feeling that all you have read was a book about Patti Smith drinking black coffee and watching crime series.
“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk (the Nobel prize in literature winner) is an astounding novel.
Imagine an Agatha Christie like murder mystery (and that already is high praise, because Christie knew how to spin a murder mystery plot like few other writers do). Now set it in a “Fargo” like setting, including the hostile weather, the small town, the eccentric people, and the quirky, pragmatic and deeply insightful main character (if this is ever made into a movie, Frances McDormand would make a perfect Mrs. Duszejko). Now cast it all in fantastic prose, tie it to Blake, to Eastern European history, to morality plays and religious texts, and finally, to the ultimate revenge narrative, “The Count of Monte Cristo”. Mrs. Duszejko isn’t a brooding sailor exposing the cruelty, corruption and foibles of upper-class French society, but she most definitely is woman in her 60s doing the same for the chauvinistic, cruel, corrupt, hunting neighbours around her.
Tokarczuk created a Character (with a big, bold, capital “C”) like no other. Mrs. Duszejko is the heart, the essence, the meaning and the end of “Drive Your Plow”. She is our way into the story, she maps out our way through it, and she judges us in the end. How we feel about her after the final page says more about us than it says about her. She is a character both full of contradictions and yet an integrated, believable whole at the same time. She is an engineer and a teacher, with a solid STEM background, that is also an astrology believer and practitioner. She is a non-religious person that constantly talks about God, a recluse that keeps making friends, a cynic that somehow manages to see good in people at their worst moments. She’s rational and pragmatic, and also deeply emotional and oftentimes impulsive. She’s powerful and fit, and a frail invalid. And she’s completely, utterly, with every molecule of her being, a real and believable human being. She’s a more believable person than I am, astrology and all.
The way that Tokarczuk ties the men’s treatment of Mrs. Duszejko (and other women) to the way they treat animals is masterful. “Drive Your Plow” could have been a parable, an allegory, a morality play, and yet it performs all that and so much more without driving the reader away. Like “Fargo,” it could have been a meaningless farce in less adept hands, and yet it manages to deal with issues that we have learned to be cynical about (the value of life, particularly as deemed valuable or useless by important men) with great earnestness and sensitivity.
There is much of Agatha Christie in the construction of the plot (particularly “And Then There Were None” and “Murder on the Orient Express”). There is much of Blake in the morality and moral outlook of certain characters. There is much of Dumas in the social observations tied to the revenge plot, and there are many post modern writers that are echoed in Mrs. Duszejko’s first person narrative. The result, however, is entirely unique, entirely Tokarczuk’s own, and well worth reading even if you have never enjoyed any of the authors echoed in the narrative. “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is a modern masterpiece, and one that is deeply moving and thought provoking at the same time.
While I’ve really cut down on physical book purchases, especially while I’m abroad, I always end up buying a few books, and this last trip was no different. On Thursdays there’s a decent antique market in Spitalfields (it also includes several food carts and a good selection of vintage clothes stalls, plus it’s a few minutes away from Brick Lane), and I oftentimes find interesting things there. I’ll likely write a separate post about my haul there, but I did get three Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series books: We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea”, “The Big Six” and “The Picts and the Martyrs”. They’re hardbacks in decent condition, with the dust jackets and the original Ransome illustrations, and I’m very glad that I found them half hidden in a comics and book stall. Ransome is an excellent British children’s book author, and if you liked the Famous Five and the Secret Seven or Kipling’s children’s book writing you’ll likely enjoy Ransome’s work.
The other two books are paperbacks that I bought at Waterstone’s Piccadilly while waiting for a friend (I’m not to be trusted in bookstores). I’ve been wanting to read something by Lawrence Durrell for a long time and “White Eagles Over Serbia” seems like a good place to start. J.L. Carr is a superb writer, and although I’m not sold on “How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup”‘s subject matter, “A Month in the Country” was good enough for me to want to give this a try.
I still have April’s book backlog to finish reading, but these two books are next on my list.
I enjoy reading Michael Palin’s (he of Monty Python fame) travel books. Palin is a good travel writer, combining keen observations of humanity, nature and location with a good sense of history and a sprinkling of oftentimes self-depreciative humour. “Erebus: The Story of a Ship” differs from his other travel writings in that it mostly isn’t his travels that are narrated, but those of the Erebus and its sister ship, Terror. These two former bomb ships spent the mid 19th century exploring the antarctic and then the arctic, with great success and to great acclaim. And then they disappeared for 160 years.
Palin starts the story with the crew, and the crew are at the heart of his tale. He could have focused on the tenacious people trying to piece together the story of the ship over the decades. He could have focused on Erebus’s last voyage and the long and oftentimes disastrous search attempts after it. But he chose to bring the ship to life through its crew, the era it was built in, and the state of the world around it. He masterfully weaves charming anecdotes of the ship’s daily life together with serious discussions of corporal punishment, racism, colonialism and the ecological damage mindlessly wrought by the Victorians. You get to hear about astoundingly brave and talented men doing the impossible, and about how ego and rigid thinking could be the downfall of their peers.
Palin traces the story of the Erebus from before it was built, through the story of its would be captain and crew and their Arctic exploits. He then goes through its creation, to its early days as a bomb ship with nothing to bomb, to its early retirement, and then its resurrection as an Antarctic explorer. He is sympathetic to its crew even as he pokes fun at some of them, and he always does his best to bring the daily life on the ship alive to the reader. There are a few well selected photos, prints and some excellent maps in this book, and they go well with Palin’s narration.
He also traces part of the Erebus’s journey himself, either by recalling past visits to certain key locations, or by actually travelling to remote places around the globe in the wake of this ship. He doesn’t sugarcoat its demise, the hardship its crew suffered, or the mistakes that they and their peers made.
“Erebus” was found in 2014 and “Terror” in 2016. They appear larger than life in many bits of literature, music and art, and it is worth learning their story. What Palin does in this book is not merely tell it as it was, but bring it vividly to life, and tie it inexorably to our lives right now.
P.S. I bought this book at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which is very apt, as a branch of the museum appears in this book, and the museum helped Palin with the research for it. If you haven’t visited this wonderful museum, I highly recommend it.
This book languished on my kindle for a long time, and is one of the ones that I was most looking forward to read as part of my “getting through my kindle backlog” challenge.
It is a first and foremost a charming book, much like the charming gentleman at its heart. It will make you smile more than once or twice, even as it discusses one of the most brutal periods and places in Western History: Russia under the Red Terror and during Stalin’s reign. Towles plays a tricky game here, much like a clever juggler, as he never lets you experience the era’s cruelty at first hand, yet he at the same time never lets you forget it. Even as the count thinks of poetry and the best of human kind, there are asides that remind you what was going on at the same time in the gulags and the collectives, in Ukraine (even then suffering under Russia’s boot), and in the daily lives of Moscovites in bread lines.
If you are looking for realism, this is not the book for you. “A Gentleman in Moscow” has the air of a fairytale to it, an insistence on seeing the good in people, in noticing their nuances and making room for them, in forgiving them for their foibles. It’s an optimistic book and I think we could do we a few more of those in the world.
This is not to say that “A Gentleman in Moscow” lacks sophistication and polish – on the contrary, it may have a little too much of them. Here is my main criticism of this book: it doesn’t trust its reader enough. It isn’t willing to let them pull out their own chair, pour out their own wine. Every point must be made clear, with charm and grace, but with little room for interpretation. The points where you are left to your own thoughts are few and far between, and you are to arrive to them after getting a thorough nudge in the right direction.
All in all though, “A Gentleman in Moscow” is a delightfully charming, accomplished book, with enough sophistication to its narrative to be satisfying without being opaque. It’s an enjoyable book to read, a book that I would gladly recommend, and it reminds me a bit in its overall theme and outlook of “Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris” by Paul Gallico (and that’s a compliment, in case you were wondering).
“‘You Just Need to Lose Weight’: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People” by Aubrey Gordon is a short reference book that discusses 20 common myths and misconceptions about fatness in an attempt to equip the reader with facts, talking points and things to consider when addressing anti-fat bias (aka fatphobia).
As a long time listener and supporter of “Maintenance Phase“, Gordon’s excellent wellness and weight loss debunking podcast with Michael Hobbes (of “You’re Wrong About” fame) very little in this book was new to me. It was a distillation of many of the ideas and topics discussed in the podcast, formed into a book that is specifically meant to be a teaching aid of sorts. It is also much more of a “call to action” book than Gordon’s previous book, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat”.
If you haven’t listened to “Maintenance Phase” I highly recommend it. You can either start with the first episode here, or jump in with one of their best episodes, on Goop. If you are looking to get into Gordon’s writing, I recommend reading “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat”. It’s much more of a reading book than a reference book. Once you’ve read that, there’s a good chance that you’ll want to keep a copy of “You Just Need to Lose Weight” around, if only to squelch tiresome Karens who tell people that “you just need to lose weight, it’s for your own good, I’m just concerned about your health”.
On a more personal note, just to highlight why I find this topic personally important (beyond me wanting to be a better, more accepting person in a better, and more accepting world):
My mother was misdiagnosed by a whole phalanx of very good doctors because all they could see is a fat person standing before them. They ignored her blood work, they ignored her biopsy, they ignored her medical history and our family’s rich and varied history with blood cancers. She nearly died because of their insistence that her problem was that she is fat. Well, she is fat, but her problem was that she had two types of blood cancer and one of them was going for her liver. The only two doctors that actually gave her a proper diagnosis were a resident that didn’t even see my mother (she just looked at the actual tests and you know, read them), and a liver doctor who is himself fat.
Bias kills. Learning about it is a moral duty, regardless of whether the bias is tied to race, gender, gender expression, size, age, disability, social class or anything else. It literally kills.
Writing at Large 