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Careless People
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Published 2025 400 pagesRead this after everyone made a lot of noise about it earlier in the year. I don’t know what I expected; pretty much everything in the book confirms exactly what I thought things were like at Facebook. They’re all weirdos and they’re all so self-absorbed they hardly notice when they enable all sorts of awful things elsewhere in the world. No second-order thinking but it’s okay because they’re all fabulously wealthy.
I was swept up a little bit during the first third. I want to hustle in the name of my ideals so bad. But maybe that’s just me being a Man In Tech, or maybe just wanting to be back in my twenties and having made different decisions, which who doesn’t want that.
The last quarter or so felt muddy, almost like Wynn-Williams had to shoehorn in all of the horrible global politics that Facebook did during Wynn-Williams's tenure. And they did a lot of horrible global politics: cooperating on election interference (although: no mention of Cambridge Analytica), building tools for spying in China, the Rohingya genocide (a single chapter called "Myanmar").
The whole thing makes me glad I’m no longer on Facebook; anyway off to WhatsApp to tell all my family that I’ve posted another book review
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Maurice and Maralyn
by Sophie Elmhirst
Published 2024 254 pages
A charming, propulsive read, in spite of one of its protagonists. Maurice and Maralyn is the story of an English couple shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific during a circumnavigation of the globe by sailboat in the 1970s; their 118 days at sea and subsequent rescue was the topic of much contemporary media frenzy. They even published a firsthand account!
What Elmhirst's Maurice and Maralyn contributes to the narrative is the context surrounding their trip: Maurice is curmudgeonly and kind of mean; Maralyn is engaged and vivacious and humble. It is mostly thanks to Maralyn that they make it out alive. They struggle with fame, and when the attention dies down they retreat to the banal life they were originally trying to escape.
They’re mostly unchanged by their harrowing experience at sea, which I think is testament to quite how sturdy British folks were in the aftermath of the war. While adrift, Maurice does vow to change his ways — but later, when they build a new boat and return to sea with a crew and an eye to complete the original voyage, he turns out to be such a drag that one of the crew bails before they've reached their destination.
Maralyn dies in 2002, and Maurice spends the last decade of his life alone and adrift again (do you see what I did there), unable to live without Maralyn but unable to die due to his stout Derbyshire constitution. He writes a memoir, more for himself than for anyone else. He gives a video interview to a shipwreck documentarian: he speaks movingly about the experience, about being alone with the wildlife in the middle of the sea. About the calls of the whales at night. And at one point he admits that if he knew he would be picked up, he’d do it again.
Maurice died in 2017 and had his ashes scattered with Maralyn's in the New Forest.
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Tinkers
by Paul Harding
Published 2009 191 pages
Tinkers is a character study of a father and son from the perspective of the son on his deathbed. The father, Howard Crosby, is a travelling salesman in the early years of the 20th century, an ineffective sort of a guy with epilepsy and a powerful curiosity about the world around him and a wife that barely tolerates him.
His son, George, is a horologist on his deathbed, looking back on his childhood, his father’s life, and his own experiences with his troubled siblings.
The book alternates modes throughout, from first to third person and from present to past tense. There are sections of seemingly incongruous extracts from books or pamphlets. There are long run-on sentences that I think are meant to sound profound. And there are images that are evocative but incongruous, like a description of a fat man as a “fleshy Olympian pear” or of roadside puddles as the colour of “iron cream”. What the heck is iron cream? Some of the descriptions run on like a fanfic writer who can’t decide on the best way to bring an image to life and so just keeps heaping new ones on.
I finished the book with the powerful sense that Paul Harding is a clever guy with a lot of novel ways to describe things. But I also finished the book with a powerful exhaustion with sentences like these:
Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it.
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The Yearling
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Published 1938 428 pages
The Yearling is the perfect example of a certain kind of story written in the first half of the twentieth century that got turned into a hundred million movies starring Gregory Peck. It’s the quintessential example of a bildungsroman set in the American south. It’s got man vs. wild. It’s got boy vs. wild. It’s got boy + wild. It’s got fathers and sons. It’s got grimy scallywag types. It’s got language you can sink your teeth into. It’s got a character arc that you can see the whole thing right from the very beginning. It’s got no black people. It’s got absolutely zero tension. This is the America that they want to make great again.
The Yearling is the story of Penny Baxter, a pioneer in the Central Florida backwoods (specifically around Ocala) in the years after the American Civil War. The story is told from the perspective of his son, Jody, who is the eponymous yearling, over the course of a single year as Jody grows from a boy to a young man. Penny and Jody navigate difficult relationships with their neighbours, torrential rains, death of close friends, and skirmishes from the wildlife that threaten their existence in the scrub. However, as I say: no tension. Penny is clever and moral and a solution is never far away.
You may have been told that the yearling of the title actually represents a young fawn that Jody adopts midway through the story, and who grows along with him over the course of the year. That’s just a clever rhetorical technique. I won’t spoil anything here but this book was written in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for the screen like 8 times, so I think you can see where this story with the fawn goes.
It’s a little trite, and it’s a little predictable, but the world that Rawlings conjures up is so rich you can almost sink your fingers into it. The blackjack oaks and the sand and the split-rail fences and the long beards and the critters. And the food — almost Ghibli-esque in its detail. Tell me you don’t want to sit down to this table:
She ladled food into pans big enough to wash in. The long trenchered table was covered with steam. There were dried cow-peas boiled with white bacon, a haunch of roast venison, a platter of fried squirrel, swamp cabbage, big hominy, biscuits, cornbread, syrup and coffee. A raisin pudding waited at the side of the hearth.
“If I’d of knowed you was comin’,” she said, “I’d of cooked somethin’ fitten. Well, draw up.”
Or this description of killing a deer, which lays forth the brutality of the wild in such few words:
He took his knife from its scabbard and went to the deer and slit its throat. It died with the quiet of a thing to whom death is only one short step beyond a present misery.
Why can’t we write like this anymore?
Stray observations
- The edition that I read (pub. Heinemann, 1969), besides having perhaps the perfectly broken spine, also featured these fantastic engraved illustrations at the start of every chapter:
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Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Published 2021 496 pages
Ryland Grace, an American middle school teacher with an annoying name, wakes up from a coma in deep space. His mission, remembered only at intervals due to coma-related amnesia, is to uncover the mystery behind an interstellar bacterium which has infected the sun and is causing it to slowly go out. Shortly he meets an alien from another star system on the same mission. Together they get into a bunch of The Martian-esque science hijinx and sort out the mystery.
That’s the book.
It doesn’t feel like a story so much as a series of problems that Grace and his extraterrestrial buddy, Rocky, have to solve. Which I guess some people quite like; but as for me I never felt like anything was in danger of happening. Most of the book is: something has upset the status quo on the spaceship; Grace & Rocky fix it; the status quo is restored; something else has upset the status quo on the spaceship.
Usually the solution involves gratuitous descriptions of pressing buttons or cycling through screens or attaching things together. This doesn’t feel like narrative to me. It is to narrative as descriptions of what someone is wearing is to character. Yes, Grace is doing things — but nothing is happening. I don’t need three pages of explanation of how some xenonite chain is designed and constructed; just tell me that you did it.
I will say that Rocky is a terrific character. He’s physically expressive, a bit of a himbo, helpless and simultaneously capable. I do wonder how much of Rocky’s lovability is because he’s like a dog that can communicate. Do we like Rocky because he's basically Grace’s daemon?
There are a couple of story beats right at the end of the book that do feel like something is happening — but they come a little bit too late:
The first explains why Grace is on the mission, despite being a middle school teacher and not an astronaut. I wouldn’t call it a twist, but it sort of reorients your perspective of characters in a way that makes zero material difference. I think it was included to give Grace a character arc, but it’s not an effective arc because the shift in character happens off-screen, while he’s out with his coma+amnesia; he goes to sleep at one end of the arc and wakes up at the other.
The second did surprise me, so I’m not going to write about it here — but the book runs out of pages to explore the consequences of what was effectively only the third or fourth actual thing to happen in the whole book.
Still I thought it was fun.
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