• Tuesday, 10 Jun 2025 6:30 pm

  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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  Monday, 9 Jun 2025 11:08 pm

  A Pennine Journey

  by A. Wainwright

  Published 1986 213 pages

  The Story of a Long Walk in 1938

  

  I’ve walked parts of Wainwright’s Pennine Journey and found it a little rough around the edges — though not necessarily in a bad way. There are sections that follow greenways and high moorland tracks like the most well-trod of the long distance trails here in England; but there are long tracts that meander across fields and over stone walls and through farm courtyards in a way that I think Wainwright might have liked.

  Wainwright’s original journey, however, followed very little of the modern signposted route; in 1938 the relatively infrequent motor traffic down what are now designated B-roads meant that he could walk along the roads and lanes and see almost no one. At one point he walks five miles up the road from Alston to Hartside Cross, a voyage no one would dare to undertake by foot these days for danger of being plastered by a BMW X9 operated by a wealthy family from Coventry out on their bank holiday weekend jollies.

  A Pennine Journey (the book, not the trail) is a book of two faces.

  On the one hand, Wainwright writes loftily of the freedom of the hills, dales, and wideopen lonely places in the north of England; he brings the reader with him into towns that have scarcely changed in hundreds of years, stone walls and flagstone roofs and modest kitchens with a little coal in the grate.

  He makes his opinion well-known: Blanchland is out of a fairy-tale; Weardale is industrially depressing; Wharfedale is a secret beauty; the Eden Valley sucks. He writes at length and with unmitigated wonder of Hadrian’s Wall (although inexplicably totally omits any mention of Sycamore Gap (RIP In Peace)).

  This tendency of forming a strong opinion of what is basically just grass and stone and tree is what has made him a national treasure (and an MBE). It’s charming and captivating and breeds a sense of romance into the country.

  Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walkover country such as this; the scene that delight the eyes, the blessed piece of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously rot within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town or smooth away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe.

  On the other hand. He is a little bit too free with that opinion when it comes to women. And his journey brings him into contact with all sorts of women: his MO is basically to rock up as the sun is setting and find someone to take him in for the night. Usually this is a private home (but sometimes an inn) where a woman looks after occasional boarders, and always does A.W. have something to say about these women.

  Usually it’s condescending. Usually it reads like something from r/menwritingwomen. Sometimes it’s outright offensive. He flirts with all of the younger ones, despite having a wife of seven years and a son back home; he passes judgment on the elder.

  And he holds a pretty high opinion of himself; I quite suspect that he was a miserable person to be around (which is lucky, because he liked to walk on his own). I’m conscious that A.W. wrote this when he was young (but not that young); he may have let judiciousness get the better of his free opinions in his older age. But I’m also conscious that his wife left him after suspecting him of infidelity, and for his lofty pronouncements about “The man has not been born, who does not want a son to follow him”, he left nothing to his son when he died.

  So! The scales have fallen from my eyes. Will I still read his Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells in the idle moments between fell runs? Uh yeah I will. Am I going to read another one of his narrative walks? Uh probably not.

  Stray observations

  • Wainwright stops at the Kirk Inn in Romaldkirk and his description heavily implies that it’s haunted or cursed or something; that despite the solicitousness of the widow who runs the joint there’s a shabby sense of bereft laid over the place like a cloak. He speculates that it will very soon go out of business but: it didn’t! It’s still around. Sam and I visited last weekend and found that the curse still lays upon the place: it is dark and cluttered even on a sunny day, serves only a single beer from a brewery I have never heard of, and remains perennially empty even on a Friday evening, while the (larger, more upscale) pub across the street is fully-booked. The solicitous proprietor remains: the pub does not take cards but does take a promise to return within the hour with a crisp polymer tenner.
  • I got the book off World of Books and when it arrived it was battered but whole; by the time I finished it went the way of A.W.’s shoes, by which I mean the adhesive had totally perished and the whole thing came pretty much totally apart.

• ---

  Monday, 12 May 2025 9:22 pm

  Postwar

  by Tony Judt

  Published 2005 878 pages

  

  You know, for a nearly 900-page book covering the history of Europe from 1945 to the new millennium (or thereabouts), Postwar is a remarkably easy read. A long read, for sure — but an eminently manageable one. If anything, its straightforward telling-of-events narrative very nearly spoils it; Judt leaves it a little bit too much up to the reader to connect the dots.

  Maybe I'm just a idiot. Maybe the average reader of a 900-page history of a continent should be up to the task of finding the common thread that weaves that history together.

  Luckily Judt puts it right at the end of the book:

  All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe's competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans' collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed. Europe's barbarous recent history, the dark 'other' against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans. Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives.

  If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europea out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past.

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  Wednesday, 26 Mar 2025 8:20 pm

  How to be Perfect

  by Michael Schur

  Published 2022 304 pages

  Interesting but kind of toothless. As far as a book about pop ethics goes, I think it does the job. If you’ve watched The Good Place, which is the latest TV show that Schur is known for (along with Parks and Recreation and writing credits on The Office), you’ve already got the gist.

  Schur’s approach to being a good person boils down to not overthinking things, eschewing adherence to rigour, self-forgiveness, and continual improvement. Rather than prescribing Right Actions, Schur’s concerned with the personal pursuit of Rightness. If you’re moving in the Right direction, that’s enough. Which, alright!

• ---

  Sunday, 9 Mar 2025 4:33 pm

  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

  by Susanna Clarke

  Published 2004 782 pages

  

  Falls flatly into that category of 2000s fantasy of which Neil Gaiman is basically the undisputed leader. Terrific atmosphere, if a little light on plot. The prose makes me wish I was re-reading Mason & Dixon.

  The basic premise is: Regency-era England, magic was rife during the middle ages but has retreated from the country and is studied more or less as history. But lo: by dint of hard study, one man (Norrell) begins to do practical magic in England again. He takes on a pupil (Strange), who goes a little bit off the rails (but in a good way). In the process, magic begins to return in earnest to England.

  (No evidence that magic exists or ever existed in other countries, which must be very frustrating for them.)

  There’s a bit of conflict that builds very, very slowly and then is resolved hastily at the end, but I think that the major appeal of the book is textural more than narrative. The world of magic feels dangerous and alien; the borders between worlds blur in just the right way. The mechanics of magic are beyond the scope of the work; while there’s some diegetic scholarship to the working of magic, as far as the reader is concerned magic just happens—maybe with a bit of effort but never really with any limits. Nevertheless I didn’t find myself questioning why don’t they just resolve this problem in such and such a way with magic? but maybe that’s because I’m not a very critical reader.

  Where I found the book fell flat was in its pacing. We spend long stretches building and building narrative tension but it doesn’t make any move towards resolution or climax until like 100 pages from the end (of an 800-page book). For the whole first half is scene-setting; things don’t get going until Strange goes away to Spain.

  There’s a curious duplication of plot elements as well: Strange goes to war twice; two women are abducted into Faerie; Norrell is advised by two ne’er-do-wells. I think that at least some of these are on purpose—things happening in pair seems to be a theme here—but others just feel like rehashing the same scenes over again.

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