More notes on recent reads
Good surprises and a letdown
I said I wanted to read more and so far 2026 has delivered, although curiously my book diet has been dominated by men – British men at that – in a way it hasn’t been for years.
Parallel Lines, Edward St Aubyn. I expect every new St Aubyn to disappoint me, because he’s struggled to produce anything that matches the incandescent heart and humour of Patrick Melrose; but I loyally read each work as it comes out, just in case he ever does. This is the best attempt by far. Lost for Words had fabulous moments of farce (my partner and I still gleefully quote wot u starin at at each other), and Dunbar coasted on St Aubyn’s facility for sentences, having strategically outsourced plot and character to one W. Shakespeare. But only Parallel Lines, in all the post-Melrose oeuvre, manages to both move and amuse. There is hope!
Empire of AI, Karen Hao. An intense journalistic exposé of the corporate history of OpenAI, including the strange firing-not-firing of Sam Altman in 2023. Well worth reading – and it certainly helped me place the recent US government tussles with Anthropic in context – though the author did have to issue a rather unfortunate correction about water use statistics.
The Boy with the Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera. I found Empireland very thoughtful, so I was disposed to like anything by Sanghera. But I had not rushed to pick this up – I feel slightly overexposed to the genre of second-generation migrant minorities examining their place in white-majority societies. That kind of book seemed especially unnecessary to me when I lived in Singapore. But for better or worse, after a few years in the UK, I’ve undergone a shift in what feels relevant, and I’m glad to have read this as a result. It is a wonderfully warm, witty and wise account of family relations under strain from schizophrenia and intergenerational change.
Two by journalist James Bloodworth – Hired: Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, a sort of 21st-century take on Down and Out in Paris and London, and Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere. Both books are straightforward and informative, though I learned rather more from Hired, especially its descriptions of stints in an Amazon warehouse and of frontline care work.
Currently I am midway through The Rose Field, the last volume in the Book of Dust series by Philip Pullman. I’ve forgotten nearly everything about the prior entries, so I have got hundreds of pages in with only the vaguest idea of what is going on or who anyone is. But I was swept along by the colours and textures and high drama well enough, until Delamere did a speech about his family history – which seemed to be implausibly well received – and declaring Lyra public enemy no.1. Prior to this the series seemed to become grander and wilder than before for its greater breadth of settings and characters; but this moment immediately collapsed it into yet another chosen-one-Skywalker-boy-who-lived-royal-family drama. It’s not even just the same type of thing, it’s literally the exact same persecuted Chosen One as before. I’ll keep reading just to get to the end and see what happens, but this is a letdown.