Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say.

- I've read most of Elizabeth Strout's novels over the last few decades and this new one is easily one of her best. It focuses on the intense, complicated relationships that quite ordinary people experience throughout their ordinary lives. Lives that seem comfortable but on many levels are not. 

- The key word is 'ordinary'. We're immersed in ordinary communities, watching ordinary families deal with ordinary dramas. Couples split up, marriages begin and end, people argue, new friends are made, accidents happen, and people die. Some from suicide, like the school principal. 

- The main character, Artie, is a history teacher at a local high school. He talks to his students about about wars, fascism and the Nazis. Why are there always wars? Can there ever be global peace? He felt he had to convey some optimism to the young students but he knew there could never be peace. The current political environment after Trump's reelection in 2024 is ugly and its negativity ever present. 

- He and his wife Evie seem to enjoy a good relationship, despite some tragedies upending their lives, such as the death of their young daughter, and his son Rob's disclosure that Artie is not really his father. Artie doesn’t confront Evie and tell her he knows. He buries it within himself. But he does contemplate suicide. 

- He’s starting to keep more secrets, and even to indulge in shoplifting. ‘He had somehow slipped the ties of the world that had been his for almost thirty years...It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now’. 

- His relationship with his son, despite the biological secret, is deep. Rob relies on his father for advice and their love is strong. 

- There are other incidents dotted throughout the novel that enrich it immensely. The book is only 200 pages long and the writing is clear and unpretentious. It's a joy to read. 

  

Emma Cline, Switzy

 

- Emma Cline is a bestselling young American author of The Girls, Daddy, and The Guest. I haven't read any of them. On the front cover Mark Haddon calls her new book 'Sublime...completely gripping...a wonder'. Daisy Johnson calls it 'Her best book yet. Completely extraordinary'. 

- My opinion? It's easily one of the most tedious novels I’ve ever read. It's a deep penetration into a shallow man, and everything about it annoys the crap out of me. Her staccato prose reflects his consciousness and vacuity. She's a writer of talent but it's wasted on this annoying lightweight of a man. The silly title, the meaningless front cover, and the absence of an author photo, says it all. 

- David Hastings, now in his early seventies, is a former Chief Financial Officer on a flight to Zurich via London, and he reflects on his long corporate life: suits, coats, shoes, flights, hotels, dinners, a Rolodex, Christmas cards, secretaries. He works for his boss called Stearns. He's constantly playing Solitaire on his phone. He’s an empty soul with minimal intellectual energy, no interest in politics, world affairs, or today's wars. He has no deep love for his family or friends, apart from one school friend Tom. In other words he’s as boring as batshit. He’s off to Switzerland for euthanasia. 

- He doesn’t reflect on how much money he’ll leave his daughter, nor his house, furniture, belongings. Not even his Will. His wife Annabel and he divorced when their only child, Rebecca, was ten. 

- At least he recognises his current irrelevance: 'Now the young people had different brains…They had seen behind the curtain..’ He's also aware of 'The smell of old people. Their decaying skin. The addled brain'. He's been diagnosed with Amyloid plaque and has, as he tells it, 'odd fake medications, tests and treatments. For executives only'. His memory is virtually gone altogether. Only habitual things remain. He's ‘now learning that everything - oh, just everything - disintegrates’. 

 - By far the most interesting character in the novel is Cody, his assistant. Cody is in his mid-thirties and looks after him in every way. I guess he's well paid but we're never told. 

- An interesting dimension to the story is his reflections on his school days, and his friend Tom. They'd go to Tom’s house for school breaks. Tom was bright. And David was attracted to him, even physically. The school bullies attacked Tom on one occasion and David stood there and did nothing. They were distant from that point. 

- At the end of the novel he and Cody fly in a private noncommercial plane to Zurich.  

- In a comfortable room, with a nurse in attendance, he swallows the barbiturate. 

- As a bored reader I thought 'thank god!' You may wonder why I lasted until the end. It wasn't because I wondered whether he'd chose life over death. It was solely because of Emma Cline's entrancing prose. 

Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

- Cory Doctorow is a snappy writer whose insight into all dimensions of AI companies and their scamming techniques is comprehensive. He’s always worth reading. 

- His new book is a fascinating social and economic take on how AI is influencing virtually all dimensions of business, employment and income, and not in a good way. He's probing deeply into the business side of AI corporations and who they’re screwing. He's not fooled at all by their pretentious rhetoric about how productive our future can be. 

 - He delves deeply into the appalling way tech companies like Google and Amazon treat their workers. 'Amazon's coders are now being worked like Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, among the most abused workforce in the wealthy world'. They're not even allowed to take toilet breaks. 

- He also addresses the contentious copyright issue. Most authors and artists are loudly proclaiming they are not being paid for the scraping of their content and that this is a breach of copyright law. Legally this isn't true. And 'every search engine makes a copy of every web page it can find, without taking a license or seeking permission to do so'. The substantive issue is that the huge dominant corporations all agree on paying their workers, including creative ones, as little as possible. Their wages are there for the taking. That is the principal issue we should be focused on. 'Scraping in order to make a transient copy of a work for the purposes of analysis, indexing, and so on, is legal'. 

- Doctorow is convinced that AI is a bubble, which will burst. ‘Every AI company is losing money, and the bigger the AI company is, the more money it’s losing. The biggest AI companies are losing billions per quarter…. even if one AI company survives most or all of the rest of them will fail. When that happens the AI bubble will burst. Investors will panic-sell their holdings. Companies will collapse. In other words the bubble will burst as all bubbles do, always....Remember: seven giant AI companies account for 35% of the US stock market...We're talking about a crash that will put 2008 in the shade and meet or exceed the pandemic sell-off'. The economic costs will be felt around the world for generations to come. It will be 'a prolonged, brutal, global crash'. 

- What's more 'The serious environmental costs of AI will be borne by everyone on the planet, and all the animals and plants we share it with, for hundreds of years to come’. 

- Cory Doctorow has written by far the most informed and enlightening book on AI and its consequences I've ever read. I highly recommend it.