I don’t think we’ll ever get a great David Sedaris book again - like Me Talk Pretty, Dress Your Family or Santaland Diaries - because he’s become too rich, famous and comfortable, and those books contained a relatability and desperation that comes from not having those things. And I think he told his best stories in those books and hasn’t got any more.
Ian Leslie’s nonfiction book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs reveals the intangible yet powerfully real love the two musicians had for one another, told through the songwriting that began with the legendary Lennon-McCartney partnership that made The Beatles the greatest band of all time and continued past it into their solo careers.
Lifelong bibliophile and author (always in that order) Susan Hill decides to have a year of not buying books and reading only the many, many books that she already owns instead. So begins Howards End is on the Landing, although the book becomes more than a gimmick/book of reviews quite quickly, morphing into a quasi-biography and random extended musings on all aspects of literature.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82) was a West German filmmaker who, in his short life, wrote and directed 38 feature films, several shorts and TV shows, including what many consider his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and even produced films for other filmmakers. A one-man film studio, he created a new movie every 100 days. But his unhealthy lifestyle ended his life early when he died of a cocaine overdose at age 37.
Erik Satie was a late 19th/early 20th century French composer whose work you almost certainly have heard without knowing who it was by (a constant for me who doesn’t know much about classical music) - if you listen to his Gymnopedies or Gnossiennes (nonsense words that he made up), you’ll probably recognise them from a thousand adverts selling anything from coffee to package holidays.
Ian Penman is a music critic and this book collects several of his most brilliant essays on such musical titans as Charlie Parker, Elvis and Prince, looking at their rollercoaster lives and legacies. I’ve never heard of or read anything by Penman before but I was really taken with It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (which is a line from Auden’s poem Walks).
“Oh, England’s fantastic for this kind of thing,” - Alfred Hitchcock on the 10 Rillington Place murdersReg and Ethel Christie had lived at 10 Rillington Place, London, since 1938 but strange things had happened in the winter of 1952/53. Nobody had seen Ethel since December and Reg disappeared from the flat altogether in March 1953. When their landlord instructed a workman to clean up the Christies’ kitchen, the workman found what appeared to be human remains behind an alcove. Three womens’ corpses were stuffed in there. And the mystery of Ethel’s absence was soon solved: her corpse was under the front room’s floor. As the manhunt for Reg Christie began, the police would soon unearth more horrors on the property…
Back in 2007/08, I was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic and, when I finished his articles, as I often did (I was working a particularly dull desk job at the time that afforded me plenty of time for reading), I’d read other writers’ pieces on the site. Ta-Nehisi Coates was one of these writers and I enjoyed his work much less than I did Sullivan’s - everything was race-related to Coates and, worse, his writing and points were both forgettable and vague.
In 1949, aspiring New York playwright Helene Hanff saw an advertisement for an antiquarian bookseller in London that shipped books internationally. A fan of obscure and old books, she reached out to them with a list of books she’s looking for, thus beginning a 20 year correspondence between herself and the principal bookseller at Marks and Co, Frank Doel, based at 84 Charing Cross Road.
In his 2010 book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet is changing the way we think and act - for the worse. Shocker! I don’t think anyone would argue differently, given the prevalence these days of garbage timesink sites like TikTok and news stories about how literature students these days can’t read books, let alone the average person!
A young Geoff Dyer became enamoured of DH Lawrence and decided that he would one day write a book about his literary hero. An older Geoff Dyer decided to realise that ambition - and then realised that that book was beyond his abilities! Out of Sheer Rage is the result of that realisation.
Antony Beevor published what may be the definitive book on the Battle of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) in 1998 - Christmas at Stalingrad is a short extract from that book, focusing on the bitter winter of 1942-43 when the fate of Hitler’s doomed Sixth Army was sealed.
Comedian and actor (to distinguish him from the famous novelist of the same name) David Mitchell writes about the kings and queens of England in his history book, Unruly. Covering the murky days of post-Roman occupation, from when various Anglo-Saxon leaders ruled areas of what will become known as England, vikings periodically stopped off for a barney, and a fictional character called Arthur ruled in a fictional place called Camelot, up to Queen Elizabeth I, because then her successor James I becomes both king of England AND Scotland rather than just England. Which makes it seem like Mitchell focused on rulers only of England but quite a few kings had also been kings of Ireland, and sometimes France, in addition to England up to that point. Hmm.
In June 2020 Sebastian Junger nearly died from a massive haemorrhage in his abdomen - and also saw his dead father floating in the void next to him, urging him onto the next plane of existence! But that was just a hallucination brought about by massive blood loss - right?
Old man Saunders likes soaking in gross ponds during inclement weather - and wrote a book about his demented hobby?! Or, y’know, it’s about literary criticism on some Ruskie short story writers or summat.
Over the course of ten letters from February 1903 to December 1908, Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke gave artistic advice to a younger chap from a similar background who was aspiring to follow in his (only slightly older) footsteps. After Rilke died in 1926, Franz Xaver Kappus, the young poet of the title, collected and published them to share the good advice and insight into Rilke’s life with everyone.
Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the richest people in the world, running the crypto exchange FTX and crypto trading firm Alameda Research, until the whole thing came crashing down spectacularly in late 2022 when the companies went bankrupt - crypto’s a mug’s game, who knew?! Bankman-Fried was arrested on a whole raft of charges including fraud and money-laundering, of which he was recently found guilty and faces decades in prison at his sentencing in March next year.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most successful film franchise there’s ever been. Starting in 2008, the series turned former B-list characters like Iron Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America into household names, as famous and iconic as the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men. It was an unstoppable, money-making juggernaut that only became more and more popular over the years, leading up to the incredible double-whammy finale of Infinity War and Endgame.
Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite is a biography on the Elizabethan poet John Donne, most famous for his poem that begins “No man is an island…” and ends with “... for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
In March 2021, rocker Mark Lanegan got the ‘vid shortly after moving to Kerry, Ireland, landing himself in hospital for several months as the virus ran roughshod over him. Devil in a Coma recounts the hellish experience, as well as his equally difficult adolescence, and showcases some of his final poems.
