December Books
Very much a memoir in two parts: The Slits and punk, and the the life after. Unusually for these kinds of books, it’s actually the life after that was much more interesting, much richer, much more memorable. The punk stuff is great but it’s a story that’s been told many times before. There are huge crossovers with Chrissie Hynde’s book because of course Viv and Chrissie were young women in the same scene; the main difference being Viv had much less self-confidence while Chrissie was a force of nature. The second half of the book—her career in TV and film, her marriage, her musical comeback—is a story far less told and all the better for it. Her solo album is also a wonderful discovery, well worth checking out. Not one for the podcast, this, but I’m glad I read it.
A lot of my reading this month came from the Japan Writer’s Conference. I bought and read Gregory Dunne’s collection Other/Wise before but I couldn’t find my copy, so I picked up another. Hopefully I leant it to someone who is caring for it. It was a joy to revisit these thoughtful, lyrical poems after a time.
Another Isobar book, a new one for me but an older collection. A Fire in the Head is a sequence of haiku inspired by the 2011 triple disaster and is, of course, very powerful and moving. For all the millions of words written about the disaster, I always find it’s the haiku moments that resonate the most.
Ian’s interesting story about the realities of teaching in and English conversation school in Japan was another acquisition from the conference. It made me chuckle a lot and was very well written in a way that lots of “Eikaiwa lit” usually isn’t. I’ve got a couple more of Ian’s books on the list to get to.
For decades Michael covered jazz for The Japan Times and other outlets, so his Guide to Jazz in Japan has been on my list for a while. It is mostly a guidebook so I’ll be referring to it next time I’m through in the capital but the back half is a collection of articles Michael wrote on the history and context of jazz in Japan and a fascinating read they were.
An early Christmas present from my aunt. I read the Millennium trilogy but that’s pretty much all I know about Stieg Larsson, so this was an interesting read. I never realised how much of an anti-racist/anti-fascist activist he was and this memoir from a fellow traveller on the Swedish left is a nice window into a world I knew nothing about.
Another window onto a world: I read this as part of research for the Big Project. There is a whole universe of musicians who we’ve heard a thousand times and no one knows because they aren’t in the bands they play in—session musicians, touring players, studio guys—and Taylor is part of that world. It’s a lot of stories about playing music, meeting famous people, and partying too hard, which I’ve always got a soft spot for.