July Books

Another lean month. July is the end of the spring semester at Japanese unis so I spent a lot of the month reading essays and creative non-fiction (spring is travel writing in my creative writing class) pieces and trying to avoid endlessly boring conversations about ChatGPT and AI (the topics aren’t boring, just the people who most want to talk about them. It’s the new crypto). It also meant an impending deadline for an academic paper on Scottish literature I’d promised a journal and for which I had to do a lot of reading. Sadly none of the reading was the actual literature—I’d already read the books I am writing about—but rather other academic papers. One joy however was this book about Iain M Banks by Paul Kincaid. It’s somewhere between a potted biography and an academic overview of his entire output, and very well written. I really only needed it for one passage, Kincaid’s definition of “the Scottish fantastic”, but I quite happily sat and read it cover to cover one weekend. There were a great deal of biographical details I didn’t know, and a number of thematic connections across Banks’s novels that I hadn’t noticed or hadn’t formalised into coherent thought. The main joy however was just being reminded of the breadth of Banks’s output and the sheer pleasure his stories and storytelling gave me as a teenager. I met his a couple of times at launches and he was the model of a public writer for me: friendly, open, a fellow enthusiast, a writer who never forgot he was also a reader, but one aware that he had a stage and a microphone and used it to say important things and try to make the world a better place. When I get a chance I’m going to go back through and reintroduce myself to his books, some of which I haven’t read since they were first published.

Towards the end of the month I took myself away for a couple of nights’ camping. I did a bit of hiking but in the 35+C heat it wasn’t much fun. Instead, I did the final proofs of my next book (!) and read this in one sitting. It’s not great from a writing point of view, and I think the ghostwriter could have done a lot more to punch up the prose, but the story is fascinating for someone like me. Steve Turner was there at the start of grunge and is one of the most influential guitarists of the 90s but hasn’t been the most outspoken: most interviews are done with singer Mark Arm. This made me laugh out loud many times, not least with his constant ribbing of Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard (with whom Turner was in Green River, and who wrote the foreword) and taught me a few things that even in 30+ years of grunge fandom I didn’t know.

Greek Lessons is another of the books I picked up in South Korea back in May. I love Han Kang’s writing, but this is something else. Beckettian, with a dash of Ali Smith, stark, bold, beautiful. She breaks all the “rules” of good storytelling and does it in style. There was once a chance I was going to share a stage with Han Kang at a book festival and it’s still one of my greatest disappointments that the whole thing fell through. What a writer.

I bought Chinatown by Thuân (translated by Nguyễn An Lý) in Seoul as well, and despite having heard great things, and it being a very thin novella, I was kind of putting it off. It’s a pure stream of consciousness novella, taking place entirely in the narrator’s imagination as she sits on the Paris metro for two hours, and so has no paragraph or chapter breaks. I wanted to wait until I could read it in one go and get the full effect, and I got the chance at the end of July when I went to Tokyo for the weekend. I blasted through this on the shinkansen and loved every minute. Stream of consciousness can be hit or miss, and this is very much a hit, telling a story in a kaleidoscope of looping memories. Joycean, Woolfean, but also its own thing. There’s a huge amount of great literature coming out of Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora and I’ve only scratched the surface. Any recommendations, let me know.

ps., still working my way through Night of Plagues by Orhan Pamuk. Loving it but the hardback weighs a stupid amount and doing more than a chapter at a time feels like doing a workout.