July 2024 Reading

July took us away from Serbia again—we travelled south to visit friends in the mountains of North Macedonia (pictured below) and then continued to the Greek island of Crete. We lived here for a couple of years about a decade ago, so it’s been great to meet old friends and measure my age by the rapid growth of their children.

I’ve still found time for plenty of reading, though, including some contemporary literary fiction, a couple of classics, and some thought-provoking non-fiction. Here are the highlights.

Eclipse by John Banville

Even when the plot and characters of a John Banville novel don’t thrill me, his writing always does. Read my full review of Eclipse for some quotes to illustrate his beatiful prose style.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

Does the title sound a bit melodramatic to you? It did to me too, but Barrat raises some very important questions here about the dangers of AI. He’s not talking about the large language models we have now, but about a truly conscious Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He points out that if we create something that is not only superior to us in intelligence but can improve its own code to become more and more intelligent at lightning-fast speeds, it could quickly get out of control and threaten our survival. I’d like to write about this at more length soon—there’s a lot to think about here.

The only disappointment was that although the book was “published” in 2023, it’s actually a reissue of a much older book with a quick preface added now that the subject is popular again. I find this happens quite a bit in publishing, and it irritates me.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

The premise of this one sounds great: a novel set in an American dystopia in which a severe economic crisis has led politicians to make a scapegoat out of China and stoke prejudice against Asian Americans. In the ensuing atmosphere of fear and distrust, children are taken away from “unfit” parents, and this novel tells the story of a child trying desperately to get reunited with his mother.

It’s got all the ingredients of a great read, and I loved Little Fires Everywhere by the same author, and yet somehow Our Missing Hearts didn’t really lift off for me. Although the dystopia sounds plausible enough, neither it or the characters felt particularly real to me. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the treat I was expecting.

Milkman by Anna Burns

“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” So begins Milkman by Anna Burns, and this Booker Prize winner goes on in the same odd, unique narrative voice to tell us about life in 1970s Belfast through the eyes of an 18-year-old girl. It was very fresh and different from anything I’ve read before, and I can see why it won the Booker.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

The narrator of Milkman is so appalled by current events that she refuses to read any literature from her century. Inspired by her and by my growing disgust at current events, I decided to plunge into a couple of long Bronte novels. Villette concerns a quiet, unassuming character called Lucy Snowe who at first seems to be a mere observer of other people’s lives but gradually comes to embark on adventures of her own and construct a life for herself. I enjoyed it, although it relies on some quite enormous coincidences which didn’t seem even remotely plausible to me (perhaps because I don’t share Bronte’s faith in God or the power of “Providence”).

The Tenant at Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

My second Bronte novel of the summer was a lesser-known but quite fascinating story by Anne Bronte about a mysterious young widow who suddenly starts living in an abandoned house on a lonely hilltop and sets the nearby community buzzing with rumour and speculation.

When the malicious gossip threatens her ability to stay there, she turns over her diary and we read the story of her marriage to a charming but abusive husband and her desperate attempts to escape it. It felt surprisingly modern and must have been quite shocking back in 1848. The only thing I didn’t like was the sharp division between saintly characters, who suffer at first but get rewarded later, and villains, who enjoy the upper hand but come to unpleasant ends.

A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe

This was a fascinating tour of the emerging field of archaeogenetics: the study of ancient DNA to learn more about our ancestors. It’s full of fascinating insights about migration patterns and social developments even before the advent of recorded history, but the title is all wrong. This is primarily a short history of Europe, not of humanity. Other regions of the world are mentioned, of course, but the European focus is so clear that it feels as if the authors wrote it with a European title in mind, and the “humanity” title was added later to make it more marketable. It annoyed me and distracted me from what was otherwise an excellent book.

What Do You Think?

Have you read any of these? Do any of them sound interesting to you? What did you read this month? Let me know in the comments below.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.

Source: https://andrewblackman.net/2024/07/july-2024-reading/