Bits #67: GUEST EDIT
Novelist Bobby Palmer on being a Mubi Man, and dressing like your favourite book
For the the month of April, I am outsourcing my weekly culture round-up to an all-star cast. A gaggle of outrageously smart, funny, mildly eccentric writers whom I beg for recs every time I see them. “What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?” I hiss at them frantically across a film screening. “WHAT ABOUT TELLY?” I bellow at them over the din of a book launch.
My first guest never fails to delight me with his weird and wonderful recs. My Book Chat co-host (icymi, we did Wuthering Heights before everyone else) and the bestselling author of novels including Isaac and The Egg and Main Characters (out July), Bobby Palmer. As those who read this letter regularly know, I am ALL about the high and the low, the chic and the vulgar, and Bobby ticks all those boxes - and more. Over to Bobby!
Under the paywall: wild and unadaptable book recommendations; a revolting kids book I can’t get enough of; my favourite new music podcast; the longest audiobook you’ll ever listen to; films, chocolates and smoked fish of a Scandinavian persuasion; hats for kids and trousers for grown-ups; Disney’s animatronic curse; delicious coffee; and the greatest TV show you’re not watching and have never heard of.
I recently took myself off for a solo afternoon cinema trip to see Sentimental Value. (Anyone with very small children will know this to be the ultimate indulgence: it’s hard to find the time to watch a full film alone, let one that’s a) in Norwegian, b) subtitled and c) two and a half hours long). I loved it, having recently gobbled up director Joachim Trier’s loosely-linked Oslo trilogy: cult fave finding-oneself drama The Worst Person in the World; uber bleak Oslo, August 31st; and the thoughtful, youthful Reprise. I think the latter is my favourite, because it’s about self-important young male authors butting up against the real world… if the sko fits (that’s Norwegian for shoe.)
Fun fact: before he was a director, Joachim Trier was a two-time national skateboarding champion. Which would make for the coolest pivot to becoming an Oscar-winning director in history, if it weren’t for the fact that Steve McQueen had already won the Turner prize as an artist over a decade before 12 Years a Slave.
There’s performative reading, and then there’s my two-year-old, who likes to match her book to her outfit even though she can’t read. Performative illiteracy? (Editor’s Note: I call it, books ‘n fits.) Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is her current modish accessory of choice, but she hasn’t listened to the corresponding episode of Book Chat because it isn’t a) sung in rhyme or b) performed by squeaky-voiced talking animals.
The best book I’ve read so far this year is Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story – her first since The Immortalists and one which does something so unexpectedly bizarre and brilliant halfway through that I couldn’t help but love it. It’s also the second book I’ve read in the last few months which has the author wondering “What’s underneath Antarctica?” (the other being Sequoia Nagamatsu’s High How We Go in the Dark). Two could be a coincidence, but three makes it a trend – and with the success of Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, it definitely feels like there’s a sub-genre brewing.
I’m very much enjoying the Esquire UK rebrand – and as a man who has started to dread the moment when the barber uses a smaller mirror to show me the back of my head, I was particularly fascinated in this piece by Tom Nicholson on the rise of the anti-balding treatment industry and the miracle drug which might actually be able to do what was long thought impossible: to bring back the hair men have already lost.
“Thanks to advances in science and medicine, the battle against hair loss has become an all-out war. The stigma that used to hang around toupees and transplants is crumbling; for many men now, they’re just another supplement, baldness just another problem to be hacked. There’s a new wave of interest in drug treatments that offer a way to make your body do what you want it to, to stop it betraying you. And the bald men are mobilising.”
In what hair I do have left, I’ve been using Wavy – and while I can almost guarantee that the Books+Bits reader has no interest in “looking more like Bobby Palmer”, I can attest that it’s a curl crème which works incredibly well for those with hair which naturally falls somewhere between “bushy” and “dragged backwards through a bush”.
I’ve been getting really into narrative non-fiction, especially on audiobook, and I’ve found that my prerequisite is an author taking on a BIG subject and giving it the epic, sweeping treatment, ideally over hundreds of pages or countless hours of narration. I loved the confidently beefy Mafia: A Global History by Ryan Gingeras and the mighty The Plantaganets by Dan Jones, although first place must go to Patrick Radden Keefe’s stunning Empire of Pain, about the Sackler dynasty and the untold horror they inflicted with their stewardship of the US opioid crisis.