What's in a review?

Alsoooo Black Mirror, Shakira + the return of The Missing

It’s rare I come to a book without context. Either I’ve read a review in a newspaper or magazine which prompts me to then buy the book, or I’ve received a rapturous press release along with a proof copy. Only very occasionally do I wander into a bookshop and pluck a book off the display table, having read nothing about it.

‘SUPER LEAD OF 2023!’ reads basically every press release. (The difference between a lead and a super lead is not clear to me.) I find myself yearning for a press release that reads, “not gonna move the earth tbh” because not only would that feel deliciously candid, but I don’t always want the earth moved! When I’m really needing comfort, I quite like reading something pat and predictable. Milquetoast gets a bad rap imho.

Now, you don’t need me to state that “everyone’s a critic these days”. (Ditto, photographer.) Thanks to social media and online review culture, it is almost impossible to read something in a vacuum - although certainly you can apply strictures to your purview.

Three years ago, I asked an author I was interviewing how they felt about the way their book had been received. Were they pleased, etc. They told me that they had explored its reception as little as possible; that their job was only to write the book, not to track its progress. “I don’t read Good Reads and I don’t read Amazon reviews”, she said firmly. How much less addled would my brain be, I thought, if I didn’t read hundreds of reviews about every book out there? And so I stopped. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I read a review of any book I wanted to read, have read (or have written) on either platform. I found it simply too hard to decide whether to read something, when one person is emphatically telling you that it is the best thing they’ve ever read, while another is equally emphatic that it isn’t fit to line their hamster’s cage with.

I haven’t opted out of review culture - I’ve just narrowed my lense. I will read reviews in newspapers and magazines and (the admittedly one-sided) press releases and decide from that, what I think I might enjoy. And when I visit a bookshop, I always ask the bookseller what they have enjoyed. And yet - I still find myself frustrated when it comes to reviews. Specifically how irked I find myself when I don’t get a book that so many people seem to love.

For instance, I recently visited the lovely Margate Bookshop, and asked the bookseller what she’d loved recently. She recommended a book which was covered - and I mean, covered - in rave reviews. And inside, were pages and pages of more of them. My god I’m in for a treat, I thought. How can a book be this good? I couldn’t wait to find out. I bought it and excitedly cracked the spine that night. I read a few pages, waiting for that thump of understanding. I read on. And on. And on. Kept expecting that lightning moment to hit - so this is why she loved it! This explains the orgiastic reviews - but it never came. I half-heartedly finished the book and felt so little I’d struggle to even write one paragraph on it.

Who cares, right? My friend Sirin and I have often very different tastes in books. And my sister and I have entirely opposing taste: she loves historical (I don’t) and thrillers (ditto), while I like a lot of contemporary fiction and non-fiction that she would find navel-gazey and/or hand-wringing (fair). I’m fine knowing this about myself. I know that Hilary Mantel was the mistress of her craft, but I just don’t currently dig historical fiction. And I don’t need to ever read another thriller for as long as I live. It’s fine! I’m fine.

And yet something really irked me about not liking this book. It was very much in my taste wheelhouse. It had been reviewed positively by every critic under the sun. It felt like I’d missed a trick. What didn’t I get? My tastes, whilst sometimes specific, are not exactly fringe; when it comes to ‘literary fiction’ (terrible category term but I truly don’t know which other one to use) I’m a basic bitch! I like being part of the masses. If only because it’s warmer in a huddle.

I realised that if I hadn’t read all those reviews - the hype, essentially - I wouldn’t have cared that I didn’t like it. It reminded me of a dream that I’d had recently, in that half-awake fugue state that comes from napping with a baby, in which someone had confided in me, “there’s nothing nicer than walking down the street with children who aren’t your own”. Why? Dream Me, replied. Because, this invisible confidante explained, you have no expectations of how they are going to behave. You aren’t armed with the knowledge that accompanies your own children: that they always scoot too fast, or that 9 times out of 10 they trip on cracks in the pavement causing your heart to leap into your mouth, or that they have a tantrum every time you walk past one particular corner shop, because you once bought them a lollipop there and now they feel like something has been stolen from them every time they pass it and are not rewarded with confectionary. There’s nothing to pre-empt. It felt like such a realistic conversation, I actually thought I’d had it.

I think the same is true of books. I love reading the books pages in papers and magazines and cannot readily resist them, but I conversely like reading a book when it comes without knowledge. No rapturous release, no enthusiastic bookseller, no penetratingly intellectual critical review, which linger at the back of my brain the whole time I am reading the book. I think the last time I can truly remember doing this was with The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, which I discovered in a books cafe in Costa Rica on my honeymoon seven years ago. I later found out she was extremely well-known and we even had her on The High Low, to discuss The Female Persuasion, but at that time I’d never heard of her, which made reading the book (which I adored) all the more sweet.

Since then, I can’t remember the last time I watched, or read something, in a silo. And I have no neat little conclusion to this except to say that a) I still feel like I’m missing a trick with that book, even though I know, intellectually, that taste is subjective! b) I miss the siloes of childhood, when you read a book without any sort of hope or hype and c) do any of you ever feel like this?

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BITS

• The Missing, a Podimo podcast series hosted by me about long-term missing people, is BACK. Season 5 has been a long time in the making and is only possible thanks to the incredible work of charities Locate International and Missing People, my producers at What’s The Story Sounds and most of all, the families of the missing people. It’s dropping weekly and so far, we’ve heard the story of Steven Clarke, 23, who went into a public toilet at the same time as his mother, Doris, three decades ago - and never came out; and Carmel Fenech, who was just 16 when she went missing in 1998. As ever, please do listen and share. Only by sharing these stories, can the families hope to find out what happened to their loved ones - and finally get closure.

  

• Like most people, I drifted away from the once era-defining Lost, when it started to lose the plot (quite literally). But this Vanity Fair piece by Maureen Ryan about the demands of creating a prestige drama and its truly toxic set, is gripping. Should be compulsory reading for every showrunner.

• This interview with Emma Radacanu by Gavanndra Hodge for The Sunday Times Style mag is unusually candid for a star of her calibre. She describes being seen as a piggy bank, dodging sharks and the slightly farcical amount of coaches she’s had since unexpectedly winning The US Open aged just 18. It’s a good interview, but she already sounds so jaded.

• This week’s wine from the excellent corner shop! The blush-rosé-with-trendy-label market must be the most crowded market in the world - and I’m determined to try every single bottle.

  

• My daughter has got into pop songs and to stop her singing Eurovision’s Then I Wrote A Song 48,000 times a day 😱 I have taken charge of her musical education and introduced her to the three S’s: Shakira, Shania and Sheryl. They just don’t make em like this anymore, etc etc

• A reminder of how loaded the term ‘flattering’ can be, via stylist Alexandra Steadman’s Instagram caption.

  

• I bought this white noise machine to help my baby sleep at night and never again will I deign to fall asleep without the sound of rainfall inside a cave. I did a demo of its 40 sounds (and 32 volume levels!!!) for my mum and sister last week and afterwards, they both went and bought one. You’re welcome.

• I read this interview with Elliot Page by Simon Hattenstone for The Guardian and immediately bought Pageboy from Queens Park Books. (It was tender and truthful but also scattershot and so raw - it felt like Page had written the memoir a little too soon). Hattenstone has a real talent for winkling out meaningful conversations from his interviews, without exploiting them and Page’s story is such a rare, brave one in a mostly closeted Hollywood.

  

• I’m still pouncing on every episode of Radio 5’s People Who Knew Me (which I wrote about last letter) starring Rosamund Pike as a woman who used 9/11 to fake her own death and Hugh Laurie as fellow cancer sufferer/ love interest helping her find her way back to her past. (Sidenote: the credit list is like nothing I’ve seen for an audio production - there were seven people on dialogue.) It’s the best audio drama I’ve listened to in years.

• Also lolled at this energetic episode of the Stories of our Times podcast with business reporter John Arlidge, about the ‘downfall’ of Vogue editor Edward Enniful - Arlidge uses the word ‘fabulous’ upwards of ten times.

• Was so moved by a piece by Amelia Tait for The Guardian about re-reading her (nine!) teenage diaries and forgiving her younger self. Took me jarringly right back.

• If you’re remotely into interiors, you’ll know all about Athena Calderone, the OG interiors influencer and founder of Eye Swoon, who once bought a £48,000 sideboard. She talked to Maureen O’Connor at The New York Times about having the most pinned kitchen in the world and getting bored of her own taste.

  

  Athena Calderone by Clement Pascal for The New York Times

• It was almost worth watching The Idol in order to appreciate this completely ridiculous and very accurate TikTok by SNL’s Chloe Fineman.

  

  @chloefinemanI guess my auditin got lost in the mail… #theidol #theidolhbo #lilyrosedepp

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• Speaking of not aligning with reviews, despite a mixed critical reception, I am loving the new series of Black Mirror - its titillating, horrifying and terrifying me in equal measure. People love Black Mirror for its dystopian fucked-upness but it feels like Brooker is bored of that, because this series features some straight-forward horror and a bit of supernatural. I’m not a diehard Black Mirror fan (the episode ‘San Junipero’ has it’s own internet sub-culture) so I don’t feel affronted by the whistle-stop tour of genres, but it’s probably no coincidence that my favourite (and the best received!) is Joan Is Awful - a classic Black Mirror episode about a middling HR worker who turns on a Netflix-esque streamer one day to find a programme all about herself, using CGI actors.