Your summer reading list, part 1

3 new novels, a great pod, my favourite room + an astonishing interview with the premier "pronatalists"

I’m starting topsy turvy this week (I’ve decided to mix up the books and the bits going forward) with an interview I cannot stop thinking about by the brilliant Jenny Kleeman. My friend Otegha sent it to me with a simple note: “when you see it, you’ll know.” And so I send it on to you, with the same note. When you get to the “bit” you will likely exclaim, as both she and I did, FUCK.

It’s one of many jaw-dropping moments in Kleeman’s profile of America’s premier “pronatalists”, Malcolm and Simone Collins, who believe, like father-of-11 Elon Musk, that to maintain population density and thus, the future of the world, it’s important to have as many babies as humanely possible. And boy, do they have the stats to show for it. They live entirely according to stats.

“When deciding where to live, they weighed metrics on a spreadsheet, ranging from LGBTQ+ rights (which they support) to the density of Nobel laureates produced in a given area to levels of homelessness to major weather events. Then, they looked at cost.”

I found the piece particularly fascinating because we live in a time where many people feel it’s better for the climate not to have children and many others cannot afford to have multiple children, and here you have this family who want to have a minimum of 7 babies out of - according to them - sheer altruism. Simone says she never wanted children and her words about how she will keep having children until her uterus haemorrhages, as long as Malcolm looks after them is… extremely bleak to read.

What’s doubly fascinating to me is how different pronatalism is to the other lashings-of-kids movement Quiverfull. That is all about Christian tradition (big families being the most godly), whereas pronatalism is a tech-adjacent atheist movement which looks so far forward that it barely concerns itself with the present (or, indeed, the actual present kids). The Collins’s describe themselves as “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist” and claim that many of Silicone Valley’s highest net worth individuals share their beliefs.

Truly, I can’t get this piece out my head. I suspect Jenny Kleeman, who admitted in the article how undone she was by her day spent with the family, can’t either. And thanks to that “bit” I mentioned, it appears to be making news headlines across the globe. Please let me know your thoughts, if you read it!

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I’ve started receiving the annual tranche of texts from friends asking for books to take on holiday and whilst I’ve written about plenty of books this last year that are RIPE for a deck chair - As Young As This, Darling, Still Born, You Are Here, Soldier Sailor and Small Hours spring to mind - there are also SO many good books coming out now and in the next quarter, at least 12 that I’m excited about and that I’m going to dish out over this summer’s newsletters. That’s a high count! There aren’t usually that many books that seize me, one after the other, bang bang boom.

Here are the first 3.

This Is Fine by Poorna Bell - out June 13th

You might be familiar with Bell’s journalism/ her newsletter, but if not, I suggest an introduction to her work via her eminently readable second novel. I know calling a novel ‘readable’ is like calling clothes ‘wearable’ but it slips down easily and regularly tugs at the heart strings. What more could you want? It’s an exploration of how, and why, we nurture - and in the ever-crowded canon of “woman in her 30s has a crisis” lit, it’s a unique and charming offering.

When a break with her boyfriend of 10 years (he wants kids, she doesn’t) renders her temporarily homeless, Padma finds herself in East Kent, babysitting her troubled teenage niece for the summer, the daughter of a sister she’s never quite found her footing with.

“I think of what it must be like to be a mother, to know your heart sits inside the body of another person, to feel the terror of that every single day, but to know that you are the beacon on the hill. The one they call home, the singular point of safety, the one who cannot bend or break, even when the storm rages overhead.”

Covering romantic love, motherhood, sisterhood, race, ambition, gentrification and mental health, it sounds hefty - but there’s nothing remotely checklisty about the way these issues arise and it’s all done with a light yet thoughtful touch.

The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley - out now

This book is an absolute riot. It’s a time-travelling romcom, ambitious and hilarious and sexy, with surprisingly wide appeal and it was an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller when it came out a few weeks ago.

In the not too distant future, a British govt ministry uses a time machine to bring back ‘expats’ from the last 5 centuries, to see if they can ‘adapt’ to modern life. Each expat has a minder, a ‘bridge’ to help them adjust. Please don’t think you have to like sci-fi - I really do not, I may never recover from trying to read Neuromancer - really, it is a satire on love and history, challenging the idea that history can be re-written, even with a time machine, or that love could ever conquer all. What’s it like for a 2030s girl to fall in love with a 1847 boy?

“We all had access to the expats’ internet histories. Arthur Googled so much (‘macarena’, ‘brew dog’, ‘clubbing’, ‘ballroom’, ‘vogue’, ‘vogue dance’, ‘madonna’, ‘poppers’, ‘rimming’) that [his bridge] had been referred to the Home Office deputation for their guidance on Adapting to Life in the UK. Margaret looked up naked women almost as much as Cardingham did, but she also looked at a lot of clothed women. She’d had a two-week stint as a ‘Swiftie’ but ran out of energy for the speed at which the discourse mutated”.

I don’t blame her.

You can tell Bradley had a lot of fun writing it. That it’s fun to read, too, is all the more impressive, given that the book covers dozens of massacres and moral crises, past and future. The thing I love the most is how each character speaks in their own era’s dialect, which must have involved a lot of research and their different attitudes to sex.

Speaking of research, the most charming and clever aspect of this book - because this book is very clever, occasionally too clever for this reader - is that it’s based on a real-life lieutenant, Commander Graham Gore (who died on the most disastrous and hideous sounding Arctic mission of all time) a charming man also known as 1847. The book came around after Bradley found a daguerreotype of him, she explains in the Acknowledgements, and began to write a book about him to entertain her friends. Oh, to write a novel like this just to titillate your mates! Unsurprisingly, the BBC have already snapped up the TV rights, with Normal People’s Alice Birch to adapt.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors - out now

I am a huge fan of Cleopatra and Frankenstein (the passage on Frank’s love rising up, like a shoal of fish - iykyk) but I love how different Mellors’s second book Blue Sisters is, lending the same attention to detail to sisterhood and mothering as C&F did to romantic love and male friendship. Like her debut, it also deals with mental health and addiction, the latter of which Mellors has had personal experience with and which she says finds a natural place in her fiction. (She’s written a beautiful piece btw on the joy she found in sobriety, for this month’s Vogue.)

another beautiful cover by Gill Button, slightly undermined by my charming hangnail

It’s an elegant, serious book, about grief and female pain, with thoroughly rendered characters, every single one of the four Blue sister entirely their own: Avery, the oldest, a sensible married lawyer living in London; Bonnie, a boxer in LA, forced to flee her job; Lucky, a supermodel in Paris, blocking out the world with booze and drugs. All of them are lost and lonely, and all of them are mourning the fourth and sweetest Blue sister: Nicky, a sufferer of chronic endometriosis, who died the year before the book opens of an accidental overdose.

“Nicky had a face like water, always moving, rippling, dancing. Their mother used to say she should have been an actress; she could convey any emotion - amusement, irritation, incredulity - with the slightest widening of her eyes or jump of her eyebrow. But the last time Avery saw her, she was strangely still, as if holding herself braced against something.”

It also deals beautifully with motherhood - motherhood by proxy (Avery), maternal abandonment (their mother), motherhood unfulfilled (Nicky). Much like This Is Fine, Blue Sisters it is a moving reminder that to mother is to nurture and that nurturing comes in many forms - least of all biological.

A reminder for any Londoners, that I will be interviewing Coco Mellors at the Reformation store in Covent Garden next Tuesday!

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I’ve struggled to listen to podcasts for the last few years - ditto music - as my brain appears to be suffering from some sort of audio overwhelm. So you should take my being gripped by s2 of Death of An Artist as a glowing endorsement. In fact, I was so gripped by the first two episodes, that I’m tempted to pay to sneak behind the paywall, so that I can binge all 6 eps instead of waiting for them weekly, which I’ve never done for a pod before.

Co-produced by Pushkin Industries (co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell) and Samizdat Audio and hosted by art historian and journalist Katy Hessel - who I’m excited to interview in September - it’s about the most famous contemporary artist of all time, Jackson Pollock, and how he only became super-famous after his death, thanks to his artist wife, Lee Krasner. Hessel’s work is all about uncovering the shadow work done by female artists (often in service to their male partners) and this is a compelling, well-made listen with brilliant talking heads.

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I can’t remember if I’ve written about them before, but there’s a chance I haven’t and we can’t take that chance: Lotus Biscoff ice creams. Criminally expensive and so addictive (for the entire family) that I’ve had to limit us to one box a week, but the best ice-cream on a stick you will ever, ever taste. I can’t tell you how many moments of pure, unexpected joy I have ushered in and witnessed on my friends faces, when introducing them to these.

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A book excerpt which had me howling - while being simultaneously quite concerned for his childhood wellbeing - is from comedian/writer David Baddiel’s My Family: The Memoir, which (in the excerpted passage at least) is all about his parents fervent embrace of Britain’s sexual revolution in the 1970s.

His mother’s very public affair which his father somehow ignored for two decades (made more confusing by her lover having the same name as her son), their extremely loud love-making (which a teenage David had to warn his friends about), his father’s stack of porn magazines which his sons all openly borrowed, and just the general, absurdist, idiosyncratic detail of it all:

“[My mother’s lover] didn’t just play golf; he ran a golfing memorabilia business called Golfiana. So did my mother. Which I think is one of the strangest parts of this story. My mother’s way of showing this bloke she was in love with him was to set up a rival golfing memorabilia business. With the same name. I’m not even sure that’s legally allowed under company copyright law.”

It comes out in July and I’m adding it to my summer reading list of memoirs. (Also on the list, My Mama, Cass: A Memoir.)

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A deliciously silly thing - the kind of meme from which we could have reasonably extracted a 20 min conversation on The High Low - from one of mine and Dolly’s favourite IG accounts, loveofhuns. Whoever runs it (I prefer to think of them as the “creative director” of huns) deserves an OBE.

Now, for any non-Brits reading this, at least half of these are if not made up, then very fringe - I’m yet to hear anyone call a parallel park “a pazza p” - but I can confirm that I know of, in active use (and yes, British people are fucking ridiculous): genny lec, cozzie livs, menty b, nervy b, vitty d, v spenny (I can still remember the complaints we got when Dolly referred to the pandemic as “the panny d”.)

Definitely going to start using “clausy phobes” for claustrophobia (which I get quite badly in lifts, tents, any small space really) because, well, how could I not?

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Ending on the most inviting room I’ve seen in ages, from Keith McNally’s apartment in New York City. McNally is as known for his rows as he is for his restaurants (in 2022 he banned James Corden from Balthazar after he was rude to a waitress over an omelet) but he has, to be sure, great taste. The rugs, the lamps, the books - I can’t wait to pile up books and flowers like this when I no longer have tiddly children. He also has a pinch of the Nicky Haslam in him, as evidenced by this tidy little swipe:

“And even though I think that taste is subjective, I also believe the opposite. That there is such a thing as good taste. The trouble is, those who use the phrase ‘good taste’ seldom have it.”

ph. by Brooke Holm for House&Garden UK

Paid subs, I’ll see you Friday! I’m working on a piece about how to parent a reader…