Fiction
Julia (Newman): Julia’s half of Orwell’s 1984. Her problem is that she doesn’t hate – she keeps trying to find the best in everyone, even when she knows better. This allows her to constantly change her understanding of her reality like a good cult-girl. It also allows her to trust people she should stay clear of – also like a good cult-girl. In her trust and outlook she is the opposite of Winston, but they both fall into the same traps – because that’s how the system is set up.
Being the female side of the story, it deals with sex – both desired and coerced, not to mention coopted – and the dangers and benefits of pregnancy in a society that bemoans sex but needs children. Julia is also much younger than Winston (the protagonist of 1984), and grew up outside of London. This all gives her a very different experience of 1984’s London, broadening the world building in some intriguing ways.
The Employees (Ravn): The book has a coherent plot, but I think it’s more about how you feel than what you learn: there’s a discomfort in some of the physical descriptions, and a general feeling of existential disorientation. The most interesting thing about it, though, might be that it was written to accompany an exhibit: Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Barbery): I confess I bought this book based on its title and cover, without looking at any plot details. I assumed it was a light, breezy story about a teenage girl who likes tiny mammals, so I was a little surprised when I found an existential crisis, from the point of view of a young girl (I got one thing right!) and a middle-aged woman who both intellectualise away their feelings. Because of that tendency to smart away the feels, it’s on the edge of pretentious at all times, and it left me not terribly emotionally attached to the characters. It includes social and political commentary, and those topics underpin the two women’s experience of their own intelligence and its possible negative impacts, based on their places at opposite ends of the social order. One of the questions the book deals with is “what does ‘happy’ mean?”, and it’s up to you as the reader to decide if it has a happy ending or if anyone there is happy at any time (and what that might require).
Stories From Stranger Times (McDonnell): A collection of short stories. I haven’t read the novels yet, but now I want to. The series as a whole has a podcast, and during lockdown some (maybe all?) of the stories were dramatised for the podcast.
For Want of a Nail (Kowal): Short story: what you learn when longterm memory falls apart – an old man, an AI, a community.
Non-fiction
Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal (Ince): Bought at Ince’s show, which was excellent. The book is about neurodivergence, but more than that it’s about being kind and accepting and embracing weirdness, passion, and chaos.
The Culting of America: What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them (Young and Reed): The preimse is that cults are on a spectrum, rather than yes/no, and that you should always be on the lookout for escalating cultishness in any group you’re in. The book focuses on the USA, and why it might be particularly enamoured of cults.
Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke): Themes of solitude, patience, and acceptance in both life and art.
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Doctorow): A sort of rebuttal to Surveillance Capitalism, with the basic idea that we shouldn’t manage the behaviour of the large software companies; we should break them down.
Beyond Anxiety (Beck): Use art to subdue your anxiety. Really good idea, and you won’t need more than that one-line summary to get started.
Arkin Prose 
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