"Mark Rothko, 1903-1970" (Tate Gallery) by Mark Rothko - book review

This is another book from my list of books to read after Finals. I became interested in Rothko after seeing the Seagram Murals at Tate Modern. It's the closest I've had to a spiritual experience while looking at art. He was also mentioned in a novel I read at the time (around 2002), Twelve by Nick McDonell, that also fetishized Nietzsche and North Face jackets, and was set in New York (thanks to Fran for helping me find it!). This is a collection of essays by academics about Rothko's life and work, his own statements about art (which he stopped making public by the early 1950s), and his materials. It also includes about 100 reproductions of his paintings, including early works that I wasn't familiar with. I had no idea that he went through classical mythical symbolist and surrealist phases before he found his recognizable abstract rectangular forms. I was expecting to understand more about what led him to take his own life in 1970 (apart from depression), but I'm not much wiser about that. I was aware that some of his paintings got increasingly dark towards the end of his life. I also didn't know that his later paintings were executed with the help of assistants. Presumably by this stage he was able to afford it, but I also think it was a result of some health problems. I was fascinated that some of his works, including the Harvard Murals, have deteriorated and changed how they look due to the synthetic materials he was using. He ran out of paint during the project and bought some cheap paint from Woolworth's! Some of his last paintings were also made on paper.

"Grief Is for People" by Sloane Crosley - audiobook review

I noticed this book while browsing at The Margate Bookshop. My eye was caught by the cover and the title because I read a few books about grief last year, shortly after my big brother Gregory died. I listened to this as an audiobook, read by the author, a few weeks later. I don't really know what I was expecting, but I was somewhat underwhelmed and it didn't really resonate with me.

The author used to work in book publicity for Vintage in New York. She was mentored by her boss and friend, Russell. He is the person who dies and for whom the author is grieving. He died about a month after the author's apartment was burgled and her jewellery was stolen. Her attempts to find and recover the jewellery become a proxy for how she deals with the death of her friend. The book also includes a section about what life in New York was like during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I'm really struggling to express what I thought and felt about this book. I just felt a bit meh about it. I didn't love it. I didn't hate it. I got to see how one person dealt with trauma and death. But it didn't feel particularly memorable and didn't give me any frisson of insight or wisdom.

The most interesting bits, for me, were descriptions of what it's like working in book publicity. It didn't deepen my understanding of my own grief.

"The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life" by Edith Eger - audiobook review

My friend and former colleague, Jenny, recommended this book to me. Edith Eger survived Auschwitz and escaped from Communist Europe. She qualified as a therapist later in life. This book is part memoir, part case book (detailing the traumas some of her patients have overcome). The most memorable line for me was: "the opposite of depression is expression" - meaning that you have to talk about your thoughts and feelings (or write them down) in order to grow past them. The book is structured by different mental problems and each chapter ends with keys to better mental health. She sounds like an amazing woman and the audiobook narrator, Tovah Feldshuh, plausibly captured her voice - like a cross between Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond and Ruth Gordon from Harold and Maud. I wanted to gift this book to encourage certain people to consider talking therapy.

"History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity" by Roman Krznaric - audiobook review

This is the third book in Roman Krznaric's loose trilogy about time: Carpe Diem Regained (2017) is about seizing the day, living in the present; The Good Ancestor (2020) is about how we choose to live now will affect the future of humanity: a forward-looking, 7th-generation empathy; this book, History for Tomorrow, looks back to the past for lessons about how we can tackle and rethink the challenges of today.

My reading of this audiobook edition, narrated by the author, was prolonged because I was stuck in the present, listening to the BBC's Newscast to keep up with the endless stream of news about the unending now and the new Labour government. I've now scratched that particular itch, having realized (again) that I'll never be able to keep up.

It engages in dialogue with and echoes other books I've read recently (I love it when that happens!): Howard Zinn's A People’s History of the United States and Peter Frankopan's The Earth Transformed - and both authors are cited. It's also preoccupied with the ongoing threats of climate change, water scarcity, the cancer stage of capitalism, social media, inequality, and AI. It's in the chapter on AI ("Keeping the Machines Under Control - Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Capitalism") that I found myself agitating slightly: I felt at times that Krznaric's definition of AI was too broad, including recommendation algorithms and citing the overdone anecdote that Target knew a girl was pregnant before she did by sending her coupons for baby products. (I feel like I've read or heard a debunking of that story, but I can't remember where it was: Malcolm Gladwell? The Reply All or Search Engine podcasts?) It rubs me up the wrong way in the same way that people used to throw around the phrase "Big Data", which instead of clarifying the concept for me just makes it fuzzier. What's probably going on is that my ignorance is being exposed and my neurological pathways are being rerouted, which probably means it's finally time for me to read Michael Wooldridge's The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI to straighten things out (or cause more cognitive unsettlings). Don't get me wrong: I think this is a good thing, and I welcome the feeling of unrest.

Having read most of the author's other books (and known him as a colleague, friend, and client for 20 years), the tone and structure of this book is very familiar - not least because I could hear his voice reading it to me! He loves a surprising juxtaposition, a satisfying anecdote, a principled role model, a sighting of empathy in the world at large. His books are successful, (I think) widely read and discussed, easily digested and marketed - grown out of blog posts and lectures, in the same way that short films are sometimes the germ for feature films. Like writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Harford, and Cal Flyn, Roman Krznaric has definitely found his voice. If I was his literary agent, I'd probably encourage him to do more of the same. But there's a part of me, a wicked sprite, that wants to challenge him to do something completely different with his next book: something riskier, more likely to fail, in a different voice. I don't know what that is (fiction? investigative journalism? travel writing? biography? a play or film script? some new genre that hasn't even been invented yet?); but maybe he does. Is there an abortive attempt lurking in the back of a drawer somewhere or an unfinished notebook? Not that you need it, Roman, but you have my permission to try something different.