Today I’m talking about a 600-page novel involving a man reaching another world by sitting at the bottom of a well with a baseball bat.

Yes, it’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami.

In this new video I discuss why this may be Murakami’s greatest work, and how he managed to research the book whilst following his 'no planning' process.

I also look at the presence of metaphysical evil in the novel, and how Murakami blends the incredibly brutal war scenes with the domestic suburban setting and his trademark surrealism.

His books are very difficult to explain or discuss, and these videos don’t do as well as my more controversial stuff on things like the publishing industry. So naturally I have decided to read every single Murakami novel and make a video on each one.

In a bold ‘meta’ strategy, that is just the kind of bizarre and ostensibly futile task a Murakami protagonist might embark upon.

The video is below, and hopefully you will enjoy it whether you have read the book or not.

Thanks,
Nick

Today I’m joined by the excellent comedian and writer Simon Evans to talk about Bret Easton Ellis’s book The Shards, along with various related literary topics.

We rate the book vs the TV show, and discuss the death of the ‘monoculture’, the nature of nostalgia, unreliable narrators, metafiction and genre, and much more.

I liked the book a lot more than Simon, but that made the conversation even more interesting. Hopefully you will agree.

Even if you haven’t read the book, I think you will enjoy this, though there are some spoilers.

Watch in the player above, or click below to listen.

Best,
Nick

Hello. I have released a new video addressing claims of misogyny in the work of Haruki Murakami.

This content may be too niche for some, and perhaps I should broaden my video topics somewhat. ‘Why Books Are Good’, for example. Or ‘The Ten Best Things’.

But I felt compelled to make this, having embarked upon the strange task of trying to read every Murakami novel, even though he’s not among my absolute favourites.

I read three in a row, and now I want to finish them all. Haters will claim this is some kind of mental condition, but I maintain that it is quite normal.

But even if you haven’t read any Murakami, or vaguely thought it was a kind of food, this video will hopefully be of some interest, as I broaden the discussion to ask whether literature should have any moral or melioristic element, or whether it is purely an aesthetic medium.

And if that doesn’t float your boat either, then I can’t help you, and you’ll just have to wait for the next one. Though topic ideas are welcome, within reason.

Watch below.

Kind regards,
Nick

Since Netflix is attempting to ruin The Magician’s Nephew, I have made a video ranking every book in The Chronicles of Narnia, as a bit of fun but also as a reminder of what is great about each one.

I reread the entire series this year, and there were so many things that surprised me. As a child, I doubt I’d have fully understood Lewis’s disdain for the Experiment House school, for example, or the implications of Shift the ape using poor old Puzzle the donkey as a fake Aslan.

It is extremely hard to rank these books, as they all have something unique to offer. The Silver Chair has Puddleglum’s defiant speech, the The Magician’s Nephew contains perhaps the most moving scene in the entire series, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers magical moments that have stayed with many of us since childhood.

I have weighed a number of factors before coming up with my final list. But the video is not just about ranking, and will hopefully give you some new insights or at very least facts about Lewis and Narnia.

Watch below and let me know how you would rank them. But please don’t be rude about my choices or you will be sent to the stable to face Tash.

And if you understood that reference, congratulations: you are a Narnian.

Best,
Nick

Hello,

As you may have heard, Aslan is to be voiced by Meryl Streep in Netflix and Greta Gerwig’s upcoming version of The Magician’s Nephew.

The film is also going to be some kind of rock opera, set in a completely different time period to the book.

In this new video, I look at why this act of cultural vandalism is so egregious in terms of attacking the Christian audience, ruining the very core of the story, and going against the spirt of Lewis’s entire oeuvre.

Watch the video below.

Thanks,
Nick

As someone who has claimed The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis’s masterpiece, I was anxious, in both senses, to watch the TV adaptation.

Hence after waiting for all the episodes to ‘drop’, I subscribed to Disney Plus just so I could ‘binge’ the whole thing.

And, like almost everything now, it was a tremendous disappointment. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be exactly like the novel, but to me it captured nothing of the book’s essence. Less than zero, one might even say.

It didn’t have to be this way. Cool pop songs and seductive images imbue Ellis’s novel, which should give TV a head start. And indeed there are plenty of songs and some decent visuals in the show. But the creators seem to be going for an ice-cold 80s pastiche, rather than the warm, hazy nostalgia Ellis captures in the book.

Because despite the gory murders and unnecessary amounts of gay sex (admittedly I speak as an extremely alpha heterosexual male) the book makes you want to be there at the Buckley School with Bret and all his rich-kid friends. Not for the Quaaludes, cocaine, and sex (even the straight stuff), believe it or not, but for that strange mixture of coolness, strong emotions, hope, and possibility that is youth.

Somehow the show misses this in a series of disconnected scenes with underdeveloped characters and miscast actors. True, the Bret actor is good, looking and sounding uncannily like a young Ellis. Susan is at least beautiful, albeit in a slightly conventional, my-mom-is-literally-Cindy-Crawford kind of way. But Robert and Thom are completely wrong, and others forgettable, with the notable exception of Wes Bentley’s portrayal of the sleazy Terry.

Still, no cast is ever going to match a reader’s vague mental projections, and this alone wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker. But everything else is also wrong.

Ironically they try to cram in too much of the book in pure content terms, via a voiceover of almost Scorsese-esque loquacity, but in doing so they miss the vibe. And vibe, with Ellis, is everything. Indeed he described his debut, Less Than Zero, as a ‘vibe novel’.

I’m not saying this is a thing easily captured or even described. It’s something to do with detached irony mixed with aching sincerity, lots of ambiguity, often nostalgia, and simply beautiful writing. Perhaps it can’t even be named in English. One turns, improbably, to the Germans and their ‘Sehnsucht’.

The roots of this word are in yearning combined with sickness or addiction. I have seen it described as an ‘addiction to longing itself’, and that is a pretty good description of the magic of The Shards. The novel, but sadly not the show.

These failings are quite surprising when one considers that Ellis himself is the executive producer. However, it seems after giving his approval based on the first two episodes, he had little more to do with the show. This might explain the failures in tone, which apparently I’m not the only one to notice. A quick AI search tells me:

While the book is heavy with mature regret, shame, and memory, Ellis acknowledged on his podcast that the show naturally over-indexed on the campy, sexy, and hyper-stylised elements of the 1980s—something he anticipated when handing the keys over to the executive producers

I suspect Ellis could have done a better job with closer involvement. But really the show is a great advert for reading. In books like The Shards and Lunar Park, and to a slightly lesser extent American Psycho, Ellis relies on the kind of ambiguity that lends itself to prose fiction, but is near-impossible on film, for the simple reason that the latter medium demands that everything be concrete and real.

This element will always be absent from any adaption, as will the humour of the prose itself, and the neurotic internal monologue, to which no voiceover can really do justice. The more VO they use, the more you think ‘I could just read the book.’ Which is, of course, exactly what you should do.

Episode four begins with a clear parody of American Psycho. The movie of American Psycho, that is. Which itself, while appealing in some ways, didn’t come very close to the genius of the book. The film then led to a meme, and one suspects in the Shards TV show we are getting a parody of a meme, taken from a film, based on a book. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the whole thing feels hollow.

You can’t force people to read, and the decline of the publishing industry doesn’t help, but it is frustrating knowing there is a world of riches that awaits anyone who makes the slight effort to turn off this kitsch, flat, borderline slop, and pick up the book.

Unlike the tragic yearning of our German friends for the ineffable, books are still here, and—like a Bret Easton Ellis protagonist describing his teenage crush—they are totally effable.

The last time I felt happy was 9/11. If I had to go back even further, I’d say it was swimming with my mother in the outdoor pool in Lanzarote as a child, with her holding me afloat, guiding me along. I will never get back to that feeling of peace, security, and joy. But the closest I came was September 11th, 2001. It was the summer break from university, and I was on a cheap resort holiday in Almería with my girlfriend Lizzy, our friend Ruth, and Ruth’s friend James, who was only there because Ruth’s boyfriend couldn’t come. I had never met James before and neither had Lizzy. Inviting him was a bad idea from the start.

The other bad idea was Ruth saying we should go for two weeks. One week seemed more reasonable to me, but Ruth won and we settled on two. I don’t remember the name of the resort where we stayed, or much about the flight. I do remember the coach ride from the airport to the resort, but only because as we pulled in I was listening to Tom Petty on my walkman. Lizzy said ‘Look’, and tried to nudge me to look out of the window, but ‘Even the Losers’ was playing and I wanted to get to the end of the song. I really related to the lyric ‘Even the losers get lucky sometimes’. That was kind of how I felt about having a sweet and pretty girlfriend like Lizzy, and now we were going on our first holiday together, and she was ruining my enjoyment of the scene by talking. The song is about recalling the thrill of a love affair, and I was making the mistake I’ve often made of attempting to feel nostalgia for the present.

The next day we all went to the beach, except it turned out there was no beach. Or there was, but it was covered in rocks, and the sand was black and felt like gravel. The rooftop pool at the resort was slightly better. It wasn’t very big, but there weren’t many other people around. They were probably too smart to pick this resort. I would sit by the pool reading my book about the assassination of JFK. It was only much later that I saw the irony of reading this book as another violent American tragedy was about to unfold.

The rest of the time we sat on the balcony playing music, mainly my Beach Boys CDs. Or we walked around fairly aimlessly. At one point we travelled to the Alhambra palace in Granada, which I’m afraid was totally wasted on me. I’ve always hated sightseeing of any kind. I guess I’ve always preferred to live in my own head.

At night we sat outside the resort where an old geezer murdered various classics on the piano. We ate pizzas and drank beer. Some nights we went out to a nearby bar and played pool. At one point England beat Germany 5-1. The game was showing on a small TV high up in the corner, and I was annoyed not to be watching it properly. One night playing pool I somehow got into an argument with James, who had been weird and moody the entire trip. I don’t remember what it was about, but when I got back to the little self-catering apartment I was so wound up I threw a glass at the oven. Instead of the glass smashing, it went right through the oven glass instead. That worried me, as it seemed potentially a lot more expensive. But when I reported it the staff didn’t seem too concerned.

The next day Ruth came and told us something had happened in America. Something bad. We turned on the small television in her apartment, and in stunned silence watched the planes flying into the buildings. I don’t think I even knew what the World Trade Center was until then. I doubt I had ever formed those three words in that order in my head or on my tongue.

To make things even stranger, it turned out all this had happened the day before, and was only just reaching us now. The simple resort was a little behind the times. There was no Internet, and this was long before smart phones. We just had Nokia bricks that could call, send a text, or play Snake. That was all we needed back then. I suddenly realised the day I threw the glass through the oven had been 9/11 without us knowing it. We knew the date, I suppose, but not the significance. I couldn’t help but think my glass was a little like the planes, and the oven was the World Trade Center.

That night the barman at the resort spoke to us about it in his broken English. After a brief conversation he said ‘Not good’, then walked away shaking his head sadly. That was our last night.

Once I got home to England, I would lie awake at night worrying about World War III. When I heard an aeroplane overhead, I would think it had finally started. It sounds silly now—the low-resolution thinking of a young man with no idea about the world. And it was. But 9/11 did something to us all. I was only 19 and staying in an attic room in a shared flat in Newcastle. Seven boys living there, in absolute chaos. There was no heating in the room, but it did have a skylight window where I could watch the planes flying by, perhaps leaving or returning to the local airport.

Planes had always meant holidays, excitement, and mystery. Now they were terrorist death machines hurtling into iconic buildings we had never even heard of before. America no longer represented an exotic new world of possibility, but a dangerous place that could reach into your life and take away all your safety.

That’s why I say 9/11 was the last time I was happy. There was a moment that day at the swimming pool, before we knew about the planes, before the argument that night and the glass thrown through the oven. Ruth and James had gone back inside. I put my JFK book down and got into the pool with Lizzy. I lifted her up under her arms and swung her around the pool. Her smiles and laughter emanated pure joy, like the barely-contained frolicking energy of a young animal. I only realise now the odd connection between my mum lifting me up in the pool as a child, and me lifting Lizzy up in the pool on our holiday. Maybe that’s strange, because Lizzy would be my child in the analogy. But I don’t feel like it’s strange. It’s just two different versions of love, at two different but somehow related times.

When I think about that day, I wonder if I could have been normal. If I could have stayed with Lizzy and had a normal life. But that turned out to be my last taste of innocence, before the planes hit the towers and everything became clouded by confusion and fear. The world got darker after that. I broke up with Lizzy and became increasingly lost. I went out with other girls, of course, but I never experienced quite that same love again. Maybe it was all destined, just as the planes had already hit the towers that day without us knowing it. But I’d choose that joyful ignorance over reality any day. Give me our 9/11, splashing in the pool, hidden from the world—from ageing, loneliness, death and chaos. For me, the problems all started on 9/12.

I recently read an interesting essay from called ‘12 Literary Opinions That Would Get Me Kicked Out of an MFA Program’.

Liza takes aim at the way ‘the publishing industry increasingly conforms to a dominant mode of artistic craft, convincing an entire generation of aspiring writers that “good literature” must be written in a certain style.’

She counters this with her twelve opinions, and I in turn have made a video reacting to these opinions to see where I agree and disagree.

It covers whether literature should be moral, the obsession with ‘show don’t tell’, if long novels are an anachronism, and much more.

This one seems to be generating some very interesting responses in the comments, so watch the video below and see what you think.

Best,
Nick

Hello, sorry for the slight break. I have just released a new video on Haruki Murakami, particularly his extraordinarily successful novel, Norwegian Wood.

I try to work out why this strange, rather dark book resonated with so many people, compare it to his magic realist novels, and consider some of the odder aspects of Murakami’s writing life.

Hopefully this will be worth watching whether you have read the book or not, so check it out below.

Thanks,
Nick

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fascinated by the strange routines writers employ to get their work done.

Hence I have made a new video covering some of my favourites.

From Murakami's 4am marathon regime to Franzen's sensory-deprivation office, Steinbeck's pencil rituals, and Kerouac's amphetamine-fuelled scroll, I'm ranking the most fascinating, eccentric, and downright bizarre writing routines in literary history.

Check out the video below.

Cheers,
Nick

Hello,

I have just posted a new video on the Nick Reads YouTube channel, discussing Don DeLillo’s White Noise with comedian and reader of great literature, .

We discuss the postmodern themes explored by DeLillo (especially the work of Jean Baudrillard), the prophetic aspects of the novel, its underrated humour, and much more.

You can click below to watch the video, or subscribers of this Substack page can listen in the audio player above.

If you didn’t like the book, it is not necessary to comment, as plenty of people have offered this fascinating opinion on my YouTube channel already.

Best,
Nick

Following my last reading update, I finished my reread of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and made a video on it. I also finished rereading Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, and then I reread Enduring Love (I read both of these at school, and for some reason wanted to return to them now).

It’s easy to dismiss McEwan as a kind of broadsheet darling. He is a safe choice for just about any literary prize, and in many ways represents a now-collapsing liberal order.

For one, he comes from the time when white male authors ruled, before they were almost completely frozen out of the world of literary fiction. Though as in so many industries, the old guard remained, while the new blood was barred (which is why McEwan is still around and has a massive house).

He also represents the old order in his worldview, which appears to be broadly the school of liberal New Atheism. He was, of course, friends with the late Christopher Hitchens, and at the end of Enduring Love he cites Steven Pinker. One of his novels has been described as a ‘boomer parable’, and McEwan does seem in many ways to be the archetypal liberal boomer.

He has a tendency to show off his reading in the field of science, and one senses a reverence for the sciences that perhaps even, like the protagonist of Enduring Love, extends to mild embarrassment at not being among their number himself.

Then we have the typical McEwan milieu. His characters are invariably poshos who enjoy picnics, drink expensive wines, and complain about expensive problems.

All this would make him too irritating to read, if he didn’t happen to be such a good writer. He is at his best when exploring the complex mesh of affections and resentments between couples, as well as the bonds of family and the mysteries of friendship.

He is also a master of storytelling and suspense. If you find yourself reading a McEwan alongside less tightly plotted fiction, you will end up finishing the McEwan first due to the sheer narrative drag.

However, rereading these books decades later, it is not the plots that stayed with me. Indeed, I had forgotten the ending to The Child in Time and the entire denouement of Enduring Love. What I retained instead were certain scenes and even specific sentences. This may be partly a reflection of my indifference to plot, or the way we remember novels in general, but it is probably also a result of the richness of McEwan’s characters, and the dynamism of his prose.

Enduring Love has some extraordinary set pieces and impressive changes of voice, though The Child in Time remains the superior book by some margin. It is less aggressively plotted, but is more rewarding in all other regards. Its depiction of reserved English parents alone, a relatively minor part of the book, is wonderfully accurate. And the disturbing nature of Charles Darke’s regression to childhood has stayed with me for decades.

There is no accurate gauge for these things, but it seems to me that McEwan is seen as the favoured choice of the highbrow housewife, rather than as a true literary great. To some degree I now think this is unfair, and probably something to do with his being English. To risk a football analogy, it is much like the way that, say, Paul Scholes for years was not recognised as a genius on the level of his European counterparts. McEwan rose to fame in the twentieth century, which, in the literary world, largely belonged to the Americans.

I enjoyed these books as a school student, then went through a long period where I would have pretentiously denounced them, and have finally returned to them more able to fully appreciate their nuances, now that I, like McEwan’s characters, am a flawed adult.

I still don’t have the bank account to appear as a character in a McEwan novel, and if I did I would probably be the irrational antagonist, questioning the boomer wisdom of the hero and his materialist outlook. So I’ll just have to stick to reading them with much appreciation and only occasional moments of mild disapproval.

Hello,

I have a new video out on the Nick Reads YouTube channel.

It is a piece on J.M. Coetzee’s masterpiece, Disgrace, which, as well as dealing with violence and tension in South Africa, also arguably predicted the MeToo movement.

It concerns a professor who has an affair with a student, but refuses to abase himself at an academic struggle session, instead claiming ‘I became a servant of Eros.’

When he leaves the university and heads to the Eastern Cape to live with his daughter, violence and violation soon ensue.

The novel raises uncomfortable questions about race, sex, and power, with Coetzee refusing to offer easy answers. This is no doubt why the book was condemned by the ANC, and Coetzee left South Africa for Australia not long after.

Here I delve into the complex ambiguities of this extraordinary novel. Please give it a watch below.

Thanks,
Nick

What if there was a novel that predicted Chernobyl, Covid, 9/11, and the hyperreal world we now inhabit?

Well, arguably there is, and it is Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

Some of you may have seen my recent list of the top ten postwar American novels. I put White Noise at number one, so thought I’d better reread it and check if I was right.

Spoiler alert: I was.

Hence in this new video, I explain why this dark, funny novel is so prophetic, and how it explores postmodern theory in a way that is profound but also accessible for the average reader.

Hopefully you will enjoy this whether you have read the book or not, so check it out below.

Thanks,
Nick

The publishing world has gone completely insane.

That in itself is probably not news. But I came across a ‘wishlist’ from an agent in New York that was even more bizarre than I was expecting.

She asks that authors do not send ‘Books with eating disorders, unchallenged fatphobia, or unchallenged diet culture’, or stories that feature the police or military.

Instead she wants ‘fat main characters’, and requires that the ‘love interest seems morally gray but is actually a marshmallow with heart of gold underneath the hard shell exterior.’

These deranged and highly specific criteria, which amount to a form of censorship, are merely an extreme version of the ideological capture we now see throughout publishing, which is one of the main reasons for the decline of literature.

Watch my video on all this below. It is a mixture of appalling and funny, as the above examples merely scratch the surface.

Cheers,
Nick

The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of ‘banned’ books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. ‘The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection’ would make a funny meme—as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey—but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: ‘The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices’.

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the ‘Voice’ section, which, we’re told, ‘amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented’.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the Woke era of radical leftism, aggressive conformity, and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism—a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

Lipa’s list falls within the first camp, with the key distinction that she is implicitly claiming this progression into Woke is a good thing. Just as few Woke ideologues even now will admit to being against free speech, Lipa knows that there is something good and important about the literary achievements of the past, and tries to harness that energy to bolster the oppressive contemporary ideology her list ultimately advocates.

We can see this hypocrisy in, for example, the fact that publishers have relentlessly weeded out the Salingers of today. Catcher would be instantly dismissed as the narcissistic ramblings of a privileged white male, and would not have a hope of being published. In that sense it really is ‘banned’ in spirit, but that is certainly not what Lipa means by the term.

William Burroughs also features, yet he would definitely be cancelled today, and probably in jail (the latter perhaps a reasonable outcome from shooting your wife in the head). Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is in the ‘Control’ section, along with Kafka’s The Trial. These are apparently works that ‘explore the mechanisms of control, both visible and invisible, including surveillance, propaganda, technological influence and ideological conditioning.’

It’s hard not to laugh at the last part, in a list stuffed with works on decolonisation, ‘antiracism’, and gender ideology. But there is also little evidence the Woke authors on this list offer a real critique of bureaucracy or technocracy, and typically the Woke were the most fierce enforcers of state tyranny during the Covid era (along with Piers Morgan).

The Handmaid’s Tale also appears in this section, and is the perfect representative of the whole list. It imagines an oppressive Christian patriarchy which in many ways resembles the real Islamic patriarchies that are in operation in parts of the world right now. As with Lipa’s list, it is far safer to create a straw man opponent and pretend you’re ‘banned’.

This is why the one genuinely brave choice on the list is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. One key distinction between the liberal and Woke eras has been the latter’s tendency to ignore Islamic oppression in favour of viewing all Muslims as victims of the West. Rushdie exists on the faultline between these two worldviews, and it would have been typical for a list like this to duck controversy by not including him. This almost makes me think he is there by mistake, or perhaps it’s because Lipa’s library is in Portugal, where they may not have got the latest Woke memo, much in the way that Michel Houellebecq is still allowed to be a literary star in France.

Rushdie’s horrific stabbing in 2022 proves that this book is still highly dangerous. The rest are largely classics that are no longer considered controversial, or, to the extent that they are, it is at the hands of the kinds of people behind the more recent works on the list. It is they who love to tear apart the canon and let loose ‘sensitivity readers’ upon the very giants on display here.

Lipa doesn’t look like she eats a great deal of cake, and that is to her credit, but here she is trying to have her cake and eat it. You either celebrate beauty, individual expression, and artistic risk, or ‘identity’, ideological conformity, and activism posing as art. You can’t have both.

Some of you may have seen my top ten postwar American novels video. Well, this being the internet, the video was deemed incredibly controversial by some.

Hence I have made this follow up to address the ten books I possibly should have included on my first list. Some I thought of later and regretted not including, others were books that kept coming up in the comments and I felt I should acknowledge.

Watch below and see if you agree with my choices. But also watch the first one in case I already mentioned your favourite!

Have a good weekend,
Nick

Welcome to Nick Reads everyone. As promised, one of the things I’ll be putting exclusively on this page is notes on what I’m currently reading.

Well, following a recent video where I claimed Don DeLillo’s White Noise is the best postwar American novel, I thought I’d better reread it to check. I first read it more than twenty years ago, when I was a student, much like those the book opens with, with their entire lives stuffed into their parents’ cars on the first day of college.

Reading it again now, I am closer in age to the protagonist, Jack Gladney, and can empathise more keenly with his fears and distractions. The book is just as prescient as I remembered. In fact it looks even more prophetic now. I’m yet to get to the part where DeLillo casually predicts 9/11, but the odd detachment from death in a technocratic world, and the unsettling nature of a state-managed crisis (the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’) feel even more pertinent post-Covid.

It is also every bit as funny as I recalled, with a strangely poetic narrative voice, and so far I feel I was right to put it number one on my postwar American list.

For reasons less clear to me, I have also started rereading Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. This is a novel we read at school, for A-level English.

I have no idea where my school copy got to, so I’ve had to buy it again. Probably for the best, as we were allowed to take books into exams, and I remember I had a very complex series of notes inside the front and back covers. By the time of the exam I didn’t even need to refer to them, as my famously sharp memory was even sharper in those days. Naturally I got an A, though I always resented my English teacher refusing to predict that I’d get an A, which hampered my chances of getting into top universities. This despite also achieving the third-highest grade in the country on my History syllabus, but let’s not get into that old story again.

I enjoyed the book as a sixth-former, though would have disavowed it by the time I was a university student on grounds of it being ‘middlebrow’. Of course, now I see it is not middlebrow at all, but very impressive writing. I can appreciate the observations on intimate adult relationships, something that school Nick knew nothing about, and the depiction of the political milieu, which I’ve also had a glimpse of now.

McEwan’s meditations on marriage and family life actually have some crossover with DeLillo’s, so it is interesting to be reading both. The Child in Time is also set during a heatwave in London, something else I can painfully relate to at present.

The theme of trauma involving children is something shared by Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. I have been known to describe crime novels as ‘slop’, though unless you count the hardboiled works of James M. Cain, I have barely read any. After speaking to a working crime writer recently, I decided I should probably rectify my snobbery. The other motivation was my love of the film The Drop, based on Lehane’s short story, ‘Animal Rescue’. The story is frankly excellent, so I thought I’d check out one of his novels.

Lehane is known as a master of story, but there is some striking prose too. I particularly liked:

Sean got that lurching sensation again, this time accompanied by the taste of dirty pennies in his mouth. His stomach felt as if a spoon had hollowed it out.

Lehane is no punk, as a Lehane character might say.

The fourth book I’m reading (yes I know, insane system) is Ben Lerner’s Transcription.

The theme throughout this post has been overcoming various reading prejudices of mine. There’s been ‘Middlebrow’, and crime, and now we can add contemporary novels, which I tend to expect will be terrible. Transcription is from 2026, so about as contemporary as it gets. I kept hearing about it, so decided to give it an honest try.

So far I hate it. I hate the protagonist, and all the other characters, and I suspect I hate the author too. I certainly don’t require ‘likeable’ characters in fiction—Bret Easton Ellis is one of my favourite writers. But where Ellis treats his characters with the appropriate mix of irony, scorn and affection, I suspect Lerner doesn’t know how annoying his cast of somewhat wimpy and self-important intellectuals really are.

But then, as we’ve learned, I could be wrong.

This four-book system is something I am just trying, applying all the usual techniques I shared with everyone in my video on how to read more.

I am not as far on into the Lehane as the others, and in this system you have to go back and catch up if you’re lagging behind on one of the books. It’s a maverick strategy that risks not finishing anything, but my belief is I will finish all four in succession in a blaze of glory.

There is a certain impatience in the rereads when one comes to an action sequence, if such a term can be used for literary fiction. I know what is going to happen in DeLillo’s ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, for instance. But then one is not reading these for plot anyway. If you want that, you can read crime. Which I also am, of course, with Lehane.

Anyway it’s a good thing I have now started this page, so all this counts as work.

Feel free to add your views. As this is a new venture I have made commenting free (speaking of risky strategies).

If you want to get any of the books, you can use the links in this article. I get some tiny amount of money if you do.

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Nick

Publishing was supposed to protect the novel. Instead, it became one of the main reasons literary fiction is dying. In this video, I go through five structural failures of the modern publishing industry:

-Ideological conformity and the rise of sensitivity readers
-Risk aversion—chasing safe bets over bold work
-Declining editorial competence
-The collapse of male readership
-The death of the monoculture

Check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick

You want to read more. You keep telling yourself you will. But your attention gets taken up by texting, doomscrolling, and asking AI pointless questions.

We all struggle with these things, but here I give five simple tips that have worked for me to get a lot more quality reading done, even in this world of distraction.

This is extremely wholesome content, and my only goal is to help. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

Check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick