Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Ever since I watched Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, I knew I had to do Wild. And by do, I mean read the book Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed.

It is a memoir in which Strayed recounts her journey hiking 1,800 kilometres of the Pacific Crest Trail. It opens with a heartbreaking recounting of her mother’s death due to lung cancer that itself was a deeply uncomfortable read, both emotionally and from the physical descriptions. But I’m glad I stuck with it as it opens up into a warming tale as Strayed rediscovers herself.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a 2009 book by Mark Fisher.

It explores the idea that capitalism has become so all-consuming, that we can no longer imagine an alternative even as we watch neoliberalism burn the planet to the ground. As captured in the phrase, “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” This, like so much of the book, has been prophetic, as we watch climate breakdown occur before our eyes.

Capitalism no longer tries to justify itself, or hide its flaws, but simply says that it is the only viable system and therefore we have to accept it. It even appropriates those who challenge it: we can buy Fair Trade or Product Red and feel we are doing our bit to mitigate the damage while consuming.

Similarly, Netflix is now awash with documentaries about the problems of everything from fast fashion to climate change, all while being streamed to us from huge data centres. We can then go on social media and be angry about it. But far from opposing the situation, this action provides big tech with free content that they can then monetise for ads.

But maybe it is all worth it. Capitalism claims to offer us an efficient market. But does it fulfill this promise?

The answer is no. Anyone who has phoned a call centre experiences the endless bureaucracy of capitalism. You have to fight your way through a phone menu to speak to a human. But even then, the human can almost never help. They have to send it off to another team and make an empty promise to get back to you. There is no point being angry at them because they are just as much a victim of the system as you are. It’s the same problem the farmers faced in The Grapes of Wrath.

Under market based systems, endless targets are set. And the machinery of organisations is focused on achieving these targets rather than doing the thing itself. Universities become more interested in league tables and student satisfaction surveys than teaching students. This is what Fisher describes as Market Stalinism. The market model creates more bureaucracy, not less.

A good example of this might be marketing. Here is a whole profession that is entirely unnecessary under alternative economic systems. You might argue that people would still need to know about products. But because we can’t trust companies to be honest, we need independent reviews such as Which Magazine or Consumer Reports to give us reliable information. Under capitalism, this parallel system already exists and marketing largely exists to prevent the efficient delivery of high-quality products by manipulating us through branding.

Fisher also discussed the privatisation of stress. Anxiety and depression are a social problem, but neoliberalism has convinced us that the problem is us: that we are somehow defective, and then tries to sell us purely individual solutions in the form of anti-depressants or therapy. But, as discussed in The Inner Level, inequality is shown to be causative to higher rates of mental illness. Given the book was published in 2009, just as IAPT was rolling out, this is perhaps one of the most prophetic points of the book.

Fisher offers some suggestions for fighting back. He suggests we resist managerialism. Strikes, which worked well in an industrial era, may not be as effective today. When teachers strike, schools get to reduce the wage bill and targets are not affected. This is critical because managers exist to fulfil targets, not to teach students. A better approach might be to target the things managers care about: metrics, reputational damage, and paperwork strikes, as these things would target things managers are actually measured on.

Seventeen years on, this is still a highly relevant read. Indeed, it only becomes more relevant as time goes on.

Autistic Menopause: A Guide to the Menopausal Transition for Autistic People and those Supporting Them is a book by Julie Gamble-Turner and Rachel Moseley.

The book is a fantastic resource. It predominantly draws on the experience of autistic participants through qualitative interviews and is heavily grounded in direct quotations. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of what menopause is, what it is like to experience, why it might be more difficult for autistic people, and what both individuals and societies can do to improve things.

Visitors is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. It is the third and final novel in the Pathfinder series and picks up where Ruins left off. There are quite a few spoilers below.

I’m glad it read it. The book has been criticised for its convoluted plot, and while it is complicated and hard to follow at times, much of it was still very engaging. And the twist at the end was good.

Where I did struggle was in seeing the importance of some of the storylines. The series starts out as a fantasy and then suddenly turns into science fiction. In this book, it was half science fiction across multiple worlds, and yet they were still fighting a war in Ramfold, which seemed fairly irrelevant given the wider picture. As a result, I’ve had it on the backburner while I read other stuff at the same time.

Overall, if you have read the first two and enjoyed them, this is worth reading, too. Although it might not be as good as the first two in the series it is still a great novel.

Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities is a book by Nick Walker. It is a collection of his writings on autism, neurodiversity and Neuroqueer Theory.

In the book, he sets out the case for the neurodiversity paradigm over the pathology paradigm, what we might also call the neuroaffirmative model vs the medical model. Walker argues that just because one way of being seems to be more frequent, that does not mean it is the “correct” way. There are far more Chinese people than British people, but that doesn’t make being Chinese the normal nationality and being British an aberration.

Neurotypical functioning is conceptualised as a social construct: when people were described as “high/low functioning”, what we were really describing was their ability to conform to social standards. Walker makes the case that there is no such thing as a neurotypical brain, but there are people who can conform to neuronormative behaviours in a way that feels natural, and therefore enjoy the privileges of being considered normal. Just as gender is a spectrum, but many people can conform to gender-based norms well enough to enjoy the privileges that are afforded to cis individuals.

Walker also makes the case for a wide definition of neurodivergence. It includes intrinsic neurodivergence, such as autism, but also includes epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, the effects of drugs, or long-term meditation. If our brain diverges from the dominant cultural expectations, it is neurodivergent.

The book explores the difference between disability and impairment: someone may have a specific impairment, but they only have a disability in a social context. If you are deaf and you walk into a room filled with people using spoken language, you are disabled. But as someone who does not know sign language, if I walked into a room filled with people communicating in BSL, I would be the one who was disabled.

Walker suggests that professionals who have spent their lives working in the pathology paradigm find it almost impossible to make the shift to the neurodiversity paradigm. Walker goes as far as to suggest that any professional wishing to work with autistic individuals should have to have training from an autistic person who themselves is well-versed in autistic culture and the neurodiversity paradigm. This seems very reasonable given the importance of lived experience that we now recognise in many areas of society.

The journey here is a familiar one: being gay has gone from a mental illness to acceptance, and then to an understanding of the damaging impact of dominant social ideologies on minorities. Neurodivergence is going through this same process. As a community, we are building a culture, claiming an identity, and speaking out against the deficit model. Walker brings this together in the practice of neuroqueering: queering social norms as to how our brains should behave.

Great little book. I knew we invented film, cement and fizzy drinks. But I didn’t know we invented planes, lifeboats, computer memory, flat-screens or the big bang.

Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland is a book by Marianna Spring. Spring is an investigative journalist with the BBC and the book charts her work exploring conspiracy theories and disinformation. This ranges from some seemingly well-meaning but misguided COVID deniers to the state-sponsored disinformation campaigns being used to interfere with elections worldwide. It also gives an insider’s view on some of the hate that those speaking up for the truth, especially women, can be subjected to.

The conspiracy side of things broadly matches with what I would expect from years of sceptics, Humanism and psychology. Often, conspiracy theorists have these conspiracies as part of their identity, meaning that facts are broadly not important because there is a psychological need to be part of these communities. However, confronting them with the real harm they are doing to other people can be helpful.

In terms of disinformation, it was eye opening to have someone with a deep understanding elucidate how much this is going on. While I generally don’t give much weight to the comments on a political Facebook post, as it is likely to be a vocal and highly active minority, rather than a representative view, it could also increasingly likely to be bots or foreign state actors, while at the same time, the efforts of legitimate journalists are undermined by those in power making these exact same claims.

Spring comes across as someone with a lot of journalistic integrity. Which, in some ways, is annoying. People like and Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell write captivating books, sometimes at the expense of sticking to the truth. Spring’s book is interesting, but not captivating, because she insists on there being complicated answers, rather than one simple but wrong one that is easier to digest. It was a good read, but I was able to put it down for large periods.

I was also aware that I was reading this at a time when multiple peer-reviewed research papers had shown the BBC was biased against the former Labour leadership (Schlosberg, 2016; Wring & Ward, 2020), and over 100 of its own staff had signed a letter saying the BBC’s coverage of Gaza was biased. These issues highlight how difficult it is to have an unbiased view.

Small Space, Big Living: Interior Design to Make Every Inch Count is a book by Sofie Hepworth.

It focuses on designing small space interiors. Most of the book uses the Shila Shed as a case study, which is a tiny home they build in their garden while they were renovating the house. It is fantastic for this kind of maximising space on a blank canvas situation, but the advice for being stuck in a rental property is somewhat limited. That said, I came away with plenty of of tips I could implement in those situations so it was worth a read.

It is also pretty practical in terms of the process of designing. It talks about how to do a draw out a floor plan (and provides ezamples), or build a mock-up model, or find a reliable tradesperson.

Mad about the House: The budget how-to guide for smart home decorating with style is a book by Kate Watson-Smyth.

The book starts with some general advice on colour, then goes systematically though each room in the house commenting on different design elements to consider. It ends with a top ten design ten design hacks. It is illustrated with a mixture of lovely line drawings and photographs. It was an enjoyable and fun read but I might struggle to tell you what crystallised knowledge I took away from it. It might be a book I come back to when I am designing a specific room.

The Interior Design Handbook is a book by Frida Ramstedt.

It’s the best book on interior design for beginners that I have read. I’m brand new to the topuc and I’ve only read three books so far. But this one is my favourite. It teaches a lot of the fundamental theory but in an acessible way. For example, how to vary your light sources, using things like the rule of three, acoustics, and all of the elements you need to bring a design together.

If you are thinking about decorating your house, this book seems to be a great place to start.