Micro-Reviews (May 2023)

May 31, 2023
Assembly by Natasha Brown, Johnson At 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell




Assembly by Natasha Brown

This is a short work - barely even a novella - which contains some quite striking and at times challenging writing.  And it’s encouraging to see something like this being given a big marketing push by a major publisher.  But I’m still not quite sure what I think of it and whether it actually works.  

Our narrator is a high flyer at a City bank.  She’s also black - but the bank’s approach to diversity leaves her feeling as if her success is down to her race rather than her merits as an individual employee.  She’s in a relationship with a white guy from an upper middle class family - but it’s suggested that he’s just going out with her to burnish his liberal credentials.  

The thing I struggled with most is that no one ever seems to get the benefit of the doubt.  For example, I think that at least some employers in fields like banking and law have now recognised that there’s a serious problem with diversity and genuinely want to do better, but struggle with it in practice.   I would’ve liked to see the author take us inside the head of someone at the bank in charge of diversity and show how, despite being well-intentioned, they were still managing to screw it up.  But we remain confined to the narrator’s head, who seems totally ground down by her existence - and the bank's efforts are portrayed as largely cynical and empty (which may be the case at some employers, but I don't think it's true of all - even if many are guilty of not doing enough and misdirecting their efforts).  And as a result, what I came away with was a sense of hopelessness - of a society where racism in its most overt, blatant forms is largely (although not entirely) suppressed, but a rather more insidious, structural form of racism remains, gnawing away at the narrator, because our society has been built largely by white people to favour white people. The implication is that it is so ingrained, no improvement is possible - but personally, I find it hard to share that conclusion.

This is difficult territory because I am white, therefore I benefit from those structures and so perhaps I am pre-disposed to be defensive about it, which may be the real reason why I didn't feel that Assembly quite worked (but I don't want to admit it).  So perhaps I don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt either.   But as you can probably tell, it certainly made me think, which is always a good thing - so why not give it a try (it will probably be the shortest thing you read this year).




Johnson at Ten by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell

This book manages to pull off two somewhat unlikely feats.   First, it manages to somehow be both quite analytical and quite gossipy, sometimes at more or less the same time.  Second, it made me have a modicum of sympathy for, of all people, Gavin Williamson- which is something I never expected to happen.  This is because it recounts an episode where Williamson (then Education Secretary) and his aides had gone to meet the PM expecting to discuss what they thought was Johnson’s preferred solution to a particular issue.  But Johnson had other ideas and wanted to discuss another approach to the problem entirely.  So they had to talk about something they hadn’t worked up at all and all their preparation for the meeting was wasted.  Afterwards, Williamson and his aides asked Johnson’s aides - “Why on earth didn’t you tell us he was more keen on what we just discussed than the solution we told you we were working on?”.  To which they responded “Because we had no idea until we got in the room with you and the PM.”  This encapsulates one of the key reasons why Johnson was such a bad PM;  he had no focus, kept changing his mind all the time and kept telling people what he thought they wanted to hear (which was often the opposite of what he had just said to someone else earlier the same day).  As a result, when his aides told people that “the PM wants X”, people just stopped believing it.  If it was something they didn’t really want to do or it was difficult, they just sat on their hands.  It’s really no wonder the country is in such a mess.
 

Micro-reviews (March 2023)

March 13, 2023
The Anomaly, The Animals In That Country, In A Good Light



The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier

This was a really enjoyable high concept literary thriller.  The plot revolves around a duplicate of Air France Flight AF0006 suddenly appearing 3 months after its first version landed in the US - so now there are 2 versions of the same plane and 2 versions of each individual who was on board.  How can something so unlikely have happened? This is where the high concept comes in, because it emerges that the...

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More London street libraries

November 28, 2022



This is another in a series of occasional posts about London street libraries, following on from this one (about a street library and secret garden at London Bridge) and this one (about another street library at Cambria Road, which is close to where I live in Herne Hill).   I found all these via this excellent map produced by The Londonist.

The one pictured above is in an old red telephone box in Lewisham.  It was quite well stocked but also looked reasonably well-used, presumably because of i...
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Micro-Reviews (October 2022)

October 15, 2022


Educated, The Paper Menagerie and A Ghost in the Throat

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts (the last one was a year ago, which is hardly the level of regularity I was aiming for).  That’s partly because I’ve been busy with other things, including trying to make some more progress with a story about China that I started ages ago (I’ve got about 25K words so far and it’s not like I’ve got stuck with the plot or anything - it’s just finding the time to write that...

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Patriots by Peter Morgan: a review

August 23, 2022



Patriots by Peter Morgan (author of Netflix series The Crown) depicts the rise and fall from grace of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.  I saw it at the Almeida Theatre where it’s just finished its run, but it's now transferring to the West End.  It’s an interesting play with excellent performances from Tom Hollander as Berezovksy, Luke Thallon as Roman Abramovich and Will Keen - who is well worth seeing for his uncannily accurate and rather chilling impersonation of Putin (especially hi...

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Still the hardest word

July 9, 2022


Well, it took over 50 resignations from his own government but he's finally agreed to go.  So goodbye and good riddance, Boris Johnson. Your many, many brazen lies have finally caught up with you.  I always thought you were a lazy, arrogant **** who was only interested in his own advancement.  Now it's finally dawned on your erstwhile supporters too.

And did we get an apology or even any hint of contrition or regret for his own actions in his resignation speech?  No.  It's much the same as ban...
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Vangelis: an appreciation

June 5, 2022


This rather long post is about Greek musician Vangelis, who died last month.  I’m writing it partly because, having read a reasonable number of the obituaries, I felt that there were some things that they missed (although who knows if anyone else will read this.… ). I should also point out that I’m not a fan of everything he’s ever done - all told, I reckon that I only really like about 20-25% of his total output (in particular, I’m not keen on his more bombastic material, especiall...

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What does the Draft2Digital / Smashwords merger mean for authors?

February 13, 2022





What are we to make of the recent announcement that Draft2Digital is acquiring competing self-publishing outfit Smashwords?  Initially, I was a bit concerned because as an author, Smashwords has been the best performing platform for me over the years - and I wouldn't want to see it go the way of others which have closed down (like Feedbooks, BookieJar and Bibliotastic).

But as I understand it, Draft2Digital primarily competes with Smashwords when it comes to helping authors create ebooks and d...
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Yard Sale by Charles Hibbard

December 27, 2021




This beautifully written book - available for free on Smashwords - occupies a not particularly well-colonised fictional space somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories.  

It’s like a novel in the sense that it depicts various episodes in the life of one character, Ruth, who was born - I am guessing - at some point in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  We first meet Ruth in (late) middle age, having gone on a solo road trip to escape marital difficulties - but ...

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Micro reviews (October 2021)

October 6, 2021

China Mountain Zhang, All That Man Is, The Vanishing Half





China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh

This book is set in a world where China is the dominant power, both economically and culturally.  The US, meanwhile, is subservient to China, having apparently undergone a protracted and violent Communist revolution, followed by something similar to China’s cultural revolution known as the “Cleansing Winds Campaign.”  Slightly frustratingly perhaps, we don’t find out too much about this hist...

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About Me


Paul Samael Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.
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