All posts by Mark Watkins

Books, Ruminations

The Medium is the Massage?

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Did you ever have that word that you’ve been misspelling since junior high school, and just figured it out?

So, I’m wandering Manchester-by-the-Book, one of my favorite small bookstores (where I discovered one of my favorite books ever, James Salter’s Burning the Days), and I stumble on The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan.

Wait, isn’t it ‘The Medium is the Message‘?

Well, no. All my life I’ve thought the book was named after his famous saying, but no. Apparently, it’s a semi-intentional pun. The Medium “massages” us, manipulates us. Sound familiar?

But this is 1967, the internet is not really a thing, there are faint stirrings of Arpanet, but no Twitter, no web browser, no Facebook, no TikTok. There’s really just TV and Radio. I open to a random page and find:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

All
media
are
extensions
of
some
human
faculty-
psychic
or
physical.

OK so that is ahead of its time. The book is attractive in a 1960-ish way, all strangely formatted text, black and white photographs, illustrations on every page, pages you have to read in the mirror because they are printed backwards….sold.

I take it home and start reading more seriously. 

The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions-the patterns of mechanistic technologies-are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank-that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”.

Ever posted something on TikTok/IG/Facebook you wanted to take back? Ever worried about the ever-growing Surveillance State, or Surveillance Advertising? McLuhan is on the case, in 1967 before it all existed. 

I’m about halfway through the book, and so far, here’s the money quote:

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. 

….

It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.

The 24×7 outrage machine we call the internet: do you understand how deeply your worldview is shaped by what you read? Or don’t read? The news sources you visit, or don’t visit? The media you consume, or don’t? How deeply what you see is impacted by the monetary imperatives of the media? (ALL of them, not just the bad guys, whoever they are for you!).

As Ryan Holiday says, “If you start your day with social media, the news, or email, realize: you’re starting your day at the mercy of others.“

A lot of people are coming to realize that much of the modern internet really just isn’t good for us. And yet, can you get away from it?

The first step is being aware. That pretty much everything that comes at you has an agenda. Question it. Why am I being told this now? What is the (economic/political/marketing) motivation for them to tell me? Does it resonate with my worldview? If so, maybe it’s false – just a re-enforcing echo chamber? Question all that you read, watch and hear, especially if it re-enforces your worldview or agrees with your intuition.

And read a book now and then :). The Medium is the Massage is a fun way to start – fast, thought-provoking, and fun. If you want to really embrace the ambiance of this book, throw on Philip Glass’s soundtrack to the cult film Koyaanisqatsi.

Because getting a massage should be good.

Books, Travel

Rarer Monsters

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Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o’ the time:
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted on a pole, and underwrit,
‘Here may you see the tyrant.’
— Shakespeare, Macbeth

Just came back from an amazing trip to New York with our good friends T— and L—. We had a chance to see Daniel Craig of 007 James Bond fame play Macbeth in an off-Broadway production with Oscar nominee Ruth Negga. So we did. We also snuck in visits to the Metropolitan Museum to look at their Greek & Roman stuff, as well as their current exhibition of the French painter Jacques-Louis David (you will say that you do not know him, as I did….wait for it …. you do). And in addition we visited The Cloisters in uptown New York City, the best museum nobody knows about.

The Cloisters is the home of our semi-canine friend above, as well as amazing medieval art, stained glass and building elements from Europe. Indeed the entire museum is essentially created from spare parts from medieval Europe, including the famous Unicorn tapestry, illustrated manuscripts, gilded wine glasses, a delightful courtyard and nearly entire chapels.

We’re going to Greece and Rome in the fall, so we were excited to see the Met’s collection of Greek and Roman art and sculpture, as well as another visit to the Arms & Armory room:

Here’s some Greek stuff: Priam begging for his son Hector’s body, a grotesque, Hercules wearing a lion…

We took a walk on The Highline, which is very nice – a kind of mini-Central Park, near where our boat-based Architecture tour departed. Lots of interesting architecture including the new Hudson Yards.

The Macbeth was wonderful. Daniel Craig provided a fair bit of cognitive dissonance for me, as I know him mostly as Bond. His Macbeth was a wonderful far cry from his Bond. He seemed quite joyful and touched by the crowd’s response afterwards. Negga’s Lady Macbeth was absolutely outstanding.

The production was good fun. The stage at first glance appeared quite sparse and I expected a “small” Shakespeare. But soon the smoke was roiling, the lights were flashing, the walls were moving, and the play took on a much more cinematic experience than I expected. Much of the production was “modern” – the witches wear normal street clothes, Banquo is dispatched by a handgun, Bond (err, Macbeth) wears a fur coat that would not look out of place on a rapper…all good fun.

Since I was going to see Macbeth and hadn’t read it since high school (or never?), I decided to read it on my last plane ride. You may not have read Macbeth, but you probably know some of the famous lines, and the story itself: Macbeth, egged on by his wife Lady Macbeth and 3 Witches who foretell his future, kills King Duncan and usurps the throne, and embarks on a killing spree to cement his rule. I’ve captured some of my favorite lines below.

Oh, those witches:

Fair is foul and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes

Ray Bradbury did not invent that phrase 🙂

And of course the famous witches’ scene:

First Witch. Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

All. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Second Witch. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

All. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

I love this rhyme, when King Duncan executes the Thane of Cawdor for treason and promotes Macbeth:

Go pronounce his present death,
and with his former title greet Macbeth.

and when the sentence is executed and the death reported back:

Nothing in his life
became him like the leaving it.

Macbeth:

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Lady Macbeth, when pondering her husband’s potential abandonment of their plan for pity of King Duncan:

Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.

and…

Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye,
your hand, your tongue. Look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t.

Macbeth, on the assassination:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly.

Macbeth after the crime, remorseful:

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—

Which reminds of the last time we went to New York City and saw the interactive, participatory show Sleep No More, loosely based on Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth, after the crime, driven mad and to some extent remorseful:

Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
then, ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?—Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.

And Macbeth’s soliloquy lament on her death:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macduff, as he fights Macbeth to the death:

Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o’ the time:
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted on a pole, and underwrit,
‘Here may you see the tyrant.’

Macbeth in response:

I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’

Books

My reading in 2021

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2021 was an interesting year in reading for me. Somewhat oddly, I felt a real challenge being interested to read this year. I say oddly because between the pandemic and what I do for work (Bookship, a social reading app), it should have been lab conditions for a great year in reading.

Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland

Still, I managed to read 36 books (45 in 2020, 41 in 2019). My reading in 2021 centered around a few themes: my book club reads (for the Greener Reader bookclub), my trip to Iceland and associated historical interests, and the usual dose of “Comfort Food” reading: some science fiction and thriller old favorites and new reads.

One of the highlights of my year was a trip to Iceland with Michelle and our old friends the Jensens. That lead to some focused Iceland reading: Jar City (Arnaudur Indradason) and The Darkness (Ragnar Jonasso), two thrillers by Icelandic authors, and the Book of Reykjavik, a collection of stories by Icelandic authors about Reykjavik. But we can’t go to Iceland without thinking about one of my long-term interests, the “Northern Thing” as Auden called it: the fascination with all things Viking, northern, Odin, Thor and all that. So together with my travel companions we read Grettir’s Saga, which I had been struggling with in past attempts. This time we read the Jesse Byock translation and it was a revelation: hilarious, scary, modern. I wrote more about it, here and here.

Cocktail I made in Iceland with hand-foraged crowberrries, and an Icelandic folktale book

While we were in Iceland, my friend Thomas recommended The Last Duel, by Eric Jagar, another medieval tale soon to be a motion picture starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck????, so we all read that together as well. The Last Duel was another revelation: a time portal to medieval France through the lens of the last judicial trial-by-combat, a duel to the death over an accusation of rape. A true story, and not a bad movie either. Continuing the Northern thing, I read Hrolf Kraki’s Saga again (Poul Anderson version, I dunno, 4th or 5th time probably). Then read Poul Anderson’s trilogy The Last Viking, about the life of Harald Sigurdsson, aka Harald Hard Rede, aka Harald Hardrada, who’s life would not be believable as fiction, it is so fantastical. Forced into exile in Russia after a disastrous battle at the age of 15, he landed at the court of Prince Yaroslav, where he remained until he sailed to Constantinople, joining and eventually leading the Varangian guard responsible for protecting the Emperor himself. From thence he crusaded to Jerusalem, led many battles and gained much wealth. He was imprisoned after a jealous Empress wanted to marry him, whereas he had eyes for someone else. Escaping back to Russia, he married Yaroslav’s daughter, eventually returning to Norway and became King. He then claimed, but was unsuccessful in actually obtaining, the Kingship of both Denmark and England. The latter cause led him to England in 1066, to his death at the hands of Harold Godwinson, who would himself shortly die at the hands of William the Conqueror. Crazy story.

Finishing up the Anderson series led me to read 1066, by David Howarth, a shortish book wonderfully recounting all the events that led to William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. That led to another grisly read, The Crusaders by Dan Jones, which I also read with, and at the recommendation of, my friend Thomas. Harald makes a minor appearance there as a Crusader, but really it’s the entire history of the Crusades in this book. If you think humanity has not improved in the last 1000 years, think again and read this book. It’s a litany of horror and cruelty on all sides. However bad we are, we’re not that.

Lastly, in the historical vein, my favorite author, Steven Pressfield, released A Man at Arms, a tale set in the holy land shortly after the death of Christ. Perhaps not as a good as Gates of Fire (one of my favorites), it’s still a great read.

Through the book club I am in, I read some wonderful fiction, much of which I probably would not have read otherwise. Kawai Strong Washburn’s wonderful mythical/modern Hawaii tale Sharks in the Time of Saviors, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Another Country by James Baldwin, and outside book club but via my book club leader, Justine Espiritu, the wonderfully cynical and scandalous Bonjour Tristesse by Francois Sagan, about a wonderfully cynical French teenager. Infomocracy is a near-future sci-fi exploration of what a global democracy might look like. A good effort, although (un-intentionally by the author I am sure), it felt more like a 1984-inspired info-autocracy).

A couple of one-off books I really enjoyed, outside my major themes:

The Ministry of Truth: the Biography of George Orwell’s 1984. Last year I read, and was horrified by, 1984, which I’d not read since high school and seems so prescient about today’s media landscape (and I am not just, or even primarily, talking about our previous knucklehead-in-chief.). The Ministry of Truth explores Orwell and all the ways this book came to be.

How Music Works, by David Byrne. I’m thinking about, and have started work on, a new form of music discovery (read more here.) Looking for inspiration, I read How Music Works, by the former leader of Talking Heads. It is about how music is made, marketed, discovered, consumed, appreciated, taught, and more. I particularly loved his chapter on Curation, which, if you’ve read my other writings, is something you know I am interested in. I read this book with Thomas and another friend, and continue to be surprised at how much social reading improves my enjoyment of a book.

In the “comfort food” category, I re-read William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer and Count Zero ( I love both but I think the second book is even better than the well-known first book ). I really enjoyed Midnight, Water City by Hawaii-based author Chris McKinney. I re-read Foundation in anticipation of the some-what disappointing tv series. A few of the notable thrillers I read: Dragonfish, by Vu Tran; I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes, An Honorable Man (Paul Vidich), and two Israel-focused thrillers: The English Teacher (Yiftach Atir) and A Long Night in Paris (Dov Alfon). The former was particularly enjoyable and felt like an Israeli version of A Perfect Spy, complete with a wonderfully realized middle-aged male self-deception. Victoria Dougherty’s Welcome to the Hotel Yalta was a fun collection of cold war Eastern Europe spy tales, a set up to her novels.

So, for 2021: social reading was a big win. The most meaningful books I read, I read socially. I plan to do more in 2022. As for what I’ll be reading? Well, I have a bunch of good books lined up through book club. Outside of book club, I hope to read Brave New World, Circe, and hopefully some good history. I’m already started on The Thin Red Line (fiction on battle of Guadalcanal), Two Years Before the Mast (historical sailing adventure), and The Windup Girl (for book club). And I hope to read more about music discovery!

Books, Ruminations

My shoulder. The Obstacle is the Way

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So, I’m having shoulder surgery in January, for a torn rotator cuff. Too much tennis, not enough outside strength training. I basically won’t be able to use my right arm for a month after the surgery, it will be in a sling. And tennis is probably 1 year away after rehab. 

The shoulder really hasn’t been right for some years now. While this surgery is seriously inconvenient, and likely painful for awhile, I’m looking at this at the path to getting my shoulder back to full health and full strength. Rather than looking at the downsides. As Ryan Holiday says, The Obstacle is the Way. 

To get myself ready, I’m collecting some of my favorite Marcus Aurelius quotes from The Meditations, the “bible”, if you will, of Stoic philosophy. These from the Gregory Hayes translation. (This is more for me than you :)).

The first one seems a bit too literal 🙂

Practice, even things you don’t expect to need.

Practice even what seems impossible.

The left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice. But it guides the reins better than the right. From practice.

I’m going to be practicing left hand stuff for awhile!

Control your mind and attitude:

Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.

Shorter, my adaptation: Never be overheard complaining – even to yourself.

How not to feel a victim:

“It’s unfortunate that this has happened.”

No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. Why treat the one as a misfortune rather than the other as fortunate? Can you really call something a misfortune that doesn’t violate human nature? Or do you think something that’s not against nature’s will can violate it? But you know what its will is.

Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself? So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

It’s not what happens to you. It’s how you respond.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed.

Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

Control your mind, as well as your outward behavior.

From Apollonius I learned: to be the same in all circumstances—intense pain, the loss of a child, chronic illness.

Looking at events as opportunities, not problems.

That every event is the right one. Look closely and you’ll see.

Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales.

Keep looking closely like that, and embody it in your actions: goodness—what defines a good person.

A visual to help you

To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

Managing pain

[On pain:] Unendurable pain brings its own end with it.

Chronic pain is always endurable: the intelligence maintains serenity by cutting itself off from the body, the mind remains undiminished. And the parts that pain affects—let them speak for themselves, if they can.

Mental vacations

People try to get away from it all — to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like.

By going within.

Other people

What’s there to complain about? People’s misbehavior? But take into consideration: • that rational beings exist for one another; • that doing what’s right sometimes requires patience; • that no one does the wrong thing deliberately; • and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried.

. . . and keep your mouth shut.

and

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.

The big picture

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

Peace

The tranquillity that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. (Is this fair? Is this the right thing to do?) < . . . > not to be distracted by their darkness. To run straight for the finish line, unswerving.

Focus on essentials

Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.

Maintaining control of your emotions and reactions

 The best revenge is not to be like that.

How the mind conducts itself. It all depends on that. All the rest is within its power, or beyond its control—corpses and smoke.

Have purpose and chase that

Then what is to be prized? An audience clapping? No. No more than the clacking of their tongues. Which is all that public praise amounts to—a clacking of tongues. So we throw out other people’s recognition. What’s left for us to prize? I think it’s this: to do (and not do) what we were designed for.

The Obstacle is the Way

In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them.

But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

The impediment to action advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way.

The Obstacle is the Way.

( This article edited left handed 🙂 )

Books, Literary Curiosities

Madness is better than defeat

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Madness is better than defeat. Down the river is the light of reason.

(From Orson Welles’s screenplay for an unproduced adaptation of Heart of Darkness 1939)

I recently made two simultaneous discoveries. And they go together quite well. The first, after a recent trip to Iceland, is Víkingur Ólafsson, the Icelandic pianist, whose recently-released Mozart & Contemporaries breathes new life into, well, Mozart and his contemporaries. It goes well with the book that follows, so go ahead and push the play button below before proceeding. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Is there any feeling a bibliophile loves more than looking for a book for (literally) years, finally finding it, only to find it exceeds your wildest expectations?

My book recommendation engine The Hawaii Project mentioned Madness is Better than Defeat by Ned Beauman to me when it was released back in 2017 because it knew I would like it (it’s good at that kind of thing). I put it on my TBR. A blurb:

A wild, astonishing literary thriller by arguably England’s most accomplished young writer, about Manhattan and Hollywood in the 1930s, Mayan gods, and a CIA operation gone terribly wrong–the Man Booker short-listed Ned Beauman’s magnum opus thus far.

Those of you who know my love of espionage books, and the works of Tim Powers, could guess this might appeal to me. Declare, and Last Call, especially – they are in the very small set of books I’ve ever given 5 stars too, back when I thought ratings and reviews were a useful thing to do. And this book has that same “smell”. It especially whiffs of Declare. But still, I’d been disappointed before, so I didn’t just order it. And strangely, it never made it to any of my local bookstores. (I know, I could look at it online; but it’s not the same). So, year after year, whenever I was in a bookstore, used bookstores especially, I would look for it along with other wayward books. Never found it.

Until yesterday.

Down in Raleigh, NC, visiting with people where I grew up, I wandered into Mr. Mike’s Used Bookstore. (No, not Magic Mike’s, although I might have made that joke to my wife…). There, along with a book about Caesar’s Legions, Caroline Alexander’s book about The Iliad, and a book about the science of music perception (thinking about doing a music startup/project…), there it was. The cover in all its Mayan glory.

My haul from Mr. Mike’s.

Well, I liked the cover quite a bit more than what I’d seen before. The fonts looked good. The book had a nice feel to it. Read the first page. It might as well have picked up where Indiana Jones left off – a warehouse full of mysterious objects and an investigation by a CIA officer. By page two, we’ve encountered rum aged in barrels made from coffin wood, which has magical properties:

This is how I know. During the failed Cuban War of Independence in 1868, a wealthy Spanish family called the Azpeteguias, who owned sugar plantations near the Valle de Vinales, were besieged inside their villa by their own farmers. They died of yellow fever, all sixteen of them, before they could be relieved by the army. It was decided to send the bodies to Havana for burial to ensure they wouldn’t be desecrated by the locals. But the farmers ambushed the caravan in the hills, prying open the coffins and tipping the bodies into the dust. In 1953, when I was still working for the agency in Cuba, I did a significant favor for a friend of mine in Pinar del Rio and afterward he gave me a bottle of rum that had been aged in a barrel made from staves of Azpeteguia coffin wood.

I have about twelve ounces left. It’s what’s called a diagnostic liquor. According to folk medicine, the long aftertaste is the most volatile fraction of the rum escaping out of your mouth as tinted vapor after it’s already washed through your guts. You taste yourself on it. There are some old bourbons with the same property…

I get that rare feeling. Of having taken one small wrong turn, and left the real world to enter a just-slightly-adjacent world that’s just as real, but not quite the same, where the same rules don’t apply.

OK. Sold. It goes into the pile to go home with me. ($4.99 btw).

Now, I’m on the plane and diving in.

Quickly, after learning about magic rum, one of our protagonists is dragged away from a large wager involving a longshoreman wrestling a live octopus in a diving tank, force-fed a nebulizing spray that instantly sobers him up, and taken to see his oh-so-rich father, who informs him he is to go to the Spanish Honduras to disassemble and bring home (!) a newly discovered Mayan ruin. (Which ruins our rum-drinking CIA hero claim have magical properties btw). Meanwhile a young aspiring filmmaker is taken to see a hermetic Howard Hughes like character who owns a film studio, was involved in a gondola crash that nearly killed him, and now lives in a spider’s nest of bell-laded cloths made from the Gondola to prevent anyone from sneaking up on him unawares. (Meanwhile, the Vikingur Olafsson’s Phantom-of-the-Opera-like music in the playlist above is playing in my headphones…). I feel like I’m watching an old black-and-white film with this soundtrack… Anyway our filmmaker is to go make a movie at the same Mayan temple. And a local newspaper editor is berating his young gossip writers for their lack of performance while a small Pomeranian barks at him to calm down (this scene is hysterical but I really cannot do it justice here), eventually deciding to send one of them along with the film crew to the Honduras.

By this time, I am valiantly and fruitlessly trying to stifle hysterical laughter, the tears are running down my face behind my COVID mask, my wife is shushing me and I’m starting to draw alarmed looks from my fellow  passengers.

Then there is the young archaelogist who has stumbled into the middle of an orgy involving her archaelogist mentor who escaped from the Mayan jungle with, shall we say, a new outlook on life? And suggests she go to the Honduras in his stead?

And I’m only 40 pages in.

This is why I read.

I’m reading as slowly as possible because I know I’ve found magic, and that I’ll only be able to experience this magic once for the first time, and it might not last. Every other paragraph is a turn of phrase or sentence I want to highlight. The writing is outstanding, this is fantasy writing done by a Booker-nominated writer with a demented imagination. That transporting experience when you realize that for 2 hours you’ve been completely unaware of anything happening around you.

What books click for people is very personal; your mileage may vary (online reviews seem to adore this book or hate it or both, no middle ground here). But Madness is Better than Defeat starts as a virtuoso performance. Worth a read.