Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?

Your round-up of the weekend’s literary reviews Dec 16/17

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Just one week to go and this time next week many of us will be too full of turkey to even contemplate reading a newsletter, although, don’t forget that my Twelve Days of Christmas Writing Advice will start next Sunday so leave a little room to digest the twelve brilliant non-fiction writers I have lined up for you.

At this time of year, it’s impossible not to focus on Christian festivals and the stories that many of us in the West know so well — a baby born in a manger, a mother who had been visited by an angel. But how much do we know of the origins of other religions around the world? Probably not nearly enough, particularly if we enjoy sharing opinions on current news events. A new book published in January, THE HOUSE DIVIDED, aims to fix that.

For example, did you know that the first prophet Muhammad, who rose before dawn to prepare for his first prayers, cut his sleeve off rather than wake his sleeping cat, Muezza? And yet for any cat owner this makes perfect sense.

THE HOUSE DIVIDED by Barnaby Rogerson is a book about ‘the making of the Middle East’ and provides an important history of Islam. He explains how from the earlier stories of the prophet Muhammad, Muslim followers split into two camps over who should be his successor:

‘For the Shia, Mohammed’s cousin Ali was his appointed successor, “sanctioned by the same divine spirit that had revealed the Koran to the Prophet”,’ explains The Telegraph in its review this weekend. ‘But Mohammed’s companions Abu Bakr and Omar staged a “coup”. To the Sunni, these companions are revered as saintlike figures, while the Shia “effectively ignore, if not actively denigrate” them. Fourteen centuries later, the two factions are led by Sunni Saudi Arabia on one side and Shi’ite Iran on the other, characterised here as “keffiyeh-wearing Arab kings” and “black-turbanned ayatollahs”.’

The history runs right up to present day, though The Telegraph reviewer had some criticisms of how it reports on that. Overall though this book got four out of five stars, and would perhaps be a good place to start in understanding the origins of people and culture, and yes, sadly, conflicts.

‘The House Divided is a rich and revealing book with which to start discovering the complexities and contemporary import of Middle Eastern history.’

You can buy THE HOUSE DIVIDED here.

A lot of the newspapers were focusing on TV this weekend, what with the big Christmas sofa marathon awaiting us, and so they were a bit thin on the ground when it came to books, but here’s another from The Telegraph and it’s an unusual one as regular followers will know I don’t often feature children’s books (let me know if you’d like me to though!).

SNAIL by Minu Kim is a picture book marketed at two to five year olds, but might it have a moral in it that we could all live by? It certainly has some beautiful pictures.

‘This charming, exquisitely drawn debut story by the Korean author and illustrator Minu Kim is a case in point. “Stay here, we’re too fast for you,” a little boy is told by his big brother, who is setting out on a cycle ride with his friends. But the child will not be deterred and peddles after the older boys as they speed away down a deserted road, out of town and through an increasingly empty rural landscape. The story contains barely 300 words, which are a masterclass in pathos.’

When the little boy falls off his bike, he starts to notice the world around him, and everything suddenly turns from monochrome to technicolour.

‘… he stops to observe a snail climbing up a tree – and has a revelation: “The boy’s heart grew light, like a cloud. ‘I’ll take it slow. All I have to do is keep my eyes on the sky.’” And having grasped this defining truth, he cycles happily on his way, in a sudden burst of colour…. As Kim explains in an afterword: “Sometimes, the sky, the wind, the grass and the trees might just tell you something that no one ever told you. Don’t be scared if that happens, just be amazed and happy. It means you are a hero.”‘

If you would like to share this beautiful tale with someone special over the festive season, or even just read it yourself, then you can buy SNAIL here.

Elon Musk’s plan to create a settlement on Mars fills me with dread — haven’t we done enough damage to our own planet without having to go and mess around with the others? But he is a man on a mission, quite literally, and our next book featured in many of the weekend’s literary pages. A CITY ON MARS by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith aims to look at whether that is even possible. The subtitle is Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space and Have We Really Thought This Through? which from this review of A CITY ON MARS alone I would answer, no. For example, any form of natural human reproduction would be nigh on impossible thanks to the whole low-gravity thing meaning that ‘fluids’ would fail to flow in the ‘right direction’ — ok, we’ve got it.

Stuart Jeffries reviewing in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine says that just the thought of being trapped in a small capsule on a six month trip to Mars with Musk and his blueprints for Martian settlement is enough to put him off, but according to this book the idea of inhabiting Mars is even more unpleasant than he has imagined.

‘The average surface temperature is -60C (-76F). There’s no breathable air, but plenty of dust storms that blot out the sun for weeks at a time. On the plus side, radiation is plentiful. There’s no soil, but lots of regolith – gravel, basically – which is so useless for agriculture that, if you’ve seen Matt Damon in The Martian, you’ll know this would mean developing a taste for space potatoes with a faecal tang. It’s like an off-planet Death Valley with fewer services and no coffee shops. Not even a Costa.’

No coffee on Mars, you say? Just imagine how irritable everyone would be…

Anyway, the one good thing of course is that if Musk and Bezos and that lot get a head start on us, we will at least be able to forget the Martians and get on with the job of being humans for a while in their absence. So let’s support their mission!

You can buy A CITY ON MARS here.

And that is where I think I’ll leave it this week as the review pages were just so thin on the ground. We’ll forgive them, it’s Christmas.

These Sunday round-ups will be taking a break for the next couple of weeks seeing as I expect the newspapers will be too, so see you on the other side — I wonder which books we have to look forward to in 2024. And if next year is the year you’re going to finally write your book, don’t forget to join my creative writing group — our first session is January 1st! Let’s start the new year as we mean to go on!

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