Tower and Town, February 2021

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A Good Read

Three very different books this month, each in their own way addressing how we think, process and use information, and how we form opinions and make decisions.

George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for Lincoln in the Bardo. He's also a teacher of creative writing at Syracuse University, NY, and in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain he has created a masterclass in reading. Developing the notes from his classes on the Russian short story, he accompanies us through the reading of stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev, asking 'what do you think about the characters and situations, and why? What do you know so far? What more do you know now? Has your opinion changed? Why? How has the writer created or built on, or subverted your expectations?' It's a painstaking look at how stories are built and how we read them, written in a relaxed chatty style which I can see some people might find a tad irritating, but (I know) who am I to talk? I'd recommend this to reading groups who might want to make their discussions a bit more formal and structured without going into academic critical theory (which is incompatible with wine and crisps in my experience), and of course to anyone who hasn't read the classic Russian writers. 

David Omand's How Spies Think also asks 'what do we know, and how, and is it what we expected?'. The former director of GCHQ lays out in ten lessons the processes that analysts go through in evaluating information and assessing threats. Omand's book shows how to recognise our own knee-jerk reactions and gauge their validity and credibility. We could all usefully learn how to identify group-think, conspiracies, agendas and misinformation, even those of us not responsible for national security. 

November Road by Lou Berney is about the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, based on the theory that it was organised by the Mafia. The main protagonist, an amoral operative for a mob boss, realises that he knows too much, and will almost certainly be 'eliminated' before the FBI catch up with him. He takes to the road, using all his experience, contacts and knowledge to anticipate and double-bluff the hitman sent after him, and takes up with a woman who has left her alcoholic husband, reasoning that her presence will provide a disguise to buy him time. It's a sweetly tentative love story, a road novel and a relentless and twisty thriller.

Debby Guest