But what those earlier readers didn’t yet know was that all of that verbal reading offered additional benefits: It can boost the reader’s mood and ability to recall. It can lower parents’ stress and increase their warmth and sensitivity toward their children. To reap the full benefits of reading, we should be doing it out loud, all the time, with everyone we know.
The promise of prosthetics is an ending of disability, but that’s a promise from people who don’t know disabled people or disabled communities. Disability is longstanding and not going away—the future will give us new ways to be or become disabled. New viruses, new patterns of animal migration and disease thanks to climate change, new weather patterns, hopefully new ideas of work and of good bodies, too.
There is much to love in My Favourite Mistake, from eye-wateringly comical turns of phrase (what could better capture two particular types of men than “Feathery Strokers” and “Beardy Glarers”?) to Anna’s over-it venting about everything from age-related invisibility to all the time she’s wasted “constructing complaints in a manner which made the fucker-upper still like me. Same with over-apologetic, explanatory emails of refusal.” Overall, there’s a depth to the novel’s modestly proffered insights that make its more escapist elements feel well earned.
A nuanced and remarkably assured exploration of Britishness, toxic masculinity and the pernicious pull of the far right, England Is Mine charts a rapid descent into extremism fuelled by fandom and disillusionment.
What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry’s luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind: the “self-forgetfulness” it induces, a “trance of attention that is as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking”.