While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today.
Slowly, everything – trees, houses, road signs, other cars – begins to fade into the vanishing point in my rear view mirror. There is nothing but me and Radio 2’s Sara Cox and a vast expanse of rugged, rusty moorland, pockmarked with silver-topped pools and giant, leather-skinned mountains looming on the horizon. I’ve seen photographs of Rannoch Moor: blue skies, limpid pools, auburn swathes of heather and gorse, strikingly spare and beautiful. But now, with dusk encroaching, rather than spare and beautiful, it feels raw and alien, and as the only car in sight melts away into the gloom, I discover I am a little spooked. I pull off at the Three Sisters viewpoint and step out of the car.
Early in my first pregnancy, about three years ago, I did a thing that a lot of pregnant women do. I picked up my phone and scrolled through videos of pregnant women doing cool things. In one, a woman with a big belly—she must have been about seven months—was surfing. She wore a bikini, and her legs looked strong. Her hair blew behind her shoulders when she slid down a wave. When I watched the video, I thought, Wow, good for her! in a not-sarcastic way. Weeks later, on modified bed rest to protect my endangered pregnancy—marooned on my sofa, unable to confidently shower or walk upstairs for fear of triggering labor—I thought of the surfing woman again, this time huffily. “Good for her!” I said to myself, and returned to my book.
I reflected on how a true sense of mischief requires one to cultivate a certain reputation for sternness, so as not to give the game away. Of course people who know you will eventually catch on. You can’t fool them for ever.
I looked down at my feet, and I thought: somewhere under there, under the carpet, under the floorboards, are the very joists we stood on.
With a pitched battle raging over the future of these public lands, Josh Jackson’s The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands, a beautiful book of photographs, maps, and illustrations coupled with accounts of Jackson’s journeys of discovery to far-flung but public corners of California, is incredibly timely.