Fires, and being fired up
Context
In the northern hemisphere, Celtic traditions etc, the start of February marked Imbolc, midpoint between winter solstice and vernal equinox, marking the first stirrings of spring. At which point thoughts turned to spring cleaning, and thanks to Imbolc's associations with fire festivals, with an occasionally resentful eye and winter-dimm'd eye on a still-teetering Stack of Books, scorched earth modes of radical rejection and renewal flit through light-starved synapses.
I cannot lie: I have thought about just blazing away all of these books I've accumulated down the decades, the composting mass of prior enthusiasms. Metaphorically, obviously - they'd go to the charity shop, at least. I am always reminded of Henry Jones Sr's injunction to try reading books instead of burning them. And anyway, now it's the start of March. Time flies. And the world is actually on fire, by which I mean even more so than it was a week ago... so time may be shorter than we dread to think.
All of which to say that, for a short month, I managed to get through quite a few books in February, proving a point to myself about my relative interest levels. If time is going to tick out quicker than we hoped thanks to human folly then I am going to foreground any opportunities to spend free moments flopped on a bed or sofa browsing some pages, trying to make some sense of it all through non-aggressive means.
Stop wars, go books.
February 2026 reading list:
Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
Ariel's Gift - Erica Wagner
I Am Sovereign - Nicola Barker
Beneath the Night - Stuart Clark
Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny - Limmy
Orbital - Samantha Harvey
Golden Years - Ali Eskandarian
The Books
Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
Finished this one quite quickly at the start of the month. What a stunning piece of work. Malone is dying alone, possibly, retreating further and further into loneliness and unreliable, increasingly dark reveries.
"Perhaps it is just another story, told me by someone who found it funny. The stories I was told, at one time! And all funny, not one not funny. In any case here I am back in the shit."
The 1950s prompted some of the best bleak humour. There's something I love about the post-war sense of the absurd as the only proper response to the hollow certainties of human endeavours. As I noted in January's post, I had a Beckett-shaped gap in my prose experience, for some reason, and obviously this read had me pricing up all available Beckett.
Ariel's Gift - Erica Wagner
This study of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters seeks to put that volume in context as a response to the art of Sylvia Plath, particularly the collection Ariel, and some of the often confusing and divisively-portrayed biographical contexts.
I got through Birthday Letters some time the year before last I think, though have only dipped into Ariel, and that some decades ago, which I'll remedy at some point. When I found this in a charity shop it looked an interesting piece. Part biography, part critical essay, it doesn't seem to be interested particularly in trying to take sides in any of the Ted vs Sylvia projections, which probably makes it worth your while if you're interested in either or both of Hughes and Plath as poets.
I Am Sovereign - Nicola Barker
A slim, library sale volume picked up on a hunch, the cover art and blurb doing a good job of tickling my fancy. It was a speedy read (it's short), and I started off a bit unsure which way to take it. It seemed unbelievably trite, with wafer-thin characters, intrusive narrator and a slight premise, but it rapidly condensed into solid dimensions, like a tulip emerging from the bud, gradually revealing something quite lovely that then falls apart just when I was loving it.
"The Author (The Author claims) will persist in calling it 'unbelievably trite' because - at some profound level - it is unbelievably trite."
Having wanted to think I Am Sovereign was a bit too clever, The Reader finished it in a strange rush of recognition and affinity.
Beneath the Night - Stuart Clark
Another library sale interest piqued by this popular science book. Beneath the Night tries to articulate something of the enduring sense of wonder imbued in humans by the night sky, or projected out into the heavens by humans. It had lots of thought-provoking moments, though seemed to keep stumbling over a tension between veneration for The Science and a recognition that we have a deep need as a species "to understand the interconnectedness of all life". This leads Clark to try and keep all "prior" thought systems at bay with qualifying adjectives like "erroneous". Multiple astronauts communicate (Clark notes) a thoroughly mystical sense of awe, connection, and blissful unity when in space looking at Earth in context. It would have been interesting to hear more about Clark's own moments of uplift, such as we see in the final pages when he's at an observatory witnessing his own shadow flare and disappear as the planet spins and the night sky emerges.
Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny - Limmy
Touching down for a moment between a pair of cosmic explorations, Limmy's autobiography is a quick read. If you don't know who Limmy is, he's from Scotland, started as a web designer (Flash games), then became known for hilarious-to-some (e.g. me) short sketch videos with a peculiar, abrasive, often quite nihilistic-seeming tone. Then he got picked up by the BBC for a few sketch show series, has had a few books of short stories out, and here's the autobiography.
The title comes from a regular Limmy Twitter gag about whatever celebrity had recently passed away, noting that he had had the privilege of meeting (name) at a party once and finding them "Surprisingly down to earth, and very funny". He's got a lot going on behind a provocative public persona, and it's often quite dark. Non-more-west coast of Scotland vernacular (liberal use of the "c-word") might upset some palates. Quite liked it masel. Resonated.
Orbital - Samantha Harvey
This was off a pile of books a colleague was bringing in for swapsies. Really good; won the Booker Prize in 2024, and well worth awards of whatever kind. It paired well with Beneath the Night; it had the kind of valorisation of Science of that book tempered with more of a grasp of the transcendent, bringing in a poet's eye for image and the proper weight or weightlessness of a phrase. It follows the extra-planetary perspectives of six (fictionalised) inhabitants of the International Space Station, who are watching a gigantic typhoon sweep across the Pacific while dealing with the unrealities of several sunrises and sunsets in one 24 hour sequence. There are also some mice, who I liked to think of as running complex experiments on the humans.
Golden Years - Ali Eskandarian
Still yet another book I found on the shelf in a charity shop, and I'm really glad I picked this one up. Ali Eskandarian was an Iranian musician and writer, who had left Iran with parents to the USA via Germany. Golden Years details an ecstatic "beat psychosis" view of how drug use, music, art and sex all might combine to make one's 20s rocket past in a blur of confusion and missed moments. This one resonated as well.
"...multi-dimensional thoughts barely decipherable but completely understood and forgotten in a flash."
It has some excellent sections I found myself re-reading, reading aloud, sharing. There are a lot of "raw" moments that don't work as well, where the energy overwhelms the prose a bit. As the editor points out, however, before they got a chance to work on it Eskandarian was killed, shot, along with two former bandmates in a senseless New York minute.
We're left with a sense of a story that might bear telling in more detail, but that also comes across completely in this book, with its preface and endnotes from the publishers. What I was left with was a sense of a lust for life, and an enthusiasm to get on with it, whatever it is.
Started (Coming Soon! Ish! Later in March I Mean!)
I started The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, having spotted it in the library. Hey, I liked the design of the cover, and it's Rick Rubin. However, I am almost certain to get my own copy and bump the library version for books I already have awaiting attention. Spring is upon us, and the shelves are not yet cleared.
