Books

Anthony Trollope’s souvenir from an 1865 trip to Nuremberg was an idea for a different kind of novel. Already famous for his Barsetshire Novels, he was keen to create “a second literary identity”1 and inhabit a different culture. As an experiment, he published Nina Balatka (1867) and Linda Tressel (1868) anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. Neither proved successful, even when reissued as novels under his usually bankable name. While his sensitive exploration of interracial marriage in Nina Balatka remains compelling, Trollope’s lugubrious tale of forced marriage in Linda Tressel is much harder to love. ...

As a recovering workaholic, I’m always keen to find more sensible ways of conducting myself. Before my late 40s, I could set unrealistic goals, achieve them, and recover quickly from the inevitable exhaustion. Instead of being selective about which project to pursue, I would hurl myself like a loon at all of them. Now a reformed character, I was recently drawn to the tagline: “Forget the five-year plan: achieve your ambitions through tiny experiments.” ...

In her autobiography Through the Narrow Gate, scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong recounts finding a fellow novice in fits of laughter. She was pointing at a notice in the boot room and shrieking. Peering at the wall, Armstrong discovered minute directions on how to clean a shoe: “take it up in your left hand, cover liberally with polish, brush off and shine with a soft cloth”. Perplexed, she then spotted the punchline: “Repeat for the other shoe.” Her colleague, still helpless, added: “Can you imagine! If Mother hadn’t had that last sentence printed, all the novices would be walking round with one shoe perpetually clean and one dirty!” ...

There’s a lot of focus on making ourselves as efficient as possible: cramming our days with conspicuous activities, multitasking, and listening to podcasts at double speed. This might make sense during the good times, but we come unstuck when everything gets a bit squirrely – during a pandemic or a recession, for instance – then we suddenly realise our regime isn’t really serving us. As Andrew J. Scott and Lynda Gratton explain in The New Long Life, if we’re too focused and efficient – what they refer to as tunnelling – we can end up in a place of scarcity. With few options to choose from, we make bad decisions. Furthermore, those decisions made with a scarcity mindset are both limiting and often short-term. For the basis of this idea, see Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. What we need instead is slack, a pool of personal resources that gives us more options. This could be savings, protected blocks of time for experimentation, or regularly learning new skills. The point is not to plan for exactly when we’ll need to deploy these resources, but to have them in reserve if they’re needed. And they will be at some point. ...

One of my favourite cartoons shows a despondent chicken telling his violin teacher, “I don’t want to practice! I want to skip to the part where I’m awesome.” I feel like this every time I try to learn something new. Although I’m certainly not becoming more patient with age, I do now have a reasonably realistic idea of what it takes to actually get good at something. This is mainly due to the work of Professor Anders Ericsson, who sadly died last week. ...

Who knows how much you earn? One person? Two? Maybe nobody apart from Human Resources. Research shows that nearly 50% of couples have no idea of each other’s salary. As Alex Holder explains in Open Up,1 we often believe our salary and assets define us. These are the true indicators of our success, status, and power. Revealing that magic figure gives someone an easy way to judge our worth. And this secrecy extends beyond our salaries. In a survey by the Money Advice Service, 45% of people admitted to lying to their partners about money, especially debt. ...

When we want to quit a destructive habit, it’s common to be hard on ourselves. We don’t just start with a gentle 20-minute canter around the block, it has to be a 5k run before breakfast. Every day. There’s nobility in suffering and, of course, we crave fast results. This punishing schedule proves unsustainable and we’re confronted with yet more evidence of our flakiness. Nevertheless, many self-help books urge us to pursue dramatic change. ...

It’s the sixth time I’ve done this meme, and it’s harder this year as I’ve been a bit slack with my reading. THE RULES: Using only books you have read this year (2015), answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. Describe yourself: Fingersmith (Sarah Waters) How do you feel: The Content Machine (Michael Baskhar) Describe where you currently live: Armchair Nation (Joe Moran) If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Packing for Mars (Mary Roach) ...

True crime isn’t usually my cup of tea, but I found myself completely transfixed by Elizabeth Jenkins’s Harriet (1934) last year. Based on the infamous Penge murder trial of 1877, the novel recounts the short life and pitiful death of Harriet Staunton, a middle-class woman with what we would now call ‘learning difficulties’. Although she struggled to read and write, Harriet took great pride in her appearance and enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle with a comfortable income. Her loving mother did everything to make Harriet’s life normal, never imagining her daughter would become the victim of a merciless fortune-hunter. ...

Although originally a character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), Mrs Grundy has enjoyed greater fame as the arbiter of nineteenth-century moral standards. In Mrs Grundy’s Enemies, Anthony Patterson selects for his study a range of authors – including Emile Zola, H G Wells, and George Egerton – who courted controversy with their frank portrayal of sexuality. He discusses how the culture of censorship shaped fiction, and examines the ways in which novelists challenged the dominant conservative ideology. Ultimately, Patterson makes a convincing argument that it was the Realists of the late Victorian era who faced resistance to literary innovation, long before the Modernists of the next century. Indeed, Mrs Grundy’s Enemies was also the title of a novel by George Gissing that remained unpublished after his publisher decided it was morally dubious. ...