Books I Read in April 2024

Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind is about how the golden age of prestige television drama series in the early 2000s has evolved to an era of “peak TV” in which a saturated market produced 600 new scripted series in 2022 alone. It’s a three act story which begins with how the cable channel HBO distinguished itself from network television and found enormous success and critical acclaim with complex, gritty dramas such as The Sopranos at the turn of the century, inspiring several other series led by antihero protagonists. Then the DVD rental service Netflix disrupted everything, committing to series without pilots and introducing the concept of dropping all episodes of a series at the same time. And then its competitors arrived with tech giants creating their own streaming arms, notably Apple TV, Disney+ and Amazon Prime among others, churning out new series at great expense but not always succeeding in producing high quality content. Some of the detail about the financial side of the business is quite dry, but there are some interesting anecdotes about how some of the best known television dramas were made and why HBO rejected shows like Mad Men and House of Cards. Biskind is best known as a film critic and comes across as someone who doesn’t much care for television which results in an unusual and abrupt tone. However, his deep scepticism for the subject is well placed when discussing the flawed business models and rampant corporate greed in the industry.

You Are Here by David Nicholls is the long-awaited new novel by the author of One Day. Michael, a Geography teacher, and Marnie, a freelance copy editor, embark on a 190 mile long walk across Britain from the Lake District to the North Sea coast on a group holiday set up by their mutual friend Cleo. A connection begins to blossom between Michael and Marnie, but loneliness and insecurity caused by past relationships impacts their self-confidence in the present. Marnie’s slightly extreme self-deprecation is reminiscent of Emma’s personality in ‘One Day‘ while the road trip aspect is a smaller scale version of Douglas’s tour of Europe in Us. ‘You Are Here’ doesn’t have a shock ending like ‘One Day’ – which a lot of readers will probably be grateful for – but Michael and Marnie’s journey is witty, warmly written and very enjoyable. Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Fire Weather by John Vaillant won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction last year. It is a narrative non-fiction account of a fire in May 2016 that destroyed most of Fort McMurray in Alberta, a city at the heart of Canada’s oil industry. Vaillant is good at explaining why this fire was so much more destructive than other fires, created by a perfect storm of hot and dry weather conditions with strong winds to the point where the fire was able to create tornadoes and melt vehicles. The structure of the book starts with a detailed account of the fire itself told by the people who witnessed it, while the final third is about climate change more broadly, explaining how petrochemical companies stopped funding climate science research in the 1970s when it became clear how the industry was implicated. This week, Fort McMurray residents have been told to be ready to evacuate again due to an out-of-control wildfire. Although this has barely made the news in the UK, Vaillant’s book is a sobering reminder of the consequences of climate change and that extreme wildfires could happen much more regularly.