April was a difficult month: adapting from Barbados to Serbia, loads of work, and the background worries about war and climate change. Did anyone see the IPCC report warning that emissions need to peak by 2025? Or this blunt appraisal by the usually diplomatic UN Secretary-General:

“Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”

Anyway, books were a sanctuary for me as usual. Here’s a quick summary of what I read this month.

Escape to an Autumn Pavement by Andrew Salkey

This was another find from my explorations of second-hand bookshops in Barbados. I was surprised to find the main character, Jamaican Londoner Johnnie Sobert, grappling with his sexual identity—the book was published in 1960, so I guess it’s one of the earliest explorations of LGBTQ themes in Caribbean literature. I didn’t much enjoy the novel, though—it was a lot of time to spend in the head of a character who was not just hard to like but also hard to understand.

Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

Now this one I did enjoy. It’s not the most exciting premise: a series of vignettes of ageing Berlin residents, as told by their chiropodist. But it really works. The lives are mostly ordinary, but Katja Oskamp makes them into something beautiful and emotionally powerful. The book reminded me of the work of Svetlana Alexievich, which I wrote about here.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

Everyone seems to love this book, but I didn’t. I liked that it was set in a Barbados of grim social realities, far from the “tourist paradise” image, but there were too many times when characters or events didn’t feel believable. For example, it starts with a pregnant woman going into labour and needing help, and as she wanders around the neighbourhood at night looking for help, the random house whose bell she rings just happens to be the one where her boyfriend has just killed someone. There were other strange coincidences to help the plot along too, and some of the characters’ motivations were really unclear to me.

Russia Without Putin by Tony Wood

I joined the Verso Book Club this month—£5 a month for every new ebook they publish sounded like a good deal—and this was the first book I downloaded as part of the membership. It was written in 2020, so before the full invasion of Ukraine, but I found it a great source for understanding the roots of that invasion. The “without Putin” part of the title reflects Tony Wood’s contention that although Western analysis tends to be obsessed with Putin as a personality and to view Russia’s actions purely in terms of Putin’s personal whims, moods or character traits, it’s more helpful to view Russia in terms of the domestic and international systems that were put in place after the fall of the USSR.

Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav

Another one from the Verso subscription. This one takes issue with the narrative that automation is putting people out of work—Benanav says that if that were the case, labour productivity would have risen, but in fact it’s declined. So the rise in unemployment and precarious employment is more due to a decline in demand for labour as a result of long-term industrial overcapacity. So instead of relying on robots to free us from the need for work, Benanav argues for the construction of a post-scarcity economy based on the fair allocation of necessary work and the ability to indulge in other work based on free choice rather than economic necessity.

Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher

This was another from Barbados bookshops, a battered old 1975 Harper Perennial edition of this classic of “economics as if people mattered”. I’d been meaning to read it for years, but what I didn’t realise is that it was not a sustained economic treatise on the value of doing things on a small scale, but a series of essays on a range of different topics. I found them all insightful and thought-provoking, but was disappointed that the “small is beautiful” theme wasn’t pursued more systematically.

Your Reading Recommendations

As always, please let me know about any good books you’ve read lately in the comments. And if you want to find more book bloggers’ monthly roundups, you can find those over on Feed Your Fiction Addiction.