I took a long road trip across Europe in June and listened to some good audiobooks, as well as the books I read on Kindle or paper. Here’s a summary of what I would and would not recommend.

News From Nowhere by William Morris

A man falls asleep in 1890s London and wakes up in a socialist utopia of the future. Although it’s described as a novel, it’s really more of a political tract with a loose fictional framing. Morris’s goal is to explore how British society could function without money and private property.

I found it interesting that Morris’s vision of the future looks a lot like the past, with smaller communities living simpler lives and showing more respect for the environment. People actually enjoy work because they are producing things they and their neighbours need, and they make them as beautiful as they can. So it’s a craft-based future in which people don’t see the point of turning everything over to machines.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi

This year’s International Booker Prize winner is an English translation of a Chinese novel that is itself billed as a translation of an earlier Japanese novel set in 1930s Taiwan. It’s a beautiful and delicate portrait of a relationship that is forbidden for two reasons: firstly because it’s between a representative of the Japanese colonisers and a supposedly inferior native Taiwanese islander, and secondly because it’s between two women. I can see why this won the Booker and want to write more about it soon.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s novels have been a mainstay of previous European road trips, and I listened to her latest one as I drove through eastern Europe and across the Alps to Basel for this year’s art fair.

The Things We Never Say shows us the ordinary life of schoolteacher Artie Dam and then gradually reveals all the unspoken details in the lives of Artie and those around him, from existential angst and suicidal thoughts to long-held secrets and betrayals. Like Strout’s other books, it skims along like a simple, well-told story but also leaves you thinking quite deeply about its themes—in this case, the distancing effect of those secrets on friendships and relationships, how every retreat from honesty makes it harder to achieve true connection.

Kin by Tayari Jones

My road trip listening also yielded a new entry in a category every reader will recognise: books that everyone raves about but that leave you cold. Kin has a wonderful premise, tracing the trajectories of two motherless babies as they grow into adult Black women in the 1950s American South. While Niecy tries to fill the void left by her dead mother, Annie is desperate to find out why her mother abandoned her.

It should work well, and yet I found that we spend too long in side-plots and not enough time on what mattered. And there were several occasions when the characters behaved in such bizarre ways that it broke the fictional spell and made disbelief very difficult to suspend.

East Wind: West Wind by Pearl S. Buck

For a recent Wall Street Journal story I wrote about entertainment in the Great Depression, I interviewed English professor Peter Conn, and he was so enthusiastic about Pearl Buck that I decided to try her work for the first time.

East Wind: West Wind tells the story of a generational clash between Chinese traditions and Western influence. It reminded me of later post-colonial literature in that way, and it was quite even-handed in helping me sympathise both with the characters who wanted to embrace modernity and those who valued tradition. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t love it as much as I expected to, and I plan to read more by Buck, who I find gets quite scant attention given her status as the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right by Oliver Eagleton

I downloaded this book on my Kindle but kept finding myself so consumed with loathing for the man that I was unable to read it without feeling sick. Now that Starmer’s odious political career has finally ended, I was able to read it with more equanimity, seeing it as a retrospective story of how a man can abandon every single principle he might ever have possessed in blind pursuit of power and then, when he has achieved his goal, find himself having absolutely no idea what to do with it.

For those of you outside the UK, the specifics of the tale will have less resonance, but the overall trajectory may give you an interesting perspective on your own set of invertebrate, focus-group-obsessed, centre-left hypocrites.

How was your reading month?

I hope you’ve read some good books this month. Let me know in the comments which ones you’d recommend (or not), or tell me your thoughts on the books I’ve highlighted above.