“Football was better in the good old days!” But was it really? Today, Marcus, Luke and Vish state the case for why football is actually better off with fewer Vinnie Jones type characters. I am sure Gazza agrees…

Marcus then plays the hits by reminiscing about the time a 35-year-old Gabriel Batistuta nearly signed for Fulham and shoehorning everyone's (no-one's) favourite British-Canadian tennis playing Greg into the show. And no, it’s not Greg Proops…

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December 15 – 17, 2023

November 16, 2023 – January 27, 2024

Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner, John Williams
Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals, Greg Jackson
Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss, Jen Beagin

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is about a bedridden woman in a decrepit mansion experiencing vertiginous opium hallucinations for pages on end. I’m glad I read it but I’m not sure I would recommend it. Speaking of opium, I also finally finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, another kind of fever dream (originally written for money, it’s a mishmash of autobiography, philosophy, and outright plagiarism) that is both completely bonkers and a foundation of modern literary criticism—in it, Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief.” One early reviewer of it expressed “astonishment that the extremes of what is agreeable and disgusting can be so intimately blended by the same mind.” Maybe I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. But a primary purpose of these lists is to give people ideas of what they might enjoy, more than what they might profitably suffer through. So, these books gave me pleasure this year: among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It for This, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. I learned a lot from all of them, too.

—David S. Wallace, editor at large 

This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?

I began to read with these ideas loosely in mind. In the fall, alone in Vermont, I read James Salter’s Light Years. This is a novel about a marriage—about the surfaces of a life and the cracks beneath that surface, the eventual rupture and the aftermath of that break. You have to wonder, a little: how did these two people ruin this beautiful life in a house on a river, filled as it was with bowls of cut flowers, bottles of wine, a pony, a dog? Skating on ponds in winter and Amagansett in the summer. Who would actually wreck such a thing and why? But then I remembered, surprisingly close to the end of the novel, that my own parents had ruined just such a happiness in just such a way, perhaps more dramatically, but not so differently; I had a childhood filled with cut flowers too. This is a tragic book, but it also manages to narrativize something about happiness, about how it is always a dance between the surface and the subterranean. This dance is obscure, even to its participants. We cannot know other people or their happinesses and we cannot quite understand even our own.

I also read, this fall, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. This is a novel about two married couples, and I was interested especially in one of them. This couple is not very different from the couple in Light Years: they too have a beautiful and aesthetically oriented life characterized by a certain kind of abundance. There is also a woman whose power comes from her slight withholding, and a man who struggles against this, sometimes to the point of misery. And yet this novel is essentially comic. That is where Colwin points us in much of her work, toward that glass-half-full view of human relations and how they might be navigated; even when the actual situations might seem miserable (untenable affairs, as in Another Marvelous Thing), she takes a view of them that might be described as both clear-eyed and full of light. In Happy All the Time, happiness works its way into the narrative mostly through the characters’ acceptance of its limits, and their realizations that the fact of it is a grace. When the four characters sit down with four glasses of wine and toast “to a truly wonderful life,” I thought, Yes, there it is. I am always insisting on toasts, and remarks, on the mysterious power that lies in repeating over and over how lucky we are, really, to be in the company of those we love.

So it does exist, she thinks, happiness.

Zack Snyder's new space opera is 'derivative pulp tosh'

This week, PEN America released a report titled “Spineless Shelves” reflecting upon the cumulative effect of the last two years of book bans in US schools. Nearly 6,000 books have been banned since 2021–and that number does not include the 444 titles pulled in one district the week the report was released.

Among the key findings in the latest report include:

Copycat banning, where titles that have not been challenged in a district may be removed because a district elsewhere banned themThe removal of all the books by an author when a single title of theirs is bannedBooks on challenging topics or about marginalized identities continue to be among the most banned in schoolsBans on books have not only become more common but many of these bans have become more comprehensive and permanent.

For those paying attention to book bans, it comes as little surprise to hear that Florida and Texas top the list in number of books banned. But it’s not just in those states. All but 9 states have recorded book bans in schools since 2021.

Young adult books top the charts when it comes to book bans, too. YA books compose 58% of banned titles, followed by adult books (17%), middle grade (12%), picture books (10%), and chapter books (3%). All of this points to the reality that books written specifically for a school-age audience are the vast majority being targeted. These are the books that adults call “inappropriate,” “explicit,” or “pornographic”–even though they are for these age groups.

As the report points out, all of this data sits in an interesting position with the research on trust that parents claim to have in librarians–if 92% of them trust library workers to select and recommend age-appropriate materials for children, why all of the book bans?

Join us for a bumper Barclays preview! Marcus, Luke, Jim and Vish settle in to write some Tom Cairney fan fiction and wonder if Steve McClaren will tear his hair island out should Man United get punished by Jürgen n’ co.

Elsewhere, Stevey Cooper looks to save his skin Under The Lights™ and Chelsea vote to ban something they’ve been doing all season - very noble.

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