Sunday, February 04, 2024

How to Fail, a great read by a very successful writer


A New Year resolution was to read more. That's it. Nothing fancy, just read more.

I'll update on here with reviews, possibly clustering on a few authors that I've binged on.

I breezed through the very readable How to Fail by Elizabeth Day, whose novels Paradise City and Magpie I really enjoyed. I have listened to the podcast too, but not enough to recall it in great detail.

This is a memoir of sorts, but ever so slightly self-helpy too. It gave me flashes of Miranda Sawyer's Out of Time - Midlife If You Still Think You Are Young, and triggered similar bouts of personal self-reflection, which I won't rehash, but I splurged on that here.

By my own measures, Elizabeth Day hasn’t failed at all: I would have loved to have been a feature writer for a national newspaper like the Observer, but it's all relative. She also got to Cambridge, and is an acclaimed novelist and successful podcaster. On the surface, it's hard to see the failure, but I suppose that's the point.

But this a warm and deeply honest book that is hugely generous for the personal vulnerability she shares.

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