Books I Read in December 2024

It is inevitable that You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here by Dr Benji Waterhouse will be compared to This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay. Waterhouse does for the field of psychiatry what Kay did for obstetrics and gynaecology, describing the harsh reality of working in NHS hospitals with dark gallows humour while making serious points about underfunding, bed shortages and staff burnout. The nature of serious psychiatric illness poses diagnostic challenges, particularly when patients can’t report their own symptoms and believe that they are werewolves or about to marry Harry Styles, and Waterhouse quickly finds the system is too overwhelmed to provide compassionate care. As well as portraits of colleagues and patients, Waterhouse also navigates the sources of his own anxiety and dysfunctional family issues. He still works for the NHS alongside gigs as a stand-up comedian, and he deploys humour with great effect in his insightful book about the mental health crisis. Many thanks to Random House Vintage Books for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Our Woman in Havana by Sarah Rainsford documents the years she spent as a reporter in Cuba in the early 2010s, when significant political and social change appeared to be on the horizon with Fidel and Raul Castro well into their 80s and closer relations with the United States during Barack Obama’s presidency. Rainsford covers several aspects of daily life in Cuba including sport, limited Internet access, healthcare and tourism. These observations are intertwined with tracing the steps of Ruby Phillips, the New York Times correspondent and original “woman in Havana”, and Graham Greene, who wrote ‘Our Man in Havana’ during the final years of the Batista regime. I think a bit more background about Cuba’s more recent history and the impact of the Special Period in the 1990s would have been helpful for the context around life in Cuba today, but overall this is a very interesting account of a fascinating country.

Translated from the Swiss German by Daniel Bowles, Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is a short and strange autofictional novel whose narrator (also named Christian Kracht) goes on a road trip with his elderly alcoholic mother from Sylt on the north coast of Germany to Zurich in Switzerland, shortly after she has been released from a psychiatric institution. Christian’s grandfather was a member of the Nazi party and it becomes apparent that they are both haunted by the past in different ways. I didn’t realise until after I finished ‘Eurotrash’ that it is a sequel to Kracht’s 1995 novel ‘Faserland’ which has yet to be translated into English. However, given the focus isn’t really on plot, ‘Eurotrash’ still works as a stand-alone novel, even if it’s too weird and sad to be as satirical as I would like about wealth and family dysfunction.

Box Office Poison by Tim Robey is a history of the biggest flops in cinema history, beginning with the silent epic ‘Intolerance’ in 1916 and concluding with the Hollywood adaptation of the musical ‘Cats’ in 2019, which is likely to be the last major flop of its kind now that streaming and the pandemic have likely changed cinema-going habits forever. ‘Box Office Poison’ is heavily focused on the 1990s and 2000s, with turkeys including ‘Gigli’ starring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, and doomed sequels such as ‘Speed 2: Cruise Control’. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the films included here were critically panned, although Robey argues that some fall into the “so bad it’s good” category and passionately defends ‘Cutthroat Island’ and ‘Babe: Pig in the City’. However, it appears that the majority were doomed from the very beginning of their production mostly due to hubris and out-of-control budgets. Robey is enthusiastic about his subject and ‘Box Office Poison’ is very entertaining.