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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life

From Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

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The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers review – the midlife adultery story our generation deserves

This is a witty takedown of insufferable millennial New Yorkers who have managed to ruin even sex

In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, Cora, a millennial mother, craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who is “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up (yes, that’s his job title. They all have absurd jobs). The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. I’d call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down.

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They hang out with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because of her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”. Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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Made in America by Edward Stourton review – why the ‘Trump doctrine’ is no aberration

From territorial overreach to deportations, the current president is not as much of an anomaly as he might seem

‘Almost everyone is a little bit in love with the USA,” declares Edward Stourton in his introduction to Made in America. And why not? It is the land of razzle-dazzle and high ideals, of jazz music, Bogart and Bacall, Harriet Tubman and Hamilton, a nation that was anti-colonialist and pro-liberty from its conception, whose Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal”. Why, then, does this same country so often produce clown-show politics, racism at home and abroad, and imperial ambitions, latterly in Greenland and Canada? Why does it regularly show contempt for the world order it helped create? Why did it once again elect Donald Trump?

These contradictions have kept an army of journalists, White House-watchers and soothsayers in business for generations. Alistair Cooke, perhaps the greatest British exponent of the genre, interpreted the country via the minutiae of everyday life, observing people at the beach, say, or riding the subway. Stourton, another BBC veteran, who first reported from Washington in the Reagan years, takes almost the opposite approach. He looks at Trump and Trumpism through the run of history, arguing in a series of insightful essays that the 47th Potus is not an American aberration but a continuation, an echo of dark and often neglected aspects of the country’s past. Trump, he concludes, is “as American as apple pie”.

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When a heart attack left me in a coma, my hallucinations inspired a novel – and a new life

After his heart stopped beating for 40 minutes, the former lawyer experienced weeks of hallucinations. The visions he experienced during his recovery set him on the path to a new career

On the evening of Monday 1 February 2021, during the third Covid lockdown, my wife Alexa and I sat down on the sofa to have sausages and chips in front of the TV. The children were tetchy, and we were worn out from trying to home-school them while working from home, me as a lawyer in the music industry and Alexa as a charity fundraiser. But at least, Alexa said to me, we had made it through January.

Then I started making strange noises. “Are you joking?” she asked. Then, “are you choking?”

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Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules!

After 35 years of teaching fiction writing, the prize-winning author shares her wisdom. First tip? Don’t write what you know…

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to write a first sentence so idiosyncratic, so indelible, so entirely your own that it makes people sit up or reach for a pen or say to a beloved: “Listen to this.” A first line needn’t be ornate or long. It needn’t grab you by the lapels and give you what for. A first line is only a demand for further attention, an invitation to the rest of the book. Whisper or bellow, a polite request or a monologue meant to repel interruption. I believe a first line should deliver some sort of pleasure by being beautiful or mysterious or funny or blunt or cryptic. Why would anyone start a novel, “It was June, and the sun was out,” which could be the first line of any novel or story? It tells you nothing. It asks nothing of you.

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The best recent poetry – review roundup

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien; Plastic by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door by Michelle Penn; Jonah and Me by John F Deane; Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)
This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the passing of friends and loved ones as well as human desire and culpability. A central sequence entitled Impasse is inspired by Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. These poems plunge us into the landscape of the detective hero’s world, a process O’Brien describes as “analogous to dream-life, where certain motifs (cities, railway stations, libraries in my case) recur without ever abolishing the mystery that animates them”. The penultimate poem of the final sequence ushers in an elegiac, pensive tone as the speaker reminds us not to forget “birdsong / the descant of the rising lark / that never ends, composed of silence”. The book reinforces O’Brien’s authority as a chronicler of our times, “love and death consorting as they must”.

Plastic by Matthew Rice (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
This book-length poem explores the experiences of a night worker turned poet. Structured as a continuous narrative, it illustrates the frustrations, inequities and relentless cycle of 21st-century manual labour: “The night is proletarian, a morgue of ghosts / given the present is a borderline”. Rice documents the tragic incidents and surreal imaginings that occur within the nightmarish confines of a plastic moulding factory. “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift / for good at the end of a rope / another’s heart gave out at 3am / performing a task as menial as mine.” This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with “hell as an idea of what work could be”; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, “the treasure buried in my father’s field”.

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Andrew Miller: ‘DH Lawrence forced me to my feet – I was madly excited’

The novelist on how The Rainbow made him want to write, the strange genius of Penelope Fitzgerald and finding comfort in Tintin

My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon.

My favourite book growing up
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It’s a story set in Roman Britain; the Eagle is the lost standard of the ninth legion. I was a boy already obsessed by all things Ancient Roman (the alternative to the kind of boy obsessed with dinosaurs). One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. To me, this voluptuous woman gazing at herself in a mirror was my mother. It’s interesting to me how the setting in which you read is such an integral part of the reading experience.

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Blank Canvas by Grace Murray review – a superb debut from a 22-year-old author

In this energisingly original novel, an emotionally detached English student at college in New York tells a big lie

Lies offend our sense of justice: generally, we want to see the liar unmasked and punished. But when the deception brings no material gain, we might also be curious about what purpose the lie serves – what particular need of their own the liar is attempting to meet. This is precisely what Grace Murray’s witty, assured debut explores: not just the consequences of a lie but the ways in which it can, paradoxically, reveal certain truths.

At a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year by claiming that her father has just died of a heart attack. In fact, he is alive and well back in Lichfield, England. This lie is the jumping-off point for an unpacking of Charlotte’s psychology, as well as the catalyst for her relationship with fellow student Katarina, a quasi-love story that forms the book’s main narrative.

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The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury review – a hymn to positivity

The science writer pragmatically shows how optimism can bring about real improvements in everyday life and change in the wider world

Can optimism influence events in your life? Does fate smile upon those who see the glass as half full? The science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury believes so. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World is his hymn to positivity, though fear not: it’s not a self-help book and there is more to it than platitudes about manifesting and living your best life.

The author realised he was a natural optimist following the premature death of his wife from cancer. In the aftermath, he made an active decision “not to spend any more time in limbo than I already had” and “cultivated the idea that the future would be bright”. Optimism is, he says, “central to the human psyche”. It fosters social progress and encourages individuals to be resilient and withstand stress, to be more successful at work and create stronger bonds with friends and family. Among the models for optimism offered here are Ernest Shackleton who, along with his crew, survived being stranded in the Antarctic, and Helen Keller, who lost her hearing and sight after a childhood illness and later, in her 1903 essay Optimism, wrote about discovering hope and joy.

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