What I've been reading this week
11/04/25
Good evening!
Not much to report from me, non-reading wise - there might not be a newsletter next week because I’m in full PhD viva prep mode now, so reading may well take a back burner. We’ll see though, I might squeeze some in and feel particularly moved to write about it.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I finished Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy (2024), which I deeply, deeply loved. It is not as technically accomplished as the other biography I recently loved, Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography, but there is an incredible amount of heart in it, and it gave extra dimension to somebody that I already admire very much. I think the overriding impression that I got was how empathetic Pacino is on a social level, and that hasn’t abated now that he is in his 80s. For example, he expresses real regret over his part in the film Cruising (1980), which he thought was making a statement when he read the script, but can now see how much harm it did to queer communities in the general public’s perception of them. In another, more positive instance, he recognises that Scarface (1983) gained particular prominence among audiences because of Black culture, especially Hip Hop culture, who took on the film as an experience that they could relate to, and also as a film that they could have fun with. When he talks affectionately about Dog Day Afternoon (1975), he recognises that the protagonist has a trans girlfriend,and he speaks very lovingly about the softness she brings out in the character. None of this is said in a ‘look how progressive I am’ kind of way, but rather in a way that shows he is a person who is constantly thinking about what he puts out in the world, who its audience is, and how he can relate to them. This is part of a bigger emphasis on how he genuinely cares about filmmaking and his place within it, and how he can create art with other people.
On the other side of that sentiment is his transparency about money and spending, which I don’t think that a lot of famous people talk about. He freely admits that he took some projects knowing that they were rubbish, but he needed the money. At one point in his life he was down to almost zero (from $50 million) because his accountant was found to be in a Ponzi scheme and was scamming him, and because he was extremely flippant about money - he was paying for dozens of people’s phone bills, taking his kids on holiday to anywhere they wanted (at one point taking them to Denmark because they liked Lego) and generally not thinking twice about spending. It was quite refreshing to read someone be honest about these kinds of mistakes, and how he had to reevaluate his place in Hollywood because he found it difficult to get work when he was broke, because he wasn’t in fashion anymore. Nobody likes to admit these kinds of things, but he lays it all out in a pretty matter-of-fact way.
There is a lot of humour in the book, which is largely down to how he is quite a zany guy. It’s difficult to parse what he will say next -- at one point near the end he is talking about having confidence, which leads him to remember that he had confidence as a child because he would go to the shop and buy his mum’s tampons. That doesn’t usually track for a lot of people, especially very famous actors who are writing their memoirs, but there is very little off-limits for him.
As in Charlie Chaplin’s life, Pacino’s is a real rags to riches story, and you can tell how much his childhood impacted him. Actually, now I think about it, there are a lot of similarities between Chaplin and Pacino’s early years -- a single mother who was loving but didn’t have the mental fortitude to look after her children all of the time, real, bracing poverty and an almost Dickensian childhood of living and working in industrial cities. Pacino didn’t quite go to the workhouse as Chaplin did, but he did live in the Bronx’s tenements, causing trouble with a tight band of friends who were like minded bored, poor children. All of Pacino’s childhood friends died of drug-related accidents, and he puts his exception to this down to his grandmother’s fierce love, and his discovery of acting through his voracious reading of plays. He mentions his friends constantly, and there is a lingering sense that he is motivated to do well because of how much they missed out on through their young deaths. There is a real sensitivity to him throughout all of the book, but it is in these moments that it becomes explicit.
The next book I read was Naomi Booth’s Raw Content (2025), which was gifted to me by Corsair. I really liked Booth’s first two novels, Sealed (2017) and Exit Management (2020), but this one did fall a little short for me. It had a very promising beginning when it introduced Grace, a woman who works in legal publishing in York. She finds herself pregnant with a younger man that she has been dating, who lives on a boat in London and who she sees when she is down there for meetings and other work things. He moves to York and she prepares for motherhood by not preparing for it at all, believing she will buy all the things she needs and start preparing when her maternity starts. Her baby arrives early, and she is thrown into motherhood in the depths of winter, with nobody to ask for help because her mother left her and her sister when she was young, her father is emotionally distant and her sister is incredibly flakey and lives a while away. She and her boyfriend Ryan become ghost-like, haunting their flat, while she grapples with the new physicality of having a baby that is completely reliant on her. This develops into ‘premonitions’ that she will harm her baby, which she tries to get on top of by practising compulsions.
I really liked the concept of this, and how it addresses OCD and intrusive thoughts. I did feel, however, that it was very descriptive in the research that went into it, with lots of lists about York, its history and architecture, and the disease that Grace suffers with. It sometimes felt as though I was reading a Wikipedia page or an article about something, with some sentences tagged either side to remind us that we’re in a narrative’s flow. There was some real potential in the first half to create a tense, atmospheric story that had OCD as a kind of terror in the classic horror sense, but this very quickly unravelled and became something else entirely in the last section. The flow was a bit off, especially in how it had so many ideas bubbling under the surface, but not much done with them in the text’s status as a fiction, and not a non-fiction.
I’m now reading Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1959), a book I have wanted to read for years. I found it in Waterstone’s Liverpool, who currently have a great Old Hollywood display (I would not think so highly of myself to suspect that any staff read this newsletter and know about My Niches, and will instead chalk this down to a happy serendipity). I have never seen this sold in a bricks and mortar shop, so I had to get it with the last of my Christmas vouchers. I’m enjoying it a lot, while also being kind of gooped at Anger’s terse directness with his subject matter.
More next week!