When was the future invented? It’s been with us so long now that we might believe that we’ve always tried to imagine what was coming, how society would change and how people would live in new ways in times to come. But we haven’t. Homeric heroes looked to the past, not the future, to understand their lives; biblical figures too looked back to their fathers and their fathers’ fathers to work out the right way to live. Religious prophecy was, for most of human history, as close as we got to trying to imagine the future—and those prophecies had to be kept usefully misty, so that the prophet could never quite be proved completely wrong. For much of human history, if people imagined the future at all, they imagined it to be essentially continuous with the past and the present.
Like all historical theories, this is debatable, but the future as we understand it probably began roughly at the same time as the Enlightenment, the “long 18th century”—from around 1685 to 1815, a time of rapid scientific discovery and political change. The French Revolution and then the American War of Independence carried with them a promise of a new “humanism”—a belief that the old orders could be swept away by will, determination, and the willingness to fight for a better future. It’s then that the idea of progress was invented: things wouldn’t just carry on being as they always had been, and neither would they inevitably fall off from a past mythical Golden Age. The Enlightenment gave humanity the idea that we might make things better, that perhaps there was some inevitability to this, that we would discover more, find better ways to live, treat one another with greater kindness, and eventually build a kind of heaven without the need of gods to hold it up.
This is the curious thing about reading goals—they are essentially homework that people make for themselves. Like homework, reading challenges can feel like pointless busywork for those who aren’t feeling intrinsically motivated to read. Or they can bring a sense of learning and accomplishment.
It’s not always a numbers game, either. Browsing the forum for this year’s Goodreads reading challenge, I found that a lot of users, in addition to pledging to read a certain number of books this year, had other goals as well, seemingly intended for self-improvement or to broaden their horizons. Some wanted to read more books by authors of color, or more classics. One woman wanted to read 100 biographies and/or memoirs before she turned 40.
In an era when the happy ending may seem elusive, naive or, at the very least, ill-suited to the realm of serious literature, it is natural to long for a conclusion that, if not exactly happily-ever-after, is happier than expected. To that end, perhaps the most memorable feature of Breanne McIvor’s debut collection of short stories Where There Are Monsters is that, even if a shadowy quality simmers throughout, so many of her stories feature characters who are intrinsically kind and good, or capable of rising above the difficulties or legacies bequeathed them. Those who cannot are most often quite literally, well, monsters — beings possessed by a darkness deeply rooted in the folklore of Trinidad — and even then, the desire to override the evil impulses buried inside flickers with a desperate, if inadequate, humanity.
Day’s previous book, Cyclogeography, about his former life as a London cycle courier, was a richly rewarding account of a two-wheeled subculture, with its special way of reading the city as “a moving, zoetropic flicker of life”. In Homing, too, Day draws us into the esoterica of an unfamiliar world – one fixated on bird lineage, wind direction and the armchair cartography evoked by the names of liberation points such as Thurso, Berwick and Barcelona – and makes it inviting to non-initiates. Pigeon racing emerges as genially competitive and pleasingly arcane. The peer approval of master flyers, with nicknames such as “Woodo” and “Big Johnny Pigeon”, is much prized.