2.5. Kinda wild. A midlife crisis and an affair with a (living?) doll. Social commentary not-so-thinly veiled, a good dash of surre134th book of 2022.
2.5. Kinda wild. A midlife crisis and an affair with a (living?) doll. Social commentary not-so-thinly veiled, a good dash of surrealism and floaty prose. A nice mix of stuff but nothing came together exceptionally. When Tse publishes again I'll be there, as a debut, this gives a lot to think about. Some bits are uncomfortable with the fist-sized dolls licking our 50-year-old protagonist to completion, but Tse did keep me generally engaged, even when I was a little taken aback. Reminiscent of Murakami in many ways I think, but nice and refreshing to read something surreal and weird, about sexualised women (young women too, and literally very small and childlike women), not written by Murakami, or any other man, for that matter. May add some more thoughts but it's late and I have work in the morning.
This isn't published till early next year. Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for the ARC....more
Almost exactly a week ago, I visited the Anne Frank house for the second time in Amsterdam. Last time it had been the height of sum135th book of 2022.
Almost exactly a week ago, I visited the Anne Frank house for the second time in Amsterdam. Last time it had been the height of summer, this time, freezing winter. I had her diary with me on the trip and read it in the mornings before going out and braving the cold and in the evenings, if I could read a few pages before dropping off. Of course, nothing about her house (the museum) has changed: it is forever immortalised. In my memory I could recall the yellow wallpaper before the secret Annexe and the steep steps leading to the loft. The tour takes just an hour, via audio. If you’re aware of the story then it doesn’t enlighten much more than what I consider fairly common knowledge, but hearing the story again, in the very rooms it happened, of course makes the experience heightened. The presence of history, tragic or not, is something I’ve always felt to be a powerful feeling, whether self-invented or not.
This copy I borrowed is the definitive version. As our audio-tour explained to us, some copies of the diary have all entries from the year 1943 missing. I think it was something to do with Anne writing in numerous places, having filled up several notebooks with her work. So this edition has the 1943 entries included. I don’t think I can say what I expected, and rating the book certainly feels arbitrary. It is what you’d expect, I suppose, the intimate thoughts of a girl trapped in a secret annexe for over two years, fearing, every day, for her life. Almost every emotion is displayed in this diary; I was surprised by how long it is, how much Anne wrote, how dedicated she was. She did, after all, dream of being a journalist or a famous writer. I did not realise, not even on the tour, the relationship with Peter, another person in the annexe, that takes up a lot of the space in her diary. There is gossip, there is complaining, there are reports from her world, now, for us as a 21st century reader, state-of-the-nation interludes, there are entries about Anne’s body going through changes, her learning about her body. She navigates pivotal stages of her life in her dark confinement. One of the most striking things in the museum, oddly (or perhaps not oddly), are the original pencil scores on the wallpaper, tracking Anne’s height growth over the years. If my memory serves me correctly, she grew 13cm whilst in the Annexe.
The final entry is the 1st of August 1944. On the 4th, the Gestapo arrest eight people from the Annexe and take them away. As the tour told us, those who helped the people of the Annexe, survived the war, along with Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Peter died in May of that year on a death march, just 3 days before his camp was then liberated. Anne Frank died in February or March in Bergen-Belsen (this camp was liberated in the April), and her body was presumably thrown into a mass grave there. Reading about the Holocaust is always an incredibly difficult but vital process. Oftentimes throughout my reading of this I was reminded of something that was supposedly found scrawled on the wall in a concentration camp: ‘If there is a God, He will have to beg for my forgiveness.’ A quote that has stayed with me for many years. On a similarly freezing day as my trip to Amsterdam last week, I visited Auschwitz in Poland. The grounds were all covered with frost. I find it almost sharp, like the prick of a needle, to picture the glass tank, like an aquarium’s, filled with the shoes of those gassed there during the Second World War. The sheer mass of shoes, a swarm of brown, is really nothing but sickening to see. Closing the final page of Anne’s diary, it felt natural to me to wonder what happened next, as if the story is incomplete. I suppose her diary is. It’s easy to read and hope for an outcome other than the outcome we find in reality. Sadly, that is not the case. Nor was it the case for millions others. Again, I think it’s arbitrary to tell everyone to read this, that they should, to get angry over the 1-star reviews littering Goodreads, the conspiracy theories and the lack of empathy, so that’s it. Below is a photograph I took looking out from the Anne Frank house tearoom after my visit on the 11th of December.
3.5. A strange little book, my first Zambra as I've continually failed to find a copy of Chilean Poet. Clocking in at 80 pages exac130th book of 2022.
3.5. A strange little book, my first Zambra as I've continually failed to find a copy of Chilean Poet. Clocking in at 80 pages exactly, it can be read in an afternoon, really, though my reading was staggered either side of work. The novel is framed around the narrator waiting for his stepdaughter's mother to return for the night. It is even said, something like, The novel can end when she returns. Coming to the end one does feel this like a little timid but strangely powerful wave, like the sort that bowl you over when you're sitting playfully within the first foot of seawater. At once it's forgettable in a way (I have a tricky relationship with short novels, I must admit, I'm in love with sprawlers), but also poignant. Now, even more so, my look for more Zambra continues. This is published by Fitzcarraldo in February next year and I recommend it as an afternoon's read. Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for the advance copy to review....more
131st book of 2022. Artist for this review is English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)*.
[image] "High Street, Oxford" — 1810
I’m an absolute sucker for131st book of 2022. Artist for this review is English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)*.
[image] "High Street, Oxford" — 1810
I’m an absolute sucker for campus novels and a sucker for Oxford/Cambridge novels, so here we are with Marías's Oxford novel, All Souls. It’s a strange and oddly wonderful little book; it is almost entirely plotless (there’s a vague plot of an affair with the narrator and a woman named Clare), but otherwise the book has a smattering of things. At once it is an ode to Oxford and academia. The narrator is a Spaniard from Madrid as a visiting professor. There are ruminations on the English, their mannerisms, their habits (interesting, sometimes humorous to read as an Englishman, example: ‘As is well known, the English never look openly at anything, or they look in such a veiled, indifferent way that one can never be sure that someone is actually looking at what they appear to be looking at, such is their ability to lend an opaque glaze to the most ordinary of glances.’**) There are long digressions about numerous topics, one is an ode to English bookshops, another to homelessness, another to the English writer John Gawsworth. The narrator at one point discusses the rubbish bins and being abroad. Marías's prose is careful, intellectually compelling, sometimes light, sometimes dense. At times I wondered why Marías had chosen to write the long digressions he had written but the novel felt personal, and because of that, very humane, so I was unbothered by the relevance or the distraction from the ‘plot’, and instead enjoyed his rambling descriptions of bookshops, Oxford cobbles, and the English professors at the university around him. Not a novel I would jump to recommend to someone, but a quiet, meditative, slightly peculiar read that tickled the academic-lover in me.
[image] "A View from the Inside of Brazen Nose College Quadrangle, Oxford" — 1803 _________________
*I miss the opportunity of looking at my favourite art pieces and artists when writing reviews, so it's likely I'll begin putting them in my reviews again when one comes to mind. I revel in the chance to connect the books I read to art I like. Who doesn't want to spend a moment looking at Turner?
**When my Canadian companion from here on Goodreads, Alan, came to England with one of his friends we actually joked about this very stereotype as we wandered through the Underground on our way to Soho. He made the observation that the English don’t seem to ever look you in the eye, and I joked that I had yet to look at them or know what they looked like. And indeed it was true, their eye-contact was far more assertive than my own, non-existent, apparently, English eye-contact....more
Despair is next as I read all of Nabokov's books in order. This one is Martin Amis's (Nabokov super-fan) second favourite Nabokov n128th book of 2022.
Despair is next as I read all of Nabokov's books in order. This one is Martin Amis's (Nabokov super-fan) second favourite Nabokov novel ever (behind, of course, Lolita). I'm sticking with Updike and calling Nabo's Glory his best Russian novel (so far - I have two left to read). Of all his books, Lolita still reigns supreme, but then I'm yet to read Pale Fire. Anyway, this one flopped when it was first published and apparently earnt Nabokov €40. It's a deliciously wicked, meta, farcical story once again. Hermann Hermann (not Humbert Humbert) is an unreliable narrator who sets out to kill his 'double' to cash on his own life insurance. I'm sure I saw my parents watching a television series with pretty much the same plot recently (within the last year). It's not so simple, of course, and Hermann goes through some troubles. The plot takes a while to get going, Nabokov plays many games. It's riddled with allusions and the whole thing seems to be mocking Dostoyevsky, which makes sense, as Nabokov hated him ('He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian.'). Hermann goes to call this book The Double, but ah! it's taken. Crime and Pun? he wonders. As ever, Nabokov walks a fine line between genius wordplay and devilish games and frustration for the reader. This one was closer to the latter for me, but it's Nabokov, I always find pleasure in reading him. Next up, The Gift (not the Velvet Underground song). ...more
3.5. I'm still trying to rectify the fact I've never read these books prior to the fifth one, which my mum read to me as a child. I126th book of 2022.
3.5. I'm still trying to rectify the fact I've never read these books prior to the fifth one, which my mum read to me as a child. I actually liked this one less than the first two honestly, but I can't work out why. Pacing felt a little off, maybe, mostly just lessons and Quidditch till the final 80 pages when everything kicks off and gets revealed. I guess as the audience 'grows up' with each book, they are meant to get more serious and this one felt like a strange middle ground with darker themes and tones but still relatively basic in terms of its writing, which often distracted me. I hate the use of full capitals for shouting, it instantly makes me want to hurl the book. ...more
Cusk is brilliant, probably one of the best British writers working today (and we stole her from Canada). The final installment in127th book of 2022.
Cusk is brilliant, probably one of the best British writers working today (and we stole her from Canada). The final installment in her Outline Trilogy is much like the first two: our very quiet but incredibly astute and cold narrator Faye continues to gather stories from the people she meets. Kudos centres around Faye promoting her new book abroad. Most of the conversations here are with people who are set to interview her, or her publisher. As ever, Cusk's critical eye looks at love, family, divorce (there's a lot of the latter in this one, something she has written about in her non-fiction too) and the future of the novel and art itself. If Cusk brought out a book like this every couple of years, I'd probably just read them forever. There's something so detached but so intimate about her writing and her novels. A literary treat, the whole trilogy. Kudos, Cusk....more
2.5/3. The book starts strong with a heavy leaning into the archaeological, which I find fascinating to read about. A lot centres a129th book of 2022.
2.5/3. The book starts strong with a heavy leaning into the archaeological, which I find fascinating to read about. A lot centres around graves found in Repton. Jarman talks about the wounds these people (warriors) suffered, the isotopes and DNA and how these things can be explored with modern technology. Interesting stuff. Once the book gets going though I generally found Jarman's prose lifeless and a little stiff. The scope widens to the east and the Vikings' influence and journeying, lots about the Rus' too. Sadly, Jarman's narrative isn't overly engaging and the interesting subject gets lost in telling prose and distanced observations. Of course, any book about the Vikings is going to lack concrete knowledge as there isn't masses of concrete knowledge. A book of theories and apocryphal stories as expected, I just wish it had been told better. ...more
Naturally this is marketed as 'writing advice' more than anything else, but the title is Novelist as a Vocation, and therefore some123rd book of 2022.
Naturally this is marketed as 'writing advice' more than anything else, but the title is Novelist as a Vocation, and therefore some of the later essays do lean more in that direction, though more on this later. Murakami remains in my head as the writer I fell in love with in my early 20s and devoured at university. On several occasions I remember sitting on the huge beanbag we had in my student house with a glass of rum and coke and reading his books cover-to-cover, like some Murakami character myself. These are, of course, very fond memories. Sadly, after not reading him for some time (I actually read his novels in order of publication, starting right at the beginning), I read the next one in my list, his newer beast, 1Q84, and almost hated it. I found myself seeing and criticising all the things I had seen Murakami criticised for in the past. I presumed my phase was over, doomed to forever remain as an 'early 20s' thing. I'm still yet to read his latest two novels.
And yet, when I saw this being advertised, I felt the rare itch of needing to buy a new book. On Sunday, I found myself in a new (I think) bookshop in the small English town of Arundel, with this new Murakami book on the shelf, and thought, actually more than Murakami and my desire to read it, I wanted to support the establishment. I almost never buy books at full price (or at all: most of my reading directions are controlled by what is available at my local library). Having studied Creative Writing for 4 years, and frequently writing and submitting short stories myself (with, so far, not masses amount of luck), I thought my old Murakami could help me. After all, his book on running once motivated me to buy expensive running shoes and start jogging when I lived away from home, a habit that didn't survive my return. The early essays do have Murakami's simple stoicism I once fell in love with. It reminded me of his old characters I used to read, their simple, selfish and humble way of life that for some reason felt relatable to me at university. I think Murakami is the perfect writer for our early 20s. For a man who isn't overly fond of the public eye, the essays are quite personal and reflect a lot about his writing life and his career. This would be my first point in a succinct review: this book is probably only worthwhile to an already established fan of Murakami. One essay is his reflections on schooling and in particular, Japanese schooling. The final essay is a walkthrough of his US breakout and success. Looking back, there isn't much hard 'advice', but really just Murakami musing pleasantly in his musing way. He has always been very similar to his characters, after all. Google 'Murakami Bingo' and you'll encounter his trademarks quickly enough.
So this is a book for fans. Anyone looking for real writing advice from him will possibly be disappointed. There's some good bits, some interesting bits too (by interesting I often mean, bits I don't necessarily agree with). In the beginning he talks about the type of person who has what it takes to be a writer and Murakami argues that those who are very/too clever, do not have what it takes. The novel, he argues, is a long way of working out what someone wants to say; therefore, someone smart can already formulate their ideas and have them ready to be presented: this defeats the need for a novel, according to Murakami. He also talks a lot about the unconscious in writing and how organic the process is, which was interesting (and slightly too late) as I wrote one of my MA essays on unconscious writing and Finnegans Wake. To Murakami, writing is just taking lots of random things out of a proverbial garage and assembling them into something magical. ...more
This is far more human than the previous Ōe book I read (The Silent Cry), and therefore I preferred it. I wonder if I had read them124th book of 2022.
This is far more human than the previous Ōe book I read (The Silent Cry), and therefore I preferred it. I wonder if I had read them the other way around, I would have been moved differently. A Personal Matter is a fascinating look into a man known as Bird as we follow the birth of his son, who is born with, so the doctors believe, a brain hernia that protrudes from his head like a second head. Ōe takes us into Bird's grotesque mind, following him in infidelity, sexual thoughts and the hope that his son dies so Bird does not have to raise a 'vegetable'. Bird, funnily enough, reminded me a lot of Updike's animal nicknamed "Rabbit" Angstrom from Rabbit, Run that was published four years before this. Both men attempt to flee their problems and act out in unsavoury ways. However, there is something imitable about Ōe's prose and dialogue: like in The Silent Cry the dialogue feels bizarre and the characters act realistically, but equally, like they are all actors cast as the wrong characters. The whole thing is like a deluded play, as I said in one of my updates. There's no way to put my finger on it, reading him is just unlike reading anyone else. His novels will continue to fascinate me endlessly, I have no doubt....more
3.5/4. I'm actually surprised by this one. I honestly thought this would be a 600-page stuffy slog with religion coming out of its 125th book of 2022.
3.5/4. I'm actually surprised by this one. I honestly thought this would be a 600-page stuffy slog with religion coming out of its ears, but I was wrong (mostly). Stowe has actually written a wonderfully readable, mostly compelling, oftentimes moving, novel. Of course, its historical significance outweighs anything else. For starters, Uncle Tom's Cabin is said to be the 'first novel to criticize the institution of American slavery'. The book was an instant success and she was given a job in New York following its publication and asked to tour England, 'where she was received by Queen Victoria'. There is also a (many believe apocryphal) story about Stowe meeting with Abraham Lincoln. This book is often said to have 'changed American history'. Big claims.
The story runs smoothly. The dialogue was surprisingly good, too. There are numerous scenes of intensity, with chases, beatings, standoffs. The last part of the novel does sink quickly and heavily into religious ideas as Stowe's anti-slavery narrative comes almost entirely from her religious beliefs. The Quakers in the novel are all wonderful people (my grandmother is a Quaker, and I must say, I've met only lovely people at her old Meeting House). There are awful slaveowners, as you'd expect. Above all, Stowe surprised me with the tenderness she writes with, some of her paragraphs were genuinely touching and moved me. A little girl, at one point, calls out to her father that the treatment of their slaves sinks into her heart, and Stowe wrote it wonderfully well. The same goes for some of the characters who tell stories of their mistreatment. Stowe often speaks directly to the reader, criticising us for slavery and its command over America. For example, less than 100 pages in, Stowe writes,
He leaned over the back of the chair, and covered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor; just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man,—and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life's great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!
This is a slim, very smoothly written book in translation from Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia. The structure is taken right from Tol121st book of 2022.
This is a slim, very smoothly written book in translation from Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia. The structure is taken right from Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches, which I actually read earlier this year, using the three timeframes, December, May and August. I was drawn to Tolstoy's book, and subsequently, this book, because my great-grandfather was captured in Sevastopol in the Second World War. Beginning the book, it's easy to be confused and curious: why did Fraia use Tolstoy's book as his inspiration? The first of the three stories is about a woman's obsession with climbing Everset, the second about a missing person and the last deals with a stage play set in Sevastopol (at last). It's one of those short story collections that gets away with being a 'novel' because of unifying themes and less than discernible connections. What struck me on finishing is the failed ambition, loneliness and quiet sense of despair in all three parts, though I didn't feel as if this was enough to satisfyingly unify them. However, I did enjoy reading them, and it was short enough to read in a few hours throughout the day, half before Sunday dinner out in the town and the other half once I was home, a little sleepy and tipsy....more
I like Holmes and think The Hound of the Baskervilles will pretty much remain at the top for me, as many others clearly agree. Thou120th book of 2022.
I like Holmes and think The Hound of the Baskervilles will pretty much remain at the top for me, as many others clearly agree. Though the ratings for the short story collections are usually as glowing as the novels, I found these quite inferior. With only 20 pages or so to work with Doyle has to set up the mystery and quickly have it solved in no time. This, sadly, consists of a lot of dialogue to report the action and the discovery as happening elsewhere or in the past. So very tell-y. Frankly a few of the stories bored me, reading two block pages of a character describing what happened to them. Sometimes the action happens in 'real time' in the longer stories but a lot of them felt too long-winded and not present enough. Sherlock remains a nice comfort read on rainy wintery English days though. ...more
4.5. Fantastic stuff, but I have a great bias towards Sebald. I often, somewhat flippantly, say the beginning of the last century b119th book of 2022.
4.5. Fantastic stuff, but I have a great bias towards Sebald. I often, somewhat flippantly, say the beginning of the last century belonged to Joyce, the latter half, to Sebald. Sometimes when I am writing my own things, on those common days of literary abandonment that ironically Sebald himself knew so well, I think, What is the point when there was already a man so good? I lack Hemingway's bravado, when he said something along the lines of, 'You have to read the Greats, so you know who to beat.' If I can, I read anything that involves Sebald in one way or another, even if something is called 'Sebaldian', I jump at it. Inside this slim volume you'll find transcripts from interviews with him as well as essays concerning him. One of the transcripts from an interview by Carole Angier, writer of Sebald's first biography, which was published last year (and worth a read). This interview dates from the late 90s, so Angier's obsession with the man has only grown with time. Another is the 2001 interview with Silverblatt, an interview I've listened to more times than I can count. For one, it is an excellent interview. For another, the interview took place 8 days before Sebald's death, and has the haunting unknowingly-close-to-death power.
If you've read Angier's biography, Speak Silence, then her interview only touches upon a few things she later explodes into greater detail. It begins her unpacking of Sebald's genre and his 'truth'. In one segment she asks, who Max Ferber, from The Emigrants is based on. Sebald replies,
Ferber is actually based on two people. One is my Manchester landlord, D. The story of Ferber's escape from Munich in 1939 at the age of fifteen, and of what subsequently happened to his parents is D's. The second model is a well-known artist.
Angier then asks, '"Which of the two, then [...] is in the photo of Ferber as a boy?'" And 'He smiles, a combination of the ironic and the open, and says, "Neither."' Sebald later says to Angier that one of the entries from his great-uncle's diary, from the same book, is a 'falsification', Sebald wrote it himself. But, he says,
'What matters is all true. The big events - the schoolteacher putting his head on the railway line, for instance - you might think they were made up for dramatic effect. But on the contrary, they are all real. The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l'effet du réel.'
The other essays provide more glimpses into Sebald's writing world. My adoration of him comes from his sentences, his dark almost invisible wit, his staggering control and command over his narratives... I think when you read Sebald, even if you don't enjoy him, you must feel awe. I recently read The Rings of Saturn again and on reaching the final page, again, I just felt as if I wanted to turn back to the first. You say to yourself, 'How does he do it?' There is something reserved about the whole ordeal, something poetic, pretentious, sometimes, yes, boring, other times infuriating, but all his books just beg to be read over and over. There is something irresistible about them. In a sick way I loved to read about his own struggles writing, sometimes it is hard to imagine his books being difficult to him.
That's the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That's the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it's because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer's block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that's going to come out ['Austerlitz']. I don't know how many months I couldn't get . . . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it's all right; you look at it the next day, it's awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of the page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that's how it is. And it's very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one's nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.
One of the saddest things in all the interview however were his allusions to the 'next' one: 'The Emigrants was more difficult than this, and the last one I could hardly do, so I dread to think what the next one will be like. [Audience laughter.]' Of course, he never wrote another, dying in 2001. Another essay sheds a glimpse of light: 'At the time of his death, Sebald was researching a book that would explore, among other subjects, his family history.' Some of the final lines of the last essay throw a number of adjectives, all of them questioningly applicable to Sebald himself, and his work, disconsolate, bitter, dark, theatrical, dour, inconsolable . . . He was a rare talent. ...more
I'm into surrealism and absurdism but Hoban's novel here is just too much for little reason. I can't put my finger on why it doesn'118th book of 2022.
I'm into surrealism and absurdism but Hoban's novel here is just too much for little reason. I can't put my finger on why it doesn't work when I adore Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, for example, which is filled with crazy characters and happenings. Kleinzeit goes into hospital and from there falls in love with one of the nurses, meets Death, who is a monkey, has run-ins with a homeless man, yellow paper and just about every inanimate object in the book talks, so there are numerous conversations he has with his hospital bed, the paper, the building itself, God, whatever. About several pages in I started to lose the excitement I had going into this and by halfway through I was wanting it to just end. I only stuck it out to the end because it's short. I do have another Hoban novel I'm willing to try, but if it's anything like this, I'll keep my distance from him in the future. ...more
A strange place for me to start with Hawking, this being the 2018 posthumous book of his. Framed as answering a number of questions117th book of 2022.
A strange place for me to start with Hawking, this being the 2018 posthumous book of his. Framed as answering a number of questions*, they sometimes cross over some of the same paths as others, giving it, at times, a repetitive nature, but of course this was never 'designed' to be one book. (As the publisher's note specifies, though in development at the time of Hawking's death, it draws from his personal archive, answers from speeches, essays and interviews.) I'm still a layman with my astrophysics/astronomy/cosmology, but this really is a book for the layman's layman. That said, just being able to read Stephen Hawking was a novelty for me, and I will be reading the rest of his published books in due time. He is a talented writer when you consider how smart the man was (still hard to imagine that he is no longer with us, though I never, in his lifetime, paid much attention to science), compared to how simple the book reads. I think it Einstein who said you don't understand anything until you can explain it to your grandma. In a similar vein, I think the same goes for explaining it to a layman. He glimpses more complicated ideas briefly, but never strays too far, no doubt in fear of alienating his reader. The most useful thing I found in the book was, randomly, Hawking's explanation of negative energy, which I want to record here. Other than that, it felt more like Hawking's general musings than deeply informative science. The last few chapters enter the realm of the depressing as Hawking admits we will doom this planet (climate change, nuclear war, etc.), he has no doubt, and our only hope is amidst the stars on a new home. There's his wit too, and a good measure of distaste for the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit. A great mind lost, but a great mind we also get to keep.
The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called 'negative energy'. To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he's not just making a hill - he's also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind behind what happened at the beginning of the universe.
________________
*Is there a God? How did it all begin? Is there other intelligent life in the universe? Can we predict the future? What is inside a black hole? Is time travel possible? Will we survive on Earth? Should we colonise space? Will artificial intelligence outsmart us? How do we shape the future?...more
Mostly boring for its 300 pages. The characters are all caricatures, which I sort of expected, but Fogg really has nothing interest116th book of 2022.
Mostly boring for its 300 pages. The characters are all caricatures, which I sort of expected, but Fogg really has nothing interesting about him. Comparing him to Captain Nemo shows how inferior this book is. In fact, comparing the whole of Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to this shows how inferior it is. The story itself, even, is fairly repetitive and lifeless and the ending is, even considering its a 'comic' novel, insipid (and, I might add, one conclusion of the story, the action of a character, happens out of nowhere, as if randomly added in). Overall, not recommended as a place to start with Verne. My mother recently showed me the first episode of the 2021 adaption where David Tennant plays the bumbling Fogg, and it was better than the book, that first episode alone. It doesn't take itself too seriously, which is perhaps its saving grace. It says a lot too, as almost the entire plot of the first episode is not from the novel, but fabricated....more
Not good. Shame as Hughes is one of my favourite poets: I remember being swept up by his Birthday Letters as a teenager living away113th book of 2022.
Not good. Shame as Hughes is one of my favourite poets: I remember being swept up by his Birthday Letters as a teenager living away from home and once devouring his Tales From Ovid on a beach in Cornwall between long bouts of swimming. As other reviewers of this funny volume say, this is a very outdated read; it is a look into old teaching styles. His advice for writing is incredibly vague. There are two tiny chapters on writing novels (odd from Hughes) and some of the advice is, without exaggeration, as simply as make sure to use chapters. I learnt nothing from the book. The only good thing was all the example poems he uses to demonstrate his points about writing landscape, weather, animals, etc., sometimes his own poems, sometimes his wife's, and a smattering of other famous names. Overall, a waste of time, though. ...more
I thought I'd give Ernaux a read post-Nobel win, as I read her Getting Lost pre-Nobel and wasn't hugely impressed. The Years is of115th book of 2022.
I thought I'd give Ernaux a read post-Nobel win, as I read her Getting Lost pre-Nobel and wasn't hugely impressed. The Years is often considered her masterpiece. I think reading a memoirist is different to reading fiction writers in that you need to build a connection with them before you begin to read about their lives and their feelings, in the same way a novel prepares us for caring about the characters involved by allowing us to get to know them. In Getting Lost I was thrown into Ernaux's diaries from a period in which she was having an affair and found it, mostly, uninspiring and boring. In a similar fashion, I felt the same emotions beginning this book.
The Years is a slippery book, a term I decided I wanted to use in my review about half way through and was surprised to read, in the last few pages, Ernaux call the book, herself, slippery. It's like the memoir version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"*. Beginning in the 1940s and running into the 21st century, Ernaux creates a portrait of France, partly the whole world. It's hugely impersonal which, in turn, creates the personal. The book riffs off photographs, beginning with the personal and then expanding to world movements, famous deaths, technology. In some places the book begins to feel a little list-like, which is where I started to grow tired of reading it. The back half of the novel saved any boredom though, as Ernaux begins to dissect why she wanted to write it and what her purpose was, in the same way Mallo does at the end of his Nocilla Trilogy.
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at twenty ('Solitude', etc.)? Her main concern is the choice between 'I' and 'she'. There is something too permanent about 'I', something shrunken and stifling, whereas 'she' is too exterior and remote. The image she has of her book in its nonexistent form, of the impression it should leave, is the one she retained from 'Gone With the Wind', read at the age of twelve, and later from 'Remembrance of Things Past', and more recently from 'Life and Fate': an image of light and shadow streaming over faces. But she hasn't yet discovered how to do this. She awaits if not a revelation then a sign, a coincidence, like the madeleine dipped in tea for Marcel Proust.
So this can act as a sort of blurb and the answer to all her questions is reading the book itself. So 5-stars for Ernaux's vision, some 3-star feelings for some of her prose in the beginning, before the novel gathers its momentum, some 4-stars for bits in the middle. A real mix. I'm going to have to read it unrated. Ernaux interests me though, and I'm pleased, all things considered, that she won the Nobel for what she's doing with the form. Anyone playing with the form is to be respected. The image of her burying her cat whilst simultaneously, in her mind, burying everyone she has ever lost, will stick with me. There's a lot in this book about things repeating themselves, time happening at the same time, always, as Einstein said, that the past, present and future are all an illusion. ____________________________
*Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye" Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock" Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai" Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land" Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion "Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say? We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan "Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire But when we are gone It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it...more
I'd never heard of Glück prior to her reading the Nobel Prize, which is also exciting as you are spoon-fed a new writer to discover111th book of 2022.
I'd never heard of Glück prior to her reading the Nobel Prize, which is also exciting as you are spoon-fed a new writer to discover. The Nobel is usually quite good at bringing an unknown author (at least to me) to light (though not this year, with Annie Ernaux winning). Glück's poetry is very pared down and in most cases, almost narrative; I had to remind myself I was reading poetry, if it wasn't for the line breaks, in some cases they felt like incredibly abstract short stories. A difficult book to rate, only comprised of 15 poems, mostly revolving around life, death and aging. Though impressed by some of the poems, I also felt disappointed by many of them. Intentionally or not, for me, Glück never quite grasped anything fully, but did leave some echoing impressions. I'm intrigued to read some of her other collections and see how they compare....more