Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read
‘Anxiety is the price we pay for the ability to imagine the future.’
— NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux
Quoted by John Naughton. Hmm. I can’t imagine the future (except in very abstract, general terms). So maybe I need a better name for the feeling I’ve been thinking of as anxiety.
Just posted on my personal site, “Nothing human”: A recent article in Vox argues that the Netflix adaptation of Liu’s The Three-Body Problem poses three contrasting approaches to the survival of humankind. We need (and fortunately have) a fourth option.
Salman Rushdie’s eighth novel for adults, Shalimar the Clown (2005), is mainly concerned with the disputed region of Kashmir, though there’s an extended passage set in France during the Second World War, and the the opening and closing episodes of the story take place in Los Angeles. Kashmir has been the subject of conflict (including three wars) between India and Pakistan since Partition. The villages that feature in Rushdie’s story are in Kashmir Valley itself, near Srinagar.
I’ve finally read The Mill on the Floss, after two half-hearted attempts when I was much younger. It took me 9 days: Eliot is not a quick read. I’d read almost nothing of hers (just Silas Marner at school). Middlemarch was the only set text on my BA course that I didn’t finish, but I’ll try again 📖
For a while now, at the back of my mind, I’ve been vaguely, distractedly perplexed that the Dublin Review of Books has been publishing so little material and so irregularly. I just realized that they publish plenty that doesn’t make it into their RSS feed! Should’ve thought of that before.
TFW you try to extend the selection of some text but iOS scrolls the page instead! 😡
I’ve been trying to write a response to this piece in Vox by Sigal Samuel, “3 Body Problem’s most mind-bending question isn’t about aliens”. I’m not happy with what I’ve got so far but don’t want to spend any more time on it. Maybe I should just let the draft sit there for another week.
I read Jane Harper’s The Dry a few weeks ago and enjoyed it thoroughly; but yesterday I found another book of hers, The Lost Man on special offer (€5 for a new hardback) and I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to buy it. I wonder why not. I got Téa Obreht’s Inland instead 📚
Last summer, my brain’s internal radio was alternating Tommy Steele’s “Little White Bull” and the musichall tune “Down at the Old Bull and Bush”. I thought I must have seen something about a bull somewhere, but it turned out that the earworms had independent coincidental origins.
I hate earworms, but can’t get rid of them. For weeks now, I have been waking up with Moore’s “She Is Far from the Land”🎶 playing in my head, and I have no idea what’s put it there. I’m sure I haven’t heard it recently (that’s to say in the last 50ish years).
The latest Talk about books is Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various. The 6th Faber anthology of “New Irish short stories”📖 includes 24 stories. I’ve written about 4 stories, with brief notes on 4 more.
Since 2005, Faber & Faber have published a series of anthologies of “New Irish short stories”, the first two being edited by David Marcus. Subsequent volumes appeared under the editorship of Joseph O’Connor, Kevin Barry and Deirdre Madden respectively. The most recent anthology, Being Various (2019) was edited and introduced by Lucy Caldwell.
There are 24 stories here, all newly written: the copyright page says “All the stories are printed here for the first time”, though Sally Rooney’s story “Colour and Light” appeared (as “Color and Light”) in The New Yorker in March 2019, a few weeks before publication of the anthology.
This Irish Times headline quotes somebody as saying that Simon Harris used to turn up in suits three times too big for him. If he wore suits three sizes too big I could accept it but suits three times too big would have to be specially made, wouldn’t they?
I think this may be all my fault. I just looked up Trevor Griffiths on Wikipedia and (having gone down a rabbit hole) elsewhere a few days ago, in part to see if he was still alive. And now he isn’t. Sorry about that 🎭
Latest post on my own site: Print-on-demand? Amazon has been sending out print-on-demand copies of books when they run out of traditionally printed regular stock (which they deliberately keep at low levels). Is this acceptable?
I bought a copy of Tana French’s The Wych Elm about 4½ years ago but have only now got around to reading it. It’s devastating, even if you find the narrator unsympathetic, as many reviewers did. There are parts of it I liked very much but overall it leaves a sour aftertaste 📖
Here’s an extremely irritating book review. I’ve read just 2 of Nicole Flattery’s short stories and didn’t like them. I suspected she might be a better novelist than a short story writer. But this review leaves me with no inclination to find out for myself.