Plumb comprises the reminiscences of one George Plumb, covering the first half of the 20th century. He starts out as a clergyman but his strict, even fanatical, adherence to his own idiosyncratic principles gets him into trouble with his church. Meanwhile he marries and has 12 children.
Continue reading
A compilation of pieces written from 1948 to 1955, all concerning contemporary African-American life and culture. The first part consists of various reviews: Baldwin is quite dismissive of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he says is not a novel so much as a pamphlet. Seems funny to review a hundred-year-old book, but I guess it was relevant to the tumultuous times Baldwin was living in.
Continue reading
This, volume 1 of a new(ish) edition of Proust’s magnum opus In Search of Lost Time, is slow-moving but totally immersive. So slow-moving that even the event that arguably kick-starts the whole extended novel, the famous episode where the narrator’s childhood memories bubble up after tasting a madeleine, doesn’t happen until about 40 pages in. And even then he spends a couple of pages struggling to remember before the memories start appearing.
Continue reading
We do have free will, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. Many conceptions of free will are just incoherent; if you think about it, free will can only mean that your decisions are consistent with your history and character. In this sense, we can have free will even if our actions are completely determined; an action can be free even if it could not have been any different.
Continue reading
I love this book. The more I read about translating, the more interesting it seems. It combines close reading with creative writing, psychology (what did the author mean by that phrase? What will the reader understand by this translation?) and more. Whenever I read a translation, I seek out anything the translator has written about the translation process. They have to solve a dozen problems on every page – the ingenuity that goes into a translation is quite amazing.
Continue reading
Mounk makes the case here for classical liberal values, untainted by what he sees as the distorting effect of identity politics. It’s convenient to treat people as members of their identity groups, according to their racial characteristics, gender, etc. But this is only ever going to be a rule of thumb, an approximation to what we really want. For example, affirmative action policies are probably better than nothing, but we shouldn’t just then sit back and think our job is done. We don’t really want to give people benefits based purely on their identity groups; instead we want to base it on each person’s individual needs. This is much harder of course! We should recognise that identity group-based policies are just a rough-and-ready first attempt; they are not the best solution.
Continue reading
This is a collection of writings about hope, not really addressing optimism much other than to disparage it. I was hoping (without optimism) that it would be a bit more technical in nature, but instead it is quite discursive and pulls in references to pretty much everything you could think of and lots you couldn’t. Eagleton is vastly more well-read than I will ever be and I couldn’t really say he wears his learning lightly. Still, I enjoyed reading the book, getting lost in a few rabbit holes while looking up some of his offhand references. There is a lot in it.
Continue reading
George Saunders has lectured on Russian literature for years. Reading this book is like attending one of his lectures. (I imagine.) The book addresses six stories: each story appears in full, along with extended discussions of its background and meanings. It’s all great stuff, especially if you like the stories to begin with.
Continue reading
Continue reading“No one can promise you that a life lived for others will bring you a deep sense of satisfaction, but it’s certain that nothing else will.”
This great whodunnit subverts every expectation. Normally in this genre, subtle clues are scattered throughout the narrative, but in this book the narrator continually breaks the fourth wall to pull the rug out from under me. He lets slip a tiny clue; I get excited and think I can now work out what’s going on; but then I am deflated as the narrator highlights the clue and says it’s not relevant.
Continue reading