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.
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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.
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Archie and Samad fought together in World War II, and both ended up back home in England. This is their story, or really their kids’ story. Around them are family, friends, school, work and community, packed full of their own stories too. The plot(s) kept things moving and brought in new interest and new characters, but it felt to me as if the plot took over towards the end and made characters do implausible things.
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Lots of short pieces relating to the art of the blurb. Initially the pieces seemed fairly light and amusing enough. But I thought the book got better towards the end, with a few pieces on related topics like publishing, cover art and children’s books. Wilder also covers tricky areas like psychology and blurbing books dealing with sensitive or controversial subjects (e.g. Lolita).
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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.
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Materialism has more than one definition in philosophy, and in this book Terry Eagleton discusses how they are treated by his cover stars Marx, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (mostly). There is a lot of information about these three and others such as Thomas Aquinas, all filtered through Eagleton’s pretty sharp mind. He’s good at seeing parallels and bringing out similarities between apparently different thinkers.
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This is a zombie book. But the zombies in this book are not mindless monsters baying for “braaains”. They are the same ordinary people they were before becoming zombies, with ordinary thoughts and plans, except they also need to kill and eat normal people in order to survive. They don’t like it, but that’s how things are and they group together and try to make the best of it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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