Articles about books

A book is a present you can open again and again.

Audition – Katie Kitamura

This starts as a tense and austere description of an ambiguous relationship, as a young man comes into the life of a successful older actress. He’s a bit odd – his story doesn’t quite seem to add up. Just as I am wondering how things are going to progress, suddenly everything changes and the whole story is recast and effectively begins again. Like a rude awakening! From that point the story continues its highly strung narrative. The characters are in a pressure cooker and the pressure is unrelenting and things begin to unravel to some extent. The prose is claustrophobic and unrelenting and fascinating and the whole book is like a tiny self-contained world. When I finished it was like emerging into the daylight from a darkened cinema.

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Plumb — Maurice Gee

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.

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Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

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.

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The Way by Swann’s — Marcel Proust

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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Freedom Regained – Julian Baggini

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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White Teeth – Zadie Smith

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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Blurb Your Enthusiasm – Louise Willder

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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This Little Art – Kate Briggs

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 – Terry Eagleton

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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It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over – Anne de Marcken

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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