Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read
I’ve finally finished reading At Swim-Two-Birds. I first attempted it at least 56 years ago and didn’t return to it till earlier this year. I kind of hate it: it’s bleak and depressing, the humour sour when not merely silly. Heavy going for a mere 228 pages. I’ll reread soon in case I’m wrong 📚
For several years now, I’ve preferred to buy albums on CD. Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan, Io Pur Respiro is available only as a download or on vinyl so I bought the download. Here’s Richard Williams’s review 🎶 🎹
Slow Horses author Mick Herron began is writing career with a series of crime novels featuring Oxford-based private detective, Zoë Boehm. The protagonist of first and last books in the four-book series is Zoë’s friend Sarah Tucker.
Susie Steiner’s three Manon Bradshaw novels were published between 2016 and 2020, the last of them appearing just two years before Steiner’s death.
Farrago doesn’t “find comedy funny”. That’s all you need to know — though in fact we all know plenty more than that about him by now.
It’s been 14 years since I’ve been in London (or any part of the UK), so obviously I don’t keep up with what’s on in the theatre. When I wrote about Stoppard’s Arcadia a month ago, I didn’t know the play was about to be revived in the West End. My uncharacteristic timeliness was sheer accident 🎭
Recommended Wynn Williams’s book [Careless People] to a friend, who bought it. A little poke in the eye for Facebook.
Two of Scott Turow’s three most recent novels feature the final criminal trials of two characters who appeared in his first novel, Presumed Innocent, nearly 40 years ago.
I answered without stopping to think. I used to believe that pedestrians were the big menace. They often don’t look around them. I’ve been knocked off my bike twice by wayward pedestrians (and once by a driver suddenly throwing open the door of her parked car). But no, drivers are worse.
Ian McEwan’s novel, Solar (2010), is a savagely comic satire that touches on questions of renewable energy and the climate catastrophe. This has been seen as a departure for him, though his grotesque antihero, Professor Michael Beard, has something in common with the protagonists of three of his earlier novels.
Someone on the train has the Z Cars theme as his (I’m assuming) ringtone!
Until a few months ago it hadn’t occurred to me that Anthony Head and Murray Head could be brothers. They seemed to belong to different worlds: 1) Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Centrepoint, “Say it ain’t so, Joe”; and 2) freeze-dried instant coffee ads, Slayer-watching 🤷♂️
None of these options quite reflects my view. I’d say that till recently a degree has been essential, though not necessarily in economic terms. But its nature is changing (decidedly for the worse), largely because of the increased role and influence of administrators.
Robert Reich was born 10 days later than Donald Trump. His reference to “ending his seventh decade and beginning his eighth” must be a deliberate error illustrating his point about reduced sharpness: someone about to turn 80 will be ending their eighth decade and immediately beginning their ninth.
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, covers a lot of ground: garden design and history, science, sex and literature, maths and physics, determinism. I suggest its main theme is entropy.
Anthony Cronin’s memoir of literary and artistic figures in 1950s Dublin and London’s Soho has been reissued. Those guys could drink!
Today I learned, thanks to Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History, that Lenin was a mushroom. That explains a great deal that has puzzled me for decades. I wish I’d known it much earlier.
On my way to the coffee shop today, I realized I’d forgotten my book so I looked in the Oxfam shop, not expecting much, and found a copy of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Loving it so far 📖
I somehow missed the fact that Jack Shepherd died back in November. I first noticed him on tv in Bill Brand, then almost failed to recognize him as Baxter Dawes in Griffiths’s adaptation of Lawrence. Also have fond memories of Blind Justice. And then jazz piano: The play that changed my life
The Remains of the Day (1989) and The Sense of an Ending (2011) are both short novels which feature narrators who give the impression of not being fully aware of the significance of the events they recount. In the case of Ishiguro’s novel this impression is deceptive.
Miss it (every so often).
Eurosceptic governments often counted on Orbán to veto proposals from Brussels without having to pipe up themselves. His absence might now draw out their own awkward views: on Ukraine, for instance.
