Art Kavanagh

17-Nov-2024:
But yolked [sic] together like this, they’re each diminished. Rachel Cooke is not impressed by Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz. She makes it sound a bit …

16-Nov-2024:
Today’s post from Talk about books is about Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields. It marks the end of the fourth year of …

16-Nov-2024: Open secrets: Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields

Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, is shorter, tighter and more mature than her first. Also, it seems to me that the …

16-Nov-2024:
My Bluesky feed 🦋 is full of people promoting “starter packs” for topics I’m not interested in. (I don’t mean yours!) Even where I am interested, I wouldn’t …

13-Nov-2024:
Farewell to Roy Haynes. Sad, of course, but he had reached a good age 🎶

12-Nov-2024:
Fred Kaplan has written a novel and it sounds intriguing: Ethan Iverson’s Transitional Technology 📚

10-Nov-2024:
I’m getting really fed up of Substack’s RSS feeds; they really ought to fix them.

10-Nov-2024:
My post on Grotius and the minimalist theory of natural law, which has been getting far more hits than any other post on my personal site, has just dropped off …

10-Nov-2024:
Just posted on my personal site: Wigs on the green: The resignation of Hugh O’Flaherty from the Irish Supreme Court. I’m still annoyed about a 25-year-old Irish …

09-Nov-2024:
In the past Lammy has called Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’. David Lammy has been fighting for his job. Gosh, I wonder why Lammy would …

09-Nov-2024:
In today’s email from The Fortnightly, Julian Gridham links to a post of his from a few years ago On the Design of Poetry Textbooks. Reading that prompted me to …

04-Nov-2024:
I know this is not a time for silly, wild-ass speculation, so forgive me, but … you don’t suppose the Trump campaign could have been bullying pollsters to make …

03-Nov-2024:
Today’s Talk about books post was supposed to be about three Roman plays by Shakespeare but I didn’t manage to get as far as Coriolanus, so I’ll probably do a …

03-Nov-2024: All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans

Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are all formally tragedies. That’s not to say that they all follow a similar …

31-Oct-2024:
Computer guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to walk in. The cautionary tale of Goldman and Apple’s credit card

30-Oct-2024:
Clint Eastwood has just directed another movie, at 94: Juror #2 🍿

30-Oct-2024:
I’m going back and forth about whether I should be worried about the US presidential election. On the one hand, the result will certainly have repercussions for …

28-Oct-2024:
I’ve decided what to do about LinkedIn (something I was dithering about a few weeks ago) and updated my profile there accordingly.

27-Oct-2024:
I’ve changed the way I do the “description” for my newsletter posts. Now, I’m using Hugo’s Summary method, with the first paragraph styled using the CSS …

19-Oct-2024:
The latest Talk about books is about the second of Wilkie Collins’s four major novels of the 1860s, in which the Vanstone sisters, Norah and Magdalen, suddenly …

19-Oct-2024: Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name

The novel that Wilkie Collins published between The Woman in White and Armadale might at first seem less compelling than either of those but it’s a powerful …

17-Oct-2024:
Unintended consequences: deposit return scheme leading to more litter

16-Oct-2024:
This summary is written at average reading age and whilst it does not form part of the judgment it must be reproduced with it. Maybe because I’m used to legal …

15-Oct-2024:
Hi @manton, I deleted templates authorslist.md and layouts/authorslist/single.html because they wouldn’t behave as I wanted. Instead, I made a new redirect from …

14-Oct-2024:
Cecily Carver doesn’t want to use her Substack to do literary takedowns of buzzy contemporary novels by women, but in the case of Miranda July’s All Fours 📚she …

12-Oct-2024:
An unusually wrongheaded post from Terence Eden: How to make Markdown footnotes start at zero. First, footnotes in HTML (and so in Markdown) are a kludge, and …

11-Oct-2024:
Nicholas Carr is on Substack now, with New Cartographies, and he’s closing down his old blog, Rough Type where he’s been posting only sporadically in recent …

09-Oct-2024:
“ It is probably the most ill-advised legal action since Oscar Wilde put pen to writ.” What, worse than Gillian Taylforth’s? (Or William Roache’s, for that …

05-Oct-2024:
The latest from Talk about books is about the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of …

05-Oct-2024: Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of Keats’s odes

In which I follow up a post on my personal site from a few months ago, about the regrettable narrowness of my taste in poetry, with a look at two of Keats’s …

01-Oct-2024:
I’m already having second thoughts about automatically crossposting from Micro․blog to LinkedIn. I’m afraid it might make me more reticent about what I post to …

30-Sep-2024:
TIL that the site of the former, much missed, AMT kiosk at Heuston is now occupied by a Caffè Nero Express. That’s a lot better than nothing and will have to …

30-Sep-2024:
Now that I’ve retired and don’t expect to be looking for work again, I’ve been thinking about how I use LinkedIn. For the past few years, I’ve been using it …

21-Sep-2024:
Today’s Talk about books post is about the short stories of Shirley Hazzard, particularly those from her first collection, Cliffs of Fall, and the ones that …

21-Sep-2024: Trying to keep the poetry separate: Shirley Hazzard, Collected Stories

Shirley Hazzard’s short stories fall into two broad categories, those about working for the UN (“the Organization”), and those about men, women, relationships …

20-Sep-2024:
What was a dead judge doing in the courthouse anyway?

15-Sep-2024:
I want to make a kind of “author index” of the writers I’ve been writing about in my newsletter, Talk about books. I suppose the obvious way would be to create …

12-Sep-2024:
I used to work beside Old Street roundabout from 1988 to 1991 inclusive, haven’t been back for at least 25 years. Amazed to think that the “jumbotron” is still …

12-Sep-2024:
While I was reading this fascinating Guardian “long read” on my phone, the page automatically reloaded twice, each time losing me my place. Do news sites not …

09-Sep-2024:
I’m shocked to read that drummer Martin France has died, aged 60. I know his work from the trio with John Taylor and Palle Danielsson. I had just been listening …

07-Sep-2024:
My latest post in Talk about books is about two novels from the early 2010s dealing with rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash a few years earlier: …

07-Sep-2024: Down the country: Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart; and Belinda McKeon, Solace

Two novels about rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash, published in 2011 and 2012 respectively, make for an interesting comparison both with each …

01-Sep-2024:
On a third reading of Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel 📖, I’m still confused as to what’s going on in the court case at the end. So is the first-person narrator: …

31-Aug-2024:
I’m watching a YouTube video of an interview with automatically generated subtitles. In the space of a minute, it has rendered “dreaming” as “streaming” and …

28-Aug-2024:
My resistance to the idea that I’m going to have to read (and buy, though not necessarily in that order) Bridget Hourican’s bio of James Clarence Mangan 📖 has …

27-Aug-2024:
Here’s an unusually informative story on Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). Nice to have confirmation that others have similar experiences to …

25-Aug-2024:
Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what …

25-Aug-2024: Deal with the devil: Three novels by Claire Kilroy

Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what …

18-Aug-2024:
Why I don’t intend to stop reading Alice Munro’s short stories, notwithstanding her appalling behaviour towards her youngest daughter.

10-Aug-2024:
The latest post from Talk about books is about Melissa Bank’s two books 📖. They look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and …

10-Aug-2024: Multiple endings: The linked short story collections of Melissa Bank

Melissa Bank’s two books look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an …

09-Aug-2024:
If it’s anything, journalism is the war of facts against narrative. Conspiracists swallow the narrative and ignore the facts. Helen Lewis, commenting on the …

07-Aug-2024:
The Corporation’s durability is remarkable. Already half a millennium old when Shakespeare arrived in London, its supporters see the survival of its rights and …

05-Aug-2024:
Hi @manton, I thought I’d have another go at crossposting to BlueSky, having given it a miss for a few months. It still doesn’t seem to work. Any idea why? It’s …

05-Aug-2024:
When I started my newsletter, I used to write my posts every second Wednesday. As they got longer and I got older and tireder, I’d start my posts every second …

05-Aug-2024:
I forgot that I’d switched to Hex keyboard input so as to type a “thin space”, and thought that my Option key had stopped working! Panic over.

03-Aug-2024:
The Stand describes a world laid waste by a weaponised super-flu virus nicknamed “Captain Trips” that has escaped from a biolab. Donal Ryan on Stephen King. So …

03-Aug-2024:
Katie Herzog recently learned that she has aphantasia. It sounds to me as if she has SDAM too. She’s refreshingly sceptical of the consensus view that it’s not …

28-Jul-2024:
Here’s another post from Talk about books. This time, I’m discussing Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels, 📖 Pleading Guilty (1993) and The Laws of Our Fathers …

28-Jul-2024: Impeaching his own witness: Scott Turow, Pleading Guilty and The Laws of Our Fathers

Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels are where his practice of doing something different each time, avoiding formulae and patterns, first becomes conspicuous, …

25-Jul-2024:
I’m going to have to stop buying secondhand books from the UK. I recently ordered a book via Alibris; it was posted on 2 July and it still hasn’t arrived. This …

25-Jul-2024:
Gosh, Stuart Jeffries didn’t like Paul Foot very much, did he? Review of Margaret Renn’s Foot biography 📚

24-Jul-2024:
Via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog

20-Jul-2024:
I just noticed that because of an error on the index page of my personal site my post “Did William Empson have ADHD?” has till now been inaccessible from the …

18-Jul-2024:
Here’s a list of “5 great underrated film performances by Nicolas Cage” that doesn’t include either of my two favourites, Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) or …

14-Jul-2024:
Just posted in Talk about books: my discussion of Mary Gaitskill’s second collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To 📖 (1997)

14-Jul-2024: “I have deep longings that will never be satisfied”: Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To

Several of the short stories in Mary Gaitskill’s second collection, originally published in 1997, deal with desires that may be incapable of fulfilment, and …

10-Jul-2024:
This is priceless! From Noahpinion

09-Jul-2024:
The nag screens that The Guardian uses instead of a paywall are not undismissable, even on a tiny iPhone Mini, but dismissing them is really counterintuitive. …

09-Jul-2024:
Slate’s Laura Miller has written a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about the sexual abuse by Alice Munro’s second husband of Munro’s daughter.

08-Jul-2024:
I enjoyed this discussion between Colm Tóibín (as Laureate for Irish fiction) with Belinda McKeon, about her first novel Solace (2011), which I happen to have …

07-Jul-2024:
I hadn’t appreciated till now that the Rwanda asylum fiasco is yet another ridiculous consequence of Brexit

07-Jul-2024:
Near Dark, Point Break, Blue Steel, Strange Days: I’m belatedly realizing that these are different movies 🍿. I could have avoided a lot of confusion if someone …

05-Jul-2024:
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has said his party is making progress towards his goal of replacing the Tories as the main opposition to the Tories. …

03-Jul-2024:
Here’s a stimulating discussion by Henry Oliver in The Common Reader of what he calls the modern discourse novel. He criticizes Lauren Oyler and Patricia …

01-Jul-2024:
Yesterday’s Talk about books post was about the poetry of Louis MacNeice. It’s incomplete, I’m afraid, but I thought it best to post it anyway. I’ll revise and …

30-Jun-2024: Slow movements: Flux and stillness in some poems by Louis MacNeice

A discussion, as yet unfinished, of some of Louis MacNeice’s poetry which deals with time and change, flux and stasis.

25-Jun-2024:
Tommie Gorman who, among his many other distinctions, was in my year at school has sadly died

23-Jun-2024:
I’ve just posted on my personal site: Bad poetic taste is better than no taste at all. I’ve always felt that my taste in poetry is regrettably narrow; finally …

23-Jun-2024:
This is a shock: Newpark Academy of Music announces sudden closure. Most of the leading Irish jazz musicians have either taught or been taught there 🎶

19-Jun-2024:
Breaking: 95-year-old man hasn’t died

18-Jun-2024:
… worried that the hoards of teenagers on the lash are going to catch a chill. It’s about time we stopped hoarding teenagers. Terence Eden, Falsehoods …

18-Jun-2024:
… the 1975, a band that represents everything I enjoy in the abstract and who have never produced one record I’ve actually enjoyed, making them the music …

17-Jun-2024:
Yellowface is sharp and funny but parts of it read like a hot take on the current state of publishing. It’s hard to believe that even such a smart and …

17-Jun-2024:
… so obvious was to it to Shakespeare’s contemporaries that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare that the first speculations that someone else might have written the …

16-Jun-2024:
I bought a copy of Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface 📚 to read on the train yesterday. Station bookshop didn’t have the book I particularly wanted. 70 pages in, I’m …

16-Jun-2024:
Just ordered this limited edition CD of Philip Chevron songs from Bandcamp. First not-jazz album I’ve bought since godknowswhen 🎶

16-Jun-2024:
I’ve just posted on Talk about books my discussion of two “music poems”🎶 📖 by Robert Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”. I had …

16-Jun-2024: Robert Browning’s poetry about music: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”

A look at two poems by Robert Browning in which a first-person speaker, an approximate contemporary of the poet’s, addresses and interrogates through his music …

12-Jun-2024:
I started to write a newsletter post about Browning’s “music poetry”, saw that John Lennard (The Poetry Handbook 📚) describes the metre of “A Toccata of …

12-Jun-2024:
Hey, it seems that Françoise Hardy was still alive till just a few days ago. Who knew?

07-Jun-2024:
Here’s Ken Whyte of Sutherland House (a Canadian nonfic publisher) on the Junkification of Amazon. It’s getting worse. Strange to think it’s almost 5 years …

07-Jun-2024:
“This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch …” according to Mike Lynch’s lawyers following …

05-Jun-2024:
This is one of the ways that Bookmunch gets on my nerves: in the first sentence of this book review the word “I” appears three times, and it’s the first word of …

04-Jun-2024:
A friend of mine, who’s slightly older than me, told me, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.” Cormac McCarthy, in conversation with the Coen brothers, …

02-Jun-2024:
TFW you’ve just arrived on a web page and are trying to dismiss the popup that immediately appears in the middle of your screen, when another popup pops up in …

01-Jun-2024:
The current Talk about books post is about Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles 📖. I particularly enjoyed writing this one. It didn’t end up where I was …

01-Jun-2024: Everywoman in Arcadia: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Though Hardy presents his heroine as a vivid, precisely drawn individual, she seems at the same time to span historical eras and periods and to bridge social …

01-Jun-2024:
I think the last time I went to the cinema was 2007, when I saw Das Leben der Anderen (with French subtitles) in Toulouse. When I lived near the Dalston Rio I …

30-May-2024:
A little over a year ago, I wrote about 2 short novels by Ian McEwan in which music plays a central role. I’ve finally got around to writing about The Children …

25-May-2024:
Sad to hear that Palle Danielsson has died. I particularly love the CamJazz albums he made with John Taylor (p) and Martin France (d). I wanted to go and see …

23-May-2024:
If it weren’t for this side gig, he’d be back home petting his cats, grading papers, and bird-watching. (He doesn’t really have a lot going on.) Huh? Has the …

23-May-2024:
Not for the first time I’m thinking about removing Bookmunch from my feed reader. They often have irritating, offputting reviews of books I might want to read. …

22-May-2024:
He had loved Thurber when he was young. He even liked the television show that used Thurber’s drawings, My World and Welcome to It. That’s from Laura Lippman’s …

19-May-2024:
I’m reading McEwan’s The Children Act for the third time, wanting to write something about his use of music. The phrase “ruin a fine tenor voice for effects …

19-May-2024:
A new post from me in Talk about books. This time I’m looking at some city comedies by Thomas Middleton: A Trick to Catch the Old One and two others. The cruel …

19-May-2024: The cruel comedy of Thomas Middleton: A Trick to Catch the Old One and other city comedies

A look at three “city comedies” by Thomas Middleton, in which he works clever variations on a repeated set of themes, sets up the occasional coup de théâtre and …

18-May-2024:
A link in Julian Girdham’s latest blog post led me indirectly to this earlier one where he writes about the design of poetry textbooks. That in turn reminded me …

15-May-2024:
I reread Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye 📖 a few months ago, having previously read it in the early 90s and remembered only the theme — and that vaguely. It’s just …

15-May-2024:
My sister was driving from France and brought the rest of the books I’d left behind there years ago. I was hoping to be reunited with Wilkie Collins, No Name; …

15-May-2024:
I think it’s time I gave up trying to crosspost to BlueSky and just posted there manually instead. It’s a pity because I like being able to include real links …

15-May-2024:
I unexpectedly came across my old copies of The Invention of Solitude and Moon Palace just now. When Auster died recently, I thought I’d like to read Moon …

15-May-2024:
Apple, why is my “Recents” folder completely empty? And why has a photo I just saved to the “Preview” folder on iCloud not shown up there, or anywhere else that …

13-May-2024:
What blasted idiot thought touchscreens were a good idea? I just wiped some dirt off the screen of my iPad and jumped at least one screen back in the browser …

08-May-2024:
Two contrasting reviews of Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel 📖, at Bookmunch and the Irish Times. The Irish Times one is subscriber only, I’m afraid.

07-May-2024:
I should have known there’d be a word for it: matriphagy. Perfect! Sarah Ditum on form, as usual

05-May-2024:
The latest post from Talk about books is Nothing to be afraid of: Seamus Heaney on the last things of Yeats and Larkin, about Heaney’s 1990 lecture as Oxford …

05-May-2024: Nothing to be afraid of: Seamus Heaney on the last things of Yeats and Larkin

A look at a lecture that Seamus Heaney gave while he was Oxford Professor of Poetry, in which he compared Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” with two poems by W B Yeats, …

05-May-2024:
Brad Mehldau has been playing in a trio with Jorge Rossy again, this time with a bassist who is unfamiliar to me (but Danish!!) Later this month, he’s playing …

05-May-2024:
There are so many reasons why Amazon should be broken up, but this look at its absolutely atrocious business culture and ethics just adds to the pile. says Ian …

04-May-2024:
I enjoyed this evisceration of Stanley Kubrick. To be fair to Kubrick, I haven’t seen very many of his films. I remember reading a (favourable) review of Barry …

04-May-2024:
I love the Brad Mehldau Trio’s version of “Day Is Done” (which I’m listening to at the moment). I wonder what Nick Drake would have made of it 🎶 🎹

04-May-2024:
You have a choice between somebody who without a doubt, and has said so, will impose a vengeful tyranny, and another person who wouldn’t … says Margaret …

03-May-2024:
Doctor Who actors ranked. I can’t believe Matt Smith came … um, where he did. Before Capaldi. And Eccleston. Preposterous.

02-May-2024:
Contingency, as an aesthetic given, tends to undermine meaning from the ground up. Where meaning is absent, dead language creeps in. Kevin Power has …

02-May-2024:
Goodbye Blackberry Way … 🎶 🎹Richard Tandy, ELO keyboardist, dies aged 76

01-May-2024:
Four years ago, I said I wanted to read Rachel Donohue’s The Temple House Vanishing 📚, on the basis of a piece by her in the Irish Times, evoking 1990s Dublin. …

01-May-2024:
Sorry, it’s my fault again. I was just thinking about Auster this morning (which is not something I do very often). I’ll try to be more careful from now on.

29-Apr-2024:
One of the things that irritates me about Substack is that their RSS feeds don’t include links to other Substack users’ profiles, leaving gaps in the text …

29-Apr-2024:
‘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 …

27-Apr-2024:
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 …

25-Apr-2024:
Having raved about Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories, I found her first two novels less satisfying. This third one sounds more like it — I hope 📖

23-Apr-2024:
Helen Mirren is great, of course, but really unimaginative casting for The Thursday Murder Club 🍿 Oh well, I probably wouldn’t have watched it anyway.

21-Apr-2024:
The latest post from Talk about books is Flight from Paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, about his Kashmir novel from 2005 📖

21-Apr-2024:
[Adam] Zeman’s research suggests that people with hyperphantasia enjoy especially rich autobiographical memories. Hyperphantasia and the quest to understand …

21-Apr-2024: Flight from paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown, is about Kashmir, the conflict between India and Pakistan over that region and the entanglement of public and …

21-Apr-2024:
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 …

20-Apr-2024:
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 …

19-Apr-2024:
TFW you try to extend the selection of some text but iOS scrolls the page instead! 😡

14-Apr-2024:
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 …

14-Apr-2024:
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 …

11-Apr-2024:
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 …

11-Apr-2024:
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 …

07-Apr-2024:
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. …

07-Apr-2024: Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various

The sixth anthology in Faber’s series of “New Irish short stories” contains 24 stories, ranging across a variety of themes and styles. I discuss four of my …

06-Apr-2024:
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 …

02-Apr-2024:
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 …

31-Mar-2024:
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 …

31-Mar-2024:
Fears that AI poses some kind of existential threat are highly effective misdirection. AI isn’t going to achieve “world domination”™️. The humans running the …

29-Mar-2024:
I liked Dervla McTiernan’s first three novels and found the fourth readable if unsatisfactory in some respects. But, on the basis of her piece in Crime Reads …

27-Mar-2024:
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 …

25-Mar-2024:
Maybe it’s actually a good review: clearly letting me know that this book is not for me!

25-Mar-2024:
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 …

24-Mar-2024:
Here’s yet another good reason not to buy books from Amazon 📚

20-Mar-2024:
The new Talk about books post (on time, for the first time in ages) looks at Caroline O’Donoghue’s second novel for adults, Scenes of a Graphic Nature 📖. A …

20-Mar-2024: Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature

The second of Caroline O’Donoghue’s 3 novels for adults features a filmmaker in her late 20s who visits her father’s birthplace on a small County Kerry island …

18-Mar-2024:
Flying six people to space is cheaper than sending an asylum seeker to Rwanda, an MP has said. Cheaper to send people into space than to Rwanda, MPs hear …

18-Mar-2024:
I’ve just deleted my Substack account, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. That means cancelling my one paid subscription. The unpaid ones I can …

17-Mar-2024:
I don’t see how you could spend even an hour in Dublin and not see the ruinous impact of the tech industry. We sold the city to these companies and made it …

17-Mar-2024:
My iPhone 12 Mini’s small screen means that I use Safari’s reader view a lot. But the way it leaves out author names/bylines is really frustrating. I know the …

17-Mar-2024:
So it was easy for me to be the titular lead director. Hey, a rare sighting of “titular” used in the old-fashioned (IMO “correct”) sense. These days, people …

16-Mar-2024:
I regularly mix up names that aren’t at all alike, so you can imagine how confused I was, having seen posters around Westport for a concert by Cara Dillon, I …

16-Mar-2024:
I really wanted the Autonomy fiasco to be HP’s fault, not Lynch’s. Of course, it’s possible for both things to be true: even if Lynch inflated the value, it …

12-Mar-2024:
My phone service provider regularly sends me emails urging me to “go 5G”, though there’s no 5G coverage in this area. Even 4G is a bit spotty since the storms …

10-Mar-2024:
Late again, here’s the most recent post from Talk about books, Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam. Two years ago, I wrote about her …

10-Mar-2024: Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam

Between 1987 and 1994, Candia McWilliam published 3 novels, none of them very long, which were critically very well received and won prizes. A collection of …

07-Mar-2024:
I just noticed that someone whose Substack Notes I follow (I get their newsletter by RSS) has posted several Notes that I hadn’t seen, but would have liked to. …

06-Mar-2024:
I got 8 out of 12 and it said “in the middle of your flop era”, but I thought 8/12 was good, actually. I was pleased with my performance; it wan’t bad at all. …

05-Mar-2024:
Sad to hear that Edward Bond has died, though at least he had a long life. I think I only ever saw one of his plays — The Sea 🎭 — in performance, though I saw …

28-Feb-2024:
Substack now has direct messages. It’s not a feature I’m likely to use very much (I sent maybe one every two years on Twitter) but we’ll see.

27-Feb-2024:
This year’s choice for One Dublin, One Book is Louise Nealon’s Snowflake 📖. The idea is that as many people as possible should read it during April. I’ve …

25-Feb-2024:
Bernard Kops is dead. He was 97, but it’s still sad. I fondly remember a playwriting workshop he led at the CityLit, early 1990s, and I went with my mother (who …

25-Feb-2024:
I just posted the latest Talk about books. It looks at philosophical materialism in Paradise Lost: Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise …

25-Feb-2024: Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost reveals Milton’s philosophical materialism, while passing over the heretical beliefs which in part flow from it.

23-Feb-2024:
Unfortunate BP employee gets fired because she wasn’t sufficiently suspicious of her husband: Insider trading.

22-Feb-2024:
I’m always complaining about Google’s search results. It’s great for one thing, though: identifying half-remembered snippets of poetry. Last night, something I …

20-Feb-2024:
Wayne Robins attempts to shape his 7-month-old grandson’s musical tastes and reminisces about “smoking a j and knocking back a bottle of Thunderbird with Mister …

19-Feb-2024:
The Critic magazine has a good article on Josephine Tey, two of whose novels have been reissued in Penguin’s Crime & Espionage series. I read and enjoyed …

17-Feb-2024:
I’m again thinking about deleting my Substack account. I moved my newsletter >2 years ago, and I’m still on Substack only for the Notes, which I thought …

17-Feb-2024:
I use Safari Reader View a lot, particularly on my phone. One thing that I find annoying is that it (often?) doesn’t display the author’s byline. I was …

13-Feb-2024:
I’ve updated my Talk about books post about William Empson’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses from Mar 2021 to include page references from the Penguin …

13-Feb-2024:
My original Talk about books post in July 2022 about Ted Chiang’s novella/long short story, “Anxiety is the dizzyness of freedom” had no page references because …

11-Feb-2024:
John Newell, a County Down man … infiltrated the United Irishmen rebel group in 1796 and helped to imprison 200 members. Newell was paid £2,000 by the …

11-Feb-2024:
I’ve just posted in Talk about books: a second visit to Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at …

11-Feb-2024: Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series revisited

A second look at Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at the first book, Case Histories, which I …

09-Feb-2024:
Hard to believe it’s 25 years since the Pinochet appeals and Lord Hoffman’s extraordinary mistake. Joshua Rozenberg has an excellent recap. As usual, I’m …

30-Jan-2024:
When you have a useful thing worth money and regularly leave it outdoors, ingenuity and an angle grinder will come for you in the end. You have to see yourself …

28-Jan-2024:
The latest Talk about books post is about Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories in Blank Pages and other stories (2021). The vulnerabilities and indignities of age …

28-Jan-2024: Jagged and straight: Bernard MacLaverty, Blank Pages and other stories

MacLaverty’s sixth book of short stories, the first for fifteen years, features many aging or elderly characters who are vulnerable to failing health and …

27-Jan-2024:
Earlier this week I was surprised to learn that Ivor Browne had, until just a few days ago, still been alive. I hadn’t heard anything about him for decades. …

23-Jan-2024:
Has Substack changed the way it handles link previews? I stopped including Twitter card meta tags in my blog posts about a year ago. For a while I replaced them …

23-Jan-2024:
My blog hasn’t been updating for the past few days. I just want to see if a new post will dislodge it.

20-Jan-2024:
Hi @help @manton There’s something strange going on with my blog. The log is full of lines like this Publish: Already queued, scheduling +30 seconds and it …

18-Jan-2024:
I think I might disable crossposting from Micro.blog to BlueSky (the only place I have it enabled) because more often than not, once I’ve posted something on …

18-Jan-2024:
In the long run, student plagiarists are mostly harming themselves, and so we should discourage them from plagiarism for the same reason that we discourage them …

14-Jan-2024: Problems with the RSS for yesterday’s Talk about books
My apologies to everybody who follows my newsletter, Talk about books, by RSS. The RSS for yesterday’s post, about Robert Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess” …

13-Jan-2024:
Here is the first Talk about books post of 2024. “I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”. The monologue is more effective as drama if we …

13-Jan-2024: “I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”

Robert Browning’s monologue is more effective as drama if we don’t assume (a) that the subject of the painting is necessarily the Duke’s first wife, as well as …

11-Jan-2024:
SEC Twitter account hacked; Twitter says two-factor authentication wasn’t enabled. Is it legal for Twitter to make it public whether 2FA is enabled on an …

04-Jan-2024:
Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It … means “actually existing”. …

01-Jan-2024:
… the kinds of book I am most likely to abandon are history and theology; the kinds I am least likely to abandon are novels and biographies. writes Alan …

31-Dec-2023:
The last Talk about books post of 2023 is about Emma Healey’s two novels, 📖Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) and Whistle in the Dark (2018). Happy New Year, all. The …

31-Dec-2023: Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing and Whistle in the Dark

Emma Healey’s two novels (to date) are quite different from each other but share some ideas and themes. Both focus on the relationship between sisters, and both …

30-Dec-2023:
Bandcamp has a previously unreleased live album by Mads Vinding, recorded 2018, with Dado Moroni on piano 🎹. I’m very tempted, except for a 9-minute version of …

29-Dec-2023:
Mince, Delors! Jacques Delors destroyed the European left. Actually, I don’t agree with much of this analysis but I think it’s worth reading.

27-Dec-2023:
… although not an especially good cook, Eve is always ready with sage advice about the arts of the kitchen. One of her more irritating sayings is “you can’t …

22-Dec-2023:
I just read the first 5 instalments of Luke Jennings’s Killing Eve: Resurrection on Substack. I hadn’t read his original books📚 or watched the tv series but …

20-Dec-2023:
I’ve never liked bagels … writes John Naughton. I must say the concept of “liking bagels” caused me a certain amount of cognitive dissonance when I read that. …

18-Dec-2023:
It looks as if Bluesky might where several of the people I used to enjoy following on Twitter have ended up. People like John Self for example.

18-Dec-2023:
I was wondering how it was that I’d never heard of the Irish film November Afternoon 🍿 till I remembered that in 1996 I’d been living in London for 9 years, …

18-Dec-2023:
Now Threads has come to the EU I’m reminded that I don’t want an Instagram account or anything from Meta. Maybe it’s time to try Bluesky instead. If some kind …

17-Dec-2023:
The new Talk about books post is about A Stranger with a Bag, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature …

17-Dec-2023: Stranger still: Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature “strangers”, people who are in some sense out of place. Many of the …

14-Dec-2023:
It’s as if the show is saying, “Yes, yes, on the one hand the Doctor always changes, but on the other hand he is also always David Tennant and he is also always …

10-Dec-2023:
Ben Sixsmith in The Critic on The sad reign of Ian Hislop. I remember remarking to someone in 1995 or thereabouts that HIGNFY was my favourite tv programme (I …

10-Dec-2023:
I get so fed up reading the phrase “show, don’t tell”. It’s not that I disagree with the principle, not at all (within reason), but surely there’s something …

10-Dec-2023:
Did William Empson have ADHD or something like it? Spoiler: I’m not able to reach a conclusion, sorry. But if he did have ADHD it would be interesting, because …

09-Dec-2023:
People often complain about Substack for various reasons but there’s a lot of good stuff on there. (One of these days, I’m going to post a list of the feeds I …

07-Dec-2023:
I listened to several old episodes of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book last night, including an interview with Sarah Hall on the publication of her novel Burntcoat …

06-Dec-2023:
Signal is fading, if this is right. I’ve found myself increasingly using regular SMS. I have an iPhone 12 Mini, most of my friends and family prefer Android and …

04-Dec-2023:
I’m not enjoying Substack Notes so I thought about deleting my Substack account entirely, to avoid the temptation to use Notes. But I have paid subscriptions to …

04-Dec-2023:
George Boole was the model for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty — true or false?

03-Dec-2023:
Just posted on Talk about books, a discussion of three novels by Jane Austen: Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion 📖

03-Dec-2023: Land and marriage: Three novels by Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s irony includes a kind of “double vision” which enables her to consider simultaneously “The economic basis of society” (W H Auden) and the …

29-Nov-2023:
Tasers and water cannon? That would be a very effective combination. Tasers to be given to Public Order Unit and water cannons sought

28-Nov-2023:
Every now and then, I find myself wanting to write a post about the unfulfilled promises of technology. Then I remember that I already wrote it, more than 3 …

26-Nov-2023:
I want to go for a walk but I don’t want to go for a walk around here (boring), it’s too wet to take the bike out and the Sunday bus timetable is such that I …

26-Nov-2023:
The iOS Weather app tells me that it’s not going to rain today until 8 pm but a look out the window tells me that it’s raining now. I wonder which I should …

25-Nov-2023:
Funny to realize that the Eblana’s existence has been forgotten and that it’s now part of “hidden Dublin”. I saw the hilarious production of Joe Orton’s Loot🎭 …

24-Nov-2023:
The people I buy my coffee from keep sending me emails that look like this. I think there are supposed to be various offers between the links styled as buttons …

23-Nov-2023:
Cydney Hayes sees a “vibe shift” on Substack since the introduction of Notes: The elite capture of Substack. I must say I haven’t been finding it enjoyable or …

23-Nov-2023:
“You don’t always have to stay in your lane. But try not to drive completely off the road into a damn flute store!” Ah, so “stay in your lane” is a driving …

22-Nov-2023:
Because of my age I qualified for free bus and train travel a few months ago. Now, I regularly catch myself singing the beginning of Jethro Tull’s “Doctor …

20-Nov-2023:
When the Haughey payments became public knowledge, some joker commented “Ben there. Dunne that. Bought the Taoiseach.” 🤣 Ben Dunne dead at 74

19-Nov-2023:
This is the 78th post in Talk about books, marking the end of its 3rd year. Unfortunately, the post isn’t one of my best: I start by saying I don’t know the …

19-Nov-2023: The last word or the first claim: Notes on some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry

I don’t know the poetry of Seamus Heaney (the tenth anniversary of whose death was earlier this year) as well as I ought to, and in this post I manage to prove …

17-Nov-2023:
A S Byatt has died, aged 87. I liked some of her novels (Possession, Still Life) very much and disliked others (The Biographer’s Tale 📚, Babel Tower) almost as …

17-Nov-2023:
When they say, “This call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes”, I say, “Thank you!”, and click the record button. Quentin Stafford-Fraser

14-Nov-2023:
I always think that Gary Oldman looks even less like “a bullfrog in a sou’wester” than Alec Guinness did!

09-Nov-2023:
Here’s a fascinating and amusing long piece about aggressive literary agent Andrew Wylie, aka “the Jackal”, who temporarily broke up the friendship of Julian …

08-Nov-2023:
Here’s Salman Rushdie on the usefulness of fable and the elusiveness of peace

06-Nov-2023:
Noah Smith has been taking a penetrating look at what’s going on in the Irish economy and has unearthed a few surprising facts: How Ireland got so rich Ireland …

05-Nov-2023:
I’d never seen Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation🍿 but read something recently about its 20th anniversary and decided it was time. I watched first 15 minutes …

01-Nov-2023:
I’ve just posted in Talk about books about Daphne du Maurier’s collection of “long” short stories, Don’t Look Now and other stories 📖

01-Nov-2023: Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now and other stories

This collection of 5 “long” short stories displays du Maurier’s versatility but without giving the impression that it’s a deliberate showcase or sampler. One …

29-Oct-2023:
For some reason (?!) I’ve been watching random episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip this morning. I really don’t like Aaron Sorkin’s writing very much but …

29-Oct-2023:
I have Safari on my phone set up to load Wikipedia pages in Reader View automatically. But I can’t expand the headings in Reader View!

28-Oct-2023:
I bought an old DVD in a secondhand shop yesterday, to rip the movie for my iPad. As I was paying (€1), the woman said “It’s 2 for the price of 1”. I didn’t …

25-Oct-2023:
When Substack introduced Notes, I said I didn’t know whether I needed a Twitter alternative but that Notes might be it. Starting to think that I really don’t …

22-Oct-2023:
The latest post from Talk about books, even later than usual (which is becoming the norm when I’m writing about Salman Rushdie) narrowly avoids discussing in …

22-Oct-2023: Shifting ground: Salman Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet

Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel marks a change of direction in his fiction, though I’m not yet sure which way it leaves him pointing. He jokes about …

20-Oct-2023:
… Google’s defense, which is that it’s not Google’s access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it’s “brilliant people, …

19-Oct-2023:
There’s a little book festival in Westport this weekend. I’m a bit tempted by the Séamus Heaney event but maybe the €25 charge would be better spent on a book …

18-Oct-2023:
I got the previous Talk about books post out on time (i.e. on the Wednesday) for the first time in several months. But already I’m slipping again. Today I’m …

17-Oct-2023:
I just looked up “negative space” because I couldn’t figure out intuitively what it might mean, and now I’m really puzzled. How is this different from positive …

16-Oct-2023:
Safari on my iPhone keeps loading completely blank pages — not even a “can’t find server” message — for every page I try to visit. I’ve never seen this …

15-Oct-2023:
The biographer’s predicament: out to be definitive, he got cornered into granting copy approval before being scooped by someone whose story it actually was. …

14-Oct-2023:
Here’s Richard Williams’s typically brilliant post on The Isleys, whose mainstay, Rudolph, has died, aged 84 🎶

09-Oct-2023:
Stuart Jeffries has a go at Nicholas Lyndhurst for the script of a daft sitcom he had a supporting role in as a young actor 45 years ago. Incisive journalism.

08-Oct-2023:
Apparently, Sam Bankman-Fried balked at paying Trump $5bn to agree not to run for the Presidency again. But maybe we could crowdfund it?

07-Oct-2023:
The Akoustic Band has till recently been my least favourite of Chick Corea’s piano-led 🎹 trios, but I bought their Live album a few months ago and it’s been …

07-Oct-2023:
Apparently, the south side of Dublin gets more rain than the north side, which is in the lee of Howth Hill. Judging by where they seem to want to live, I don’t …

06-Oct-2023:
I’ve started to read Mansfield Park 📖, a Jane Austen novel that I haven’t read before. I might write about it, Emma and Persuasion (both of which I have read, …

04-Oct-2023:
I just posted this from Talk about books: Becoming Amazons: Lisa Lutz, The Swallows 📖. The book is an unusual — but very effective — combination of serious, …

04-Oct-2023: Becoming Amazons: Lisa Lutz, The Swallows

Lisa Lutz’s novel, The Swallows (2019) successfully performs a difficult balancing act. The theme is deadly serious — sexual exploitation and abuse — while the …

04-Oct-2023:
Ah, the problem seems to be specifically with Wordpress sites.

04-Oct-2023:
Is Cloudflare or some similar service down this morning? Many sites (e.g The Overspill) aren’t loading at all, whereas many others are loading normally 🤷‍♂️

03-Oct-2023:
Here’s an absorbing “long read” about Michael Lewis (oh, and somebody named Sam Bankman-Fried): The Insider

03-Oct-2023:
“MX”, the subject of the first case study of acquired aphantasia, could give detailed descriptions of scenes and landmarks around his native Edinburgh: “I can …

02-Oct-2023:
I’ve just finished reading David Garnett’s 📖 The Grasshoppers Come (1931), a novella in which a crashed pilot in the Gobi desert survives by eating locusts. …

02-Oct-2023:
I picked up a hardback copy of Chris Power’s collection of short stories, Mothers (2018) 📖 in good condition in a secondhand shop today, so I’m feeling quite …

30-Sep-2023:
I don’t like the sound of this. Hope I’m wrong. Songtradr acquires Bandcamp 🎶

26-Sep-2023:
“Background music” is noise pollution. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in a shopping centre while waiting for my bus,and making no progress with the book I’m …

23-Sep-2023:
Latest from Talk about books: Out of series: Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver and Lying in Wait 📖 Liz Nugent’s first two novels combine familiar, naturalistically …

23-Sep-2023: Out of series: Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver (2014) and Lying in Wait (2016)

Liz Nugent’s first two novels combine familiar, naturalistically described settings with melodramatic action and motivations that are shockingly twisted. The …

23-Sep-2023:
I’ve just been reading Ethan Iverson’s remarks about William Friedkin’s films, including Jade (1995). About Jade: I used to think David Caruso was pretty good, …

22-Sep-2023:
The up-arrow on my 2019 MacBook Air (butterfly keyboard) no longer works. Usually, that’s no problem but today I needed to search through Terminal history for a …

22-Sep-2023:
This priceless “mute interview” with Samuel Beckett following his Nobel prize win (1969) looks as if he directed it himself. Sorry it’s on Facebook. (I was able …

21-Sep-2023:
Booker shortlist dominated by Pauls 📖

21-Sep-2023:
If this lawsuit makes US copyright law stricter against AI, all it would do is make companies hesitant to develop and innovate in their products. He says that …

17-Sep-2023:
John Marshall, drummer with Soft Machine has died. I have two albums he made for ECM with Arild Andersen (b) and Vassilis Tsabropoulos (p). I’m going to listen …

17-Sep-2023:
And this what pushed the post about Bookshop.org off the front page: Tracking my reading. Yet again, I’m giving up the idea of keeping track of the books I …

17-Sep-2023:
This post from the start of this year has just dropped off the end of the front page of my personal site, so I thought I’d give it a bit of a boost, trying to …

15-Sep-2023:
What we think of as vanilla—sweet, bland—is a lie. Real vanilla rather than synthetic vanillan can taste “dark-sweet, of smoke and cherries; or earthy as …

14-Sep-2023:
I’ve just reread Candia McWilliam’s A Little Stranger 📖. I love these old Picador paperbacks, they remind me of how I felt back in the late 80s. I realized I’ve …

14-Sep-2023:
In Normal People 📖, the fictional Connell cast his first vote in a general election for Declan Bree (as did I, 30-odd years earlier). Now, the veteran Cllr Bree …

12-Sep-2023:
I read John McGahern’s novel Amongst Women 📖 in 1991 or 1992, and I couldn’t understand the praise it had attracted. To me it seemed just another tale about …

12-Sep-2023:
What’s the point of having a nuclear arsenal if you can’t use it to bluff? Elon Musk let Russia scare him — The Artlantic

10-Sep-2023:
The latest post from Talk about books is about Wilkie Collins’s 1875 novel, The Law and the Lady 📖. Valeria Woodville is advised by many wise and well-meaning …

10-Sep-2023:
Hi @help, the status of my current newsletter is that it’s “scheduled to go in -9 minutes” (i.e. 9 minutes ago). It seems to be stuck. Your help …

10-Sep-2023: A double standard: Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady

Valeria Woodville is advised by many wise and well-meaning people that to investigate her new husband’s hidden past can result only in misery and despair. Her …

10-Sep-2023: Échappé belle
I spent several hours yesterday writing 1,300 words for my newsletter. I write in Tot, which syncs between Mac and iPad (and in principle iPhone) via iCloud. …

08-Sep-2023:
I just deleted 32 feeds from my feed reader (NetNewsWire) and subscribed to them in Substack app instead. As I said yesterday, I’m using the app regularly for …

07-Sep-2023:
I’ve been using the Substack app (on iPhone) and website (on Mac and iPad) daily because Notes. I’m now thinking that, since I’m using the app/site anyway, …

03-Sep-2023:
After tinkering with it occasionally over 5 years, I’ve finally abandoned my short story “Purpose of Amendment” (the first part of 3 is still up). I was really …

02-Sep-2023:
I do think no story has ever been read properly unless it’s read twice. Claire Keegan 📖

02-Sep-2023:
When I was repatriating my books from France earlier this year, this is one that I packed. Now I’m wondering what I was thinking when I made space for a bulky …

01-Sep-2023:
Surely this should be more widely known. The publisher George Weidenfeld and the writer Cyril Connolly named each other as corespondents in successive divorce …

30-Aug-2023:
… a robot once used in an underwater search for a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Spain has been called in as backup. Whaaaat? Submarine trapped on seabed, 1973

30-Aug-2023:
The NetPositive browser had no support for either CSS or JavaScript. It was fast and light and I thought it was beautiful. In those days, the conventional …

27-Aug-2023:
I just posted this on my own site: Substack Notes: a substitute for Twitter?

27-Aug-2023:
I think I’m going to stop adding OG tags to posts on my personal site. It annoys me to have to paste in the same text twice for title, description etc.

26-Aug-2023:
Naomi Klein has a Rick Springfield problem, or something more serious. Naomi Klein on following her “doppelgänger” down the conspiracy rabbit hole

26-Aug-2023: Poetic imagery: William Empson and the visual imagination in the criticism of poetry

William Empson said that he never formed visual mental images while he read or thought. I’ve no doubt that aphantasia affects the ways one reads and reacts to …

23-Aug-2023:
I was telling my doctor what aphantasia is (because I thought not being able to visualize might be making it harder for me to deal with anxiety) and she seemed …

22-Aug-2023:
I hate JSTOR. It won’t accept password from Keychain, won’t let me size pages so that the text is legible (and yes, I am wearing my glasses) and now won’t let …

21-Aug-2023:
Finished A S Byatt, Sugar and other stories 📚. This was Byatt’s first short story collection. It’s very uneven. One story, about a 63-year-old woman living in …

20-Aug-2023:
If you like Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 📚, I recommend this post by Adam Roberts. It’s long (almost 9,000 words) and well argued, …

20-Aug-2023:
I just posted this on my personal site: Book reviews, plot summaries and other ways of writing about books. It’s a response to Henry Oliver’s recent post Ban …

19-Aug-2023:
Here’s more Tom Gauld // @odd

15-Aug-2023:
Do not say that your grandmother used to read to you as a boy, unless your grandmother really was a boy, in which case you’ve thrown away a better opening. …

15-Aug-2023:
Substack has brought back the former feature by which you could follow somebody’s Notes without also signing up for their emails. The new implementation is …

13-Aug-2023:
The latest Talk about books post is about Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh 📖. One character is a brutally unflattering portrait of a real-life …

13-Aug-2023: “What, not one hit?” Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

Rushdie’s fifth novel for adults, his next after The Satanic Verses, features one character who is a brutally unflattering caricature of a real-life Hindu …

11-Aug-2023:
With the books and CDs that I brought back from France, I found some DVDs that I seem never to have ripped, including 2 from Chick Corea’s Rendezvous in New …

11-Aug-2023:
I’ve often seen this album on download or streaming sites credited to “AC Trio, feat. Anders Christensen”. It’s another example of these sites spreading bad …

10-Aug-2023:
47 years on, Wayne Robins remains unimpressed by The Last Walz. I never saw Scorsese’s film, but in 1978 I shared a flat with a guy who had the soundtrack …

09-Aug-2023:
Reddit won, it says here. A battle or the war?

07-Aug-2023:
When I saw The French Connection, I was too young to appreciate it. Years later, I was blown away by To Live and Die in LA. But there’s still no way I’m going …

07-Aug-2023:
Coincidentally Mulk Raj Anand has turned up in two very different books that I’ve been alternating. One is fiction, the other biogaphy: Salman Rushdie’s The …

07-Aug-2023:
The rise of “mate” mortgages. Everything old is new again, eh? It reminds me of the mid 80s, when the soaring cost of housing brought about the messy end of a …

07-Aug-2023:
I was just reminded of the former existence of Questia, which I had completely forgotten about. I never found it that useful and hadn’t used it since … when? …

06-Aug-2023:
I hadn’t logged in to Artifact for several weeks and when I did it wanted me to begin the whole personalization process all over again! I had been having my …

05-Aug-2023:
I like these new covers for Ian McEwan’s novels from Vintage. (I like some more than others, naturally.)

04-Aug-2023:
In @scottmclemore@mastodon.online ’s newsletter, The Interval, he writes about this summer’s Umbria Jazz, where he saw 🎹 Stefano Bollani and Enrico Pieranunzi. …

04-Aug-2023:
In my household, this phenomenon is known as “boyfriend recall,” a highly developed survival technique. Helen Lewis. I hate to admit that it has served me …

03-Aug-2023:
Carl Davis, who wrote (among many other things) the music for the BBC miniseries Oppenheimer, has died, aged 86 🎶

01-Aug-2023:
Newts threaten Boris Johnson’s plan to build swimming pool. This sounds very like the revenge of Ken Livingstone.

01-Aug-2023:
Eight books about friendships with wealth disparities📖. And not one of them by Sally Rooney!

30-Jul-2023:
Here’s my first post for some time about SDAM and aphantasia: Sex, SDAM and aphantasia. I tried before to write about how aphantasia affects sex, but I wasn’t …

30-Jul-2023:
The first thing I listen to almost every morning now is Esbjörn Svensson’s very posthumous solo piano album. I was a bit meh about it on first hearing but I’ve …

29-Jul-2023:
Richard Pine, whom coincidentally I mentioned in yesterday’s Talk about books post, writes in The Irish Times about the devastation caused by fires in Corfu. … …

29-Jul-2023:
Here’s something I never expected to say: there’s a new Shakti album out 🎶. I’m strangely unmoved; I think they may have missed their moment as far as I’m …

29-Jul-2023:
Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the …

29-Jul-2023:
Suspended: John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook 📚. I found the particular passage I was looking for — in the Introduction. I’m not going to read the rest straight …

28-Jul-2023:
Finished R F Foster, The Irish Story 📚. I started to read this for the essays on W B Yeats — I’ve found that Roy Foster, a historian rather than a literary …

28-Jul-2023:
The current Talk about books is about Notes to Self (2018), Emilie Pine’s extraordinary collection of personal essays. It deals with having an alcoholic parent, …

28-Jul-2023: “I never call it a memoir”: Mind and body in Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self

Emilie Pine’s extraordinary collection of personal essays deals with having an alcoholic parent, childlessness and miscarriage, the body, perceived failure, …

27-Jul-2023:
Soak, lad, wee maid, It.

26-Jul-2023:
Google makes me feel stupid, as if it’s my own fault I can’t frame a query in a way that’s impossible for it to misinterpret. I’m increasingly thinking of the …

22-Jul-2023:
Finished Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature 📚. Definitely going to reread this soon. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though there were places where it …

22-Jul-2023:
Curious: a review of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait 📚 that doesn’t mention Browning or “My Last Duchess”

21-Jul-2023:
“If I’m thinking: ‘Is it good?’ it’s not good. If it’s great, you can’t stop thinking about it.” Felicity Blunt, literary agent

16-Jul-2023:
Here’s a thought-provoking piece in The Observer about the vital function performed by small, independent publishers in the UK, since the consolidated …

15-Jul-2023:
I used to have Wikipedia automatically open in Reader View, because the font was so small and the lines of text so long. Then they changed it to be more legible …

15-Jul-2023:
I posted the latest Talk about books yesterday morning, with the title “Andrew Marvell’s objects”. It looks at the poet’s use of an unusual grammatical device …

15-Jul-2023:
In a few days I’ll be getting new reading glasses which I hope will improve my concentration and prevent me from getting so tired. But I’m keeping my old …

14-Jul-2023: Andrew Marvell’s objects

A look at Andrew Marvell’s use of an unusual grammatical device in which a single verb has two objects, one abstract, one concrete (or in one case, one human, …

09-Jul-2023:
Well, it has taken me 7 years, but I’ve finally grasped the purpose of Brexit. It’s so that people in the UK can have Threads, even though Threads is not …

09-Jul-2023:
The bloody iPad is refusing to join iPhone hotspot again! iPhone keeps adding blank space to the end of the password. I’m never again going to own more than one …

09-Jul-2023:
I don’t listen to any podcast regularly, but was glad to find Caroline O’Donoghue’s Sentimental Garbage while searching for a discussion of O’Donoghue’s 2nd …

08-Jul-2023:
Crooked Timber is 20 years old and several founders and contributors have been marking the occasion with posts like this one. Here’s to many more years to come: …

08-Jul-2023:
Abdullah Ibrahim is playing in the NCH (Dublin) on Thursday, in trio. I’m not going to be able to get to it (didn’t find out in time), but I’m OK with that. I …

08-Jul-2023:
What the heck is wrong with Google? I put a phrase in quotation marks and it shows me variants of that phrase in preference to the exact words; I precede a word …

06-Jul-2023:
“Aviophobia” means fear of flying, apparently. I saw the word and immediately assumed it meant fear of birds. Overdosing on du Maurier, perhaps.

05-Jul-2023:
Finished Eliza Clark, Boy Parts 📚. I liked this more than I was afraid I might, going by the reviews and comments online. And I’m glad I didn’t know beforehand …

04-Jul-2023:
I just spent 45 minutes trying to get iPad to connect to iPhone as wireless hotspot, something it’s been doing almost every day for 2 years. The iPhone password …

02-Jul-2023:
I’m reading R F Foster, The Irish Story 📚. I’d intended to read only the essays on W B Yeats, at least for now, but I’ve got caught up and I’ll probably read …

01-Jul-2023:
I don’t think this could have happened in Ireland without the women’s movement, without women who had known oppression wanting their gay and lesbian siblings …

01-Jul-2023:
Sometimes while I’m browsing the Guardian, a large, blank orange square will load in a part of the page where there’d normally be an ad, and when this happens I …

01-Jul-2023:
Hey, macOS Preview, if I type “Chapter 3” (without quotes) in the search bar while a PDF is open, shouldn’t it be obvious that I’m looking for the next …

30-Jun-2023:
I sought a theme and … “the Law” won.

30-Jun-2023:
Finished Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields 📚. In jazz, I like pianists in whom Paul Bley’s influence is strongest — like Marcin Wasilewski — more than I like …

30-Jun-2023:
Minister for Media Catherine Martin had warned those appearing to engage in “as transparent a manner as possible”. No more Turbidity, then. RTE before the …

30-Jun-2023:
It seems that Twitter will no longer let me view a tweet on the web unless I sign in/create an account. This really is the end. Thanks, Elon, for making it a …

29-Jun-2023:
I’ve just sent out a Talk about books post in which I discuss Caoilinn Hughes’s two novels 📖, having written about some of her short stories a year ago. The …

29-Jun-2023: Cutting losses: Caoilinn Hughes’s novels

Caoilinn Hughes’s two novels are quite different from each other and from her short stories. But both feature strained sibling and parental relations and show …

28-Jun-2023:
Jeremy Corbyn tweeted Shelley’s “Rise like lions after slumber …” to promote his own poetry. I bet he found it on the sleeve of a Jam LP. That’s where I first …

27-Jun-2023:
Ted Gioia on becoming — quite late — a Dan stan. To me they seem a contradiction: 🎶 music meticulously assembled (not simply played) in the studio that …

24-Jun-2023:
Why in the world are Elon and Zuck planning to punch each other? asks a headline on Vox. I can’t see any great mystery. Who wouldn’t want to punch either or …

24-Jun-2023:
“His brother, who is also a musician …” Norwegian Roxy Music model Kari-Ann Moller fights to stay in UK after Brexit

23-Jun-2023:
I’ve been having trouble concentrating on work recently. I thought it might be undiagnosed ADHD (which my nephew credibly believes he has, and which sometimes …

22-Jun-2023:
Brian Cox: There is no word for “no” in Irish Gaelic. It’s like it’s an offence to say no. They’d sooner cut your throat than say no to you. The great thing …

20-Jun-2023:
Of course, no one types URLs anymore says Dan Kois. Huh? I never got that memo. I type dozens of URLs most days. At least I type part of them. (I’ve relied on …

19-Jun-2023:
If a particular piece of writing — an email, the introduction to a report, a press release, a student essay — can be generated by AI it probably isn’t worth …

17-Jun-2023:
If the music industry only lasted a century, so be it. It’s up to the musicians to make the music, no matter what. This was published in April, but I’ve just …

17-Jun-2023:
I just posted on my personal site Hugo Grotius and the minimalist theory of natural law.

17-Jun-2023:
Tom Hanks first got into acting because Vincent Dowling offered him the opportunity to work for nothing. At least Dowling didn’t propose “exposure” in lieu of …

16-Jun-2023:
Sir Martin Amis was, retrospectively as it were, a knight for the last day of his life. It’s nice to realize he would have known this was coming. Who needs the …

16-Jun-2023:
I’ve noticed I’m having to charge my phone (a 2-year-old iPhone 12 Mini), more than once a day now. Time to replace it, maybe. I wouldn’t even consider getting …

16-Jun-2023:
John Self interviews Ian McEwan about 📖Amsterdam’s Booker win, 25 years on. I love the way McEwan “admits” (gleefully) that characters in his books have …

16-Jun-2023:
New Talk about books post: Anatomy of a series: Scott Turow’s Kindle County novels. And I seem to have got the new newsletter template working the way I want …

16-Jun-2023: Anatomy of a series: Scott Turow’s Kindle County novels

Although Scott Turow’s novels have a number of common themes and tropes, each of them starts from a noticeably different place. The author goes to unusual …

13-Jun-2023:
I’ve added @vincent’s Tinylytics script to just one page so far, the most recent Talk about books. I’m going to add it to the footer template, but with a …

11-Jun-2023:
Sometimes I really hate the iPad. The bezels are so skinny and my thumbs so relatively fat that I often unintentionally tap a link in the navigation panel while …

08-Jun-2023:
I’ve just read Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger with a Bag 📚. A collection of 13 short stories all but two of which originally appeared in The New …

04-Jun-2023: Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983) — Talk about books post
Yesterday, I posted “Floating upwards from history: Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983)” in Talk about books. The post appeared on the web and in the RSS feed, but …

03-Jun-2023:
The latest Talk about books post is about Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) 📖. I found it harder to write about than I was expecting. Floating upwards from history

03-Jun-2023: Floating upwards from history: Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983)

In Shame, Salman Rushdie’s next novel after Midnight’s Children, the author attempts to fictionalize a Pakistan that he views as already partly made up. The …

24-May-2023:
LitHub has just posted an essay from the late Martin Amis’s The Rub of Time (2018) 📖. It’s about Jane Austen and what’s wrong with the adaptations of her work, …

24-May-2023:
Just read Anne Enright The Gathering 📚: Interpersonal dynamics in a large Irish family — twelve siblings born alive, though not all of them stay that way for …

22-May-2023:
The last time I ordered a book by post from the UK, it took about 6 weeks to get here, so I was prepared for a long wait for this one 📖. But it came this …

21-May-2023:
What a ridiculous way to put it! If she was 10 months older then, then she’s 10 months older than him now, unless one of them has died in the meantime, which …

21-May-2023:
I gave up on Garrett Camp’s Mix.com ages ago because it was mostly showing me stories from The Guardian, Slate and other sites I was regularly visiting anyway, …

20-May-2023:
In the latest Talk about books, I’m looking at two volumes of short stories by Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island (2012) and 📖That Old Country Music (2020). …

20-May-2023: Short stories by Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island and That Old Country Music

There’s a narrowing of range, and not just geographically, between Kevin Barry’s second and third collections of stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad …

17-May-2023:
I might be overdosing on Irish writing. I’ve spent most of today trying to write a newsletter post about Kevin Barry’s short stories. Earlier, I started to read …

16-May-2023:
I appear to be trying to persuade the leader of the Lib Dems to join a socialist Labour party that doesn’t even exist, using a GCSE study guide on the 20th …

14-May-2023:
I love this, from Lincoln Michel on the skewed distribution of AI “gains”: … the calls to replace people with AI are focused on artists and workers rather than …

13-May-2023:
Henry Oliver has been reading David Edmonds’s new biography of Derek Parfit, and says: … he had little sense of connections between his past and present self, …

12-May-2023:
Want to read Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger With a Bag 📚. I’ve been looking for about 6 months, but it’s out of print and most secondhand copies, though not …

12-May-2023:
I’m reading Emma Forrest, Cherries in the Snow 📚. Emma Forrest is writing a short series in The Guardian about her icons. Her column on Eve Babitz prompted me …

07-May-2023:
Just read Claire Kilroy, All Names Have Been Changed 📚. A group of creative writing students gradually and painfully free themselves from the (anxiety-inducing) …

05-May-2023:
I was finding it much easier to push the water through my Aeropress ☕️, so I thought the seal must be leaking air, and bought a new one. It turns out it wasn’t …

05-May-2023:
Of course, Twitter still wouldn’t show me the Lil Nas X tweet unless I signed in first, which I can’t do because I deleted my account weeks ago. My loss, no …

05-May-2023:
Twitter seems to have found a new way to be childishly obstructive. The Twitter links from Helen Lewis’s newsletter today can’t be opened directly from the feed …

04-May-2023:
Scrolling through this ranking of Vin Diesel’s films 🍿, I can’t help wondering if he hasn’t been a bit typecast occasionally.

03-May-2023:
Finished reading Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know 📚 An enraged, angry satire written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. I’d forgotten how bleak and …

03-May-2023:
Latest post from Talk about books is about two very short novels by Ian McEwan, Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach 📖. They’re starkly dissimilar — one has been …

03-May-2023: Two short novels by Ian McEwan: Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach

Two very short novels, about the same length, published 9 years apart, are starkly dissimilar — one has been described as “brilliantly acid”, the other as a …

02-May-2023:
Remind me again what Web3 was: Web3 Funding Continues To Crater — Drops 82% Year To Year

01-May-2023:
Now that Claire Kilroy has a fifth novel out, her first since 2012, it’s high time I read the two I’ve had lying around for ages. I meant to start with All …

29-Apr-2023:
This is a game changer for me: I’ve found out how to follow a Substacker’s notes without getting their emails too. It’s still an algorithmic feed but it doesn’t …

27-Apr-2023:
If we could control love, nobody would love anybody. Nobody would take that chance. Smokey Robinson has a new album out at 83 🎶

27-Apr-2023:
Red Rock West, mentioned in the first sentence of Zach Schonfeld’s elegy for Netflix’s DVDs by Mail service, is the film that finally persuaded me that I liked …

23-Apr-2023:
Just read Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule 📚. The last third — once the protagonist starts to recognize that her beliefs are wrong and wouldn’t anyway have …

23-Apr-2023:
I just posted on my own site about Some books I didn’t leave behind a second time

23-Apr-2023:
Noah Smith asks Will there be a Millennial Big Chill? He doesn’t say so explicitly but this piece illustrates the folly of looking at disparities of wealth in …

22-Apr-2023:
The latest Talk about books is about the last three books in Michael Dibdin’s series (of 11) featuring the Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen 📖. Eighteen months …

22-Apr-2023: “This persistent universe game”: The conclusion of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series

A look at the last three books in Michael Dibdin’s series (of 11) featuring the Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen. Eighteen months ago, I wrote about Zen’s …

20-Apr-2023:
Hey @scottmclemore@mastodon.online I see from The Interval that you’re tweeting again. I fully deleted my Twitter account so I won’t be going back. I’m going to …

20-Apr-2023:
Octogenarian retired Law Lord wrote his memoirs (or at least the first volume of them) entirely on his iPhone: Joshua Rozenberg, A Lawyer Writes

17-Apr-2023:
I was in France just before Easter and I heard a young man say he was protesting against pension changes because they make him pay more to support “boomers”. …

16-Apr-2023:
Rereading End Games 📚 I’m now reading Michael Dibdin’s final book for the third time, having originally read it in November 2018 and again (as Micro.blog’s …

14-Apr-2023:
Want to read Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule 📚. I was in Galway at the beginning of the week and I bought the B-format paperback in Dubrays. I expected them …

14-Apr-2023:
I wanted to like Helen Lewis’s Substack post today (as I’ve done in the past) but I can’t because I no longer get her newsletter by email. I unsubscribed from …

12-Apr-2023:
One thing that worries me a bit about Substack Notes is the possibility that I might sign up for emails from Substacks that I already read in RSS, just so that …

12-Apr-2023:
I copied and am posting the link to my first Substack Note, just because I can. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a habit of this.

11-Apr-2023:
Reading about the latest episode of Succession put me in mind of the 1970s tv series The Brothers 📺, which in turn prompted me to Google Gabrielle Drake 🎭, and …

11-Apr-2023:
Sounds like theatre-going may be the new football hooliganism: The ugly new side of theatre audiences

10-Apr-2023:
It looks as if writing.ie might have been hacked ☹️. I first thought they must have let their domain name expire, but the “Young poet’s view of today’s world” …

10-Apr-2023:
This is my favourite headline for a long time: Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud; via …

09-Apr-2023:
I just posted the latest Talk about books. It’s about Thomas Middleton’s tragedy, Women Beware Women (c. 1621). Though I love The Changeling, which he wrote …

09-Apr-2023: “Fools will serve to father wise men’s children”: Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (c. 1621)

Women Beware Women, by Thomas Middleton alone though he often collaborated, has two tragic plots which are tightly integrated. As is true of his earlier play, …

09-Apr-2023:
Who is this Mark Read, and why does my iPad keep prompting me to undo him?

09-Apr-2023:
There was a time when I played Danilo Rea’s 🎹 Lost in Europe 🎶 constantly. I’m just listening to it for the first time in several years. It’s so good. It might …

08-Apr-2023:
Noah Smith reflects on Twitter’s reaction to the (mis)perceived threat from Substack Notes. Will Elon Musk kill Substack?. (Partly paywalled but the first 6 …

08-Apr-2023:
My CD collection has been languishing unplayed in a French attic since 2011. I wanted to bring the discs home. But not their “jewel” cases, which only add bulk …

07-Apr-2023:
I got a notice from the Irish Post Office that a Customs charge of €6.36 was due on a CD I bought. I thought that at a little over half the value of the CD the …

05-Apr-2023:
Just read Trevor Hoyle, Project Avalon 📚, a novelization of 4½ episodes from the first season of Blakes 7 📺. Though Hoyle also wrote original fiction — some of …

04-Apr-2023:
Rowdy Herrington’s Striking Distance (1993), just about my least favourite film by a director that I love — A Murder of Crows; The Stickup; I, Witness — is on …

03-Apr-2023:
I’m in France for a week, rescuing from my sister’s attic books that I left behind in 2011. I decided to rescue my CDs too, though most of them were ripped to …

03-Apr-2023:
It’s increasingly rare for me to click on a link to an NYT story but every time I have done so in the past 2 years I’ve been told that I’ve used up all my free …

03-Apr-2023:
Finished reading Julie Parsons, Eager to Please 📚. Like her first novel, Mary, Mary (1998), this is almost good. I like the plotting apart from the resolution …

02-Apr-2023:
I got a second bite at the cherry, when it comes to recovering the books of mine that had remained in my sister’s attic since 2011. And this time I found the …

01-Apr-2023:
Andrew Marr, former BBC political correspondent, used the same branch of Waitrose as I used to. I didn’t live anywhere near East Sheen but I worked there.

01-Apr-2023:
I’m visiting my sister this week. She recently got two cats, Shana and Onyx (Onyx is the black one, of course). They’re both very nervous of me, and hide where …

29-Mar-2023:
Suspended reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck 📚. i’ve read 8 of the 12 stories. The collection is a bit uneven but I’ve liked most of …

28-Mar-2023:
Read Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint 📚. A very mixed bag; several of these (“Early Music”, “Timeshare”) are character studies rather than full stories. The …

28-Mar-2023:
Google is getting worse. It used to be that if you searched for a phrase in quotation marks it showed exact matches. I just did that and it said “Showing …

28-Mar-2023:
Almost all of Russia’s growth under Putin accrued to the top 10% of the country … Noahpinion: Putin is a rest stop on the road of post-Soviet collapse

27-Mar-2023:
MyHeritage.com keeps sending me email reminders for birthdays of relatives who died years ago. I really ought to unsubscribe but I can’t help feeling that one …

27-Mar-2023:
Robin Rendle on The Writing of the Gods: Forgotten and unreadable for more than a millennia, Dolnick’s book captures the strangeness of hieroglyphs and how …

26-Mar-2023:
Talk about books: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show 📖 After the death of her two children from smallpox, a conservative landowning Englishwoman goes to …

26-Mar-2023: Paris in the springtime: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936)

Following the death of her two children from smallpox, a conservative landowning Englishwoman travels to Paris where she takes part in the revolution of 1848, …

26-Mar-2023:
Interview with Naomi Alderman whose 4th novel, The Power, is being adapted. I’ve been meaning to reread Disobedience 📖; I hadn’t realized that it was her first …

24-Mar-2023:
Mary Gaitskill says of her short story “Secretary” It sounds like a porn cliche but actually I took the idea almost directly from a newspaper story. She has …

20-Mar-2023:
Maria Bustillos in The Nation: The breakneck deployment of half-baked AI, and its unthinking adoption by a load of credulous writers, means that Google — …

20-Mar-2023:
I enjoy Noah Smith’s Substack, Noahpinion, but I wish he’d occasionally get off the fence and let us know what he really thinks. Yes, of course we should ban …

19-Mar-2023:
my uber-Tigger-Pollyanna personality High Court judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn on working with Parkinson’s disease

18-Mar-2023:
Enrico Pieranunzi was supposed to be playing in the Sunside (rue des Lombards, Paris) tonight but had to cancel “pour des raisons personnelles”. I really hope …

18-Mar-2023:
I don’t usually listen to or recommend podcasts from the Economist but this one has Sebastian Scotney (starting at 19:40) talking about the first part of Brad …

17-Mar-2023:
It’s just two months short of three years since I bought a refurb MacBook Air with an Intel chip and a butterfly keyboard. The keyboard has generally been …

17-Mar-2023:
Electric Literature has a list of new Irish novels due out this year. Sarah Gilmartin’s Service 📚 sounds as if it covers some of the same ground as her …

16-Mar-2023:
TIL that the toast alarm in this apartment isn’t able to tell the difference between smoke (from a hypothetical fire) and steam (from an actual shower) when I …

16-Mar-2023:
You need a special degree of ineptness to write From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been …: Goodkind must have meant ‘vast’ to modify ‘number’, but …

14-Mar-2023:
I sometimes buy secondhand books from thebookshop.ie and they usually include a surprise free book. Today’s freebie is Liz Nugent, Lying in Wait📖, which I’ve …

12-Mar-2023:
A much better than usual haul from the charity shop on Friday. I’ve read all of these already but want to read them again; I’ve known for ages that I’d soon …

12-Mar-2023:
I’d like to be able to block replies (by people on Micro.blog) to people I’m not following on Mastodon, while still seeing replies to people I’m following on …

11-Mar-2023:
The latest Talk about books post is a look at Alice Munro’s 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway📖, which includes the three stories that Pedro Almodóvar …

11-Mar-2023: “Just a way that she has found to manage her life”: Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)

A look at Alice Munro’s 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway, which includes the three stories that Pedro Almodóvar adapted for his film, Julieta (2016). …

08-Mar-2023:
Here’s a short story by Maria Farrell, Burning Men, published appropriately on International Women’s Day. I haven’t had time to read it yet so this isn’t …

06-Mar-2023:
I noticed on Friday that Substack’s RSS feeds are leaving out some links, just leaving a gap in the text. I’m not able to tell which links it’s not displaying, …

05-Mar-2023:
I just noticed that 4 out of the last 7 books I’ve read have been collections of short stories. That’s unusual for me, and I have a few more collections lined …

03-Mar-2023:
How great it is to have fast internet. I just started to transfer a file of 413 MB at 20 KB a second. This may take some time 😜

02-Mar-2023:
From The Guardian: Wayne Shorter, icon of jazz saxophone, dies aged 89 🎶

01-Mar-2023:
Joshua Rozenberg explains how the Stormont brake is supposed to work.

28-Feb-2023:
The tv dramatization of MacLaverty’s story “My Dear Palestrina” was the first thing I ever saw Liam Neeson in, and I was impressed by acting and story alike. …

28-Feb-2023:
A few days late — writing about poetry slows me down — Sunday’s post from Talk about books takes a look at William Empson’s poetry from the decade leading up to …

26-Feb-2023: “Not human to feel safely placed”: Further reflections on the poetry of William Empson

William Empson’s poetry changed after 1930. Between then and 1940, his main subject was the approach of war. And then he stopped almost completely.

25-Feb-2023:
I might reread Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife 📚, though I disliked the serial-killer-tortures-young-women plot. The husband narrator is obviously unreliable …

21-Feb-2023:
TIL that Text Fragments are a thing. Ingenious and potentially helpful but I’m not sure I’d actually use them. After all, if the person citing a reference can …

19-Feb-2023:
The original article seems to be behind a paywall, but Om Malik quotes a passage saying that iA Writer is “not a good app anymore”. I used to use iA Writer for …

18-Feb-2023:
I wrote last week’s Talk about books post, on Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in a hurry, finding the novel more of a handful than I had remembered. I also didn’t …

17-Feb-2023:
Looks like I got Irréversible all wrong. I thought it was Albert Dupontel’s character, not Vincent Cassel’s, who beat someone to death with a fire extinguisher …

16-Feb-2023:
Finished Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now 📚. Five longish stories, all quite different — one spooky, one SF-spooky, one naturalistic adventure, one …

13-Feb-2023:
Finished reading A S Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories 📚: 5 stories, 3 of which have supernatural or paranormal elements. In my least favourite a grieving …

11-Feb-2023:
Just trying to read a journal article on JSTOR. It’s in PDF, and if I zoom in enough to be able to read the text, I can’t see the whole page, and it doesn’t …

11-Feb-2023:
I have my work Outlook/Exchange email on my personal computer (as well as on my work one, obviously). I get really pissed off at being repeatedly nagged at the …

09-Feb-2023:
Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel is stuffed with themes which don’t always seem reconcilable yet don’t exactly clash. It’s not surprising, though unfortunate, that …

09-Feb-2023: Two falls and a Submission: Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel is stuffed with themes which don’t always seem reconcilable yet don’t exactly clash. We get the migrant’s-eye-view, and enquiries …

07-Feb-2023:
Zombie stories aren’t dystopian, they’re wish-fulfillment dreams, and the dream they fulfill is the dream of guilt-free hatred of the Other. says Alan Jacobs. …

04-Feb-2023:
Finished reading Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To 📚. I got to like these stories more as I progressed through the book. The title story, the second in …

02-Feb-2023:
There’s an excellent review in the FT by Tanjil Rashid of Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City 📖. It’s probably paywalled but I was able to read it without a …

30-Jan-2023:
Jim Collison is not himself aphantasic but 4 of his children are. He says they’ve all done well. Interestingly, they’ve all worked in STEM fields. (The …

29-Jan-2023:
John Naughton in The Observer says that Microsoft’s backing for, and other developments at, ChatGPT are causing panic for Google/Alphabet. Maybe a good time to …

29-Jan-2023:
I see there’s a new novel by Salman Rushdie out. Coincidentally, I was just about to start rereading The Satanic Verses today, to write about it in Talk about …

28-Jan-2023:
When I was posting my stories on Medium years ago, I generally added an image at the start, as recommended. I’ve now removed all of these images except this …

26-Jan-2023:
I’ve never read any Jeffrey Eugenides but he’s an author I’ve long had in mind as somebody I should read. I think this piece in The Guardian by Dizz Tate might …

26-Jan-2023:
As a “small memorial to David Crosby”, John Naughton has chosen a Stephen Stills song. I’d have picked “Long Time Gone” or “The Lee Shore” 🎶

25-Jan-2023:
Today’s post in Talk about books is titled Social distance: Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You and it looks at Rooney’s treatment of social class in …

25-Jan-2023: Social distance: Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)

Each of Sally Rooney’s novels and several of her short stories feature a friendship or relationship across the class divide. One party is poor, the other well …

24-Jan-2023:
Maybe the book doesn’t need to be “disrupted” in the first place? suggests Lincoln Michel.

23-Jan-2023:
I bought an album by Kenny Drew on Bandcamp last week (download only, no CD) and it’s really good. Solo/Duo: 4 tracks are duets with Niels-Henning Ørsted …

23-Jan-2023:
I finished reading John Haffenden’s William Empson, Volume 1: Among the Mandarins 📚 last week, having put it aside for several months. I’ve just added a comment …

22-Jan-2023:
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, I got no takers for my offer of a sample print edition of last week’s Talk about books post. So, I decided to try making a …

21-Jan-2023:
Brad Mehldau has a book, Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One 📖, coming out in a couple of months. Scott Flanigan’s review is on the LJN site. There’s …

21-Jan-2023:
I keep my iTunes Library (so named since 2004) on an external disk. I found that, to import a CD, I have to reset the library location to the default, then …

21-Jan-2023:
I’ve been trying to import a CD into my Apple Music library for the first time in many months. I don’t know where it was putting the ripped audio files but not …

20-Jan-2023:
The Guardian lists Crosby’s 10 greatest recordings, including this one, which I hadn’t heard before: “Morrison” by Crosby, Prevar & Raymond. RIP 🎶

20-Jan-2023:
This really is the end of an era. Legendary US musician David Crosby dies aged 81 🎶

19-Jan-2023:
Claire Harman has some very welcome suggestions as to where to start with the stories of Katherine Mansfield 📖

18-Jan-2023:
The British tabloid press behaves shockingly, but even outrage at its flagrant racism could not sustain my interest through long passages about wedding …

17-Jan-2023:
Several analyses suggest that U.S. riders are more likely to wear helmets compared with cyclists in other countries — all while suffering the highest fatality …

17-Jan-2023:
From John Haffenden, William Empson, Vol. 1: Among the Mandarins. I’m not at all surprised but pleased to learn that Empson was apparently aphantasic. A …

17-Jan-2023:
That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community. Craig Hockenberry. Whatever …

12-Jan-2023:
I’m surprised to see The Eyes of Laura Mars🍿, “this brilliant slice of giallo-esque baloney”, at number 4 in this ranking of Faye Dunaway’s best performances. I …

12-Jan-2023:
Here’s @arrroberts@mastodon.social with some important points to make about violence in contemporary writing, film and games, particularly Fantasy. What do we …

11-Jan-2023:
I have extremely mixed feelings about Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter 📚on first reading. Some bits I really hated, yet I was never tempted to abandon it, …

11-Jan-2023:
I just posted Death in Florence: Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death📖, the first Talk about books post of 2023. And I’m …

11-Jan-2023: Death in Florence: Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death

In these two novels, Florence has a paradoxical quality: dry, sunny and beautiful, relatively inexpensive and with a rich cultural history, and yet home to a …

09-Jan-2023:
A year ago, I was thinking about a print edition of Talk about books, but I did something else instead (i.e. moved it from Substack to MB). It’s an idea whose …

09-Jan-2023:
It took me a whole week to read Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show 📚: it’s densely written and not to be rushed. The central character’s antisemitism …

08-Jan-2023:
Here are a few paragraphs on why publishers don’t like short story collections resurrected from an out-of-date, deleted longer post from a few years ago.

07-Jan-2023:
Hey, @manton, I see you have changed the output from Finished reading so that it’s sorted according to Finished date rather than last item edited (as it was …

05-Jan-2023:
Interesting, this, from Fay Weldon’s obituary. … one might see connections with the reimagined fairy tales of Angela Carter, or the malevolent morality plays …

01-Jan-2023:
After 2 backspaces and 1 wrong guess, I knew what the answer was but then I accidentally hit a wrong letter. (Been doing that all day today.) Hi, @cdevroe 🔙🔙🟥🟥 …

01-Jan-2023:
Why I don’t trust Bookshop.org: The declared aim of Bookshop.org is to support independent bookshops. The effect may be to make them appear irrelevant.

01-Jan-2023:
I finished reading Helen Simpson, Dear George and Other Stories on Friday but forgot to post. The collection has several stories about motherhood, childbirth, …

31-Dec-2022:
Ah, that didn’t work after all. I edited my JSON template to delete the comments for the books that would no longer be shown, then reloaded the page and then …

31-Dec-2022:
Instead of deleting my Bookshelf page, as I considered doing, I’ve limited the Finished Reading section of the page to show only the most recent 35 books. That …

31-Dec-2022: I didn’t mean to write a year-end look back but it happened anyway

A look at some of the things I’ve been writing about in Talk about books over the past 2 years, including a list of all the posts about short stories, and a …

21-Dec-2022:
The world’s whole sap is sunk; The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr’d; yet all these …

21-Dec-2022:
No Little Dorrit, no Bleak House? Bah! Where to start with Charles Dickens

20-Dec-2022:
“Effectively, my entire archive of emails either sent or received since 2014 has simply disappeared,” one such user said. “Inconvenience? It’s an absolute …

20-Dec-2022:
At the end of the year I might delete my Bookshelf page (again), though I’ll continue to use MB’s Bookshelves feature and Epilogue. I’ve been using a kind of …

20-Dec-2022:
By the end of the year, I’ll have read 72 books in 2022: a nice even 6 per month. Of those, just 2 are nonfiction: William Empson, Milton’s God and Emilie …

18-Dec-2022:
Another coincidence: Terence Eden has just posted You don’t need HTML. Just yesterday, I’d been thinking of doing something more with my Even plainer text, such …

18-Dec-2022:
A short story by acclaimed novelist Tessa Hadley: Juana the mad, about an unexpected encounter at a Christmas party.

18-Dec-2022:
Emily St John Mandel tweets that she needs to be interviewed by a journalist so she can say she’s divorced and then use the interview as evidence to update her …

16-Dec-2022:
Here’s a short note on a few lines of Marvell, pointing out something that ought to be obvious but that I missed for almost 50 years. Mistaken long: Andrew …

16-Dec-2022:
It’s now a year since I moved Talk about books from Substack to Micro.blog, taking advantage of Manton’s then newly introduced newsletter feature. The latest …

15-Dec-2022: Intelligent AF: Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)

Klara and the Sun marks a return by Kazuo Ishiguro to the first-person narrative, following his departure from that mode in 2015’s The Buried Giant. But Klara …

15-Dec-2022:
Here’s a bit of a surprise: the last few mornings I’ve woken up with multiple ideas for opinionated long-form posts, something I haven’t been doing for ages. I …

14-Dec-2022:
One of her main interests is to work out how to incorporate data visualisation into fiction. I don’t think I’ve found any idea about fiction so …

11-Dec-2022:
Twitter relaunches blue tick service with higher price for iPhone users. I thought Apple didn’t allow sellers to charge less on the web than in the app? But I …

11-Dec-2022:
This time last year, I was thinking about a print edition of Talk about books. Then, Manton added a newsletter feature to Micro.blog so I shelved the print idea …

11-Dec-2022:
How a Hello Kitty guitar became Stratocaster’s hottest property. I saw this and thought it might interest @maique 🤣

09-Dec-2022:
I’m rereading Klara and the Sun 📚 at the moment, to write about it in the next Talk about books post. In the meantime, here’s a reminder of what I wrote three …

08-Dec-2022:
Now that Jason Kottke is blogging again, I think I’ll remove his feed from NetNewsWire and just visit the blog regularly instead. His blog looks a lot more …

08-Dec-2022:
Hi @help, I added Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat to my Currently reading shelf at the weekend. (I think it was previously on Want to read.) Yesterday, I …

07-Dec-2022:
I just finished reading Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat 📚 This is just the second du Maurier novel I’ve read, the first being My Cousin Rachel, and I think …

06-Dec-2022:
Description to the literary novelist is a form of moral commentary. Every great novel is a thought experiment — the “storytelling” aspects are more than mere …

05-Dec-2022:
Shortly after Musk bought Twitter, I said I wasn’t going to quit it in haste though I dreaded what he might do. Five weeks later, I’ve deactivated my account. …

04-Dec-2022:
A few days late, Talk about books has begun its third year of existence with another post about Wuthering Heights, a book I’ve already written about in the …

04-Dec-2022: The role of Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights

Nelly Dean, the main narrator of Wuthering Heights, is often defensive in describing her own behaviour, and evasive or even deceptive towards her “masters”. …

03-Dec-2022:
Faint praise from Adam Roberts for Nobel winner Annie Ernaux, The Years 📚 I’m not sure the book puts the necessary distance between portraying banality, …

02-Dec-2022:
Helen Lewis explains Kier Starmer, since he won’t do it himself: The Bluestocking

26-Nov-2022:
Journalism is about asking questions and refusing to accept whatever the currently accepted narrative is, whether it’s about politics or celebrities. It is not …

26-Nov-2022:
This made me laugh: Morden You Know: jazz standards within the M25

26-Nov-2022:
For some, success is a billion-dollar exit, for others success is a profitable business which employs a dozen people. For some, failure is bankruptcy, for …

24-Nov-2022:
Anne Enright pays tribute to Anthony Cronin in the Irish Times. Reading Dead as Doornails 📖 while I was living outside Ireland in the early 90s had a strong …

23-Nov-2022:
Now reading Wuthering Heights 📚 I’m rereading Emily Brontë’s only novel. Two years ago, in my third post in Talk about books, I wrote about reading it with …

23-Nov-2022:
The toast alarm has been chirping at me all day: it seems that a battery needs to be replaced. But the alarm is mains powered; how can it need a battery as …

22-Nov-2022:
I’ve just finished reading Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood 📚 I often felt while in the middle of it that at 1000 pages it’s too long, with too many characters …

19-Nov-2022:
More than 14 years (can it really be?) after his death, a previously unreleased solo piano album by Esbjörn Svensson has just come out! How Ted Gioia joined the …

19-Nov-2022:
A few days ago I was thinking of changing the way I insert descriptions (for Twitter tags etc) into longer posts with titles. The way I’m doing it now is a bit …

18-Nov-2022:
I’ve been hand-grinding my coffee for the past 18 months or so. It’s a bit of a chore, with the result that I’ve increasingly been getting around to drinking my …

18-Nov-2022:
The first time I bought a HP LaserJet printer (July 2001) I had to call customer support because I was trying to put the toner cartridge in upside down. The …

17-Nov-2022:
My 52nd post in Talk about books, ending its second year, discusses a trilogy whose plot threads range from the implausible but entirely possible, through the …

17-Nov-2022: An almost insignificant figure: Jonathan Holt’s Carnivia trilogy

Jonathan Holt’s Venice-set trilogy mixes a collection of plotlines that range from the implausible but entirely possible, through the all too likely, to the …

16-Nov-2022:
Can’t happen too soon: Musk testifies he will ‘reduce’ time at Twitter and eventually hand over reins

15-Nov-2022:
I’m thinking about changing the way I do the descriptions for my longer posts (the Talk about books “newsletter” ones). The description is used in the Twitter …

14-Nov-2022:
OK, that makes it 2 days in a row I’ve missed doing my mbnov post. My internal clock, never a good timekeeper, seems to have gone haywire recently. I couldn’t …

13-Nov-2022:
My first thought when I woke up this morning was that I hadn’t posted anything for mbnov yesterday. It’s one of several things I meant to do but let slide. I’m …

12-Nov-2022:
Who could possibly have predicted this? Twitter blue check unavailable after impostor accounts erupt on platform

11-Nov-2022:
In this quirky and fascinating post about “xenoglossy”, Adam Roberts manages to display a cool-headed scepticism about some of the more outlandish suggested …

11-Nov-2022:
When the Tim Westwood scandal broke, people in the book world that I follow on Twitter were asking how soon they could expect the similar truth about a …

11-Nov-2022:
Musk will almost certainly sell Twitter at an eye-watering loss — a tax loss for Tesla. In the best case, he’ll do it soon, giving someone else the opportunity …

10-Nov-2022:
Andrew Marvell’s father, also Andrew, was a minister of religion (officially “lecturer”) at Holy Trinity Church, Hull. The poet said his father had been “a …

09-Nov-2022:
In theory, this conversation could continue until the end of time. Almost certainly it won’t, but it will feel like it is doing so. Infinite conversation …

08-Nov-2022:
I don’t wilfully take up contarian positions in opposition to the consensus view (on films, for example, such as The Matrix 🍿). It just seems to happen that way …

07-Nov-2022:
In a series of 3 posts in Talk about books, under the umbrella heading “Empson’s insightful errors”, I argued that late in life critic William Empson expressed …

06-Nov-2022:
I’m rereading Jonathan Holt’s The Abomination (Carnivia Trilogy Book 1) after a few years and finding it even more enjoyable than I remembered. Holt is another …

06-Nov-2022:
Rosalie Colie’s 📖‘My Ecchoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (1970) describes how Marvell alluded to other poets in a critical way. It’s one of the …

05-Nov-2022:
In line with Hamish McKenzie’s claim that Substack is not part of “the newsletter economy”, I’ve stopped describing Talk about books (originated on Substack but …

05-Nov-2022:
I hate the English lyrics to “My Way” (originally «Comme d’habitude»). I mean, “And saw it through without exemption”! What kind of line is that, and how could …

04-Nov-2022:
I’m very fond of the word admiration because it comes from the Latin for “wondering at” and I like the idea of wonder. I associate it with “marvel” and …

04-Nov-2022:
My latest post in Talk about books is about The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley, written in 1622. I don’t think I’d noticed before that it’s not a revenge …

04-Nov-2022: Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling

The greatest achievement of Middleton and Rowley is a kind of post-revenge tragedy that to start with resembles a romantic comedy.

03-Nov-2022:
On this side of the Atlantic, license with an “s” is a verb, while the noun has a second “c”. At least I think that’s how it works, it’s a very long time since …

02-Nov-2022:
Today I’m writing about a play that was first performed in the 1620s. It’s The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, a feast of lechery and …

01-Nov-2022:
Judge Florence Pan has ruled against the merger of Simon & Schuster with Penguin Random House. I’m pretty sure this is the right decision but the rationale …

01-Nov-2022:
I haven’t yet managed to figure out whether I should take part in the November MB challenge, so I’ll try to keep my options open for the time being.

31-Oct-2022:
Noah Smith has a timely roundup of his previous posts about Twitter. His opinion as to what needs to be fixed hasn’t changed much: get rid of the Quote Tweet …

30-Oct-2022:
I just posted on my own site an addendum to last week’s Talk about books post about Ian McEwan’s spy fiction: I wanted to write specifically about the “trick” …

30-Oct-2022:
It’s striking how small a role the Handmaids play in The Testaments 📖. There are 3 narrators, one an Aunt (who wears brown). The second is training to become an …

29-Oct-2022:
Just finished reading Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 📚 I enjoyed this even more than The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a longer, more complex story with three …

29-Oct-2022:
I’m not going to quit Twitter in haste, even though I dread what the new boss is going to do with it. Maybe he’ll get bored and quickly sell it off cheaply to …

28-Oct-2022:
Science fiction author and Professor of nineteenth-century literature Adam Roberts is one of the people I’ll miss following if I have to delete my Twitter …

28-Oct-2022:
One thing is worse than Twitter now being the private property of a multi-billionaire tech bro: people I follow keep retweeting comments about him. I might have …

28-Oct-2022:
The spooks have been getting their own back [on Suella Braverman]. Is that a form of poetic justice — or a dangerous interference with the democratic process? …

28-Oct-2022:
The price of coffee has gone up since the last time I ordered, so I had to buy just 3 Kg to qualify for free delivery this time instead of 4 Kg as had always …

25-Oct-2022:
Filled in a form online to move my electricity account from the old apartment. At the end, it said it couldn’t complete the switch and I should phone. There’s a …

24-Oct-2022:
I’ve started to read Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 📚 at last. I borrowed the hardback from my sister months ago. It’s about time I got around to it 😎

24-Oct-2022:
Got it on my last chance 😎 🔙🔙🟥🟩 Stupid 297 2/2/2

24-Oct-2022:
I always had a picture of the life I wanted says FT reviewer Janan Ganesh. I never had (not having pictures of anything). I had assumed that I was unusual in …

23-Oct-2022:
My latest Talk about books post is about Ian McEwan’s two spy novels, The Innocent (1990) and Sweet Tooth (2012) 📖 But I seem to have broken the archive page: …

23-Oct-2022: Sweet and Innocent: Spy stories by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan wrote two spy novels, published 22 years apart. Both of them tend to support my view that spy fiction is largely about sex.

23-Oct-2022:
Virago founder Carmen Callil remembered by her friend Rachel Cooke: ‘Of course she was difficult’

21-Oct-2022:
How do I end a call on an iPhone when the red button isn’t visible and only the green one is showing? I’ve been restarting the phone but there must be an easier …

16-Oct-2022:
For the past few days Sonny Condell’s “Down in the City” 🎶 has been inexplicably (till now) running around my head repeatedly. It’s the line “I’m up on the top …

13-Oct-2022:
The trend that Substack is part of is not a newsletter trend says Hamish McKenzie. And, a little earlier The term ‘newsletter’ was just a rhetorical device … …

12-Oct-2022:
So RTÉ imposes conditions for interviewing Shane Ross about his book on Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald — certain topics must not be mentioned — and then …

12-Oct-2022:
The web is already drowning in articles that read as if they were generated by machines trained to produce bland uniformity. Anybody deliberately setting out to …

11-Oct-2022:
I’m about to abandon Amy Bloom’s White Houses. It’s not dreadful, but I’m impatient to get on to something else. The description of Hick’s mother’s death was …

11-Oct-2022:
Zuck: Twitter is the clown car that fell into a goldmine. Musk: A clown car? I should be driving that!

10-Oct-2022:
I’ve started to read Amy Bloom, White Houses, a novel based on the long relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok (“Hick”). I’m finding it …

10-Oct-2022:
London Jazz News’s Mothers in Jazz series has now reached Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs who has a new trio album coming out soon 🎹 🎶

09-Oct-2022:
Four days late (sorry), my latest Talk about books newsletter post is about Sophie Hannah’s detective fiction series centred on Spilling CID. Sophie Hannah, the …

09-Oct-2022: Sophie Hannah, the Simon Waterhouse/Charlie Zailer series

Hannah’s series centred on Spilling CID combines ingenious puzzle-solving with psychological acuity and a dissection of dysfunctional family (and workplace) …

08-Oct-2022:
🔙🔙🟥🟩 Stupid 281 2/2/2 Tricky but I got there in the (very) end. @cdevroe

07-Oct-2022:
Helen Lewis is back, having spent most of September finishing a book. The Bluestocking vol 251

05-Oct-2022: Talk about books newsletter: another slight delay, I’m afraid
I had intended to write today about four of the 11 novels in Sophie Hannah’s Simon and Charlie series, namely A Room Swept White (2010), Kind of Cruel (2012), …

02-Oct-2022:
His own fortune secure, he’s now decided that it’s best for the world if writers, publishers, agents, and booksellers can’t make a living. Ken Whyte on …

24-Sep-2022:
Two of my favourite recorded performances of “’Round Midnight” are those by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden (Last Dance) and Jürgen Friedrich (Pollock). But …

24-Sep-2022:
Incidentally, Naoise is my middle name. Until recently it was invariably considered a boy’s name. I’ve no objection to Irish parents appropriating traditionally …

24-Sep-2022:
I finished reading Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times 📚last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s essentially a love story, though an unusually nuanced and …

22-Sep-2022:
Here’s an entertaining and informative speculation by Noah Smith about the ways in which artificial intelligence may resemble Lovecraftian horror.

21-Sep-2022:
Present discontinuous: Tense and tension in J M Coetzee’s Disgrace 📖 Today’s issue of Talk about books newsletter is about J M Coetzee’s 1999 novel, written …

21-Sep-2022:
I should have remembered to edit the email version of today’s newsletter to remove the Twitter embed. It works fine in the web post, but in the email the next 3 …

21-Sep-2022: Present discontinuous: Tense and tension in J M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)

J M Coetzee’s 1999 Booker winner is written almost entirely in the present tense. It’s a surprising choice for a book whose themes are so grave and disturbing. …

18-Sep-2022:
I was enthusiastic about Kavanagh’s poetry while at school and afterwards, until I read Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails which turned me mildly ambivalent. I …

18-Sep-2022:
It took me a whole week to finish rereading Shame (1983) though it’s much shorter than most of Rushdie’s novels. I suspected I’d been unfair to it previously or …

18-Sep-2022:
I just posted this on my personal site about Louise Nealon’s novel, Snowflake 📖. It’s kind of a supplement to my most recent newsletter issue, about 2 of her …

17-Sep-2022:
I only just found out that this live recording exists of Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke playing as a duo in Marciac. I was actually in Marciac that year (2014) …

16-Sep-2022:
Nobody is so awful that they don’t have any redeeming qualities. You can say what you like about Thérèse Coffey but at least she’s opposed to the Oxford comma 😜

15-Sep-2022:
Shorter words are harder. The more letters there are the less the likelihood that there will be several possible answers 🔙🟥🟥 Stupid 258 2/1/2 Stupid word game — …

10-Sep-2022:
I’m now rereading Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) for the first time since the 1980s or early 90s. I want to write eventually about it, The Satanic Verses, …

10-Sep-2022:
Much as I love the title’s echo the work of a different Andrew M, I haven’t yet made up my mind to read Instant Fires, reviewed here in the Irish Times. I …

08-Sep-2022:
This issue of Talk about books (newsletter) is a bit later and shorter than expected. I’d intended to write about the novel Snowflake as well as two short …

08-Sep-2022: Two short stories by Louise Nealon, author of the novel Snowflake

Louise Nealon’s first published short story, “What feminism is”, won a prestigious prize. I’ve found only one other short story by her online, “The possibility …

06-Sep-2022:
Oh, I didn’t notice till after I posted the link that that interview is available as audio! I just read it in the feed reader without seeing the audio link. I …

06-Sep-2022:
Here’s a fascinating interview by Henry Oliver (who is writing about late starters) with economist Noah Smith. It’s largely about motivation, a topic that I’ve …

01-Sep-2022:
I’ve just finished reading Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. I think it may be the first thing by du Maurier I’ve read but it won’t be the last by any …

01-Sep-2022:
Palin into insignificance (again): Sarah Palin loses Alaska special election to Democrat Mary Peltola

31-Aug-2022:
My old bookshelf page had notes or comments for many of the books I had read, from a JSON data template (to which I added the comments by hand as I finished the …

30-Aug-2022:
I stopped updating my bookshelves at the beginning of July. There’s something about tracking my reading that feels wrong to me. But @Manton’s improvements to …

28-Aug-2022:
Finished rereading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for the first time in more than 30 years. Hilarious and clever. I don’t remember Adams’s second Dirk …

28-Aug-2022:
Useful search results from the library’s ereading app.

24-Aug-2022:
It’s crime fiction yet again in this issue of my newsletter, Talk about books. I’ve written about The Good Turn, the third book in Dervla McTiernan’s Galway-set …

24-Aug-2022: “People I should trust”: Dervla McTiernan, The Good Turn (2020)

The third book in Dervla McTiernan’s series featuring DS Cormac Reilly is a bit of a departure from the first two. Unfortunately, the publishers don’t seem to …

24-Aug-2022:
How authorship of “a delightfully diverse set of papers” was ascribed to JC Shakespeare, who may be related to TA Shakespeare: Terence Eden

23-Aug-2022:
Often when people quote poetry on Substack they enclose it in tags. This doesn’t look great, particularly in an RSS reader. I suggest putting verse in a quoted …

17-Aug-2022:
Rather incongruously, this powerful piece, about how highly experienced experts can still make dangerous errors, made me want to listen to some Esbjörn …

14-Aug-2022:
Anne Enright’s introduction to Nuala O’Faolain’s second volume of memoir, Almost There (following Are You Somebody? in 1996) 📚

13-Aug-2022:
I’m playing this piece of shit Yamaha electric grand piano … It’s ugly, but it was loud and it was clear and it was in tune. But you can hear it sounds funny, …

13-Aug-2022:
My upstairs neighbour got a hardback copy of The Satanic Verses 📖 as a Christmas present in 1988 and he gave me a loan of it, so I had read it before the …

13-Aug-2022:
I described Midnight’s Children as “the most important English-language novel of the second half of the twentieth century”. I believe this to be true, though of …

10-Aug-2022:
In the latest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, I discuss Prison and prisoners in the crime novels of Peter Abrahams, specifically Delusion, Lights Out, …

10-Aug-2022: Fit the crime: Prison and prisoners in the crime novels of Peter Abrahams

When a character in one of Peter Abrahams’s novels goes to prison for a long stretch, he may or may not be guilty of the crime of which he’s been convicted. …

09-Aug-2022:
Noah Smith has done it again: made me read a whole post about crypto. I think I finally understand what NFTs are supposed to be doing.

08-Aug-2022:
Fascinating Twitter thread

07-Aug-2022:
A friend of mine wanted to quote “American Football” in the programme to a play of his own that he was putting on in the Rosemary Branch, Hoxton, in 1996. …

07-Aug-2022:
David Hare on Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, Maggie Nelson, Rachel Kushner, Colm Tóibín, Helen Lewis and others. Matthew Reisz in The Observer

06-Aug-2022:
You’re kidding, right?

03-Aug-2022:
I hate password managers. I’m trying to log in to spectatorworld․com but Keychain will neither show me the saved password nor fill it in automatically. So, I …

03-Aug-2022:
Just testing the ability to put parentheses around an MB username that one user (​@odd​​) mentioned earlier. Update: I tried it with ​ before …

03-Aug-2022:
As a cyclist, I think it’s ridiculous that legislation should encourage pedestrians to rely entirely on their hearing to warn of approaching vehicles. Also that …

01-Aug-2022:
The most important lesson you will learn is that border officials may not know the law and yet are infinitely empowered. Nesrine Malik, Only a country as …

31-Jul-2022:
My descriptions of the short stories I had added to my Mix collection were lost when Mix got rid of comments. I’m starting very gradually to replace some of the …

31-Jul-2022:
The doctor said the reason why the bruises looked so bad was because I have thin skin. I told her I found that remark offensive. She didn’t get it. Seán …

30-Jul-2022:
I was very tempted to abandon Alan Glynn’s Paradime (2016). The opening chapters, in which a man with PTSD flounders hopelessly, were painful to read. But it …

30-Jul-2022:
Thank you, @help, those posts are showing now 😎

29-Jul-2022:
Hi, @help. I’ve noticed that some of my posts containing the book emoji aren’t showing up on the Books discovery page. This one, for example. I thought it might …

29-Jul-2022:
Ted Gioia, How My Career as a Poet Was Killed by Kraft’s Macaroni & Cheese. Yeah, I hate it when that happens.

28-Jul-2022:
… though [Martin] Brest had final cut on the movie, he was strong-armed into recutting it from a weird, offbeat movie about a gangster who wants out into a …

28-Jul-2022:
Johnson led a government that played fast and loose with the rule of law. And continues to lie about it, of course: Joshua Rozenberg

27-Jul-2022:
The new issue of my email newsletter, Talk about books, is about Ted Chiang’s novella (or long short story) from his collection 📚Exhalation (2019), “Anxiety is …

27-Jul-2022: Who knows where the timeline goes?: Ted Chiang, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”

Ted Chiang’s 19,750-word novella, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, is at once a moral fable and a dazzling meditation on whether it might be possible to …

25-Jul-2022:
I was fed up trying to read Twitter on a small (iPhone 12 Mini) screen so I created a new Twitter list of people I’m most likely to want to read on my phone, …

24-Jul-2022:
I just added another short story to my list of short stories that are available to be read online. It’s Sarah Hall’s “Wilderness”, which appeared in The …

24-Jul-2022:
I’ve just finished reading Caoilinn Hughes’s first (2018) novel, Orchid & the Wasp. Very ambitious; loosely combining ideas from Deleuze and Guattari, …

23-Jul-2022:
Today was the first day for several months that I’ve been cycling in the rain 🚲. I didn’t notice that the weather app on my phone was showing the wrong …

21-Jul-2022:
Two simple rules for using Twitter. Make sure you’re seeing “Latest Tweets”, not “Home” (which will show you tweets you didn’t choose to see) Be careful who …

20-Jul-2022:
To some people, it’s liberating: They think tracking viewership isn’t a showrunner’s job anyway, and there was never a time when Hollywood decisions felt …

19-Jul-2022:
I’ve finally got around to starting to read Orchid & The Wasp, having bought a copy a few months ago around the time I wrote about Caoilinn Hughes’s short …

18-Jul-2022:
I called my academic friend and wept until she gave me her NCBI log-in details. That’s something you can do? I wish someone had told me earlier. The strange …

17-Jul-2022:
Last week I read a description of Wuthering Heights — here, if you’re interested — that struck me as drastically wrong, so I thought it was as good a time as …

14-Jul-2022:
Because they can. Via The Overspill

13-Jul-2022:
The first book in a series (of 5 so far) set in Restoration London depicts a city experiencing an unaccustomed degree of social mobility, much of it downwards. …

13-Jul-2022: “Like ghosts, while London burns”: Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London (2016)

The first book in a series (of 5 so far) set in Restoration London depicts a city experiencing an unaccustomed degree of social mobility, much of it downwards.

10-Jul-2022:
Is anybody surprised by this? I’m a bit surprised that we’re getting to hear about it. Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak …

10-Jul-2022:
In his newsletter, SHuSH, publisher Ken Whyte predicts that sharp increases in the cost of printed books will make ebooks start to seem more attractive again to …

10-Jul-2022:
I’ve updated — for the first time in 3½ months — my page of short stories that can be read online: I’ve added A S Byatt’s “Sea Story”. It’s been available …

09-Jul-2022:
“How do you feel about spoilers?” somebody asked in a Copper discussion thread so, not for the first time on this topic, I went off on a rant.

09-Jul-2022:
Now that I’m no longer using Bookshelves data to populate pages on my Micro.blog or necessarily updating it when I start or finish a book I’m wondering if I …

09-Jul-2022:
I just logged in to Teams on my phone at the weekend, 2FA and all, purely to get rid of the annoying red unread count badge. Why have I still got Teams on my …

08-Jul-2022:
The early middle (formerly known as the dark) ages actually did happen after all. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler, the post is well worth reading anyway). Via Helen …

08-Jul-2022:
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions. In other words, they are authorized to speak to the …

07-Jul-2022:
That was a tricky one, @cdevroe. So many possibilities. (I like them like that.) 👍😎 🔙🔙🟥🟥 Stupid 188 2/2/2

07-Jul-2022:
I’ve read Andrew Taylor, Blacklist 📚. For a while the plot seemed overstuffed, too many minor characters being blackmailed, threatened or killed; but the ending …

07-Jul-2022:
Allegedly fake Chagall includes “recurrent iconographic elements of Chagall’s work” but these lack “real presence”, according to authentication committee. “Real …

07-Jul-2022:
So the great Johnson intends to stay on as PM till the new Tory leader has been chosen. I’m trying to think of a phrase that rhymes with “lame duck”.

03-Jul-2022:
Just finished reading Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London, the first in his series set in Restoration London, starting with the great fire. I’d already read the …

03-Jul-2022:
Sebastian Scotney went to hear Marc Copland, Adrian Vedady and Jim Doxas at the Montréal International Jazz Festival. They’re making a trio album together and …

01-Jul-2022:
I’ve just read Louise Welsh’s The Girl on the Stairs (2012) 📖. I suppose it’s about the way impending childbirth can distort someone’s perceptions, not to …

30-Jun-2022:
The current issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is about James Plunkett’s 1959 collection of short stories, The Trusting and the Maimed. It’s out of …

30-Jun-2022: James Plunkett, The Trusting and the Maimed (1959)

A collection of 12 short stories dating from the 1950s by the author of Strumpet City is long out of print but worth seeking out.

29-Jun-2022:
I’ve deleted the Bookshelf and Books to read pages from my micro.blog, though I’ve kept backups and could restore them if I change my mind. I don’t think I want …

29-Jun-2022:
(The Athletic has a paywall, though unfortunately I couldn’t see it when the Javascript on my browser broke.) Yeah, really ought to get around to doing …

28-Jun-2022:
Natural selection has shaped the living world, he argues, but so too has a sort of formless cosmic drifting that can, from time to time, assemble order from …

28-Jun-2022:
It’s good to be kept informed.

27-Jun-2022:
I just got a very battered but complete and readable paperback copy of Andrew Taylor’s 1988 spy novel, Blacklist, in the post. I would have settled for the …

26-Jun-2022:
Here’s a concert I’d love to have got to. The first time I saw the Brad Mehldau Trio was in the Barbican in Feb 2006. The sound/mix was dreadful until the …

26-Jun-2022:
Hey, I seem to be able to access Substack with Safari again. I’ve no idea what’s changed; can’t help feeling that it probably won’t last. Now to see if I can …

26-Jun-2022:
Can’t help wondering if a data goldmine is actually useful for any purpose and if so for what? How TikTok is turning a generation of video addicts into a data …

25-Jun-2022:
I’ve just started to read Robin Sloan’s 2009 novella, Annabel Scheme, which I downloaded free from his site about 2 years ago but hadn’t got around to reading …

25-Jun-2022:
I found the first series of Westworld very disappointing and didn’t watch any more, only to be told later that it had got a lot better and I was missing out. It …

25-Jun-2022:
I suspect there are going to be plenty of Republican legislators in GOP-controlled states thinking “Oh shit, we got what we were asking for.” The Supreme Court …

24-Jun-2022:
Another look at why I reacted so adversely to le Carré’s Smiley’s People on first reading. “A preferable technique to bribery”: The nature of coercion in …

24-Jun-2022:
You gotta be cruel to be kind Wayne Robins, Nick Lowe’s quality rock and roll revue 🎶

22-Jun-2022:
I’ve read Lucy Foley, The Guest List 📚 and added a brief comment to my bookshelf page: Highly entertaining but very contrived plot. The identity of the murder …

19-Jun-2022:
He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. Verbaluce™ sounds just what I need. Will it be coming to …

17-Jun-2022:
Long but mostly interesting piece from Hamish McKenzie explains (among much else) why Substack took VC funding: Escape from Hell World.

16-Jun-2022:
The current issue of my email newsletter, Talk about books, discusses Kate Atkinson’s spy novel, Transcription (2018), a book I enjoyed even more on rereading …

16-Jun-2022: A fabulist’s adventure: Kate Atkinson, Transcription

Kate Atkinson’s spy novel is a compelling synthesis of references to le Carré, remarkable real-life operations against British fifth columnists and a heroine …

16-Jun-2022:
The novel … has a million jobs to choose from, and each individual novel can pick what fits. It shouldn’t need saying but it apparently needs regular …

12-Jun-2022:
I renewed the domain name registration of “talkaboutbooks.net” for a second year a few days ago, so I suppose I must be taking this newsletter thing seriously.

12-Jun-2022:
I’m rereading Kate Atkinson, Transcription, which I first read in about August 2020. I’m surprised at how much I had forgotten of the spy fiction plot, though …

08-Jun-2022:
I’ve been enjoying bassist Thomas Fonnesbaek’s 🎶 recordings with Enrico Pieranunzi 🎹 but have just realized that I probably saw him live about 5 years ago. I …

07-Jun-2022:
Last year, I tried to cancel my Irish Times subscription but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: a year at half price, just €6 a month. If they’re going to …

07-Jun-2022:
I like the Irish Times website redesign. But how long is it going to keep nagging me to enable notifications? Shouldn’t there be a checkbox labeled “Don’t ask …

06-Jun-2022:
Sorry to see the return of MagSafe on the MacBook Air: it’s not a major irritant in itself but it suggests that Apple is focused more on eye-catching gimmicks …

06-Jun-2022:
The most recent issue of Talk about books is longer than usual and a few days late. It’s about the last two books (the 5th and 6th) in Tana French’s series set …

06-Jun-2022: Daughters and fathers: Tana French, The Secret Place and The Trespasser

The last two books in the Dublin Murder Squad series feature the same two detectives in very different settings, and reflect the differences in their varied …

03-Jun-2022:
This time, it worked. I don’t know what’s going on.

03-Jun-2022:
Now I can’t sign in to The Guardian (which insists on a sign-in before it will let me read anything). I don’t want to stop using Safari (the only browser I know …

01-Jun-2022:
I deleted all my cookies and browser history, and had to sign in to The Guardian again. My password wasn’t what I thought it was, so I had to reset it. I …

01-Jun-2022:
I can’t sign in to Substack any more. Earlier today, I couldn’t use Google, and some other sites. So, I deleted all cookies and Google came back. But there are …

01-Jun-2022:
Here’s an interview with Karen Jennings, author of An Island, that @zioibi and I were nattering about a few days ago 📚

01-Jun-2022: Another slight delay but this will be worth waiting for
I’ve finally reached the last two novels in Tana French’s series about the fictional Dublin Murder Squad. Unfortunately, my discussion of them is going to be a …

01-Jun-2022:
I don’t like the tiny bezels on my 3rd gen iPad Air. The screen could do with being just a little narrower. But the bigger annoyance is that I’m constantly …

30-May-2022:
Try our weights and measures quiz I got 16 out of 18. The two I got wrong were the grams/lb conversion and the number of gallons in a peck (and it beats me all …

27-May-2022:
I was totally on the wrong track today. 🔙🔙🟥🟥 Stupid 147 2/2/2

27-May-2022:
It says here that Sir Richard Dearlove was “a former director of MI6 between 1999 and 2004”. If he was a former director then, surely he’s still a former …

24-May-2022:
I just got an email from the library to say that Ted Chiang’s Exhalation (ebook) 📚 which I had on reserve is now ready to be borrowed. I’ve read just one or two …

23-May-2022:
Read Karen Jennings, An Island 📚 It seemed the most interesting book that didn’t make it from the Booker longlist for 2021 to the shortlist. It’s a powerful, …

22-May-2022:
My ravenous newsletter has been devouring most of what I’ve written these last few months. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my personal site (not exactly a …

22-May-2022:
On a whim I thought I’d take another shot at downloading the Copper books app. It has become available in Ireland in the meantime (iPhone only, I think), so …

22-May-2022:
The photo shoot – Osman’s 6 ft 7 next to the diminutive Keyes with her dark fringe and spiky eyelashes – resembles one between Roald Dahl’s BFG and Matilda. …

22-May-2022:
Sandra Newman: Do I want men to go away? No Hard to believe. Even I want some men to go away, some of the time.

22-May-2022:
Long ago, before I knew about aphantasia, I told 2 visual artists that I don’t have a visual imagination. They looked at me askance. I took it as reproach for …

21-May-2022:
Another successful actor/comedian/public personality turns out to have been using his — the examples I have in mind are all male — high profile to build an …

20-May-2022:
A new viral ‘Bionic Reading’ tool … could completely change the way you read and consume content … it says here. Well it might change the way I …

20-May-2022:
Never mind — I found it: How to use the new text editing gestures. First attempts suggest it doesn’t work very well.

20-May-2022:
I’m really starting to hate i[Pad]OS. A particular irritant is when I tap in the middle of a body of text, hoping for the popup that will allow me to “Select …

19-May-2022:
In the rhythm of “The Wife Is Praised”, Empson is alluding to Swinburne’s “Dolores”, jollied up: “I want it more homely and jolly”. But rereading it and writing …

18-May-2022:
William Empson’s wife, Hetta (née Crouse), had a long-standing practice of taking younger male lovers. Her husband wanted to join in the fun. So naturally he …

18-May-2022: And not to yield: William Empson, “The Wife Is Praised”

William Empson’s wife, Hetta (née Crouse), had a long-standing practice of taking younger male lovers. Her husband wanted to join in the fun. So naturally he …

15-May-2022:
but if I had a sister, even if I didn’t care for her much, I don’t think I’d be quite so happy to stare at her corpse. And I stare at a lot of corpses. What’s …

14-May-2022:
As I’ve said before, I’m not generally a fan of Emil Viklicky’s piano-playing but I do like the duo album he made with George Mraz, Together Again (to which I’m …

14-May-2022:
Poets are not normally thought of as either efficient or conscientious. The subject is Marvell, of course, but do you recognize the author?

14-May-2022:
I don’t believe it. I read (very nearly) a whole post on the subject of Bitcoin! Quite likely the last one I’ll ever read: Noah Smith (Noahpinion), “What kind …

10-May-2022:
I must remember not to go to Insomnia any more, old habits notwithstanding. I was in one branch yesterday where they still serve espresso in real cups but most …

07-May-2022:
I signed up to the waiting list to get an invitation to Copper books last year. Recently, the invitation arrived with a link to download the iOS app. However, …

07-May-2022:
Once again, we are among reasonably well off students at Trinity College Dublin. Well, yes, on average. Frances is broke and Bobbi is rich, as in Normal People …

06-May-2022:
Windows says it 13° and raining, iOS that it’s 16° and cloudy, with sunny spells expected for the rest of the day. At least iOS has a better idea of my …

06-May-2022:
My favourite Beatle is David Crosby 🎶

04-May-2022:
Finished reading Rosemary Jenkinson, Lifestyle Choice 10mg. The title of this collection should have given me a clue, but I was surprised by the amount of …

04-May-2022:
The latest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is about Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel, The Buried Giant, with a brief reference to When We Were Orphans 📖

04-May-2022: “Solemn oaths undone in cruel slaughter”: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

The first of Ishiguro’s novels not to have the protagonist as a first-person narrator examines the founding myths of the English and Welsh nations and imagines …

04-May-2022:
Mr. Musk works in a way that only the “most confident leaders do,” said Tim Draper, a venture capitalist … “Think J.F.K., George Washington and Ronald Reagan.” …

03-May-2022:
If you could kill Putin, would you? I would. And I’m a total peacenik. Graham Nash on toxic masculinity — there’s another kind? — not least his own 🎶

03-May-2022:
I’ve said before that iOS badly needs a fast way to collapse the selection (either forwards or backwards). What it needs even more is a way to paste the …

03-May-2022:
Is it time to retire psychoanalytic literary criticism? Henry Oliver asks. And he’s not too impressed by Four Thousand Weeks📚 (which I’ve no immediate …

03-May-2022:
I’ve gone back to reading printed books as much as possible. But I don’t print out drafts of my own writing. Not yet anyway though that Paul Graham thread has …

03-May-2022:
Paul Graham reading essays on a phone screen

02-May-2022:
I somehow overlooked The Garlands of Repose when I was writing my thesis on Marvell, though its title comes from “The Garden” and O’Loughlin’s essay on “Upon …

01-May-2022:
… alternative means of resolution, such as meditation and arbitration … Meditation is the current big thing, of course, but I hope it doesn’t entirely displace …

30-Apr-2022:
I went back to Twitter 18 months ago, after a 2-year break. I haven’t regretted my return (though I’ve been a lot more careful about who I followed this time …

28-Apr-2022:
“I’ve just heard that Chapters on Parnell Street is reopening.” Now, that’s how to bury the lede. The Irish Times: Kevin Power can’t stop buying books

27-Apr-2022:
“Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway”: so good they named it twice. Or, if you’re counting historically, four times. Irish Times, NUI Galway to change …

27-Apr-2022:
I stopped using the Twitter app on both iPhone and iPad. On iPad I use the web interface in Safari and on iPhone I have Spring Mini (iOS app store link). I’m …

26-Apr-2022:
Preparing to write about The Buried Giant (2015) in my newsletter, I went back to read my previous post about Never Let Me Go 📖. One friend implied that I focus …

26-Apr-2022:
Finished Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun📚last night. I’ll need to read this a second time before I have anything to say about it other than that I enjoyed it …

26-Apr-2022:
I’ve started to read Rosemary Jenkinson, Lifestyle Choice 10mg📖. I bought the paperback direct from the publisher after they cancelled her new book: my …

25-Apr-2022:
Years ago, a Dutch friend gave out to me for eating clementines (clemenules), which were obviously the work of humans and not “natural”. That didn’t bother me. …

21-Apr-2022:
I’ve added Orchid & The Wasp to my Suspended bookshelf. I started an ebook edition from the library but I’ve put it aside. I may have temporarily overdosed …

21-Apr-2022:
I’ve been thinking about trying to get a ticket for Tord Gustavsen trio at Bray Jazz festival on 1 May. I saw the trio there (with Mats Eilertsen on bass) in …

21-Apr-2022:
It’s only recently I discovered that the reason I hadn’t been hearing much about Christine Tobin lately was that she had moved to New York 5 years ago. Now she …

20-Apr-2022:
Caoilinn Hughes has published one book of poetry and two novels, all award-winning. Her short stories have won prizes too, but have not been published in a …

20-Apr-2022: Ephemeral Woman in waterlogged landscape: Short stories by Caoilinn Hughes

Though Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories have won prizes, they have not been published in a collection. I list 8 stories that can be read online, and discuss 3 of …

19-Apr-2022:
Whenever I update iOS or iPadOS, the update sneakily turns Bluetooth on and it usually takes me a few days (once it took several weeks) to notice that my …

18-Apr-2022:
I’ve been reading some short stories by Caoilinn Hughes online and I came across this Google talk from a few years ago by/with her, which I thought was pretty …

16-Apr-2022:
The Pen Corner🖋 is closing down after 95 years in business. This is sad but obviously not surprising: Much-loved Dublin city shop Pen Corner to close its doors

16-Apr-2022:
I’m wondering again how long it’s going to take the manufacturers and positioners of bike stands to notice that mountain bikes, with extra wide handlebars, have …

15-Apr-2022:
In desperation, I removed this line from layouts/partials/head.html <link rel=“stylesheet” href="{{ “css/main.css” | relURL …

15-Apr-2022: Headings in newsletter posts — and other posts with titles
If you have received this post by email, please ignore it. It’s a test and I intend to try to delete the email before the it is sent out. If I haven’t managed …

14-Apr-2022:
Here’s a great list of neglected or forgotten books that deserve more attention. I found it thanks to John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. The universe is clearly …

13-Apr-2022:
I finished reading Louise Nealon’s Snowflake and I’ve added a brief comment/note to my bookshelf page. I’ll be rereading the book and writing about it in …

12-Apr-2022:
Anne Trubeck’s newsletter on “The problems with indie booskstores” is behind a paywall but the subscription is not expensive and there’s a 7-day free trial. She …

12-Apr-2022:
I’d say unless you’re directly working for Musk, it’s simpler just to ignore him. … (As a general rule, I don’t think it’s worth following anyone with more than …

12-Apr-2022:
… and set a bookmark for the UK front page of the Guardian. Trying to get there by normal navigation eventually became too frustrating on the iPhone’s tiny …

12-Apr-2022:
As I said before I tend to use autocomplete instead of bookmarks for sites I visit regularly. I formed this habit before the iPhone existed, but I continue …

12-Apr-2022:
Henry Oliver quit his job on his 35th birthday to ✏️write a book — about opsimaths. (What would a 35-year-old whippersnapper know about that subject?). I’ll buy …

11-Apr-2022:
The enumerator collected my census form yesterday evening. In the end, I left the time capsule box blank. If humans still exist in 2122, they’re probably going …

11-Apr-2022:
Sophia Domancich, whom I’ve previously heard play in a trio with Simon Goubert (d) and Jean-Jacques Avenel (b), has a solo piano album out, reviewed here 🎶 🎹

11-Apr-2022:
a bunch of smart people can get very big things wrong for a very long period of time, and that period of time may include the present. Noah Smith on why …

10-Apr-2022:
I finished reading Keith Ridgway’s A Shock yesterday and added a short comment about it to my bookshelf page this morning. I’m not sure what to make of it …

10-Apr-2022:
When I saw the name of this trio, HÜM, my first thought was that the album might be by [Daniel] Humair, [René] Urtreger and [Pierre] Michelot but of course it’s …

09-Apr-2022:
I haven’t read much by Roy Foster, here on Conversations with Tyler, but I remember an essay that struck me (nearly 10 years ago) as the most sensible and …

09-Apr-2022:
The Weather app on my phone says it’s 9°C but according to the tips of my fingers it’s more like 3° or 4°.

09-Apr-2022:
I’m full of admiration for Richard Osman and Graham Norton, who managed to build up their author profiles by developing careers as high profile tv presenters …

09-Apr-2022:
Writing about Smiley’s People for my newsletter seems to have shaken loose some recalcitrant ideas and impressions as to why I took against it so badly all …

07-Apr-2022:
Another one from John Self: three new books — but not first books — from Irish authors, Colin Barrett, Adrian Duncan and Lucy Caldwell 📚

07-Apr-2022:
Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land were both published one hundred years ago. John Self looks at other works from 1922, including Katherine Mansfield’s …

07-Apr-2022:
I was in a bookshop on Tuesday so I got the mass market paperback of Louise Nealon’s Snowflake. I’ll start to read it at the weekend, once I’ve finished my …

07-Apr-2022:
Yesterday’s issue of my newsletter (Talk about books) is about 2 spy novels from the late 1970s, by Graham Greene and John le Carré respectively. Reluctant …

07-Apr-2022:
Somebody I follow on Twitter retweeted Elon Musk. I was so tempted to block him. (Musk, I mean, not the other guy, whose tweets are usually interesting.) But …

06-Apr-2022: Reluctant defectors: Graham Greene’s The Human Factor and John le Carré’s Smiley’s People

Two novels from the late 1970s by “spymasters” Graham Greene and John le Carré show (in rather different ways) the futility, waste, brutality and frustration of …

03-Apr-2022:
Sad that Pete St John has died aged 89. Sadder still that his maudlin, manipulatively heart-tugging ballads couldn’t have gone to the grave with him 🎶

31-Mar-2022:
Finally! I ordered Smiley’s People (paperback) on 21 February. Last week, the seller and I agreed that it had been irretrievably lost in the postal system. I …

27-Mar-2022:
When I wrote in my newsletter about the Jacobean play 🎭The Revenger’s Tragedy a few weeks ago, I concentrated on the subplot, which doesn’t have a tragic …

27-Mar-2022:
I’ve updated a page I keep of short stories that can be read online, to include (again) a link to Niamh Campbell’s prize-winning “Love Many”. I had previously …

26-Mar-2022:
Only cyclists are allowed to hate cyclists and, permitted such license, I will continue to despise myself every time I roll eyes at the fair-weather crew making …

26-Mar-2022:
I said “tab” in this reply, but in fact I don’t use browser tabs: they’re much too neat and organized for my taste. I open web pages in separate windows; one of …

24-Mar-2022:
I actually finished reading Louise Welsh, The Second Cut a few weeks ago but I’m posting this now because I’ve just added a comment to my bookshelf page: I read …

24-Mar-2022:
I recently read all but one of the stories in Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music in a library ebook. Last night, I read the remaining story in a (printed) …

23-Mar-2022:
The new issue of my newsletter, which I’ve just sent out, is about Candia McWilliam’s 1997 collection of short stories, Wait Till I Tell You 📖

23-Mar-2022: Candia McWilliam, Wait Till I Tell You

Candia McWilliam writes in an oblique style, which sometimes leaves the reader unsure what is supposed to have happened, combined with a very satisfying level …

22-Mar-2022:
Brad Mehldau is “the greatest living jazz pianist now performing”, it says here. Mehldau is great but for my money Enrico Pieranunzi just about shades it. …

21-Mar-2022:
Mail from the UK has become more snail-like. About a month ago, I ordered two books from different booksellers both via Alibris. Both were dispatched on 21 Feb. …

20-Mar-2022:
Yesterday, I added conditional text to my posts template, to insert some boilerplate into newsletter posts. I was pleased with myself for learning how to use …

20-Mar-2022:
In this help topic about including images in posts, @manton says that newsletter emails are not processed by Hugo: instead MB converts the Markdown to HTML and …

19-Mar-2022:
Alexander Larman in The Critic thinks that film director Joe Wright is a sacred cow. I’m barely qualified to comment, having failed to make it all the way …

17-Mar-2022:
The shuffle process, showing impeccable taste, selected two tunes from the same album, twice. Robert Glasper’s Covered and Maria Schneider’s Data Lords … says …

17-Mar-2022:
I didn’t enjoy the early chapters of 56 Days, where boy (29) meets girl (25) just before pandemic restrictions are imposed: too much of the writing here has the …

13-Mar-2022:
Got it, finally. I’ve updated the Help topic. Here is one of the tidied-up pages: not a “(Dublin Murder Squad, Book 3)” or similar in sight.

13-Mar-2022:
I feel like I’m really close to removing the unwanted garbage in brackets from the titles on my bookshelves but I’m still getting something wrong. Regex gave me …

12-Mar-2022:
Newsletter moves from Substack to Ghost and now I can’t find the RSS feed ☹️. The Whippet

10-Mar-2022:
Twitter suddenly started to show me a Home tab as well as “Latest Tweets”. So, I’ve just deleted the iPad app and I’ll use the web interface instead from now …

09-Mar-2022:
The title of the new issue of my email newsletter, Talk about books, is “Fractured Spaces: Tana French, Faithful Place and Broken Harbour”. It looks at the two …

09-Mar-2022: Fractured spaces: Tana French, Faithful Place and Broken Harbour

In Faithful Place, two separate Dublins poke through the holes in each other; similarly, Broken Harbour features two incompatible locations attempting to occupy …

05-Mar-2022:
I’d have thought that “reverse ransom” implies either that you pay the kidnappers to keep the victim or they pay you to take her/him back. But apparently that’s …

05-Mar-2022:
Machines will do the nasty jobs; human beings the nice ones it says here: Covid has reset relations between people and robots. I hope the robots are OK with …

05-Mar-2022:
I’ve at last managed to add notes/comments to some of the books on my “Finished reading” shelf, using a data template. Thanks 👏 to @jsonbecker for confirming …

04-Mar-2022:
We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget. Ha! That explains why I’ve never been much of a note-taker: I can usually forget …

26-Feb-2022:
Talk about books is now seven issues into its second year. Here’s a recap of what I’ve been posting recently and an indication of my intentions for the next few …

26-Feb-2022:
Hi @manton, I’ve noticed recently that when I moved a book from “Want to read” to “Currently reading” and another one from “Currently reading” to “Finished …

25-Feb-2022:
I think today was my first day this year to be out on the bike 🚲 without gloves. I thought I was going to need them — it was colder then usual this morning — …

23-Feb-2022:
In this issue of Talk about books, I look at The Revenger’s Tragedy (printed in 1607), particularly the (main) subplot, which doesn’t have a tragic ending. “A …

23-Feb-2022: “A villain not to be forsworn”: The Revenger’s Tragedy

A malcontent who is prepared to commit multiple murders to avenge the death of his betrothed, persists in an attempt to corrupt his own sister, with their …

23-Feb-2022:
I’ve been writing my newsletter today, so I’m finally getting around to having my “morning” coffee ☕️ at 5.30 pm. I’m looking forward to lunch, though the sun …

22-Feb-2022:
Hamlet Revenge is Henry Oliver’s Favourite Michael Innes book. Mine too. The Common Reader: Six underrated detective novels 📖

20-Feb-2022:
My various posts about aphantasia and SDAM, the first dozen or so of which originally appeared on Medium in 2018/2019, are now all on this page

18-Feb-2022:
What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Dorian Lynskey on Why comedians stopped being funny (UnHerd)

17-Feb-2022:
Record Store Day hasn’t adapted to the modern realities of selling physical music, says Rupert Morrison. Time to take a break from it? Record Store Day is …

15-Feb-2022:
I enjoyed Dervla McTiernan’s The Good Turn but if (unlike me) you’re one of those people who think that heavy reliance on coincidence in the plot of a crime …

15-Feb-2022:
I love this suggestion from Ted Gioia that the record labels should develop a next generation vinyl format. Let’s call it Super-Vinyl. It would have all of the …

13-Feb-2022:
I just finished le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). I’m very impressed though I have a reservation (limitation period). We find out what Smiley had on Mundt, …

12-Feb-2022:
I’d be most grateful for help from people who know about CSS (and also possibly about Hugo). I’m trying to make a simple theme, which can now be seen on my test …

09-Feb-2022:
The latest issue of Talk about books is “An exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion”: Ian McEwan, Enduring Love. In McEwan’s 1997 novel a successful …

09-Feb-2022: “An exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion”: Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel is (apart from a few chapters) the first-person narrative of Joe Rose, a successful science journalist and popularizer of scientific …

06-Feb-2022:
I forgot to do Wordle yesterday so today I’m on a streak of 1.

04-Feb-2022:
I haven’t listened to or probably even thought about After the Gold Rush for more than 45 years. But since Neil Young has been in the news, I’ve caught myself …

29-Jan-2022:
Some of us, by dint of work, have to be engagé … But if others choose not to be, that isn’t an act of dereliction. It isn’t irrational. It is a subtle and …

29-Jan-2022:
Catherine Flynn on Joyce’s Ulysses in the context of Futurism, Dada and Apollinaire’s surrealism: Ulysses and the international avant-garde of Trieste, Zurich, …

28-Jan-2022:
I just ordered a book published in 1991 though Alibris for €3.19 (€10.87 including postage). The next cheapest copy was €76.89 and they had several in the …

27-Jan-2022:
The Substack editor has a word count now, I read incredulously. Surely it always had one? But no, it’s a new feature. I draft all my posts (even tweets, for the …

27-Jan-2022:
With its short justified lines, this Bloomsbury Quid is hard to read and anyway I’ve got the same story in a more standard format. Still, I’m tempted to hold …

27-Jan-2022:
I hate the way the expression “the wrong side of history” has been making a comeback. I often used it back in the late 70s and early 80s (and maybe into the …

25-Jan-2022:
Did you know who wrote “Nature Boy”? I didn’t. (It’s the opening track on an album I love: Stefano Bollani, Jesper Bodilsen and Morten Lund’s Mi ritorni in …

24-Jan-2022:
Irish police rule out foul play over corpse in post office pension incident is the headline in The Guardian. Two men were trying to collect the pension of a …

23-Jan-2022: An infant in its cradle: William Blake’s prophetic serial killers

Michael Dibdin’s first US-set novel, Dark Spectre (1995), features a group of serial killers who believe they’re inspired by William Blake. But the resemblances …

23-Jan-2022: Disappearing ebook
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m rereading John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy. The copy I have is an ebook I bought from Apple (then iBooks) in 2011. At the …

22-Jan-2022:
I’m rereading The Honourable Schoolboy, the only Le Carré I’ve read for more than 40 years, having been put off by Smiley’s People 📚. I’m going to reread …

21-Jan-2022:
Wednesday’s issue of Talk about books is titled An infant in its cradle: William Blake’s prophetic serial killers and it discusses Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dark …

21-Jan-2022:
“There are two things you need to know,” she said. “The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second—and you …

20-Jan-2022:
I’ve deleted all the posts and pages that I thought might be causing the problem. Mainly, of course, I’ve deleted Wednesday’s long post with a title, the …

16-Jan-2022:
I’m going to mark the death of Jean-Jacques Beineix by watching Mortel Transfert (2001) again. The title is usually Englished as Mortal Transfer, but “Deadly …

16-Jan-2022:
I dreamt about serial killers and CSS. Probably an unconscious pun on CSI: I finished rereading Red Dragon yesterday and I obviously associate it with William …

15-Jan-2022:
That’s Rai (né Umeed Merchant), narrator of Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999). As someone with aphantasia and SDAM, I’d like to believe Rai is right …

14-Jan-2022:
One thing I wasn’t expecting about getting old is that I no longer need to shave at precisely 24-hour intervals. So, when to shave has become a conscious …

12-Jan-2022:
How Japan created its own jazz 🎶

10-Jan-2022:
Well, that turned out to be easier than I expected. I’ve now got an automatically generated newsletter archive (based on applying the category “Newsletter” to …

10-Jan-2022:
Wordle 205 5/6 ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜ 🟩🟩⬜🟩🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 That was a tough one but at least I finished it. Yesterday I had to give up 😳

09-Jan-2022:
I’ve got some details to iron out, but I think I’ve managed to add a description (separate from the Summary) to the heads of my posts with titles (i.e. …

08-Jan-2022:
Wordle 203 3/6 ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟩🟩🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I was lucky today.

07-Jan-2022:
I enjoy playing Wordle. Ignore the haters. Helen Lewis. There are Wordle-haters, really? Nobody tells me anything.

07-Jan-2022:
Wordle 202 5/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 🟨🟩🟩🟩⬜ ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 First time. I should have got it in 4: I had all the letters then, but overlooked the yellow square from the second …

05-Jan-2022:
The new issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is out. It’s titled “You’ve got a right to be angry: Salman Rushdie, Fury”. This is the second issue since I …

05-Jan-2022: You’ve got a right to be angry: Salman Rushdie, Fury

Like some of his earlier fiction, notably Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (2001) is driven by anger. But it’s a more diffuse, less directed …

01-Jan-2022:
A few days ago, I discovered this charming, tiny book exchange in an old electricity box near where I live. I was very tempted to take Louise Nealon’s Snowflake …

01-Jan-2022:
At least the weather in 2022 is better than last year’s, so there’s that.

01-Jan-2022:
London Jazz News reports that Nikki Iles has been awarded the BEM — very well deserved 🎹🎶

01-Jan-2022:
Noah Smith, “Six reasons 2021 was a better year than people think” (4 of them restricted to subscribers). Reading his preamble, I saw that 2021 must have seemed …

31-Dec-2021:
I recently read Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as an ebook borrowed from the library. Knowing I’d want to reread it soon, I ordered a printed copy but, because of …

30-Dec-2021:
Read Charles Cumming, Judas 62. Mission: Impossible meets Smiley’s People. Who said the Cold War is over? Reviewing Box 88, I said it was “a secret, rogue …

30-Dec-2021:
I find that, contrary to the laws of nature, Gillette Fusion blades are actually less expensive in the local pharmacy than in Dunnes, an 18 Km bike ride away. A …

29-Dec-2021:
I think I’ve found an extremely kludgy, horribly inelegant way to add Twitter cards to my newsletter posts on Micro.blog without having to learn how to hack …

29-Dec-2021:
I was starting to think I should proooobably start thinking about finding somewhere to live that wasn’t 300 too many square feet and 500 too many dollars. The …

27-Dec-2021:
Read: Imran Mahmood, I Know What I Saw. The first-person narrative of a long-term homeless man whose memory is damaged and who is sure he witnessed a murder …

24-Dec-2021:
One thing I didn’t like about using Substack for my newsletter is that, if you hover the pointer over a link in an email, instead of seeing the destination URL …

22-Dec-2021:
I’ve just sent out the first issue of Talk about books to be hosted on Micro․blog: “Peter Abrahams’s impaired heroes”. I love this new feature. For the next …

22-Dec-2021: Peter Abrahams’s impaired heroes

Three novels from the mid 2000s by Stephen King’s “favorite American suspense novelist”, featuring protagonists who have the odds stacked against them, even …

18-Dec-2021:
I used <details> and <summary> tags to include two notes in my earlier post about “Marvell and Mortalism” and guess what? NetNewsWire (on both Mac …

18-Dec-2021:
I just posted this on my website: “Marvell and Mortalism: A supplementary note to my essay on ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’”

18-Dec-2021:
Sir Rod Stewart decided to enter a plea to avoid the inconvenience and unnecessary burden on the court and the public that a high profile proceeding would …

17-Dec-2021:
I suppose it would be too much trouble to put the “advance” notice that the cycle path is closed at the bottom of the hill, before we start to climb, rather …

16-Dec-2021:
I’d love to hear Kenny Barron and Dado Moroni but I’m not going to London just to do so. I expect it will turn up on Radio 3 at some point. There’s a wonderful …

16-Dec-2021:
I’ve just had an email from the library to tell me that the ebook of Charles Cumming’s Judas 62 has become available a month earlier than expected. So looking …

15-Dec-2021:
As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”. From Tomiwa …

15-Dec-2021:
John Naughton mentions “In the beginning was the command line”, which remains the only thing I’ve read by Neal Stephenson. In 1999, it persuaded me to adopt, …

14-Dec-2021:
So, any ideas which author the next issue of my newsletter should be about?

14-Dec-2021:
I enjoyed this post by Anne Trubek about getting out of academia and into publishing. I started my doctorate too late, and took too long to finish it, ever to …

13-Dec-2021:
Toby Litt is starting a writer’s diary on Substack in the new year. It’s $50 a year, but there’s a 100% discount (reducing the annual cost to, eh, zero) if you …

12-Dec-2021:
This post is for people who are following the RSS feed of Talk about books. That feed now includes all my Micro.blog posts. To get only the posts for the …

12-Dec-2021:
I had a bit of a wobble about moving “Talk about books” from Substack when I realized that each current subscriber will be asked to confirm — an …

12-Dec-2021:
I just finished reading The Buried Giant. I enjoyed it better than anything else I’ve read by Ishiguro, including Never Let Me Go. (I haven’t read Klara yet.) …

12-Dec-2021:
I really don’t want to learn Hugo. I’ve been trying to create an archive page, based on the category “newsletter” (which will automatically be assigned to posts …

09-Dec-2021:
I’ve upgraded to a premium subscription on Micro.blog and, all going well, I’m going to move Talk about books over from Substack. I’ve a few things to work out, …

09-Dec-2021:
The latest issue of my Talk about books newsletter is about Andrew Marvell’s poem, “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body”. The previous issue discussed 9 crime …

09-Dec-2021:
The previous post was kind of a test. I wanted to see what would happen if I used <cite> tags in a post. They had no effect in the timeline but the book …

09-Dec-2021:
Last week I began to reread Milton’s God. I haven’t made quick progress: Empson’s argument is dense and typically idiosyncratic, but I’ll keep at it. I thought …

08-Dec-2021:
This is what I was eating yesterday evening as the storm raged outside: canard à l’orage

08-Dec-2021:
I’m listening to Esbjörn Svensson Trio Live in Hamburg (2007) for the first time in at least a couple of years, maybe much longer. I had persuaded myself that I …

08-Dec-2021:
I’m supposed to be writing my newsletter today, so I’ve tinkered with the Hugo theme of my Micro.blog to add a link to my Bookshelves page just below the …

08-Dec-2021:
John Naughton, who owns a Tesla, characterizes Elon Musk as “three-parts genius and one part fruitcake”. A bit like Dryden’s “to madness near allied”, I …

08-Dec-2021:
To prove I can be ruthless, these are the only editions of Marvell’s poetry that I’m keeping. To be honest, I’m not sure I need both first (hardback, 2003) and …

07-Dec-2021:
The overflow carpark is seriously overflowing this morning.

07-Dec-2021:
I’m not watching You Don’t Know Me on BBC1. The library has the ebook but it’s not available till March, so instead I’ve reserved Imran Mahmood’s next book, I …

07-Dec-2021:
Ted Gioia writes that, when Czesław Miłosz wasn’t allowed back into the US, his wife Janka Miłosz … angrily confronted a bureaucrat at the State Department, …

06-Dec-2021:
Chris Noth on The Good Wife’s Peter Florrick: “I don’t feel any connection to [it]. It’s odd, because I know it was well received. I have an emotional void …

06-Dec-2021:
The inclusion of Danielle McLaughlin’s novel, The Art of Falling, in John Self’s pick of the year’s fiction in The Critic, reminds me that I’ve been meaning to …

03-Dec-2021:
It wasn’t until I’d read more than half of the series that I began to see the pattern: he gradually but perceptibly becomes less conscientious and less law …

01-Dec-2021:
I found the pdf copy of my 2016 piece in Essays in Criticism, “Andrew Marvell’s Gender”. I still had the proof (also pdf) but I’d given up hope of finding the …

01-Dec-2021:
One reason I hate streaming and music download services is that the metadata is rarely clean. Seems the same may be true of some book data used by Bookshelves. …

30-Nov-2021:
I’ve had another go at customizing a Hugo theme but, as before, I’m finding that I can do most of what I want simply by editing the CSS. I’m having problems …

30-Nov-2021:
That’s the 3rd day in a row I’ve had to reboot the MacBook Air to force it to sync with iCloud — and this time it didn’t even work. I seem to be permanently …

30-Nov-2021:
A tweet with 1000 likes and 17 angry vicious replies will still look like a dumpster fire, even though almost everyone liked it! In How to fix Twitter, Noah …

29-Nov-2021:
So, here is the explanation I promised as to why Literal.club is not for me. I don’t need an alternative to Goodreads: I’m happier when I’m not keeping track of …

29-Nov-2021:
The upshot is I’ve no longer had it with Apple and I’m no longer (particularly) glad that I resisted the temptation to get an M1 MacBook Air!

29-Nov-2021:
Rebooting cleared the logjam, I’m pleased to say. But that’s the second time I’ve rebooted in 24 hours. I hope I’m not going to have to do this every day.

29-Nov-2021:
Well, I got my missing iCloud folders back but the Mac has again stopped syncing with iCloud. It says it’s uploading and downloading “items” but at 0Kb/sec. …

28-Nov-2021:
I finished reading Andrew Taylor, The King’s Evil, the third in a series set in Restoration London but the first I’ve read. I’m not going to write about it till …

28-Nov-2021:
OK, this worked: I unchecked iCloud Drive in Finder preferences, rebooted the MacBook Air, and then rechecked iCloud Drive. It took a minute or so to refresh …

28-Nov-2021:
Help! Last week, my MacBook Air wouldn’t sync with iCloud, so I signed out of iCloud and then back in. Now, some folders on iCloud, including Web, containing …

27-Nov-2021:
I had my booster yesterday followed by a restless night but I think that had as much to do with the high winds and rain as with the vaccine. Thanks to said wind …

26-Nov-2021:
I was racking my brains trying to remember Bruno Bettelheim’s name this morning and it just wouldn’t come. I kept thinking “Brigid Brophy”. Right initials, …

26-Nov-2021:
A tweet from Adam Roberts yesterday, comparing the volumes of two collections of Basil Bunting’s poetry (the smaller of the two titled Complete Poems) sent me …

24-Nov-2021:
In the latest issue of Talk about books, I attempt to deal with an entire series of detective novels in a single post. In the end, I had to skip two (Medusa and …

24-Nov-2021:
After my previous post, I tried logging the Mac out of iCloud and logging back in again. Fingers crossed.

24-Nov-2021:
Since I upgrated to Monterey, my Mac won’t sync with iCloud, and it’s extremely frustrating. I also upgraded to iCloud+ so I could use iCloud email with my own …

23-Nov-2021:
Three book reviews that I originally posted on Literal.club. (Charles Cumming, Box 88; Louise O’Neill, After the Silence; and Michael Connelly, The Law of …

23-Nov-2021:
I get really annoyed when I Google the distance from one place to another and I’m told it’s “a 5-minute drive” or “only a short taxi journey”. How do I convert …

23-Nov-2021:
The Wheel of Time is the latest fantasy to plunder Irish culture. Are we okay with that? I don’t see why not — we weren’t using it 😜

21-Nov-2021:
I’m likely to add two paid subscription levels to Talk about books newsletter: PDF and print editions.

21-Nov-2021:
I think I’m going to delete my Literal.club account. I’ve no desire to track my reading, or to rate or review books. I like my choice of things to read to be …

20-Nov-2021:
… a political writer convinced that political dogma (of any sort) is inimical to writing itself … the country’s most popular writer who holds some of our least …

19-Nov-2021:
I’m reading the 4th in a row of 5 of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novels 📖 that I’m going to write about in next week’s newsletter. I wonder if that explains …

18-Nov-2021:
And, speaking about toggles in iOS/iPadOS, I’d love a quick (instant!) way to switch smart quotes on and off. As I’ve said before, I usually want curly quotes …

18-Nov-2021:
I wish iOS and iPadOS had a way to toggle “select mode” on and off. I’m fed up trying to position the insertion point precisely only to find that I’ve selected …

18-Nov-2021:
I haven’t read all of this WSJ piece because paywall but the accessible part suggests wired headphones are back because AirPods are “too widespread to be cool”, …

18-Nov-2021:
the press release/back cover copy genre does what I spent decades telling undergraduates not to do: it turns the concrete vague, it generalizes at the expense …

17-Nov-2021:
I just opened the Maps app for the first time since I upgraded to macOS Monterey about three weeks ago and … everything is clearer, sharper, more detailed and …

17-Nov-2021:
I just renewed my .ie domain name for a fourth year, so I guess I must be serious about it. I haven’t been posting a lot there recently as my Substack …

13-Nov-2021:
I just posted A year of “Talk about books” (already). Seriously, a year? The rate at which time is accelerating is increasing. Exponentially.

12-Nov-2021:
I’ve been noticing recently that some pages on my site (hosted on GitHub Pages) don’t fully load, or at least aren’t fully “painted” on the screen. Refreshing …

12-Nov-2021:
The book Antifragile is pretty bad. Like most popular management books, it’s a single useful idea padded out with anecdotes. I haven’t read the book but …

12-Nov-2021:
I’m pleasantly surprised that, among the books I chose last year to rescue from a French attic, are the second and third volumes of Len Jackson’s Foundations of …

11-Nov-2021:
I intend to reread 5 novels in Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series over the next 13 days, to write about them in the next issue of my newsletter: Cabal, Dead …

10-Nov-2021:
The 26th fortnightly issue of Talk about books, which has just gone out, is about Lucy Caldwell’s 2016 collection of short stories, Multitudes 📖

09-Nov-2021:
I thought I’d missed the opportunity to see Enrico Pieranunzi (with Jasper Somsen and Jorge Rossy) at Koa jazz festival in Montpellier; but the performance has …

06-Nov-2021:
I did worse than I expected on this Kristen/Kirsten/Kristin/Kyrsten quiz, with a score of 5 out of 12. Got both Senators wrong, but Stewart, Bell and Dunst all …

06-Nov-2021:
I never really understood Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility”. I now know that’s because what I’m able to recollect isn’t emotion but something …

04-Nov-2021:
“To mitigate the issue with Snipping Tool, use the Print Screen key on your keyboard and paste the screenshot into your document,” recommends Microsoft. “You …

04-Nov-2021:
I took a photo on my phone, and uploaded it to iCloud, intending to edit it on the Mac. 25 minutes later, it still hasn’t shown up on iCloud in the Finder. …

04-Nov-2021:
Among the very limited selection of books that I had sent back from France were two different editions of The Changeling: the New Mermaid one, ed. Joost …

02-Nov-2021:
I’ve finally recovered those books that had spent the last 10 years in my sister’s attic in the south of France that I wasn’t willing to abandon, so I think I’m …

31-Oct-2021:
I was taught art by Patrick McGoohan’s sister at a secondary modern school in Hounslow. I’ve taken a Danger Man approach to pictures even since. Elvis Costello …

30-Oct-2021:
I’ve been reading and writing about Andrew Marvell on and off over the past 25 years and I think the thing about him that I’m most satisfied to have learned …

29-Oct-2021:
Well, I got Windows 11 installed and I find that the taskbar is fixed at the bottom of the screen, and can’t be moved. I’ve no objection in principle to …

29-Oct-2021:
I’m downloading Windows 11. It took just over 2 hours to get to 99% (with the speed fluctuating dramatically). It’s been on the last 1% for ten minutes 🤷🏻‍♂️

29-Oct-2021:
Lucy Caldwell’s “All the people were mean and bad” won the BBC National Short Story Award. A woman and her 21-month-old daughter, on a 7-hour flight home from …

29-Oct-2021:
Dropbox has gradually grown in unpopularity on the Mac it demands all sorts of access (effectively, root) that people are wary about. The Overspill. That’s why …

28-Oct-2021:
I just got from the library You Love Me, Caroline Kepnes’s 3rd book featuring repeat murderer Joe Goldberg. It looks from this Slate story as if the makers of …

27-Oct-2021:
Substack has been adding new “tools for writers”. What interests me most is the one for embedding files, including PDFs. I’ll think about including a PDF …

27-Oct-2021:
This issue of Talk about books newsletter is out and it’s about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a book I found disappointing when I first read it more …

26-Oct-2021:
Well, I zapped my Medium account: it’s gone for good. I hadn’t been able to set up redirects for my old “blog” subdomain, so those links are broken. My busiest …

26-Oct-2021:
For me, the hard choice in question 2 here is clearly between options 2 and 3. I’ve finally come down on the side of 2 but if you’d asked me an arbitrary number …

25-Oct-2021:
Every now and then, I get the notion that I ought to read something else by Arthur Phillips (having so far read only his first novel, Prague) but to date I …

24-Oct-2021:
Terence Eden has a post on his blog today about problems with footnotes on WordPress. That prompts me to resurrect my post from 3 years ago about avoiding …

24-Oct-2021:
I have this 5-year-old Bluetooth Boombar, that I’ve generally used with an iPod Touch, but now the battery is starting to go. So, I tried plugging an even older …

24-Oct-2021:
I found out yesterday that the Brad Mehldau Trio is playing the National Concert Hall on 3 Nov — and it was already sold out by the time I heard. So …

24-Oct-2021:
Here’s Mike Collins’s review of the new Marcin Wasilewski Trio album, En attendant. I was afraid at first that I’d been given short measure, but the album’s …

24-Oct-2021:
An album by Enrico Pieranunzi, Thomas Fonnesbaek and Ulysses Owens Jr includes a version of a very popular standard under the title “Alt kan ske” (YouTube …

23-Oct-2021:
I’ve been neglecting my Short stories on the web page, I’m sorry to say. I just updated it for the first time since December 2020, with two-not-one new stories: …

23-Oct-2021:
I keep a page that lists the 19 or so posts about aphantasia and SDAM that I’ve written since April 2018. It occurred to me yesterday that the newsletter issue …

23-Oct-2021:
The Common Reader’s Henry Oliver is Not quite against alcohol, and neither am I. I’ve become a temporary nondrinker during the pandemic, but I don’t like to …

23-Oct-2021:
… a detestable man of extraordinary contradictions … someone who even Steve Bannon pronounces too extreme in his beliefs and intentions for the Trump White …

23-Oct-2021:
I was chatting on Teams yesterday to someone at work who mentioned the need to “eliminate efficiencies”. I think I’ve always been good at that.

23-Oct-2021:
It was this that lost it for the Sun. Enjoyable piece of flash fiction from Adam Roberts (whose Purgatory Mount📖 has just come out in paperback): Earth versus …

23-Oct-2021:
People often complain that Medium hijacks text selection for highlighting, quote-tweeting, commenting etc. I’ve noticed that in Safari on iOS and iPad this …

22-Oct-2021:
This arrived in the post yesterday: the first book by Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah that I’ve owned, or indeed seen. As well as the introduction, Gurnah wrote …

22-Oct-2021:
I suppose the inescapable implication of Douglas Adams’s well known riff on technology is that we can’t avoid getting more suspicious of and bewildered by …

22-Oct-2021:
It’s such a tedious cliché when someone is described as “socially liberal but economically conservative”: without liberal economics, you can’t pay for …

22-Oct-2021:
Since I said that I’m not going to be posting on Medium any more, I continue to get new followers but no new views/reads (to be expected as there’s nothing …

21-Oct-2021:
Getting around to my “afternoon coffee” (a term of Art) at last. (It’s 21:50 here). Actually wondering if I should skip it for today.

21-Oct-2021:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died. I’d barely heard of him and haven’t read anything he wrote but I nevertheless referred to him in a post: In defence of flow: A …

21-Oct-2021:
I deleted my Facebook and Amazon accounts; I still use Google for search but zapped my Google account (having used Gmail as my main email provider for 15 …

21-Oct-2021:
I’ve been thinking again about RSS and find that I’m even more convinced than I was when I wrote this post last year that RSS shouldn’t be a separate thing from …

20-Oct-2021:
I’m not sure about Metaverse, but I’m definitely Facebook-averse.

20-Oct-2021:
Salman Rushdie has posted a new short story on Substack. Whimsical, perhaps would-be Borgesian and undoubtedly timey-wimey, it features a (temporary) visitor …

19-Oct-2021:
I got an email from Tesco Mobile (my former phone service provider), saying they owed me a small refund and attaching a PDF purporting to include a barcode I …

18-Oct-2021:
This is my final post on Medium, unless I change my mind again. I’ve enjoyed writing there but I’m going to focus on Substack (Talk about books) and my static …

17-Oct-2021:
Yesterday, I was complaining that I couldn’t set up iCloud email wiith a custom domain address because there was something wrong with my SPF record. Turns out, …

17-Oct-2021:
I’ve moved all the Medium posts that I wanted to keep to my static site and I don’t intend to post on Medium in future. I retained the ugly Medium URLs and …

16-Oct-2021:
I’m trying to set up iCloud mail with a custom domain, but I keep being told to check my SPF record. It looks fine to me, and I’ve tried deleting and recreating …

16-Oct-2021:
As a teenager many decades ago, I meant to read Under the Volcano but somehow never got around to it. I just discovered that it quotes Marvell’s “Clorinda and …

15-Oct-2021:
Wednesday’s issue of Talk about books (about Kazuo Ishiguro’s short stories in Nocturnes) contained a link to my post from 2019 discussing Never Let Me Go …

14-Oct-2021:
I think it’s time Talk about books revisited Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad. I had separate posts about the first 2 novels (of 6 in the series) early on. The …

14-Oct-2021:
I often complain about the slapdash metadata associated with music streaming and downloads. I just had to redownload Nathalie Loriers New Trio’s album, Les 3 …

14-Oct-2021:
The last time I bought an album by Terje Gewelt was over 10 years ago. It was Oslo (2009), with E Pieranunzi on piano, and I got it from iTunes because CD …

14-Oct-2021:
The top ten publications on Substack collectively make more than $20 million a year in subscription revenue, while less popular newsletters typically make tens …

13-Oct-2021:
The latest issue of Talk about books newsletter has just gone out. It’s mainly about Kazuo Ishiguro’s collection of 5 short stories, Nocturnes. Next issue in 2 …

11-Oct-2021:
There were several things I was unhappy with on Google+, including the way it handled links and the inflexibly regular grid layout. When Google announced its …

11-Oct-2021:
Wednesday’s issue of Talk about books is going to be (primarily) about Kazuo Ishiguro’s short stories in Nocturnes. In the meantime, here’s the mini-review that …

11-Oct-2021: Substack discovery: literature
Substack’s “Discover” page can be reached in one of two ways: either straight from the home page or from the Reader at https://reader.substack.com/discover. In …

10-Oct-2021:
No, it’s Andrew Hill. Cedar Walton 🎹 🎶

10-Oct-2021:
I’m enjoying the Marcin Wasilewski trio’s performance of “Riders on the Storm” so much that I’ll never listen to The Doors’ version again. Mind you, I wouldn’t …

10-Oct-2021:
Brexit Destroyed Labour Party, Not Corbyn, it says here. Actually, I’m pretty sure that Brexit at least contributed to Corbyn’s destruction too.

09-Oct-2021:
I wish Esbjörn Svensson Trio had made a live album of the music from Seven Days of Falling. Live in London includes “Mingle in the Mincing Machine” and …

09-Oct-2021:
Usually, for a book this good, this well written, this artful, I would extol it and exhort you, I would send copies to people, I would quote and quote and …

09-Oct-2021:
Spying as a summer job, between A-Levels and university: Charles Cumming’s Box 88 📚

07-Oct-2021:
So, I just ordered the Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (paperback), edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I’ll read some of Gurnah’s fiction soon but I thought …

07-Oct-2021:
I’m so glad I cancelled my subscription to the NYT last year, because now I can’t give in to the temptation to read that long “Bad Art Friend” story. I know I …

07-Oct-2021:
It’s 30 years this month since I gave up legal practice. Last night I dreamt that a batch of personal injury cases had been found in which I’d allowed the …

06-Oct-2021:
Kennys’ Bookshop has a new search facility and it’s a lot faster (and, on first impression, more comprehensive) than the old one. If you want to buy from a real …

06-Oct-2021:
Lennie Briscoe was one of my favourite characters on Law & Order. I didn’t know that Jerry Orbach, who played the role, and his first wife, writer Marta …

04-Oct-2021:
I was sure I’d never previously read Brian Moore’s Catholics, about which I posted yesterday. But writing about the ending, and finding the cover image, have …

04-Oct-2021:
The current issue of my newsletter (Talk about books) is about women on the run in novels by Lisa Lutz and Laura Lippman. The next one (due 13 Oct) might be …

04-Oct-2021:
I just learned by browsing Substack that Freddie deBoer thinks The Matrix (1999) is rubbish, while Ross Douthat insists it’s good. That’s all the confirmation I …

03-Oct-2021:
I just posted something about Brian Moore’s 1972 novella, Catholics. Now, back to Ishiguro’s Nocturnes but, first, my “morning” coffee 📖☕️

02-Oct-2021:
One thing I prefer on the Mac to the iPad: I can leave “smart quotes” on as default, and get “straight quotes” when I need them with a keyboard …

30-Sep-2021:
I’ve never used Keynote and very rarely use Numbers but I’ve just gone and downloaded updates to both. Indeed, these days I can go for months without even …

30-Sep-2021:
The newsletter (Talk about books) is due out every other Wednesday, but I held it till this morning so I could read it over with rested eyes. Then I overslept. …

29-Sep-2021:
I hadn’t had a keyboard with a numeric keypad for a long time until I got a Windows desktop late last year. Only a few days ago, it finally occurred to me that …

28-Sep-2021:
As I was reordering my book review posts, I was reminded of this from 6 years ago, about Andrew Taylor’s The Anatomy of Ghosts. I think I need to do a …

28-Sep-2021:
I reordered the book reviews (none recent) on my reviews page into alphabetical order by author surname. I wonder should I arrange by title the posts that have …

28-Sep-2021:
Don’t say you weren’t given fair warning. This is from John Naughton, quoting The Guardian.

26-Sep-2021:
I’m trying out the Safari Technology Preview, as John Gruber recommends before installing Safari 15. It seems fine so far. I never use tabs anyway: one of the …

26-Sep-2021:
I haven’t got a fixed internet connection here so I connect through my phone. Before I had an iPhone, I had to recharge the phone’s battery 2 or 3 times a day …

26-Sep-2021:
I was just trying to write a short note about Brian Moore’s 1972 novella, 📖Catholics📚 when it struck me that I might have been misreading it and that it may …

26-Sep-2021:
JSTOR is so frustrating! It won’t let Keychain suggest a strong password, or automatically store a password once created (you can add it manually to Keychain …

25-Sep-2021:
This is what I have to say about Philip Kerr’s early novel, A Philosophical Investigation. It’s rather more than I was expecting, given the difficulty I’ve …

24-Sep-2021:
Spotify and music streaming generally want to keep a fraudulent payment system in place because they benefit from it, as do the fraudsters, of course, according …

23-Sep-2021:
Felicia C Sullivan writes about her bridge book, the novel Follow Me into the Dark, which I discussed in my newsletter last month 📖

21-Sep-2021:
“Musk thinks Peter [Thiel] is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.” They’re both, of course, very perceptive people and good judges of …

21-Sep-2021:
“You can now embed NFTs in your Substack posts …” Finally! Exactly the feature I’ve been waiting for with bated breath. (Excuse the sarcasm, I got a bit carried …

20-Sep-2021:
According to my ebook app (BorrowBox) I’m now on page 141 of 140 🤷‍♂️

20-Sep-2021:
Pianist Emil Viklicky remembers bassist George Mraz who died last week. As I’ve said before, Viklicky is not one of my favourite pianists but I often listen to …

20-Sep-2021:
The Irish Times books quiz is unusually easy today. I still got one wrong, though.

19-Sep-2021:
I just read a longish Substack post in NetNewsWire, wanted to ”like” it, so I opened the web page and regretted that I hadn’t read the whole post on the web. It …

19-Sep-2021:
Dave Gelly reviews with enthusiasm Chick Corea’s Akoustic Band Live. I have 2 previous albums by this trio (one live, one studio) that I don’t listen to enough. …

19-Sep-2021:
I love Tot but I’m finding its erratic behaviour frustrating. I accidentally deleted a note on my phone (no idea how) and neither shaking nor 3-finger swipe …

18-Sep-2021:
I’ve had more feedback on my Frankenstein post than on any previous issue of the newsletter and all of it favourable so far. So, naturally, I’m now worrying …

18-Sep-2021:
Somebody just commented on an old post of mine about motivation, productivity and aphantasia, recommending Obsidian. I’ve seen plenty of discussion of Obsidian …

18-Sep-2021:
I just went to turn off autocorrect on my iPad, only to find out that I already did that months ago. It still highlights misspelt words when I try to edit them, …

18-Sep-2021:
Help! The version of Carla Bley’s “Vashkar” on the new Marcin Wasilewski album is ruining those on Arctic Riff for me 🎶 🎹

17-Sep-2021:
Recent mentions of Herbie Hancock on Twitter have sent me back to the album 🎶Herbie Hancock Trio 81🎹, which I haven’t listened to for years. I’m starting to …

16-Sep-2021:
First impressions of Marcin Wasilewski Trio’s En attendant: at 43 mins, it seems insubstantial; and I much prefer their “Riders on the Storm” to The Doors’ 🎶🎹

15-Sep-2021:
The next issue of the newsletter, in 2 weeks’ time, is likely to be about “fugitive women” and to feature Laura Lippman’s Sunburn📚 and Lisa Lutz’s The …

15-Sep-2021:
I just got an email from the company I buy my coffee from, saying that Lavazza are putting their prices up, but not (unless I’m missing something) by how much. …

15-Sep-2021:
The latest issue of Talk about books (newsletter on Substack) has just gone out. It’s Creature and creator in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I loved writing it …

14-Sep-2021:
“I’ll put it on my reading list.” Might do better actually to read it. Alan Jacobs — @ayjay — recommends Richard Dawkins, improbable though that might sound: …

13-Sep-2021:
Microsoft has been messing about with Windows Paint again. When are they going to learn? I had to set a new Registry key to get it even to run, and now it takes …

12-Sep-2021:
Yesterday, I posted something on my static site that, at any time over the previous 4 months, I’d have posted on Medium. Posting on the static site is …

11-Sep-2021:
This is the first thing I’ve posted on my own site since May. I had been posting to Medium (using a custom domain name) in the meantime, but that experiment is …

11-Sep-2021:
The more I look at the draft I have on the Mac, the more I see that it’s a very early draft, missing edits that I made nearly an hour ago. The iPad must have …

11-Sep-2021:
Not only did I lose the last paragraph, but edits that I’d made to earlier paragraphs also didn’t survive. I thought Tot had versions, so that I could go back …

11-Sep-2021:
I really need to be careful when switching between the iPad and the Mac. I just lost the last paragraph of something I’d been writing in Tot on the iPad when I …

10-Sep-2021:
I’m not consistent in choosing filenames (slugs) for posts on my website. Sometimes I’ll use an initial capital for proper names because it’s allowed: the names …

10-Sep-2021:
I just found out that there’s a new Marcin Wasilewski Trio album out today, 🎹En Attendant🎶. I’ve ordered the CD direct from the ECM website. Now playing their …

08-Sep-2021:
Sean O’Neill argues that the significance of Sally Rooney’s Irishness hasn’t been given the attention it deserves. He makes a good, if overstated, case. It …

08-Sep-2021:
The phrase “vanilla JavaScript” has lost none of its power to irritate the hell out of me. Why are tech people so bad at knowing what to call things? Other …

08-Sep-2021:
Problematically, Substack does not identify which authors are part of the Substack Pro programme. Yeah, that’s capitalism for you. Very few businesses …

07-Sep-2021:
Before I deleted my Google account, I had been artkavanagh@gmail.com for 15 years. I regularly got emails — one concerning someone’s mental health and several …

06-Sep-2021:
That’s twice in one day I’ve come across (unrelated) references to Howard Carter and Tutankhamun’s tomb. Coincidence? Almost certainly.

06-Sep-2021:
I’m back doing my own coffee-grinding for the foreseeable. I cycled to Castlebar Aldi on Friday to stock up on their ground espresso but there was none left so …

06-Sep-2021:
When I was writing last week’s issue of the newsletter (about the Jackson Brodie series) I forgot to include a link to something I’d written before, about Kate …

05-Sep-2021:
I write most things that are intended for my own site in nonstandard but valid Markdown, i.e. mainly “plain” text with html tags where necessary. I was using iA …

05-Sep-2021: Innocence, ignorance or complicity (Kazuo Ishiguro) 📚
Ishiguro’s new novel provides the opportunity to take a second look at Kathy from Never Let Me Go I haven’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s very recent novel, Klara and …

04-Sep-2021:
The latest issue of my Substack newsletter is about Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series of novels. I expect to feature another of her books, Transcription, in …

04-Sep-2021:
Four months ago, I resumed paying the Medium membership fee to get a custom domain name and hoping for better recommendations. But the quality of items in my …

04-Sep-2021:
One thing (of very many) that annoys me about Google is that, if I click a search result and then follow a few more links from there, the only way I can get …

04-Sep-2021:
I detest websites that make the fan start up on my (Intel) MacBook Air. LinkedIn is one of them if I leave it open too long. That in itself might be a good …

04-Sep-2021:
This WSJ story is the first of the many pieces I’ve read on the Supreme Court’s order on the Texas abortion law to explain the issues in terms that I could …

03-Sep-2021:
I just joined literal.club where my username is @artkavanagh (as it is almost everywhere except Twitter). I deleted my Goodreads account some time ago, so I …

03-Sep-2021:
… perhaps there are no new forms – of writing, of personal connection, of belief in something that gives meaning to the world. Perhaps there is nothing for it …

02-Sep-2021:
The most recent issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is about Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels. I’ve been wanting to write about them for some time 📚

31-Aug-2021:
I just deactivated my Reddit account. I never really felt I belonged there. Interestingly, a deactivated account is not recoverable, while other platforms offer …

31-Aug-2021:
I’ve used autocomplete in preference to bookmarks in my browser since autocomplete started. I visit Charles Arthur’s The Overspill almost every weekday. So, …

29-Aug-2021:
I don’t usually like “very short stories” or flash fiction because, too often, there just isn’t room for the story, or even a story. But I always make an …

28-Aug-2021:
TIL that Rupert Holmes, who wrote the novel on which Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies🎬 is based, is also responsible for “The Piña Colada Song”. I’m utterly …

28-Aug-2021:
Richard Williams, reviewing Marc Johnson’s solo bass album, Overpass, points out that Charlie Haden, “who recorded many times in a duo setting,” never made a …

27-Aug-2021:
I just wasted a chunk of the afternoon trying to persuade a mod on r/books that I ought to be able to include a link in a discussion post. It seems that the …

27-Aug-2021:
Here’s an interesting view on Sally Rooney’s novels as a “shameless reassertion of white individualism”. Rooney clearly sees economic class, not race, as the …

26-Aug-2021:
Rock musicians aspire to have jazz credibility – even Ginger Baker called himself a jazz drummer, for God’s sake. This cracked me up: an acerbic aside from …

25-Aug-2021:
This is my favourite Charlie Watts story 🎶🎹

24-Aug-2021:
Twitter … satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality … an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses … I enjoyed Adam Roberts’s review of Patricia …

23-Aug-2021:
I often use Dir$() in VBA in my day job, to batch process folders of Word documents. But it doesn’t handle subfolders. For years I’ve put off learning an …

22-Aug-2021:
My newsletter, Talk about books, has now reached its 20th fortnightly issue, which means it’s been running for 38 weeks. I just posted a summary of issues 14 to …

22-Aug-2021:
In the current issue of my newsletter, I make the case that ambivalence about justice is more or less universal, arising from our reason/observation/experience …

19-Aug-2021:
I hadn’t seen any of The Good Fight📺 since season 2, but I just caught an episode from season 5 and it’s an utter travesty. It felt more like Ally McBeal than …

18-Aug-2021:
The new issue of Talk about books, my newsletter, is titled Your favourite author’s ambivalence about justice. In 2 weeks’ time I’ll be writing about Kate …

18-Aug-2021:
Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) about rationalists: they’re about “overcoming bias,” about eliminating subjectivity – cognitive errors to them are always about …

18-Aug-2021:
Couldn’t keep my eyes open at 7.30pm yesterday, so I lay down for a late siesta and woke up after midnight. I didn’t want to cook dinner at that hour, so worked …

18-Aug-2021:
Facebook (and in some aspects of their business, Google and Amazon) are the robber barons of the information technology era. That’s how they got so rich.

17-Aug-2021:
Is Dark Spectre (1996) a riposte to Red Dragon (1981)? Thomas Harris’s Francis Dolarhyde kills because of delusions about William Blake. Michael Dibdin suggests …

15-Aug-2021:
Parts of the internet — Medium, GitHub, om.co, the Irish Times — seem to be out today, or at best very sluggish, while other parts — including Micro.blog — are …