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Kudos
After discovering her piece Aftermath a few years ago, and having revisited it several times since, I’ve been an adherent of Rachel Cusk’s. I am tempted to re-read that piece now, but I know that its stark, hypnotic beauty would move me too much and prevent me from writing anything about her latest book. Kudos is the third in a […]
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Circe
Madeline Miller’s Circe is not a bad book, but it is disappointing in a number of ways. It takes for its first-person hero the witch of Aiaiai, Circe, a daughter of the sun-god Helios, turner of men into pigs, and eventual lover of Odysseus. It is a sort of riposte to The Odyssey so it’s unsurprising that […]
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12 Rules for Life
You probably shouldn’t read Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I’m not normally one to discourage reading (or intellectual endeavour), but this is a strange exception. It’s not exactly that Peterson is wrong about anything specific, although he occasionally very much is. It is rather that on many topics, he is […]
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Mrs. Dalloway
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why Mrs. Dalloway is so heartbreaking. Some of it is undoubtedly down to its manner of plumbing the depths of time, the way in which those strong moments of life, of violence and of youth, of youth’s violence, can so resolutely stand time’s test, can so indelibly inscribe one’s present, can […]
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Bullshit Jobs
First, David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is an extremely pleasurable read, and you should read it, if nothing else for the accounts of the utterly useless things people have been employed to do. The book was born in the wake of the storm of Graeber’s 2013 article “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs“. The premise is simple: In […]
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The Enchanted April
“Enchanting” and its close cousin “charming” are apt words for Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel The Enchanted April. It’s an outwardly unassuming meditation on how one’s surroundings can change one’s mind, and gives a fair amount of early (1922) insight into British attitudes towards the rigidity of society, as well as to the ameliorative effects both of […]
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How to Change Your Mind
A few weeks ago I was fortunate to see Michael Pollan talk about his new book, How to Change Your Mind. He was interviewed by author Zoe Cormier, at a co-working space called Second Home in East London. Pollan is best known for books on food, including the excellent Cooked (2013), the first book of his that I read […]
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Flourish (2011)
Psychologist Martin Seligman’s Flourish is a strange book, in that it does not deliver on any of its promises, and yet somehow remains enjoyable. You would be forgiven for assuming, given the book’s rather bold opening that “This book will help you flourish,” that the book will in fact help you flourish—which it does, sort of. […]
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The 100-Year Life (2016)
The basic argument of The 100-Year Life, by psychologist Lynda Gratton and economist Andrew Scott, is that not enough is being done to adapt to increasing longevity. After a quite interesting chapter on how drastically longevity has changed (the 1900 US expectancy was under 50!), the book sketches out in some detail archetypes from the baby boomer, […]
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Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964)
Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964) is a work of impressive scholarship that remains extremely (and sometimes depressingly) relevant today. It traces periods of intellectual flourishing as well as the reactions against them, from the deeply intellectual Founding Fathers to the incoherent and incandescent anti-intellectual aggression of the McCarthy era. The overarching point of the book seems […]