Category: Books

An elaborately Barthesian pleasure at reading the first pages of Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, her book on the psychoanalysis of depression. I giggle, recognize myself, nod understandingly, make comments… “For those who are wracked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia.” You’re right, I won’t…

I’ve been enjoying A Book Addict’s Treasury (Rugg & Murphy, 2006) for the second time through. It’s yet another of those collections of excerpts, bound in pale paper with simple fonts for the title; but this one is actually quite good – intelligent passages, well chosen, many surprises, really just a lot of very well-chosen,…

Spurious is talking about some kinds of writing, notably the vastness of the page/canvas in American arts… well said, but that was a time that changed, that seems to have faded. I remember being startled, when I spent a year in Germany in 1993, at the sheer crowdedness of the country: at the endless neat…

It is dangerous to read books that have certain moods – especially when they are well written. Your own mood distorts and shifts to match them…. Tom Disch’s masterpiece is certainly 334, his intricate exploration of various denizens of an overcrowded, rather listless, declining but realistic New York in 2021-26. It’s really a series of…

After a rather long and chaotic day (many undergraduates being foolish – getting distinctly irritated with some of them), reading Beckford’s Vathek (and The Episodes of Vathek) for fun, late at night. My taste for fantasy was established largely by Lin Carter’s vast publishing venture in the 1970s, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. A lot…

Reading Geoff Ryman’s Air. I know: it’s a bit silly to talk about a book you’ve only started – I’ve read about three chapters. It’s also the kind of book that is deeply involving; a somewhat dangerous distraction when I’ve had so much to do – on the other hand many things are done, perhaps…

There are some wonderful Christmas stories – they start with Dickens’ Christmas Carol, of course. It’s a shame that it seems so hard to make a successful film out of it, because it’s so overwhelmingly dramatic – but all the many, many versions and adaptations always seem stiff and clumsy when compared with reading the…

So, in this rather weird transition between the semester and its end (a few meetings left), and also between working hard on the Liverpool presentation and working on the next paper, and having made myself a bit sick in doing so (gastro mostly), and trying to get a list of things done around the house,…

I have always loved Joan Didion’s books, especially the essays. In some cases, such as Slouching towards Bethlehem, or The White Album, I care about the subject of the essay; but in Miami, or Salvador, I don’t – yet it’s the sentences that are always so amazing, so eerily short and blunt, yet so utterly…