Category: Books
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A game of madness
I’ve never paid particular attention to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s famous London churches, although I am familiar with some of them. I have, however, become embroiled as a reader in a complex literary game which has been articulated around them, through the work of several writers. My first encounter was through Alan…
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One face in a thousand
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her important structural taxonomy of fantasy literature, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four key types of fantasy, defined by the way that they relate the fantastical to the prosaic. The first and most widely used is the ‘portal-quest fantasy’, in which the protagonists either pass through some kind…
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A kitchen quadrivium
This book made a big noise on release, and Spouse bought me a copy for Christmas shortly thereafter, which I promptly forgot about. Last year I made a decision to start working my way through all the unread food books I’d been receiving for Christmas and birthday gifts, and since…
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Worlds and authorities
I was spurred by the recent BBC TV adaptation of Northern Lights to re-read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, mainly because I couldn’t remember enough of the plot to grasp how they’d changed it, but also because when I read it before (aloud, to Spawn at bedtimes), it had…
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A book to sort you out apiece
A viral disease is sweeping the world, killing indiscriminately. Well, nearly. Its fatal impact is concentrated in a particular minority, one that many in society seem to regard as expendable, as less valuable than the average. At least in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s socially unacceptable to vilify older people…
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For Pete’s sake!
In 1983 or 1984, I had a good look around Charles Jencks’s Thematic House, then recently completed. It is now the only Grade I listed building in the Ladbroke Conservation Area in Kensington, owing to its unique importance as an early example of Postmodern architecture. I was given a thorough…
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The magic of the real
My introduction to fantasy fiction was The Lord of the Rings, which I encountered surprisingly early, while visiting a friend whose mother was reading it to him as a bedtime story. I suspect her assessment of its suitability as a bedtime story for a three-year-old may have had something to…
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Food as illustration
In Western Europe we take holidays on the Mediterranean, we hear about migrants attempting to cross it, we imagine our histories as entwined with it—the cradle of a Roman Empire that impinged on the continent’s most distant fringes, bringing olives, wine, and dozens of other markers of its cultures and…
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A book on the wall
For a small, softly-spoken country, Scotland carries a large intellectual stick. Voltaire said that ‘we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, and its influence during the Enlightenment would probably be hard to overstate. It’s difficult to find agreement on exactly what or when the Enlightenment was, but…
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Energy and entertainment
My long-interrupted project to read or re-read all of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books has at last been resumed, after several years’ hiatus. Volume 3 in this 1990s omnibus series brings together the original four Hawkmoon novels, which were the first Moorcock I ever read, aged thirteen. I read the…
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Sexy stabby
Illustration is a word that usually implies instrumentality, a visual work that’s auxiliary to something else. More broadly, you might illustrate a point, which implies one utterance in support of another. But illustration also suggests an approach to drawing (or potentially to any kind of picture-making) which locates its meanings…
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Tilting at reality
I’ve read a lot of popular science books over the years, but never until now have I felt a real urge to go and learn the maths I’d need to properly understand the work. I feel as though, if I had read this book twenty, or even ten years ago,…
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A trajectory
General relativity tells us something enticing about time. It doesn’t tell us what many would like it to tell us, that time is simply another dimension which our limited perspective turns into the one-way-street of our experience; it tells us instead that time has a particular relation to entropy, that…
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For the readers
There’s something wonderful about being immersed in the world of a book, something which for me is even more pronounced when that world is invented. Even when a secondary world is dystopian, like Margaret Atwood’s theocracy of Gilead, there’s something about inhabiting it which excites the explorer in me, which…
Oliver Arditi 