Category: Books
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A cautionary elegy
William Boyd thinks that The Radetzky March is ‘one of the enduring monuments of twentieth-century European literature’; I’d never heard of it before a friend recommended it to me. It’s quite likely that Boyd hasn’t heard of the books I think are ‘enduring monuments’ either (although I actually think that…
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Molecular anecdoty
I don’t follow cook-book publishing that closely (or indeed at all), but you can’t help noticing a few things if you work in a library. One is that we seem to have bid farewell to the conventions of my youth, where the majority of cook-books were either reference manuals, like…
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Fear of the unknown
I only ever read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a haphazard manner, and my familiarity with his oeuvre has owed as much to Sandy Petersen’s 1980s role-playing game Call of Cthulhu as it has to the few stories I read before diving into this mammoth volume. His imaginary milieu, the so-called…
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Generous manoeuvres in the cosmic dark
Juice Aleem has an inclusive attitude to his cosmic voyage. There seems very little reason for anyone seeking to revalue the markers of difference by which they have been excluded to invite white people along for the ride, but Juice Aleem makes very clear that they, along with a list…
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Unofficial beauty
Pingu, a TV series I enjoyed entirely as an adult, has a special place in my heart similar to that reserved for the cultural artifacts of my childhood. For one thing it was on TV when the spawn was small; for another it has a brilliantly infectious, funky theme tune…
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Impossible spanners
I read a book about the thought of Pierre Bourdieu to prepare for reading this, since I knew it leaned heavily on Bourdieu’s theories – ‘cultural capital’ is a concept that Bourdieu introduced and defined. In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation John Guillory is not discussing that…
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Enjoy with a mince pie
This very pretty (in a tasteful, minimalist way) Faber edition of Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was given to me for Christmas so that I could read it aloud to my painfully cultured spouse and spawn. I’m not sure if I can call it a translation, as…
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Traces of lives on geographies
I’ve been skirting around W.G. Sebald for years. I read The Rings of Saturn, as I suspect many people have in my part of the country, because it is a travelogue through territory with which I am familiar, and then re-read it in some detail as part of my research…
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The temporary truths of moving targets
The sociologist and social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is one of those (many) writers and thinkers to whose ideas I have been exposed, and which I have haltingly deployed, without ever really investigating their work. I have finally got around to doing so, in Bourdieu’s case, by way of preparing to…
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A humane document
Mother London was something of a surprise to me, inasmuch as it’s something I needed to read, something that should have been more or less top of my reading list, but which I simply happened to read by chance. Firstly it was chance that I happened to spot it in…
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Ammunition
Behave is a behemoth of a book. Unless you know quite a lot about neurobiology already, you’ll need to read the appendices: including those, it clocks in at seven-hundred and seventeen pages. You may well be familiar with longer reference books, or textbooks, or even novels, but this is a…
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Sculpted in the clay of language
Christopher Tolkien made it perfectly clear in Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, that it was the last book he would produce as the editor of his father’s considerable legacy of unfinished writings. As he was then in his 93rd year, this seemed a reasonable point at which to hang…
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The opposite of psychogeography
Patrick Rothfuss is an excellent writer slumming it in the undemanding environs of commercial fiction. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things. It is a novella with much to recommend it, a pleasing book, a pretty book, written with a deft touch technically…
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Can you skate theory?
Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (to give this academic monograph its full title), is a work of architectural history — which is to say that it is not about the history of buildings, the history of the built environment, or the practice of architecture. Iain Borden’s…
Oliver Arditi 