Books
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REVIEW: Brighton Fringe – Moby Dick
Moby-Dick is a book much quoted but seldom read. Its infamous tale of obsession, ecocide, and preposterous human ego is a fine tome for our times. It is also so much more besides. It’s about Ahab’s fanaticism, sure, but it is also: a tale of queer love, which is hinted at here; the desperate and… Read more
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Review: The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career And Steal Your Future, by Hilke Schellmann
This review first appeared in the Morning Star A friend of mine once wrote a sketch about a management training guru, who claimed to have invented a tool that can tell “whether you’re a blue, a green, a red or… a dickhead.” Compared to the products and procedures documented in Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm: How… Read more
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The Booklovers
Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own. He who has life and strength enough to say: “Yesterday’s dead and gone – I want to live today”… From visiting every Wimpy to writing a postcard every week for a year, I am a fan of doomed challenges.… Read more
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REVIEW: A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir, by Ian Buruma
Note – this first appeared in my substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here You know how it is. It’s the mid-seventies, you’re an upper-middle-class Anglo-Dutch student, and you’re macho-posing in a red jockstrap to Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” in a seedy theatre behind Kyoto station while a topless dancer writhes around you.… Read more
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REVIEW: Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism, by Owen Hatherley
As the title implies, Owen Hatherley is trying his best in trying times. This collection of his essays covers everything from tributes to Black Box Recorder to shop signs in Walthamstow High Street, from early blog posts to recent essays for the London Review of Books, as Britain staggers from late Blairism to coalition austerity… Read more
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REVIEW: Everything, all the time, everywhere, by Stuart Jeffries.
I was an undergraduate during post-modernism’s golden age. It was 1998 and things, we had recently been assured, could only get better. Warwick uni was the quickest to embrace New Labour’s neoliberal reimagining of higher education. Private security goons stalked campus roads to nowhere. Treatises as brazenly unserious as Francis Fukuyama’s End of History were… Read more
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“It is lumber, man – all lumber!”
Today I had a book returned to me by an old friend. I lent it to her in 2006; she took it back to Canada with her, where it languished in storage for many years. Then it was found in a clear-out, brought back to England, and finally, eventually, unexpectedly, fell back into my possession.… Read more
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Review of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying”. Le Guin, in her own introduction to the novel My journey to Le Guin started with a dim awareness of her via a Ghibli adaptation, falling in love with Earthsea, and then carving my… Read more
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Review: The Word For World Is Forest – Ursula K. Le Guin
It starts with the title. I loved this book before I had read a single word because of it. I am happy Le Guin was talked out of calling it “The Little Green Men“, as was her initial intention. The word for world is forest. Not earth, or rock, or soil. Or mall, or semi… Read more
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Pattern Recognition
I just finished reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. It’s a book an erstwhile colleague of mine was pretty obsessed with, to the extent of owning the Buzz Rickson jacket owned by its main character. Gibson imaged the internet, and made it cool and sexy. As a teenager reading Neuromancer or Idoru, while watching ludicrous… Read more
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