Here’s a quick roundup of some good books I read this month, featuring Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Tyler and more.
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The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain
The Heart of the Race is a classic of Black British women’s history. First published in 1985, the book filled in large gaps in British history, which had traditionally neglected the Black experience altogether before belatedly including the perspective of Black men while still largely excluding women. This was the first book to lay out a comprehensive history of Black… Read More
A Steam of Consciousness
As I was writing recently, a slip of the pen turned a stream of consciousness into a steam of consciousness. I quickly inserted the missing “r”, but then it made me think that steam is actually a better metaphor than stream. Consciousness is not like a stream that flows predictably along a set course from its source to its destination…. Read More
August 2020 Reading Roundup
After my quick trip to the UK last month, I’m back in Belgrade again. We made a few stops on our drive back across Europe, but it’s really not a good time to be travelling. It was, nevertheless, a great time to spend a couple of hours strolling around Venice with no crowds. Here’s the Piazza San Marco as you’ve… Read More
I’m Teaching a New Online Writing Class
I was happy to be asked recently to teach an online writing masterclass for Litro, a London literary magazine. I’m teaching a four-week course on breaking writer’s block. In a decade and a half of writing novels, short stories, journalism and other stuff, I’ve learnt a thing or two about facing and ultimately overcoming writer’s block. The idea is to… Read More
The Unsaintly Side of Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi is one of those people whose position as a hero of history is assured. He overcame the most powerful empire on earth with the power of nonviolence. He is immortalised through his quotable epigrams like “Be the change that you want to see in the world” and “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they… Read More
July 2020 Reading Roundup
I’m writing this in the middle of a two-week quarantine in the UK. Don’t worry, I don’t have any Covid-19 symptoms—it’s just a precaution for people arriving from certain “high-risk” countries. Why the UK (with 46,000 deaths) is quarantining people from Serbia (with 500 deaths) could be the subject of another post about the intersection of Covid rules and international… Read More
Children of the Cave: A Fascinating Finnish Novel of Ideas
In Children of the Cave, Finnish writer Virve Sammalkorpi imagines an encounter between a group of explorers and some strange creatures living in a cave in the remote forests of northern Russia that look like animals but also have some very human characteristics.
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No, I Don’t Have the Bandwidth Right Now
Something is very wrong with the English language. People have started asking me if I have the “bandwidth” to work on new projects. What am I, a modem? This is part of a broader trend of viewing human beings as machines. When we need a break, we go offline. When we achieve something new, we level up. In a corporate… Read More