Reading

“Birchwood” by John Banville

This book has very clear echoes of Proust, both in the writing style and in the sense of nostalgia that pervades the story of aristocratic decline. The references are clear and deliberate – in the very first chapter, Banville’s narrator…
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End of the sea code

Saw this very sad snippet of news in the 29 August edition of Freedom magazine: At least 73 migrants have died at sea after ships repeatedly passed them by despite their being in difficulty after their dinghy ran out of…
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“Fire Horses” by Mark Liam Piggott

Joe Noone seems to have it all – a beautiful house built into a Mallorca hillside, a comfortable lifestyle, a beautiful girlfriend. Yet it’s New Year’s Eve 2007 and as fireworks go off around him and people celebrate, he seems…
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“T.S. Eliot” by Peter Ackroyd

I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the…
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Miscellaneous facts about bees

Sorry, this has nothing to do with reading, or writing, or anything else this blog is supposed to be about. I just read an amazing piece about bees in the latest issue of the New Internationalist, and before I throw…
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American vs. British readers

Some interesting analysis of US and UK reading habits, courtesy of the summer edition of The Author magazine: American readers prefer romance; British ones prefer literary fiction Men make 35% of book purchases in the US; 42% in the UK…
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“The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon

There are three separate stories in this book: one is the killing of Russian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908; another is the struggle of the narrator, Bosnian immigrant Brik, to adapt to life…
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“Thoughts” by Giacomo Leopardi

The book was unfinished in Leopardi's lifetime, and perhaps the finished version would have been brilliant. This sequence of half-formed thoughts and bon mots, however, was just a quick and not particularly satisfying read.
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