Reading

Books not to miss in 2009

I’m never sure how these lists get created. In any case, the Guardian has named it’s books not to miss in 2009. Odd phrasing – not books to read, but books not to miss. Like the best advertising, it suggests an urgency,…
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“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story of A Pale View of Hills takes place in…
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"Three Stories" by Alan Bennett

All three of these stories have a deeply satirical flavour, with dry, mostly successful humour and pointed observations on the various absurdities and hypocrisies we live by. “The Laying on of Hands” describes a memorial service for a masseur to…
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Interesting thought

The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. When the projected light is switched off all that remains is a blank screen. That which has been projected by light was a series of ‘stills’. Such…
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Franco Moretti on the Novel

Read a very interesting piece by Franco Moretti in New Left Review, July/August 2008. It seems like a synopsis of a much longer, multi-volume work on the theory of the novel, which I plan to read when I have time.…
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Racial identification

Read a fascinating article in the Fall 2007 edition of the Du Bois Review. In an article “The New Latin Nation”, Alejandro Portes made the very interesing, and ironic, point that whereas in the past, much Mexican immigration to the…
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William Cuffay, Black Chartist

Just read an interesting pamphlet called “The Story of William Cuffay, Black Chartist.” It’s quite a story. His grandfather was an African, sold into slavery in St Kitts, where his father was born a slave. Somehow he ended up being…
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