Author: jon

Review: My Struggle #1

Post author By jon
Post date May 20, 2021

A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009)

I’ve been really blindsided by how strong a reaction I had to A Death in the Family.

There’s a lot of fiction, Nabokov obviously, but also the Borges or Kafka or lots of other stuff, where I can just look at it and go “fair enough, I couldn’t do that, that’s incredible”.

But the Knausgaard is just thoroughgoingly ordinary – pages of unflashy prose from a pretty nice Norwegian man describing his sometimes comfortable, sometimes troubled childhood and his difficult relationship with his father and alcohol in the most straightforward, least romantic way he can. One reviewer described him as a “chatterbox” – the whole book is just digression after digression, all the kids at his school, what dinner tasted like when he was 8 years old. Someone else said “it’s boring, but I can’t stop reading it”.

I have literally been dreaming about the life of Karl Ove for the last week.

Cycle Touring Cycling Domestic Tours

Bike Tour: To Hull and Back

Post author By jon
Post date April 27, 2021

647 km (402 miles) over 6 days between Apr. 12, 2021 and Apr. 17, 2021. Read the full account on CycleBlaze here.

Wild camped all the way in rather cold conditions.

International travel was out, so I decided to ride up through the East of England, from the Bedfordshire Ouse to the Yorkshire one and over the Humber bridge.

Books Nonfiction Reviews

Review: Other Minds

Post author By jon
Post date March 18, 2021

By Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016)

This really is excellent! Learnt loads on this (pretty fascinating) subject (intelligence and cognition in octopuses and cuttlefish). To my surprise it also includes a short account of the theory of ageing – which I had a chapter of my PhD on. Usually you see the cracks when an author moves onto something you’re very familiar with, but I have to say he pretty much nails it. It actually sent me back to my thesis (for the first time in 8 years) to refresh myself on the background.

Genuine sense of affection and pathos for these wonderful animals. Was quite cut-up at the inevitable death of the short-lived intelligent giant cuttlefish.

Books Fiction Reviews Short Stories

Review: Borges and Salinger short stories

Post author By jon
Post date March 18, 2021

Labyrinths Borges (1962), Personal Anthology Borges (1965), Nine Stories by JD Salinger (1953)

More Borges short stories. He was really quality over quantity, there just isn’t that much (published, translated) out there. Ficciones was so good I’ve raided Labyrinths (from the 60s and by a bunch of different translators) and Personal Anthology (there’s a lot of overlap of stories so it’s not really reading three books).

Books Fiction Humour Reviews

Reviews: great funny books

Post author By jon
Post date February 15, 2021

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) and Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe (1974).

A Confederacy of Dunces. This really is an incredible book, even funnier than I remembered it, and a bit sadder too. Ignatius is such an amazing invention … grotesque in every way and a total tool, but somehow heroic. It could be dated given the setting (1960s New Orleans) but holds up remarkably well.

Porterhouse Blue is a bit more dated – but in recompense has some fantastically funny lines, and will be all-too-familiar to anyone who’s spent any time in a Cambridge/Oxford college.

Books Pastiche

Excruciation

Post author By jon
Post date January 20, 2021

As I said to my friend and pupil Pancetti, as we walked on the Via Corso, Rome is the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti, firstly my friend, and only then my pupil. My pupils could only become so after first being my friend. Or rather, my pupils would only accept me as their tutor after they accepted me as their friend. And that would only be possible in Rome, the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti smiled and agreed. I can think clearly here, in Rome, on the Via Corso, unlike in Austria, that base land of the petite bourgeois. Petite bourgeois Austria, that land of the self-satisfied yeoman, satisfied in all their base passtimes. Lower Austria is the place where all that is high minded goes to stultify and die. No, I will never leave Rome again, I told Pancetti, I will never go from where I can think clearly as an artist and a human and return to self-satisfied Austia, petite bourgeois Lower Austria. Pancetti only smiled and continued to walk on his perfectly polished loafers, bought only from the most expensive shops in the Via Corso. He is so excellently cultured, the very finest human in the world – a human like him could only exist in Rome, never could have arisen in base Lower Austria, to which I shall never go back. I walked down the Via Corso…

Repeat for three hundred pages, and then you get a new paragraph

Books Fiction Reviews

Review: Extinction

Post author By jon
Post date January 20, 2021

By Thomas Bernhard (1986)

So, finally forced myself to finish Extinction at the weekend. I did not get on with this at all – the whole book felt like an exercise in trying the reader’s patience. It turns out that two continuous paragraphs of hundreds of pages each, consisting entirely of the same criticisms of bourgeois Austria repeated again and again, in really very basic and graceless style – can become tiresome pretty quickly.

I don’t think I’ve read anything as simultaneously affected and leaden.

Books Humour Reviews

The academy of the overrated

Post author By jon
Post date January 20, 2021

I like to keep things positive when chatting about books, films, music etc if only because there’s just so much negativity available on the internet, and I often get the sense people find it much easier to rip on stuff than talk about something they really love.

On the other hand – it’s great fun. And maybe can tell us more about our tastes. So the Bernhard book got me thinking – what are people’s least favourite books/authors? Who do you think is overrated? Why?

Why? Why are you writing like that?! Stop referring to your hair as your “rug”!

Books Nonfiction Philosophy Reviews

Review: Feline Philosophy

Post author By jon
Post date January 11, 2021

By John Gray (2020)

So, this continues my frustrating relationship with John Gray, where I can appreciate he’s a good writer (crisp, clear, readable etc) but his basic positions seem … unfounded to me. And he doesn’t seem particularly interested in arguing for them, but just leans on the fact they’re unpopular to make them “unpalatable truths”, or something.

Books Fiction Reviews

Review: Middlesex

Post author By jon
Post date December 7, 2020

By Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

Middlesex is another case of high expectations – I didn’t read The Virgin Suicides until recently, but it was definitely close to the top of my fiction list last year. That book is incredibly economical, unforgettably eerie and has a genuinely innovative use of a collective unreliable narrator in the neighborhood boys.

Unfortunately I’m not sure Middlesex quite lives up to this. A sprawling – and comparatively conventional – family chronicle, the story follows three generations of a Greek family fleeing war-torn Anatolia in the 20s and settling in Detroit. The novelty here is the connecting thread is the passing down of a recessive gene – having its fateful expression in inbreeding and intersexuality.

Humanistic and amiable throughout … but doesn’t quite gel

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