Reviews and other ponderings
Aristotle famously said ‘Man is by nature a political animal.’ This can also be translated as ‘Man is an animal, the nature of which is to live in a city’. The point is that human beings are animals, as much as we like to forget it. At least, that is what I believe. I don’t [...]
Get it hereThis is another fable-like work from Tolstoy, and one I found more satisfying in the detail than in the overall story. The tale, such as it is, is a simple one: A money grasping businessman goes out to close a deal, taking his servant and horse with him, when the weather suggested that [...]
I cannot remember having to reassess a book as often, and as radically as Walden. I started thinking that it was a long harangue against the world. Then I thought it was a book about the beauty of nature, which is what I had expected. And then it revealed itself, in the very last few [...]
May I recommend that everyone interested in bookish matters, becomes a podcast-subscriber to ‘In Our Time’, a BBC Radio 4 programme. The website is here.The appeal of it lies in the fact that you have three real experts on a given subject, who have a limited time to expound on it. So there is no [...]
One of the things about hard copy books, is that they convey a lot of information before you even take them off the shelf. They may be thick, thin, tall, hard cover, paperback, in a fancy slipcase, and so on. All of these things help you make a judgement about how much they are worth, [...]
I have about one and a half thousand books by my last count (a couple of years ago), and a whole room is given over to them. However, I have found it quite disturbing to listen to an audiobook, and have no ‘hard copy’ of the book, to pop on the shelf like a trophy. [...]
I am part of the way through Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. I tried to read it a couple of years ago, but ended up throwing it across the room, as I realised I did not have the faintest idea what he was on about. His prose style is most elliptical and confused, and he [...]
Get it hereOnce, I tried to read Aristotle, and found it absolutely impossible. The language was so dry that it had withered away to bones and dust. An occasional sentence would stand out, but the overall work was impossible to digest, or so I found.Then, I read a little more ABOUT the works. It seems [...]
Get it here! I know Gustave Flaubert from Madame Bovary, which I enjoyed very much. However, I had always harboured some resentment towards him, as he seems to imply in this book that reading too many novels has caused his protagonist to get above herself, and, in fact, that this was at the root of [...]
The problem for this book is that it has had so many imitators that its innovations have become cliches. For me, the same fate has befallen ‘Citizen Kane’, and, unfortunately, while intellectually I realise I am encountering a genuine original, my guts keep spotting the works which built on it. So, instead of thrilling to [...]