Hacks

David Gordon: famous in Japan! (Both novels are very good BTW.)

Closing tabs

Miscellaneous light reading: Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (very good); and, inevitably, 'Robert Galbraith,' The Cuckoo Calling. It is quite decent, but feels very artificial: just as the Potter books were curiously redolent of Enid Blyton, so this one recalls a lost Agatha Christie world of 'mansion flats' and high-end women's accessories! (I think, too, of the Margery Allingham novel set in similar fashion-world environs only of 1930s; and there is a touch of course of Brat Farrar also.) I will read further installments with enthusiasm, and I commiserate wholeheartedly with Rowling's desire to write and publish a book with no pressure or expectations.

Unrelated, though perhaps touching on some of the same underlying questions about fame and expectations and pressure: Andrew Hultkrans gives me a strong desire to see the Big Star documentary.

Loving literature

At Slate, various writers on the "great books" they most hate. The one here that most resonates with me (could have written these sentences myself, and in fact may quote them in the style book) is Daniel Mendelsohn on Joyce:

Honestly I've never been persuaded by Ulysses. To my mind, Joyce's best and most genuine work is the wonderful Dubliners; everything afterwards smacks of striving to write a "great" work, rather than simply striving to write—it's all too voulu. Although there are, of course, beautiful and breathtakingly authentic things in the novel (who could not love that tang of urine in the breakfast kidneys?), what spoils Ulysses for me, each time, is the oppressive allusiveness, the wearyingly overdetermined referentiality, the heavy constructedness of it all. Reading the book, for me, is never a rich and wonderful journey, filled with marvels and (no matter how many times you may read a book) surprises—the experience I want from a large and important novel; it's more like being on one of those Easter egg hunts you went on as a child—you constantly feel yourself being managed, being carefully steered in the direction of effortfully planted treats. Which, of course, makes them not feel very much like treats at all.

NB this obviously all intensely subjective: other writers name some personal favorites of mine, including Hardy's novels and the Iliad (and I love the behavioral psychology in Gravity's Rainbow - I'm only about 150 pages in, so we will see whether I still feel the same way when I finish, but it is a surprisingly enjoyable reread). The great book I most love to hate, I think, is The Great Gatsby, which seems to me infinitely inferior to Fitzgerald's stories...

Lost reputations

An interesting profile of Max Mosley by Lucy Kellaway for the Financial Times (site registration required).

Rabbits redux

At the FT, Angus Watson walks Watership Down (site registration required).

I must confess that I absolutely adored Watership Down as a child - I read it again and again, and found the scenes of rabbit warfare unutterably moving! I was just thinking a few days ago of Richard Adams - I was reading the first installment of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series and was very much reminded of Adams' novel Maia, a favorite of mine when I was a teenager.

In the late 70s and early 80s, Adams seemed absolutely central to the (my?) literary landscape - The Girl in a Swing made a huge impression on me as a Young Person, and I was again thinking recently that I should obtain a copy and read it again. But one does not seem to hear of him so much these days - his reputation might be due for a revival...

The wiki reputation system

Accuracy by the winnowing-down effects of consensus?