Late-night reading

Sleep schedule now thoroughly distorted by post-semester schedule fluctuations. This book is based on an utterly ludicrous premise but I read it through to the end anyway. Joanna Smith Rakoff's A Fortunate Age is addictively readable and I blame it for one (not all) of my recent late nights. (I am surprised the Amazon reviews are not more positive - it is a novel of considerable charm, written by an evidently talented novelist whose subject in this book is perhaps too trivial to deserve the attention lavished on it - but it is an unusual gift, to write a book that so strongly compels the reader to the end, and I will eagerly look out for her next one.) Saskia Noort's Back to the Coast strikes me as excellent. High-caliber Dutch noir; caused me to reflect that novelists in some sense write books that are like themselves, ditto readers and their preferences, and that my subjective experience suggests that my own life, though it might not look so on the face of things, is far more Noortian than Smith Rakoffian...

Self plucking

From the Telegraph's gallery of peculiar signs....

Extreme movie makeovers

At the Telegraph, pictures of an amazing (insane!) Star Trek bachelor pad...

On loneliness

Some pig.

Bonus link: what are zoos for? (FT site registration required.)

College admissions

The WSJ invites college presidents to write application essays in response to an essay question from each president's own school's application. (The article's politely phrased conclusion: it is a difficult genre in which to stand out from the pack!)

(Link courtesy of I.H.D.)

Ace cartography

At the TLS, Peter Hennessy reviews Brian Harrison's new history of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. An interesting topic, and some very good snippets:

From a journal to which I was hitherto a stranger, Heating and Ventilating Engineer, [Harrison] has gleaned that in the UK, the “average living room was over 5° Fahrenheit warmer in 1970 than in 1950[.]”

A. J. P. Taylor’s celebrated English History 1914–1945 has stuck to the Velcro of my memory, for example, partly because of his use of the brilliant cameo biographical footnote of which the second one in his first chapter was particularly unforgettable: “George V (1865–1936), second son of Edward VII: married Princess Mary of Teck, 1893; King, 1910–36; changed name of royal family from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor, 1917; his trousers were creased at the sides not front and back”.

Science-fictional penguins

At the Guardian, Alison Flood blogs on the design of Penguin's science fiction line. The Penguin science fiction site is here. (Triffids!)

Double exposure

An evocative story in the Science Times about a deserted site on Long Island associated with Nikola Tesla - reminds me of the photos my father took on the old Nobel factory site at Ardeer in Scotland.

NB the illustration below is what it feels like inside my head at this time of the school year!

"Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint"

From Jane Austen, Love and Freindship:

Janetta was then only fifteen; naturally well disposed, endowed with a susceptible Heart, and a simpathetic Disposition, she might, had these amiable Qualities been properly encouraged, have been an ornament to human Nature; but unfortunately her Father possessed not a soul sufficiently exalted to admire so promising a Disposition, and had endeavoured by every means in his power to prevent its encreasing with her Years. He had actually so far extinguished the natural noble Sensibility of her Heart, as to prevail on her to accept an offer from a young Man of his Recommendation. They were to be married in a few Months, and Graham, was in the House when we arrived. We soon saw through his Character--. He was just such a Man as one might have expected to be the choice of Macdonald. They said he was Sensible, well-informed, and Agreeable; we did not pretend to Judge of such trifles, but as we were convinced he had no soul, that he had never read the Sorrows of Werter, and that his Hair bore not the slightest resemblance to Auburn, we were certain that Janetta could feel no affection for him, or at least that she ought to feel none. The very circumstance of his being her father’s choice too, was so much in his disfavour, that had he been deserving her, in every other respect yet that of itself ought to have been a sufficient reason in the Eyes of Janetta for rejecting him.

"Who killed John Keats?"

My favorite stanza of Byron's Don Juan:

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, - without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: -
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

The miscellany

Sometimes I blog as I read, sometimes not so much...

Martin Millar is a genius (why do all his main characters have to have an X in their names?) and Lux the Poet (a new re-release from Soft Skull) is utterly delightful. Millar is one of only a handful of writers I can think of who combines the style gene with the light reading gene - it is an unusual pleasure to relish sentences so much at the same time as compulsively following developments in the lives of characters...

I happily whiled away an hour or two with Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery, only it set me off on wondering about the history of occult detectives in literature (results of inquiry yet to be determined); I also recently read the first book in Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series, and though I like this sort of book very much, it occurs to me (belatedly!) that perhaps it is not the freshest idea going round...

Richard Stark's The Hunter (thanks, Levi!) was too short to last the whole plane trip, but I am willing to forgive it almost anything for introducing me to the past-tense verb vagged (arrested for vagrancy - transitive and intransitive, as far as I can tell)...

Terry Pratchett's Nation is a lovely book - I think I like his young-adult fiction even more than the best of the Discworld novels. It is made out of the same cloth as the seafaring adventures of Joan Aiken's Dido Twite and Eva Ibbotson's Edwardian little girls, with stiff infusions of Victorian adventuring fare, but very distinctively Pratchettian also - highly recommended.

Last but not least, I raced through my friend Farai Chideya's Kiss the Sky in two sittings. It is addictively readable, and there is a description of the protagonist, as a child home alone after school, breaking her mother's rules and eating things secretly out of the fridge that is so vivid and beautifully written that it is going to stay with me for a long time...

Losing the plot

At the Observer, Adam Mars-Jones on A.S. Byatt's new novel - a model for a thoughtful but largely negative review.

The study of whiskers

Poets ranked by beard weight.

The trouble with gin

This must have been a very strange interview.

Also, if you missed it last week, Christopher Buckley's Times Magazine piece about his parents is well worth your attention.

Psittacine prodigies

Vocal mimicry provokes dance-like behavior in parrots. (Courtesy of Brent.)