Samuel Johnson, opsimath

Unlike a lot of self-made people, Samuel Johnson was lazy. He got up late and often stayed in bed until the afternoon. He never held down a real job. He thought the two best pleasures were 'fucking and drinking', which left him confused as to why more people weren’t drunk more often because they certainly …

84 Charing Cross Road, film review up on the new blog

This is a wonderful film (and book) about the American autodidact Helene Hanff ordering books from London in the 1950s and 1960s. Ann Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins are superb and there's a cameo for Judi Dench. Get the snacks. My review is up on the new substack where I'm blogging now. It's been pretty popular …

Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid

I just published this post over on the new substack. Sign up to get future reviews and essays. Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid Then, turning to me, my father asked what he could make for me.It came into my mind without thinking. "A trunk," I said."But you have a trunk already. You have your mother's trunk," …

The blog is moving to substack

Yes, it will still be free. I'm sick of the layouts here and I don't like the chemo name. Also, Substack just looks nicer. The name is changing too... taking inspiration from Samuel Johnson, 'I rejoice to concur with the common reader.' Sign up here: https://commonreader.substack.com/ You can add that to RSS feeds, read it …

A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias

What a sucker punch of a novel. Joyce Carol Oats said the prose had subtle irony. Maybe I missed that. Certainly there's a wry self observation. But it's a double bildungsroman, first of the young man failing in love, then of the middle aged man repairing and recreating a deep powerful marriage, so a wry …

The exasperated spirit. How to read books and why.

Harold Bloom said that irony is the key to reading well, 'even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found.' And it is remarkable how often, even when watching plays or television, people object to the use of irony. There's a schoolteacher's insistence on explaining, …

The escape from irony. Scenes from a Marriage and Marriage Story.

Johan and Marianne are trapped by the ironies of their life together. Marianne is a divorce lawyer who cannot acknowledge she is unhappy in her marriage. She is frustrated by the conventional expectations of Sunday lunch with her parents but not by the conventions imposed on her by Johan. She thinks their friends who are …

Symposium, Muriel Spark

She was twenty- three and he was twenty- nine; they had met in London in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, Oxford Street, less than four months ago. She had spoken first: ‘Be careful, those grapefruits look a little bruised.’ Who else could get that blend of the bizzare, the romantic and the puzzling. …

Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark

This novel opens in a graveyard, involves the machinations of a group of pompous middle class twits who attend meetings of the suspicious and cultish Autobiographical Association, has a plot twist that hinges on a young novelist's friendship with an elderly woman who wets herself, swears a lot and helps the novelist steal manuscripts, acts …

Convenience Store Woman. Is Sayaka Murata a reactionary arguing against conservatives? (Plot spoilers, Straussian reading.)

Convenience Store Woman. (US link). What is the lesson of the eccentric book? Perhaps mostly that we should not think it is so eccentric? The obvious analogy between working in a store as a convenience to customers and living in a normal way that is convenient for everyone else extends to the idea of a …