Some more books
November 5, 2007 – 12:52 amSome books i have been reading lately:
Agatha Christie: An english mystery - Laura Thompson (2007)
A biography of my favourite author so I read this with great interest: it’s a good complement to agatha’s own writings about her life ( she published two sets of autobiographical writings) - and goes into a lot that Agatha doesn’t reveal about herself. the disappearance in 1926, her first marriage etc.) I particularly enjoyed reading about her early life, i always do about people’s lives and the minutiae of everyday life in a bygone era.
Desertion - Abdulrazak Gurnah ( 2006)
Published in 2006, by a man who is an english lit professor at the univ. of kent and originally from the beautiful sounding island of zanzibar - i found this really fascinating. ( if only for the details and insight into life in zanzibar, that exotic place, in the 50’s, and Mombasa, at the turn of the century) the two sets of tales are intertwined.
You can’t keep a good woman down - Alice Walker (1982)
Fourteen short stories, provocative, sharp and poignant. I read that this never got the kind of acclaim that The Color Purple received..ah well, there’s no accounting for taste, is there?
Dancers in Mourning - Margery Allingham (1937)
perhaps because i spent my childhood onwards devouring Christies, Margery Allingham was a crime writer i didn’t bother to delve into very much. i found an old penguin edition in the library, and having heard lots about Albert Campion over the years, picked it up. I found the narrative interesting, and sparkingly amusing, but i didn’t find it on par with a Christie, assuming I were comparing, of course.
Miss LonelyHearts and A Cool Million - Nathanael West (1933)
this man clearly had a wicked sense of humour, and a ripping sense of satire: black comedy about the Depression years. A random find at the library, the author sounds like an intriguing character, I must read more about him. America is such a crazy place, i’m interested in finding writers who touch upon that insanity.
27 Responses to “Some more books”
Hey! Welcome back to the blogosphere. It’s been a while. Reminds me that I should do more reading.
By Leighton Cooke on Nov 7, 2007
hi leighton good to see you! it has been a very long while indeed. i thought, fuck this, its about time i just started writing whatever crap is in my head.
are you back from amsterdam?
ive not read very much this year, compared to last year, dunno where the time has flown, it seems to be whizzing back
By sonia on Nov 9, 2007
I’m in Cardiff at the moment. Know what you mean about time. We are very busy with the Spanish permaculture project at the moment.
By Leighton Cooke on Nov 9, 2007
before you start disgracing the culture of other people, why dont you criticize your own shitty life, freaking lunatic whore.
By ghost on Nov 20, 2007
Just graduated from charm school, have we Ghost?
By Rumbold on Nov 20, 2007
^^ indeed rumbold and this gives me some bragging rights.
By ghost on Nov 20, 2007
Hey sonia.
email me. we have a lot to talk about!
By Salahudin on Nov 20, 2007
Why the need to be rude? Can’t you engage with Sonia’s points rationally?
By Rumbold on Nov 20, 2007
Rumbold:
how stupid would it be for a nobel prize winner in medicine to explain the complex process of signal transduction and cross-talk of signalling pathways in a cell to a 5 year old boob suckling child. That is why I wont get into a debate here because it would be stupid for me to do that. Rather ill become a boob suckling child and reply in the same manner.
By ghost on Nov 21, 2007
hello all! good to see you all here, hi rumbold and salahudin - ( cool, will drop you a line sometime during the day/end of!)
first of all everyone, comment moderation seems to happen quite randomly, i don’t know why some people take it so personally - don’t - its Akismet - a ‘program’ that makes the decision - not me.
rumbold, ghost is quite defensive it seems to me, clearly seems to be an us/them thing. ‘before you go and insult other people’s culture… so he/she clearly thinks i have no position/or right to have the views I do hold. (i’m assuming its the whole religion bugbear with ghost, seeing as he/she ‘met’ at Apostate’s blog, if met is how you can describe such encounters. ) Ah well, people are always going on about “authenticity”. Funnily though, it is my lunatic background and life i’ve been using as a source, to write on religion, and very much my strong views/dislikes/thoughts on religion, whic are of course very personal. Still, i don’t see why people think you can’t criticise ‘other’ people’s culture - what’s the definition of ‘other people’ anyway? i’m not into exclusive understandings of groups/communities - i think that’s where problems like ‘racism’ come from -t he idea that races are distinct, separate, do not have anything in common, have more ‘differences’ and often, that they should stay that way. Ditto for any other group defining itself on some factor other than race, and you have the world of social exclusion, identity competitions, and strife. what a struggle! frankly i comment here on the past, the present and the future. Two of those states by definition - i have not experienced. To suggest that writers and thinkers confine themselves only to their own experience - is so limited, to be laughable.
By sonia on Nov 21, 2007
Ghost:
In other words, you cannot think of any rational arguments to counter Sonia’s points. Do try harder.
Sonia:
“Ah well, people are always going on about “authenticity”. Funnily though, it is my lunatic background and life i’ve been using as a source, to write on religion, and very much my strong views/dislikes/thoughts on religion, whic are of course very personal. ”
Exactly. You have the right to criticise anything that you want to. Your personal experience informs your views, but even if you had not had such experiences, you would still be perfectly entitled to criticise.
I have the depressing feeling that many people will always base their judgements on an “us and them” mentality. It seems they cannot think for themsleves without the umblical protection of their chosen group.
By Rumbold on Nov 21, 2007
indeed. we should criticize blacks too. blacks are responsible for ‘inherently’ dumb as J.Watson, the Nobel Prize winner, said. He had the right to criticize blacks. Why was he suspended from the Cold Harbor Spring Laboratory? Justify that then I will consider ’sonia’s’ right to criticize to such an extent that criticism becomes hate speech.
By ghost on Nov 22, 2007
blacks are inherently dumb*
By ghost on Nov 22, 2007
following in those footsteps, terrorist bombers have every right to kill anyone they want. Its their right as terrorists as it is sonia’s right to criticize people based on their cultures. In that sense, terrorism is a culture too. They have their own values, their own concepts and their own ideologies as sonia has her own values, her own concepts and her own ideologies. I dont accept just bigotry that sonia gets to exercise her right while terrorists dont.
By ghost on Nov 22, 2007
such*
By ghost on Nov 22, 2007
poor ghost, got your knickers in a twist have you, look on the bright side, you’re getting all these places to indulge your hate speech, and you’re not getting banned or deleted! you’re criticising away, aren’t you. good job some of us are big girls, not wussy little pussies going ‘wah..’
By sonia on Nov 22, 2007
its also very interesting that Ghost thinks words have the same impact as bombs.
well i suppose some do say Islam wasn’t spread by the sword, shit someone should have told them! they could’ve just blogged about the Meccans and the Disbelievers, God would’ve accepted that. They didnt’ really have to go and actually kill them all!
heh.
By sonia on Nov 22, 2007
Sonia:
I cannot actually work out what Ghost is trying to say. Perhaps his intellect is far greater than ours. First he said that you should criticise your own culture (which you do), then he said that you shouldn’t deny terrorist supporters their freedom of speech (which you don’t).
Ghost:
Are you a bit confused? Do you need a lie-down?
By Rumbold on Nov 22, 2007
good point rumbold, i’m not quite sure what he’s trying to say, but he seems to be trying to generally communicate a strong air of disapproval! not quite sure why he thinks i would care, but there you go. social conditioning is interesting - perhaps Ghost thinks I will wither away or something. stop raising these uncomfortable issues/casting shame on my culture and religion and be a good little conformist girl. (fat chance)
By sonia on Nov 23, 2007
you know, as representative of a rather large group of apostates of islam, i have to say that muslims abuse and hate apostate women of islam more than anyone else… they go after them with a passion…
some form of patriarchal madness. it reflects the lack of emotional maturity in the muslim world.
By Salahudin on Nov 23, 2007
Sonia:
“I’m not quite sure what he’s trying to say, but he seems to be trying to generally communicate a strong air of disapproval! not quite sure why he thinks i would care, but there you go. social conditioning is interesting - perhaps Ghost thinks I will wither away or something. stop raising these uncomfortable issues/casting shame on my culture and religion and be a good little conformist girl. (fat chance).”
The question I want to know is whether he is accusing you of being a traitor to Islam, or an Islamic terrorist. Can anyone translate Ghost for us?
By Rumbold on Nov 23, 2007
I didn’t know till this evening that ghosts are inherently dumb. Perhaps it’s because they hide behind a made up name that they are so liberal with their insults.
By Leighton Cooke on Nov 23, 2007
oi! where’s that email?
By Salahudin on Nov 28, 2007
Thats a good list of books.
But the problem is that these days books are becoming more and more like magazines, in the sense that they have almost similar shelf life.
I mean, once upon a time, books that got written were expected to last for years, if not centuries, but these days, the book becomes a bestseller for this week and in the next week it disappears completely.
By Indy on Dec 3, 2007
One book I am reading currently is Niall Ferguson’s Empire.
It is quite interesting, though at times Ferguson does appear slightly condescending or disparaging towards people of Africa and Asia.
But I won’t term that as racism, he does speak with lots of facts, which can only be countered by more facts.
By Indy on Dec 5, 2007
i’ve read that book, very interesting it is too. very informative, very good description of empire, i like the bit where he says “empire was built on a rush of sugar, caffeine and tobacco”. and i find niall’s philosophy quite conventional and simplistic - the means justifies the end sort of thing, but what can you expect, and the old ‘best of all possible world’ sort of thinking. But its a good insight into empire machination. and after all he is simply reflecting the reality of what Empire was about - and which has always been ( everywhere i mean - all empires in history) about having a world-domination outlook. i wouldn’t reduce it to racism, which obviously may or may not be present, but the bigger picture, more significant issue is that it’s certainly group-ist, tribalist. ‘our tribe is the best and we are shining ” sort of thinking, whatever that group or tribe chooses to identify around, and of course, the British empire wasn’t the only one that went around thinking such things. for example, we sub-continentalists are highly experienced at multi-axis and multi-layered group discrimination, islam has been very much imbued with arab supremacy type thinking, and so on and so forth.
By sonia on Dec 13, 2007
Hey what happened to your posting! We miss you!
By Daniels Counter on Jan 8, 2008