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2008
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July
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- What Remains Unsaid
- Clear Cut Clean Through
- Hatched Intellect
- Screen of Truth
- Russian Icon 18th Century
- Colleen-I'll Read You A Story
- The Animal of Creation & the Dialogue of Invention
- Shame
- God is Dead. Why?
- John Carey New Work
- Ingres and Feminism
- Somnambulance
- Ingres, Turner & the Desire for Order
- Interview
- Establishing Guilt
- Colours of Paradise
- Hypothetical Book Review
- The Authorities
- Identity
- The Castles
- Unreliable Narrator
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July
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2 comments:
If a book is deeply relevant to today's world and the paltry lives we live now then it's certainly not worth reading. As for a book having life-changing qualities, I know of none myself. At least none that by reading the actual words they contain would have the least effect on how one lives one's life from day-to-day. Of course, such books might exist, in theory; I just haven't come across them in a real bookshop or even in my hypothetical local library. A book could change one's life, I suppose, now that I think about it, if say, it were thrown from a passing train, striking one on the temple with great force and causing a serious brain injury. But I'm sure such books are extremely rare.
Though it does seem that deeply relevant books that change people's lives are, and have been, all the rage for some time.
I've just bought Joseph Roth's & was greeted by Roger Scruton's recommendation in The Times:
‘Roth’s masterpiece is of such enormous relevance to our times’.
I still bought it though. Satire in small doses has its charms, but when the targets are ducks of such comical lameness, you have to wonder if it isn't all a bit too easy. What can you do but shoot the poor bastards, though.
I didn't intend having a go at philosophising geography teacher Scruton, but this was too apposite to exclude.
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