Episodi

  • Week 60 The Usefulness of the Useless

    Week 60 The Usefulness of the Useless
    Mar 24 2024
    This book was inspiring enough to make me try my hand at my first YouTube book review. And rereading it made me angrier than ever about the way our world is going: the materialism, the populism, the trivialisation and banality, the excessive worship of money and hectoring charlatans. I could go on, but I urge you instead to read Ordine's book which is an impassioned plea to preserve what is best and wisest about us puny humans.

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    17 min
  • Week 59: Aristotle's Way

    Week 59: Aristotle's Way
    Mar 17 2024
    The penultimate book of this series dates from 2018, but I am still urging it on friends and students for the bridge it provides to timeless ideas. Edith Hall is an eminent academic specialising primarily in Greek theatre, but here explored her devotion to Aristotle despite his less than complimentary approach to women. His ideas about self-knowledge, values and virtues, and of course, about the theatre still resonate, and Edith Hall is a helpful and lucid guide to his thinking.

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    16 min
  • Week 58: Shahnameh The Book of Kings

    Week 58: Shahnameh The Book of Kings
    Mar 10 2024
    This week, a big fat book full of wonderful stories, dragons, magical birds and super-strong heroes with equally powerful horses. One of the books that makes me think that in school, we really ought to be teaching myth and legend from across the world - there would be enough to keep us busy for all 15 years of formal school.

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    19 min
  • Week 57: The Faraway Nearby

    Week 57: The Faraway Nearby
    Mar 3 2024
    For this week, I almost chose another book, but then I could not - Solnit's exploration of ice, of Arctic Dreams, the subject of one my own earlier podcasts, of Frankenstein and her account of her stay in the Library of Water on an Icelandic peninsula are so compelling, that I found myself reading and rereading.

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    17 min
  • Week 56 Collected Prose, Elizabeth Bishop

    Week 56 Collected Prose, Elizabeth Bishop
    Feb 25 2024
    Elizabeth Bishop's artistic reputation and legacy seem, rightly, to grow and grow. She won a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1950s, and was a challenging teacher of writing and literature at Harvard and MIT. She died of a brain aneurysm at 68 in 1979, no doubt a product of the booze and fags she packed away during the course of her life. She was also intrepid, insatiably curious about the world around her, and one of the most perceptive observers of all that it is to be a human. The more I read about her and by her, the more I want to read, but there is a limited palette - a relatively slim collected poetry, a thicker, richer collected prose, all driven by an eye at once objective and tender in its delineation of who and what we humans are.

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    18 min
  • Week 55 Othello

    Week 55 Othello
    Feb 18 2024
    Somehow, although the play is called Othello, it often ends up being all about Iago, arguably the most malevolent of all Shakespeare's villains. For a look at the best filmed versions of this terrific play head to ThatReadingWritingThing, where there are links galore.

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    18 min
  • Week 54 The Great Gatsby

    Week 54 The Great Gatsby
    Feb 11 2024
    This week, a book that is 99 years old and grows in stature and authority with every passing year, as its satirical depiction of the super-rich and their destructive impulses gathers authority.

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    16 min
  • Week 53: Heart of Darkness

    Week 53: Heart of Darkness
    Feb 4 2024
    Conrad's 1898 novella, based on his own experiences as a riverboat captain on his only voyage to the Congo, is today a contested book. Two particular attacks, by Chinua Achebe and Edward Said, level accusations of racism and imperialism at Conrad himself, invoking his regular use of the N-word and his depiction of the Africans that Marlow encounters throughout. Regarding the n-word, that is purely contextual. Conrad was writing at a time when it was common parlance, and it is important for us to understand that there was such a time, whatever our modern sensibilities suggest. Again, with the way that Africans are depicted throughout the novella, it reflects Conrad's own experiences, and the deliberate use he makes of stereotypes throughout the story. The fundamental is that Conrad sees through the hypocrisy and cant of European imperialism and colonialism, and skewers the brutish, undeserved superiority of the white men ripping resources from the country they believed should be their plaything.

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    21 min