Posts by Fergus Barrowman
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Two books about the recent financial nonsense. The Big Short by Michael Lewis, great reportage. The Privileges by Jonathan Dee, a great novel about a super rich American family: The Sopranos by Edith Wharton.
Mourning the great Hank Jones by listening to him on Artie Shaw's Last Recordings of 1954: a cultural highlight any year you listen to it.
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None offered, he said tragically.
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This is completely irrelevant, but has anyone else noticed that the PA ratio of responses to views is usually about 1:30? What does it mean when it gets wider? Wider public interest, or a few tragics compulsively checking back?
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As well as all the new books (of which 2666 is the greatest), I found some good oldies which I recommend. I loved Cassandra at the wedding (1962), Dorothy Baker’s brilliant fourth and final novel about superglued twin sisters, which sent me back to her first, Young Man with a Horn (1938), which I’d neglected because of its reputation for getting Bix Beiderbecke wrong. But when Baker wrote in her note ‘The inspiration for the writing of this book has been the music, but not the life, of . . . Bix Beiderbecke’ she meant it; it wasn’t a legal nicety. And it’s a fine and tender novel. Nicola Beauman’s The Other Elizabeth Taylor is technically not a good biography. It suffers from over-identification with the subject, impertinent speculation and some bizarre literary judgements; but was nevertheless (or therefore?) fascinating reading, and reminded me to read A Game of Hide and Seek, The Wedding Party and A Wreath of Roses. All wonderful novels, but now sadly I’ve read them all.
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FMF explains the relationship of his book and its title to the Great War here: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/fmf/gsdl.htm
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I don't remember The Good Soldier as having anything to do with war; I think I understood the title to be metaphorical. But I should read it again, it's been years. I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now, as the song goes.
But really I don't think there are any rules at all about this sort of thing, except for what works.
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Ford Madox Ford said no one should even attempt to write a novel until they were forty. And then wrote one of the great books of the 20th century to prove his point.
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That's a terrific essay, Jolisa. Insight, wisdom, good jokes, a stirring conclusion.
On a passing note, I liked your recognition that Google Books is every honest writer's friend, and a plagiarist's nightmare.
Fergus
PS: I think "wracked our brains" should be "racked our brains".