Category: book
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Of Nativity
I, too, am a native. Saying this aloud, a mere whisper lost to the the deep night, is terrifying. The quick phrase feels like the slow stripping of all agency, a rape of my right to speak of the world and its concerns, forced to leave them to ‘better men’. To be native is to…
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The Uncoupling of Jesus Christ.
Hope is a long leash drawn in slowly. Wendy Cope, After Prague I came to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ well disposed to Philip Pullman, and I left with my illusions intact. Pullman tackles the central conundrum of the Christianity: how did the oh-so-radical Jesus leave the oh-so-conservative church as his sole legacy? Pullman’s…
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The Step Between.
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The life and times of the person Cromwell. Umberto Eco tells us there is a fate that links the historical novel to medieval topics. He explains that this is because many of our contemporary conflicts can be traced to the tumultuous, and ongoing, break…
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Library Daze.
Every so often, I ricochet between books. When I am not mired in this dismal chaos, I romanticise it to anyone who will listen as the best part of this crazy writing life and what not. Utter rot. My library wanders between zoo and carnival. There are always some islands. Last night, one was John Gray.…
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Anarchist, Ahoy!
Three books about the price of revolution. All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life: science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and historical outlook, among them.…