Q&A on Book Reviews

~ Clarissa

I should definitely do that, at least for the best ones. In the meantime, you can enter “book notes” in the search field, and they will all pop out. There’s many of them, is the problem. Would be easy for movie notes since I see a movie a year or so.

Talking about books, every September publishers drop a stack of phenomenal new books, and I spend much of my reading time trying to figure out which one to read and not reading anything. I’m a typical Buridan’s donkey.

Is anybody reading anything great at the moment?

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Published by Clarissa

8 thoughts on “Q&A on Book Reviews”

  1. Finally getting around to reading Road to Wigan Pier.

    Most of the way through Ladder of Divine Ascent, which is one of those you absolutely can’t read quickly, but well worth picking up to read a page or two before sleep every day.

    Can recommend both.

    Fiction though… almost wouldn’t read it anymore at all, but for your reviews. Don’t know if it’s that publishing has died, there are vanishingly few good reviewers out there, or I’ve simply lost my taste for it in middle age (my father claims this happened to him). I kind of miss it, but it’s not worth the endless, frustrating, read the first chapter of 40 books to find one that’s not garbage… I’m not that patient and nobody is paying me for it.

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    1. It’s true. One has to go through mountains of stuff to get at something decent in US fiction. It’s even worse with British. And even worse with Canadian.

      What’s really shocking is that I haven’t seen a good novel come out in Spain for a while either. There are useful novels that help me prove that neoliberalism is bad. But really good stuff, which even a few years ago was ubiquitous, is becoming rare. I’m not sure to what this can be attributed. There was q literary boom in Spain, then suddenly it all fizzled out.

      Same with Latin America.

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    2. Same here. Reading fiction has become such a slog, whereas when I was younger I would read 5-7 novels a week, now it’s not worth the bother. I’m turning 60 and of all the newly published books that I read, 95% are non-fiction.

      Or else I reread the classics. Speaking of which, do you know The Bridge of San Luis Rey? Fantastic novel by the great Thornton Wilder.

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  2. OT: apologies for the spate of anonymous comments. I’m in the process of porting all my junk to a new computer, and learning to use linux, so… logins not working quite as expected, working the tangles out of everything.

    It’s honestly easier than I expected, and for a new computer install, I can wholeheartedly recommend it: first time I’ve ever set up a new machine and not spent days swearing at it while removing all the bloatware.

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  4. I’ve been very gradually reading Latin: Story of a World Language. Has a good deal to say, both directly and indirectly, about linguistic change that comes with the formation and dissolution of the nation-state

    Of course, the hegemonic claims of national languages ended less because of a change in consciousness and more because the idea of the nation-state became increasingly untenable. The modern world not only is linguistically more complex but also has become economically and politically intertwined as never before. Interestingly, no sooner had the Cold War come to an end than a debate about empires developed. In the pro cess, the historical model of the Imperium Romanum has gained unexpected salience in the po liti cal sciences. This model of empire en-tails linguistic organization, and not only for internal communication. Language pervades the cultural and po liti cal fabric of a society. The Romans themselves provide an example of how an empire may be multilingual. For long periods of time, Latin did not serve the function that national languages have in modern nation-states, as I show later. Rather, Greek and other cultural languages were allowed to flourish.

    Today we see a tendency toward regionalization in almost all of the old nation-states, expressing a need to stake out a place for old regional languages in opposition to the dominant national language, which unites the citizens of a particular country. This is evidence that the national languages are not the “natural” languages of a particular nation but are cultural constructs imposed by intensive schooling and mandated commitments and obligations that, however, have never been completely able to displace loyalty to regional tongues. Examples include the reestablishment of Catalan and Galician, along with Castilian, as offi cial languages in Spain; the linguistic reorganization in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, such as Lithuania and Georgia; the linguistic provisions regarding minorities in the Italian regions of Friuli and Sardinia; and last but not least the approval of regional variants in the classroom, even in a country as centralized as France. These trends are, in the final analysis, a recognition that premodern European realities were merely lying dormant as nation-states asserted themselves. They are now reawakening.

    The exigencies of modern economics also require that languages be organized differently. Until the end of the twentieth century, trade and production were localized in a clear linguistic center even when a company’s reach was international— that is, a French company remained a French company no matter where it conducted its business. Today this center has been replaced by a multiplicity of complex regional and national arrangements that are determined solely by the technological possibilities. In this world, national boundaries constitute little more than obstacles. On the one hand, business requires one or several world languages to ensure communications; on the other hand (and this much more so than in the sciences or politics), it requires connections with local cultures and languages. This is because a consider-ably larger proportion of society is engaged in economic, trade, and production processes than in politics or science. These processes can no longer be limited to a small elite group with a capacity to communicate internationally.

    Whether I have any other recommendations this week depends on how much of my planned reading I can get to. It won’t be anything new though.

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