Oh dear. A bit of an avalanche this week.
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse - after a recommendation by a Twitter contact. It's a set of essays on cultural criticism, mostly exploring the relationship between history and other literary forms - Vico, Croce, Derrida and Foucault make significant appearances.
Brian Baker, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000. My PhD was about masculinity in 1930s Welsh novels, so I need to catch up on subsequent developments.
Eric Linklater, The Impregnable Women. It's an invasion novel and a re-telling of the Lysistrata story (women go on sex-strike to end a war). Unfortunately for Linklater, he published this tale of a French invasion of Britain in… 1938. So much for foresight.
Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: more good quality scientific muck-raking from the good doctor.
Jonathan Meades, Museums Without Walls: another blast of polemic from one of the best cultural and architectural critics in the business.
Barry England, Figures in a Landscape. Ben said it was good. It won the Booker in 1969 and it's a 'horrors of war' novel.
Philip Pullman, Galatea. Pullman's rather deranged-looking fantasy novel for adults. Nazis! Zombies! He doesn't like to talk about it. He also doesn't like to talk about 1972's The Haunted Storm, but I don't have £750 spare to buy a copy of that. My friend Mark has it though, picked up for pennies in a charity shop as usual…
Finally, two new Moomins reprints: the comic strips Moomin's Winter Follies and Moominvalley Turns Jungle. Because they're charming and wise.
1 comment:
I'm currently reading Bad Pharma on my daily commute, and it's pretty good, although I don't entirely love the format (for commuter-reading, more chapters is better!).
Tropics of Discourse and Galatea both sound very interesting, but I've bought a few too many new books recently, so I might just have to leave them in my Amazon queue for now!
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