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Despatch from a Dying Planet: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

12/13/2020

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I’ve tried to write about this book several times since I first read it back in June; every attempt I make seems to fizzle a few sentences in. I read Charlie Jane Anders’ first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, during a particularly depressing summer, and it sparked something hopeful in me that I thought I’d lost. It’s a book about talking to animals and building supercomputers, and it is beautiful and charming and kind, in as much as a book can be kind. I loved Anders’ vision, her aesthetics, her narrative voice.
 
So I had been eagerly anticipating her follow-up release, The City in the Middle of the Night, for quite some time, and after I’d read it I loved it too. I’m writing this because I want to explain why. Maybe this time I’ll even manage it. 

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Thinking Time: Finding Philosophy in Lockdown

12/6/2020

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It’s been a year to really get you thinking, and think I did. For almost half of the year I was on furlough, leaving me with more free time on my hands than I had had in years. Time that I spent thinking and reading, and reading and thinking, and thinking about what I’d been reading – which led me to reading philosophy. I’m going to share with you a couple of the books that really stuck with me in the hopes that you can read them too and start to see philosophy, like I have, as an anchor in a choppy sea and a safe place to call home. 

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Tortilla Flat: John Steinbeck’s underappreciated masterpiece

11/29/2020

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John Steinbeck is one of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, the works of his that first spring to the minds of most would be Of Mice & Men and the devastatingly brilliant The Grapes of Wrath. After becoming a mainstay of school syllabuses across the world, thousands have fallen in love with his quintessentially simple writing style, and his ability to weave out the lives of real working people cast in the shadow of The Great Depression. With a stunning eye for small details within nature and people, few have been able to depict the downfall of The American Dream in a way which is as equally touching as it is disturbing. We tend to remember him for his tragic endings - George being forced to kill his only friend, or Rose of Sharon breastfeeding a starving man in a barn – but little is said about Tortilla Flat, the novel with preceded Of Mice & Men and one of the most understated and completely joyous masterpieces of literary history.

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Book Review: Leonard and Hungry Paul (2019), by Rónán Hession

11/22/2020

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2020 has been a year where a lot of us have had to learn how to spend time with just ourselves. Over lockdowns and restrictions, we’ve had to learn new ways to be productive as well as new ways to not be productive. We’ve had to learn how to take things slowly amidst so much uncertainty. Above all, we’ve had to learn to be kind to ourselves. And it’s in this strange and quiet environment that Rónán Hession’s Leonard and Hungry Paul has come into its own. In what is astoundingly his first novel, Hession offers us a maturely crafted and heart-warming story of ordinary people doing their best. With a beautifully written focus on life’s littlest details, the book feels like a guide in how to simply exist and enjoy the present moment around you, even if that just means sitting in a park or playing a boardgame.

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Atticus        tomattic.com
The photos of stone carvings used in the headers are from Indonesian and Cambodian temples. The pictures on the book pages are all old maps relating to the various subjects.