The Challenge of Things by AC Grayling (2015)

I've just emerged from an undergraduate philosophy degree, which lends a particular flavour to this. I'm very aware of the difference between academic philosophy writing and its populist correlate - Grayling is noted in both of these shades. I haven't read any of his academic material, though he covers here subjects which were grist to our student mill, like optimism versus pessimism, nature and nurture, the place of science and the notion of scientific method, brain science and its discoveries, arguments about what constitutes the well-lived life, and so on. In a book of this popular nature, he is obliged to cover them in what might be called slightly 'reduced' terms - the broad brushstrokes of newspaper and journal pieces. He manages to include some gems (for me at least) within the more basic materials here, little neat revelatory points tucked away: one I particularly remember was about the notion of 'the soul', and how it was an early Christian construction to serve the needs of a certain stage of argument about believers "not seeing corruption", and imported from Plato. At the same time, this need for the clarity of populist prose sometimes leads him to overly clunky oppositions and blanket pronouncements. The voice in my head at these moments is that inspired by, for lack of a better term, punkish sentiments, where love of rigour meets a readiness to identify waffling middle class comfortability! His heart is almost universally in the right place, but nevertheless colourlessness is engendered. In the piece near the end entitled Optimism, he contrasts the 'bar-room talk' of so-called pessimism, and the cheery 'seeing opportunity in difficulty' of so-called optimism, where the terms of discussion have become somehow so leached of severity that blandness is the only conclusion possible. This trope is repeated relatively regularly, as is its opposite of the tang of pointed discovery. Ultimately I respect him, and see his fumblings of reduction as unfortunate dead ends on a journey (the retention of philosophically-tinted intellectual discussion as a deep value in popular culture) which is worth undertaking.

Commonplace Book

'"Children,' Millie said, 'are the world's great materialists. The great 'natural' market for tin and plastic. The great 'natural' cult of Epicureans." ... "we notice that they'd rather be outside than inside, and we attribute some glorious perception, some sixth sense to them because of it. It's not fair to them. We can't give them anything believing that. It's just that everything is new, and whatever is new is fascinating, like shoes and book-bags. If they'd rather live in the country than the city, it's not because they're ... closer to God! It's because country things are better toys than city things. And even that's pure in a way we don't quite understand; uncluttered, somehow, accepting the world at face value. I mean, look at the connoisseurs of wine, look at the perfume sniffers and the soup tasters, look at the diamond merchants, people who spend their lives dealing in the learned, subtle differences and still never get away from things. Because in a way it is a higher perception, don't you see, not to be able to tell the difference between a diamond and a piece of broken glass."'

from Descend Again by Janet Burroway (Chapter IV)

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (2017)

This was a fun read, and in some ways very familiar. I have spent large swathes of my working life in the bookshop trade, both secondhand and new. This volume's recounting of the quirks (to put it kindly) of some bookshop customers is one of its main calling cards. But what is it about south-west Scotland in terms of attraction for the insane? Because the regularity of Shaun's teeth being set on edge, or his fulminating anger being inspired, is truly epic. Most of these oddnesses are very familiar, but usually happened, in my time, at decent distances from one another. For Shaun, it's every other day. Or is there something about Shaun which inspires the incipiently mad to suddenly flower into full certifiability? The humour, which is the other calling card of this one, tended to run in waves I found, but still gave it an entertaining twist. The best of it is Nicky, a second-in-command who has a predilection for skip-jumping for grossly mashed culinary delights, a sarcastic sourness in dealing with Shaun's dourness, a delightfully whacko sense of logic, peculiar dress sense, and Latter Day Saint convictions. If the rumbles are true that this one will be filmed, I hope the producers haven't overlooked the fact that the inescapable casting for this part is Siobhan Redmond. There were some less intentional revelations tucked away here. Shaun seems to have quite straightforwardly egalitarian political convictions, but also seems to be a little in awe of greatness and goodness, and very happy to give way to the occasional bout of middle-class aspiration. I loved his stories of heading out to look at collections for sale, and the consistent excitement of 'I wonder if there'll be something rare and amazing in this lot?'. And of course the other side of that coin, when the disappointment sets in at coming face to face with a pile of tat. A few of his pronoucements on the history of the trade, and how we got to the Amazon-squashed disaster we're currently navigating, were a little bit off in some of their details, but very much on the money in their diagnosis of the problem. Great fun - 'I look forward to the sequel', I say, in that worrying way that signifies the trashy serialised crud (thus revealing my partially insupportable prejudices) of modern new bookselling, and to which Shaun has given in - it was published last year. Of course there's more to sequels than their modern sludge-instantiation, and of course, I'm sure Shaun's fits that much more classic bill.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)

By way of admission, I now recognize more formally (this is my first James) that my writing style is 'Jamesian'. Should I be ashamed? I certainly echo him in being quite happy to chase down refinements of meaning with qualifying elaboration, 'till the cows come home'. Sometimes that works exhilaratingly, and one ventures way out onto a promontory of meaning, feeling like beautiful and heady precision is being approached. Sometimes, of course, one gets dumped in a bog on the isthmus, and can only clamber out and slug home, mud-spattered and shamefaced! I'm not sure how I feel about this recognition, mainly because of how I responded to this book. It was quite grasping of my attention, but not so much because of the writing style of the author, which varied between his much-vaunted old womanishness and a kind of somewhat gothic sensuous straightforwardness. It is a book which pleases without thrilling in its first few hundred pages - there is a sense, via Isabel Archer, the youthful main character, of a life embarked upon with spirit, having dark patches well sketched but not casting enough shadow to overcome her. Then comes the time when she marries, and it falls into a slough of despond, not because of the subject matter (her marriage going wrong, psychologically) but because the book itself droops. There's always the temptation to say that it feels this way because of the subject matter. I've said this before, but it's so apt here it needs saying again: there's a difference between detailing boredom or negativity in an involving way, and not doing so. James here falls into the latter grouping. The typical first year uni student yelp of "It's supposed to feel that way!" misses the point hugely. No reader should be bored reading about boredom, or feel drab reading about drabness. My guess is that this is where this book loses the majority of those who give up on it. It is a good three hundred pages where it wilts significantly. I will concede that it does, if you stick with it, figure the airless and blocked atmosphere with some fidelity. But it really does drag upon one's patience, becoming a disinspiration. When Isabel leaves Rome to see her cousin Ralph at the end, some of that fog lifts a little. I'm sure that, like many others, I'd have been well tempted to drop this once I reached Isabel's marriage and its aftermath, apart from a strange thing which kept it going, not of itself. For some reason, I think probably trying to imagine Nicole Kidman as Isabel in Campion's film (not having seen it), and registering the wither of her inappropriateness for the part, I began a process of 'recasting'. No idea why, but this soon metamorphosed into a full-fledged scenario. My version was filmed in 1952, with the actress who, at that time, was made for the role: Elizabeth Taylor. It was probably directed by someone quite controlling and intense - Otto Preminger, Orson Welles? Every time Ralph Touchett spoke, I could hear Cary Grant. Mrs Touchett would have been categorically filled out by Katharine Hepburn. Madame Merle would have been a film-stealing revelation of a performance by Greer Garson, as would that of a toxic Hurd Hatfield as Gilbert Osmond. And so on. Imagining this interpretation took on a lot of the life of the reading process, especially when the going got tough. Thinking about how an early 50s version would look, the stillness and formality of the conversations and the stiff silence in which they took place, the carefully undercurrent sexuality, the occasional touches of humour, the highly pushy orchestral score, the echoey metallic tonal element in all the sounds and colours, all added to the prodigality. And of course the camera loving Taylor at her most luxurious and sensual in her youthful glow. Would it have been a notorious shoot? Would it have been a troubled production? Would someone have missed out on an Oscar they ought to have won? All good fun, anyway, and not something that has ever taken on such hyper-reality before in a reading experience. Why? Was my mind providing savourful interest where I could subconsciously sense it was lacking? Maybe - I will say that I don't particularly look forward to another full-length James, looking at this one without the film scenario. Now his many, many novellas - maybe they are where he won't have an opportunity to fall into a hole?