November 21, 2017

From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on working on old laptop):

I’m back to using my old laptop again and constantly muttering about its crappiness. Everything is slow and irritating. Even the clock is wrong. Part of me suspects that I enjoy an element of adversity – even welcome it. You only truly appreciate the stuff you battle for.

From The Guardian (Tessa Hadley on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"):

Discovering Alice Munro’s stories – Open Secrets was the first collection I read – unlocked so many insights, helped me to begin. She’s an extraordinarily innovative writer. The illusion of her stories is richly alive; and yet she’s found a way of putting her authorial hesitations down on the page: is this really how it was? You can feel Munro’s influence everywhere in contemporary fiction.

From The TLS (Mary Beard on Books of the Year 2017):

Three “picture books” of very different kinds. The wonderful catalogue of Damien Hirst’s Venice exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Other Criteria) captures the excitement of underwater archaeology, with a series of lustrous images of the newly made “finds” from Hirst’s fantasy ancient shipwreck. They’re craggy, decayed and breathtaking, in a way that outdoes even the treasures that come from real underwater archaeology. Those who like their antiquities more or less genuine, would probably prefer Jennifer and Arthur Stephens’s Pompeii: a different perspective (Lockwood), a complete colour record, house by house, step by step, of the remains of the ancient town’s main street, the Via dell’ Abbondanza. It offers a beautifully detailed, complete state view, minus the tourist. For literary laughs I have seen nothing funnier than Tom Gauld’s Baking with Kafka (Canongate), cartoons on a literary theme. Kafka’s special lemon drizzle cake, anyone?

From The Economist:

In rich countries millennials who grew up buying goods online are moving into their prime spending years.

From Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote (quote from Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity):

I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it ‘the backwards law’. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float . . . insecurity is the result of trying to be secure . . .