November 26, 2017

From The TLS (Paul Binding on Books of the Year 2017):

David Harsent’s remarkable Salt (Faber) is a “series, not a sequence” of short poems united by a “ricochet of echoes”, a magic-lantern show for the psyche: “Wind-driven salt in the crevice of a rock is how / memory works: image, invention, regret”.

Gisli Palsson’s The Man Who Stole Himself (Chicago; translated from the Icelandic by Anna Yates) inspiringly recreates the life journey of Hans Jonathan, born in 1784 to an enslaved black woman in the Danish Virgin Isles, and the victim of legal ambivalence in Denmark itself, who escapes by ship to Iceland where he now has 600 descendants.

Two distinguished novels: Gravel Heart (Bloomsbury) by Abdulrazak Gurnah, which pits its sympathetic Zanzibari narrator/protagonist against the complexities and dishonesties of his turbulent times, and John Lucas’s moving, enthralling Summer Nineteen Forty-five (Greenwich Exchange), where two boys confront the disappearance of an evacuee girl in a Midlands village, understanding it only decades later.

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

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman.

From The Guardian (Katherine Rundell on "The book I most often give as a gift"):

The collected verse of John Donne.

From The New Yorker:

Americans are not moving as much as they once did: the number of people migrating within the country is now about half what it was forty years ago. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, nearly eight per cent of unemployed men moved across state lines; in 2012, two and a half per cent did.

Workers used to follow jobs, but now those who do move often go to places where unemployment is higher and wages lower, because housing is cheap.

From The Economist:

Amazon aims not just to meet customers’ expectations but to set new ones. Its Prime annual subscription ($99 in America) initially just made it easier to buy things online and covered shipping, but now includes audio and video streaming.