Michael Mullins

There are some books that teach us nothing more so than we just don't care. The Ode Less Travelled — witty, well-written, wonderful as Stephen Fry is and does — taught me that I care not a ounce about poetic form, my eyes glazing over with the mention of each passing form and the rules which bind those forms. It's not that I don't like poetry. I have been moved by poetry, though not nearly as often as I've been moved by prose. I've even written some poetry in my day, though of the dreaded free verse variety which poets of a certain ilk disdain. Writing for me is about giving rise to creative impulse, at the best of times born of fiery imagination, lighted by genuine inspiration. For whatever reason, formality as described here seems to extinguish that flame before it has begun.

I can read Shakespeare and experience deeply the genius without needing to analyze any poetic mechanics the man may have used. For me the thought and language driving the plays is sufficient. (Shakespeare was no stranger to prose himself.) In much the same way I can write music without needed to consult the underlying musical theory of what I'm writing. In the case of music, I know the theory, but having learned it, I forget it. Experienced intuition can dazzle as much or more than formal structure. As for the theory of poetry, I'd just rather not bother. Structure, apparently, is something I create myself or do without altogether.

Rand succeeds despite shitty politics and a sophomoric world-view. The more I explore literature, the more I realize just how flawed a novel can be and still hold up. With Rand there are two types of characters and that's all you get: White Hats and Blacks Hats. The White Hats are the heroes, standing alone against an inferior sea of snivelling underlings, incapable of seeing just how magnificent the White Hats actually are. The Black Hats are any of the aforementioned underlings unfortunate enough to show up in the foreground sufficiently for Rand to take notice. Their job it to try to thwart the noble (and capitalistic) ambitions of the White Hats.

On one level this is so much roman à clé, used to support Rand's philosophic darling, Objectivism. And in her mind, I have no doubt, the staring role of Chief White Hat belonged to Rand herself. The problem with literature as rhetoric is that humanity is invariably more complex and flawed than any such Black and White thinking can represent. In the real world, every White Hat riding in on White Horse probably has a whore tied up in the closet, just waiting for him (or her) to stop saving the world long enough to return and do whatever depravity White Hats do when no one is looking. Without nuance, character remains caricature.

And yet the novel works. There are two overarching skills that come into play for novelists. Writing and storytelling. And while Rand is a bad writer she is a very good, if not great, storyteller. (This same argument could be made about J.K. Rowling, save that she doesn't have a political ax to grind - unless you include muggle discrimination in and amongst the wizard world. Also, literary theory doesn't always carry over well between mainstream/literary books and genre writing.) So while Rand's prose suffers from simplistic characterizations and a mind stuck somewhere in deep adolescence, the book itself is underpinned by an engaging story, a phenomenal sense of world and place, and a real talent for plotting that would be equally at home in, say, a book by Rushdie or Pynchon as one by Stephen King or Dan Brown.

By all means, give it a try. Even with its deep flaws I gave it four stars. And I stand by that. Despite her considerable efforts to ruin it this novel has good bones. The only caveat would be for a young person approaching the book for the first time. Please understand that the politics presented here - those explicit and those implied - are untenable when held against the light. Neoconservatism (also confusedly referred to as Neoliberalism) is ultimately an attempt to justify our baser instincts as not merely acceptable and unavoidable, but noble. (For a more adult perspective, check out Ken Wilber, though his novel Boomeritis is lacking in all the places Rand excels. In short, he's not much in the novel-writing department. Luckily he writes mostly non-fiction. Start there.)

If you can see past the sophism, you might just enjoy Atlas Shrugged. You'll also come to understand why Randall Jarrell referred to a novel as “a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.”

The work of highly successful artists is often described in the work's place in time relative to the artist's career. Thus you have early Picasso, late-period Beethoven. Sometimes the word vintage is employed as in, “Jaws is vintage Speilberg...” Writers seem to fare less well than their non-literary counterparts as their careers mature. Late-period Beethoven could be summed up by terms masterful, exquisite and revolutionary. Picasso never stopped innovating and only in very old age, right at the end, did he struggle and fail. My perception is that writers seldom get a glittering third act. Maybe time and further reading will prove me wrong. DeLillo seems to have the reputation of the artist whose best work is strictly in the rear-view mirror. I don't agree.

Centered on a trio of characters, this novella seems to vibrate with what must be a distinct Delilloness. I felt it in White Noise and I felt it here in this compact story of an experimental filmmaker (whose career it seems will never have a second act, let alone a late-period/vintage/revolutionary phase); a fading, retired military scholar — the intended subject of the filmmaker's new project; and the scholar's disturbed daughter. My overall impression is much the same as it was for White Noise. Somehow I sense that DeLillo is playing three-dimensional chess, and while I might be stuck playing checkers, I can feel the genius in his work. I will leave in-depth interpretation of the book up to readers more familiar with his entire body of work. All I can offer is an assertion that whatever skill you can identify on the page is just the tip of the iceberg. The uneasy, almost other-worldly quality and the characters which practically slip from the page they are so alive attest to much more going on than meets the eye.

If anything, reading this short work convinces me that DeLillo deserves a full hearing, that I owe it to him and to myself to read all his books. I started Underworld as a teenager, loved it even then, but stopped for whatever reasons. Let's blame it on the hormones. Mao and Libra have been on my (virtual) shelf forever. I will now try to make my way through the entire heap. I can't offer a higher recommendation than to say it makes me want to read more.

The author bills the science presented as Medicine 3.0, but at every turn my intuition screamed that what was being presented was at best Medicine 2.1. Not bad if Medicine 3.0 wasn't actually out there, but I feel that it is. You should still read “Outlive”. You should read all such books, popular health or popular medicine, I guess we call it, popular as much for an ability to speak with accessibility to the general populous as having any actual popularity.

We are in an age of embarrassing riches, no more so than with the feast of high quality, well-researched, well-meaning, thoughtful, and nuanced texts presented by such highly qualified individuals. It is to our detriment that we ignore even the scantest evidence where our greatest resource, our health, is concerned. For Peter Attia, I would say that although you can take the doctor out of the training, it's much more difficult to take the training out of the doctor. You really must read it to decide for yourself as I only have my gut instincts to go on. The science is infinitely complex and there is little agreement among the professionals about what it all means. At a certain point we have to trust the deeper parts of our intelligence to take over, synthesizing mountains of data and the various interpretations of those data. Intuition gets short shrift in our society.

Peter Attia seems in the throws of the paradigms he's struggling against, still very much attuned to a mid- to a late 2oth century mindset, a practice still bounded by old understandings despite an ostensibly cheery prognosis overall.

I'm hesitant to give specifics and argue against professional training, but the areas that pinged my radar the highest were his advice on exercise, his reliance on numbers and extreme testing, and his underestimation of the power of fasting. It all seems a bit out of balance to me.

Compare and contrast (for yourself) this book against books like Richard Johnson's “Nature Wants Us to Be Fat” (2022), Daniel Lieberman's “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding” (2021), and Steve Hendricks “The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting” (2022). There are many areas where these books are in agreement with Attia's advice, but worrying in the ways they disagree, sometime sharply. This list of books of course is in no way exhaustive, with new science coming at us every day. We are foolish if we don't at least try to make sense of it all. The stakes are ridiculously high. The price too precious.

In reading this book there were no aha moments, a few head-nodding moments, and a whole slew of head-shaking, frowny moments.

Too much ‘go without it how it feels.'

Not near enough ‘sit down, get over yourself, and work.'

Both yin and yang are of course necessary, but it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of unassuming grit, that simple, clear-minded work which actually gets it done. As this book proves, though, it is very easy to overemphasize the touchy-feely.

Creating is more akin to what the stonemason does. As artists we're less interested in what the forest spirit does, dancing about in flowing, sheer robes.

There's way too much conflation of Eastern philosophy now with mysticism. Authors and practitioners need to begin to make a clear distinction once again. Singer sounds more like a preacher than someone expounding on an aspect of Eastern philosophy. This generation of writers and teachers are largely suspect now as a result. If I wanted talk of Christ, I would go to church.

I ended up reading this novel and another of a similar bent back to back. (No pun intended.) I wrote a review for that other book, which was simultaneously a tacit review of Young Mungo — sort of a compare and contrast. You can read that review on the corresponding Goodreads review page.

Long story short, Young Mungo is top shelf stuff and I barely feel qualified to review what is so obviously a masterpiece. If you want more, check out that other review.

When I first dabbled in this book, years ago, I remember placing it in lineage with so many others, an endless parade of books which all say more or less the same thing when it comes to that most workaday aspect of storytelling, the plot. Campbell is invoked, the hero's journey extolled, and careful and precise subdivisions of what makes a plot are enumerated. If you watched Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society this would be the point to rip up the book in question and proclaim it “Excrement!” I wonder sometimes if the reason for so many bad movies and books now isn't due to the readers of these books growing into their own and writing the way they've been taught; badly, I mean, using shortcut and formula instead of craft and artistry. I'm a different, older writer now, and whereas before I missed them, the nuance and wisdom of Dibell's book and how it stands out from these other books became apparent with this latest reading.

Myself, I think focusing on plot is putting the cart before the horse and something like Dibbel's book would better serve a book's second draft, but better writers than I — which is to say writers who have actually finished a book — would disagree. There's more than enough pantsing/plotting debate going around, though. I'm of the mind that we don't go to story to find out what what happens, but rather seek to find out what happens in order to have an excuse to immerse ourselves in story.

At one point Dibell says

As I've said before, stories—especially live, convincing stories—will change under your hands. That's the reason I've never been persuaded of the usefulness of outlines. By other writers' experience and my own, I judge that you generally won't know how a story's going to go until you get close to the place where something is just about to happen. It will take its own shape and tell you how it wants to go, if you listen and watch attentively for the ways it's telling you.

I'm ashamed to admit I spent more time than I should have figuring just how Reversalism would work. (Conclusion: It wouldn't.) In the book Reversalism is an economic system supported by the Prime Minister (not quite himself of late) in which the economy would flow backwards. One paid one's employer for hours worked and then received compensation for shopping, the whole system rounded out by penalization for the accumulation of wealth. The origins for this literary device lie in the novella's other literary device, his homage to Kafka:

He was beginning to understand that by a grotesque reversal his vulnerable flesh now lay outside his skeleton...

The Children Act

There really is no secret. A positive attitude tends to produce a positive life; a negative attitude, a negative one. This is not rocket science. I enjoyed the movie because of the music, funnily enough. I ripped the soundtrack and have listened to it numerous times. This is no philosophical heavyweight. Nonetheless, you could do worse than to spend a few hours with something of a positive message, Pollyanna notwithstanding.

There are certainly deeper truths. True and great philosophies to explore and inhabit. Taoism and Buddhism spring to mind — my personal favorites. The philosophies which propelled the Renaissance and the Enlightenment have something to offer. The smorgasbord with which we are not presented in terms of available literature means you can range far and wide, pick and choose, and with a little work come away from the experience with a fairly sophisticated worldview.

So why the high rating? I tend to judge things more and more on their own merit as apposed to comparing, one to the next. The perspective presented here is very positive. And as I said, I liked the music. If you want deep, read Nietzsche. If you're looking for a game-changer, I would recommend Lao Tzu. If darkness encroaches and fear is taking over, consider the words of Siddhartha Gautama. Whatever you do, please don't turn it into a religion. And if you do, please don't foist it on your neighbor.

If you simply want to turn off you brain for a few hours and have someone tell you it can all be alright, well, you could do worse than this.

Very well done. I wouldn't say I read it in a white-hot heat, but in this small volume Gottschall manages to pack in a lot: dreams, identity, online fantasy worlds, Wagner/Hitler and that most destructive of myths which resulted, the real nightmare quality of children at play. There was something mildly depressing about the whole enterprise, story as a concept reduced in parts to a balm we slather over ourselves in order to get through life. Story is something else for me, as I suspect it is with most writers. Story hums with life, especially when it comes unbidden to the writing mind, transporting the soul to someplace altogether bigger, realer, weightier than the shell which normally houses us and our day-to-day experiences. Definitely worth one's time though, this book. Just don't expect a paean to escapism.

In a book encompassing nothing less than the entirety of human potential Toby Orb has written a thorough, statistic-laden, intelligent and slightly tepid response to all the things which could go wrong in the worst of all possible nightmares. Asteroids, climate change, nuclear war, volcanos, exploding stars, AI — everything (save one thing) which poses natural or anthropogenic annihilation of all human potential (as opposed to just those threats which could cause the extinction of the species) is gamed out, mathematically and logically. Herein lies the only real problem with the book. In another recent book, The Republican Brain: the Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, Chris Mooney points out that such factual counterpointing rarely has the desired effect. Mooney says:

[...] as for defending reality itself? That's the trickiest thing of all.

As I've suggested, refuting conservative falsehoods does only limited good. There are more than enough conservative intellectuals out there to stand up (sic.) “refute” the refutations, leading to endless, fruitless arguments. And for the general public, those unconvinced or undecided, sound and fury over technical matters is off-putting, and leaves behind the impression that nobody knows what is actually true.

Rather, liberals and scientists should find some key facts—the best facts—and integrate them into stories that move people. A data dump is worse than pointless; it's counterproductive. But a narrative can change heart and mind alike.

And here, again, is where you really have to admire conservatives. Their narrative of the founding of the country, which casts the U.S. as a “Christian nation” and themselves as the Tea Party, is a powerful story that perfectly matches their values. It just happens to be . . . wrong. But liberals will never defeat it factually—they have to tell a better story of their own.

The same goes for any number of other issues where conservative misinformation has become so dominant. Again and again, liberals have the impulse to shout back what's true. Instead, they need to shout back what matters.

You could argue that the three main legacy branches of modern psychology are Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian. Everyone has heard of Freud; most everyone has heard of Jung; some have heard of Alfred Adler. Don't believe me? Type in ‘Freud' (just the one name, no first name) into a Google search field. Now try it with ‘Jung'. Finally, try ‘Adler.' Assuming the search results have not significantly changed since this writing ‘Freud' and ‘Jung' will return the desired figure as the first result, as well as a biographical strip down the side of the page: Wikipedia snippet, birth and death dates, etc. ‘Adler' will get you a page filled with various Adlers — as names, as places — with poor Alfred down near the bottom of the page with one, pathetic entry. Kishimi quotes Adler early on, saying, “There might come a time when one will not remember my name; one might even have forgotten that our school ever existed.” Kishimi then writes that, “[...Adler] went on to say that it didn't matter. The implication being that if his school were forgotten, it would be because his ideas had outgrown the bounds of a single area of scholarship, and become commonplace, and a feeling shared by everyone.”

We are somewhere in between these two events, between the forgetting and an all-pervasive adoption of his ideas. It would be unfair to say that his name is forgotten; fading into the background, sure. With the advent of the internet, nothing is truly gone. An endlessly republished encyclopedia means that the curious and persistent can just about remember it all. You could also not say that his ideas have reached dominance; but if you stand back far enough and get quiet long enough, you can see another perspective beginning to shift into focus in a big way. Before Adler — linked in this book to the ideas of ancient Greece — you have Eastern philosophy: the Taoists, the Buddhist; a little later Zen shows up — in short, an understanding of power and ease which is hardly new and has found greater expression than just in the writings of the ancient Greeks. It is this forgotten wisdom with which The Courage to be Disliked concerns itself, even if it isn't fully aware of what it's doing.

In the form of a Socratic dialogue between teacher and student, the material is clear, methodically presented and comprehensible even to someone coming to these ideas for the first time.

Focus on something and it will grow. It seems to be universal. The best way to get a difficult teenager to be more difficult it to focus on their difficulties. Meet political strife with more political strife and where there was a kitchen fire suddenly the whole neighborhood is alight. This is an extreme oversimplification of Adler's ideas, but the difference between etiology (Freud) and teleology (Adler) in many ways comes down to such a focus. Adler puts the power of our lives right where it belongs, in our hands and on our shoulders. We alone bear responsibility. The notion that we somehow created situations apparently beyond our control is harsh medicine, at the very least, and baffling to many first encountering it. Someone reacting to Adler's ideas might justifiably say, “But we can't blame the victim for the crime.” Adler might respond, “What's past is prologue.” He would probably have said it in German, though.

It might be time that we re-remember the name Alfred Adler. If this book is just one in a line of such books I would call that good news.

Heartbreaking.

I prefer to know as little about a book going in as possible. If it's good by reputation and of a general subject matter to interest me — or if it seems an especially important work, as this one — then I prefer to take the ride the author intends, discovering the book in the initial read. Such was the power of ‘The Nickel Boys' that I was unsure if I was reading a disguised memoir, what they unfortunately now refer to as a ‘nonfiction novel', or if it was a work of pure, if brutalized imagination. The truth was, as many truths are, somewhere in the middle. Based on the all-too-real Dozier School for Boys, this book's characters may be fictional but their stories are true. From here arises the heartbreak.

It is unfortunate that the story which unfolds is in many ways predictable. Stories of brutalized prisoners litter history as do stories of abused children, and the story of the torture of the Black Man in America is so common that it has permanently warped us as nation, an eternal specter hovering over the shoulder of anyone speaking of American exceptionalism and greatness. ‘The Nickel Boys' is very much a story of that torture, but these tortured boys were not only black, and so calling this a story of black oppression doesn't quite hit the mark. Should we ask how can we as a society imprison our young? I think the question is larger than even that: Can we really punish people into falling in line? This seems to me the greatest myth in a book filled with the misdeeds of people acting out whole hosts of destructive myths. While it is surely necessary to remove people who endanger others, the notion that we need to do so brutally in order to punish is one of the great tragedies of society. We should imprison with regret, trepidation. We should mourn all those whose freedoms are so taken away, no matter how warranted. Until we can do so, ideas of greatness and exceptionalism need to be stricken from our collective hearts.

Colson Whitehead is a very good writer, at least as far as this book demonstrates. I've not yet read another. The novel's power is found in the story's arc, and so reading ‘The Nickel Boys' in one sitting would be best. At about 250 pages, this is not unreasonable. Much of the book is a straightforward telling, without artifice and literary tricks. Whitehead understands language and can dip into poetic registers when it suits the narrative, but generally let's the power of the story tell itself. Mostly it's an important book. And heartbreaking. Did I mention heartbreaking?

Well. OK. But now I need a shower.

An obviously well-written, well-researched treatise on the alarming rise of hate groups in the modern era, I kept wondering if knowing the difference between factions of hate is really the point. Of course it is right to draw clear maps of such phenomena and define carefully the landscape, but at what point do we simply call crazy and delusional out for being just that? Knowing the difference between the eponymous Proud Boys and Neo-Nazis doesn't hurt, but at some point we have to start lumping rather than splitting, and then begin the process of dealing with those we have unfortunately if accurately lumped under the heading of crazy and delusional. Ultimately this all involves questions of freedom of speech, of assembly, of the right to bear arms. Do we, as a free people, need to curtail the rights of citizens to transgress too far over certain lines? (Of course we do. We do it all the time. But by how much and in what direction do we curtail? And who does the curtailing?) Germany postwar bans the use of Nazi symbols under certain circumstances. Even more of a reach is Germany's ban on publicly denying the Holocaust. And yes, the fact that Germany now represents the sanity to which we need to strive should give us all pause.

In a final tacked on chapter — Decoding and Derailing White Nationalist Discourse — Stern seems to be pointing to what she believes is solution, but it is so underwhelming in the face of the absolute horror that she has laid out up to that point as to be laughable:

My hope is that by dismantling and disassembling alt-right ideas, and scrutinizing their flawed logics and bigoted assumptions, we will be better able to defuse and short-circuit them.

interrogate and disassemble [the alt-right's] metaphors and language, and remain mindful of the perfidious implications of concepts such as the ethnostate and white genocide.

I'm beginning to suspect that the best approach to learning history is in these fairly hefty chunks. The entirety of world history is just too big to be written about effectively in a single volume, whereas microscopic histories limited to a single people at a single place or of a single event are just too myopic at first. Kershaw's The Global Age: Europe, 1950-2017 (also called Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017) is the final volume in the nine volumes listed in the Penguin History of Europe Series. This is one of those books which makes you feel smarter than you are, if you know what I mean. Kershaw's approach, in texture and language, reminded me quite a bit of Diarmaid Macculloch's Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years, a book I need to return to and finish. Maybe you have to be in the right headspace, but a detailed knowledge of a subject which continues to play out against our daily lives, affecting us in small and big ways, is a handy thing to have.

Obviously a master of his subject, the author writes well. The book has me thirsting for more.

Fact #1: As a rule, I refuse to DNF books. I would estimate that the ratio of books which I put down and say, “Nope, I'm done.” is about 1:150. I put books down all the time, but that's because I read like an ADHD howler monkey on cocaine, surrounded by the many shiny objects which comprise our ever-increasing shared literary heritage. My intent is always to pick them back up at a later date.

Fact #2: As a rule, I do not write reviews of books which I have not read front to back.

Fact #3: I have no problem viewing women as equals, and in the case of individual skills, betters. I've never understood the need to denigrate women. Accuse me of misogyny if you want — and some will want to by the end of this review — but I have no problem with the ongoing sexual revolution.

Fact #4: I was very much in the mood for an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.

Fact #5: This book — or what I read of it — seems to be (wait for it...) an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.

Fact #6: But the women (and perhaps some men) involved in the production of this book ruined it. Instead what we have is actually a smokescreen. The authors and most certainly the editors of the book wanted you to think this was a book about programming but actually this was a book about the contributions of women to programming, and any actual entertainment value derived from the book about the fascinating subject of programming was purely accidental. They had an ax to grind and they ground it at every available opportunity.

Fact #7: If they had written a book about the contributions of women to the discipline of programming and billed it as such, I might have read it, finished it, and then praised it. Assuming of course it was well-written. But instead they tried to backdoor an agenda in there, reminding the reader continuously of the unfairness of being a women.

For anyone interested, I put do the book down at this paragraph:

“““
During the first half of 1964, two college-age White men, John McGeachie and Michael Busch, devoted hours to computer programming. So much time, in fact, that McGeachie was known as 225, short for the GE-225 mainframe computer for which he was responsible, and Busch was known as 30, short for the GE Datanet-30 computer that he programmed. They were students at Dartmouth, an elite, overwhelmingly White, Ivy League college that admitted only men as undergraduates, and they were coding a new computing network. In the early 1960s, McGeachie's and Busch's access to technology was extraordinary.
”””

Surprisingly compelling prose in a book I read just for completeness and because, you know, reading is what I do. Like many I've been reading King since adolescence, and although I've largely outgrown him as a reader and as an increasingly serious writer myself — serious is how I take the task and not necessary how I write — I'm on dedicated path to read everything the man has written, if only because I can. And even when the prose groans the man still knows how to tell a story. As of finishing Nightmares in the Sky — and according to the spreadsheet I'm staring at — I'm 67.1% finished with King's current oeuvre by total number of books and 65.7% done by total words written. (If you think I don't keep track you're crazy.) I didn't expect to particularly enjoy the book. As I said, it was a chore, a check mark on a list, insomuch as reading can be a chore or just an item on a list. As is often the case, however, the book we expect and the book we receive are different beasts, and in this case a collection of beasts, which “alternately grinned and leered, sobbed and smirked, snarled and cringed”, these gargoyles of New York City. I'll stop now lest the review become larger than the essay which inspired it.

It's hard to actually place this book in terms of overall quality. The author is certainly on the right track and largely eschews dogma though the scent of the dogmatic is in the air. (The smell of wet dogma?) Moreover, my extensive reading with admittedly popular nutrition convinces me that he's operating from a limited perspective. This is an earlier book and if memory serves Fuhrman eventually begins strongly advocating for intermittent fasting, so I think his thinking becomes broader and to my mind better aligned with truth, which for nutritional science, is a very hard nut to crack indeed. Our bodies are a miracle of infinite complexities and any declaration of how they behave needs to be tempered with a healthy portion of humility. Lastly, the facts have changed somewhat since the writing of this book. (Which is to say that either the situation has changed or our understanding has changed — facts, of course, don't actually themselves change.) Specifically the prevalence of trans fats in the food supply has significantly diminished due to federal regulation. Mark one small win in a sea of losses for the American eater.

A tough call. Many disagree with reducing the effect of a piece of literature to a simple star rating, but truth be told I do it more for myself and less for others. It's a way of keeping track and a shorthand for the books I enjoyed, or hated, or books that were just middling. A near five-star read for me, this book is written in a register which just works, or does so at least for me. The story of a British High Court judge — specializing in family law? (I can't be sure) — middle age and feeling it, forced to deal with a marriage in strife while she would rather put herself fully into her work, for which she seems to have considerable talent. Novels of manners, novels of the quiet intricacies of family life can go so wrong, so easily, that I'm caught off guard when someone gets it exactly right. Not that this is wholly either, but it is a novel of human intricacies, and this is what seems to trip up so many writers. McEwan seems to remember to make the stories interesting, that in fact the greatest writer of them all would poison, or stab, or rape, or to chase by bear if it came to that, and the greatest sin would be to bore, to have people sitting endless in salons chatting in mutual navel-gazing. My favorite novels are when the writer balances the equation, getting both sides right. Here is the story of these people and they are real, or seem so to us — and here is why this story is interesting absent all of that faffing about. I've read two or three or four other McEwan novels (I've lost track) but at this point I've decided to line them all up in row, everything the man has written, and read them every one, over time. I can offer no higher recommendation than that.

Three stars are for the book, with maybe one of those stars born of a gravity effect from the five-star drama - of the same name and similar pedigree - pulling up the score of this lackluster adaptation. Hidden within the BBC show are depths unspoken. Unfortunately, that depth is of an elusive, almost silent variety. A better novelist could have listened, through the silence, and found the truly literary amongst the dramatic. Instead, we have a thinly disguised, reformatted teleplay. Even the tense carried over, as if the author couldn't be bothered to transform the most surely present-tense script (scripts are almost universally written in the present-tense) into a more traditional, past-tense novel. Simply set the writing application for stun - reformatting the script - and insert the odd detail, a bit of inner-dialogue, a novelistic touch. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm not sure.

But do catch the BBC program.