Drink your milk

“Then there was the matter of the milk, a drink I detested however it was served, and at whatever temperature. It made me gag. There was no allowance for such distastes in the home’s régime. This resulted in a great deal of time spent in the dining room, with its sour odours of curds and [...]

When science fiction gets it wrong

I’m currently reading Ben Bova*’s novel Colony. Written in 1979, it’s set in the far-flung future of 2008, and features such developments as a permanent moon base, city-sized orbiting colony and a World Government. For the first 150 pages I was surprised at how little of the book seemed dated, considering the fact that it’s [...]

A stroll and a browse

Saturday morning. I drop my daughters at their Italian cooking class and find myself with an hour and a half free. I head to a nearby café for a coffee, muffin and free wifi. I’m surrounded by laptoppers and breastfeeders, and I manage to concentrate on my book for about twenty minutes before conceding that [...]

Browsers

I love bookshops. I hate bookshops. I love browsing, making discoveries, and simply taking pleasure in the knowledge that such a variety of interesting and beautiful books is available to me. I hate seeing so many books I want to read and then thinking of the piles of books sitting on the shelves at home, [...]

Could you be a little more specific?

“The Matses are a 2,500-strong tribe, and they live in the tropical rainforest along the Javari river, a tributary of the Amazon. Their language, which was recently described by the linguist David Fleck, compels them to make distinctions of mind-blowing subtlety whenever they report events. To start with, there are three degrees of pastness in [...]

Your correspondent

“She was funny. Yet despite my feelings for her, I realised that I would have preferred a letter to her presence. Is this pathology due to the predominance of written correspondence in my life? Rare are those whose physical presence is preferable to one of their letters – assuming, of course, that they have a [...]

Greetings!

How to say hello in Ghana: “The course and temperature of the first greeting are of the utmost significance to the ultimate fate of a relationship, which is why people here set much store by the way they salute each other. It is essential to exhibit from the very beginning, from the very first second, [...]

Quitting is for quitters

As recently noted on twitter/facebook, I have a curious inability to stop reading a book even if I don’t like it. In this case it was the irritatingly tedious “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood. I knew after about 100 pages that I wasn’t really going to enjoy it very much, and yet I couldn’t [...]

Drunk Aliens

“Y’sul spent a large part of the journey complaining about his hangover. ‘You claim to have been around in your present form for ten billion years and you still haven’t developed a decent hangover cure?’ Hatherence had asked, incredulous. ‘Suffering is regarded as part of the process, as is the mentioning of it. As is, [...]

Our Dear Leader

“In Mrs Song’s home, as in every other, a framed portrait of Kim Il-Sung hung on an otherwise bare wall. People were not permitted to put anything else on that wall, not even pictures of their blood relatives. Kim Il-Sung was all the family you needed – at least until the 1980s, when portraits of [...]