Books I've actually finished lately: 48

Mercifully witty.

Books I've actually finished lately: 47 / Found in books - GUEST ENTRY

[Jacques] Guérin now held a sad, tattered book in his hands, a first edition of Swann's Way, printed in 1913. Inside, on an intact page that escaped Marthe's ruthless effacement of all traces of Marcel's name, Guérin discovered a dedication: To my little brother, a souvenir of lost time, regained for a moment whenever we see one another.

- Lorenza Foschini

Books I've actually finished lately: 46

(Editor's note: Also, I have just named my first dog 'Maus', on account of how he looks exactly like the one on the left.)

George Orwell

reviews Mein Kampf - with the usual unfaltering honesty.

[via Oliver Ashford, with thanks]

Well. Sure. But...

Although a bit gutted

that, thanks to an old schoolfriend's click-baity Facebook activities, I was compelled to go and look up the word 'emacity', I confess I did feel somewhat better when I read '3 matching dictionaries'...

[problem caused by Nathalie Gwilliam]

Intriguing...

Back in the pre-WWW days you couldn’t just whip open your phone and command it to give you a rare book: You had to brave odd looks in rare bookstore after bookstore by people who had never heard of The Codex Seraphinianus and who highly suspected you had either hallucinated the existence of such a book or had heard of the book from someone else who had hallucinated it.

- Dangerous Minds, on the (now extant) Rizzoli edition of the Codex Seraphinianus

--
Footnotelet: What does it mean to have a 'French' edition of this (ostensibly untranslatable) book?

Books I've actually finished lately: 45

Excellent.

And thank you for the primer on axolotls.

Zone of almost total uninterest

Martin Amis has another novel coming out, apparently.

So...

My housemate has asked me - post factum - if it is alright that she borrowed one of my books to level her projector.

The book is not a first edition, or anything (and yes, I did notice the gap on the bookshelf; and yes, I do know precisely which book it is), so I said it was fine, and it was. Kind of.

Let's say this housemate is a chef. It occurs to me now to wonder how she'll react when I borrow her food mixer, dehydrating rack, or imported Japanese knife-whetting stones to prop up my 'overflow' bookstacks...

As I suspected...

Recently I read Here and Now, the letters of J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster (I don’t recommend it).

- John Self, from the Asylum

Favourite footnotes: 3

Responding to the publication of the book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein, a work ostensibly directed at his physics, Albert Einstein said, 'If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.'

- Zia Haider Rahman, In The Light Of What We Know

Books I've actually finished lately: 44

Erm...

Books I've actually finished lately: 43

Capitalism. I don't know. Capitalism means pain and fear but also a walk on the moon and a hybrid car and this email and all the comforts that make life less bad. Capitalism is just people and when we say it's evil, we're really just expressing our disappointment with people. In the fact that they're not better than they are. That they're just people.

- Aaron Thier

Books I've actually finished lately: 42

Fictional counterpart to (much of) Rana Dasgupta's Capital: a Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi?

Books I've actually finished lately: 41

Longlisted - without the ugly sticker - for the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Also wins the ASH Smyth Prize for most uses of 'fuccan cunt' in an historical novel. (Probably.)

InDefinition - 72

outcome, n. m. gross product of erotic dream

Thing there should be on the internet:

James Joyce-type random obscenity generator.*

--
* Idea going for 15% cut of all profits.

James Joyce-type minced oath

Be'Chandos, Petunia and Cyrusvance!

'I am a writer...'

I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher. But, above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man.

- The Master

Pro writing tip

Avoid impulse-bought biros from the Sports Direct counter. They're rubbish.

Jackpot

Free access to Siegfried Sassoon's war notebooks, courtesy of the University of Cambridge.

Oscar Wilde - in context (again*)

Swallow, swallow, little swallow - as I said to YOUR MUM last night!

--
* for Dominic Hilton

Books I've actually finished lately: 40

Cock-in-mouth, I'm afraid, is pretty much a condition of existence.

- Randall, or The Painted Grape