Books I've actually finished lately: 83

Books I've actually finished lately: 80

Because if you haven't read Tristram Shandy, you are not yet born.

It was going to happen eventually

As in this month's Literary Review.

DECREE: generic title for use on all memoirs here on in

Don't Let Other People Make The Tea

[with thanks to SG - who likes it as a 'meta statement' - and to my father, who probably would've used this title anyway]

The justification for truth

We are free to choose our paths
but choose We must, no matter
where they lead, and the tales We
tell of the Past must be true.

- WH Auden, 'Aubade'

A million little James Freys

The book is billed as “memoir written as fiction”, which, as far as I can work out, means that it’s fiction.

- Philip Womack in The New Humanist, on Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death In The Family

A reasonable point, though clearly not what that means. Still, nobody to blame but the publisher for letting such a dicey descriptor make it onto the shelves. (I predict at least one lawsuit.)

Magnificent valour!

Truly splendid biog

Crispian Jago writes the 2011 Orwell Prize Longlisted blog, Science, Reason and Critical Thinking where he waves a shitty stick in the general direction of Irrational Nonsense. He is the vice president of the Hampshire Skeptics Society and co-convenor of Winchester Skeptics in the Pub. He is a compulsive record collector and when he doesn't have any spare time, he's a Freelance IT consultant.

as found attached to this article, from the Spectator.

Say hello to Posterity

I very rarely think either of my past or of my future.

- Leonard Woolf, opening line of autobiography (vol. 1 of 5)

The leaker, leaked

Julian Assange's first-draft memoir to be published, contrary to its author's wishes.

Ouch.