Ben Okri – The Famished Road

1991 Booker winner The Famished Road more closely resembles an extended fable than a conventional novel. Okri’s prose is extremely lyrical, the narrative tends towards the abstract, inexplicable, and hallucinatory. I get the feeling that everything – every object, every place, every character, every event – is intended to symbolise something. It all feeds in […]

David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

A collection of essays and articles is perhaps a peculiar place to start with Wallace, given the undisputed centrality of Infinite Jest to his oeuvre. Upon finding A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again in a charity shop for the bargain price of for 30p, however, I couldn’t rightly resist. Even without Infinite Jest, […]

Haruki Murakami – Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories written by Murakami between 1980 and 2005. All of the trademark characteristics of Murakami’s writing are in evidence here: the juxtaposition of Japanese and US style, the dreamy and wistful aura of his fictional universes, and, of course, the baffling surrealism. While Murakami’s writing is […]

Ted Kaczynski – Industrial Society and its Future

“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.” Given that I was starting a research project on the relationship between modern society and nature, I thought there would be no better way to ease into the reading than by checking out […]

Wolfgang Streeck – Buying Time

I picked up Buying Time after reading a couple of chapters for one of my modules last semester and finding Streeck to be one of the stand-out authors included on that course. Streeck is a critical theorist writing in the tradition of crisis studies from the 1960s and 1970s, from which came the idea that […]

Pierce Brown – Golden Son

Golden Son is the second instalment in the still-expanding Red Rising series, the first of which I completed at the start of this year. Part one was an engaging, action-packed rollercoaster full of twists and turns, and Golden Son keeps up those standards. This is an extremely readable book, which in many ways elevates the […]

Carl Schmitt – The Concept of the Political

I read the bulk of The Concept of the Political quite rapidly, but I nonetheless got a few interesting though scattered reflections from Schmitt’s influential essay. It’s hard to talk about Schmitt without raising the fact of his unmitigated allegiance to the Nazi party, and while this piece was written prior to the full realisation […]

Max Horkheimer – Eclipse of Reason

Horkheimer is my sort of thinker. He writes with the perfect combination of exceptional erudition and a burning passion that would make Nietzsche proud. The Eclipse of Reason is an unrelenting assault on the various disciplines that fall prey to what Horkheimer describes as subjective reason. That is, in brief, the reason by which the […]

Philip K. Dick – VALIS

VALIS is beaten only by The Third Policeman to the title of most psychedelic novel I’ve ever read. However, where The Third Policeman delivered unrelenting, perfectly constructed surrealism, Philip K Dick’s VALIS instead takes the reader into a world of actual insanity imposed onto something that may or may not resemble reality. VALIS is essentially […]

Iris Murdoch – The Bell

The Bell is a novel of quiet, understated brilliance. It is everything you could want from a work of literary fiction: intriguing, complex characters operating within a perfectly crafted, relatively enclosed ecosystem where their distinct personalities are free to interact and conflict in a seemingly organic manner. In contrast to the vivacious, inner-city buzz of […]