Why read fiction?

Sometimes we read only for pleasure – and that’s enough. Most recently I read The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope for precisely this reason. It’s a brilliant, sometimes scathing, sometimes exuberant satire of polite society. Tongue in cheek, fast and loose, it takes you on a rambunctious ride, and along the way you encounter a morally bankrupt group of high society miscreants. In short, Trollope is like Dickens - but racier.

Book of the Week

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Recommended by Daniel Jourdan

This highly fictionalised autobiography tells the tale of a rebellious heroin addict who, in 1980, escapes an Australian maximum-security prison having served 2 years of a 19-year sentence for armed robbery.

After fleeing to Bombay as a 'brave, hard man without a plan', he swiftly finds lasting companionship in a friendly street guide named Prabaker, who introduces him to the seedy life of the city and insists that he changes his false name Lindsay, to Lin, or Linbaba.

Writing Against Time - When Will You Publish Your Great Novel?

Sally Rooney is a great novelist, and she is only 27.  Her second novel, Normal People is wonderful, and you should immediately go out and buy it, before settling in to read it in one sitting.

It isn't everyone that has published something marvellous before the age of thirty.  Does that mean that it's too late, that we'll never do it?  Apparently not.  Have a look at this infographic to find out when some of the most famous authors of all time published their work.

https://electricliterature.com/infographic-what-age-do-writers-publish-their-most-famous-works-34ff180b08a3

It seems like there might be time after all.  But why wait?

Wu-Tang Forever!

Chamber Music about the Wu-Tang ( in 36 Pieces) by Will Ashon
Reviewed by Mr Kemp

This book is a sort of history and meditation on the influential hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan’s first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Annoyingly, it doesn’t work. Ashon doesn’t really seem to know exactly what he wants to do with the book. And it shows.

At once Chamber Music is a history of hip hop, a potted biography of RZA, GZA, ODB, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, and Masta Killa, a treatise on race relations and socio economic equality, as well as being a catalogue of Wu-Tang’s influences from Asian philosophy and martial arts films. As this sounds, it is a mess. The parts don’t cohere into a satisfying whole.