Category: ‘Books and Literature’
The Shoemoney Choice and How to Survive It
Signs of truth are often found in some unlikely places. If you really want to find out what's going on 'OUT THERE', you have to learn to be an expert tracker. You have to learn to spot signs as subtle as a slightly bent leaf swaying to and fro on a branch. You have to bend down and examine faint tracks of movement along the earth. The paths of migration through the wilderness have to be your home away from home.
Fight Club and the Fallen Generation
Have you seen Fight Club? Of course you have! It's over ten years since it was released. We were all blown away by its anti-consumerist message. It's belated success convinced many of us that we were really starting to make some headway against our current, soulless zeitgeist. We devoured every word of Palanuik's novel; sucked down the essence of his delicious sense of irony and let it weigh heavy on our conscience. We went back to our jobs and domestic lives with new eyes and greater resentment. Fight Club closed out a decade that had turned a suspicious eye over everything
Twilight, the Anti-Fan, and the Culture Wars
What is the cause of the astonishing schism surrounding Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga? The internet has become a scorched earth of rabid fans (so called twihards) and anti-fans doing battle over the legitimacy of Twilight as a cultural product. What is it exactly about Twilight that inspires these extreme reactions? How exactly should these novels [...]
The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
There is an old clichéd maxim that the truth will set you free. No doubt you know it. But if you reflect on it a little while, its meaning can often feel elusive. In what way free? Graham Greene’s novel The Tenth Man is about as fine an answer to that question as has ever been provided. [...]
Ernest Hemingway – Across the River and Into the Trees
It's always with a certain degree of relief that I find myself coming back to Hemingway. I've usually read some impossibly metaphoric and muddied work beforehand - something that is always keen to tell you what to think, expositionally, and yet the clarity of such thought being far from adequate. The relief in Hemingway, at the beginning at least, comes from knowing that I won't be told to think a single thing - such is his discipline.
