Breathing Just a Little

I have been continuing (slowly, in the background) my mission to read all the Booker prize winners from the decade of my birth. Here are two I have recently finished: one which I thought was dated but interesting, and one which I thought was pretty bad (the first one I've encountered so far in this project that I'm baffled by its Booker win!) Reading this book in 2026, I found it dated, but also an easy and quite interesting read. I'm sure that when it won the Booker in 1975, it seemed very modern, picking apart the problematic paternalism and racism of the British in 1920s India through the eyes of a contemporary (1970s) protagonist (which it certainly does do, and quite effectively). Now, the text reads as absolutely infested with the particular kind of Orientalism that characterised 1970s attitudes to south Asian people - less obviously malignant, but still uncomfortable and damaging. In particular, like many a British writer in the 20th century writing about India and B...

is there anything more boring than a poem about a strange dream where the house is sold but you forgot, and you haven't  started packing, but you must get out next Tuesday also the house is not actually your real house it's a trick mirror version, all weird angles and hidden rooms decaying walls, brick dust and everyone still here, even those who moved out no one gone and you can't find or can't remember  where all the paperwork is at and no one wants to help pack and when you try Googling "packing services" Google just gives endless hits of sad poems

 I have recently finished two books that I was reading simultaneously (actually I'm reading three, as my Agatha Christie re-read project continues, but two new-to-me books!) One of them was a book I'd not read by one of my favourite authors of all time, the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin. The other was a recently popular book that is my book club's selection for this month, so I was reading it to be able to discuss it properly at the meeting. I finished the two within a day of each other (Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven first), and I think that my judgement of Chosen Family, the other book, was undeniably harsher because of how incredibly good the Le Guin work is. This really magnified my disappointed feeling that Chosen Family was incredibly unsuccessful - as a story, as a character study, as a piece of writing. Had I not been spoiled for the mundane by Le Guin's elevated prose and complex ideas, I might have judged Chosen Family a little less stringently, although I...