Peter Reavy’s blog

I don’t like the way Amazon reviews become the property of Amazon. I would prefer if people visiting Amazon could see reviews on private blogs in some way. However, this is not going to happen soon.

Occasionally I would like to comment on a book publicly in a way that might help others to decide whether to buy the book. I’ve belatedly realised that I have no choice but to add my thoughts to Amazon’s site. So I’ve added a link to my Amazon reviews over at the right hand side.

Tyler Cowan posted a link to these photos of libraries. It seems to be down at the time of posting. I can’t remember where I found this link to photos of people’s books. I like nearly any photos of the inside of other people’s houses.

You can keep a list of your books at Google Book Search now. I look forward to seeing how they can hook that up to other content. I would like to see online communities for books growing up around something like this. The conversation around each one would come from personal blogs.

I’ve never felt comfortable just starting a blog post on whatever book I happen to be reading. It seems too much like talking into the void. I would like to be able to attach my thoughts to something so that other people with an interest in that book could easily find it.

I don’t like adding reviews to Amazon because I want to have ownership of what I’ve written. I like Amazon a lot; I just don’t feel that I owe them free content.

Possibly I could just write a blog post and put the ISBN and ASIN at the end? Then in the future, an all-powerful book review search engine would collect up all the blogged thoughts on all books.

Will Self advises Salman Rushdie about accepting knighthoods, quoted in the Guardian:

Given the furore that The Satanic Verses occasioned, it does strike me that any responsible writer might ask himself whether the fallout from accepting such an honour was really worth the bauble … it is surely better that writers decline any form of honour.

Clever words, eh? Rushdie should scorn baubles, like Will Self would.

But when bullies gather, clever Will Self won’t stick up for a fellow writer.

The book Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 by David Kynaston has been receiving a lot of attention. Not sure whether I’m ready to tackle it just at the moment, so I pulled together a few reviews of it.

Here they are: Independent, Observer, Guardian, Times, Literary Review, Telegraph, Telegraph, Spectator, Daily Mail.

Tyler Cowan shares tips on how he reads fast. I’m fascinated by this topic. I worked through most of Breakthrough Rapid Reading, with mixed results. Mainly what I took from it was that you should know in advance what you need from a book and read at a pace that suits.

I used to read fast as a child, but I read fiction and naturally skipped. I stopped reading for a while as a teenager and may have slowed down as a result of that, but I can skim Google Reader feeds as fast as I want, so it may only be that I treat books with undue seriousness.

I came across this top 10 list of fantasy fiction.

I didn’t realise that Max Ernst’s book Une Semaine de Bonte could be bought quite as a cheap-ish paperback. I may have to treat myself, but in the meantime, some of it can be seen on the web.

Investigating another book on the list, I thought the cover looked interesting, and a bit more digging led me to the German painter Franz Stuck. Though classed as a symbolist, he reminds me a little bit of the New Objectivists I posted about recently.

I have a CD of Rigoletto which I was listening to yesterday. I have never seen the opera, so I read the synopsis on Wikipedia. Even as a synopsis, the power of the story came across. Unrelatedly, at lunchtime, I finally finished a novella by Chekhov, called An Anonymous Story, which touched a chord with me.

Both of these pieces of work have strong plots. I didn’t have to ponder either of them to reach this conclusion. In both cases it was just an obvious fact. It was so blindingly obvious in both cases, I realised that most other fiction must be weakly plotted. Most fiction of any kind, including even quite good fiction, gets along on plots which in comparison are low on drama and scarcely believable, but for some reason, no-one notices and it doesn’t matter.

(The Chekhov story was in this book).