I loved this book and right now I can’t think of any book I like better (well maybe Ragged Trousered Philanthropists). It’s clever, it’s accurate, it’s brutal and it’s full of wisdom.

Like this manifesto for dealing with bullies:

Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards.

Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence.

Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice.

Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.

Which is worse? Scorn earnt by informers? Misery earnt by victims?

The brutal may have been moulded by a brutality you cannot exceed. Let guile be your ally.

Respect earnt by integrity cannot be lost without your consent.

Don’t laugh at what you don’t find funny. Don’t support an opinion you don’t hold.

The independent befriend the independent.

Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty.

Or this bit about wordcraft:

Teachers’re always using that ‘in your own words’.  I hate that.  Authors knit their sentences tight.  Its their job.  Why make us unpick them, just to put them back together more shonkily.

And this bit about what good writing means:

“Anyone can be truthful.”
“About superficialities, Jason, yes, is easy. About pain, no, is not. So you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar, who seeks approval of the literary world.”
“Is that so impossible?”
“If you wish to be a versifier,” she answered, whirlpooling her wine, “very possible. If you are a true artist” — she schwurked wine round her mouth — “absolutely never. If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falsenesses.”

Or this bit about being true to yourself:

How about an Outside You who is your Inside You too? A One You? If people like your One You, great. If they don’t, tough. Trying to win approval for your Outside You is a drag. That’s what makes you weak. It’s boring.

I was bullied relentlessly at school. I never stood up to my tormentors, so Jason’s 13 month journey is something of a wish fulfillment for me.

Now I want to read Eva van Crommelynck’s reading list: Hemingway, Chekhov, Madame Bovary, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Gogol, Proust, Bugakov, Victor Hugo, Kafka and Le Grand Meaulnes. And more blimming David Mitchell too.

Get your own copy here
— I reccomend it.

The story didn’t really finish up where I expected it would, which left me a bit disappointed, but overall I highly recommend this book.

Hmmm. After reading this book I’m less sure. I had read extracts of the first chapter, about cereal production, in the Guardian and that was enough to get me to buy the book. It struck me that from 38 years of watching TV advertising I had learned that breakfast cereals were both fun and good for you, I didn’t actually know anything about how they are made and why the advertisers work so hard getting us to eat them.

The system of food manufacture and distribution we have now keeps people in poverty by persuading us to buy food made in factories from cash crops that make us fat and unhealthy but make vast fortunes for a handful of multinational corporations and retail chains. This isn’t good.

Felicity Lawrence writes about the human and environmental cost of our sugar, corn,  milk, bacon, fish and soya oil. I never even knew I was eating soya oil.

Reading this book on the train on the way home and then going to the shops to buy cake for a family treat was a source of anxiety. But the book ends optimistically. We can improve our own diet by eating simpler food, but fixing all this will need political will and that will is growing.

Which just leaves the question of what should we eat ? The answer:

organically, more locally, more seasonally, more directly from producers and independent retailers, more fair trade, less meat and animal produce, more wholegrains, pulses, fresh fruits and vegetables, few highly processed foods, nothing with ingredients on the label you cannot recognise, nothing that claims to be a new or techno food, nothing highly packaged

Here’s me trying.

I particularly liked the guy playing chess with the hit man who was pursuing his friend, and the girl who gets paid to have hairs extracted from the back of her legs with tweezers (does this really go on ?) and the guy getting offered cocaine by his girlfriend’s dad. Yup, I like these young Spanish (language) novelists.

I first read this book, on my first Open University Summer School. I remember buying it from Durham Waterstones at the start of the week and it being finished by the train home.

It felt like a personal development for me to be reading a book that wasn’t about science fiction or horror or part of an imaginary A’ Level reading list.

The title grabbed me because I knew lots of people from Cork, but the book held me with lots of factual stuff about astronomy, lots of philosophical stuff about beauty and love, and interesting bits about London and publishing from the turn of the 1990s, which were current on the first read but now have a certain nostalgia.

It was made in to a film called Frankie Stralight with Matt Dillon, which I would very much like to see, but Lovefilm don’t have it.

I enjoyed the Dork of Cork the second time and would recommend it to anyone. This book is special to me and it was a fitting start to re-read year.

In the 80s and 90s it was enough for me just to know I was against the tories, but this time, maybe because I’m a parent now with responsibility to impressionable young minds, I feel like I really have to try and understand what it is I do believe in.

This book was really helpful in that regard, and it’s also been fun, for me at least, to be discussing philosophical problems at the dinner table. I found Sandel’s Politics of the Common Good to be convincing and it is certainly compatible with lots that I believe, like the importance of stories and storytelling.

The book is about American politics, so there isn’t too much that applies directly to our daily political life in Scotland, but there is much to inspire, such as:

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product…if we should judge the United States of America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Robert F Kennedy in 1968. And don’t we all just feel exactly the same way now.