Tag Archive: Ian McEwan


2011 IN REVIEW : BOOKS

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December 29, 2011

Cover image of Retromania - my favourite book of 2011.

This was the year when Tory minister Michael Gove pronounced that, from the age of 11 up, we should read at least 50 books a year. I only managed to read about 40 this year – does that make me a dumbass?

These are the best books I read this year, needless to say, not all were published in 2011 and I wrote blog posts about them all:

Best fiction :

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

One Day by David Nicholls

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

The Hunger Games (parts one + two) by Suzanne Collins Continue reading →

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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS LEAVES THE PARTY

Filed under: Music — 2 Comments
December 17, 2011

The death Christopher Hitchens at the age of 62 comes as no surprise but robs the world of one of the great orators of our age. I didn’t always agree with his views, notably his support of the US attack on Iraq, but his opinions were always rationally argued and delivered with a wit and eloquence that put most public figures in the shade.

For this reason, I prefer watching clips of him on You Tube to reading his columns or books. This video of him talking about death and the afterlife  seems apt in the sad circumstances:

 Related links:
Illness made Hitchens a symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism (Richard Dawkins – The Independent)
Consummate writer, brilliant friend (Ian McEwan – The Guardian)
Christopher Hitchens remembered (Slate tributes)

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SOLAR ECLIPSED BY FAT MAN

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June 23, 2011

“How do we engage with global issues like climate change, AIDs and poverty when we’re so inept at managing ourselves?”  This is a question Ryan Roberts posed to Ian McEwan during an interview in London on 12th June 2008 , conducted for the book ‘Conversations with Ian McEwan’.

McEwan responded by saying that he sees cause for hope despite the huge challenges facing the planet but this means we have to think outside the box and modify our inclination for selfishness and short-termism. We have to start “doing favors for unborn people” he said.

This question was prompted with reference to McEwan’s essay about his experiences on an expedition to the Artic with Cape Farewell in February 2005. That trip to Spitsbergen was, as he confirms in the acknowledgements, the starting point to the novel, Solar.

The novel’s central character Michael Beard, is a Nobel Prize winning scientist who wants to do something about climate change but is constantly thrown off track by his own weaknesses and faults.

At the start of the novel (in 2000), he is in the middle of the wreckage of his fifth marriage. Beard, we soon learn, has an insatiable appetite for fattening food, good wine and fine women.

His obsessive womanizing borders on sex addiction. However fulfilling a relationship is, he finds it impossible to remain faithful and cannot resist the temptations of the flesh.

In the opening lines of the novel he is described as “a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic , mathematic, stricken”. I confess that I had to look up the adjective ‘anhedonic’ , and found that it derives from the word ‘anhedonia’, meaning “an inability to experience pleasure”. This actually directly contradicts a later description of Beard as man who takes his pleasures seriously. Continue reading →

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WHEN WILL THE WORLD END?

Filed under: Atheism, Italy — Leave a comment
January 18, 2011

A four day Science conference is to be held in Rome at the end of this month to discuss the end of the world (“La fine del mondo. Istruzioni per l’uso” – The end of the world – user instructions).

Thankfully, the boffins seem to give us ordinary mortals more time than that fixed by  the Mayan Calendar.

The Mayan prophecies speak to us of  major changes on December 21, 2012. Thereafter only the privileged few can look forward to the dawn of a fifth sun (fifth Ajaw)  to realise their spiritual destiny and enjoy a new harmony between male and female energies.

Carlos Barrios, from the Eagle Clan of the Mam Maya of Guatemala says:  “The world will not end. It will be transformed… Continue reading →

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ATHEIST’S PORNOGRAPHY

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June 2, 2008

stairstohell

An interesting long article by Ian McEwan in Saturday’s Guardian about the state of the planet vis-a-vis the way beliefs in the doomsday scenario now seem scarier with the rise of religious extremists. He laments the fact that a recent questionnaire in America revealed that only 12 per cent believe that life on earth has evolved through natural selection without the intervention of supernatural agency. He says:
“To the secular mind, the polling figures have a pleasantly shocking, titillating quality – one might think of them as a form of atheist’s pornography.” A glimmer of hope is that the poll results are unreliable, he asks the question: “From the respondent’s point of view, what is to be gained by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a clipboard?“

The piece ends with these wise words:

“The believers should know in their hearts by now that, even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is, as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a reluctant intervener. The rest of us, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, in this case it hardly matters who is wrong – there will be no one to save us but ourselves“.

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