Godt voet alle creaturen / God feeds all creatures. Leiden botanical gardens

One last day of summer light!

Best thing I've ever read about AI and the academy - every line a banger

Back to Proust (trans. James Grieve). The Lydia Davis translation of the first volume was so good: really looking forward to this one too.

Also found my way to the end of this brilliant, kaleidoscopic book. I get the frustration with Pynchon, but it’s dazzling, just as funny as I expected and a thousand times more moving.

Hmm, I didn’t love it. Fernanda Torres is amazing, everything has real conviction and urgency, but I feel like the film doesn’t know what it wants to grab onto, jumps over the hard questions and settles as a warm tribute to great people (Rubens & Eunice Paiva) and great actors (Torres, Montenegro).

The end of three weeks in Brazil, and I’m finally getting round to seeing this.

Always proud of the things Peterhouse Choir achieve, but never more so than on days like this, when the Choir's first ever album goes on general release with Naxos. Remarkable music from @peterhousecam.bsky.social Chapel from the 1630s Listen here: naxos.lnk.to/8574700AC

“Was the signal going around the planet, or through it, or was linear progression not at all the point, with everything instead happening simultaneously at every point of the circuit?” (Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 123) This book is beautiful!

Summer reading; lots of it was wonderful. Now time for a short pause, and a long book: about to crack open AGAINST THE DAY.

"Bill Forsyth’s 1983 masterpiece LOCAL HERO is perhaps the greatest film ever made about attuning to the frequency of a place, of someone fitting in where they least expected."

Radiant this morning.

Just opened a book I started a fortnight ago, but then left for a bit. Two bookmarks fell out. Which led me to think maybe there’s a small ghost story where, every morning, a book contains more and more bookmarks. Different readers on different pages. Who reads the book while you sleep?

May I also add to this thread of early modern images of happy student life?

I'm late to this, I know, but MICHAEL KOHLHAAS is so, so good. One hundred pages long; it moves like some terrible machine, no waste at all. Wilder and wilder with every step, and deeper and deeper into the grip of its own crazy story. Really does read like a Kafka ur-text. A banger!

Two new reads, two recommendations, two German novels from 1809-10. Goethe is brilliant, unsettling; you keep thinking it's about to settle into schematic observation, and then something ecstatic or horrific blows it out of the water. Have just started Kleist: such an amazing, relentless narrative.

Bookshelf ghosts.

One new read and an old one. Two books of puzzles: stories within stories, worlds within worlds. Loving them.

#A-Schubert-A-Day starts today. I am attempting to listen through the complete Hyperion Schubert Song edition, one song per day until there are no more. I have no idea how sustainable this will be, but I am going to give it a try.

This is so weird and so hypnotic, and the starry cast just makes it more of a mixed-up dream -- like a crossover between Picnic at Hanging Rock and A Field in England and somehow more unsettling than either -- amazing to think that it predates them by so many years.

‘Power is surely the greatest moral problem that human beings face, and is important above all in monarchical, courtly, political tragedies like Hamlet: this of course gives the play its mysterious third line, “Long live the king!”’ Barbara Everett on ‘Hamlet’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Beautiful. I had been in a (very slight) funk, but then I watched these two intriguing little films and started a book that I actually wanted to read and had a bit of chocolate, and everything's ok again.

This and 26 Bathrooms: fantastic short Peter Greenaway documentaries. Moving, puzzling little reveries. Wonderful to see them both for the first time! www.architectural-review.com/essays/26-ba...

Such an exceptional novel. Read it a few years ago and it blew my mind. Don't think I've ever read a work of fiction that so urgently challenges the willing suspension of disbelief. Nothing quite like it.

I've been reading Trieste by Dasa Drndic for the last few days and it has absolutely wiped me out. Reading it next to Celan, Pound, etc., and my head is spinning. What a work of fiction - as well as a historical and documentary indictment of the world that reads it.

“No one watching this woman … could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.” (Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping)

I felt warm and well-disposed to The Fish Can Sing, but also underwhelmed. Does that make sense? Wisdom and humour, but I just didn't get the bite. So I'm going back to another small town: something I loved when I first read it.

My first Laxness!

I loved this. At the start I misread its looseness and raggedness as whimsy; by the end it felt like it could hardly hold itself together in the face of its own fury and grief. Really mind-blowing. Should have read Belladonna first, but now's the time for that.

Now making a start on this excellent book. 👍

150 pages in, and I'm just not getting it. Persevere, right?

I love this. A mad comedy but somehow even scarier than The Turn of the Screw, the uncertainties even more diabolical.

So interesting to read this a few weeks after Swann's Way: a micro-study of obsessive jealousy. Catches you in the swells and wrenches of her feeling, but also allows you to stand two steps back and watch her incredible reflective intelligence at work.

"Close reading is untimely. It bristles against today’s universities, which treat students as customers to please and as future workers to train rather than as people in pursuit of human flourishing."

Reading, May 2025. Something old and something new.

April 2025: stuck at home longer than expected, but at least more reading happened. Some real bangers here: ALISS AT THE FIRE, MELANCHOLY II. The last hundred pages of Wuthering Heights died on me a bit, but BENITO CERENO and BILLY BUDD, SAILOR, wow, amazing to discover and recdiscover these.

Judith Butler in the @lrb.co.uk ‘refuse all forms of violence, including legal violence, in affirming the equality, value and interdependency of all living beings. Foolish and unrealistic, no doubt. But no less necessary for that.’

Wisteria on excellent form at @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social this morning.

Finished Melancholy I-II on Palm Sunday. The first novel is so severe, and I struggled to get much out of it, but the second is devastating, one of the most astonishing hundred pages that I've ever read. So bereft, so full of pity and honesty, so much embodied loss and kindness and hope.

I hadn't read Wuthering Heights since I was seventeen and had forgotten how crazed it is (or never realised back then). Terrifying, cosmic novel.

Took a run at some shorter Jon Fosse over the weekend; enjoyed Trilogy; Morning and Evening was resplendent, immense; Aliss at the Fire just incredible, devastating, every bit as great as Septology.

"Vicuña Porto was like the river; he grew with the rains." Antonio di Benedetto, Zama

I took the day off and read this amazing little novel. Jaeggy is incredible: I think Sweet Days of Discipline and Proleterka are the best things I've read all year.

Job alert! College Teaching Officer in English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

It’s the UK publication day for the New Oxford Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, featuring my critical introduction on theatrical innovation, rape, race, politics, and how the play has always forced audiences to confront their relationship with Shakespeare. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Last night: a rewatch of All That Heaven Allows. Everything about that film is wild, but the final scene is off the charts. What a shot.

‘The ungraspable phantom of life’: why puppetry is perfect for plumbing the deep mysteries of Moby-Dick

At the start of 2024, I resolved to read fifty books that weren't for work over the course of the year. I fell six short, but here's what I managed, along with my twelve favourites - six books that were new to me, and six others that I was going back to (or filling a gap with).

In case you were wondering, on the cover of the Brazilian Portuguese edition of Solenoid is an aerial drone view of downtown Bucharest.

You think the article is about an obscure rebellion about grain prices, but then someone really smart shows you that it's about what it means to be human among other humans—questions you never suspected anyone would ever put words to—and you can't ever see the world the same way.