William Shakespeare - Romeo & Juliet

This play was very enjoyable and a good read. It’s hard to tell how much of the enjoyment comes from its status as the archetypal love story in most Western European countries. Any attempt to discern this would be impossible given my cultural background so I won’t attempt to answer this question.


The play’s prologue is really beautifully worded and sets the scene for a fast paced narrative. It was exciting even though I was fairly familiar with the basic plot. It’s not a strictly realistic play insofar as some elements of the plot belong firmly in the realm of fantasy. The best example of this is the potion that Friar Laurence gives to Juliet to make her appear dead for 42 hours, which is medically impossibility. Another aspect of the plot that I was slightly suspicious of was Juliet’s decision to take this course of action in the first place. Why doesn’t she just run away and join Romeo in exile in Mantua straight away? Going through the rigamarole of pretending to be dead and spending a couple of days in a tomb seems a bit unnecessary. She already knows her parents will disown her if she refuses to marry Paris so in this sense she has nothing to lose. I suppose it is plausible that she fears a retaliation from her family if they find out she has eloped with Tybalt’s murder. In this case it may be safer to fake her own death. Against this, it is possible that news of her reunion with Romeo will reach her family in Verona and she will be discovered in any case. It’s not a major compliant and the play is clearly not supposed to be hyper realistic. This part of the plot is also essential in setting up the climatic tomb scene.


On the whole, the characters and dialogue are much more realistic than the plot. Of course, the speed and intensity with which Romeo and Juliet fall in love could be questioned. As could the willingness of Friar Laurence to lie and scheme on behalf of a couple of teenagers. On the other hand, scenes like the interaction between Juliet, her Nurse and Lady Capulet are excellent and instantly recognisable (Act 1 Scene 3).  The Nurse insists on recounting a nostalgic tale about Juliet’s childhood twice, in the true style of a domestic windbag, before being told to shut up by Juliet . Equally, the boisterous, swaggering chatterbox character of Mercutio is very well drawn and his bantering with Romeo in Act 1 Scene 4 also rings true:

ROMEO: I dreamt a dream tonight.
MERCUTIO And so did I.
ROMEO Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO That dreamers often lie.
ROMEO In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.

And later in the same scene, when Mercutio is recounting a lengthy monologue on the different types of dreams people have according to their tastes and interests, Romeo interrupts him saying:

ROMEO Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talkest of nothing.
MERCUTIO True. I talk of dreams; Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy; Which is as thin of substance as the air

Mercutio’s bawdy chatter with the Nurse is also a highlight of the more lighthearted sections of the play:

NURSE God ye good-morrow, gentlemen.
MERCUTIO God ye good-e’en, fair gentlewoman.
NURSE Is it good-e’en?
MERCUTIO ’Tis no less, I tell ye. For the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.
NURSE Out upon you! What a man are you!
(Act 2 Scene 4)


Of course, other sections of dialogue are far more stylised and there are several monologues that could never have a counterpart in natural speech but this is true of almost all theatre. Equally, I feel  this type of dialogue conveys the inner life of the characters, something that would be far harder to achieve if they were limited to everyday speech. Some of these sections are extremely beautiful and the language can be a joy to read. For example, when Romeo expresses his agitation to the Friar who is trying to calm him down after the murders of Mercutio and Tybalt:

ROMEO Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel.
Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,
An hour but married, Tybalt murderèd,
Doting like me, and like me banishèd,
Then mightst thou speak; then mightst thou tear thy hair, And fall upon the ground, as I do now, Taking the measure of an unmade grave. (Act 3 Scene 3)

Here, one can hardly say the form of speech is realistic but it contains such heartfelt and faithful feeling it seems entirely appropriate and is very effective. Also, throughout the play the dialogue is riddled with gnomic comments and observations. Again, this can hardly be considered true to life but the comments are circumspect and thought-provoking and lead the reader, or theatre goer, into interesting asides. This is one aspect of Shakespeare’s plays that makes them so enjoyable to read; they are rich with ideas and opinions to reflect on. There are too many to quote extensively but a few examples will suffice:

ROMEO The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law.
The world affords no law to make thee rich. Then be not poor, but break it and take this. (Act 5 Scene 1 to the Apothecary when he hesitates to sell Romeo illegal poison)

JULIET They are but beggars that can count their worth. (Act 2 Scene 6)

FRIAR For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime’s by action dignified. (Act 2 Scene 3)


There are also myriad sections where the poetry and euphony of the language make it a joy to read regardless of the ideas expressed.

ROMEO The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light, (Act 2 Scene 2)

ROMEO Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books; But love from love, toward school with heavy looks. (Act 2 Scene 2)

FRIAR Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift. Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift. (Act 2 Scene 3)

ROMEO O here Will I set up my everlasting rest And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! (Act 5 Scene 3)

ROMEO The time and my intents are savage-wild, More fierce and more inexorable far Than empty tigers or the roaring sea. (Act 5 Scene 3)

I really enjoyed reading this and look forward to seeing it again at the theatre now I have a deeper familiarity with the text. As I’ve tried to describe, the language is so rich and pregnant with different meanings; it’s truly polyvalent. Reading, as opposed to watching, the play gives more time to consult the notes and re-read. The plot is maybe a little too fairy story for my tastes but that’s the type of play it is and I really liked it for what it was.

Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

I found this book seriously underwhelming. It wasn’t completely devoid of enjoyment for me as Murakami has a tight, pithy writing style and there’s the odd simile or expression that’s really good. It’s readable and in this sense the prose is flowing and easy to consume. Some of the sections were Watanabe feels confused by his emotions when he is in love with both Midori and Naoko are well drawn too. I have too many problems with the characters, structure and narrative to really say I enjoyed this book.


First, Watanabe isn’t a likeable or believable character. He’s self-obsessed and posturing but at the same time strangely bland and one dimensional. At one point I thought that maybe Murakami was trying to write him as a typically self-obsessed 19 year old. For instance, he never mentions his family and seems to only think of himself. While at the same time believing that he is worthy and virtuous in a special way that makes him better than everyone else. The further I got into the book the more I thought that Murakami was trying to write a kind of sentimental, troubled and romantic character that he thought other people would think deep and dreamy. For me, he’s a total failure as a character and is a sort of superhero for pretentious young men who think themselves more intelligent and profound than everyone else. He seemingly has no interest in girls, except for his highly romantic love for Naoko, but they can’t get enough of him and his brooding self-absorption. Every girl he sleeps with orgasms even though he is only a 19 year old who hasn’t slept with many people. This is unrealistic. They all fall in love with him, Naoko can only get wet for him, Reiko gives up years of celibacy to sleep with him and it's apparently so good she never wants to have sex again (Chapter 11). Midori sums it up quite well when she says, ‘you’re all locked up in that little world of yours’ (Chapter 10) but the problem is that this world of his isn’t interesting or believable. He doesn’t talk much and what he does say isn’t engaging and so it’s a bit of stretch to think of him as this magnetic character that Murakami wants us to believe that he is. He’s always sitting around, lovesick and feeling sorry for himself, and indulges in some really overwrought, romantic sentiments like this section where his roomate gives him a firefly:

‘Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.
More than once I tried stretching my hand out in theat darkness. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond their grasp.’ (Chapter 3)

This struck me as twee, sentimental, posturing and pretentious. Amusingly, later on Midori talks about how she manages to get lots of work as a writer by inserting, ‘one little episode like that and people love it, it’s so graphic and sentimental’ (Chapter 4) and I immediately thought that this was a good description of Murakami’s style in portraying Watanabe. Watanabe’s month long trip sleeping rough after Naoko’s death is another example of unlikely sentimentalisation of depression. It’s like he is throwing together fairly unconnected stories and impressions in the belief that they’ll correspond to what people want. In this regard, I have to concede he has been pretty successful!


In general, the dialogue and behaviour of the students is far too grown up and sophisticated for people of their age. I was reminded of Donna Tartt’s Secret History where all the teenage students are ascribed highly adult ideas and conversations. It’s implausible and incongruous. Equally, there are inconceivable incidents like the dinner that Watanabe, Nagasawa and Nagasawa’s girlfriend have together where the couple start discussing their relationship in highly personal terms in front of Watanabe. Watanabe seems to be very intimate with Nagasawa’s girlfriend in spite of the fact he never seems to spend any time with her. As Nagasawa gets into a taxi he gives high falutin, overly certain assessment of Watanabe’s character to Watanabe and his girlfriend:

‘Watanabe’s practically the same as me. He may be a nice guy, but deep down in his heart he’s incapable of loving anybody. There’s always some part of him somewhere that’s wide awake and detached. He just has that hunger that won’t go away. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’ (Chapter 8)

Like a lot of the dialogue, it reads like a posturing middle aged author rather than the drunk student who we’re supposed to believe delivers it. To complete the farce, Watanabe tells Nagasawa’s girlfriend to dump him and Nagasawa doesn’t seem at all concerned by this and the two continue to be friends. Naoko’s character also indulges in the following sentimentalised assessment of her relationship with Kizuki. She claims that the two of them missed, ‘the pain of growing up’ and now have to, ‘pay the world back what we owed it’, using this as an explanation for his suicide. It’s all far too manicured and reads like a middle aged man writing about idealised, fictional teenage relationships rather than authentic dialogue or feeling. Naoko also talks about how her and Kizuki had, ‘no sense of the oppressiveness of sex or the anguish that comes with the sudden swelling of the ego that ordinary kids experience’ (all Chapter 6). This section is not only implausible but isn’t even internally consistent given that Naoko can’t even get wet to have sex with Kizuki so they never do it! There are lots of examples of this kind of sloppy character construction and inauthentic dialogue.


I was also extremely bored and unimpressed by the number of lengthy monologues that this book contains. Everyone seems to want to tell Watanabe their life story in highly stylised dialogue that would only ever really be found in a book. Naoko, Midori and Reiko all pour out implausibly long and well presented speeches on their lives that are only interrupted by an occasional nod or, ‘what happened next?’ from Watanabe. It’s a really lazy narrative device and doesn’t read at all well. These sections were a real slog to get through and reminded me of the writing style of cheap thrillers or romance novels where a character’s backstory is dumped out on the page in crude heaps of ugly, rambling text. It’s facile and guileless writing.


Another aspect of the book that really annoyed me is Murakami’s borrowing from other books without really acknowledging it or exploring it in any kind of detail. The most obvious example is Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Watanabe is reading this when he goes up into the mountains to visit Naoko at her own mountain sanatorium. The similarities are too numerous and obvious for anyone who’s read the book to miss. Watanabe takes a long journey to visit someone at the sanatorium, the place itself has a strange, other-worldly feel and a lifestyle and community all of its own. Just like Hans, Watanabe is physically assessed by a member of the community when he arrives. The food is delicious, just like in Magic Mountain. Many of the patients have been there for years and there is a suggestion that Watanabe may stay there for a long time if he settles into the rhythm of life there. The patients take their temperature and are involved in therapy, just like in Magic Mountain. The outside world is referred to as a distant and different place, just like the ‘flatlands’ in Mann’s book and the winters are snow filled and beautiful. Despite all of this, Watanabe doesn’t seem to notice or reflect on any of this even though he is reading the book while he is staying there. This is implausible and the only reference made to it is when Reiko says to Watanabe, ‘How could you bring a book like that to a place like this?’ and Watanabe thinks, ‘Of course, she was right’ (Chapters 5&6). I don’t see any reason why she was right to say this. On the whole, it just seems like Murakami borrows a lot of details from Magic Mountain and wants the reader to know that he has read it but doesn’t want to have his character reflect on it in any substantial way. This was irritating and unsatisfactory for me. He also seems to borrow lots of other bits and pieces during the course of the story like life being like a box of cookies, from Forrest Gump, and tigers turning to butter from Little Black Sambo. I’m sure there are others that I either didn’t notice or are borrowed from books I haven’t read. Of course, all authors borrow from other things that they have read but I felt in this book it was done in an especially unsubtle and artless way.


My last complaint about this book is the misogynistic tone that I felt permeated the whole story. All the women are more or less sexual objects for Watanabe including Reiko, which is the most implausible and confusing. The women are subservient to men and seem to define themselves only in reference to men. Naoko’s psychological problems are cast in a mainly sexual light and she only gains relief from them when she sleeps with Watanabe. She exposes herself to him in her sleep and is presented as an object for him to masturbate over. When Watanabe goes out with Nagasawa, girls are desperate to sleep with them and are even willing to swap partners if that’s what the men want. Reiko makes several jokes about rape when Watanabe is staying at the sanatorium and flirts with him. Of course, Watanabe ends up sleeping with her even though it doesn’t really fit the storyline and makes for a clunky conclusion. Midori’s conversation is sexually explicit from the outset and she gets upset when Watanabe doesn’t notice her new haircut or view her as an object for his sexual desire. Everything relating to women in the book is about sex and none of the women seem to be happy or fulfilled unless they are having sex with the wonderful, male Watanabe. Even when the women speak, Murakami has them denigrating themselves in comparison to men. Naoko writes, again highly implausibly, ‘Girls my age never use the word fair. Ordinary girls as young as I am are basically indifferent to whether things are fair or not. The central question for them is not whether something is fair but whether or not it is beautiful or will make them happy. Fair is a man’s word” (Chapter 5). This not only sounds like a man writing and not a young woman, it is also highly insulting to women of all ages. It’s a good example of both the bad, implausible dialogue and the misogynistic tone that occur throughout. The whole book primarily seems to portray women as weak sex objects that are desperate for the approval and validation of men. Nagasawa’s girlfriend is another perfect example of this theme.


The prose in this book is good but otherwise it’s pretty bad and annoyed me in several ways I’ve outlined above. I didn’t enjoy it much at all and at the end I thought about Nagasawa’s policy of only reading books by authors who have been dead for 30 years. He justifies this by saying, ‘It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature...but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short’ (Chapter 3). While this is an extreme statement, and not one I wholly agree with, this book was disappointing and I felt it was a bit of a waste of time reading it. Perhaps it will be considered a classic 30 years after Murakami’s death but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it!!

Robert Lipsyte - SportsWorld

Set in 60s and 70s America and featuring a cast of athletes and sports writers that I have no familiarity with, I think I would have found this book hard going if it wasn’t for the fascinating ideas about sports, culture and the intersection between the two that it contains. Structurally, the book is a pastiche; part memoir, part history of sports journalism in America, part feature piece on significant sportspeople, part philosophy of sports and part reflection on society. It was the last two facets that were really exciting to me and made the book worth reading. Like a lot of journalist’s books I’ve read, it struck me as a collection of long form articles rather than an especially coherent whole. I can forgive this as the individual articles are interesting enough, told with an experienced newspaper writer’s turn of phrase and eye for a story. What really made the book so interesting were the unfamiliar and uncommon observations Lipsyte makes about ‘Sportsworld’ and what that, in turn, says about society. First published in 1975, they still seem highly pertinent today.


Before I attempt to summarise the most powerful parts of the book, I’ll preface it by saying a bit about how I found out about it. I came across Robert Lipsyte while watching the excellent documentary OJ: Made in America, which also tries to locate sports in the wider context of society. Thinking that his comments as a talking head in the film were eloquent and erudite, I googled him and found out about this book. Out of print at the time, I pre-ordered it online and waited for a couple of months until it arrived. Reading the introduction and first chapters, I realised that Lipsyte is probably quite unusual for a sportswriter insofar as he is not a sports obsessive. He writes that he fell into sports writing ‘accidentally’ and never really attended many sports games before becoming a journalist. Equally, he wrote this book as, ‘my valedictory to sportswriting before I headed off to fiction’. Both of these facts may contribute to the refreshing and original flavour of this book. Neither sentimental glamorization of ‘Sportsworld’ and his role in it nor bleary eyed hagiographies of the sportspeople he writes about are to be found here. It is this unorthodox perspective that makes this book good.


The things I didn’t like about the book were outnumbered by the wealth of interesting ideas I found within it. That said, I do have a few criticism. As I mentioned in the introduction, it’s somewhat haphazard in its construction. Mixed in amongst the characterisations and reflections on SportsWorld are less appealing chapters such as a long and rambling chapter on Muhammad Ali (Chp 4), an arcane history of modern American sports journalism (Chp 6) and some fairly mundane meditations on Lipsyte’s own experiences learning to play tennis (Chp 7). They’re not totally unconnected to what he is writing about; Ali is the quintessentially objectified athlete, journalism is the means of observing and marketing sports to the masses and Lipsyte’s tennis lessons are an example of sports being played and enjoyed rather than consumed. These were not terrible chapters in and of themselves but seemed to stray from the central argument of the book. The writing is generally good but there is one absolute clanger for a British reader. Lipsyte, clearly with one eye on his mainly American readership, recounts an anecdote where former French president Charles De Gaulle uses a rugby metaphor about, then UK Prime Minister, Harold Wilson’s attempt to push Britain into the Common Market. “He’s a linesman who thinks he’s an offensive back” (p10), quotes Lipsyte, apparently unconcerned by the fact that these are American football positions and not rugby football ones! To my mind, he should have kept the original quote and explained it or discarded it altogether. For any reader who knows anything about rugby it’s a meaningless aberration and a brazen misuse of quotation marks! I’ll refrain from making any further comments about journalists and their propensity to fabricate helpful quotations. Lastly, whoever was responsible for ‘editing’ this book did almost no work at all as the text is littered with scores of basic typos and spelling errors.


When you grow up loving to compete and play sports this very easily leads to loving to watch competitive sports. Watching the most skillful players practice their craft holds an addictive allure. That allure is only enhanced by the opportunity to discuss their exploits with your friends and competitors in the playground. The view that sports are a pretty much unmitigated positive seemed a fairly orthodox and uncontroversial truth to me for most of my life. Sports are fun, sports are cool, what could possibly be wrong with sports? Occasionally, I would wonder if it was quite such an unmitigated good that society allocates so much money to go to such a small group of young men. But I would tell myself that was just the way a market for talent worked and that I too was contributing to these astronomical salaries by loving sport so much! I also feel that this positive view of sports is fairly mainstream and widely held. For example, here is a quote from The Economist, June 9th 2018 that I was reading at the same time as Sportsworld, “We see in the World Cup the fulfilment of some of our most cherished values”. Sport represents progress via the formative crucible of competition. Competition is fun and natural. As a race, we compete our way to greater and greater achievement and glory. It’s evolution, it’s the way the world works! Sportsworld helped me to think about these beliefs and preconceptions in a new light.


To continue with the example of the soccer world cup that’s taking place in Russia at the moment. First, the current tournament, and the next in Qatar, take place in authoritarian countries with dodgy human rights records. This is probably connected to FIFA’s well publicised problems with bribery and corruption. Are these the ‘most cherished values’ of the Western, capitalist world as exemplified by The Economist? The truthful answer may well be, ‘Yes!’ but this is most definitely not the image that ‘SportsWorld’ wants to portray of itself, which is broadly one of clean, fair competition and sporting excellence. Players choose which country they will represent based on what the law will allow. Some have special visas issued and even switch allegiances halfway through their careers, if their lawyers can appease the relevant authorities. This is hardly a representation of the much vaunted pride and passion of playing for one’s country that is constantly referred to by pundits, media and commentators alike. On the pitch too , I think there is a good case to be made for questioning the values on display. Players dive, hack, spit at each other, feign injury, run down the clock when it suits them, use abusive language towards the officials and will broadly do whatever they can to win. This is fundamental to SportsWorld; win at all costs. But why do we accept, and even celebrate, these otherwise repugnant and sociopathic behaviours? In any other arena they would surely be explicitly condemned even if they might find more acceptance privately. What does it say about our society? A cheat is branded a ‘ruthless competitor’, with a good deal of admiration in many cases, and his or her indiscretions on the field are explained away by the fact that they’re ‘a different person off the pitch’ and give money to orphanages and old folks' homes. What SportsWorld is really saying, behind all the marketing razzmatazz and bullshit, is, ‘it doesn’t matter how you achieve it but you must win’. This is a highly questionable message that Lipsyte exposes and examines in several interesting ways.


As well as exemplifying questionable behaviour and ethics, the structure of sports also attracts criticism from Lipsyte. Owners bully competing cities into building stadiums with public money and ruthlessly move their franchises based on the best deal available to them. Is this really the best use of public funds or the kind of attitude that a true fan of a sports team would display? Instead, Lipsyte sees America’s major league owners as motivated by the same suspect values of Sportsworld; self interest and success at all costs. Wealthy owner’s teams are useful tax shelters, players are seen as assets to be depreciated over time as their utility declines with age and damage to their bodies. This kind of objectification of individuals is in some senses inhumane. It’s interesting to note that sports seems to be the only industry where an employee is legally sold by one employer to another. A player cannot move without the consent of his owner, a situation which would be illegal and intolerable in any other industry. This strikes me as a clear example of the owners supremacy over the employees; who are objectified and commodified. Sports has little interest in the well-being of its players once they have ceased to serve their useful purpose. That purpose is to perform for their owners and to please them by bringing success to the team, the town and the fans. If they can’t do this then they are discarded. Their entire existence revolves around pleasing others whether that be making their owner rich and famous or carrying the dreams of their childhood friends and neighbours into the major leagues. Problems like these are usually dismissed with a scoff because some sports people are paid so much money to do something many other people wish they could do too. How can these people be exploited when they earn so much money? A much quoted Sports Illustrated statistic that 78% of players of former NFL players are, ‘bankrupt or under ‘financial stress’ within two years of retirement’ gives a drastically different perspective. Not to mention all those who never make it to the rarified atmosphere of the highly paid top leagues and work in the far less remunerative lower tiers of the professional sports.


Perhaps the problem is more easily apprehended via the hyper competitive world of high school and college recruitment. Indeed, it may be here that many American sportsmen and women begin the shambolic induction into SportsWorld that will serve them so poorly in the real world. In high school and college, the money isn’t so big. Although large amounts of it change hands under the table in yet another indictment of the true values of SportsWorld. Young athletes are incessantly recruited from an early age by multiple intermediaries, often with their own best interests taking precedence over the child’s. They will move house to fit into the right catchment area, sometimes they are seperated from the ‘bad influences’ of their parents and siblings to be transplanted into a foreign world where they are only loved for what they can do on the pitch and the glory they can bring to their coaches and schools. Academic and behavioural rules cease to apply to this ‘privileged’ class and they are showered with scholarships, illicit payments and hundreds of other perks as long as they keep producing the goods on the pitch. The scale and extent of cheating that goes on could fill several volumes and, again, paints a sorry picture of the world’s best loved pastime. Why do elite academic institutions, supposedly existing to promote knowledge, truth and learning, ride roughshod over these supposedly sacred values in the name of sporting success? Essentially because it is good marketing, serves the vicarious fantasies of other students, fans and alumni and can be profitable too. Lipsyte writes about poor teenagers from the ghettos in NY and their progression to the big athletic schools in basketball:

“Products of the “city game”, they reappear as college stars in South Carolina and Tennessee and West Texas and Wisconsin, often after a year of ‘prepping’ at one of several small private academies in the South and West that seem to exist primarily to sand off the roughest of their streety ways and teach them to understand, if not speak, white English. The conventional SportsWorld wisdom, that most of these young men would never have a chance to attend college without basketball, is absolutely true. And a condemnation of the educational system that barely needs comment.” p126

This reminded me a lot of Netflix series I watched called Last Chance U about a junior college where misfits from the college recruitment processes go for one last chance to gain a scholarship to a big school for American football. Almost all are poor, almost all struggle academically; but in Mississippi there exists a place where they can go on a full scholarship to serve the continual drive for competitive success. The coaches in these environments are often seen as quasi social workers, helping underprivileged children to find a way out of the poverty and deprivation of their indigenous social environments. But Lipsyte asks us to question if they’re not simply exploiting these children for their own ends in the same way the whole system seems to? The fact that I enjoyed watching it so much made me sad that I am so enthrall to what is ultimately such an empty fantasy for the vast majority of the young people that pass through the sporting scholarship process. Books like Friday Night Lights and films like Hoop Dreams highlight the same issues. Are these young people really being granted opportunities or are they simply grist to the mill for a system that exploits them for other people’s ends? They are sold a fantasy of escapism that will eventually do them more harm than good and, crucially, do nothing to alter the horrifying social circumstances they are trying to escape. Lipsyte likens it to drug addiction in a different form when writing about young basketball players:

“Basketball is a hard drug too...He is not practicing to gain the recognition of his peers or to impress girls or get a college scholarship; at that moment [flashy slam dunk] he is on a trip, and for as long as he is on it, he is everything he wants to be. It should not be surprising that so many playground aces are junkies with dope, too.” (p130-1)


SportsWorld is intimately involved in selling this empty fantasy to both players and fans alike. Lipsyte is very candid about the role that journalists and sports media play in this marketing machine. SportsWorld is a dreamland where talent, competitive spirit and a win at all costs mentality can get you millions of dollars, beautiful women and the adoration of all sports fans. Nevermind that the vast majority of aspiring athletes fail to make anything out of their total dedication to their sport and leave it with nothing more than a neglected education and significantly impaired employment prospects. Fans too dream of being paid astronomical sums for doing something they love without ever being exposed to the negative side of the system. Journalists, according to Lipsyte, can’t and won’t write about it for fear of upsetting the apple cart and losing their access to teams and players. SportsWorld wants positive press and not revelations that will damage the sport that is being successfully used to market every conceivable product and service. As such, the media perpetuate the myth of SportsWorld as a healthy, wholesome utopia. Wages and transfer fees are one good example that Lipsyte uses. These figures are usually vastly inflated but it is no one’s interest to expose this. Athletes don’t want their egos damaged by revealing that they are being paid far less than their rivals or peers. Journalists, owners and marketing departments know that it’s great advertising; everyone wants to see the man who is worth $200m or is being paid $20m a year to play. It gets a huge amount of press coverage, makes good headlines, sells replica shirts and brings more fans to the stadium and eyeballs to the screens showing the game, which in turn brings more endorsements. It’s not in anyone’s interest to uncover the darker side of sports and the fans don’t want their fantasy spoilt. Lipsyte is remarkably candid on this topic and writes:

“Sportswriters, presumably speaking for their constituents, the fans, react badly against holdouts, strikes, and lawsuits by players, because it unmakes the magic: Fans do not really want players to humanise themselves too much. Pictures of wives and kids in the yearbook, okay, but the sportswriters thought Ron Swoboda went too far the year he said he was ashamed to face his wife after the paltry raise the Mets had given him. He was ashamed to face his wife. Who isn’t? Who needs a National Pastime to hear that?” (p210)


Lipsyte also extrapolates how the rhetoric and implied values of SportsWorld extend into other aspects of our lives and society. It’s hard, if not impossible, to decipher which of these came first. A classic chicken and egg situation. However, when you look at the exploding popularity of sports and the ever more commercialised and personality driven nature of politics you could be forgiven for thinking the situation is deteriorating. Against that, Roman books like Cicero’s How to Win An Election would give the impression that the more things change, the more they stay the same! For Lipsyte, Nixon was the apotheosis of SportsWorld culture as represented in the political world. In the 2018 preface to the book he also refers to Trump as, ‘an avatar of the worst aspects of jock culture’. He also bemoans the fact that he granted him column inches as, ‘an entertaining if unreliable subject’ admitting that, ‘we didn’t take him seriously enough because we stayed in the press boxes interviewing each other instead of wandering through the bleachers talking to the fans’. This is characteristically honest and self-critical writing from Lipsyte and other examples abound throughout the book. Nonetheless, in spite of the urge to view contemporary events as the worst in history and the temptations to identify signs of the end of empire all around us, the culture is probably largely the same now as it was in the 70s. This theory would explain the abiding relevance that I see in the ideas of this book. Returning to Nixon and the similarities between the empty fantasy and the grubby realty in both sports and politics, Lipsyte writes this:

“It took Nixon and the seventies for us to realise that both American capitalism and American football were elaborate hoaxes, and that not only were they contradictory to each other, but each was self-contradictory.
Here was football demanding that gratification be deferred until a specific goal was reached, while capitalism urged us to desire and consume without purpose, or selectively sacrifice so we could desire and consume again.
Here was football demanding collective spirit within each team and total antagonism among all opposing teams, while opposing owners operated jointly to keep their costs down, their prices up, and their employees indentured. If there was a larger lesson in that, perhaps it was that in capitalism, as in football, the regulations to balance growth and power were actually conspiracies to control the workers. And just as football was mock war, contained and regulated, so had war become mock war, contained and regulated. But shoulders and knees still popped , and young men still came home in rubber bags.” p46

There is an element of newspaper sensationalism in this but also an undeniable element of truth. The rich get richer and control more and more of the world while the masses are fed the distractions of sports and politics, which are both reported on by and controlled by elite interests. The ideas and philosophies of SportsWorld are both ethically questionable and fundamentally conformist. As Lipsyte puts it:

“The player who will do anything to win may turn maddog on the field, but he will not march in campus demonstrations during the season. The coach who will do anything to win may divert anti poverty grants to the athletic department slush fund but he will not disparage the educational standards of the university. The businessman who will do anything to win may steal a rival’s formula but he will not expose price-fixing in the industry. And the presidential candidate who will do anything to win may lie, steal, commit unspeakable perversions, but he can be relied upon never to upset the social structure that allowed him to play in the biggest leagues” (p8)

One of the strangest things about looking back on this book from 2018 is that two of the books non-conformist heros, Muhammed Ali and Billie Jean King, have been recruited to its pantheon of heroes. This involves more than a little hypocrisy on the part of SportsWorld but also highlights its ability to assimilate new ideas to adjust to the tastes and beliefs of different ages. As Lipsyte puts it in his introduction, these former rebels, ‘have been bleached into sainthood’. Only time will tell if the early signs of fresh athletic protest represented by Colin Kaepernick and several championship teams refusal to endorse Trump by attending the White House will result in a fundamental change of culture in SportsWorld or will be, ‘subverted and co-opted as it was fifty years ago’. Sadly, I feel like the power of self interest and money may see it, ‘channelled into hustling for endorsements’ once again.


None of this goes to say that sports are inherently evil or bad. Quite the opposite, it is the pleasure and exhilaration of sports that makes it such a powerful tool for advertisers and others to exploit. It would hardly work so well if it were not. Just like sex has been used to sell and influence public opinion in ways described in documentaries like Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self, so too has sports. In probably the best single sentence synopsis of the book’s central argument, Lipsyte writes:

“The joy of sport is as real and accessible as the joy of sex; and both have been distorted and commercialised to make us consume and conform” (p254)

However, these issues are so complex and hard to apprehend I think it is a fair criticism of this book and films like Century of the Self that they’re a little too glib and slick. Both reduce mind-boggling complexity and confusion into a comprehensible, unorthodox thesis that’s easy to dismiss as a conspiracy theory. Against this, in order to make a powerful and compelling idea accessible, it is necessary to simplify it. It is impossible to write a opinion without bias and there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion. The value of an idea is not totally negated just because it has some flaws or doesn’t deal with every single objection. Given that the ideas contained in both presentations of consumerism are quite rare, I feel it is forgivable that both take a hugely difficult subject and attempt to make it more facile in their pursuit of making the strongest possible counter-argument to accepted thinking.


After reading this damning indictment of SportsWorld, I began to wonder, ‘is all competition a bad thing?’ Looking around for evidence to support this theory, it’s not hard to find. The career of Lance Armstrong is an excellent example of how extreme competition creates extreme cheating, lying and deception. The 2017 film Icarus, shows that successfully avoiding doping rules and regulations is perhaps the most important part of a cycling team’s job. Many riders have come out to say that the problem is endemic. Cycling is certainly not alone. The entire Russian Olympic team was banned from competition after the discovery of a state sponsored doping program. Track athletes are regularly banned or stripped of their medals for failing drugs tests. Baseball too has had its own widespread use of doping exposed. The examples are too numerous to go on listing.


Perhaps sports like soccer are less prone to this kind of cheating as there is no simple way to boost skill in the ways athletics or cycling teams can boost endurance and shorten recovery times. Nonetheless, when there is so much money involved and winning is pursued at all costs it feels naive to assume that teams and individuals in all sports aren’t doing everything in their power, legal and illegal, to achieve this aim. Perhaps we should just accept that doping is so widespread that we should abandon any regulations and allow athletes to do whatever they want in their pursuit of victory. I would agree with this type of philosophy when it comes to the use of recreational drugs. The ‘War on Drugs’ has been such an abject failure, why continue to criminalise citizens, at huge expense to the taxpayer, when all these drugs are freely available almost anywhere in the world? Here, the argument goes that it is better to regulate, supervise and tax these highly dangerous substances rather than put their production and distribution in the hands of violent and dangerous criminals. But in the case of sports, leaving aside the long term health of athletes, which strikes me as an equivalent concern in recreational drugs, it feels like the spirit and joy of sports is being undermined by this obsession with competition and winning. It’s exactly the kind of distortion that Lipsyte is writing about.


Some may counter these kinds of arguments by saying that competition is fun and natural. But I would counter by asking if cheating is really a value that we should celebrating and upholding so vigorously in society. Many financial crises, wars, public health, bribery and price fixing scandals can trace their cause to exactly this kind of win at all costs, SportsWorld mentality. Inequality and all its attendant social issues may well also trace its roots to this competitive fervour. It could be argued that this kind of self-interest is fundamental to human behaviour and the way the world operates both within society and within nature. But this strikes me as rather determinist and fatalistic. Shouldn’t we be trying to overcome our social or genetic pre-conditioning? More primitive societies concerned themselves with fighting over land, cattle and women. We rightly place ourselves above them and can justifiably feel proud of public healthcare, education and infrastructure. Perhaps future generations will look back scornfully on this era where competition and victory were deified in the same way we now look at war as uncivilised and destructive. Until very recently, soldiers were celebrated for killing and overcoming enemies whereas now almost no one can name the top officials in their country’s armed forces. Lipsyte makes this point too:

“Once we had carelessly scooped out our heroes from the soldier-statesmen-athlete pool. But in 1951 the military dried up when President Truman dismantled Douglas MacArthur, posthumously demoting Mad Anthony, Stonewall Jackson, Sergeant York, and Patton. Soldiers would never again be given their moments in the sun, much less their seven days in May. By the late sixties, the media had somehow turned the medal of honour into a psycho’s badge. Vietnam veterans and prisoners of war came home in 1974 to the perfunctory welcomes reserved for losing teams in state championships” (p209)

But it is also possible that the last few relatively peaceful decades in Western Europe are just a statistical anomaly and that humans will forever compete and fight each other. It could even be argued that this is the only way for our species to progress, evolve and survive. As I wrote before, I find this a depressing prospect. Institutions like slavery, ownership of women and punishing homosexuality were all thought of as natural at certain points in history. I would argue that it is a sign of progress that we have abandoned these cruel and inhumane practices and I hope that murdering and warmongering will have the same fate. Clearly, these are incredibly difficult subjects to prognosticate upon and no one can know what he future holds. Good, evil and morality can all be seen as entirely relative concepts, which would relegate my opinions and theories to little more than a reflections of the fashions and fads of my particular period of history. I hope this isn’t true but it’s not possible to prove or support this in any concrete way.


This book led me to think about sports, its place in society and what it says about us as a people and civilisation in many interesting ways. Much like this essay, it could probably be accused of oversimplification and grandiose theorising about mankind. Nonetheless, I feel like this kind of thinking is both fascinating and valuable. I can certainly say that I enjoyed reading it and thinking about the ideas it contains.

Yu Hua - China in Ten Words

Written in plain, flowing and readable prose this book organises one author’s reflections on the China’s history and development around the ten words that he feels best characterise it. It has an easy, conversational feel of a man recounting stories from his eclectic past. Deceptively homely and easy to read, nevertheless it conjures vivid depictions. He draws on his experiences of childhood during the Cultural Revolution, his work as a tooth-puller and then an author under the Communist regime and observations about China since the advent of the open door policy and market reforms. He moves easily from one anecdote or observation to the next, varying between highly personal, childhood recollections, national news reports and even macro-economic observations. While such a disparate selection of vignettes might run the risk of becoming rambling or veering off topic when dealing with such complex, wide-ranging issues. His account strikes a fine balance between his own experience and his ideas about Chinese culture and history as a whole. Yu Hua always manages to gather together the various strands and leaves you with a feeling of comprehension and appreciation of a zeitgeist that can be absent from more strictly factual or chronological accounts. I felt this was supported by his skill in selecting poignant stories to tell, his eye for detail in furnishing these accounts with details and his smooth prose.


China’s passion for revolution and the chaotic society that it created left me feeling dumbstruck that something so widespread could have happened in such a huge country. How did these ideas take root so rapidly and deeply, I kept wondering? It’s easy, and comforting, to dismiss it as a quixotic mass mania, completely alien to me and the society I know and have grown up in. But this must surely be a mistake as what a Chinese revolutionary, or a Russian one, or a French one or a German Nazi felt at the time is probably what I would have felt in the same context. Whatever seems incomprehensible in history, in some sense, exists within us, however repressed, and needs only the correct circumstances to become patent. While I believe this to be fundamentally true, it is still a huge imaginative challenge to think of having such strong feelings of loyalty and devotion to Chairman Mao and the Revolution that I would happily inform on my friends and family in the full knowledge that they would face prison or be shot. But these things happened with such regularity that it must be accepted, however wild and unlikely it seems today. Yu Hua doesn’t seem to try and spare his own revolutionary activities from the repugnant light that they’re seen in by Western eyes today. He honestly recounts a horrible story about beating up a peasant who had come to his town to illegally sell his oil coupons to fund his wedding. He and his friends do this out of vigilance against counter revolutionaries that seems cruel and unnecessary by today’s standards. Such was the fervour of their revolutionary zeal. Another facet of this incredible enthusiasm that I was unaware of before is the position of popularity that Mao still occupies in China today. In the West, Mao is a criminal; guilty of atrocious human rights abuses with the blood of millions of his starved countrymen on his hands. But 85% of modern Chinese people interviewed think his return would be a good thing! I still find myself incredulous at this statistic even as I write it now and even when I reflect on the huge amount of propaganda that supported Mao’s life and legacy I still find it hard to see why the huge number of deaths under his regime don’t identify him as a shambolic and evil leader among ordinary citizens today although I supposed I could be accused of parroting Western propaganda by saying that!


One aspect that may support this lasting positive view of Mao and Communism is the euphoria Yu Hua describes during the early days of revolution. All classes and factories close as people are all too busy, ‘making revolution’. Goods and services that normally cost money become free, food is abundant and plentiful, people travel freely around the country with all trains and accommodation expenses provided for and everyone feels bound together by feelings of camaraderie and revolutionary spirit. He describes a scene in Beijing when he feels a blast of warm air on a chilly night during the early days of the revolution and eventually discovers its source as tens of thousands of people singing revolutionary songs at a bridge. They have come together to defend it against the army and are undeterred by their lack of weapons such is the strength of their feeling.


If the consequences of the revolution weren’t so tragic they would certainly be comic. Suddenly, social order is totally inverted. Children can openly insult and assault their teachers, Yu Hua’s brother burnishes his revolutionary credentials by punching his teacher in the face as a 9 year old, and everything is justifiable by reference to one of Mao’s sayings. Usually, ‘to rebel is necessary’. People form themselves into impromptu gangs, claim power and legitimacy from Mao and the Revolution and fight to the death for the government seals that signify power like school children playing capture the flag. Yu Hua remembers walking around his town watching street fights as a form of entertainment in his childhood days. Adults can be cowed by children simply by their threatening to brand them ‘counter revolutionaries’ or ‘capitalist roaders’. Mass humiliation and public execution appear to become the norm in terms of public entertainment. People are thrown in jail or shot for folding a picture of Mao across his face or accidentally contradicting something he said. Rich people suddenly become society’s least fortunate members, almost sure to be purged as capitalists, and those who lost fortunes in the recent past count their lucky stars that they are poor now. This was the case with Yu Hua’s family and is also depicted by the main protagonist in the film To Live. A gang of revolutionaries can authorise travel, condemn people to death, invade people’s homes and steal their property all in the name of the revolution and Chairman Mao. Only to be purged and replaced by another gang proclaiming exactly the same thing! It reminded me of what I have read about witch hunts in Britain during the 16th and 17th century. Everyone lives in fear in a fevered environment of violence and accusations where anything is justifiable by appeal to an unquestioned principle. Everyone accuses everyone of being a counter revolutionary and no one is safe from this ill-defined and changeable crime that carries the most deadly consequences. The contradiction and chaos are too much to comprehend and have all the trappings of high farce. Yu Hua does a good job of capturing some of this topsy-turvy world through his quotidien observations of childhood during this period. Again, it is hard to think of any ideology powerful enough to make me think that shooting my neighbour is a justifiable or acceptable act but surely I would have behaved in the same way or have ended up dead for my failure to conform. What happened to people’s humanitarian conscience in this era? Did people cease to care for one another? How did death and violence become so everyday so suddenly? It shows what a powerful drug revolution must have been.


Yu Hua draws interesting parallels between the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic miracle of the past 30 years. Just as the fervour of revolution swept all before it, now the obsession with wealth, growth and personal gain justifies all. This may be, in part, what makes people nostalgic for certain aspects of revolutionary philosophy. In the same way people went mad for revolution, now people go mad for money and development in a way that Yu Hua depicts as characteristically Chinese. The same zeal that allowed a whole society to be turned on its head has allowed it to grow rich and expand faster than any other in history. But just as the revolution spawned violence, death and tragedy in its wake; so the explosion of capitalism has lead to what Yu Hua calls ‘unequal development’. Old women are bulldozed in their houses by government officials chasing ever higher GDP growth, company directors have their legs broken in pursuit of company seals, corruption has become endemic and the powerful spend millions of dollars on apartments while millions of their countrymen still live in poverty. ‘Copycatting’ and ‘bamboozling’, once frowned upon as immoral and distasteful, are now considered acceptable, even desirable, in the pursuit of wealth. Yu Hua paints both as the results of Chinese avidity and intensity.


There were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy about this book. Both relate to what I see as a tendency to sentimentalise and romanticise. First, although the general quality of the prose is excellent, it is occasionally spoiled by a hackneyed simile or metaphor like, ‘scattered far and wide like leaves in the autumn breeze’ or something equally cliched. Secondly, when Yu Hua relates his tale of copying out illegal books he talks about copying Duma’s ‘La dame aux Camelias’ in one night with his friend. Even though he tells us that the beginnings and endings of these dogeared, underground editions would often be missing, I find it impossible to believe that two young boys copied out 250 pages of text in one night. Especially as this would have been in Chinese characters, which are wildly inefficient and time consuming to write! The subsequent story about how he couldn’t read his friend’s characters and vice versa, while amusing, is equally unlikely as they could hardly have stood under a street lamp and read 200 odd pages out loud in one evening. I suppose Yu Hua is a born storyteller and, like most storytellers, is inclined to embellish his stories a bit for artistic improvement or narrative efficiency! Yu Hua quotes a Chinese saying himself that says, ‘there’s no tax on bullshit’!


On the whole, I enjoyed this book and felt it gave a vivid depiction of a period of Chinese history that is often encountered in a more formally historical fashion. He also draws interesting connections between this period and modern China while making illustrative observations about both. Of course, as I have written throughout this piece, much of the psychology and mindset of this era must remain a mystery to me as an anachronistic observer, living in an entirely different context. Nonetheless, I have the feeling, perhaps misplaced, that I understand a little more now than I did when I started the book.

George Orwell - Animal Farm

I read this book as a teenager and my overwhelming recollection is a feeling of anger and injustice at the lot of the ordinary, unintelligent animals at the hands of first the humans and then, more gratuitously because they purport to be helping them, the pigs. This feeling of indignation is best represented by the treatment of Boxer. When I re-read the book these feelings remained but what I found new, or at least failed to recall from my last reading, was a grim sense of inevitability about the pigs’ corruption once they get into power and the descent into brutal exploitation of the weaker members of the their society. The animals could never break free from the humans and establish their own order without the intelligence of the pigs. Old Major gives the philosophical underpinnings of their revolution in his excellent rallying speech at the book’s beginning. Beyond that, the animals would never have been able to defend the farm from the first attack of the humans if it were not for the pigs learning about military strategy from the books they find in the farmhouse (Chp 4, pp24-9). As such, when Squealer argues that the pigs deserve their special treatment and dispensations in order to prevent the return of the humans; there is some truth to it. For example:

“‘Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades,’ cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, ‘surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?’” (p23)

To me, this seems to indicate that those with superior intelligence or abilities must necessarily lead and sustain the revolution but that once they have achieved this aim they will naturally see themselves as more deserving than their fellow animals. This sense of entitlement leads to a corruption of equality, the inauguration of special privileges and the establishment of a ruling class. ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others’ (Chp 10). Once in power, Orwell seems to be saying, everyone becomes a despot, it’s just the natural order of things. This message seems to be repeated at the book’s conclusion when Orwell writes, ‘Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be, much better or much worse - hunger, hardship and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.’ (p86). This looks like an admission that inequality and exploitation are the inevitable outcomes of leadership or even of the functioning of life in the world as we know it. Self-interest trumps any communal spirit and the strong manipulate and mistreat the weak to their own ends. The book seems to be saying leadership necessarily leads to corruption and the creation of an elite, which then exploits and suppresses the working class. I was reminded of this quote from the character Mark Staithes in Aldous Huxley’s, Eyeless in Gaza:

“What did the French peons get out of their revolution? Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter? A few years of pleasant intoxication. Then the same old treadmill. Gilded, perhaps; repainted. But in essentials the old machine.”

Perhaps I’m simply more jaded and cynical than I was as a teenager but this bleak conclusion was the overriding impression the book left upon me.


As a treatise against communism, or perhaps just its Russian manifestation, the book has clearly identifiable themes and equivalents that are apparent even to someone as ignorant about Soviet era communism as I am. Old Major as Marx, Napoleon as Stalin, Boxer as some version of Stakhanov, Snowball as Trotsky and Squealer as a wily head of propaganda who’s name I don’t know! There are also events and themes that obviously ape Communist Russia; mismanagement of large projects and misallocation of resources leads to hunger and famine (p50), Napoleon’s use of young puppies to create an indoctrinated secret police (p22), the re-writing of Snowball’s place in the farm’s history and its battles (p54, p65, p78), Napoleon’s adoption of more and more grandiose titles (p61), the creation of a bureaucracy to justify and cement the elites position (p86), variable and contradictory foreign policies (p66), wildly positive official statistics (p61) and Squealer’s repeated sophistry in explaining away the pigs’ abrogation of the original rules (p23, p37, p44, p46, p83). Another facet of Communism that I thought was well portrayed was how the birth of Napoleon’s children definitively establishment of a ruling class (p76). I’ve always thought that the strength of family ties and the desire to see one’s children succeed or be comfortable must always undermine a Communist philosophy. You could also argue that self-interest performs the same role; both seem to be too powerful and fundamental to be restrained for any substantial period of time. Beyond these more obvious representations there were some that I was less sure about. For example, who do the wild animals in the following quote represent?

“The attempt to tame the wild creatures, for instance , broke down almost immediately. They continued to behave very much as before, and when treated with generosity simply took advantage of it” (Snowball, p20)

Is it simply a representation of true human nature or does it refer to efforts at Communist foreign policy and diplomacy towards non-Communist countries? I also wondered if the windmill represented nuclear power specifically or just a brighter, less laborious future facilitated by technology more generally? Moses the raven seems to clearly represent religion with his talk of a promised ‘Sugarland’ above the clouds but I was less clear what his reappearance later on symbolised (p78)? I presume that anyone preaching religion in Stalinist Russia wouldn’t have lasted long but perhaps he represents those missionaries brave enough to try!


The sale of Boxer to the slaughter house after he can no longer work and the pigs’ spending of the proceeds on a banquet is the most heart-rending and repugnant episode in the book. Here, Orwell seems to be displaying Russian Communism as evil and not just making the more general point about the strong exploiting the weak that I started this essay with. Alternatively, he may be making the point that while power in a democracy is limited, thus limiting the extent of corruption amongst the elites, that in a Communist system the absolute nature of the leader’s power results in absolute corruption! Beyond this, I wondered what Orwell would make of the rich, powerful families that fund and control so much of politics in many democracies.


If there was anything that I would criticise in this book it would be these two very minor points. First, on p16 the disappearance of the milk is the first hint of greed and selfishness on the part of the pigs. However, on p18 it also says ‘nobody stole’ but, to my mind, the pigs appropriation of the milk should be seen as theft. Equally, on p51, the farm begins to sell eggs to make up for short falls elsewhere but if all the eggs up to this point had hatched chicks then wouldn’t the farm be absolutely overrun with chickens?!


These very minor considerations aside, I really loved this book and thought it was powerful, pithy and provocative!

Ali Smith - Free Love and Other Stories

The good stories in this are really wonderful and sketch vivid, evocative scenes with just the right amount of detail. Free Love, Text for the day, Jenny Robertson your friend isn’t coming, the second passage in To the cinema and College were all good; especially Text for the day. The less good stories either had too little information in them, making them feel disconnected and obscure (Scary, The unthinkable happens to people everyday), or were overly sentimental, too neat and tidy or twee (A story of folding and unfolding, The touching of wood). Conversely, A quick one had a really excellent ending and Cold Iron had an ending I enjoyed too, even if it is a little sentimental, because I liked the idea of gathering things together and trying to think out a story that makes sense. I really loved the best stories but overall it was a mixture.

Free Love is good and i liked the way it was ambiguous as to whether it was a boy or girl for the first page or so. The recollections have a warm, youthful glow and the details are terse but full of richly descriptive context. Very enjoyable and evocative but not so much in a sexual way. Even though the story is explicitly about sex and sexuality, its sex scenes are sparse and minimalist.

A story of folding and unfolding is quite bad and doesn’t really capture either of the situations it describes vividly. Scene of recently bereaved father is better than the electricians bantering in the girls’ dormitory. A little too romantic and twee for me. Also a bit grand and theatrical in its conception.

Text for the day. Loved the idea of the whole story and it’s rapid, haphazard pace. The voices are funny and likeable, especially on the telephone sections. The idea of the book fuelled hiatus from work and life was fantastic. Perhaps leaving a paper trail behind her as she went was a little pretentious - what would you think of someone actually ripping up books in front of you? - but the whole concept was so cool I really enjoyed the overall effect. The prose, characters and narrative all seemed to chime together on this and it was my favourite so far.

A Quick One. I wasn’t so sure about the descriptions of love making at the beginning of this but the atmosphere of meeting up with an old lover at the cafe is really well done. I also really liked the end, which isn’t prim and doesn’t try to tie up too many loose ends or stuff a huge amount of the protagonist's narrative into two paragraphs.

Jenny Robertson your friend isn’t coming was beautifully mundane and uneventful. The protagonist was whinging and seemed to be unusually preoccupied with illness. It was an enjoyable, realistic description of a trip for dinner and a film told from the perspective of someone who doesn’t seem to be happy unless they’re moaning!

The cinematic theme in To the cinema didn’t really resonate with me but I liked the thinly sketched scenes of domestic deterioration. The protagonist seems unhappy in her relationship and seems to be under pressure to have a baby from Geoff, her partner. She seems to have a day job in marketing but works at the cinema on Sundays, which Geoff attributes to her ‘vulgar streak’. The stifling effect of her relationship, work and life, with the exception of the bliss she feels at the cinema where she dreams she would stay all day without getting paid, are very richly drawn with remarkably few words. The story itself is a bit longer than the ones that precede it. It’s split into four parts and seems to be have been written by: 1) an outside observer who knows the cinema intimately 2) the protagonist who works at the cinema on Sundays taking tickets 3) the protagonist’s stalker 4) perhaps the impartial, cinema-loving third person from section 1 again? The second section is by far my favourite because it paints her life so expertly yet so succinctly. The third one is creepy and slightly obsessive; its voice hovers somewhere between harmless immaturity and menacing fixation.

The touching of wood was a bit of a strange mixture of holiday scenes, leprosy and a love story. I didn’t like the end and thought it was a bit cliched or too neat and tidy. Strangely, one of my favourite parts was the nightmare the narrator has before they wake up and enact the clunky ‘touching wood’ ending. The scenes were the two lovers lark about on the island are well drawn. It annoyed me that the couple say they are on a week long holiday but when they talk about looking at the photos they’re taking they say they will do it in two Saturdays time; is this delay for developing the film or are they going on somewhere else and, if they are going somewhere else, why doesn’t this count as holiday too? The fact that the narrator’s lover looks much better and loses the dark circles around their eyes, ‘coloured in by the sun’ which is a good phrase, is also annoying as it didn’t really seem to connect with any other parts of the story. Sometimes, Smith seems to get it spot on and gives you just enough detail, just well enough connected to the narrative to make it conjure up all sorts of ideas and situations. In this instance, the detail seems to sparse and unconnected; it just sort of sits there, disconnected and meaningless except for its hint at an illness or unhappiness that’s never explored.

Cold Iron was a slightly disjointed account of a family bereavement, which I didn’t enjoy much. The last lines, “Myself I’m hanging on, leaning on the rail that overlooks the sea on either side of me. I’m picking up bits and pieces for my house. I’m thinking it out, I’m working out the story.” were crisp and cathartic while not being overly optimistic or sentimental.

I liked College and thought it had a good pace and well expressed scenes and characters. It’s quite exciting, without having a especially far fetched narrative, and I felt it had a cinematic quality when I read it. The scenes are vivid and the descriptions of the sunny, Southern England university town (Cambridge, I think, because of the bridge) were very realistic. I assumed the family of the deceased student are Scottish and felt the story did a good job of capturing the foreignness of Cambridge.

Scary tells the story of a new couple taking a train trip to visit an old friend of Tom’s and her new boyfriend in London. The protagonist, Tom’s girlfriend, seems fairly passive during the trip, their arrival and supper. However, when Tom is in the bathroom, she takes her things and leaves to go home on the last train back to where the came from. It’s not clear whether she objects to the other couple’s obsession with River Phoenix or whether it’s Tom’s moaning about how rude his friend’s boyfriend was to him or neither of these things. Whatever it is, it’s strange for the protagonist to take such drastic action without any indication as to why she is doing it.

The unthinkable happens to people everyday is about a man trying to find someone at an old address where he grew up in Scotland. He calls from London, where he lives and works and finds out they no longer live there. He crosses the street and smashes a few TVs in a TV shop before getting in his car and driving all the way to Scotland and the house where the mystery person he is trying to find lived, even though he already knows they are no longer there. His car runs out of petrol so he leaves it on a road and walks into a loch beside the road where he meets a young girl. The young girl’s mother gives him something to eat and some petrol and he drives home again. Is this a depiction of someone who has gone temporarily mad? It’s a strange and disunited story and I never felt connected to the man, his actions or his possible motivations.

The World with Love describes a chance meeting between old school friends who reminisce about how their French teacher went mad one day. This leads Sam, the protagonist, on to other reflections about the French class, the teacher and a girl who he had fancied long ago. The scenes had a sad and oppressive quality like there were many things Sam wanted to do back then that he didn’t and now looks back on it somewhat sorrowfully.

Michael Lewis - The Undoing Project

Reading this after finishing Thinking Fast and Slow really threw the two writing styles into sharp relief. Lewis’ prose is flowing, readable and journalistic. There are plenty of evocative character details and lots of thought-provoking, illustrative analogies. Kahneman’s prose is tortured by comparison. His style is dry and academic and the more anecdotal passages read like they have been written by someone who has been told to be ‘witty’, ‘conversational’ or ‘informal’ but really has no idea how this might be done. There is no doubt that Kahneman’s book contains much more information; each chapter is essentially a detailed summary of an academic paper in Thinking Fast and Slow. But the density is overwhelming and, in the absence of a clear structure, soon creates confusion. In fairness to Kahneman, he does try to group the chapters into five sections: 1) Two Systems 2) Heuristics and Biases 3) Overconfidence 4) Choices 5) Two Selves. Despite this, there is so much information in each section, and it is presented in such a detailed way, I rarely felt like I was mastering the key points. Lewis, on the other hand, drastically reduces the amount of material he’s trying to present in The Undoing Project but still manages to convey a lot of the same information that Kahneman does because he is so much better at selecting and presenting the material. There is a real sense in which Lewis has simply taken the five or ten most striking ideas in Thinking Fast and Slow and mixed them with some of his excellent character sketches and career histories of the key actors behind the ideas. This is exactly the same formula as The Big Short; simply swapping complex decision theory for complex financial derivatives and psychologists for hedge fund managers. The result feels journalistic insofar as it is a collection of shorter essays, profiles and sketches stitched together. With Lewis it’s easy to look back over what you’ve read and identify the key themes: representativeness, availability, how people feel commission is worse than omission when dealing with regret and how people are risk seeking when dealing with losses and risk averse when dealing with gains. With Kahneman, the same information is presented in far richer detail but the overall sense of clarity is lost amongst the deluge of papers reviewed, the subtlety of the distinctions he is drawing and his questionable writing style. Kahneman’s book contains all the nuance and, ultimately, is a more informative book but Lewis’ presents the more comprehensible narrative; something that Kahneman would admit is very important given the way our mind works! Lewis is superficial and no one could accuse Kahneman of being that, but he is also readable and no one could accuse Kahneman of that either!

The life stories of both Kahneman and Tversky are interesting. With Kahneman as a fretful, nervous lonely, immigrant geek and Tversky as a swashbuckling, popular, native war hero; they make an odd couple. Perhaps Lewis’ book is too kind to Kahneman, who I presume spoke with Lewis far more than Tversky who was probably dead before Lewis even started this project. At one point I had the impression that Kahneman had all the ideas and Tversky simply helped him to have more confidence in them and make their papers a bit more readable! The academic community seem to have taken the opposite view, ascribing the majority of the credit to Tversky, which I think shows how this book ‘takes Kahneman’s side’ vs. the contemporary history. It was Tversky’s unwillingness to correct this presumption that he was the senior partner in the relationship that seems to have been the root of Kahneman’s displeasure with him. However, according to Lewis, it seems theirs’ was a true collaboration with neither able to compare individually with their abilities as a duo. As such, it is especially sad when the two fall out and drift apart. Given that both men seem to be fantastically difficult individuals it can hardly be seen as surprising. As ever, Michael Lewis draws intriguing biographical outlines of the two characters. Kahneman lived in a chicken coop for a while in occupied France as his family hid from the Nazis and their French sympathisers while Tversky once disobeyed orders to rescue an Israeli army colleague who had fainted beside a landmine he was trying to clear, saving his life. As usual, Lewis’ sketches are vivid but not comprehensive or particularly reflective. It reads like a newspaper or magazine profile or essay. As with his treatment of their academic work, he does a great job of selecting interesting vignettes and presenting them in a form that’s easy to consume. But both lack true depth, which is what makes the book such an easy read and probably makes Lewis so popular. Like almost everyone else, I’m more disposed to ‘A very short introduction to…’ type titles than completing the hard slog of long reading lists to really get to know a subject. To some extent, the more superficial and simplified it is, the easier it is to read and therefore the more enjoyable provided there is a decent narrative to keep you interested. Lewis creates most of this narrative out of the relationship between the two with the progression of their ideas playing an impressive supporting role. He’s good at judging the correct level of detail and spinning these quite scant details into a compelling narrative. But in the same way that I couldn’t hope to get the same level of understanding of the ideas contained in Thinking Fast and Slow from this book, it’s probably foolish to think I really know much about either psychologist’s life or character from the brief caricatures here. Looked at in another way, Lewis is a master of giving you enough information to support the main points he wants to make and doesn’t make the mistake of reducing the clarity of the whole book in an attempt to be exhaustive. Lewis is an author who appeals to your System 1 brain, as Kahneman would say! He tells you a cogent, vivid story that is easy to comprehend and satisfies you with its coherence! Lewis’ method has the drawback of being a bit journalistic. The information he selects is, necessarily, brief and sometimes I had the feeling that the protagonists’ lives, careers and characters were being simplified to make them more readily comprehensible or appealing; which, of course, they were!

It was a bit repetitive reading the same ideas that I had just read in Thinking Fast and Slow but, frankly, Lewis expounds them so much more briefly in prose that is so much easier to read I skipped through most of the repetition without inconvenience. There was only one section where I thought the writing was confused. In chapter 5, around p157, Lewis tells us that people are quick to jump to conclusions from a small amount of data; making assumptions about a general population on the basis of evidence from a sample size that is too small. As an example, he uses IQ and a sample group of students. If people are told the average IQ for all students is 100 and are then told that one student in the group sampled has an IQ of 150. Apparently they are, when asked, still likely to believe that the average IQ of the sample is 100 and that the person with the IQ of 150 is an outlier. This is as may be, but it definitely does not illustrate the point that Lewis is trying to make. In fact, it makes quite the opposite point. If people were too quick to draw general conclusions from small samples then they should believe that the average IQ of the sample is higher than 100 based on the person with an IQ of 150. This example Lewis gives shows that people are RELUCTANT to adjust their general assumptions based on a small sample not vice versa.

Kahneman’s character and work are subject to a good deal of hagiography in this book and you could argue that this is deserved given how influential his work has been. There were several aspects that stuck with me. Kahneman was a prolific idea generator and seemed to have far less trouble than most deciding to change his mind. He said, “I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen. If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.” This strikes me as sound advice for investment too! The best example of this trait is probably when Kahneman abandons his theory of regret causing people to be risk averse when they actually showed themselves to be risk seeking when dealing with losses. Although he was losing a lot of work, by not obsessing over this he went on to discover something even more significant. Indeed, he showed admirable psychological fortitude in overcoming the sunk cost fallacy! Kahneman was also non-combative, unlike Tversky, and was, apparently, fond of giving the following example to students: Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced and in the other it is increased. It’s a key idea, making it easy to change”. Kahneman appears to have questioned himself, looked for faults in his behaviour and changed his mind a lot more than the average person. He also thought that singing things made them easier to remember, which is probably true!

At one stage I was tempted to say you could read this book and not bother with Thinking Fast and Slow but the two are of a totally different scope. TF&S takes you through all the nuance and nitty gritty. TUP is a brief precis of TF&S’s main ideas, with a history of the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky appended. This appropriately involves a history of each individual. However, Lewis includes a few other biographies that have a far more minor role in events. Probably most notable is the chapter on the general manager of the Houston Rockets, ostensibly included as this was the way Lewis himself found out about Kahneman and his work! Overall, this was a good, interesting book that summarised some of the ideas of TF&S and placed them within a brief context of the author’s lives and careers. It’s weak points were its slightly haphazard side plots and its formulaic, journalistic structure. The prose was flowing without ever being exceptionally beautiful but it was extremely readable. I think I would have preferred it if Lewis had been forced to write a more detailed summary of TF&S and then two focussed biographies of Kahneman and Tversky. Lewis has a gift for explaining complex ideas comprehensively and concisely. He also has a gift for profiles or personality sketches. However, in this book he wanders too far from the central topic in ways which are fairly enjoyable but also pretty irrelevant and I felt the main subject deserved tighter attention. Lewis focuses a lot on the magical relationship between the two psychologists even though it will be forever impossible to recreate a dynamic that only two people, one dead, ever experienced. I felt like a tighter focus on the pair’s biographies might have yielded more interesting insights. The book could have had a better, narrower structure in my opinion but it’s a minor complaint as, on the whole, I thought it was a good book.