Of the books I reviewed this year, the ones I most enjoyed reading were two novels, two autobiographies (though neither conventional), a semi-fictionalized biography, and an account of living alone with only birds for company.
Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, The Stranger’s Child (Picador; reviewed on July 17), was an absorbing account spanning four generations of how a World War I poet’s reputation fared. But it was more than that.
It was also an elegiac evocation of how English life, savaged by two wars, struggled onwards amid self-repression and cover-ups. The title comes from Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam — the landscape we once loved will be forgotten, but then “grow familiar to the stranger’s child.”
Photo courtesy of Canongate Books
Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory (Heinemann, reviewed on Oct. 16) was an acerbic, politically-incorrect story of a French artist and his involvement with a famous novelist called Michel Houellebecq. It’s bitterly nostalgic for a lost France, while guardedly enthusiastic for the technological innovations that have come in its wake. Brilliantly translated by Gavin Bowd, it makes for compulsive reading. And, as in Hollinghurst’s novel, time is seen as obliterating everything.
Julian Assange’s Unauthorized Autobiography (Canongate; reviewed on Nov. 13) narrates the life of the founder of WikiLeaks. From his childhood in Australia to what he thinks might have been sexual entrapment in Sweden, it’s absorbingly interesting. We read about all the major leaks, including the infamous “collateral murder” from a helicopter gunship in Iraq that led to the arrest of Private Bradley Manning (about whom Assange says that his organization’s technology and methodological guidelines don’t allow him to know if Manning was the source of the leak or not). WikiLeaks, he asserts, isn’t anti-American, merely anti-bastard.
Michael Moore’s Here Comes Trouble (Allen Lane; reviewed on Oct. 30) also narrates the early life of a whistle-blower. Moore’s genius is that he combines radicalism and comedy, with the comedy arguably more effective in print than on film. Subtitled Stories From My Life, the book consists of 24 episodes, mostly hilarious, including a youthful dry run for an escape to Canada, confrontations with General Motors in his native Michigan, phone calls from John Lennon, and the exposure of a then-racist Elks Club at a summer-camp when Moore was 17. This is a book that’s enjoyable on many levels.
Less momentous, perhaps, but still memorable, were Neil Ansell’s Deep Country (Hamish Hamilton; reviewed on April 10), describing his five years alone in a remote cottage in Wales, and Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile (Allen Lane; reviewed on Aug. 28), an impressionistic evocation of Thomas Mann’s novelist brother Heinrich and his wife Nelly, in exile along with Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann himself, in California during World War II.
Crop damage from Typhoon Danas “had covered 9,822 hectares of farmland, more than 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s arable land, with an average loss rate of 30 percent, equivalent to 2,977 hectares of total crop failure,” this paper reported on Thursday last week. Costs were expected to exceed NT$1 billion. The disaster triggered clashes in the legislature last week between members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and China-aligned lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). DPP caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) argued that opposition lawmakers should take responsibility for slashing the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA)
July 14 to July 20 When Lin Tzu-tzeng (林資曾) arrived in Sansia (三峽) in 1830, he found the local conditions ideal for indigo dyeing. Settlers had already planted indigo across the nearby hills, the area’s water was clean and low in minerals and the river offered direct transport to the bustling port of Bangka (艋舺, modern-day Wanhua District in Taipei). Lin hailed from Anxi (安溪) in Fujian Province, which was known for its dyeing traditions. He was well-versed in the craft, and became wealthy after opening the first dyeing workshop in town. Today, the sign for the Lin Mao Hsing (林茂興) Dye
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
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