twenty-seven words about lawns, putin, the lake district, computronium etc

Did you arrive here through my suggestion on twitter that you take Yuval Noah Harari away with you on holiday (so to speak)? If so, welcome - I read him while on holiday with S. near Slanchev Bryag, the Blackpool of the Black Sea (if Blackpool had been built by the communist authorities during the 1960s); also near Nesebar, of course - don't think we were just there for the sun and the cheap booze, it was an educational trip too, I learned the Bulgarian word for ashtray (it's пепелник = pepelnik, sounds more like a small bird that sings in the forest, no?).

Talking of holiday reads, I read Sarah Bakewell's superb group biography of the Sartre/ de Beauvoir circle while staying (for the third time) at the Three Cliffs Bay campsite near Swansea a couple of years ago; this led to me meeting the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre in a dream. I took my wife and daughter along as well but they weren't that into it.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Amazed me twenty years back. Would this Jesuit adventure story stand a re-read? Yes: so much I missed first time around. Sex, spirit, language, calling, redemption, jokes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Read opinion piece (forget whose) suggesting literary league tables down-rank intentionally comic writers (“yeah? try also being female,” you interject). This rise-of-robots novel outclasses Asimov and 1984.

Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. It’s about the past and future of humanity; inter alia, lawns, pigs, the Black Death, animism etc. The relaxed, conversational style belies this book’s depth, breadth, originality.

Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI futures. Same-but-different teleology as readable climate-"sceptic", peer Matt Ridley.  This tour-de-force talks about turning all the universe’s matter into computronium like that'd be a good thing.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. How Putinism operates, propagandises; not your grandparents’ Soviet propaganda (as today’s Republican moment isn’t William Buckley’s). Prostitution (overt, covert, metaphorical); gangster sentimentality, bad faith. Funny, horrible, sinister. (See also 'To Russia With Love')

Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Author remembered, if remembered for writing about what does/ doesn’t last (paradox); cites contemporaries we still read (Orwell, Woolf), others. Lucid investigation of mandarin versus demotic prose. [See also.]

Petruska Clarkson's Gestalt Counselling in Action (updated by Simon Cavicchia). Thought I had her on Fritjof Capra- then, aha, intellectualisation= modification to contact (“lose your mind and…” – Perls). Reading= gestalt process; more/ less than; professional recap, recalibration.

William Wordsworth's The Prelude. Milton looks over Wordsworth’s shoulder, I overlook my own, re-engaging with canonical text I failed to read properly at uni (because older then than now). Multivalent; fluid; illuminative.

John Betjeman's Summoned By Bells. ‘Anxiety of Influence’ again; verse autobiography inevitably recalls Wordsworth, though Betjeman explicitly disdains thought, commitment, preferring sensibility, music (bathos-music of suburban placenames). Betjeman is ‘catchy’ (ambiguous praise).