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The irregular review of reviews, vol. XVI
Paid subscribers can join this chat thread about Pride and Prejudice. The book club meets on 16th February. The next Shakespeare book club is 23rd February. We are discussing The Comedy of Errors. I strongly recommend watching this version from the Globe.
How to read more
I was interviewed for this piece in GQ about how to improve your attention span to read more. My advice: noise-cancelling headphones, read through what you don’t understand (like a child would), see what influenced the modern authors you like, and for God’s sake read what you enjoy. Ignore the moralising literature Nannies.
Because by far the most effective way to read more is to have fun while doing it. This seems a screamingly obvious point – but by positioning reading as a “good” kind of content consumption, as opposed to smooth-brained scrolling, we also taint it with an aura of smug virtue. Oliver hates the moralising, snobbish attitude which equates reading certain books with becoming a better person. “You’re not at school,” he says. “The heart asks [for] pleasure first, and if you deny it that, then you won’t get any of the other benefits.”
Remember, these are peak human experiences.
“If you want to do it, do it,” says Oliver. “Reading Tolstoy is honestly going to be one of the best things that happens to you.”
Generations
You need to be reading . (I added her to my Recommendations recently.) is consistently good. Learn from her!
The idea is that there are four generations represented in Homer’s Iliad, each about 21 years apart from the last, and each representing four temperaments in keeping with the different social roles of each. In other words, the Iliad represents generational position as temperament, and it reveals how crisis events create temperamental differentiation, which is then presumed to be stable over time.
Hill’s Professor of Poetry Lectures
is transcribing Geoffrey Hill’s Oxford lectures, which, remarkably, has not been done before. The Substack is called . I have not read them yet, but I hope to do so soon. This is very good work he is doing. I hope he writes some summaries and guides to the lectures also, or an introduction.