It was a toss-up between Gurdjieff and more Reynolds.
This time, Alastair won.

Indispensable

Hardened hack I may be. But a verbose one too! This is one of the brightest guides to producing readable writing I’ve yet encountered.

Could this one take a Ph. D in physics to handle?! To be reviewed in tandem with ‘Chasm City’

Giving Grimwood’s alternative history another go, after ‘Pashazade’. The corpses are piling up and so are the problems for El Iskandryia’s new police chief…

A superb compendium, rendered particularly helpful by the excellent cross-referencing of articles, this work took its editor 10 years to put together. It’s vast, not the kind of encyclopaedia I’d even dream of writing up … even were I qualified to do so. However, I’ve been dipping into it often since buying it at the turn of the year.

Ursula grew up with this, me on her, and somebody sees the fun in it!

I’ve finished it now. For the third time over what…? 30 years? No review promised; but I’m leaving it here for a while longer. It gets better with each reading. There are plenty of Fowles sites on the web. Plenty of spoilers too.
Fowles didn’t need to fiddle with it in 1977 - one concession too many to perplexed readers in my view - but the “revised version” is, to my relief, no less seminal than the original, which seems, alas, no longer anywhere to be found.

Anybody who learnt the art of communication in incomprehensible algebra lessons is off to a good start.
A useful addition to my Safari bookshelf.

Some say that the ‘Birthday Letters’ (1998) were the finest work Hughes ever did, but I have many other favourites too. When Amazon suggests reading these poems along with Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’, that strikes me as a good idea.