09:49 pm - My book of the year
Even though the year is far from over, it's unlikely I'll get to read much fiction in the following months. But I do hope to bury myself in Dibdin's Dead Lagoon; the cover looks ( promising )
Even though the year is far from over, it's unlikely I'll get to read much fiction in the following months. But I do hope to bury myself in Dibdin's Dead Lagoon; the cover looks ( promising )
Johnson, by contrast, set himself the not inconsiderable task of reinventing the novel with every book he wrote. Starting, in Travelling People, with devices adapted from his beloved Tristram Shandy - pages shading to grey, then to black, to convey the experience of a character having a heart attack - he went on to cut holes through the pages of a book, so that readers could see forward to a future event (Albert Angelo), and present the chapters of one novel unbound in a box, so that readers could shuffle them and recreate the randomness of experience for themselves (The Unfortunates).
Хитченс пишет про Северную Нигерию:
In 2005 I learned of one outcome. In northern Nigeria — a country that had previously checked in as provisionally polio-free — a group of Islamic religious figures issued a ruling, or fatwa, that declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States (and, amazingly, the United Nations) against the Muslim faith. The drops were designed, said these mullahs, to sterilize the true believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back, and not just in northern Nigeria. Nigerian travelers and pilgrims had already taken it as far as Mecca, and spread it back to several other polio-free countries, including three African ones and also faraway Yemen. The entire boulder would have to be rolled back right up to the top of the mountain.