Funfare for the Common Man

(Given to me by one of my Latvian students, 2007) Or perhaps you’re better off burying your head in the sand and reading something else. At first, I wanted to provide an objective (as possible) take on current events. But I try to steer clear of politics on these pages.  And, get your 2021 off to an introspective, contemplative start with a few philosophical yet practical articles that have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with politics or pandemics.  Feel free to skip down to the reading list. Otherwise… My upbringing I grew up in democracies – Western Europe and the United States – during the Cold War era. I studied and learnt about various coups and insurrections in other parts of the world: the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe even…but North America? Not so much. I studied history and politics at university and graduate school. Again, much of the same, but in more depth. Over the years, my students have asked me various questions about history and politic...

It’s my annual year in review. I think I’ve done one of these every year. Or most years. I don’t remember. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday season last couple of months, which have been oh-so-frenetic, this too will be a rushed, whirlwind recap of what was truly a raucous annus horribilis. And if that makes no sense, that’s because this year hardly made sense. The biggest positive to emerge from 2020? One of my most productive years of reading ever. But that also came at the cost of other things. When people ask ‘how do you find the time to read?’ I answer: ‘because I don’t do most of the stuff I should be doing instead of frittering away my time reading!’ Herewith 2020 in review. The books are a selection of my favourites and highlights. Mercifully, not all of them. January and February: months like any other, for the most part Grand Hotel , Vicki Baum; Flights , Olga Tokarczuk; Love, Poverty and War , Christopher Hitchens; Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation , Michae...

We’ve made it to the end: Part 10 (of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge.  Where do we go from here? If you’ve missed any of the previous 9 parts, a recap: Part 1: A decade in quotations: Part 1 (of 10) of the August 2020 Challenge Part 2: My readers ask, I answer: Reader Mailbag, part 1 Part 3: We live in a haunted house Part 4: The Joy of Getting Away From It All Part 5: Looking for truth in all the wrong places Part 6: From the wilds of Western Ukraine to the wild 1970s Soviet Union: Yaremche v Tiraspol Part 7: My wife tried to kill me: [mis]adventures in the Carpathians Part 8: Why my language skills suck: Part 1 Part 9: Why I speak such lousy Ukrainian – even after 10 years in Kyiv So what comes next? First, a quick English lesson: the past simple versus the present perfect. This should be easy for most of you. Compare: This pandemic period was difficult. This pandemic period has been difficult. Are they both correct? No. In the first example, the use of the past simple – was ...

And Part 1 (of 2) of ‘A life in quotations’: The electronic version We’ll see how this goes. In my last post, The Writing Process, I mentioned my attitude towards using quotations in my writing, and how I never seek out ones to use, but instead rely on those I’ve discovered in the course of my reading.  This is part 1, where I take you through my e-book notes, dating from 2011-present. As much as I love to rant and rave about the evils of technology, I have many a time waxed lyrical about the splendours of my Kindle. There’s nothing like the real thing – a good old-fashioned hardback or paperback – but when it comes to highlighting passages or making notes, an e-book really makes the gathering process fairly easy. Still, nothing beats the real thing. On the other hand, when you’ve got hundreds of books and seemingly thousands of highlights, it’s easy to lose track of them, and many of them are probably floating around in the cloud, waiting to be shared.  There are some absolut...

9pm every night, after the little one is tucked in for the night With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez After last week’s heavy theme of the [potential] doom and gloom of the future, this week will be a different kind of heavy: heavy on links, light[er] on commentary.  If there’s one thing this quarantine is doing to people – me, especially, but if Twitter is anything to go by, many of us – it’s sending us down all sorts of nostalgia rabbit holes. You know, I’m not really sure if we can go down nostalgia rabbit holes, but you get the idea. I’ve been down this…road before, just a fortnight or so ago with my ‘Mixtape’ post. That, along with some comments from old friends, has really kicked the music nostalgia urge into overdrive, and I’m trying to put together a music-themed post. But I’m struggling to find the right angle. So in the interim, let’s focus on links and love.  As in, this is about the point in the quarantine, if you haven’t reached it already, where tempers are r...