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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
It's interesting to compare Bend Sinister with 1984. (Nabokov didn't much like Orwell, and thought he was a hack). Orwell's take on totalitarianism, is, roughly, that it's evil. Nabokov's is more that it's terminally stupid. Even when the rulers of the State would actually prefer to get things right, they've fucked up their minds with nonsensical ideology to the point where they're no longer capable of coherent thought. I wonder whether Nabokov wasn't closer to the truth. In the end, the Soviet Union's collapse seems to be have been, more than anything, due to the simple fact that nothing worked any more. Nabokov suggests that the process starts with dishonesty about artistic choices. There's a very funny passage near the beginning of this book, describing a politically correct version of Hamlet in which things have been reorganized so that Fortinbras is the hero. It's a nice metaphor for what's wrong with the whole system. The scene where Adam is trying to cross the bridge is also a fine piece of black humor. But things rapidly stop being so amusing, and the ending is very tragic indeed.
I recall a quote from Viktor Korchnoi that I've always liked. He's trying to explain why chess was so popular in the Soviet Union, and says it's because, try as they would, no one was ever able to define what a bourgeois chess move might be. Think about that for a moment.
 - Vladimir Nabokov)