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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
We're in Venice this week, where we've just finished taking part in an international workshop on speech and language technology. Somewhere around the middle of the first day, it struck me that the setup was eerily similar to the opening of the penultimate volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. Nick, who I think is now in his mid 50s, is also attending an academic conference here. He and the other members of his generation are treated with respect, but they're starting to feel increasingly marginalized by the energetic young people who have begun to take over the narrative. And Death is no longer an unexpected and shocking guest: he's now taken for granted, and it's just a question of who's next.
The conference hall even had a ceiling with an huge fresco illustrating a classical theme. Though, somewhat disappointingly, the subject wasn't as racy as the one in Powell's book.
 - Anthony Powell)