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MannyRayner

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
Richard Dawkins
R in Action
Robert Kabacoff
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Douglas R. Hofstadter
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Harold McGee
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Simon Evnine
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Christopher M. Bishop
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
Richard C. Tolman
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten

Histoire d'O

Histoire d'O (Relié) - Pauline Réage, Leonor Fini, Jean Paulhan The most useful piece of advice on literary criticism that I've ever come across is Nabokov's dictum to identify with the author, not the characters. This book is a perfect example. If you make the mistake of identifying with O, it's all a bit bewildering. Why exactly is she interested in being blindfolded, tied up, whipped, and fucked from all angles by a bunch of people she doesn't even know? It seems bizarre and rather distasteful.

The rest of this review is in my book If Research Were Romance and Other Implausible Conjectures