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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
ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN
This book offers a quite remarkably negative self-portrait. The most obvious explanation is that Amis was disgusted with himself for leaving his first wife in such a callous manner, but few people would have gone this far. There's an interesting question of chronology here, which I remember discussing with Jordan and Beth Ann. Maybe someone who knows more about Amis can tell us in precisely which order the following events happened?
- Amis starts writing this novel.
- Amis decides on the title One Fat Englishman.
- Amis gets involved with the woman who later becomes his second wife.
- While Amis is asleep on the beach, his first wife scrawls 1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I FUCK ANYTHING on his back in lipstick, and takes a photograph which is later widely circulated.
- Amis leaves his first wife.
