When I was growing up, my father — always eager to instruct his backward son — would regularly intone the phrase, “I shall pass this way but once.” Since Dad wasn’t one to care about anybody outside our extended family, he never quoted the rest of the old Quaker proverb: “Any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now.” No, he simply meant that I shouldn’t put things off, imagining that I’d come back to them at some later date.
To my surprise, this paternal advice became, without my quite knowing how, the abiding principle of my professional life as a writer and reviewer — at least until recently. Over the years I’ve certainly returned several times to a handful of writers, most prominently those twin monsters, Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov, but in general I’ve never counted on rereading anything. I give each book or subject my best, then move on to something new.
Bayesian persuasion is an idea only a little more than a decade old that’s being used to study phenomena as varied as advertising, the law, bond ratings and parking enforcement. A working paper this month uses it to analyze political lies. The authors conclude that politicians will lie more when they know they’re being fact-checked. (Finding a real-life example of that behavior is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Peranakan cooking, a Southeast Asian cuisine with multicultural roots, created and popularised by nyonyas (Peranakan women), is often labour-intensive and time-consuming. Sometimes it takes several days to prepare one dish. Take ayam buah keluak (chicken and black nuts stew) for instance. The buah keluak, a nut native to Malaysian and Indonesian mangroves, has to be soaked in water for three to five days, changing the water every day, before extracting the black paste inside the nuts.
The protagonist of this debut novel by the Scottish actor and screenwriter Kenny Boyle is Wendy, a recent graduate stuck in a dead end call centre job. But the story starts with her hiding after an art heist, along with a precious stolen painting, in the attic of her grandmother’s house in Glasgow. The tale of how she comes to be catapulted from boredom to daring adventure is also a quirky and honest portrayal of early twenties friendship.
The first thing to say about Ardal O’Hanlon’s Brouhaha is that is very good. By good I mean it is humane, clever, funny, gripping, complex, serious and surprising. It won’t win the Nobel or the Booker, but it ought to have a fair run at the Bollinger Wodehouse prize. It is comedy crime, which is a difficult genre to make work successfully. If the comedy is too overt, the harm to others is diminished. If the crime is too forward, the witticisms seem a little puerile. But O’Hanlon gets the balance perfectly right. I laughed out loud, and I sat and wondered about the horrible truths. That is no small achievement.
In Bittersweet, she starts off with an intriguing idea: why are we so taken with sad songs? Referencing songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, she explores the reason that she is so drawn to music with melancholy – and alights on the “bittersweet”; those rare moments we experience joy and sadness at the same time.