What I’m reading #145

Not a lot because I am currently editing two manuscripts at once. This is not impossible, because only one is fiction, but it is suboptimal. Also, there is a funding round in progress for one of the organisations I help assess these things for, and it is quite a task working out how much fiction is involved in some of the applications.

The Spectator announces the results of competition 3008 in which entrants “were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written in the style of the author in question”. Great idea. The clever-clogs winner started: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” and you would think that Finnegans Wake would be impossible to parody but no.

All the others are good but my favourite was this, using The Da Vinci Code as the starting point:

For a moment, he thought he heard a woman’s voice — the wisdom of the ages — whispering up from the chasms of the earth to the splendour of St Peter’s. Langdon froze. ‘The wisdom of the ages’ — surely a coded message! Suddenly, in a sudden flash of realisation, he realised it. A totally contrived anagram! ‘An anagram!’ he realised. The Wisdom of the Ages = ‘Who misfeeds the goat?!’ Of course! Now he simply needed to find the unfortunate ungulate, and guilty goatherd… before it was too late! Heidi? Esmeralda? The Lonely… Suddenly, he had it — Paddy McGinty — whose goat swallowed dynamite! A deadly coded warning in deadly earnest! And Valentine Doonican = Neel doon in Vatican! In no time he found, behind the hassocks and dyslexic Scottish translations of tourist leaflets, the sticks of dynamite. The Vatican saved… but why had the clues been so obvious?

Slightly more topically for New Zealand readers, the Economist defends an often-criticised group:

One by one, prejudices are tumbling in the West. People may harbour private suspicions that other people’s race, sex or sexuality makes them inferior—but to say so openly is utterly taboo. As most kinds of prejudiced talk become the preserve of anonymous social-media ranters, though, one old strain remains respectable. Just ask a childless person.

And Private Eye reviews (not online – they’re not silly) John McEnroe’s second autobiography But Seriously:

This is an extended shrug of a book, a pointless, wildly self-indulgent ramble that reads like the transcript to an interview with a celebrity magazine during which the interviewer wandered off for a sandwich and couldn’t face going back.