⤳ This is not a full Week Notes-style post, I just wanted to list all the stuff I read while I was in Kefalonia last week….
⤳ Lean Impact- # How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good. A bit of a ‘work read’, but I don’t mind a work read if it’s interesting and inspires me. This didn’t I’m afraid to say. The content itself is solid (although it never really fully delivers on what it promises and there’s a lot of padding), but the tone is so flat it really is a grind to read. No variation, no wit, no personality. Even ‘work books’ need personality!
⤳ Foe by Iain Reid. Saw that it had been made into a film, so decided to give some fiction a go after a long time of not reading much at all. Loved it. Reid has a great, spare style, but it’s not miserable or dry and even though not loads happens it still manages to be a page-turner. Looking forward to the movie now.
⤳ Finished Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard., which was a lot of fun and fascinating. What the Washington Post called ‘essayistic digressions’ in its review are indeed quite distracting and do (fancy literary term alert) ‘go on a bit’, but overall it’s a great biography even if you have no idea who Peter Beard was.
⤳ Started on Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith after reading this article in the WSJ. Superb so far. Again, knew nothing about this guy until five days ago, now he’s vying for a spot at my fantasy dinner party guest list.
⤳ A few other good articles I read:
What’s driving Cycling Mikey, Britain’s most hated cyclist? (Times paywall alert).
David Hockney: ‘All I need is the hand, the eye, the heart’ (again, Times paywall in the way)
There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing (NY Times paywall this time)
My Generation - Anthem for a forgotten cohort (which is about Gen X - which I am a fully paid up member of - but I still don’t think I totally understood what it was getting at, although some parts definitely resonated).