Reading Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. The eponymous character is in Saigon tracking down his prey. In a seedy bookshop the latter is known to visit he checks out the expatriate offerings:
For the English, pornography printed in Brussels. For the French, row after row of tattered classics: Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hugo.
I laughed out loud. Typical Le Carré, but so accurate too. On my last visit to Brittany the newsagents were crammed with biographies of famous mathematicians.
Summer coming and some of ye may want something light. Personally, when heading to the airport I pack some worthy tomes (science, philosophy, history yadda yadda) and then read entertaining thrash and bring the tomes home unread (my brain shuts down in the sun).
Last year, I read The Rosie Project. I think we’d all agree that bursting out laughing in public while reading a book is naff. Strictly entre nous, this happened to me a few time while reading this book.
Was this because the narrator/hero of the tale is a mathematically inclined eccentric genius called Don? 😜 Hmm…good question.
Anyway, as well as being light and entertaining, I thought it clever, witty and even somewhat thought provoking.
Third meeting this morning. Well attended: Brendan, David, Don, Michael, Richard and Tony.
The theme for the meeting was 
listed as Strange Lands but somehow we managed to talk while hardly mentioning books or authors although Jim Crace, John Le Carré, Patricia Highsmith and John Steinbeck got honourable mentions. The relative merits of story versus characterisation were debated. Cormac McCarthy got short shrift while poor old Jean-Paul Sartre was put firmly in his existentialist box and his homeland cast adrift in the Bay of Biscay, sauve qui peut. Thomas Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehaviour was briefly described in relation to the formation of racial, economic or religious ghettos despite the absence of prejudice.
Serious discussion concerned the Welfare State but it is beyond my meagre skills to recap on the many useful ideas which would surely resolve the problems in double-quick time.
The theme for the May meeting is: You-Don’t-Have-To-But-You-Really-Should-Read ______. Needless to say, nobody will!
Asynchronists 