Season's readings part two -
Hari Kunzru to Philip Pullman: writers and politicians pick the best books of 2008
Compiled by Ginny Hooker writing in guardian.co.uk, Saturday 29 November.
Hari Kunzru to Philip Pullman: writers and politicians pick the best books of 2008
Compiled by Ginny Hooker writing in guardian.co.uk, Saturday 29 November.
Hari Kunzru
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I'm living in New York, and the only thing that's made me feel homesick is a photography book called No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britain 1967-1987 (Hayward Publishing). It shows a world I remember from growing up, a world that now feels very far away in time, as well as space.
Philip Pullman
Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise has been widely praised, and quite right too. It's a history of 20th-century music so vivid and original in approach that it made me listen again to many pieces I thought I knew well. It was so interesting that I even forgave him for saying nothing about my favourite composer, Nicolai Medtner.
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A book I read slowly and with continuing pleasure and fascination was Philip Waller's Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 (OUP). The vulgar brutality of the bestseller lists, the profitable misery of lecture tours, the iniquity of reviewers, the knife-in-the-back competitiveness - nothing has changed.
Read the full list of picks from the various contributors at the Guardian online.
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