Current reading.

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I've just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines' sites. Patchy — quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often — but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn't phoning it in.

The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I'm on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I'm bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it's page-turningly good.

I've also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook.

I've been wondering about the value of fictional evidence. Particularly reading a pile of Hitchens book reviews, wherein he strongly advocates good fiction for its power to explore and teach you how humans work. Off the top of my head I can think of more accurate commmunication media, but stories are natural to humans so I would be unsurprised to find them testing out as a much more powerful vector than, e.g., popularisations of psychological research. I'm not entirely convinced by the Hitchens line but was surprised to see him pushing it so vehemently.