Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
November moon, as seen in a backyard in Geilston Bay. November 2010. Friday Book Club and a productive week of reading has just gone by. Three for three in terms of quality, although when you have the ninth all-time bestselling book ever published and a Nobel Prize winner’s most fondly remembered novel in the mix, you would hope so! The first one to mention is Imre Kertész’s wonderful self-autobiographical novel Fatelessness . When he won the Nobel Prize in 2002, the committee noted that his writing “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". This is very much a theme in Fatelessness . Ostensibly the tale of a young Hungarian boy swept away from his life in Budapest through the changing fortunes of the Second World War. Ethnically, the boy is a Jew; yet his family (bar an uncle) do not actually practise that religion. In this way, the notion of being persecuted – to the extent of Auschwitz – for something you are unsure of your...