Howard Bloom - The Lucifer Principle (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995) ***

In "The Lucifer Principle", self-proclaimed scientist Howard Bloom investigates the power of evil: its  reason to exist, its value, its biological, psychologial and social causes and purpose, and luckily also how to deal with it. As with any of Bloom's books, you get an incredible display of borrowed knowledge, from biology, paleontology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, history, economy, psychology and any other "ology" you can think of. He is the guy with the big picture vision, who identifies patterns and analogies to substantiate his thesis, regardless of whether these patterns actually exist, or regardless of whether there is any causal relationship between these grand analogies he identifies.

In his view, evil is an inherent part of our life. It's part of everything that happens. It's the power of destruction versus the power of creation at work in everything that's taking place.

Like in his other books, he has an optimistic view on the future. The global superorganism to which we increasingly belong, will try to find ways to deal with evil, and the former tribal fights over resources (land, live stock, women), the deepest savagery that drives humanity, will be turned to positive outcomes through the power of imagination, the new world that we can imagine to live in one day.

Even if Bloom connects what should not be connected, or even if he jumps to conclusions, or even if he too eagerly wants to prove that he is right - instead of taking the scientific method to question his own theory - the sheer amount of interesting facts make this a highly interesting book, which will surely challenge your current ideas. If only for that reason, it's worth reading.

Colm Tóibin - The Blackwater Lightship (Picador, 1999) ***

Because I was so enthralled by Irish author Colm Tóibín's latest novels, I bought this earlier work, "The Blackwater Lightship", shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. The story is about three generations of women who each have problems with the mother-daughter relationship. Because the son/grandson is dying from AIDS, the family now has to live together at the remote country house of the grandmother.

Like with his other novels, Tóibín is a master at creating real-life characters, people of flesh and blood, whose position you can understand, and even if you can't understand them, they are still presented as entirely plausible and natural. All the characters have own personality and even way of dialoguing: cynical, confrontational, conflict-avoiding ... but at a much deeper level they are thrown together by life itself. They have no other choice but to deal with the situation, and because of Declan's disease, they have to overcome their own all too human smallness to create something grander for the young man's last months.

Even if it's not his best novel - I think his writing style has much improved - its still above average by any standard. Tóibín is the master of the deep emotions of daily life and he loves all his characters. There is no evil to be spotted, unless in fate itself.

Recommended!

Luckas Vander Taelen - De Grote Verwarring (Houtekiet, 2016) ***

Luckas Vander Taelen, documentaire-maker, ex-politicus, columnist en vrijdenker durft het zoals gewoonlijk aan om zijn mening te uiten over één van de heikele thema's van het moment: hoe omgaan met het toenemend fundamentalisme in de islam, en dan met name in België?

Als atheïst is hij tegen elke vorm van indoctrinatie door religieuze instanties, hoewel hij uiteraard niemand het recht ontzegt om te geloven.

Hij klaagt de houding aan van politieke partijen en opiniemakers die het verschil niet kunnen zien tussen iedereen gelijke kansen geven aan de ene kant, en religieus fanatisme aanvallen aan de andere. We leven in een samenleving waarin mensen kansen krijgen, en het eindeloze verwijt dat het "de samenleving" is die verantwoordelijk is voor de problemen, of dat het "Westen" de oorzaak is van alle problemen - zowel lokaal als internationaal - houdt geen steek.

Hij verwijt "links" dat ze mee gaan in dit discours, wat leidt tot een soort blinde verdediging van "de migrant" zonder dat de problemen worden aangepakt die sommige migranten creëren of waar ze ook zelf het slachtoffer van worden.

Hij pleit voor betere en meer integratie (maar geen assimilatie) met respect voor de waarden en vrijheden waar deze samenleving eeuwen voor heeft gevochten. Het probleem durven onderkennen is een eerste stap om tot een oplossing te komen.

Ik hou van zijn logica, zijn rechtgeaardheid en zijn echte bekommernis om er iets aan te doen. Jammer dat iemand als hij de politiek de rug heeft moeten toekeren.

Karl Ove Knausgaard - Dancing In The Dark - My Struggle 4 (Harvill Secker, 2015) ***

Book 4! Two more to go and Knausgaard's "The Struggle" series will be finished, I guess. In this book he describes how he became a teacher right after secondary school (!), moving to the north of Norway to start working in a local school. Like with the previous 'novels' he takes the concept of autobiography to a new height, recreating in minute detail the facts and dialogues and thoughts and feelings that he cannot possibly have remembered, fantasising the day-to-day happenings around the key moments of his life.

And you get it as it is: the love stories, the friends, the teachers, the distress, the puerile attitude, the young man's irresponsible behaviour now that he's living away from his parents, and his responsible behaviour now that he's a teacher, his disrespect for his drunken father, his brother, his mother, and his own drunken bouts ... all themes and stories that we have started to know from the previous books. But nevertheless, it makes for fun reading, especially because it is so easy to identify with him. Knausgaard is nine years younger than me, but the context, and even the music where not that different then. The people are real people, with real stories and behaviour, erratic or friendly. The plot and the characters are real, and then you may wonder why you read this description of a reality that is nothing special, that is so unbelievably common and recognisable ... because that's exactly what it does. His writing is so good, that you get transposed again, not into fiction, but into a reality that you had almost forgotten. It brings back memories of what you, as the reader did at that time. It's a kind of literary time-machine. And that makes it fun. There is doubt about it that I will read the other two books.

Orlando Ortega-Medina - Jerusalem Ablaze (Cloud Lodge, 2017) *

Orlando Ortega-Medina is a Californian of Judeo-Spanish descent, and "Jerusalem Ablaze" is a series of short stories that take place in Japan, Oregon, Canada and Israel.

The stories are immature, with unreal and dark situations that are created for effect, but without any sense of humanity or even tension. The narrating is distant, without any interest or even deepening of the characters. You read and wonder 'so what'? Who are these characters and why would I care about them? The stories and the characters remain at the surface, with the plot twists as the only element of interest, but as I said, mainly there for effect. The writing is good, but without a specific style or voice.

I have better things to read.

Carlos Castán - Bad Light (Hispabooks, 2016) ****

A man is murdered. His friend muses over their friendship. There is not much action. There is no investigation, apart by the friend himself, near the end, rummaging through his appartment looking for clues. The rest of the novel is an abstract investigation, about life, about art, about the relationship between the individual and life and art. It is a philosophical quest, more than a crime investigation. It is a search for a lost friendship, a reconstruction of lost loves too, as both men have become single recently.

Castán's style is poetic, meandering from thought to memory and back in a kind or abstract stream of consciousness, and every fact, and meeting and plot twist is lifted to a higher level, a comparison with art, with philosophy all drenched in an incredible sadness and darkness. Even love does not bring light, only sorrow and a sense of abandonment: "One cannot truly love a safe haven unless there are dark forces lurking outside, a world brimful of orphanages and tombs and beasts, of children who have gone hungry that night and a wind that howls as it whips around the corners of the neighborhoods in which we had never set foot".

This novel will not cheer you up, but offers the kind of writing that luckily escapes the "creative writing" courses that destroy literature, offering a voice that is special and unique, that defies commercial interests or even literary pretense. That authenticity and careful craftmanship, together with a wonderfully sustained and balanced atmosphere make it a strong book.

Lawrence Krauss - The Greatest Story Told ... So Far (Simon & Schuster, 2017) ****

"The Greatest Story Ever Told" obviously refers to the bible, but that is just fiction, so Krauss brings us the wonderful story of science and matter, which is the real "Greatest Story Ever Told ... So Far", allowing for new scientific insights to change our current beliefs.

Krauss takes you along to the very tiniest particles of matter, and beyond that, explaining how to even can exist, and explaining what we don't understand. And despite his genuine efforts to include the layman among his readership, by inventing analogies and visual explanations to give us a glimpse of what mathematics or what the Large Hadron Collider has revealed, the outcome is still as mystifying as it was before. But luckily not only to me, but also for particle physicists and astrophysicists who look in wonder at their findings, probably even more surprised than I am, because they can understand at least part of it : "Not only have our explorations revealed the existence of dark matter, which is likely composed of new elementary particles not yet observed in accelerators, but far more exotic still, we have discovered that the dominant energy of the universe resides in empty space - and we currently have no idea how it arises" .

But that makes it fascinating. Not an easy to read book, but fascinating stuff.

David Bezmozgis - The Betrayers (Penguin, 2014) **

Israeli politician Baruch Kotler flees from his country with his young lover Leora to the Crimea, where, by accident, he meets the KGB officer who once betrayed him when he was a Soviet resident, sending him to the gulag so many decades ago. They had already rented a room at his betrayer's place, so they stay locked up in the same space for much of the novel.

The novel is about betrayal, and as Vladimir betrayed Baruch so many decades ago, so does Kotler himself feel to be a betrayer, not only to his wife but also to his country. But is also about being Jewish in modern times, even if non-religious, about the state of Israel, about zionism.

Even if the overall concept of the novel and the plot are good, and even the writing is not bad, the overall impression is one of a missed opportunity. The tension never goes really deep, and maybe too many questions are answered, especially the place of 'jewishness' is a little too preachy for the non-jew that I am.

Daniel Dennett - From Bacteria To Bach And Back (Allen Lane, 2017) ***

In this ambitious book, American philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the evolution of mind and consciousness as the result of biological adaptations in a very Darwinian way. No problem with that of course. And to a large extent you can only agree with all the different facts that support his vision.

But then he suddenly makes a jump to the description of consciousness which is, if I understand him well, an illusion. I can understand that the perception of the ego is an illusion, but consciousness itself? He calls it a 'user-illusion' at the same level as the color that stays on your retina after you've closed your eyes, a kind of imprint of continuity that does not exist in reality. I have no problem with this either, but he does not substantiate this fully, apart from a philosophical plausible explanation. Suddenly, the facts are no longer there, only the analogy with visual illusions.

At the same time you wonder who is writing for? The language is too complicated and the arguments too subtle to be read by mass audiences. But then why does he spend so much time on attacking "Intelligent Design", when surely none of his readers will need to be convinced of its stupidity? Why does he need to attack Noam Chomsky in such a way, when it's not even needed for his reasoning? Why does he refer so often to his own work to make his point?

In the end the reader will have read an interesting overview of a selection of scientists working in the area between biology and cognitive science, or seperately but brought together by Dennett in a synthesis of current thinking, with a original viewpoint of his own. At the same time, it is needlessly complicated, with divergence and repetitions that could have been avoided.

Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach - The Knowledge Illusion (McMillan, 2017) ****

Steven Sloman is professor of Cognitive Linguistics and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and Philip Fernbach is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Colorado. In "The Knowledge Illusion" they have written one of the most interesting and thought-stimulating books about the mind that I've read in quite a while. The writing is fluent, easy to understand for lay audiences, well substantiated with evidence and coherent in its narrative, which is not always evident for prominent scientists.

They describe quite a number of cognitive tests that demonstrate how little we actually know, and how strongly we over-evaluate our own knowledge. They explain the 'Illusion of Explanatory Depth' (which demonstrates how shallow our knowledge is of evern everyday things such as zippers and flushing toilets), they explain how our perceptions fool us by (re)constructing the gaps in our vision for instance. They explain the Illusion of Comprehension when you think you understand it because it looks familiar (as in a student re-reading his course without integrating the knowledge).

Their theory is that the mind is actually much broader than the individual. You don't store information because you know it's available elsewhere (as with the natural distribution of sharing knowledge within couples: tasks of storing information becomes divided). There is the obvious 'groupthink' that reflects the unquestioned beliefs and assumptions that you take over from the group you belong to.

Our brain has evolved to work properly in an action-oriented environment. Sufficient to act in different circumstances, driven by a simple cause-and-effect logic.

It's a humbling book because of all the flaws that we have in our thinking, the faulty perceptions, the lack of logic, the overestimation of our own capacities, the shallow memory, etc. At the same time, it is also enriching, in the sense that it demonstrates that in specific circumstances, we can obtain strong results by collective thinking, by adding different perspectives to our own. We are social animals, and by listening and challenging and enriching each other, we can challenge assumptions, misperceptions,  and other illusions.

Highly recommended!

2016 - Books of the Year

First, this was a strange year in terms of reading. Of the 28 books I read, most were non-fiction, and with Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature" taking up a significant chunk of the time allocated to reading. Even if it wasn't published in 2016, I can recommend it to anyone who's interested in our world. And I must say that the non-fiction I read was often more captivating and even entertaining than the fiction, which says a lot about the writing skills of the authors in the non-fiction catagory. In that respect, Andrea Wulf's "The Invention of Nature" could serve as an example for any non-fiction writer.

Second, and in contrast to other years, I did not find any novels that really took my breath away. Javier Marías comes up first on the list, even if his new novel is not as good as "The Infatuations". I enjoyed David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks", although more for the stylistic prowess and entertainment value. I was disappointed by some generally acclaimed novels, such as Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Sympathizer" and Yanick Lahens' "Bain de Lune". And of course a whole bunch of books is still waiting to be read: Julian Barnes, Knausgaard, Ian McEwan, Boualem Sansal, Amos Oz, Carlos Castán, Tahar Ben Jelloun to name but a few. I look forward to the new Michael Chabon. All that's for next year.

Third, I decided to switch to English for my reviews, since most of the books I read are in English. That may also increase the readership.

Non-Fiction

1. Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of our Nature - A History Of Violence And Humanity 
2. Amir Alexander - Infinitesimal - How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Changed The World
3. Andrea Wulf - The Invention Of Nature 
4. Scott E. Page - The Difference
5. Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz - Islam and the Future of Tolerance

Fiction

1. Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins 
2. Eduard Márquez - Brandes' Decision
3. David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks 
4. Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt - La Nuit De Feu
5. Miguel Syjuco - Ilustrado 

Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of our Nature - A History Of Violence And Humanity (Penguin, 2011) *****

It took me some years before I actually starting reading this book, because its size, close to 1,000 pages in small print, meant that I needed to have time, also to put aside some other books I wanted to read.

Trust me, this is a must-read ... and more than worth to make time for. Its author, Steven Pinker is a well-know psychologist from Harvard University, and he became famous with his books about the workings of the mind: "The Language Instinct" and "How The Mind Works", both highly recommendable books. Pinker is not only a scientist, he is a very gifted writer, able to synthesise gigantic quantities of studies in a very readable format for an educated lay audience. The breadth of his knowledge allows him to give a very big picture of the broad scientific areas of cognitive sciences, neurology, linguistics and psychology.

In this book, "The Better Angles Of Our Nature", Pinker goes even further in the breadth and scope of his vision, giving an amazing overview of the nature and the size of violence in history, with the remarkable conclusion that we currently live in the least violent period ever in humanity. It is remarkable because we are bombarded on a daily basis with scenes of horror in the Middle East, in South Sudan, in the Sahel, with terrorism apparently on the rise and daily stories of homicides and rapes and brutal aggression.

But Pinker breaks through this bias by presenting us figures from anthropologists, paleontologists, historians, economists, sociologists and other specialists that are truly eye-opening. One of the most striking figures is that in pre-historic times, not less than one third of all the people living in small tribes were killed by other humans. Death by disease, accidents and animal attacks have to be added to this figure. Dying of old age was almost unheard of.

Pinker guides us through history, and the horror of incessant fights and brutal killings among the conquered nations. But he also looks at modern times, at warfare and homicide in the 19th century and the 20th. Sure, not all statistics can be trusted, but even then the results speak for themselves. The rise of human rights, the global agreements on codes of warfare, the increased respect for minorities, the acceptance of societal diversity have led to a significant reduction in rape and murder, also in the most "civilised" societies.

But Pinker wouldn't be Pinker if he didn't delve into human nature and what can be done to improve things in the future. He believes - and he gives the evidence for it - that because the scope of our world has increased, through globalisation, international commerce, travel and tourism, the thinking about "the other" has changed. Global views and policies take consequences about the out-group into account. The financial interests of international commerce make politicians think twice before declaring war on other states. He also sees the importance of women in leading functions as an evolution towards more dialogue and less violence. He introduces some elements of game theory - changing the Prisoner's Dilemma into the Pacifist's Dilemma - to explain how an attitude of non-violence is always the better choice, and as a consequence also one of biological survival.

The amazing thing is that view people perceive our world as such, and think about former times, when everything was peaceful and calm. That past is as much an illusion as anything else of course.

Pinker's book gives hope. It is encouraging for all people who fight for more democracy, human rights, peace and tolerance. He demonstrates that we are moving in the right direction, even if the news of the day may show otherwise.

A must-read.

Paul Bloom - Just Babies - The Origin Of Good And Evil (Broadway, 2014) ***

Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom ask the simple question: "is morality innate or the result of education?", and this book gives the results of his studies on the moral attitudes of babies and young children. Babies? Yes, studies can be conducted with babies as young as six months to determine their preferences for helping or obstructing characters in very simple tests. Obviously, this will not be reflected in their own behaviour, but babies seem to make judgments very early on about good and bad, about kindness or cruelty. At a later stage, children do show kind behaviour, but until the age of four only towards people they know, never for instance to adults they haven't met before.

The most violent time of everybody's life is around two years old, and as Bloom points out "Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons".

But Bloom goes further, and gives the results of experiments of generosity and altruism, just to check how moral people are and how selfish. He checks how group-thinking and racial bias occur and at what age, and especially under which influence, as well as the feelings of disgust and moral judgments.

"Just Babies" is an easy to read and enlightening book, and it ends with the positive message that it is possible to transcend some of our innate selfishness, by our unique human capabilities of imagination, compassion and rational thought.

Eduard Márquez - Brandes' Decision (Hispabooks, 2016) ***½

The narrator is a painter living in Nazi-occupied Paris and whose entire collection of paintings was confiscated by the Germans. He can only get his own work back in return for another painting by Lucas Cranach that he owns. Brandes' decision is about whether to keep the masterpiece and relinquish everything he ever painted, or to get his own paintings back, and to reliniquish the masterpiece. I will not tell you what decision gets finally made, but the true value of the story is in the telling itself, the narrator's reflections on his own life, his father, his lover. And at an even deeper level, it's a reflection on truth, value, honesty, authenticity. A precious book.

Yanick Lahens - Bain de Lune (Sabine Wespieser, 2014) **

Written by Haitian author Yanick Lahens, the novel relates the story of Olmène, a young peasant woman who gets noticed by Tertulien Mésidor, the wealthy owner the land where the girls lives. The story moves between various generations, and creates a lively picture of the country, yet somehow it didn't capture my interest. Reading gets slowed down by the many characters and you have to flip to the back of the book each time to understand how they fit into the six generations family tree, and you are equally slowed down by the use of many Haitian words that are to be found in a glossary at the back. It did receive the Prix Femina though. It is well written. But not my thing, apparently.

Amir Alexander - Infinitesimal - How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Changed The World (Oneworld, 2015) ****

Fascinating! In 17th Century Italy, some mathematicians, first the monk Cavalieri, later, Torricelli and Angeli, came to the conclusion that in order to make correct calculations, "a line should be considered as composed of distinct and limitlessly tiny parts". This would later become the basis for calculus. The concept itself was strongly opposed by the Jesuits, the christian order of the educated and educators themselves, who could not accept this reasoning for theological reasons. They could not accept that their god would have created a universe where ambiguity and lack of precision played a role. The mathematicians themselves, had of course no theological or religious intention, but discovered that their use of "infinitesimals" was the only way to calculate slopes and volumes. What ensued was a real battle to destroy any thought and use of this new mathematics, because they endangered the world view of order as organised by the creator himself.

In the Jesuit view, "divine mathematics, universal and perfectly rational, orders and arranges the physical world to the best possible effect".

"For the Jesuits, the purpose of mathematics was to establish the world as a fixed and externally unchanging place, in which order and hierarchy could never be challenged. That is why each item in the world must be carefully and rationally constructed, and why any hint of contradictions and paradoxes could never be allowed to stand. It was a 'top-down' mathematics, whose purpose was to bring rationality and order in an otherwise chaotic world. For Cavalieri and his fellow indivisiblists, it was the exact reverse: mathematics began with a material intuition of the world, that plane figures were made up of lines and volumes of planes, just as cloth was woven of thread and a book compiled of pages. One does not need to rationally construct such figures, because we all know they already exist in the world. All that is needed, as Cavalieri says, is to assume and imagine them, and then proceed to investigate the inner structure. Ultimately, he continues, nothing contractory can be deduced, because the fact that the figures exist guarantee that they are internally consistent".

The attack by the Jesuits was fierce. Excommunication, joblosses for university mathematicians, angry letters and public denunciation, the abolishment of the monastic order who welcomed the mathematicians ... every trick could be used to bring these mathematicians back to order and old-school Eucledian geometry. And even if they managed to destroy the Italian world leadership in mathematical thinking, the concept of the new mathematics resonated with mathematicians in northern Europe, with again a comparable existential philosophical battle between John Wallis who expanded on the new mathematics and Thomas Hobbes who fiercely opposed them, to become gradually accepted, and part of every secondary school curriculum.

Again: fascinating! Amir Alexander manages to write a book on the history of mathematics that reads like a suspense novel. He goes into sufficient detail in the lives and contexts of each of the various 'dramatis personae' to bring them to life, even illustrating their personal hesitations and uncertainties from a load of well-documented material like personal letters. But it is even stronger that he shows how this - to lay people insignificant - mathematical innovation created a seismic shift in the way the worldview changed, how even well before the enlightment, and at the same time of Galileo, another revolution took place to bring science and factual thinking to a higher level than church doctrine to understand reality.

David J. Hand - The Improbability Principle (Scientific American, 2015) ***

David Hand is a professor of mathematics at Imperial College in London. In "The Improbability Principle", he gives a very readable overview of things that on the surface look like improbabilities, yet for a variety of reasons are fully to be expected.

He guides us through the Law of Inevitability, the Law of Truly Large Numbers, the Law of Selection, the Law of the Probability Lever, the Law of Near Enough, all laws that are active on a daily basis and may at times give the impression that miracles occur, when only the statistics of chance play their game.

At the same time he fiercely attacks quacks and paranormal entertainers for deceiving people. He accuses our education for not helping us understand everyday fallacies better than we do.

And that's why I would recommend this book to anybody with an educational role: it is easy to read, yet filled with examples that at first sight look totally impossible, yet when you listen to Hand's explanation, become totally understandable, like a magician explaining his tricks.

Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins (Hamish Hamilton, 2016) ***½

Javier Marías might be Spain's best writer of the moment. Last year, I gave "The Infatuations" a five-star rating, and rightly so, I guess, which made me take the next novel that appeared on the shelves of the book stores.

We meet young Juan De Vere, who works for Eduardo Muriel, a Spanish film director in the 1980s, just after the Franco regime. He ends up living with the excentric Muriel, whose relationship with his wife is one of neglect and vicious contempt, and young Juan eavesdrops on their misery and pain, the possible result of something that she may have done in the past, or still doing. As a result, she does her own thing, and young Juan suspects her of having affairs, even if he is also attracted to her, and at the same time he is wracking his brain to find out what she could have done to deserve all this.

One of these possible lovers is the dark figure of a Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, about whom rumours circulate, but who is also willing to take De Vere on night trips to clubs and bars.

Marías is a master of slow and precise prose, and his narrative sucks the reader into the bizarre situation of becoming a spy in the household of two bourgeois people, and even if you think that the narrator has long passed the boundary of privacy, you still read on, to know what is happening. And that is the strength of the book, there is no escape to be taken on a trip to the darker side of human nature, deep under the visible cover of decent bourgeois life, where appearances are almost by definition deceptive. What appears a boring marital problem becomes a moral investigation of respect, guilt, and self-knowledge, full of uncomfortable moments for both reader and narrator.

Simon Blackburn - Lust (Oxford University Press, 2004) ***

I was so thrilled with Simon Blackburn's "Trust", that I also bought "Lust", one book in a series by various philosophers on the seven deadly sins.

The British philosophy professor gives us his best: short chapters each looking at one aspect of 'lust', each time with a different approach, as the essay is a collection of lectures given on the subject. He talks about Plato's view, about Diogenes' public copulations, or the Christian panic of Augustine, who  so abhorred of physical lust that "he preferred the idea that in paradise children might have begotten by purely spiritual love", but he also talks about the biology of lust, and the surprising ways of nature, as well as about the evolutionary aspects of it and the pyschological ones. He compares desire to lust, he discusses prostitution and pornography, skimming through the books of literature and philosophy, illustrating the whole with drawings, paintings and statues, quoting famous philosophers such as Hume and Hobbes, as well as a whole panoply of unknown authors, moralists, feminists and other people with an opinion, in an overall erudite, literate and amusing book.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt - La Nuit De Feu (Albin Michel, 2015) ***

This is the true story of French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt taking an organised trip in the desert of Algeria. One day, he gets distanced from the others and loses his way in the desert. Left on his own, he tries to stay where he is in the hope to be found again by the rest of the group. During the night he has a kind of mystical experience, abandoning himself to the overpowering night sky, abandoning all hope and concepts and labels, giving himself to the totality of nature, which makes him burn like a flame, full of energy and totally motionless.

I can understand the feeling, even if is totally irrational. It must have been a profound experience. Schmitt writes well. There is no plot. The novel evolves towards the experience I describe above, then he is found again, and they all go home. But something has changed in him.

Worth reading.