180: The only sheep in town.
Tim Winton, AI and English, Hanne Ørstavik, 'King Lear', Emma Smith and Todd Borlik, Tom Newkirk, #edchatie and lots more.
New Year’s greetings to everyone. Hope you’ve had an excellent reading holiday: a reminder of my Books of 2024.
Tim Winton
is someone I always read. His book of essays The Boy Behind the Curtain: notes from an Australian Life was my Book of 2017 (I met him at a signing that year). He is of course the author of a series of powerful novels, too, and his latest has recently come out.
At Christmas I hesitated to start the 500+ pages of Juice (guests, cooking), but in fact I flew through them. Two developments: it’s a thriller with touches of Station Eleven and The Road, and it’s what is sometimes awfully called ‘cli-fi’. But Winton’s deep concern about the environment is consistent with what he has written before, in this story of a man’s life in a world in which the temperature has gone up several degrees and made much of the planet either extremely hostile or just uninhabitable.
King Lear scene by scene
The podcast is now complete, and here are 12 episodes in my dulcet tones covering the whole play.
There is also a 52-page pamphlet of all the transcripts which you can download for free.
Shakespeare webinars with Emma Smith
How about this! Professor Emma Smith, author of This is Shakespeare and more, has just started a 41-part webinar series on all of Shakespeare’s plays, marking the Oxford World’s Classics Shakespeare new editions. First this week was As You Like It with Todd Borlik (interesting link with King Lear). I loved directing this play a few years ago.
Free registration for future sessions.
Love by Hanne Ørstavik
I caught up with Love, first published in Norwegian in 1997, and translated into English by Martin Aitken in 2018. Definitely a winter read (reminding me of Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire a couple of years ago at this time).
Such a contrast to Juice: set in the frozen North of Norway, short, little action, meditative, haunting.
Jon is on the cusp of his 9th birthday. He and his single-parent mother Vibeke both leave the house, and do not connect in their journeys around the town. The most distinctive element is the way the narrative between the two perspectives switches without any visual warning such as a text-break. Each time you have a little jolt as you realise it has changed, and often you need a sentence or two to adjust. This adds to the general sense of disconnection and dread.
From JacquiWine’s post ‘Ten haunting, atmospheric novellas’: I’ve previously recommended here A Month in the Country and Cold Enough for Snow.
The Art of Slow Reading
by Thomas Newkirk is one of the best books I have read about English teaching, and the principles which should underpin it. I read it first about 10 years ago, and recently decided to revisit it in the light of the arrival of AI in education (more coming: see below).
AI and English teaching
is my current intellectual focus, particularly the challenges the technology might pose to what we do, and how it clarifies what the central principles of our subject are.
Here’s a page with links to people I am finding particularly helpful to follow and read at the moment (I’ll regularly update it). Many are writing on Substack, such as
, , , , and.
Andrew Bennett
was superb in the role of Mr Kinsella in the 2022 film version of Claire Keegan’s Foster, An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl (my comments).
Before Christmas I went to hear him read the whole of Small Things Like These in a staged reading at the Pavilion Theatre (supported by Eleanor McEvoy with some subtle and unobtrusive music).
It is rare that we can hear an entire work in this way, and it is always a nostalgic treat for an adult to be read to. This book is perfectly suited for such an experience, delivered at a natural human pace (see Newkirk, above).
#edchatie
returns on Monday evening for educators in Ireland, with my colleague Humphrey Jones hosting an online discussion on Ireland’s teacher recruitment and retention crisis. It’s a rich opportunity for sharing ideas and concerns, and the two sessions in December that I hosted were terrific.
All you need is a Bluesky account, and then just join in with the hashtag #edchatie between 8.30pm and 9.30pm.
Page with all details, including past sessions.
Teaching and Learning Things:
Becky Allen with a rare example of a measured piece about AI and teaching (so much is hype and hyperbole), ‘Generative AI and the Future of Artisan Teaching’, which suggests some positive possibilities:
This raises profound questions about the future of teaching. Will educators embrace these tools, trading some of their creative control for convenience and reduced workloads? Or will they resist, holding onto the autonomy that has long defined artisan teaching? Perhaps the bigger question is whether a new generation of teachers, growing up in a system shaped by AI and centralised resources, will even miss what it means to be an artisan.
John Tomsett on ‘This much I know about...how to have more fun in lessons’. His new book coming in the summer is one to look forward to: This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them):
Pupils who like a subject primarily do so because they are taught by highly trained teachers who know their stuff and make the content irresistible. The pupils pay attention, think hard, are challenged by the content and learn. They then taste success and become increasingly hungry for more. In my experience, the subject itself is not important when it comes to determining whether a pupil enjoys studying it; rather, the quality of teaching and the pupils’ levels of success are what heavily influence whether a pupil enjoys a subject.
A compendium of presentations from researchED Belfast, which I attended in September and wrote about.
Et Cetera
David Lodge (1935-2025) was such a reliably enjoyable novelist. RIP. A selection from my shelves above.
A fascinating insight into a very different life: Gianni Simone in Tokyo Calling on the life of 72-year-old manga artist Saito Nazuna in a ‘danchi’ building.
Gerald Durrell’s Corfu books are now in Penguin Modern Classics with cheering covers: a tonic for the winter.
- , Times journalist who writes well about books, has started a Substack: worth signing up. His best books of 2024.
Another novelist, Barry Malzberg (1939-2024), has died. I’d never heard of him, but boy was he a fast writer (starting with a novel written in 27 hours). Jeet Heer ends his obituary:
Barry Malzberg was an admirable writer, but not an easy one to emulate. I’ll shamefacedly admit that I spent far more time laboring over this obituary than he took in writing at least one novel.
Which reminds me of the anecdote about the also famously-fast (in all senses) Georges Simenon; Hitchcock once rang him only to be told that Simenon was unavailable, writing a new book. "That's all right," replied Hitchcock. "I'll wait."