The Occasional, issue 2.

Brian Klaas, John Boyne, Victoria Kennefick, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and more.

Many thanks

to readers who have subscribed since the last issue. Sincere thanks for your encouragement and generosity.

Below the payline after Fluke, I discuss, among other things:

• Clair Wills’s highly personal history (a useful companion to Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These) Missing Persons.

• The first two short novels in John Boyne’s The Elements quartet, Earth and Water.

• Victoria Kennefick’s second poetry collection, egg/shell (her recent essay - Irish Times subscribers - on her the transition of her former husband was very powerful, and she covers this in the book too).

• plus: NYT books of the 21st century, Conor Murphy on AI in English teaching, Alice Etches on self-checkout machines, African book covers, Michael Longley, reading as an antidote to pessimism and much more more.

The Fortnightly will be back near the end of this month.

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Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

is by

Brian Klaas

, whose Substack The Garden of Forking Paths is worth signing-up to. The title of the newsletter explains what the central thesis of his book is: that every moment in our lives is a fork, and that our lives are massively ‘contingent’ rather than ‘convergent’. We have far less control or agency in our destinies than we imagine (that’s a comforting fiction). Klaas is good at using stories to elucidate complex ideas, starting with Henry Stimson and Kyoto, and this book was a thought-provoking read during recent travels in the European sunshine.

A good example of his thinking, in a post called ‘How the World Sped Up’:

The world now moves so fast that we can no longer understand it. Speed creates order and efficiency. But speed has also placed a ticking time bomb under the systems that govern our lives.