five top things i’ve been reading (fifty-fourth edition)

the latest in a regular 'top 5' series

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai

• John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism, Joseph Heath

• Collected Poems, Langston Hughes

• You be the judge: should my husband stop calling all sweet things ‘buns’?, interview by Georgina Lawton

• Andante, Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Mozart, played by Daniel Barenboim

---

This is the fifty-fourth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) On Boxing Day, I finished reading Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.¹ I’ve been rationing my access to this novel, since mentioning it here a few weeks ago. I’m not sure why I enjoyed it so much, considering I found much of its writing either clunky or cliched. But I think it’s because Desai manages to create a wholly convincing world out of some pretty unconvincing characters, and some almost convincing love stories out of some pretty unconvincing matches. The Ratty refrain! The moment Satya’s wife borrows the car! The kebabs at the end! Even now, Desai’s characters hold sway in my mind, disappointing each other, seeking purpose through migration, struggling with their reactions to world events, bickering, eating, and swimming in unpredictable seas. One of the best novels I’ve read this year.

2) This week, I read this excellent 2024 overview piece by Joseph Heath about the twentieth-century ‘no-bullshit Marxists’. Heath argues that these exponents of modern analytic Marxism gave up their last few Marxist commitments after being convinced that Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism offered better answers to their concerns about capitalism than attempts to engineer the labour theory of value into proving the wrongness of worker exploitation. It’s a strongly written and argued piece, marred mainly by a few big over-claims, including:

“Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as ‘liberal egalitarianism’.”

“Every single one” is a bizarrely unnecessarily high bar, which risks undercutting reader confidence in the rest of the piece. And it’s simply obviously not true about Cohen (and various of the others), either!

3) Some of the best poems I’ve read this year are by Langston Hughes. I really like the 2020 edition of the Serpent’s Tail collection of his poetry, which draws from Hughes’ own selections from his collections, alongside rarely and never previously printed poems.² [See footnote for clarification about this!] I love its front cover, and its range is great. It covers everything from oppression to freedom to fatherhood to drunkenness. Perhaps its only flaw is that it doesn’t include Juke Box Love Song.

4) Last week, I read this Guardian piece about a couple arguing over the word ‘bun’:

“Joe’s approach to food terminology is chaos. He needs to learn from supermarkets: it’s important to clearly categorise your food. Joe claims “buns” can mean any type of cake, and that in Rotherham, where his family is from, they call all cakes, biscuits and sponges “buns”. He defends this practice by saying the term “cake” doesn’t make any sense to him either, because you can have fishcakes and savoury cakes. I think that’s a false equivalence.”

I’m happy to know that philosophy of language is alive and well in everyday Britain.

5) Speaking of being made happy, I just published the latest episode of my philosophy podcast, Working Definition. This latest episode is, yes, on the topic of happiness, and it stars my excellent friend Henry Oliver. Since Mozart comes up in it a few times as an exemplar source of happiness, here’s a link to the Mozart piano sonata movement that I most enjoy, both to listen to and to play.

1. My favourite Boxing Day was the one, a long time ago, when I read Middlemarch at my grandparents’ house.

2. I’m grateful to the excellent Hollis Robbins for pointing out (see comments section) that this volume is effectively a reprint of Hughes’ 1959 selection. It’s odd that the Serpent’s Tail volume doesn’t make this clear (except, as far as I can see, on the back cover), and that even the intro doesn’t mention it. It’s also odd the way the ST volume refers to the previously unpublished poems, since it seems these must have been previously unpublished prior to the 1959 volume, not this one.. But there we go!