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A year and more ago, halfway through Gormenghast, I stumbled. Reaching Irma Prunesquallor’s party for the scholars, I found myself in the midst of a chapter of such awful dryness and tedium, brimming with excruciatingly exact narration of the embarrassments and humiliations endured in the course of a social event, that I gave up on the book altogether.

Looking back, I should have leafed beyond the page I halted on. If I had, I’d have found that mere pages away was excitement, danger, despair and the resumption of a thrilling narrative that had momentarily withered away. While forensic examinations of social mores have their own merit, authors must bear in mind their debilitating effect on the human soul. Almost any other book I would simply never have picked up again.

When reviewing a book of such grandeur and depth, it seems churlish to focus on its flaws. But consider: Gormenghast should have cemented Peake’s place as the greatest post-war English novelist, and despite its failings, it remains one of the most compelling novels I’ve ever read. It should never have taken me so long to complete, and now I have, I’m half tempted to simply start again.

Paul Graham is known for several things: as a founder of Viaweb, the online shop software bought by Yahoo!; as a Lisp developer and language designer; as a founder of startup incubator Y Combinator; and, to many more people, as an essayist on the art of computer programming.

Hackers & Painters is, in the main, culled from Graham’s back catalogue of articles, and many of them are available online. Nevertheless, the convenience and aesthetic value of a physical copy is not to be underestimated, and Hackers & Painters is far from a typical O’Reilly book in this respect. The copy is well typeset, and while the cover doesn’t quite live up to its content, it does include a decent enough reproduction of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel.

One particular improvement to the online versions is the inclusion of pictures; even for someone who gets the majority of Graham’s artistic references, there’s a distinct advantage to having a reproduction of the painting in question right there on the page, even in black and white.

When writing on language design, Lisp and startups, Graham is authoritative and writes with clarity, sharpness and candour. While there’s no denying the keenness of his observations, his amateur sociology lacks in comparison. Nevertheless, this is a book full of valuable insights, and I would recommend it to anyone involved or interested in computer programming.

Kim takes Chalmers-style zombies to be conceptually untenable, writing that

Zombies are indistinguishable from us in their speech behavior, and we must regard them as genuine language users. Among the assertions they make are “My elbow hurts,” “This mosquito bite is really itchy,” and the like; they make phenomenal assertions of the sort we make, and do so under similar conditions. Moreover, their phenomenal assertions are not easily isolated; they are integrated smoothly and seamlessly with other parts of their discourse. To hold onto the zombie hypothesis, we must apply a massive “error theory” to these creatures—namely that all their (positive) phenomenal assertions are false. I believe that this is incoherent. We must grant that the creatures have inner consciousness, although the qualitative character of their consciousness remains undetermined.

However, he accepts the plausibility of qualia inversion, leaving us with an epiphenomenalist view in which qualia are irreducible but all other mental states are functionally reducible.

Four students drive into the Arizona desert, searching for a cult who, they believe, can offer them eternal life. The catch? For two to gain immortality, the others must die—and one of them must be a willing sacrifice.

The 2008 editon, published by Creation Oneiros, is not recommended. The copyediting is appallingly slack, and the ghastly Introduction must be read to be believed. Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s work remains compelling—and terrifying. Dr. Willett’s stumbling escape from the vault of horrors is genuinely frightening, as the horror mounts to a terrifying climax.

Lovecraft’s ghost pervades popular culture, but I hadn’t encountered his work directly until a couple of years ago, when I read Michel Houllebecq’s biography. Apart from being a fascinating read in its own right, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life included several of Lovecraft’s short stories. One hears so much above his overwrought prose that I supposed his influence to be several orders of magnitude greater than his talent, and so I was pleasantly surprised by just how good they were. Ever since, I’ve had something of a hankering to delve more deeply into his oeuvre. Hopefully the gap between readings won’t be as long this time.

A fascinating treatise on modern warfare, The Utility of Force should be read not merely in every military staff college but in the halls of Westminster, Brussels and Washington. Conflict now permeates international relations: the last twenty years have seen military interventions by Western powers in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the intifada in Palestine and a spilling-over of that conflict into Lebanon.

General Smith argues that our failure to resolve these situations owes much to our shortsightedness about the very nature of warfare: that the paradigm of industrial warfare is dead, and that we live in an era of “war amongst the people”. Force must now be employed not as a solution in itself but as one component of a holistic approach including elements appropriate to the specific circumstances at hand, whether they be humanitarian, administrative or diplomatic.

Reviewing the history of warfare from Napoleon onwards, the book demonstrates the links between the emerging paradigm of industrial war and the formation of the modern nation-state. One classic example is the alliance of nationalistic politics and military service which empowered Prussia during the German wars of unification. By handing the people a stake in their own future, the state was able to swell the ranks of its military with conscript soldiers without inciting revolution.