What We Are Reading Today: The Waste Land

Short Url
Updated 11 January 2023
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: The Waste Land

Author: Matthew Hollis

Renowned as one of the world’s greatest poems, “The Waste Land” has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era.  A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written.

Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life.

He reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged it  through the lives of its protagonists — of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work.


What We Are Reading Today: The Great Escape by Angus Deaton

Updated 19 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: The Great Escape by Angus Deaton

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations.

In The book tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Addiction by Design’ by Natasha Dow Schull

Updated 18 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Addiction by Design’ by Natasha Dow Schull

Drawing on 15 years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away.

Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.

“Addiction by Design” is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life.


What We Are Reading Today: The Aesthetic Cold War by Peter J. Kalliney

Updated 17 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: The Aesthetic Cold War by Peter J. Kalliney

How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In “The Aesthetic Cold War,” Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers.

In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean — such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka — carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work.


What We Are Reading Today: American Mirror by Roberto Saba

Updated 17 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: Ocean

Updated 15 May 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: Ocean

Authors: David Attenborough, Colin Butfield

Drawing a course across David Attenborough’s own lifetime, Ocean takes readers through eight unique ocean habitats, through countless intriguing species, and through the most astounding discoveries of the last 100 years, to a future vision of a fully restored marine world, even richer and more spectacular than we could possibly hope.
Ocean reveals the past, present and potential future of our blue planet.