Category Sách & Tri thức

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How to use procrastination to your advantage

As medieval sages understood, putting things off – done well – can open the doors to creativity and purpose

A soft rain hammers at the window. I’ve pushed the couch to the other side of the coffee table because I need to get closer to my floor lamp. In front of me is a stack of 40 student essays, unopened and ungraded. The water I boiled for tea went cold an hour ago and I’m looking up the age of celebrities on Wikipedia. David Hasselhoff (born 17 July 1952). Dannii Minogue (born 20 October 1971). Has my afternoon been wasted? Is this … procrastination?

Today the P-word has a bad reputation. Psychologists link it with increased anxiety, diminished self-esteem and depression. And magazines (like the ones I just sorted into a date-ordered stack) feature articles with headlines such as “How to Stop Procrastinating, NOW!” Am I one of the 20% of the population with “chronic procrastination”, the lifelong tendency to avoid doing the things I should be doing? A few years ago, this would have alarmed me – but now I no longer worry. I embrace days like this. Because an obscure idea I discovered in a work of medieval theology has taught me how to relax.

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Life of Pi author Yann Martel: ‘I thought the Iliad was a book for old farts… then I started getting ideas’

The best-selling novelist explains why his new retelling of Homer’s epic offers the ideal antidote to the age of Trump

Yann Martel’s writing studio, where he sits while we talk over Zoom, is a mere 10ft by 12ft; beyond his treadmill desk lie the drifts of snow that separate him from the house he shares with his wife, writer Alice Kuipers, and their four children. Martel was born in Spain, but his father’s academic work took the family to places including Portugal, France, Costa Rica and Alaska; perhaps it’s no surprise that, after all that travelling, he’s been settled in Saskatoon, Canada, for many years. But his novels couldn’t be any less rooted, in time or place: from the sea-tossed raft of the Booker prize-winning Life of Pi to the Dante-inspired Beatrice and Virgil and the era-shifting triptych of The High Mountains of Portugal, Martel is clearly possessed of an itinerant imagination.

Now comes Son of Nobody, for which Martel has written what the novel’s dismissive professor would term “pseudo-Homerica”; a version of the Trojan war seen from the perspective of an unknown soldier, Psoas, and discovered by an eager researcher in present-day Oxford, Harlow Donne. The poem appears in full, with Harlow’s story – including the breakdown of his marriage and his relationship with his young daughter, Helen – presented via digressive footnotes, at times scholarly but just as often humorous and domestic.

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‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

From sad-fishing on Facebook to sensational Substack revelations – today’s readers don’t have to look far for confessional writing. Is this the end of autobiography?

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.”

Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences. “Most writers I know,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire”. But she takes that risk, addressing the book to “you”, her fluidly gendered husband Harry (who’s angry when she shows him a draft), while exploring identity, pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality.

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Sarah Hall: ‘Everyone wangs on about Anna Karenina – I’ve never been able to finish it’

The author on being inspired by Michael Ondaatje and how Hilary Mantel helped her overcome her aversion to historical figure novels

My earliest reading memory
The headteacher in my village primary school used to recount terrifying Cumbrian ghost tales to the class, which I’m sure was formative. I can also still hear my mum sing-songing rhymes; “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s”. My dad read the Ant and Bee books to me, repeatedly – he’d drive back over a high upland road from work and get home in time for bedtime stories. But my earliest independent reading memory is The Story of Ferdinand by Leaf and Lawson. I loved that bull!

My favourite book growing up
Big books gave me the whirlies so it took a while for them to start landing.

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Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden review – are criminals born or made?

A psychologist delves into the genetics of bad behaviour in a book littered with fascinating scientific findings

In 2021, the psychologist and writer Kathryn Paige Harden co-authored a paper outlining her research into the genetic patterns linked to a higher risk of developing substance abuse problems or engaging in risk-taking behaviour, such as having unprotected sex or committing crime. The paper referred to the genetics of “traits related to self-regulation and addiction”, but Harden thought of herself as studying the genetics of sin.

Harden is a professor at the University of Texas and the author of a previous book, The Genetic Lottery, on how our knowledge of genetics should shape our views on meritocracy. She once received a letter from a man who has been in prison since he was 16 for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. “What would drive a boy to do such a thing?” he asked her. Her new book is a heartfelt, subtly argued response to his question, an attempt to outline how our expanding knowledge of what makes people do bad things – the interplay of our inherited tendencies and our life circumstances – should influence how we assign moral responsibility and blame.

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The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley review – the laureate of bad relationships

Riley has always skewered cruelty with shattering exactitude. What’s new in this story of two old friends in London is the delicacy she brings to moments of tenderness

In the opening pages of The Palm House, London is enveloped in a dust storm blown up from the Sahara. As old friends Laura and Putnam meet for a drink in a Southwark pub, a packet of crisps open between them, the occluded atmosphere renders the city unsettlingly strange: the sky is “dark yellow … like iodine”, while the pictures in the evening paper show a “blood red sun”, a “jaundiced” City square, a “prodigious cloud, menacing the Shard”.

Like a Saharan dust storm, Gwendoline Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new. Her female protagonists, often writers themselves, struggle with bad relationships: in First Love, shortlisted for the 2017 Women’s prize, Neve grapples with an abusive marriage, while Bridget in 2021’s quietly brutal My Phantoms is caught up with her desperately self-involved mother. The mothers in Riley’s novels are mostly monstrous and persistent, the fathers mostly monstrous and dead. Her stories are not structured around linear plots – nothing much happens – but Riley’s disquieting acuity and her spare and unsparing prose makes them shimmer with tension. She has a phenomenal ear for dialogue, for the myriad ways in which people unknowingly lay themselves bare, both in what they say and, more agonisingly, in what they don’t – or can’t. She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March

John Lanchester, Patmeena Sabit and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I find it hard to read contemporary fiction while I’m in the middle of writing a novel, so I use the time after finishing as an opportunity to catch up. I hugely enjoyed two British novels, Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, about friendship and business, and The New Life by Tom Crewe, about gay life in the 1890s. European fiction: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is a funny novel about going on a road trip with a deranged parent; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is about the horrible life of digital nomads; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk is an unclassifiable, riveting sort-of mystery.

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JD Vance announces a new memoir about his conversion to Catholicism

The vice-president’s follow-up to Hillbilly Elegy is announced as speculation builds over a 2028 run to succeed Trump

US vice-president JD Vance has announced a new memoir centred on his conversion to Catholicism, adding to mounting speculation about a potential 2028 presidential run.

The book, titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, will be published on 16 June by HarperCollins and is described as “a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian across the seasons of Vance’s life”.

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Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs review – the relationships that drove a genius

A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centre

Today, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but this wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already on the wane in his lifetime, declined after his death in 1987. On the publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories a decade later, Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained of his “intellectual flaccidity”. He also dismissed The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s searing 1963 essay diptych on the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an overly emotional “period piece”. If such a verdict was out of touch then, six years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, pitifully shortsighted.

An inflection point in the Baldwin revival arrived in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which juxtaposes footage of modern-day protest and racist police violence with clips of Baldwin’s civil rights-era speech­making. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s prescience as well as reasserting his rightful place as a key witness to that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s preferred name for the writer-spokesperson-celebrity mantle he had assumed by the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral obligation and frustrating passivity).

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The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review

Writer and author Alex Preston said he “made a serious mistake” after a reader spotted similarities between his review and one that appeared in the Guardian

The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

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