2009 Brussels 20km

It's time to start seriously preparing for this year's Brussels 20km run. It is on 31 May, which means there are only three more weeks to train. So far I think I'm OK - I'm running 15 km every Sunday without any problem - no blisters, no pulled muscles, no heart attack! Hopefully the stretch to 20 km will not be too hard - I'm hoping that the extra adrenalin that such an evnt produces will carry me to the finishing line. Unfortunately the last 5 km, that I have not yet added to my training schedule, include the notorious Avenue de Tervuren/Tervurenlaan, a long hill that comes just at the point when the very last thing you want is a hill.

February 14 - no love for Salman Rushdie

Lesser known than St Valentine's Day, February 14 this year is also the 20th anniversary of the issuing of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book The Statanic Verses.

I've read The Satanic Verses, and frankly don't see what the fuss was about. I suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini hadn't read the book, but I'm far from an expert on the workings of the religious mind so maybe there's something I didn't see. Either way, I'm glad that nobody was foolish enough to try to act on the Fatwa, and that Rushdie is still alive and well (I saw his cameo role in Bridget Jones's Diary again recently). It's a pity, though, that he had to live his life in fear for a decade because of the inability of an aged cleric to understand the modern world.

I recently read Rushdie's earlier book, Midnight's Children, for which he not only won the 1981 Booker Prize but also won a unique 'Best of Bookers' in 2008. Both well deserved prizes - it is a much better book than The Satanic Verses and presents a convincing picture of an India (and Pakistan) that few westerners know. Written in a disarmingly simple style, its message is powerful and moving. At times you feel that the true central character is Mumbai itself, Rushdie's birthplace and obviously a place that exerts a strong influence on its natives. But the story goes well beyond Mumbai and brings the reader with it brilliantly.

By coincidence Slumdog Millionaire, also a film with Mumbai as its unforgettable backdrop, came out not long after I read Midnight's Children. It presents another, but not inconsistent, view of that great city. I think we'll be hearing more and more from Mumbai as India moves more decisively towards the global mainstream.

Brussels Metro 2009

Today they finally put up maps of the new arrangement of the Metro lines in the trains themselves, but so far the new map is not on the STIB/MIVB website. The new arrangement will start on 4 April.

The new arrangement adds only a small extra piece of track, between Clemenceau and Gare de l'Ouest/Weststation, but they have taken the opportunity to completely rearrange the Metro lines. Where before there were three lines, known (confusingly) as 1A, 1B and 2, there will be four, to be known as (stll confusingly) as 1, 2, 5 and 6. The missing lines 3 and 4 are not actually metro lines - they are the 'through-town' tramlines which used to be clled 'pré-metro' lines. Got all that? Good.

Anyway, I will be on line 5, which will go from Herrmann-Debroux to Erasmus (instead of Heysel at present). There will also be a kind of circular line going around the centre of town (the old Line 2, but now all joined up). It isn't yet clear if it will go in a continuous circle, or if it will go back and forth like a circular pendulum.

All in all it will mean quite a few changes in the way we look at the Metro. With four lines it will make Brusels seem like really grown-up big city. But for our daily lives I don't really see much change, on the eastern side of town anyway. Over in Gare de l'Ouest/Weststation, the only place along with Beekkant where all four lines will run, it will make a lot of difference I suppose. If they increase the frequency, which is already quite good, it will be an extra bonus.

Belgian Boat Show

Don't bother, if you're a sailor.

I drove to Gent this morning to go to the Belgian Boat Show. Although I am not yet an active sailor, it is my intention to get a boat one day - a real boat, a sail boat. But the Belgian Boat Show had, ... well ..., almost none to see. There were about 10 superboats, of 10 metres length or more, and price tags to match, and two (yes 2) smaller 'day sailor' boats. But the whole large range of 7 to 10 metre boats was entirely missing, and yet this is both the most popular range, and the most affordable.

There were a few (but not many) dinghies, and a lot of motor boats - basically macho boats, all white leather seats, champagne bottle holders and chrome.

So, if you are looking for a power boat, something to make you feel cool and trendy on the Cote d'Azur, then go to the Belgian Boat Show. Otherwise don't bother.

Me, I'll be going to the Paris Boat Show next year.

What happened to the 1980s?

In economic terms the 1980s seem to be returning in my country – unemployment is increasing rapidly, factories are closing every day, and people are starting to feel poor again.

But although I remember the 1980s all too well for exactly those reasons, it seems that in one sense I slept through most of the decade.

I analysed the music on my MP3 player by date of original recording, to see if it would show a peak of musical preference at a particular moment in my life. The results are shown below (with the raw figures grouped in five-year averages to avoid a too-spiky graph):


What the results show is that, as is normal, I have a visible preference for the music of my teenage years (the peak on the left). However, I have almost as great a liking for the music of the 1990s and 2000s. The surprise (for me) was that I seem to have no great liking for the music of the 1980s. Apart from 1988, which is quite well represented, I have an average of two tracks per year from the 1980s on my MP3. The question, of course, is not why I have those tracks, but why I do not have the others. So I checked back to see what was popular during the 1980s, to find that it was the decade of: ABC, Tina Turner, INXS, Hall and Oates, Bananarama, Pat Benatar, Whitesnake, Duran Duran, Billy Idol, Whitney Houston, Thompson Twins, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Police, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis & The News, Tears for Fears, The Go-Gos, Run D.M.C., Culture Club, Bryan Adams, Prince, Billy Joel, The Bangles and Wham!

OK, that explains it then!

Hunger

I recently went to see Hunger, a film about the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland, and more particularly about Bobby Sands, the first of the men to go on hunger strike and the first to die.

For me at least the film was unsatisfying. The hunger strikes had been such a large part of my own life at the time that I learned nothing new, either factually or emotionally. I know what happened, and I knew the passions on both sides - passions I shared, I would have been at Bobby Sands funeral if it had not coincided with my university exams.

The most strange thing about the film is the way it completely ignores everything that happened outside the prison, with the exception of the assassination of one prison guard. By doing so, it gives the impression that the hunger strikes were an intimate action that happened only within the secrecy of the prison, when in fact they represented a massive explosion of popular anger and activism. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, organised, agitated, and voted in support of the hunger strikers, but this was ignored in the film. The fact that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during his hunger strike was relegated to a mere title at the end of the film. Yet this is a fact that remains significant in Northern Irish politics a generation later.

Clearly the producer (Steve McQueen) set out to present only the intimacy of Bobby Sands life and death in the prison, but to an audience ignorant of the background this could have the effect of making the whole thing seem irrelevant. I watched the film in a Brussels cinema surrounded by Belgians who, in all likelihood, did not even recognise the voice-over of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps believing her entirely one-sided statements to reflect a 'neutral' narrator. The bilingual subtitling did not make clear that the drawling voice was one of the main protagonists in the story.

The Beach, by Alex Garland

I got (gently) criticised for piggy-backing on Amazon.com reviews when I blogged a few of the books I have read recently, so this time I'll ignore Amazon, and try to use only my own words.

My first thoughts on The Beach, before I started it, were slightly negative. My copy (shown above) has Leonardo di Caprio on the cover, as he starred in the film version of the book. I haven't seen the film, so I don't know what it is like, but when publishers use a film to retro-sell the book, it worries me. In addition, the group of figures on the cover (on Leonardo's chest!) look like an ad for Lost.

The book was not what I had expected, though.

Richard, the main character and narrator, is a credible example of the kind of rich western youngster that is seeking ever more extreme excitement in south-east Asia. His characterisation is fairly moderate - Garland resists the temptation to make him either heroic or anti-heroic. He just is what he is, warts and all. The cover blurb refers to Generation X, and in some senses Richard is a classic example of the stereotype - well-versed in TV and film culture, but largely uninterested in the actual cultures of the countries he is travelling in.

The plot is a strange mixture of utopian fantasy and The Lord of the Flies. Again, the cover blurb refers to The Lord of the Flies, but I had had that feeling even before I succumbed to the temptation of reading the cover reviews. The similarity, though was clear to several of the reviewers. Initially, though, I was more interested in the sense that Garland was trying to describe a type of Generation X utopia - an isolated beautiful spot inhabited by young people from all over the (western) world, where food and dope are free and plentiful, modern problems like illness and boredom are absent, and everyone is cool. Curiously absent is any mention of Generation X's other recreation, sex.

The utopia gets strained, though, and the modern world intrudes, ultimately destroying paradise. Perhaps Garland was trying to make some deep point, but it gets lost in the plot. Ultimately the book is simply a good read, retaining all the reader's attention right up to the end, which in typical Generation X style is a bit of a blur. Richard, the narrator, tends to take both the life and death of paradise fairly stoically, as if such things are expected by the jaded 'traveller'.

Garland's style is fairly sparse but effective. You are drawn into the book slowly - there are no clever literary hooks to grab you - but before long you want to continue reading simply because the book is interesting and readable. You don't really identify with Richard - he's too shallow for that - but you follow him nonetheless.

All in all, a good book, and Garland is a writer with talent. I have also read The Coma, his second book, and I would really ecomment that too.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

This morning I finished reading Atonement, by Ian McEwan. It is a lovely book and should probably have won the Booker Prize, instead of only being shortlisted (though, since I haven't read the 2001 winner, I cannot be certain). I entirely agree with the newspaper reviews quoted on Amazon which say:

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence', Independent .
'Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book - A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them', Sunday Times .
'... a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel', Independent on Sunday

And Amazon's own review, which says:

'Atonement, McEwan's first novel since the Booker-winning Amsterdam, is an extraordinary achievement and possibly the finest work he has yet published. It is a engrossing book, full of narrative suspense and wonderfully defined characters. It is also a consciously literary novel, with allusions to Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James, but with none of the ponderous self-importance that label often suggests. Atonement confirms McEwan's great talents and well deserves its place on the Booker shortlist.'

Atonement is a classic Booker novel, in that it deals with powerful events and their effects on a small group of people, in a style more commonly associated with a number of Irish writers - Elizabeth Bowen, Ann Enright, John Banville and Willian Trevor.

It is hard to believe that Atonement was by the same author as Amsterdam. The latter was a weak book, I felt, and not a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

A small unnoticed extinction in East Congo

The tragic situation in East Congo is outside the scope of this blog. The scale of death and suffering is unimaginable in modern Europe, and nothing I say below should take away from the misery of the people who have suffered for years and who are still suffering in Congo.

Apart from the humanitarian situation my interest in north-eastern Congo is due to the fact that it is - or was - the home of many variants of the great African game of Mancala. In the brief period between the colonisation of central Africa and its decolonisation several anthropologists collected tantalising glimpses of the richness of the region in terms of variants unknown elsewhere. Many of the writers said that many other variants existed, but had not yet been documented. Decolonisation, and the collapse of civilisation in several important mancala playing regions, mean that they may now never be collected. The widespread disruption and death in the region now means that much of the memory of these games is being lost. A displaced people is likely to lose large parts of its culture, through loss of artifacts (game boards), loss of the people who know the rules, or the homogenising effect of mixing with other peoples in refugee camps.

Men are the main players of mancala, but the war has separated many men from their friends and their children, and the knowledge of the games may not be passed on. The children will be more likely to play football or cards - these effects were visible even before the war. So by the time the war ends, as it must some day, there may have been a widespread, unnoticed, unknown, extinction of many mancala variants.

In 1977 a young anthropologist, Philip Townshend, published the biggest study of Congolese mancala games ever: Les Jeux de Mancala au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Les Cahiers du CEDAF, Cahier 3, 1977)(Not on the internet - I got it via the library of the ULB in Brussels). In it he gives details of dozens of games played all over the region, many of which are threatened with extinction. How many more there were, we can only guess. In his conclusion, Townsheld says that "this study does not claim to be exhaustive. There are undoubtedly a large number of other games that are unknown to us, and it would be interesting if other researchers could complete this preliminary study" (my own translation from the original French). Unfortunately those other researchers never materialised, but instead war came, and amongst its sad unfortunate casualties may be a large part of the regions gaming culture.

Whether additional knowledge exists in the Africa Museum in Tervuren just outside Brussels is hard to know. The Museum only allows accredited researchers access to its collections, and provides no real information on its website. Townshend, in another publication in 1979, stated that the Africa Museum has a good collection of boards, but whether it has also the playing rules that they need, is unclear. In any case, boards and rules in cold wet Belgium do not compensate for the death of games in their natural habitat. If the games are lost in Congo, they are lost as real games. Our diversity as humans has probably just shrunk in this, as in so many other, aspects.

Janggi - Korean Chess

A short time ago I bought a set for Janggi, the Korean version of the great chess family. Janggi is more closely related to Chinese chess (Xiang Qi) than any other version, and it is generally believed that Janggi derives from an earlier version of Xiang Qi.

Janggi is played on a board similar to that of Xiang Qi, but without the river, which obviously affects some moves (in Xiang Qi the elephant piece cannot cross the river). The pictures below show the two sides set up in a conventional arrangement, and the empty board (paper, as is also common for Xiang Qi):

The pieces used in Janggi are flat, as in all other East Asian chess variants. They have the name of the piece written on the flat surface, in green for one side and in red for the other (or, at least this is the commonestcolour combination -modern Korean sets use other clours, such as blue). The pieces are usually hexagonal, as shown below, but again, modern Korean sets (and one reported from 1895) can be circular as well:

My set are basically cheap plastic pieces - I would like to get better wooden ones, but they seem to be unavailable in Europe. Most games shops are unaware of even the existence of Janggi - I asked in Just Games in Camden Lock (London), a long established games shop, and the owner has never heard of Janggi, despite selling nice wooden sets of Xiang Qi pieces. In Korea, though, you can get lovely sets, but I cannot figure out how to buy them, as the sellers website is in Korean only.

There are a few good websites that explain the rules of Janggi, including (of course) Wikipedia, and the Chess Variant pages. Written information in English is quite scare, and quite recent. The original source was the great games historial Stewart Culin, who wrote one of the earliest descriptions in his 1895 book Korean Games:

Unfortunately, Culin's book is not easily available - Amazon.com has some copies available second-hand, but at a price. I don't remember where I got my copy, but I think it was not too expensive at the time. It is a Dover Publications reproduction from 1991 (ISBN: 0486265935).

The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi

I recently read The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel. For the first half of the book I was pleasantly expecting it to be like Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani, a book I really enjoyed. (Incidentally, when you put "Londonstani" into Amazon.com as a search word, the second item on the list of 18 hits is The Buddha of Suburbia - by a different author, and with no obvious connexction. Obviously I'm not the only person who saw the similarity!).

The Buddha of Suburbia is not, unfortunately, anything like as good as Londonstani. It starts with promise, but the characters fail to develop, the plot never really comes together, and the story quickly becomes unbelievable and, frankly, silly. Although Kureishi may be drawing on his own experiences (though I doubt this), it certainly doesn't resemble what I know of the lives of Indians in England in the 1970s (and I was there during that time, and knew Indians).

The book's publisher, Faber and Faber, on their website say that "The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain".

Oh dear ... they haven't even read their own book. One of the recurring threads in the book is Karim's annoyance at being called a "Paki" - he is, of course, Indian (the frequent references to Bombay may also give this away). Like this little fact, the rest of their self-serving review is also wrong - it is not a tour de force - more of a forced first novel. Read it if you want, but it isn't worth the price of a new book (I bought mine second-hand, of course).

Culling my MP3

I usually run for an hour every Sunday morning in the Bois de la Cambre/Terkamerenbos in the south of Brussels. While running, I listen to my MP3 player. When you're running there is, of course, very little else you can do, so you tend to concentrate more on the music.

So during this hour or so I get the opportunity to really re-listen to my supposed musical tastes. Out of a large number of CDs I have had to select only 194 tracks to put on my MP3 (it is not, of course, an iPod); these 194 tracks should, therefore, represent those I like most; and to a great extent they do. But inevitably, the constant repetition of the same tracks over and over (I also listen to my MP3 on the way too and from work), makes clear that I don't, in fact, really like some of them. Some tracks I look forward to, and other I skip when they start playing. This has been a small revelation to me, as I had thought I liked them all.

So which are the winners and losers?

The tracks I skip past tend to be from Brian Ferry, Prodigy, and one or two from New Order. The current 'winners', that I look forward to, are also from the same era, and include Blondie, the Ramones, REM, and odd tracks by Black Sabbath (Paranoid, of course), The Buzzcocks, Tracy Chapman, and Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels. Newer stuff includes NWA, Motorhead, The White Stripes, and the Cranberries. Some tracks by New Order and Prodigy remain among those I look forward to.

It's time for a cull. My MP3 is full to capacity, so I have to cut some tracks in order to make room for new ones. I think the old crooner, Brian Ferry is going to almost disappear. But who will replace him? I don't like a lot of the recent music, which I find fairly tuneless and dull (the Kooks, Coldplay, Radiohead, etc, though I increasingly like the Kaiser Chiefs), so I might have to go back and look through my CDs again.

Siren City

I live quite near one of the main arteries in Brussels. This means that, apart from good transport links, I am exposed to some noise from the sirens of the police, ambulances, and fire brigade. I don't mind this, as I reckon that the faster they get to where they're going, the better. It might be me that needs one of them one day!

But the other day I was crossing the road, when a car with a loud siren came racing down the road. Like everyone else, on foot or in cars, I made way for the emergency vehicle, only to see, as it passed me, that it was a vehicle from the water service! The water service .... ? What possible emergency were they in such a hurry to get to? A dripping tap?

So maybe all those sirens that provide the backing track to my city life are not as important as I thought. How many other non-urgent services have sirens on their vehicles? If they do not have a real life-and-death reason to be able to over-ride normal traffic rules, and demand privileged treatment, then they should not have sirens.

I was a millionaire

I own property in Ireland. Thanks to the enormous bubble in house prices since the mid 1990s (see Figure 2 on page 4 of this paper) I became a paper millionaire for a few years. It was, of course, only a 'feel-good' fortune - I had no intention of ever selling my home, or even using it as collateral to fund an affluent lifestyle. Now, thanks to the inevitable reversal of the Irish property boom, I am no longer a millionaire. But so what? Since I wasn't ever going to sell the house, and since I continued to enjoy the same level of pleasure from it when it was expensive as when it was cheap, am I any worse off? The answer, clearly, is no. I was lucky to have the house when it was worth next to nothing, I was lucky to own it when it was worth a fortune, and I will be lucky to own it in the future, regardless of the state of the property market.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

This book won the 1998 Booker Prize, so I expected great things of it. I had recently read, and greatly enjoyed, the 1997 Booker Prize winner - The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy - and I usually find Booker Prize winners and shortlisted books to be excellent.


I was surprised, then, to find that it read more like a short story than an important novel. I kept waiting for its genius to shine out, but then it just went and ended. Without any genius. Or any shining. In fact, it was so forgettable that I've already almost forgotten it.

Admittedly, the 1998 Booker Shortlist was not a particularly strong one, though it did have Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto on it - a much stronger book which, with the benefit of my recent hindsight, probably should have won.

Ian McEwan was short-listed again, in 2001 with Atonement, which I have yet to read (its on my shelf at home, though). I hope that turns out to be better. The film of Atonement is currently in the cinema but I am reluctant to go and see it before I read the book. By the time I do read it, though, the film will have disappeared from the cinema, and I'll have to wait for the DVD. Such a dilemma!

Another World, by Pat Barker

Almost by chance, I read a few of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy books last year and found them unexpectedly good. So when I found Another World in the Oxfam Bookshop in Uccle recently I bought it.

It was a disappointment. She returned to her First World War theme, but indirectly through the memories of an old man who is, himself, only one of the charachters of the book. But all the characters are shallow and undeveloped, and the book ends up being an uncoordinated clutter of clichés without a convincing central plot. Even the dénouement, when it finally comes, is a damp squib, because by then the reader (well, this one anyway) has long since stopped caring.

Indian summer

At the moment in Brussels we are enjoying an Indian summer (this is somewhat like an Irish summer, only warmer, drier, and more pleasant!). Yesterday it was a pleasure to be out and about in Brussels, and many many people were enjoying that pleasure. Town was thronged with locals, tourists and day-trippers from all over. Every pavement café was full, and the parks, streets, and squares were full of people sunning themselves, reading on park benches, cycling, walking, playing with their kids, and so on.

In the morning I was in the Bois de la Cambre, the green lung in the south of the city. Although normally its internal roads are full of speeding cars, on Sundays half of it is closed to traffic and becomes an oasis of calm and relaxation. It is full of walkers, joggers, kids learning to ride bikes, older people learning to roller-blade, dog-walkers, pick-nickers, and amateur footballers.

In the afternoon I cycled around the city; the canal area, Place Flagey, the Bourse, Place Royal, the Park van Brussel, Matonge, the Cinquantenaire Park, and many places in between. What is immediately obvious when you cycle, is just how small Brussels is (geographically), but how much it squeezes in. There are so many different areas, so much to see, so many beautiful building, and so many grotty ones. By turning a single corner you can go from the grottiness of the poor housing near the canal to the trendiness of the Saint Catherine area. And everywhere, in every quartier, there are hundreds of cafés and restaurants, each looking (and smelling) very inviting - some get mentally noted for a later and more leasurely visit!

On days like yesterday it is truly a pleasure to be living in Brussels. Lets hope thee are many more like it.

Brussels No-public-transport Day

Following on from the (limited) success of Brussels No-car Day on 20 September, today, thanks largely to the trade unions representing well-protected public sector employees, we are enjoying No Public Transport Day.

Yes, today is either:

• Brussels 'walk-to-work' day,
• Brussels 'drive-to-work' day (thereby negating the good you might have done on no-car day),
• Brussels 'cycle-through-the angry-cars' day, or,
• Brussels 'have-an-involuntary-long-weekend' day

At least it isn't raining!

Since there are neither trams, metros or buses, I chose to walk to work. I hadn't ever done it before (and to be honest, hadn't intended to try it today, but someone took the key of the bike-lock to work with her ... ). It took me a little less than 30 minutes, and wasn't unpleasant. Given that it can take 20 minutes door to door using the metro, that isn't bad.

I saw several cyclists who looked like they were not used to the traffic, and on a few occasions looked as if they were a danger to themselves. I suppose no-one will publish a comparison of the figures for cyclist or pedestrian casuaties today compared with a 'normal' day. If such a comparison showed a doubling of the death/injury rate due to the lack of public transport, what effect would that have on the strike-happy 'workers'?

Of course, as a good tolerant liberal, I support every workers right to strike. But still, it is a bit pointless of the rail, metro and bus workers to (as usual) punish their customers! Surely, if they want to make some point to their employers they could continue to work, but refuse to gather fares.

Toxic Resto

I have added a link (over there on the right) to my friend Dudley Salterton's new blog - http://toxiresto.blog.co.uk/. Well, OK, Dudley Salterton isn't really his name, but I guess libel laws force all of us to tell little white lies once in a while.

The aim of the blog is to act as a kind of anti-resto.be (http://www.resto.be is the site that lists all the restaurants in Brussels, indeed all of Belgium, but to Dudley's annoyance only allows you to give them a 'good' or 'great' score). His point is that many actually deserve a 'bad', or 'awful' score, so he has set up Toxic Resto to name and shame them. As he says, the blog is 'A real guide to the worst of Belgian restaurants!'

So, if you've had a bad restaurant experience in Brussels, share it. And if you are thinking about going out, check out Toxic Resto first.

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

While I was in Pecs I also read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. What a disappointment! What a load of rubbish, frankly. I had been led to believe that he was a brilliant writer, and the cover blurb tells you that this book "is a transforming novel", and that Coelho has "the power to inspire nations and to change people's lives". What a load of tripe! The book was shallow, predictable, and frankly silly. However, what it seems to do (and maybe his other books too?) is to push a kind of silly spiritualism that borders on pseudo-religion. And maybe that is why some people think he is brilliant - maybe they are believers in the silly modern pseudo-religion of 'spiritualism'. Well, I'm not, and this is my blog, so my message is clear - don't bother with this short, shallow, and uninteresting pseudo-religious load of rubbish.

And will I look for more books by Coelho? No, I won't.