Grand unified books thread

[Sheilbh]

Same - I had similar but possibly the opposite. I've not met either but, to the surprise of no-one, I was quite keen on No Logo and the Shock Doctrine back in the day.

And was then very surprised when I saw Naomi Wolf being interviewed and thought she'd really changed.

[garbon]

I see from looking this was bubbling up in past but now in mainstream news.

It doesn't sound like plagiarism but it does feel like eyebrows should be raised both at Szalay and the Booker Prize.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/david-szalay-flesh-barry-lyndon-similarities-b2956474.html

All the glaring similarities between Booker winner Flesh and a Stanley Kubrick film

Booker Prize-winning author David Szalay has found himself at the centre of speculation about authorial inspiration and homage, as readers of his novel Flesh have questioned whether a film by Stanley Kubrick inspired the book almost "beat for beat".

The sixth novel by Canadian-Hungarian writer Szalay, Flesh was released in March 2025. It follows a young working-class man called István, who over the course of his life rises up the ranks from poverty at home in Hungary to sitting among London's elite.

The book, which became a talking point for its sparse prose and 500 repeats of the word "OK", won the 2025 Booker Prize; at the time, awards chair Roddy Doyle said that the judges had "never read anything quite like it".

However, a number of critics and readers have noted similarities between Szalay's book and Kubrick's 1975 film Barry Lyndon, which itself is adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray's 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

Barry Lyndon's eponymous lead comes from Ireland, not Hungary, yet the characters follow near identical trajectories: they enlist in the army, marry wealthy women, grieve their sons and clash with their stepsons, and lose everything they have earned later in their lives.

But despite the similarities in the plots, Szalay has not listed Kubrick's film as an inspiration for the story or writing process. This has led to some readers speculating that Szalay is playing an elaborate game and has included Easter eggs referencing Barry Lyndon in his novel.

In Kubrick's film, Barry is shown a painting and comments: "I love the use of the colour blue by the artist." In Flesh, Istvan is taken to the National Gallery and says of a different painting: "I like the use of the colour blue in that one."

The Independent has contacted Szalay's representatives for comment.

What critics said at the time
Flesh received rave reviews upon its release, with few critics at the time noting the similarities between Barry Lyndon and Flesh.

The first reference appears to have been made by Aled Maclean-Jones in June 2025 on the Substack publication The Republic of Letters, where he suggests that Flesh is "quite clearly, a near beat-for-beat mirror – both of the novel and of Kubrick's film adaptation, to such a level I'd almost call it a retelling".

In July, The New Statesman published a cultural reexamination of Barry Lyndon, where writer David Sexton argued that the similarities between Flesh and Kubrick's film was a sign of the story's "continued potency".

"Unnoticed by most reviewers and uncommented upon by Szalay himself, Flesh – which is about the picaresque career of its hero István, from Hungary to London, from poverty to riches and back to poverty again – is nothing less than a thorough revision and updating of Barry Lyndon (Kubrick's movie, not Thackeray's novel)," he wrote.

Sexton doubled down on his argument in The Standard following Szalay's Booker Prize win, where he put forward that Flesh was Barry Lyndon "updated, relocated, re-imagined, but the same".

"There is nothing remotely wrong about it. It's not plagiarism. Indeed, it could be considered a vital tribute to a fantastic film," he wrote.

What Szalay has said
Appearing on Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club podcast, the author listed Hamlet, Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Michel Houellebecq's Platform and Katherine Faw's Ultra Luminous as the five books that had influenced Flesh, with no reference to either Kubrick's film or Thackeray's novel.

In an interview with The Observer from November, Szalay said that he had seen Barry Lyndon when he was 20, and said that "the rags-to-riches arc was an influence".

Szalay is explicitly asked about the similarities between the texts in a forthcoming episode of BBC Radio 4's This Cultural Life, where he's asked if Flesh is a "direct reference" to Barry Lyndon.

"No, I wouldn't go that far," Szalay replies, adding that Kubrick's film "wasn't really at the front of my mind, I don't think". When pressed, he says that he could have been "influenced by it in some way", but denies that his book was written in homage to the film.

[Syt]

Reminds me of the episode of Frasier where they run into J.D. Salinger T.H. Houghton who is a reclusive writer known for only publishing only one book that was absolutely seminal.

They secretly read his new unpublished manuscript. They love it and praise it for lifting the structure and imagery from Dante's Divine Comedy.

Which Houghton didn't do consciously - he sees it as confirmation that he's a hack and a fraud who only had one book in him and goes on to destroy the manuscript, thanking the horrified Crane boys for "saving his reputation."

[Norgy]

I may be out on a limb here, but I never really found "Catcher in the rye" that great. 

Then again, I was more into Koestler's "Darkness at noon".

[Maladict]

Re-read 1984. When I first read it back in the 90s I was very impressed by it. Now I'm terrified and depressed.

[garbon]

Amazon has gone me hooked on purchasing some kindle titles reduced to 99p. Lately I've been reading 'A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths' by Dr John Barton. It has been a while since I've read a book about the bible/early Christianity and I'm finding it rather interesting. However, despite the author being an Anglican priest, I'm not sure I could ever recommend this to any of my Christian relatives (despite how they'd be excited that I'm reading about the Bible ) as it strikes me as a work that shows the closer you get to any of this, Christianity seems a bit hollow / just all the work of falliable men.

[grumbler]

Recently finished a few new books in series that we have discussed here.

For the Black Company fans, I read Lies Weeping, the first book in a new proposed trilogy taking place after the existing end of the BC series. I say I read it for you because that means that you don't have to read it.  Cook still writes well, but the story is a mess, centered around characters we've barely been introduced to and a brand-new set of baddies that don't seem very plausible.

The Book of Dust is a three-book series by Philip Pull that wraps around His Dark Materials. The first book in the series takes place before HDM and tells the story of how Lyra ended up in Jordan College at the start of HDM. The second two books take place after the events of HDM, hen Lyra is twenty years old.

Tonally, these books are very different from HDM, as they are not written for the YA audience, but the adult audience. I enjoyed Pullman's writing as much as I did before, but struggled to finish the books, as I suffered "crisis fatigue" in all three of them. The stories lurch from crisis to crisis, with the "bad guys" able to implausibly figure out how the heroes escaped the latest trap and just set up another.  The end of the story just comes unexpectedly, with major issues never resolved.

I think that both of these series are cautionary tales that show the problems authors face when following up on well-loved book series long after they have ceased to be the authors that wrote the original series. I really can't recommend either new series except to the most devoted fans.

[Norgy]

Re-read 1984. When I first read it back in the 90s I was very impressed by it. Now I'm terrified and depressed.

I heard it as an audioplay recently. It was very well done, and I thought, damn, we're there already.

Been reading Laura K. Field's "Furious Minds - The Making of the MAGA New Right". It is heavy on the less known, but probably important figures, like Michael Anton, and how they have been the intellectual leaders of a rather disparate movement. What I like, is that Field traces the roots back quite a long time, even back to the interwar era and to Goldwater.

[The Brain]

I was looking at history books online and lot of them had AI slop covers. Am I correct to assume that those books are all BS, or are we at a point when some good books get AI slop slapped on them?

[Norgy]

Finished "Hayek's Bastards" by Quinn Slobodian. He really has it in for the Mont Pelegrin Society guys, and rightly so, judging by the evidence he supplies. However, this, unlike "Globalists", covers a more dystopian undertow in the extreme versions of libertarianism in Europe and the US. The one where measuring IQ, rehabilitating eugenics, closing borders and hoarding gold as fiat currency will crash take centre stage. Among the topics discussed is the bell curve and Ron Paul's influence on shaping the current strain of extremism, German private gold hoarding after the introduction of the Euro and a few not very nice words for president Milei of Maradonistan.

I found it interesting, but even after seven books covering some of the same subject matter, I have a hard time keeping track of the persons and names.

[Sheilbh]

I like Slobodian a lot but he can be a bit reckless with quotations. I think Globalists especially is phenomenal though (although slightly wonder with him and people Samuel Moyn etc if we've gone a bit too far on the history of ideas front and maybe overemphasising it?).

Currently reading Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce, subtitled A Personal History of a Vanished World, it does pick up the author's family experience of the West of Ireland (as well as the more prosperous South-East - where my family's from, incidentally, and were peasants) - aside from Ireland there's a focus on Poland and, to a lesser extent, Italy.

Joyce is in his 70s and is a very great social historian - often cited but the referees for his first academic job were Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson. This is a really fascinating social history of a world that had roots for thousands of years and that has died or will die in my lifetime - Europe's peasants. On current trends it's likely the world's peasantry will be gone by the end of the century. As he notes it is challenging as the history of the peasants is one of silence or being silenced which requires leaps of imagination and perhaps a bit of reading against the grain. But it's very interesting and deeply empathetic. I'm reminded of EP Thompsons's goal "to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the utopian artisan [...] from the enormous condescension of posterity" for the peasantry and succeeds (as someone instinctively fairly anti-peasant ).

[garbon]

I've been reading the Wheel of Time series (well just finished Book 2 but plan to continue ) as I'd only ever read Book 1 before the tv series came out.

I've been surprised how easy they are to get through what with me reading first book in 2 weeks and now just finished second book in just under a week.

I have to say I've also been surprised how well they hold up given those initial books were products of the early 90s. In contrast, while I generally have enjoyed her work, Kristin Kathryn Rusch's White Mists of Power has aged like milk.

That said, I've also had some appreciation for some of the changes made in the aborted TV project. Like I'm glad the tv show didn't have all of the young women pining after Rand which would have felt like too much of the old school fantasy trope in a 2020s project. I've also seen it debated online but I think Nynaeve's Accepted Trial was so much more horrifying as portrayed in TV versus how it went down in the books.

I wonder how these opinions of mine will hold up as I read on