I tried to approach this book with an open mind, although it really didn't look like my sort of thing; I'm not generally keen on novels about ordinary people having affairs, and even less so when they're by and about men. However, I did want to give this a go.

On this book's showing, Updike is a good writer who deserves his two Pulitzer Prizes. It's well-written and does a good job of showing us what it feels like to be Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, former basketball star and now middle-aged car salesman. However, while I don't think Rabbit is meant to be an entirely likeable protagonist I found that I couldn't warm to him at all. Even so, I might have persevered, but the book is the third of four and is peppered with references to the events of the previous books. I felt as though I'd come in halfway through, and given that I wasn't enjoying the book that much anyway I really couldn't motivate myself to persevere with it.

So, unfortunately, this one just wasn't for me.

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THE ILLIAD is one of the great works of literature that so many should read. This epic Greek poem by Homer follow Achilles and the rest of his friends and enemies in Greece.

The book is a must read for any lover of classic literature. Homer has finely crafted a world of power, love, family and adventure.

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There are a few problems with this book. It’s a bit too brief, in that a few crucial points are not properly contextualised and argued. I frequently found myself cringing at certain argumentative leaps of faith. Another problem derives from Ayer’s slightly petulant, dismissive tone. Sometimes this brought me out of what he was trying to say and reminded me that the book was in some sense an extended editorial on the state of 1930s philosophy departments. In addition, I don’t think he can successfully escape the charge that his philosophy advocates solipsism.

However, my main issue is that although I’m an atheist, and not keen on grand systems of aesthetics, ethics etc, I think it is possible and desirable to speak of things which you can’t ‘verify’. Also, science moves on. Ayer might say that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about the inside of a black hole, apparently a truly unobservable part of the universe. But theory may be wrong: one day we may be able to measure what goes on in there, and if it turns out to be (maybe by chance) equal to what we may predict today, that would make what we say today meaningless but the identical statement in 1000 years true. One can also imagine future experiments which might, finally, test subatomic string theory. Ayer’s position on verifiability is counterintuitive, anthropocentric, and assumes that we know now and always whether a statement is verifiable, and I think that it must therefore be wrong.

This book certainly made me think. However, because I constantly disagreed with the central idea of verifiability, I found it a bit hard going. I suppose at root I’m not a fan of analytic philosophy. I would recommend Nausea, by Sartre, as being a much more rewarding read. It’s another first book, about the same length, and was also written in the 1930s. However, it explores philosophical aspects of day-to-day human experience in a much fruitier manner. Ayer’s damp, academic firework display does nothing for me.

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