{"id":742,"date":"2004-06-30T18:21:21","date_gmt":"2004-06-30T18:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2004\/06\/the_outsider\/"},"modified":"2004-06-30T18:21:21","modified_gmt":"2004-06-30T18:21:21","slug":"the_outsider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/the_outsider\/","title":{"rendered":"The Outsider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently Penguin commissioned one of those spurious <a href=\"http:\/\/books.guardian.co.uk\/departments\/generalfiction\/story\/0,6000,1233121,00.html\">polls<\/a> which suggested that men who read are more attractive to the opposite sex. This isn&#8217;t something that I&#8217;d previously noticed.<br \/>\nAnyway, there were various followups on stations like Five Live where I heard a discussion which threw around a few books which should do the trick. One of these was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0141182504\">The Outsider<\/a> by Albert Camus. So I eagerly consumed this short tome on the tube (prior to today&#8217;s strike) to see if it worked. I can report no luck at all. I did get nudged in the back by one woman, and another gave me a dirty look when my rucksack toppled over onto the back of her calves. But I don&#8217;t really think either of these count.<br \/>\nThe protagonist, Meursault, really is an outsider, and I thought the snappy postscript was quite a good summary of the book. Despite not being the most descriptive of books, I certainly got an understanding of what it might have been like in Algeria in those pre(?)-war years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>0141182504<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}