
An interstellar event that happened 30 years in the past is at the centre of Laura Lam’s Goldilocks. The novel begins with one of the people who was involved in the event and its consequences finally deciding to break her silence.
Continue readingAn interstellar event that happened 30 years in the past is at the centre of Laura Lam’s Goldilocks. The novel begins with one of the people who was involved in the event and its consequences finally deciding to break her silence.
Continue readingUnder the Skin is Michel Faber’s debut novel. I borrowed it from a friend after watching the film of the same title, directed by Jonathan Glazer and starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m glad that I read the book after the film, because there is only a loose connection between the two. I love the film, but I wonder whether I would feel the same if I’d read the book first and seen the film as an adaptation of the book.
Continue readingToday I’ve started my ninth book in my attempt on this year’s 20 Books of Summer.
It’s a 1900 edition of R D Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. I bought it from Withnail Books in Penrith. There was a mystery in the front.
Continue readingRead 22/08/2021-28/08/2021
Rating 5 stars
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is book eight on my summer reading challenge list, part of Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. It is the story of Joy, a Drama teacher whose life is unravelling. It combines narrative with text layout, font weight and insertion of illustrative elements to represent Joy’s unravelling. There’s a feel of concrete poetry to it, and the sort of textual play that Nicola Barker used in her novel H(A)PPY. There’s also a feel of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine to Joy’s story, superficially in the way Joy looks to women’s magazines to distract and instruct, and more seriously in the way her immediate family has treated her, and the damage not having a safety net can do to a person. Continue reading
Hello June, here so soon. I’m a day late for this month’s Six Degrees of Separation because summer arrived in Manchester this week and yesterday was too glorious to pass up the chance to read in the garden. Kate, who hosts the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best, has chosen the Stella Prize winning book The Bass Rock for the first book in the chain.
Continue readingCathy, over at 746 Books, is hosting 20 Books of Summer again this year, or however many books you think you might be able to knock off your To Read pile. The challenge runs from 1 June to 1 September.
Continue readingRead 05/04/2021-18/04/2021
Rating 3 stars
Hit Factories is a curious and eclectic book. The title and the flyleaf blurb suggest a social history of pop in industrial cities – how the industrial landscape influenced the music and vice versa. It’s not that, though. It’s more personal, built around an attempt by author Karl Whitney, a Dubliner transplanted to the North East of England, to understand Britain differently.
Whitney has drawn on a travel writing approach of exploring the relationship between landscape and community, finding the out of the ordinary and drawing on the voices of those involved in the story. The book examines why certain industrial cities developed, or didn’t, distinctive music scenes and represents the condensed musical histories of 11 cities across just over 300 pages. Continue reading
Read 21/02/2021-26/02/2021
Rating 5 stars
Permafrost is the first novel by Catalan poet Eva Baltasar. It’s a thing of beauty, visceral and uncompromising. It’s about depression, and being cared about but not loved; it’s the story of someone who tries not to let others in because being self-contained is safer. It’s also deeply, dryly funny.
Read 31/08/2020
Rating 4 stars
Book 10 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge.
Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing is a companion book to the BBC series of the same name. You don’t need to have watched it to enjoy the book (although I hope you do watch it, it’s quite the antidote to much of the rubbish on the box). Nor do you need to be an angler or interested in fishing. You don’t even particularly need to be a fan of either Bob Mortimer or Paul Whitehouse. The book is more than the sum of its parts. Continue reading
Read 14/06/2020-27/06/2020
Rating 5 stars
Book 3 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge.
This centenary publication about the history of the Forestry Commission is a fascinating insight into the origins of the organisation, in the immediate period after the First World War, and its development over the last 100 years. Continue reading