Posted on
by

Read: The Given World by Melissa Harrison ★★★★ 📚

Angela had realised with a start that despite being in her mid-thirties her daughter hadn't yet understood how fleeting things were, that cherry blossom and blackbirds singing weren't a constant backdrop but a clock that counted you through your life: each thing there for only a moment, and then gone until next year.

Some events in the novel are leaving forever not just till next year. Chapters go through the seasons and characters. Each having a main one who reappear or you learn more about in later chapters.

Posted on
by

Likes When rocks take a walk.

Nature waiting, I call it: just sitting there, waiting to see what comes along.

and

That would be cool. Inevitably, my former favourite rock will continue to erode: like us (and everything else) rocks wage an ongoing, ultimately futile war against entropy. But I’m sure my old rock will outlast me.

I’d like to develop some of that patience, I generally keep on the move. Maybe getting older will strengthen the ability to wait.

Posted on
by

Read: Land by Maggie O'Farrell ★★★★ 📚

A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irregularities. How radiant, how lovely is the land and yet how empty. It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where humans are unknown, where he is the only one, and will have to make the best of it.

A mix of history & myth which did not go down well with the reviewers but it did with me. I was fairly enthralled. Most of the tale set in post famine Ireland, but stretching back to prehistory and across to India & Canada.

Posted on
by

Read: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout ★★★ 📚

As he steered the sailboat back to his wharf, it came to him how he had once, when he was a kid, said to his father, "I'm going to have a boat one day," and his father had smiled and said, "No, Artie, you're not ever going to have a boat." This did not hurt Artie to remember.

Rather melancholic novel. Older teacher Artie, goes through things in a Strout-ian way. Some rather dramatic twists, turns & happenings. Sadder than I expected, perhaps a little crammed with ideas, but the writing goes straight in.