Category Archives: Book

Posted on
by

Read: There There by Tommy Orange ★★★★★ 📚
Cleverly told, almost thriller from multiple characters with different POVs. Life & life histories of urban Native Americans, all carrying the weight of the collective past.

The train emerges, rises out of the underground tube in the Fruitvale district, over by that Burger King and the terrible pho place, where East Twelfth and International almost merge, where the graffitied apartment walls and abandoned houses, warehouses, and auto body shops appear, loom in the train window, stubbornly resist like deadweight all of Oakland’s new development.

Posted on
by

Read: Ripeness by Sarah Moss ★★★★ 📚
Edith in her 70s in 2023 and 17 in the 70s in alternative chapters, the echos of the holocaust, family, belonging to a place, refugees & friendship. Excursions into Irishness & ballet.

Mike’s friend Phineas in Dublin is a sound engineer, hears whole orchestras of weather, traffic, birds that for her are only ambient noise. Sound and signal, she thinks, meaning in every atom and cell if you remember to look and listen. And Dennis the chef, eyes half-closed as he attends to his tongue, names each herb and the provenance of the oil in a salad, and the perfumery up the hill here, every note in a scent, they say, music the metaphor for smell, all of everything, everywhere.

Posted on
by

Read: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

After The Land in Winter, this turned out to be quite different. Reminded me of Kidnapped! An atrocity in Spain, an English solider, running from another sent to kill him, heads for the Hebrides. Excitement & sympathy for all the characters.

Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.

There were tears on his cheeks. He hoped the doorkeeper, this woman whose name he had failed to learn, might notice them

Posted on
by

Read: Winter Ali Smith ★★★★★ 📚
Amazing book, floats between time and characters, dreams & hallucinations. Funny too.

Her sister Iris is making nothing of her life. Sophia thinks of their mother, when Iris worked at the filling station, telling anyone who asked how her daughters were doing that Iris had a good position in an oil company.