Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller★★★☆☆ 📚
Increasingly crazy survivalist father takes his 8 year old daughter to live in the German woods. Tells her it is the end of the world. Told from the girls POV with compulsive foreboding leading to a guessable horror on the last page.
Category Archives: Book
Read: This Is What Happened by Mick Herron ★★★★☆ 📚
One nasty twist changes this in quite a surprising way. Not quite what I expected from Mick Herron.
Read: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★📚
A subtle & grownup take on the post apocalypse novel. I think I enjoyed everything about this. Flits between characters & time before & after the Georgian Flu which kills 99% of the population.
None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.
Read: For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie ★★★★☆ 📚
The thoughts of two medieval mystics moving through life towards a meeting. Very short alternate sections bring them and their differences to life.
Read The Overstory by Richard Powers ★★★★☆ 📚
Several different stories & ideas around the importance of trees to the world weave together. Some resonated with me more than others.
Many of the ideas are better known now than when the book was published.
The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story
This is a good story, it might change part of your mind, unfortunately like everything else it is more complicated.
Read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood ★★★☆☆ 📚
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition—broken mirrors and so forth—hope’s not based on any kind of logic, it’s just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.’
Sometimes uncomfortably gripping. A touch of The Secret History.
Read: The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey ★★★★☆ 📚
Set in the 15th century, a priest tries to solve a “murder”. More about the priest than the murder. Told in reverse it revels his character & the story in an interesting way. Hypocrisy, superstition & morality.
Read: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★☆ 📚
Gentle SciFi. Some of the characters from The Glass Hotel appear.
When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?
And
What if it always is the end of the world?
Read: The Drowned by John Banville ★★★★☆ 📚
A who done it, that doesn’t focus of the crime or solution. Follows on from the previous one in a series, nothing is really clear, characters uncertain about most things. Lots of moral ambiguity.
Read: Groundbreakers- The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar by Chantal Lyons ★★★★☆ 📚
The author’s fascination with boar & belief in the good they could do to the environment doesn’t stop her reporting on both points of view. The difference between European acceptance & Uk fears is telling.