Category Archives: Book

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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.

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Read: The End of Everything by M John Harrison ★★★★ 📚

'Summer. I stood in a long shallow chalk valley half a mile from the sea, listening to the sound of the waves – the sound waves! – amplified by acoustic lensing conditions in the absolutely still air, and came to the inescapable conclusion: the iGhetti are only a mirage. We wait for them to reveal them-selves, forgetting what has revealed itself daily since they came. They did not arrive from the astral plane: they arrived by reconfiguring it. They are only a refraction of something else in the universe, something we can't know about because it's the other side of some horizon. Perhaps we are too?'

Grabbed from the review pull quotes: 'baffling, confounding, haunting, dreamlike' all resonate. A strange book where noting is explained. The 'aliens', inexplicable & might not even know they are at war. Everything is falling apart but folk still go down to the coast for a break.

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Read: The Captains and the Kings by Jennifer Johnston ★★★★ 📚

Taking Clare by the hand, he had begun to run. Now he realized that, in all their years together, he had given her nothing, only a child that he had not allowed her to enjoy. She had slowly died of starvation. In her whole life with him only her garden had been an act of defiance against his indifference. He was suddenly shaken by anger. Not against himself but against Clare that she had denied her own right to existence. He turned from the piano to speak to her once more but the sofa was empty.

‘I am old’ he complained to the emptiness. I should not be tormented by the past like this? He got up slowly and went to search for the whiskey bottle.

Old man, member of the disappearing Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. Stuck in his diminished big family house with little contact with the outside world. Friendship with a wee local boy stirs up memories and create misunderstanding. Thoughtful and sad.

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Read The Devils Footprints by John Burnside ★★★★☆

I am unsure how much to ‘believe’ of the main character’s narrative. He claims a childhood murder and the insanity of running away from his wife and life with a 14 year old girl who he thinks might be his daughter. The nasty side of a Scottish small town. Queasy, uncomfortable & involving with lovely prose.

Like the visit from the angel, or that moment of terror before cock-crow, a flicker of light revealed how, mostly, we are creatures of chance – how, when the devil has work to do, he makes it look like an accident, at least to begin with, in order to lure us further into his trap, protesting mildly, if at all, but willing accomplices at the last.

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I would come to where I was then: the dusk of a winter’s morning on the streets and the houses, dusk on the point, the starlight above the firth a perfect echo to the night boats coming in, and someone watching it all from an upper room, a man who might as easily have been someone else but, as it happened, was me: a quiet, solitary man in a world lit by new snow, leaning towards the window and touching the dark, empty pane, to feel the cool of something other than the night, remembering his fingers through the glass.

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Read: Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen ★★★ 📚

Viva who works for corrupt philanthropists & her Eccentric millionaire partner take on said philanthropists, corrupt politicians & MAGA activists to stupid for the proud boys. Heavy satire, fun but feels a bit forced.

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Read: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan ★★★★ 📚

Say, forever. What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we've done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say "time and again" when something is bothering us and "it's time" when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.

I raced through the 440 pages absorbed in the characters & situations. American small town story over two wars, two or three generations. The cast all damaged by birth, those wars & circumstances.

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Read: Misinterpretion by Ledis Xhoga ★★★ 📚

An Albanian interpreter gets into a lot of communication difficulties. Set in New York & Albania Constantly surprising narrative as the narrator bounces from one complex situation to another.

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Read Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside ★★★★★

Finally (and this seems less fanciful with each passing day) our inner spaces are being placed in jeopardy, as the providers of social media colonise and denature what use to be called the life of the mind for advertising revenues or political gain. Science fiction not so long ago, the enclosure of experience itself – not only of our consumer tastes, but also of our root desires, our dreams, our political leanings – has become commonplace. From habitat to place itself, from public to inner space, from freedom of speech to the chambers of our imagery?, everything is subject to enclosure, all too often by powers and principalities that we cannot even name.

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This grief is all the more painful because it is shot through with a guilt from which no one is exempt. For, according to the accepted environmental / Climate Change narrative, we are obliged to accept that everyone is equally guilty, even though it always seems to be one small and shamelessly entitled group that profits most from the destruction.

What a wonderful book, 4 essays on morality & extinction. The Wind and the Willows, Thomas Hardy, poets & philosophers. Burnside touches upon a range of linked concerns from cave painting to covid always in depth if not at length.