Category Archives: Book

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Read: Ashland & Vine by John Burnside ★★★★ 📚

Now I was beginning to wonder if she had just been bluffing. Maybe there wasn't even a Wes, though I'm not sure about that. She'd had a look in her eye, a mix of apprehension and pride, like you see in certain types of pit-bull owners, and I really didn't want to test her story.

Film student Kate, bit of a mess, starts listing to an older woman Jean's stories of her family and life. American history, WW2, Vietnam, culture & counter culture is only a bit of it. Relationships, death, grief is another. Tempted to re-read this immediately.

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Read: The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansing Suryawanshi ★★★★ 📚

Our review of the world’s studies on snow leopard populations had found that less than 10,000 of the estimated 3 million square kilometres of the snow leopard distribution range had been surveyed by researchers using rigorous scientific methods. The total snow leopard habitat in the state of Himachal Pradesh alone was 25,000 square kilometres.
The largest area to have been surveyed was a mere 1,500 square kilometres in the Gobi in Mongolia.

…..

We decided to take the challenge head-on and estimate the snow leopard population for the state of Himachal Pradesh – an area two and a half times larger than all the previous surveys put together. An area the size of Belgium covered in some of the tallest mountains and deepest gorges in the world.
The survey would test us to our limits. Not only our physical ability to walk such a large and mountainous area to collect the necessary data but our ability to think through technical problems of study design and analysis.

A personal history of studying snow leopards over 20 years. Interesting in surprising ways. Connects the conservation efforts to politics, tourism, & local people. Nicely personal. The changes over time are especially powerful.

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Read: Ubik by Philip K. Dick ★★★ 📚

Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee.
Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name.
I am. I shall always be.

Long time since I’ve read any pkd. Plenty of twists & turns between life & half-life, psychics & anti-psychics. Great sucker punch at the end.

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Read: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino ★★★★ 📚

The fact is that the whole time my brother had to do with it, outdoor Masonry (as I'll call it, to distinguish it from the kind that later met in closed buildings) had a very rich set of rites, which involved owls, telescopes, pinecones, hydraulic pumps, mushrooms, Cartesian divers, spiders, Pythagorean tables. There was also a certain display of skulls, not only human but also craniums of cows, wolves, and eagles. Such objects and still others, including the spades, squares, and compasses of the regular Masonic liturgy, were found at that time hanging in the branches in bizarre juxtapositions and were likewise attributed to the madness of the baron.

As a twelve year old the baron to be leaves his house, in a dispute over eating snails, and live the rest of his life in the trees. This don't stop him having a rich life exploring & embodying various philosophies. Simply told & sometimes laugh out loud.

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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.

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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.

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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.