Category Archives: Book

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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.

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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.

and

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: 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.