Read: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell ★★★★★ 📚 I enjoyed everything about this, the detail of life at the time and the natural world and the sadness. The idea of Shakespeare as almost a secondary character is solid.
Category Archives: Book
The Book of Echoes by Rosanna Amaka
Read The Book of Echoes by Rosanna Amaka ★★★★☆ 📚 told by a ghost or spirt, it covers the lives of two folk, a Brixton boy and Nigerian girl. Both places far from my ken, educating but never dull.
A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin
Read: A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin ★★★☆☆ enjoyed this tale of older Rebus.
Read: Music Love Drugs War by Geraldine Quigley ★★★★★ 📚
Beautiful book about a group of youths in 1981 in Derry in the midst of the troubles. Their difficulty in expressing themselves & sharing feelings is heart-wrenching. I raced through this.
All the Pieces Matter
All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire by Jonathan Abrams ★★★★☆ 📚
Quotes from the actors, writers, producers, directors & others involved. Going through the series in order. I’ve watched all 5 series several times through and this makes me want to watch it again.
The Gospel of the Eels by Patrik Svensson
Read: The Gospel of the Eels by Patrik Svensson ★★★★☆ 📚
Great read, a mix of the history of the study & natural history of eels with the author’s eel fishing with his father. The list of folk who studied eels runs from Aristotle through Freud to Racel Carson. Includes a bit of recent Swedish social history, the mystery & plight of the species. loved this.
Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes
Read: Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes ★★★★☆ 📚
Multi narrator life story of Clio, Scottish singer & activist. Starts at her end in 2018. Revisiting most of the narrators and scenes revels more & more about all the characters.
The Heartbeat of Trees
Read: The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature
by Peter Wohlleben, Jane Billinghurst(Translator)
★★★★☆ 📚
New science about trees back up with references mixed with personal rumination and experiences. The good trees do for us and the planet and the bad we do to them.
Some really fascinating snippets about tree biology too:
The trick to living another couple of decades or even centuries is to compost yourself. Fungi that enter via a wound in the tree convert the wood into a sort of humus as they eat their way through the tree, creating debris that is soft, crumbly, and moist. Now the tree can grow inner roots into this “soil” and reabsorb nutrients it stored in earlier years in its growth rings.
Read: Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan ★★★☆☆ 📚
A novel Maddox up of short stories over 100 years linked by a Edinburgh tenement. Gothic, ghosts, queer, beat, crime and more. Some seemed to flow for me better than others. Probably best read in fewer sessions than I did.
Pew by Catherine Lacey
Read: Pew by Catherine Lacey ★★★★☆ 📚
The main character has little memory and their sex, colour, age and origin are all in doubt. They are discovered in church and meet the locals, good folks to their own thinking, without talking Pew revels them to us. We never find out about Pew and the ending is ambiguous.
But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time
The book begins with a quote from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – which I’ve not read for a long time.