Category Archives: Book

Posted on
by

Read: Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively ★★★★ 📚

There is a vogue for ‘life writing’ at the moment, both for publication and as private endeavours. I am all for it, partly because I gobble up other people’s lives, as a reader, but also because it seems to me a productive personal exercise – to stand aside and have a look at your story and try, not to make sense of it, which may be too taxing, but to trace the narrative thread, to look at the roads not taken, to see where you began and where you have got to.

Lovely memoir and reflections on memory, books & old age. The author is continually curious across history, objects, people…

Posted on
by

Read: No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes ★★★ 📚

What do you mean, you didn't see me there? Well, of course you didn't. It's not a trick, it's grammar. Greek uses the masculine and the feminine, but it prefers the masculine (I know). So no matter how many girls were in a room (just one, in this instance), if boys were there too, the word 'children' takes the masculine ending. And the girls disappear. But yes, in case it's unclear, Medea and Jason had three children, two sons and then a daughter. I was a baby when Jason left my mother; Medea fled Corinth holding me in her arms.

Retelling of the Medusa myth, lots of points of view, female, that are only hinted at. The first half is fragmented but it really picks up when Medusa takes over the narrative. Jason doesn't get much respect.

Posted on
by

Read: And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Burgh ★★★★ 📚

Working class boy is dazzled by Cambridge & his magician, occultist “friend”. Page turner, dark academia.

Some people say we’re our true selves when we think nobody is watching. But how do we know our own identities without others’ confirming gaze? If, like the tree falling in the proverbial wood, nobody is around to hear us, is our story a story at all? And when were different things to different people, what then?

Posted on
by

Read: Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur ★★★★★ 📚
A scientist as monster father. Adam’s ego and bi-polar comes to a head his family is exploding in various ways. Alternative chapters written in close third keep some sympathy for all the privileged Cap Cod cast as the family history is dug up. Lots of nature, funny & exciting, I really enjoyed this one.

Posted on
by

Read: Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis ★★★ 📚

UN newbie gets caught up with isis bride. Interesting, engaging & very mixed up on several levels. The mix of humour & seriousness felt slightly off kilter to me. The authors credentials made this more surprising when I read them.

Posted on
by

Read: There There by Tommy Orange ★★★★★ 📚
Cleverly told, almost thriller from multiple characters with different POVs. Life & life histories of urban Native Americans, all carrying the weight of the collective past.

The train emerges, rises out of the underground tube in the Fruitvale district, over by that Burger King and the terrible pho place, where East Twelfth and International almost merge, where the graffitied apartment walls and abandoned houses, warehouses, and auto body shops appear, loom in the train window, stubbornly resist like deadweight all of Oakland’s new development.