Tag: ★★★★

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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.

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Read: Solace House by Will Maclean ★★★★ 📚

After sudden scalding exposure to the late twentieth century, and the garish monomania of the supermarket, it was joyous to return to the hospital, to the house. I found that I wanted to immerse myself in Solace House and its environs, gather it around me, cloak myself in it. I didn’t doubt, in that moment, that this was what Flayne had felt, sequestered here in his self-imposed exile.

Fun Gothic horror with magic mushrooms. A narrator who becomes more & more unreliable as the book gets weirder. I am not sure I really know what went on. Plenty of nineties details.

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Read: The Savage Landscape by Cal Fly ★★★★ 📚

Travelogue & wide ranging exploration of the idea of wilderness. Indigenous people, conservation, history, fiction & religion. The author digs through idea & puts herself in the picture, questioning her own ideas & coming up against lots of contradictions. Lots to think about. Curious & surprising details.

Travelogue & wide ranging exploration of the idea of wilderness. Indigenous people, conservation, history, fiction & religion. The author digs through idea & puts herself in the picture, questioning her own ideas & coming up against lots of contradictions. Lots to think about. Curious & surprising details.

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Read: The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich ★★★★ 📚

IN SOME PLACES, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing he sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.

A very mixed up novel, romance, farming, ecology, a series of bank robberies, local gossip & lots more. Often hilarious, enjoyable & thought provoking.

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Read: Clown Town by Mick Heron ★★★★ 📚

Familiar world & characters with some interesting developments. A nice surprise at the end. I am surprised at how the series continues to be enjoyable & pleased the author has not needed to make things increasingly dramatic.

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Read: The Names by Florence Knapp ★★★★ 📚

She wonders again if she is doing this right. Any of it, all of it. If it's even the right thing for Gordon himself to be carrying on this tradition. Maybe consenting to live in the shadow of his father and his father's father is only perpetuating the likeness, increasing the weight of it for him. Perhaps calling their child something different would be a liberation. Not at first, but later.

Names change character & experience. Three versions of the same characters lives. The sliding doors moment comes when the name of a wee boy is chosen.