Tag: ★★★★

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by

Read: Sheila Armstrong by Falling Animals ★★★★ 📚

Celia turned five last month while he was on a container ship from Liverpool to Halifax. They were passing an island off the coast of Newfoundland and Manoy clung to the port railings, scrabbling for a few bars of reception to make a call from the satellite phone, even though the sea-ice was wrist thick and the containers looked like frosted teeth on a blue-white jaw. After hearing her voice, he came down below with a wind-red nose, but a smile so wide the top of his head could have snapped off.

A set of loosely joined stories connected to a coastal town on the west cost of Ireland. Told at a gentle pace that kept me wrapped in each tale. I was slightly disturbed by the way episodes trailed off, but it intrigued & made the atmosphere linger.

Posted on
by

Read: Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki ★★★★ 📚

Why? Well, look at it this way. Your head is alive, but if you seal it up inside dead classes, you're lost. Take it outside and get the wind into it. Riding the streetcar is not the only way to get satisfaction, of course, but it's the first step, and the easiest.

At the turn into the 20th century country boy Sanshirō goes to university in Tokyo. Mixes with crowd interested in the west, literature, art & science. Very much out of his depth as he drifts through lectures & relationships.

Posted on
by

Read: The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers ★★★★ 📚

The Battle was the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, at which Redbone was a more than willing partici-pant, and a subject that Calvert has frequently indulged his friend in over the intervening years but which he has little desire to hear repeated now, or indeed ever again, for the account is well worn and the telling of it is like retreading a desire path through the vegetation of Redbone’s semi-fictionalised personal history.
Calvert has long suspected that his friend somehow equates that June afternoon with some of the blood-and mud-flecked battles that he himself was a part of in South Georgia, when of course they are incomparable.

1989 over a summer 2 very different misfits spend 10 nights creating crop circles while lost in their own thoughts about society, the natural world, war & much more. A boys book perhaps, but an enjoyable one.

Posted on
by

Read: The Cut Up by Louise Welsh ★★★★ 📚

Cat slipped off her jacket. Her arms were decorated with tattoos not yet dense enough to be considered sleeves but numerous enough to declare commitment. She saw me clocking them and gave me a want-to-make-something-of-it stare.

Another crime novel about Rilke, an auctioneer, Glaswegian & nice take on the compromised but conscience driven hero in the criminal borderlands. The novel chases along at a great rate. Especially enjoyed the Glasgow setting. Lots of places I know.

Posted on
by

Read: The Spy and The Traitor by Ben Macintyre ★★★★ 📚

On the morning of 4 July, a dishevelled couple in tattered clothes could be seen lounging aimlessly at the end of Victoria Road, Coulsdon, in the South London suburbs. One was Simon Brown, of P5, MI6's head of Soviet bloc operations; the other was Veronica Price, the architect of Gordievsky's escape plan. A Home Counties creature from her pearls to her twinset, Price was not suited to this sort of subterfuge. 'I've borrowed the char's hat,' she announced, as they climbed into their disguises.

I've not read much spy fiction but this true story of a KGB man who betrayed Russia & helped cool Cold War tensions only to be first caught & then escape from the USSR to Britain was quite a trip.