#bloomstrolling for #bloomscrolling in Glen Douglas yesterday. Lots of sparkles on the ground. #flora.
Format: Status
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.
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.
Read: Vigil by George Saunders ★★★ 📚
Ghosts gather round a dying oil billionaire, trying both to make him understand the damage and ease his passage. The deceased are almost comic characters, a couple reminding me of the two old guys in the muppets.
Insects, from a walk round Ardmore point yesterday.
A lot of white butterflies (mostly green-veined, large & small) out & about on Friday. Some flightily red admirals too.
Later, beside the track an excited green-veined white butterfly fluttering amount the leaves. Underneath a leaf a small white hanging upside down. Misplaced affection?
Talking a short walk along the Kelvin between Kelvin Bridge & The Botanics while my wife was in the dentist. These sunlit leaves above the path pulled in this speckled wood. Another flew over some sparkling water through light & shade. A happy moment.
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: Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen ★★★ 📚
Viva who works for corrupt philanthropists & her Eccentric millionaire partner take on said philanthropists, corrupt politicians & MAGA activists to stupid for the proud boys. Heavy satire, fun but feels a bit forced.