Love this, but can see it would not be everyone's cup of tea huge slabs of exposition/back story, with only minimal dialogue every few pages. Central characters some will find irritating (various shades of privileged white men blah blah). And animals dying (usually but not exclusively of natural causes) to indicate that Things Are Wrong... Continue Reading →
Oh, this is brilliant. You gotta read this. Naylor, inspired by of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, tells her tales with compassion, wisdom and an unflinching eye for human weakness, self-delusion and well, evil. The longest section is the first, about a woman called Mattie, who grew up in the Deep South and is... Continue Reading →
Go read it here. Someone asked me what grok means. From the wikipedia entry I ended up rabbit-holing to "William Tenn," who was an engineer and sci-fi writer (with a sardonic/satirical bent) And from there to the wonderful short story The Liberation of Earth (wikipedia page), which even has a climate mention (not carbon dioxide... Continue Reading →
The problem for satirists these days is to make their fiction as outlandish and unbelievable as reality. Tricky job. But "these days" is the hostage to fortune in this, because fifty years ago Philip Roth faced the same dilemma with Richard Nixon. And his brilliant "Our Gang" (no, seriously, you should read it) has some... Continue Reading →
This slender volume - containing three essays entitled "The Sin of Height," "On the Level," and "The Loss of Depth"- is an erudite, reflective and profound meditation on love and loss. Of course it is - this is Julian Barnes we are talking about here. The first two sections deal with early hot-air ballooning (including... Continue Reading →
This one's a keeper. Eleanor Bron translates and introduces a work by German author Christine Bruckner. The work is 11 speeches/musings by real (including Gudrun Ensslin, Mrs Martin Luther) and fictional (Desdemona, Mary, Effi Brest etc) women as they reflect on their lives and how they have been shaped (and mostly constrained/contained) by men and... Continue Reading →
Have moved house. Had to pack up one or two books and then unpack them. You'd think this would cure me of buying more. Ha ha ha ha. It's a damn pathology. I understand its roots, (I think), I understand the costs. I choose not to act to cure that pathology. Human, all-too-human. But I... Continue Reading →
On a bit of a weather/climate-disaster novels kick at the moment ("The Sixth Winter" by Orgill and Gribbin). The Weather War is one I bought a while back and it just sat on the shelf. In short - it's fun, but nothing you need to struggle to find and read, 'less you're as strange as... Continue Reading →
A man washes up on a Mediterranean beach, with no memory of who he is. The past he does not have in his head is getting in the way of his future - men with guns menacing him, beautiful women he must learn to trust - or fear. Can he learn how to use his... Continue Reading →
This slender gem is one I shall have to come back to again, I think. The narrator meets the titular Utz - a fascinating MittelEuropean figure just the once, but is able to piece together the before and the after (the first scene tells of Utz's funeral). Its set mostly in Prague, from the 50s... Continue Reading →
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