After a disappointing start to #ShortStorySeptember, I’ve corrected things with Claire Keegan’s supberb collection, Walk the Blue Fields.
This is Keegan on fine and familiar ground – stories about the loner in the village, tortured priests, isolated women, Irish folklore – all told with a little barb. So clever. Continue reading
The #20BooksofSummerWinter challenge is complete… although I haven’t quite got to reviewing all of the books I read as part of the challenge. What I have reviewed are linked via my original post.
The important bits: I read 17 books and listened to five audios. Continue reading
So I cleverly turned one of the trickier (for me) Nonfiction Reader Challenge categories – gardening – into reading a book about gin! Yay me!
The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart explores, in great detail, the plants that create the ‘world’s greatest drinks’.
The book came about after a visit to a liquor store (in Australia, we call it a bottle shop, or bottle-o) with a fellow botanist –
…we stood in the doorway for a minute and looked around us. There wasn’t a bottle in the store that we couldn’t assign a genus and species … Suddenly we weren’t in a liquor store anymore. We were in a fantastical greenhouse, the world’s most exotic botanical garden…
That’s a fun party trick! Continue reading
Confession: I don’t really have a problem with disconnecting/ doing nothing/ having vast amounts of unstructured time/ ‘resisting the attention economy’ (hmmm… is that a confession or a boast…?).
Nevertheless, I picked up Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, partly because I found her more recent book, Saving Time, interesting. Continue reading
There are so many important things in Ben Shewry’s memoir, Uses for Obsession and I could supply dozens of quotes regarding his thoughts on restaurant awards, sustainability, looking after staff, hot chips, and his mentors.
But actually, read this book for the 47-page chapter on lasagne. That is all.
4/5
There are many things to recommend Yiyun Li’s novel, The Book of Goose. For me, it started with the cover (published by 4th Estate in Australia) – what appears to be a section from an Old Masters painting, with a pop of neon. The contrast was arresting and I bought the book, knowing nothing about it or the author. Yep, raw-dogging my book-buying.
In brief, it’s the story of Agnès and her best friend, Fabienne. As children in a postwar provisional French town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves. Fabienne, the bolder of the two, hatches a plan to create some excitement in their lives, and the result changes everything for Agnès.
How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life – by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me? Continue reading
Okay, this book is bananas. And cue all the trigger warnings if you’re planning on reading Alice Carrière’s memoir, Everything, Nothing, Someone.
In brief, Carrière recalls her unconventional and bohemian upbringing in Greenwich Village in the nineties. Her mother, renowned artist, Jennifer Bartlett, and her charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière, each loom large in the memoir for very different reasons. Continue reading
Annabel from AnnaBookbel and Emma from Words and Peace are hosting the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge this year. The challenge is straightforward – read the books between June 1st and August 31st. I reckon this is the most relaxed reading challenge you can participate in (swap books out, change your target, do whatever).
Continue reading
What a delight! Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands is a curious little book. A bit bigger than ‘pocket size’ (or maybe my pockets are too small….), a striking use of colour (bright orange paired with aqua blue fore-edges), and crammed with fascinating facts about islands that are essentially dots on a world map. Continue reading
I think about Leanne Shapton’s 2012 memoir, Swimming Studies, often. I sometimes wonder if I ought to drop Leanne an email to tell her what a deep impression Swimming Studies left on me… in fact I will. *adds to to-do list*
Like Swimming Studies, In Cars: On Diana, is an interesting blend of art and prose. Described as a ‘visual essay’, Shapton focuses on Princess Diana getting out of cars. Stepping out of the car highlights a transitional space – moving from the privacy and safety of the vehicle to being on show, where her identity was fought over, flash bulbs popped, she was scrutinised and criticised, ‘on duty’.
Diana stepping out of a car,
cab and curb. Concealment and exposure. Continue reading