celticman's blog

‘A murder that wasn’t a murder.’ That’s the tagline. A Rebecca Connolly mystery. I don’t think I’ve read any other in this series. I was pretty sure I’d figured out who the murdered that wasn’t the murderer was. Like the Brexit result, I was wrong. Small margins. Leave or Remain? I voted to Leave England but remain in Europe. Most of Scotland voted for the latter, but not the former. Very few, then or now, voted in the Tories. The moron’s moron...

Lionel Shriver (2024) Mania. I read a wee bit of this book. Not for me. Mania is a conceit. Ostensibly it’s about the policing of language in an Orwellian sense and thereby the policing of thought and behaviour. No one can be called dumb. Everyone needs to practice being a snowflake. Right-wing media love that idea they’re fighting for something bigger than the moron’s moron Trump and his vile worldview. This is shown in the opening pages of ALT...

The Islanders and the Orb is a revised edition, extended by Calum MacLeod to cover the periods between 1995 and 2023. Hunter’s scholastic examination of the evolution of the Harris Tweed industry from the nineteenth century is enhanced by the afterword, which highlights its positive effect on the Islands. The new edition, like the old edition, is sponsored by the Harris Tweed Industry. You pay for what you get. ‘Tweel’ is defined in the Concise...

Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) Fleishman is in Trouble. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble, is no trouble to read. It’s pretty much perfect. I’m pretty much tempted to leave it at that and let the book speak of itself. But I’ll say a bit more. No prologue. Just a one line invitation: ‘Summon your witnesses.’ Aeschylus. It begins at the beginning, of course, but in medias res , which is a fancy way of saying, in the middle of things...

Jagger’s novel is about a poet, Noelle, having a meltdown over her second collection of poems. Being an outsider likely complicated Noelle’s life, considering she is around the same age as the author. (Jagger identifies as autistic and reveals she had been Catholic). A good match of world views with a vampire called Moses added. There are several kinds of coming-of-age novels. We have the traditional Bildungsroman . Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë...

Bloody Scotland, 14 th September 2024 I don’t go out much. When I usually do it involves watching Celtic and getting drunk. That’s Bloody Scotland for you. But this was a different kind of outing. Bloody Scotland inspired by William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw . Labelled the Godfather of Tartan Noir, the Glaswegian detective didn’t as much solve a crime as solve the world with his philosophical musings. Over the weekend of Friday, Saturday and Sunday,...

Fern Brady is a well-known comedian. I didn’t know that before I read her autobiography, Strong Female Character . She comes from Bathgate and planned to kill herself before she left school if she didn’t get the grades she needed to go to university. Call that overkill. That’s normal for her in a world of hypervigilance in which there’s no such thing as normal. For convenience all the information the reader needs is on the cover. ‘Fern Brady is...

It’s mandatory to namecheck Louise Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room , which won just about everything. This is her tenth novel. It’s set in much the same place as her first. In and around Downhill, Partick and the West End of Glasgow. The protagonist is Jim Brennan. He’s a Professor at Glasgow University, his speciality is criminology. Louise Welsh is a Professor at Glasgow Uni too. Her speciality is Creative Writing. I take it she’s not...

In My Own Words, Billy Connolly, BBC 1, BBC Scotland, BBC iPlayer, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0022mr1/in-my-own-words-series-1-billy-connolly Billy Connolly seems to have been about forever. He’s the face and voice of Scotland. The face of Glasgow where he grew up and worked on the Clyde as a welder. That working-class grounding, he claimed, made him the man he was. He’s Parkinson disease (the bastard should have kept it to himself)...

Sarah Chaney asks in the Prologue (is a Prologue normal?) Am I Normal? ‘It seems like a straightforward enough question.’ Much the same as is it raining outside. But rain is part of the seasons and weather system. Normal is a social construct. In other words, we make it up as we go along. WEIRD people (that is, Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) in 2010 make up just 12% of the world’s population but 96% of subjects in...